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Dharavi and the Unmalling of America?

by Sandy Ikeda
Mon, 31 Dec 2007 at 2:17 AM

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On a 6-hour flight the other night from JFK to Phoenix I managed to read through most of The Economist Special Holiday Double Issue (22 December 2007). If you can get your hands on it, I strongly urge you to do so quickly before they run out. (It can be found at The Economist website, but unless you are a subscriber you won't be able to access most of them.)

Before I get to the two articles that I want especially to discuss, there are several others that you may find interesting, though they don't relate directly to things urban. (To be honest, though, I think there are actually very few important social developments that aren't closely linked to things urban.)

"From polygamy to propriety" gives background and history of the "Mormon Church," especially useful with Mitt Romney's bid for the presidency. I learned from "When Japan was a secret" that the Kuroshio current occasionally swept lost Japanese seafarers all the way across the Pacific to North America, some living to tell the tale, long before Admiral Perry strong-armed his way into Edo Bay in 1853, re-opening Japan to the West. "Where 'California' bubbled up" explains how and why the East-West fusing Esalen Institute became the essence of California-ness. "The end of the pier" reveals the entrepreneurial origins and fragile financial and structural life cycle of those familiar bridges to nowhere that enable mortals to walk on water, so to speak.

And speaking of entrepreneurship, there's a nice piece in the Face Value column called "The accidental innovator," that tells how the founder of Blogger and Twitter, Evan Williams, is attempting to institutionalize creativity by founding a new company called Obvious, on the idea that "radical constraints … can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things." There is an excellent article, "The new (improved) gilded age," reporting on recent scholarship that shows "consumption inequality has barely budged for several decades, despite a sharp upswing in income inequality." And "Noble savage?" undermines the widely held belief that agriculture and the settled life meant the end of Eden because hunter-gatherers may have been taller and healthier simply because they were killing off the weaker warriors (of their own as well as of competing tribes) through murder and conflict at a rate much higher than previously thought.

Also, there were fascinating pieces on outstanding graphs ("Worth a thousand words") and kitchens ("Downstairs upstairs") that I just couldn't get to before we landed.

Now, the first article that is especially interesting from an urbanist perspective is "A flourishing slum" about Dharavi, a community in the center of the city of Mumbai, India. It occupies about one square mile and has a resident population of perhaps a million, making it the largest slum in Asia. But as Jane Jacobs has noted, not all slums are the same. Although in places in Dharavi there is only one water tap for roughly 100 persons, only 16 latrines per 3,000, and sometimes up to 12 people living in the same small hutment, many families have lived there for generations, occupied with clothes washing, tanning, sewing, hammering iron, and molding clay. Indeed, the article observes that "it is for its industry, not its size, that Dharavi is most distinctive," and that the "clothes, pots, toys, and recycled materials its residents produce earn them millions of dollars in annual exports alone." Some businesses employ up to 200 workers. As one resident put it, "In the village we were starving … here, we were poor, but we could eat." Indeed, "again and again, the stories are same. Everyone is working hard and everyone is moving up."

What has made this poor (though often highly educated), densely populated, and ethnically and religiously diverse community for the most part so successful – what Jacobs would describe as "unslumming"? Well, safety for one thing, which is the result of the government recognizing residents' property rights over their own dwellings. Also, state provision of water and power that had up to then been the leverage used by local gangsters. And cheap labor with little or no government regulation and taxes.

Naturally, the state now has plans to bulldoze this place out of existence — it's a "slum" after all — and build high-rises in pursuit of massive urban redevelopment and a chunk of $10 billion in real estate. The residents, however, seek things the town-planners cannot provide: a sense of history, community and freedom…. It is organic and miraculously harmonious. It is intensely human. Unlike random tower blocks, Dharavi makes sense.

I found surprisingly strong parallels between what's going on in Dharavi and what the Bloomberg administration has planned for Willets Point, Queens, that I'll blog about next week.

Finally, "Birth, death and shopping" is about the purported demise of the (indoor) shopping mall. This is a topic that I find fascinating because malls can be seen either as a substitute for traditional downtown districts, as was largely the case in the 1970s and '80s, or as the next step in the evolution of living cities, as seems to be the case more recently as malls have evolved and even in some cases moved back downtown. While enclosed malls have seen better days, the drive to build them has slowed to a trickle, but as more open-air malls are springing up around the country, even in areas of extreme temperatures, I think they can be seen as simply an adjustment to changing demographic and technological circumstances. They are still place to gather, shop, exercise, socialize, or just do nothing — what one current builder, Rick Caruso, likes to refer to as "lifestyle centers." Kinda like traditional downtowns, which the original mall-maker, the Viennese Victor Gruen, wanted to transplant in American soil. Caruso claims to be "trying to create not just profitable shopping places but also more perfect city centres."

The mall is dead, long live the mall!

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