Bestow heritage status on Dharavi …….Jeb Brugmann
WHY does the world constantly turn its media, literary, and cinematic attention, not to the cultural legacies of Agra and Thanjavur, but to Dharavi, Asia’s so-called “biggest slum”? The answer: we detect some greatness in Dharavi’s against-all-odds achievements. Many are drawing back the curtain of slum stereotypes that have prevented insight into the genius in Mumbai’s centre of bootstrap poverty reduction.
India’s cities will double in population over the next 30 years. In ten years, some 20 million new migrants, largely poor, will join the 62 million slum dwellers recognised today. The nation’s prosperity, and perhaps even its stability, hinges on a strategy for urban growth that enables shack-dwelling new arrivals to steadily build a secure, productive, and legal place in the mainstream of urban India. Dharavi shows a way. Its brilliance can be reverseengineered, made systematic, and scaled across the slum-building stand-off that is urban India.
So I make an audacious proposal: that Dharavi not only be preserved and steadily upgraded, but be designated a United Nations World Heritage Site to protect it from expedient development schemes that would deny India the exemplar of one of its native forms of urbanism.
The United Nations applies four main criteria when selecting districts in cities like Havana, Liverpool, Quito, and Prague for World Heritage Site protection. Dharavi scores high on all accounts.
Dharavi exhibits an important interchange of human values on architecture, town-planning and landscape design. In Dharavi, hundredfold chains of migration have mixed very diverse Indian village traditions and trial-and-error approaches to “town planning” to create a global manufacturing and trading city in a matter of decades. Dharavi is a living “interchange of human values” fixed in space and given robust economic logic.
Formal sector urban development today is capital-intensive, and therefore inaccessible to the majority. But unconstrained by large fixed capital investments and maintenance costs, Dharavi’s resident-builders practice a flexible, resilient, just-in-time approach to city building that still works at the scale of more than half a million. Dharavi’s approach offers two special advantages. First, it is accessible to migrants with limited cash-flow and credit, who incrementally build and upgrade as they generate savings over a period of years. Second, building design and arrangements can be adapted quickly and efficiently to respond to economic, social, and environmental pressures, offering resilience for those living at the margins. Dharavi demonstrates an economically robust form of city building that allows the poorest to develop complex industrial economies, supporting remittance lifelines across village India from their positive balance of trade.
Dharavi is an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, bearing unique testimony to a cultural tradition.
Like the traditional mahalles of western Asia and the kampungs of southeast Asia, Dharavi represents India’s tradition of adapting village form, life, and culture into a settlement solution for large cities. These traditional forms of urban settlement smoothen the transition from agricultural to urban society, providing governable and, when necessary, self-reliant social and political units in fast-growing cities. There are many more modern, yet failed alternatives to organising large migrant populations, among them the highrise public housing ghettos in America’s inner cities and on France’s urban peripheries. With no economic logic of their own (other than constant subsidy), these approaches create centres of instability.
Dharavi is an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural ensemble, or landscape that illustrates a significant stage in human history.
Just as old Manchester evolved unique building types and ensembles to support the Industrial Revolution, Dharavi evolves urban designs at the front-line of the migratory urban revolution. Every building, shop, and space responds to the lean economics of the migrant city builder. Otherwise separated buildings and building uses are clustered to support a variety of functions in the same space. There are residential-retailcreche buildings, retail-warehouse-movie theatre buildings, or industrial-residential-warehouse buildings. Dharavi has invented its own form of 24/7, resulting in an extremely high utilisation rate of property.
Dharavi’s residents and businesses also have extremely low costs for transportation. Most of Dharavi’s workforce lives there. The alternative is commuting from distant low-cost settlements. Similarly, many Dharavi industries have minimal logistics complexity or cost because manufacturers are located next door to suppliers and retailers.
With low transportation costs, efficient utilisation of property, reduced logistics, and clustered entrepreneurial communities, the resident-worker-entrepreneurs of Dharavi gain stable competitive advantage. They can support and educate their families on low wages and long hours, and meanwhile gain access to global finance, goods, and labour markets.
Dharavi is directly and tangibly associated with events or living traditions, ideas, or beliefs of outstanding universal significance.
The issue of Dharavi’s preservation is not about an aged slum. It’s about a strategic choice facing India and other rapidly urbanising countries. Will New India honour the ingenuity of its urban traditions, and evolve these into even better home-grown solutions? Or will India build its future with less robust solutions imported from other places? The wrong choice can lead to costly folly.
The recent subprime crisis, like the Asian financial crisis before it (1997-1998), is about more than a failure of the banking industry. Both crises were rooted in uncritical acceptance of capital-intensive, industrial-scale models of urban development based on deeply flawed economics during periods of rapid urban growth. Both the Asian Tigers and the US turned away from tested, resilient forms of native urbanism and towards expedient, “modern” ways to become the “next Shanghai” or “next Silicon Valley.” But Dharavi reminds us that effective urbanism provides far more than an expedient fix: it creates places that can be affordably adapted and improved upon to renew competitive advantages in the face of constant change, even for the poorest of households in the hardest of times.
Dharavi offers too much guidance to a world of growing cities to face “renewal” through demolition. That is why it captivates the million-fold migrants of India and, with them, the attention of the world. Just as cities like Barcelona, Lisbon, and Rio de Janeiro preserved their erstwhile slum districts as they legalised and invested in them, Dharavi should be proudly claimed and upgraded in partnership with its existing residents. It is a unique and salient creation of living Indian heritage.
(The author is co-founder of The Next Practice, a strategic advisory firm)
(The author is co-founder of The Next Practice, a strategic advisory firm)