Indian Urbanology

Neon sign, Bangalore

Being in Bangalore has served as a reminder that, as a rule, Western backpackers in Asia tend to avoid cities as much as possible. It's understandable, but kind of a shame nonetheless - especially, as I noted before, if you're genuinely looking for the "real" version of wherever you happen to be.

At any rate, I haven't posted about it yet, but when we were in Mumbai, Rachel and I had the opportunity to meet up for drinks and dinner with some wonderful people who are doing cutting-edge work on thinking through urban planning in India. Among their many projects, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove run the websites Urbanology.org and Airoots.org, which feature thoughtful and incisive analysis of urban design and community issues in a number of global cities including New York, but especially Mumbai. They've also constructed a wiki site for residents and allies of of residents in Dharavi, a very well-known slum in the heart of Bombay.

Dharavi has been attracting some attention lately as one of the settings for the film Slumdog Millionaire, but it has also been in the news because its continued existence has been in doubt, thanks to the proposed Dharavi Redevelopment Project. National Geographic recently featured a major article explaining Dharavi and the proposals for its redesign. It's a complicated issue in many respects - residents are in sore need of improved infrastructure and service delivery, yet at the same time many are not eager to leave behind a community that is highly functional in its own fashion.

Land in Mumbai is extraordinarily valuable - the city competes with Hong Kong and Singapore in terms of real estate costs, and it suffers from a serious housing shortage. Dharavi, moreover, is strategically located in the middle of city, very near the high-end commercial and residential district of Banda. The Maharashtra government and private developers have proposed to completely redevelop the area, moving long-term (but not newer) residents into apartment towers. The proposal has changed somewhat in response to criticism, and now may be off the table entirely on account of the financial crisis, but interest in the future of Dharavi will continue.

Rahul and Matias have written about the complexities of how a place like Dharavi is understood, in the course of explaining their own approach to the community as a "user-generated city":

The global media loves to work with the simplistic and highly problematic label of “slum”. City reporters, activists and non-governmental organizations also find the short-cut concept useful. Dharavi has often been pictured by the city’s media as a wasteland with barely standing temporary structures; an immense junkyard crowded with undernourished people hopelessly disconnected from the rest of the world, surviving on charity and pulling the whole city’s economy backward.

It is only recently, and in conjunction with informed local and global opinions that an alternative picture of Dharavi has begun to circulate. Where it appears as a developed urban area composed of distinct neighbourhoods, as a space where artisanship thrives, where commerce and business are the main defining moments of its landscape. Far from being depressed and isolated, the economy of Dharavi appears to be deep-rooted in the city and networked globally, with local goods being exported as far as Italy and Sweden.

Skepticism about the official DRP does not mean rejection of efforts to reimagine Dharavi - but it does mean emphasing continuity where appropriate, preserving that which should be preserved. For instance, in writing about the Dharavi streetscape, Rahul and Matias argue that rather than wiping the slate clean and imposing a new grid, planners should carefully take note of "a rich legacy of user-generated space patterns that are organically connected to the way people live and earn livelihoods."

These patterns are based on the principles of incremental development. In other words, they have evolved over time, over generations and through the absorption of new migration inflows, constant movement within and between neighbourhoods and through continuous class mobility.

It is our contention that these patterns of incremental development are embodied within the streetscapes of such localities. It is in the street that the genetic code of a habitat gets imprinted. They emerge as walking paths connecting markets, homes and nodes of transport hubs. As they evolve, accommodating cars and other forms of local transport, street bazaars, spaces for youngsters to hang-out, for children to play, for neighbours to exchange news and gossip, for people to shop and set-up shop, they follow the needs of the residents very directly. The signature of a neighbourhood is often a streetscape.

Ideally, slum redevelopment schemes should build upon the incremental logic that most slum histories embody. And a pragmatic way to do so would be by recognizing the street layout that has evolved within such habitats.

In the most simplistic analysis, you might say that this is Jane Jacobs applied to slum redevelopment in a modern Indian metropolis. In the larger sense, the analysis provides a snapshot of the complexities confronting those who approach urban planning issues with any degree of concern for what local residents think.

