Rhetoric of the ‘slum’
Pushpa Arabindoo
Abstract
Despite Gilbert's recent identification of the ‘return of the slum’ as a dangerous trend (2007),
scholars such as Rao (2006) assure us that there is a broader theoretical interest in applying the
term ‘slum’ in a normative sense, as it offers a new analytic framework for understanding the
global cities of the South. Using the recent politics of large-scale slum evictions in Indian cities,
this paper explores this tension, asking if a theoretical return to slums can help generate new
narratives of poverty, serving as an important site in which historiographies of neoliberalisation
in the global South can be unfolded and addressed. It underscores the need for a new direction in
collecting ethnographies of the urban poor in India as they negotiate the current political and
policy drive for creating ‘slum-free’ cities, conscious that the resulting spatial articulation could
possibly reveal how formal and informal geographies connect with each other in increasingly
multiple and complex ways. As this paper argues, what is needed in the context of contemporary
urban change involving harsh and often violent slum eradication strategies is perhaps not ‘slum
as theory’ but a sincere engagement with in-depth, empirical case studies that clarify much of the
uncertainty surrounding the spatialisation of urban poverty.
Keywords
‘slum as theory’, evictions, resettlement, urban poverty, India/South Asia
‘The word “slum” is itself problematic. It arose out of a specifically British
experience of the early industrial era, and … has associations inappropriate to poor
urban settlements of Dhaka, Mumbai or Lagos.’ (Seabrook, 2009)
On 1 January 2010, 178 residents of Ganesh Kripa Society (GKS) in Golibar, Mumbai's second
largest slum woke up to the prospects of a bleak year, as they were served an eviction notice by
the Maharashtra state's Slum Rehabilitation Authority. Although a proposal to redevelop their
slum had been in the pipeline since the mid-1990s, and residents had agreed officially in 2003 to
rehabilitation and resettlement, nothing much had happened since then. What caught them by
surprise was the notice coming from a developer with whom they had not signed the initial
agreement. 1 As they raised alarm over the use of forged documents by the new developer,
residents were also concerned with the violation of several rehabilitation rules. The site identified
for their resettlement was on a contested property (claimed by the Indian Air Force), and the
adjoining Western Railway had refused to give a no-objection clearance, issuing a stop-notice to
the construction. In addition to the residents complaining about the poor quality of the transit
camps, there was also the fear that not all the 283 of the 323 tenements originally identified for
rehabilitation would be resettled as only 550 of the 10,000 homes demolished had been reaccommodated. However, by the end of the year, the High Court bench ordered the eviction of
‘non-consenting slum dwellers’ reasoning that more than half of the dwellings had already been
pulled down. Even as the residents cobbled together resistance against this forced eviction, their
tenement structures continued to be razed in small, yet consistent, numbers on a regular basis. 2
As such stories emerge from the shadows of the more controversial yet high-profile plan to
redevelop Dharavi, Mumbai's largest ‘slum’, it is not just Dharavi and Golibar that face eviction
but a violent reality confronting nearly 200 of Mumbai's 2000 slums. 3 Earlier, this kind of state
action was seen on a good day as a well-intended (albeit misguided) attempt by the government
to provide better shelter for the urban poor through relocation, and on a bad day as a knee jerk
reaction to assert authority. Today, it would be naive to assume so, as evictions form part of a
calculated plan to recapture valuable land for real-estate development. Since the beginning of the
21st century, major Indian cities have officially launched at an unprecedented scale massive and
often brutal eviction drives amidst a national commitment to a ‘slum-free’ urban India. An
estimated 300,000–450,000 people were evicted in Mumbai between October 2004 and January
2005, with 200,000 more facing displacement (Bhide, 2009 ). In Delhi, at least 200,000 of the
city's 3 million slum dwellers have been evicted since 2004 to facilitate the city's preparation for
the (much-maligned) 2010 Commonwealth Games (HLRN-HIC, 2011). In Chennai, the scenario
is worse where alongside the 200,000 already displaced there are plans to evict an additional
300,000. Given the city's 1 million-plus slum population, this comprises a worrying 50%.
