Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability

8. Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai

Introduction* The problem of inadequate housing—often referred to simply as ‘slums’— has long occupied policy attention in Mumbai.1 In the last decade, the city’s housing stresses have attained a particularly global visibility, as special ‘urban’ issues of scholarly journals from Social Text (2004) to Science (2008) supplement a wealth of recent literature on the contemporary global urban condition. Books like Planet of Slums (Davis 2004), Shadow Cities (Neuwirth 2006), and Maximum City (Mehta 2004), and the film Slumdog Millionaire (see Echanove and Srivastava 2009, details in note 2) have constructed and reinforced understandings of a global, and yet simultaneously Southern, urban predicament marked by seemingly intractable problems of poverty, marginality, and uncontrolled growth (Zeiderman 2008; Dawson and Edwards 2004). With remarkable consistency in this literature, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban slums in the twentyfirst century. In early November of 2007, Maharashtra State Housing Secretary S. S. Kshatriya addressed a transnational group of urban policymakers, activists, and scholars assembled for a conference called “Urban Age India.” In his introductory comments, he announced, We’ll plan for making cities without slums. That does not mean bulldozers will be there . . . We have moved far . . . a long way from that, and our policy is that we are going to provide in-situ housing for slum dwellers 8 Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai Nikhil Anand and Anne Rademacher * An earlier version of this chapter appeared in N. Anand and A. Rademacher (2011), Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai. Antipode 43 (5): 1748–1772. 202 Nikhil Anand and Anne Rademacher wherever they are residing, except for where the land is required for a vital public project, like an airport, road or railway line. (Kshatriya 2007)2 The secretary went on to describe an enlightened government that regarded all city slum-dwellers (hereafter, settlers)3 as entitled to humane resettlement. He invoked bulldozers as if they were relics, suggesting that violent or unannounced evictions were a thing of the past. Forced evictions, he suggested, were no longer a condoned official practice. Yet the bold, semipublic declaration was only partly true. Indeed, as the secretary pointed out, the state government has formulated a slum development program to give developers clear incentives for providing apartments to qualified settlers (Coelho and Raman, this volume; Doshi, this volume). This program is generally referred to simply as ‘SRA,’ a reference to the official agency through which it is administered, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. As Doshi points out in the next chapter, the SRA administers several different kinds of urban housing interventions. Depending on their political and geographic location, when settlers have their homes demolished, they may be provided housing on an adjacent piece of land, or be provided housing on the city’s periphery. Doshi points to some critical and troubling effects of the SRA housing policy for those displaced to the city’s margins, that is, the latter type of program. In this chapter, we focus on the former type, the in situ rehousing initiatives of which Secretary Kshatriya spoke above. In this case, settlers receive apartments free of cost, in a location adjacent to where their homes existed previously. In contrast to gated communities and enclaves in other cities, that spatialize and separate inequality (Caldeira 2000; Low 2003), in situ SRA developments highlight, and in some ways, concentrate the experience of urban inequality. In addition to apartment buildings for rehoused settlers, private developers are given lucrative development rights for construction on the same site. Since high real estate values generally characterize the settlement areas that are redeveloped in this manner, the opportunity to produce SRA rehousing schemes tends to excite developers and many of the city’s informal settlers alike. For the latter, who are living on valuable land, it presents an opportunity to negotiate the terms of resettlement, and to acquire formal housing free of cost in the general neighborhood in which they already reside. Housing in the Urban Age: Inequality and Aspiration in Mumbai 203 Contrary to Kshatriya’s claim, however, in situ SRA initiatives have not fully replaced state-initiated demolitions and evictions. In fact, on the very day that the Maharashtra state housing secretary declared them to be a thing of the past, bulldozer demolitions took place in a nearby suburb of Ghatkopar (Doshi, personal communication). Furthermore, only three years earlier, the secretary’s own...