At any rate, as I said - we met Matias and Rahul and a few of their colleagues for a very convivial evening, giving us a chance to talk about Dharavi, Mumbai's Rent Law (worthy of a lengthy discussion in its own right), New York, and urban politics and design in general. We were very lucky to have the opportunity and it was generous of them to meet up with us, a couple of strangers fresh off the plane in a city they know very well.

Here in Bangalore we had another great conversation about urban India - which I'll talk about in another post.

Chowpatty Beach

photo by Paul

Rachel and I lived in Bangkok for a while a few years back. Like Bangkok, Mumbai is huge, noisy, and traffic-choked. Unlike Bangkok, Mumbai has the sea - at its most charming at Chowpatty beach, where families and tourists come to play and watch the sunset.

Above three photos by Rachel

Chowpatty beach is also home of Mumbai's famous street food, bhelpuri, which is like one of those wild, crazy parties you sometimes hear about but never seem to get invited to, if that party were a salad:

Photo by Rachel, eaten by Paul

Again, click on any picture for higher-resolution version.

Cricket on the Oval Maidan

There was a little snafu with some of the photo uploads, so I'm still only getting to some of the Mumbai pictures now. Anyway, click on the picture for a larger size.

More Mumbai photos here.

Transportation curiosities, and what we were doing in Sangli

I was expecting to find the traffic in Mumbai terrifying. I don't know if I've just gotten braver over the past few years or if the pace of traffic in Mumbai is nothing compared to Bangkok and Managua but riding around in taxis turned out to be the most thrilling and fascinating part of our three short days in the city. Catching fleeting glimpses of temples, slums, luxury apartment complexes, and street markets all unceremoniously crowded together on the same streets left me constantly straining my neck to see what was going on and wishing we had more time to explore the city. A few extra days probably wouldn't have made much of a difference though--Mumbai seems like the kind of city you have to live in to even start to understand.

It's not just a stereotype that everything in India is colorful, nor is it an exaggeration that the bureaucracy here is insane. We managed to spend practically a whole day booking our train ticket from Mumbai to Sangli, although this was partly because we took a taxi all the way to the station before realizing we needed our ATM cards and had to go all the way back to where we were staying to get them. The reason we needed our ATM cards, despite having enough cash on us to buy the tickets, was that in order to buy tickets as a foreigner you have to prove your foreigner status by showing an ATM receipt for the cash you're using to pay (in addition to showing your passport)! We then had to find the special foreigner ticket window and wait with the other foreigners on a bench marked "foreign tourist only"! We eventually got our tickets, but they were only provisional tickets, meaning we were second and third in line to get seats if people canceled, so we had to go back the next day to confirm that we could actually get on the train. We then had to come back one hour later to find out what seats we had been allocated!

Anyway, it all worked out and we finally got on the sleeper to Sangli, where we had been invited to visit the offices of SANGRAM, an organization that provides outreach, support, community, and services to sex workers in certain regions of Maharastra and Karnataka. I hadn't been on a sleeper since I was a kid and I was so excited that I didn't sleep at all. Every time we stopped at a station the noises coming from outside made it sound like we were at an amusement park instead of a train station. We arrived in Sangli at 5:20am, where we were met by one of SANGRAM's staff members and taken in a rickshaw cab to the SANGRAM office, where we managed to sleep for a couple of hours before being woken at 9:30 for breakfast.

That day, after hearing a brief history of SANGRAM and its sister and brother organizations, VAMP (serving female sex workers) and MUSKAN (serving male sex workers), we talked with some of the women from VAMP and sat in on one of their weekly organizational meetings, where delegates from different regions reported back on outreach they had done that week, issues in each region, and plans for the next few weeks. Some topics of discussion included finding housing for the children of a sex worker who wasn't able to take care of them and reaching out to home-based sex workers who are reluctant to visit drop in centers. I had heard all about how huge and wide-reaching Indian sex worker organizations are but you have to see them in action to really understand what that means. I've never seen such a practical, focused and well-organized meeting and I was left wondering why it's so difficult to organize sex workers in the US (and other Western countries). I was also inspired to start thinking a lot more about plans for organizing after we get back home.


