Parallel Urbanisms: Dharavi

Colonial cities are classically dual cities, and Indian cities are no exception. Indian cities have always been dichotomous in nature – traditional & modern, formal & informal, organised & unorganised, etc. And since the political and economic system is biased towards the formal, organised and rich sections of the society, the informal, unorganised and poor sections are left to fend for their own. They occupy the interstitial spaces of the urban environment and based on their limited resources and create environments that mimic their original rural backgrounds and social structures.

The informal settlements are basically user-generated models of human settlements employing ingenious use of materials and resources, sometimes self-generated, and sometimes tapped from the city “outside”. The formal city and the user-generated city share a complex symbiotic relationship, and together they form the complex ecosystem of the contemporary Indian City. These two models, running parallel, one within the system, the other outside, present an interesting dichotomy.

Surprisingly, the self-built, informal sections of Indian cities come very close to the models of sustainable growth that cities in the developed world are trying to create; with systematic recycling, local production of objects consumed locally, and density and mix of uses that reduces commute. Does Dharavi reveal a contemporary urban model that defies functional urbanism?

Informal housing, and particularly Dharavi, present interesting models of sustainable living outside the purview of the formal city. Dharavi has been tagged as a slum, but if you took a closer look you will see a self-contained township, with a close work-place relationship, eulogised by Patrick Geddes, but never realised in the formal city of Mumbai. What we may call as “unplanned” and “unorganised” in fact has its very own economic model of decentralized production within a flexible and adaptable production process. The high demand, both nationally and internationally, for these products, proves the success of this process.

Dharavi has also developed over many years a township with close live-work relationships and have achieved an integration of housing, production and community, without the traditional land-use separations. It has the potential of not only being refined and improved upon, but could become a model to be replicated in the newer townships.

In Dharavi, we find “Organic Urbanism” manifested in its truest form, and it has been the result of the people living and working within this community, without any involvement from the formal city. In the case of Dharavi we witness the emergence of new cultural, social, and economic patterns, which might well be some type of a global edge; an early adaptation to deep transformations in our ways of working, socializing, interacting and thinking.

The fishing village in the neighbourhood, the potter’s community that settled there and the waves of rural artisanal migrants from different parts of the country came with their multiple skills and shaped this enclave in the most creative way one can imagine. In fact artisanal skills are primarily what has made Dharavi what it is. No wonder it is often talked about as the ultimate workshop-factory-residential space. Dharavi further emphasises, and reminds us that people make a city, not the buildings and infrastructure. The success of Dharavi is built on the creativity, hard work, entrepreneurship, and innovativeness of the people, despite the lack of infrastructure.

User-generated cities present a valid alternative to the centralized, top-down city planning approach prevalent in India. User-generated cities take the idea of People Participation to the most fundamental level, and represent the aspirations and myths of the citizens in the most basic form. Parallel urbanisms – one the formal, planned, organised city, and the other informal, un-planned, organic city. These cities, within the mother city, running parallel, and interacting at various levels, economic, social, physical; still maintaining their own distinct identities. But these exchanges are at a very superficial level, almost antagonistic. The task then is to make the relationship between these two “cities” symbiotic in nature, where one benefits from the other, and both prosper in return.

In the post-industrial age, and into the information age, characterised by a new “network city”. This age shuns centralisation, and a top-down approach. The “network city” is about decentralization, and a bottom-up approach. An “Open Source City”, where every individual is a contributor in creating the city. Dharavi is quintessentially an open-source city in many ways. The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), backed by the State Government, takes a very controlled and top-down approach, ignoring the intrinsic character and qualities that make up the slum. Many cities in India, Europe and many other countries experienced this slow, incremental and organic development process over many generations, imparting a specific and unique character to them. The Dharavi project ought to become an exemplar for integration of the formal and informal city, rather than being seen as a Redevelopment project.

The first impression one gets while walking through these localities is the humane scale of building, the coziness of homes, shops and production units nestling close to each other. You know the fortune of each dweller is dependent on their neighbour. This social network is a vast support system, fuelled by proximity and circumstance. The construction is efficient and locally derived, based on such optimisation of men, materials, processes and time as could give a few good lessons to professionals in building and management. Although untrained, these contractors develop on a bank of building lore, learning from precedent and experience, adjusting to the vagaries of budgets, climate and the ever looming threat of demolition. For example, their way of introducing toilets in places where underground infrastructure is absent is remarkable for its ingenuity. They are also true masters of recycling, nothing goes waste. Each house is built on the debris of its older avatar, which when demolished is compacted into a high plinth. 

Public Participation, being a buzz-word for politician and policy-makers in the formal city, finds its true form in informal, organic settlements like Dharavi. This paper presents the grass-roots level, informal urbanism as one of the Alternative models of urbanisms for future Indian cities.