What template Dharavi would set?

For every urban development planner and thinker, the works of Jeb Brugmann, Cambridge University professor instrumental in urban development of 49 cities in 21 countries, is an essential reading. Particularly, his 2009 book “Welcome to the Urban Revolution” for telling what made transformations of cities across the world successful. He came to Dharavi too, more than a decade ago, after the PPP mode of development had replaced (in 1990s) the earlier in situ redevelopment plans of various Maharashtra agencies had failed.

Expressing his shock after a particular presentation by a private builder on dismantling and rebuilding Dharavi as a “world class city”, he wrote: “How could anyone who had observed Dharavi for so long miss the most obvious fact about it: that the residential-industrial citysystem was proving itself every day in the market place to be world class? It stood as probably the most successful, scaled poverty-reduction programme in the history of international development. Within the Indian context, Dharavi’s migrant generations had developed an accessible, replicable citysystem for the advancement of the country’s poor majority.”

He added: “It was a stunning example of Indian entrepreneurial ability and ambition. With millions of poor households migrating to India’s cities each year, it seemed almost obvious that this migrant citysystem just needed to be accompanied with the same public investment in urban infrastructure offered to every other Mumbai city model and master-planned suburb, and replicated throughout country.”

Brugmann went to explain how the World War II-ravaged Tokyo was rebuilt. Japan’s central planners rebuilt the wrecked water, sewerage and road systems (infrastructure) but left it to the residents (“citizen city-builders”) to rebuild the city’s housing and commercial spaces. These citizen city-builders “created” a flexible city of villagelike, residential-commercial settlements “in some ways remarkably like the migrant-entrepreneurs of Dharavi”.

He also recounted how the world abandoned the dismantling and rebuilding approach long ago. Rio de Janeiro abandoned its drive of dismantling urban slums and relocating the residents to high-rise buildings in “mid-1990s”. Instead, it began redeveloping slums (in situ) into more stable, lawful, sanitary, mixed-use neighbourhoods “with minimal clearing and relocation”. Europe abandoned its dismantling approach of 1960s-1970s after “planners learned the folly of ghetto clearance and master-planned urban renewal”. Similar was the experience of North America.

But Brugmann didn’t ask Indian planners to follow anyone (Tokyo or Rio), howsoever tempting that might have been.

He advised: “…the true measure of Mumbai’s “world-class” nature and the true test of its ability to tame its chronic crisis (like monsoon flooding, crime and corruption) will not be its success imitating the models of other cities. It will be whether it musters the will and confidence to create a new urbanism of its own”. (That is because there are new sources of advantage produced by shared economies of density, scale and association of co-located firms or industrial cluster.).

A few years later, Edward Glaeser, Harvard’s economics professor and author of “Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier” looked Dharavi from an economist’s eye.

In an article in 2011, he started off declaring that “Mumbai's Dharavi slum is the most entrepreneurial place I've ever been.” Two of his other observations are particularly interesting for economists: (i) migrants to Dharavi are also learning new skills, including developing insights into the grocery demands of urban consumers and (ii) their businesses remain tiny “because raising capital is difficult and because their small scale enables these urban entrepreneurs to slip past the web of regulations”. Another one relevant for town planners and sociologists is (iii) “Dharavi is safe – not because Mumbai's police force is so effective but because the community looks after its own”.

Dharavi slums

Dharavi: Challenges of rebuilding economically viable cities