The Tabooed City Power, Politics and Contestation in Dharavi Slums, Mumbai

Abstract

The year 2009 shall remain a milestone year in the century as the year which witnessed the major shift of diaspora in urban centers of India for the first time in human history. In this context, it is essential to understand the socio-spatial negotiations happening and may happen ahead between the physically growing city and the everyday life, work-live relationship of these invisible communities within the city. Does the growing city with an economic disparity and tremendous polarization of amenities consider their criticality and social aspects which are deeply rooted within these communities, thriving in the vast and continually changing physical fabric?

The planning framework of the cities are manifestations of a bigger play of byelaws and demonstration of power often blurs out the existence of inculcating the ‘excluded’ quarters of the city within a holistic whole. As a result, these quarters grow sporadically within the city creating a sense of anarchy. This paper tries to seek the relationship of state and political hegemony with these “excluded zones” where profit, political stability, and a constant saga of the failure of proposals to regenerate a highly diverse settlement within the financial capital of India. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai is a sprawling 525‐acre area with shanty roofs and deleterious sanitation conditions, housing over one million residents diversified in terms of its religious and ethnic matrix along with a wide gamut of informal occupations which makes it unique. Dharavi’s residents like most slum dwellers around the world, live in illegal housing units lacking basic amenities and suffer from social exclusion.

The paper would critically investigate the failure of community engagement and mobilization attempts forming cooperatives, formation of the several schemes across three decades and failures of almost all policies raising questions of redevelopment, how costing and finance schemes were mostly inefficient at large.
The paper would also try to understand the scale and scalability of various neo-liberal redevelopment processes initiated by political will, largely vested in the interest of capitalistic gains and focusing less on addressing the complexities and issues of the existing socio-economic conditions.