Monday morning got to work earlier than I have been lately (the great Jocelyn morning slacker routine continues) because of a visiting group of urban planning students from Leuven, Belgium. We had a presentation from Pankaj on the Eastern Waterfront, which is a contentious area here. Basically, the ports are owned by private companies, not the city, and there is a ton of unused land that has been encroached upon by squatters and it’s created extensive slums. The city is trying to figure out a way to work with the private companies to gain control of the land and convert it into something more useful as the ports’ usefulness have decreased over time with changes in the economy, etc. Essentially in a city with such limited space, being able to access the unused land in the waterfront area is crucial, and there’s a big debate going on now about how to do it. Moreover, the entire eastern coast is walled off from the southern area of the city, which kind of defeats the purpose of it being an island/peninsula. Pankaj says it’s cut off the “city’s imagination.” I’m not entirely sure, but I think UDRI’s position is that the should be used for affordable housing to ‘rehabilitate’ the slums, whereas the city and corporations want to build big expensive complexes that would be way too expensive for the vast majority of Mumbaikers. The trend is that instead of preserving open spaces, let alone creating new ones, developers want to build malls, clubhouses, private communities, which Pankaj believes will lead to the arrival of Walmart in India, eventually. Instead of having clean, open parks for kids, they are forced to go to malls, which leads to profits for the companies. Yes, it also creates jobs, but it reinforces the informal sector trend in which unskilled labor continues a race to the bottom. It never really brings India forward, goes the argument.
Anyhoo- the students are an international group- Tanzania, Italy, Argentina, US, Belgium, Zimbabwe, Albania, Canada, Thailand, Taiwan, China, and on. Sounds like a pretty cool program in sustainable human-centered development with a focus on urban centers. The program is in English, and funded by the Belgian government, which allows for so many foreigners. Turns out the professor leading the trip is originally American- I thought she was European because she speaks that sort of affected English. Her name is Kelly Shannon- as my dad would say, might as well be Irish McIreland.
So after the presentation we loaded into a van and took off to visit the abandoned ports, to see what has become of them. Driving in the van out of the well developed central business district into the edges of the ports there was a clear transition to a much lower standard of living. Streets lined with shanties, less cars, more cows, more trash. We pulled into a dock area and got out of the van to see up close completely filthy water, practically solid sludge, with big abandoned ships sitting in it. From there we actually entered a slum, creating quite a spectacle as a group of (mostly white) foreigners armed with cameras and notebooks. What became clear is that it’s not that these people are necessarily the poorest of the poor- they have electricity, tv, relatively nice clothes, many of the kids go to proper school, they have enough food, etc- there is just no where else for them to live. Of course the place is in bad shape, but it’s a credit to the ingenuity that comes from difficulty that it’s managed to shape up as well as it has.
The kids were especially adorable, wanting to have their pictures taken and then gleefully looking at the digital results. Even the adults got in on the fun. It’s hard to imagine what the area would have looked like as anything other than a shantytown, to think of it as a real working port? The water really looks like a solid mass, so dark with oil and trash it almost looks like lava. As opposed to what I’ve seen of Dharavi where the economic sector is immediately coexisting with private homes, this slum was pretty much entirely residential because the inhabitants work in the remaining functioning docks, or elsewhere.
Before coming to the India, and even here before coming to slums, I predicted feeling despair and sadness when seeing them. When we first entered, I felt nervous and cautious, but then I found myself relaxed and actually enjoying it. There is such a sense of vitality and community connection, it was hardly sad at all. Children play and laugh, women gossip over their cooking or washing, men chew betel nut on breaks from work—it’s a neighborhood that just happens to be more dense and less solidly constructed than any other. I understand why there are problems with relocating the slum dwellers to formal apartments- they miss the interconnectedness that thrives there. The moments when I’ve felt the most despair are when I see children begging in the roads—despair that they live in a system which leads them to this action, that they risk their lives walking into traffic, that there is so much injustice on so many levels: misallocation of wealth and resources from the global to local level, parents who force them to do this, pimps who skim off the top of the beggars’ earnings, my feelings of helplessness and confusion.
Tuesday we started the morning of site visits in the Bombay Port Trust garden, which is technically a public space but is kept pretty much hidden from the city. It’s not listed in any tour books, no one knows about it- this was my first exposure to it, and that’s too bad because it’s a lovely space with signs explaining the botanical plants, benches, pavilions, lawns. From there we went to the Sassoon Docks (as in the Sassoons who built the synagogues, library, and industries) where the fishing industry is based, and spent a few fragrant hours learning about the design of the buildings on the docks which collect, sort, and send out the fish locally, throughout India, and around the world. Apparently the night’s catch comes in all at once at 5am, when the main market begins, but I’ll take their word for it. Again, this is a public space, but not at all a place visited by tourists, so we got lots of stares, and suspicious questions by the port police. We weren’t allowed to take photos, which was a shame. In one area there were probably 60 women and girls squatting on the ground sorting through mini-prawns, and the pink piles in front of them made a very colorful scene with all of their different saris.
Yesterday the students gave a presentation on their findings so far on the design and planning challenges here to us, and some other local architects, planners, and journalists. Following their powerpoint, an interesting conversation began which essentially concluded that Bombay is facocked. Good. Great. Wonderful.
Last night I met part of the Jew Crew at Mocha, in Bandra, yet another tres cute café with shisha, tapas, crepes, pancakes, latkes (spelled laktes on the menu), and a gazillion milkshakes amongst other items. Felt very Israeli, very chill. Bandra is definitely the up and coming part of the city.
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