Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]

 

Yesterday we listed half a dozen contributing factors to Dharavi’s revival. There are more:

7. Capital finance is plentiful. The tenants and others are jostling for position because not only does the property offer economic prospects, the globe is awash in capital looking for investment:

 

Newspaper advertisements were published in 20 countries … offering “the opportunity of the millennium” for five major developers to take part in the long-delayed and controversial project in one of Asia’s largest slums.

The SRA has cleverly subdivided the site, which will both encourage more rapid redevelopment and create a natural competition among the bidders. Government is slower than the private sector, but it is very good at getting the private sector to butt heads with one another

 

I think your proposal is full of bull

8. Market demand for the site. Dharavi’s big vision, and the government’s market-leading commitment, is very likely to generate lots of developer demand, especially as there’s a big vision:

 

The development plan for Dharavi has many amenities in it; viz. wider roads, electricity, ample water supply, playgrounds, schools, colleges, medical centers, socio-cultural centers etc. For proper implementation, Dharavi has been divided into 10 sectors and sectors will be developed by different developers. The total duration of this project is expected to be of 5 to 7 years.

Global tenders will be invited from developers for this project. The developer will be evaluated technically and financially by a Committee headed by the Chief Secretary of Government of Maharashtra.

If you wave money, they will come.

 

I heard there’s money to be made in this cornfield

“It’s been mind-boggling. Everyone and their cousin want to participate in this scheme,” Mehta said.

 

We want in!

9. Density will dramatically increase. For the land to be more valuable, the use will be much more dense. This seems paradoxical when you see Dharavi today:

 

We cover the earth … and two stories in some places.

Where will the new people live? Up:

Some 57,000 families — about 300,000 people — will be moved into free but tiny one-bedroom homes in the area and swathes of land will be cleared for business and high-rise flats bounding some of the city’s wealthiest parts.

Evidently the plan also mixes some mid-rise:

 

Rehabilitation building will be of 7 storeys.

However it comes into being, the new Dharavi will have a much larger vertical aspect than it now does. That verticality demands proper municipal infrastructure, which has to be put in first, before the residential buildings go up. Hence the need for demolition.

 

Sometimes you start herre

 

10. Slum dwellers have to become knowledgeable participants. Time and again, I have seen that current residents are skeptical if not outright hostile to redevelopment plans of any kind — including those that offer substantial improvement in their situations. That’s natural enough, since up to the redevelopment moment they have been government’s castoffs. Remarkable indeed are their status quo rationalizations:

In a place with one toilet for every few hundred people (the so-called politics of defecation is a perennial hot button in India), the prospect of having one’s own bathroom would seem to be a powerful selling point for the plan. But even if a stir broke out last summer when gurus declared that the waters of Mahim Creek, the slum’s reeking unofficial public toilet, had miraculously turned “sweet” (leading to much gastrointestinal trauma), many Dharavi locals were unmoved by the idea of a personal loo.

“What need do I have of my own toilet?” asks Nagamma Shilpiri, who came to Dharavi from Andhra Pradesh 20 years ago and now lives with her crippled father and 13 other relatives in two 150-square-foot (14 square meters) rooms. Certainly, Shilpiri is embarrassed by the lack of privacy when she squats in the early morning haze beside Mahim Creek.

When so many around you are ill or die and you do not, you persuade yourself things are not so bad.

But the idea of a personal flush toilet offends her. To use all that water for so few people seems a stupid, even sinful, waste.

When you have had nothing, having anything seems a consumption indulgence.

In many a scheme, the most difficult issue has been having the resident council become a knowledgeable and effective participant in the transaction structuring. Over the years, I’ve found that often residents immediately suspect anyone who dresses decently and talks as if educated.

Everyone in Dharavi had their own opinion about how and why the plan was concocted to hurt them in particular.

Education and any material success are seen as infallible indicators of betrayal, which also makes the residents easy prey for paranoiac demagogues.

 

Trust your feelings, ignore your mind

People are smart; communities of people always have some very smart people. Communities can be even smarter than individuals, if the community is knowledgeable and participates constructively — not naively but with an ability to engage and debate and negotiate and learn. That takes some doing, and some time, and the right mix of community people in the community leadership. It’s hard to define how to achieve it, but easy to recognize when it occurs — when the community group or resident council is participating actively in the deal structuring with the explicit goal of making happen not the best possible result, but the best result possible.

11. A visionary took an interest. Every change begins with an idea, and every idea begins in the mind of someone. Here there’s no doubt that Dharavi’s revival begins with one man:

 

“Talk about doing something about Mumbai slums, and no one pays attention. Talk about Dharavi, and it is Mission Impossible, an international incident,” says Mukesh Mehta as he enters the blond-paneled conference room of the Maharashtra State Administration Building. For nine years, Mehta, a 56-year-old architect and urban designer, has honed his plan for “a sustainable, mainstreamed, slum-free Dharavi.” At today’s meeting [May, 2007 — Ed.], after many PowerPoint presentations, the plan is slated for approval by the state chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh.

 

Mr. Deshmukh said Yes.

What drove Mr. Mehta? The same thing that drove Abraham Lincoln: empathy:

Mehta says, “I had an epiphany. I asked myself if these people were any different from my father when he first came from Gujarat. They have the same dreams. That was when I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to fixing the slums. Because I realized: The people of Dharavi—they are my genuine heroes.”

 

12. The time is right. No one factor will change Dharavi. I’ve already listed eleven, in a jumbled order because most of them connect multiply to the others. The visionary, the land values, the technological construction advances, the cities’ reinvention, the global capital, the progressive government, the market demand, the slum dwellers’ education — they all are part of the solution.

 

“Throughout the world slum dwellers are regarded as pests,” said architect Mukesh Mehta, who has championed the project for a decade.

Ten years to create the plan; another 5 to 7 to build it out. Changing slums is not easy, and one key element is time, time to assemble the resources, time to create the political consensus, time for the tumblers to align.

 

Is Dharavi replicable? Probably not, at least not at scale. Philanthropy is the moral pastime of the rich, and the capital required to remake slums is massive. Still, as the cities become wealthier, and as more of that capital resides domestically in developing nations with liberalizing governments, maybe we can find another.

 

Why we’re doing it … for their future

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