Global Downtowns

10. “Slum-Free Mumbai” and Other Entrepreneurial Strategies in the Making of Mumbai’s Global Downtown

1 0 “Slum-Free Mumbai” and Other Entrepreneurial Strategies in the Making of Mumbai’s Global Downtown Liza Weinstein In late 2 004, t he municipal government of Mumbai, c arrying out orders from the state’s chief minister, undertook a massive demolition campaign to clear the city’s unregulated slums and squatter settlements. During the fourmonth campaign, government bulldozers dismantled hutments built along roads and railways and on “open” plots of land throughout the city. In the process, they demolished an estimated 90,000 homes and displaced upward of 4 00,000 people (Mahadevia a nd Narayanan 2008b; Weinstein a nd Ren 2009). Responding to criticism, state officials defended the campaign as necessary to improve the city’s quality of life and bolster its competitive position. “The proliferation of slums through the city,” the state’s chief minister explained at the height of the campaign, had “ created obstacles for development .”Their clearance, he elaborated, would enable Mumbai’s transformation and make it more attractive to global investors (Mahadevia and Naraynan 2008a: 114). Justifying these actions, state officials cited a series of recommendations made by the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company that promised to ma ke Mumbai a “world class city” within a decade (Katakam 2005; Sharma 2005). Released a few months earlier by the civic association Bombay First, the McKinsey Report warned that Mumbai’s economic competitiveness w as sl ipping. “ Slums ha ve p roliferated a nd c ongestion, p ollution a nd Entrepreneurial Strategies in the Making of Mumbai’s Global Downtown 235 water problems have skyrocketed,” the report noted, all of which were leading to “a slippage in rankings” (McKinsey & Company 2003: 3). Among its recommendations for bolstering Mumbai’s standing in the rankings, the report declared that the government should halt the proliferation of slums and re-house a majority of the city’s current slum residents. Although the report did not explicitly advocate the use of bulldozers to achieve these objectives, representatives of Bombay First, the organization that commissioned the report, affirmed their support for the government’s actions. “If Mumbai has to be a World Class city, then the slums have to go and . . . strong and urgent steps need to b e taken” (quoted in Mahadevia and Narayanan 2008b, 551). Although it is likely that the chief minister’s strategy was formulated independently and the demolitions would have been carried out in the absence of the McKinsey Report, the association with the international firm helped deflect some of the negative response and legitimate the state’s actions. Meanwhile , as news outlets around the world reported on the demolition campaign, the action succeeded in bringing international v isibility to t he state’s new entrepreneurial urban agenda. As reflected in the demolition campaign, Mumbai’s new urban agenda is grounded in efforts to both beautify the city and replace slum settlements with glossy downtown developments that obscure the unsightly living conditions of most Mumbai residents. Civic groups like Bombay First assert the need to remove the eyesores of slums, which they claim hinder Mumbai’s ability to attract businesses and global elites. At the same time, the shortage of developable land in Mumbai—an island-city with limited transit linkages to the mainland—has led to an inward turn in search of land. The city’s spatial politics have long been shaped by this land shortage, but politicians and developers have only recently turned to slums and squatter settlements. Estimates suggest that Mumbai’s slums, which house upward of 60 percent of the population, occupy as little as 8 percent of the city’s total land area (Appadurai 2000).Yet slums have been identified as the next best hope for solving central Mumbai’s intractable land shortage and constructing the office parks, h igh-end r esidential de velopments, a nd c onsumption spac es t hat many believe will help Mumbai become a “world class city.” The demolition campaign also highlights the important new role global consultants have assumed within this agenda. Leveraging externally conferred expertise, consultants like McKinsey & Company have helped frame the city’s development agenda and legitimated its implementation. Although consultants and advisors have helped shape Mumbai’s development policies 236 Liza Weinstein and c ontributed to la nd u se p lans si nce w ell b efore i ndependence, t he greater authority they have assumed since the late1990s reflects a shift in the local politics...