Affordable Housing Institute

Over the last six months I’ve written extensively about slums generally, and Dharavi (Asia‘s largest slum) in particular.  Last week the Economist, which seems eerily to write about subjects on which I’ve posted, did a lengthy year-end article on Dharavi, from the slum-dwellers’ perspective.  Even as it vividly captures Dharavi, the piece also illustrates many of the principles about which I’ve written — so let’s profile Dharavi, both in the Economist’s experience (dark blue text):

 

A flourishing slum

 

Dec 19th 2007 | MUMBAI

AROUND 6am, the squealing of copulating rats—signalling a night-long verminous orgy on the rooftops of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai—gives way to the more cheerful sound of chirruping sparrows. Through a small window in Shashikant (“Shashi”) Kawale’s rickety shack, daylight seeps. It reveals a curly black head outside. Further inspection shows that this is attached to a man’s sleeping body, on a slim metal ledge, 12 feet above the ground.

 

Shashikant Kawale, a courteous host [Economist]

 

AHI’s explanatory posts are in black text, starting with Slums are a wealth extraction machine:

 

For a slum, what we see is squalor, as shown by the definitions in the Free Dictionary (“A heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor”) or Wikipedia (“A slum is a district of a city or town which is usually inhabited by the very poor or socially disadvantaged”) — but these are only the manifested symptoms.  Slums reconstitute themselves, seemingly without effort, restoring themselves to their previous squalid state.  They do so because they are economically rational, and their economic reason is wealth extraction.  Slums are a giant wealth-extraction machine, distilling human beings to their financial essence and pumping that value off-site. 

 

To understand this, imagine that money glows green and people are merely shades and phantasms, as if we are all seeing with X-ray eyes:

 

Think of it as money and it all becomes clear

 

Each of us is thus a faintly gray form with a bright rectangle on our hips (wallets) or by our ribs (handbags).  Follow us from above on fast-forward throughout our days and weeks, hovering over a slum, and what do you see:

 

Morning

 

Every morning, small dim dots stream out of the slum, dispersing throughout the city.   People are seeking work (whether formal or informal is hugely irrelevant here). 

 

Day time

 

Reaching their work locations, the dots settle, and as the day passes, their financial cores brighten as they earn money.  Some brighten faster than others; some brighten irregularly.  All generally end the day a bit more lustrous than before.

 

Evening

 

The dots stream home, and the slum into which they trickle glows more brightly.  The dots swirl about as slum-dwellers transact one with another.

 

Over the week, the slum grows ever brighter.  Then comes rent day.

 

Slums are astonishingly dense places:

 

With maybe a million residents, crammed into a square mile of low-rise wood, concrete and rusted iron, Dharavi is a squeeze. And in Shashi’s family hutment—as slum-dwellings are known in Mumbai, where half the city’s 14m people live in one—it feels like it. As the sparrows stir, so do the neighbours. Through the plank-thin walls of the tiny loft where Shashi, a jobbing cleric-cum-social-worker, lives above his parents, come the sounds of people bumping and bickering.

 

Jockin knows where he’s going, and I’m just following him

 

Two years ago, I wrote that slums are economically rational:

 

The private sector has a straightforward and economically rational solution to the problem of unsustainable renters, consisting of the following steps:

 

1.       Compress rentable space each unsustainable renter occupies.  This has the effect of increasing the revenue per unit.  

2.       Reduce operating expenses to a bare minimum.  This results in an accelerating cycle.  Inadequate operating expenses lead to deferred maintenance and a decline in property physical condition.  Declining property condition leads to lower curb appeal, difficulty attracting good tenants, which leads to acceptance of marginal tenants.   Accepting marginal tenants leads to higher collection/ bad debt losses, higher maintenance, secondary problems (e.g. vandalism).  All this leads to higher-income tenants moving out.  Loss of higher-income residents leads to lack of rentability, which leads to stigmatization of the property.

3.       Adverse-select the worst location because these have the lowest acquisitions/ operating costs and the tenancy residing in them has the fewest alternatives and the least economic imperative for (as an example) transportation and public services.

 

The long-term end result, of course, is a slum, and it is economically significant that exactly the same slum-creation economics recur in cities going back two thousand years. 

 

Slums will inevitably come into being unless government intervenes in otherwise ‘normal’ market practices.