After the meeting we visited the offices of MUSKAN, where some of the boys from the group performed in drag, carrying out a traditional fertility ritual which involved handing out vegetables and putting tumeric on our foreheads (see picture!). The entertainment continued with dancing and acting out various well-known (apparently) scenes from Bollywood movies.

We then repaid SANGRAM for all their hospitality by running off to Goa with their only set of office keys, which then had to be couriered back to Sangli (at least eight hours by road I think) at top speed before they could get back into their offices for work. Yeah, we're still feeling pretty guilty about that.

Mumbai Taxi

Traffic in Mumbai, like baseball, is a game of inches. If you don't like baseball, the metaphor still works - as it seems to go on forever and the rules are bewildering.

My first impression of Mumbai taxi drivers was that they were trying to kill me. Then I decided that the safest place around a Bombay taxi was actually inside it. But as we realized - I think Rachel was the first to point it out - the rules of the road, to abuse a phrase, actually seem to work. What would seem in many other places - even New York - like psychopathic road behavior seems to work perfectly well in Mumbai; everyone slows down or veers out of the way at the last possible moment with no ill will on either side, and nobody's actually getting killed (I'm sure the statistics disagree, but the point is they can't be as bad as the situation looks at first glance).

Rachel and I both felt as though we spent half our time in the city seeing it from the back of a cab - but it was actually sort of enjoyable. Mumbai's taxis are 40 year old Fiats stripped of nonessentials like seatbelts and often painted up and decaled with pictures of Ganesh or tigers or whatever else. Watching the city go by from the back seat is pretty fascinating, offering glimpses of a place you begin to understand has many more layers than you can even start to peel back in a few days' time.

Gateway to India

Only Europeans would build something in a port city and call it the Gateway to India. Everybody else came via Afghanistan.

Anyway, we're here, six days in, and finally have a chance to post. I'm writing from Sangli, a provincial town in Southern Maharashtra - why we're here is for a later post. We spent four days in Mumbai, and it wasn't enough. It's a massive, frenetic city but it has a distinct charm. I'll try to describe it more later - for now I want to get some pictures up in a series of posts.

I hesitate to say it, because I don't want to get into exoticizing places and because a lot of traveling around is grubby and difficult, but since we've been here I keep having moments where I feel as though I'm in a movie. Careening around Mumbai in a taxi, making our way through the masses of people heading into Victoria Terminus (now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, as a cab driver made a point of telling us) on their way home from work, watching families play in the sunset at Chowpatty Beach, laying awake in a sleeper on the night train, watching the MUSKAN guys perform traditional harvest festival dances and act out Bollywood scenes resplendent in sari-wrapped drag (again, more later), cruising the streets of Sangli in a big white Land Rover listening to Indian pop music and watching the oxcarts, autorickshaws, bearded old men, women in saris, schoolkids in uniforms, fruit vendors, motorcycles, goats, palm trees, everything - there's this series of moments that all feel so cinematic.

Oh, as for the top picture, of the Taj hotel and the Gateway - if you didn't know what had happened here, you wouldn't know what happened here. Everything is open for business and life seems to be very much going on for people in Mumbai.

Lots of pics in subsequent posts - probably another day or two.

The Mumbai Tiger

Tammany Tiger (Source)

This may be the last post before we get to India - we're off to London tomorrow and flying from Heathrow on Monday evening, arriving in Bombay/Mumbai on Tuesday.

As for what to call it, I'll stick with Mumbai since that's the common usage these days, but Suketu Mehta makes a pretty good case for Bombay. The official name change, he observes, was decreed by the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party when it won control of the Maharashtra state government in 1995. As Mehta describes it, after the Sena had formed a majority coalition with the BJP,

the government took a look at the awesome urban problems plaguing the city, the infestation of corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy and the government, the abysmal state of Hindu-Muslim relations, and took decisive action. They changed the name of the capital city to Mumbai.

Mehta compares the Sena to the old political machines of American cities, ensuring service delivery and delivering jobs to the urban poor in exchange for votes. The Tammany tiger lives again - the same animal is used to symbolize the Sena. And like Tammany, the latter organization's ascent marks, for better and for worse, the arrival in power of a new class of urban resident. The old urban elites and their noblesse oblige concern with good government are increasingly irrelevant:

The new inheritors of the country - and of the city - are very different from the ones who took over from the British, who had studied at Cambridge and the Inner Temple and come back. They are badly educated, unscrupulous, lacking a metropolitan sensibility - buffoons and small-time thugs, often - but, above all, representative....