While the freeing up of inner-city slumland to the speculative exuberance of private capital is a
key reason for the relentless pursuit of evictions, the official argument is couched in a nobler
discourse. Following its commitment to meet the targets of poverty-related Millennium
Development Goals (MDG), the central government issued a seemingly pro-poor National Urban
Poverty Reduction Strategy in 2009 announcing a new deal for the urban poor with loud promises
of making cities and towns ‘slum-free’ by 2020. As a strategy that has basically co-opted the
2001 draft National Slum Policy (one that was never adopted), its emphasis on reducing urban
poverty through a spatial recasting where there is no place for slums is not surprising. What is
puzzling is its rather naive argument that slums are a viable entry point for addressing the visible
manifestations of urban poverty when according to its own estimate only 43 million of the 86
million urban poor are supposed to reside in slums. There is of course a great degree of
ambivalence surrounding these figures as the criteria for determining poverty and defining slums
keep changing. The exact number of those living below the poverty line (BPL) is in constant flux
as parameters are redefined. Following revised criteria based on the Tendulkar report (2009), the
national government has commissioned in May 2011 a brand new BPL census. Whatever the
estimate, it can be safely concluded that while a considerable number of the urban poor live in
slums, not all slum dwellers are poor, and more importantly, a significant proportion of the urban
poor do not reside in the slums. Recently, a Government of India report (2010, p. 7) revised its
2001 Census definition of a slum to ‘a compact settlement of at least 20 households with a
collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature, crowded together usually with
inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities in unhygienic conditions’. While this definition
was intended to be broad and all encompassing, it fails to address the fact that the most extreme
levels of poverty are not necessarily found in the slums. Reports and studies on the urban poor in
India acknowledge this but ignore it when it comes to assessing and analysing urban poverty. For
instance, the National Urban Poverty Reduction Strategy toes a modernist line that one can get
rid of poverty by simply eradicating slums. It thus conveniently chooses ‘slum-free cities’ as the
mainframe, mainly because ‘slum settlements are spatial entities, and they are possible to be
identified, targeted and reached’ (Mathur, 2009 , p. 11).
This is precisely what Gilbert (2007, 2009) cautions against in his thought-provoking articles on
the return of the word ‘slum’ with all of its inglorious associations warning that it is being used as
a slogan to confront urban poverty. In the process, not only is much of what we have learned
about urban poverty being erased, there is also a tendency to distort our understanding of the
nature of poverty, reducing the lives of all poor people to the lowest common denominator
(Gilbert, 2009). Extending the argument, this paper suggests that as the conceptualisation of
poverty continues to be dominated by the challenges of measuring it, slums have come to act as a
stand-in for analysing and representing poverty. In a context where measuring poverty is
increasingly relative, governments are opting to use the more easily quantifiable slum population
as the key indicator of poverty. Thus, establishing a ‘slum line’ has proven handier than the
much-contested ‘poverty line’. Social science research has equally developed the bad habit of
overlaying the social category of the urban poor over the spatial terrain of slums anticipating a
neat fit. Few actually go that extra mile to unpack qualitatively the heterogeneity of the urban
poor and the spaces they inhabit. As Auyero (1997) wryly observed, academic doxa fusses so
much around getting the arithmetic of the misery correct that they fail to take note of Wacquant's
insistence on forms instead of rates of segregation, unemployment or destitution (1997).
While one would identify this as an urgent empirical problem that can be addressed through indepth ethnographic studies of the urban poor, recent arguments suggest otherwise that theorising
the slum is not only an effective way of thinking through the social production of urban poverty
but also, more generally, about contemporary urban change in cities of the global South.
Following Buckley's argument (2011), it seems as though scholars' efforts to talk about slums in
theoretical rather than empirical terms indicate that they are after bigger conceptual fish. This
paper questions this epistemological fad given that the ‘hegemony of poverty’ (Roy, 2003) is
reproduced in spaces other than slums, more so now with neoliberal development policies
resulting in a volatile remaking of many cities. The concern here is whether ‘slum as theory’
(Rao, 2006) is a helpful way of rethinking urban poverty, particularly at a moment when a
constant risk of eviction dominates the political and economic realities of the urban poor (at least
in Indian/South Asian cities). Does it offer a reasonable, empowering discourse that can usefully
challenge this unfair pressure, or does it merely generate surreal representations of their
deprivation and exclusion? As this paper argues, capturing the social, economic and cultural
complexities of their everyday life is demanding as one needs to sift spatio-temporally through a
layered multiplicity that is perhaps better unpacked empirically than theoretically.