 

Large plaques mean government money

 

On one side is a family of 12 living in a 90-square-foot room—about half the size of an American car-parking space. On the other, eight people share a similar area. Night-sounds suggest they include a man with a painful cough, a colicky baby and an amorous couple. At least they can squeeze inside, unlike the man roosting behind Shashi’s hutment—and unlike Parapa Kawale, a 22-year-old friend and neighbour, who had dropped by the previous evening to share a spicy bean curry.

 

The largest and poorest slums require temperate climates; they’re not so extensive above forty degrees of latitude, for the brutal reason that people who sleep outside can die of cold and exposure.

 

Parapa, a semi-skilled electrician, lived with his parents, two brothers, their wives and two children in a room of 48 square feet. If half the family members slept on their sides, they could just about fit. But as the only single male, Parapa felt a dreadful gooseberry. Like Shashi, he is a member of the local branch of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which tells Dharavi’s youths not to marry unless they can support a family. Wretched nonetheless at the nightly coupling around him, Parapa began sleeping in the alley outside—and drinking heavily.

 

A month ago, explained Parapa, a strapping, beaming, Chaucerian fellow, he chased one of his brothers and a wife from the hutment in a violent, drunken rage. They fled back to the remote village in southern Karnataka that the family emerged from three decades before.

 

Slums arise because people come to cities seeking a better life — and, for all their density and squalor, it is a better life than rural poverty.

 

Aftab Khan is typical. A tailor with a trim moustache, and scholarly wire-rimmed spectacles, he arrived from Uttar Pradesh (UP) 20 years ago, with little more than a needle. He now employs a dozen youths—all recruited in his native village—to turn out 150 items of children’s clothing a day. In workhouse fashion, they eat and sleep where they labour, in the upper two floors of a hutment. Reachable only by a ladder and rope, this resembles nothing so much as a tree-house with sewing-machines. Yet for their drudgery, the apprentices earn 200 rupees a day—about four times a rural wage in UP.

 

It’s better in the city.

 

Parapa then fixed a man-sized plank to the hutment wall, so that while his father and brother made love to their wives below, he could stay chastely on the shelf.

 

Loft bed added to a small 200-square-foot co-op high-rise flat, Dharavi

 

Most housing in slums is self-improved, or ‘incremental’ housing, in the donor jargon.

 

During a four-day stay in Dharavi, as the guest of Shashi and his friends, your correspondent heard many such tales: of hard times, facing up and getting by. The narrators were sometimes bitter or suspicious, but mostly friendly, almost invariably courteous, and occasionally, like Parapa, very funny. If poverty can seem dehumanising from afar—especially in much reporting on it—up close Dharavi, which is allegedly Asia‘s biggest slum, is vibrantly and triumphantly alive.

 

Slums are the breeding grounds of small informal enterprises, or as I have dubbed them, Cryptobiotica:

 

Cities and slums are economic ecosystems, and just as a biological ecosystem has its biota, so to do all the active entities – that is, the companies, professionals, and individuals who operate within the ecosystem – comprise its ecota [my ungainly term].

 

From a distance, cryptobiotica looks like nothing much.  But if you look more closely, that speckled mass, which gives the soil a held or dried-mud appearance, is a complex form of life.  As described on the Web site of Capitol Reef National Park:

 

Cryptobiotic soil is found throughout the world. In arid regions, these living soil crusts are dominated by cyanobacteria, and also include soil lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria.

 

In other words, what appears from our vast height to be simply dried mud is actually a complex interdependent community of organisms that have eked an existence out of an inhospitable and apparently empty environment.

 

Sort of like the people who live in slums.  […]  Cryptobiotica soil, though comprised of the tiniest and most fragile of particles, creates this powerful network effect – it stabilizes the soil.  Slums stabilize communities. 

 

Water and sanitation are essential, not just for health but also for education, enterprise, and income:

 

Soon after 6am, in the metre-wide street outside Shashi’s hutment, an ugly morning ritual has begun. “It’s my turn! My husband needs to get to work!” a woman shouts, in jostling over a water tap. In Shiva Shakti Nagar, a slum area of dalits (former “untouchables”) from rural Maharashtra, there is a tap for every ten houses, or roughly 100 people. “Push off! My kids are late for school!” another woman lashes back.

 

Wash hanging out to dry, Oshiwira 1, Mumbai

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]