The cities of India are going through a transition similar to what American cities went through at the turn of the twentieth century, when the political machines of the Democratic party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way. Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck. In Bombay, this has not yet happened.

Mehta laments the impact of the new rulers on the city he loves - their violence, incompetence, and corruption - but he sheds few tears for the old ruling class, who hardly left the city in a good state.

One notable difference between Tammany and the Sena is that the former was an immigrant machine, while the Sena began as an organization of Maharashtrians - the mostly working-class locals who constitute the plurality of Mumbai's residents but who had traditionally been excluded from power by the city's cosmopolitan elites. The Maharashtrians had always called it Mumbai; the cosmopolitans had always called it Bombay. Now the Maharashtrians are in power.

In recent decades, the Shiv Sena has sought to move beyond its original Marathi base and style itself a party of Hindu nationalism in general. Most notoriously, the party was allegedly a prime instigator and organizer of the vicious 1992 communal riots during which hundreds of Muslims were massacred.

Some reports have suggested that the Sena may be losing its potency amid an internal succession battle and accusations of diluting its program, though it seems to have done well in Maharashtra's 2007 elections. As with Tammany, its legacy will probably live on long after the tiger itself is gone.

Approaching Maximum

So a week from today we'll be arriving in Mumbai (or Bombay, more on that later). I've been reading Suketu Mehta's marvelous Maximum City, an in-depth look at the city's sprawling array of fascinations and crises - politics, gangs, social life, sex trade, and more, written by an expat Indian who has returned to the city after years living in Jackson Heights, Queens. It's equal parts thrilling and disturbing.

One point Mehta dwells on is just how many people are jammed together in Mumbai, on land reclaimed from the sea and filled in among a series of islands. With 14 million people, Mumbai is one of the most populous metro areas in the world. It's also the densest: Mehta reports that, in 1990, the city had a population density of 17,550 people per square mile. New York City, by comparison, has about 2,180 per square mile. The comparison seems less mind-boggling if you consider that Manhattan itself has a density of about 70,000 per square mile - but Mehta's number for Mumbai seems to be on the low end of the estimates I can find, and it's reported that, in some areas of the city - the slums - a single square mile can be home to as many as one million people.

For Mehta, these numbers are alarming - and more alarming still is the stream of new arrivals turning up in Mumbai every day. One of his points is that, for all the indifference Bombay's residents show toward the rest of India - a country to which, he says, they literally turn their backs, preferring to gaze west toward the Arabian Sea - their city cannot be saved unless other systemic problems in the country are first addressed:

What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath [i.e., living on the streets or sidewalks without shelter]. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the cities.

I found this interesting after having read Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods - a highly-praised account of modern India and its challenges. Luce argues precisely the opposite: India, he says, isn't urbanizing enough. Sixty years of post-independence policy has prioritized preservation of village life and neglected the development of cities. To Luce, this is a major source of misery in both city and country: there are just too many people in the villages, he argues. Land holdings, divided among so many peasants, are simply too small to be profitable, even for bare subsistence, and are certainly too small for the kind of mechanization that could make India's agricultural sector productive enough to drive a sustained economic expansion.

The solution, Luce believes, is for many more people to leave the villages and move to the cities - to build a modern economy while those left behind in the countryside can consolidate land holdings enough to make them at least modestly profitable. Luce accuses India's federal government of ignoring the problems of the cities - allowing the ongoing existence of massive slums, which are indicators of an urbanization process the government obstinately refuses to acknowledge, much less encourage. India should be focusing on making its cities decent places to live - rationalizing land use, improving service delivery, and planning for a more urbanized future. In other words, pace Mehta, Luce says: if you fix the problems of the cities, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the villages.

I have no idea who's right on this question, but I'm inclined to believe that Luce's argument makes more sense. I don't expect that a whirlwind trip through India will really shed much more light on the matter, but it's something I'll be thinking about as we arrive in Maximum City.