Flirting with theory
The past few years have witnessed academics returning to the (use of the term) slum with a
renewed fervour, reshaping it to ‘fit the new capitalist conjuncture and the spatialities proper to
economic and cultural globalization’ (Cavalcanti, 2008, p. 996). Much of this effort is set within
a framework to theorise the slum, an exercise that Rao (2006) believes will capture best the
spatialities of historical processes exemplified by contemporary cities. In a sophisticated
discussion, she draws ironically on Davis's Planet of Slums (2006) and the UN-Habitat's The
Challenge of Slums (2003) to suggest a passage from slum as population and terrain to slum as
theory. While acknowledging the nomenclatural difficulties associated with the indiscriminate
use of the slum label, she is convinced that there is ‘a broader theoretical interest in analysing the
term “slum” in a normative sense to gain visibility for certain histories and the landscapes of
politics and action that they imply’ (Rao, 2006, p. 228). Roy(2011) in this regard supports her
claim by outlining her idea of a subaltern urbanism as a way of theorising the slum. With the
megacity becoming a metonym for underdevelopment, Third Worldism and the global South, she
recognises the need to develop a vital and radical challenge to its dominant narratives. The
paradigmatic alternative she offers is this idea of subaltern urbanism that functions through slum
ontologies constituting a ubiquitous geography of this urban condition. Clarifying that much
more is at stake than Gilbert's fear of an old, never euphemistic, dangerous stereotype (2007), she
insists that it is necessary to confront how the megacity is worlded through the icon of the slum.
This is unfortunate given Robinson's persistent reminder about resisting categories such as mega
and Third World cities (2002). In addition, one has to be careful with the current wave of
theorisation, as there seems to be an overwhelming urge to draw in a rather careless manner
broader, (over)generalised perspectives about the slum, a warning issued by Varley (2010) in her
related arguments about theorising informality.4 The risk is that these larger debates do not
merely theorise poverty but herald a more sweeping gesture to theorise the city. Rao (2006), for
instance, sees this idea of the slum as a demographic and theoretical construct straddling the
conceptual and material forms of city-making, and challenging the imaginary of the modern city.
Her argument is based on the Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas's work (2002) on nonWestern cities (particularly Lagos) where he turned the dysfunctionality of the African city into a
sort of virtue in so far as it can be understood theoretically to incubate the future. In an attempt to
overturn the prevalent apocalyptic view of a doomed urbanisation strategy, Koolhaas sees a
continued functionality in the slumscape of Lagos and other megacities of the South, making a
case to revise our existing theories, tracing instead a new kind of urbanism in this anomaly. This
of course has been viewed sceptically by others (Gandy,2005; Hecker, 2010; Fourchard, 2011) as
over-romanticisation through the use of a rather dubious logic in not only accounting for the
extremity of Lagos's deterioration but also for making a paradigm out of a pathological form of
the West African city. Koolhaas's outlook is characteristic of architectural and cultural theorists
who generally turn to aesthetic imagination and representation to develop a theory of a global
slum, one that constructs reality out of fantasy and fiction (cf. Varley, 2010).5
Here, slums under the guise of setting the manifesto for a radical 21st-century urbanism become
the only ‘recognizable frame’ through which the cities of the global South are perceived,
understood, mapped and created (Nuttall and Mbembe, 2005). One encounters this problem in
Watts' conclusion (2005, p. 189) that ‘it is the slum that constitutes the defining feature of
contemporary African metropolises’. While Koolhaas (2001, cited in Gandy, 2005, p. 42)
suggests that this is indicative of a terminal condition where African cities are ahead of other
(Western) cities, Nuttall and Mbembe (2005, p. 193) are critical of Watts' unimaginative ‘view
from the outside’ and his portrayal of the slum as a master trope of African metropolitanism.
They make a case for moving away from the vantage point of the slum and its accompanying
conventional questions of urbanisation. According to them, cities of the global South represent a
great deal more than the excluded, invisible, weak and the limited.6More importantly, the
excluded, invisible, weak and the limited need to be read in more imaginative theoretical terms.
This theoretical imagination is what Roy (2011) tries to provide through her rethinking of
subaltern urbanism, which as a new geography of theory is supposed to help in the unbounding of
the global slum. Moving away from the confines of spaces of poverty and forms of popular
agency, she draws on different scholars to introduce four epistemological categories, that is,
peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and grey spaces, concepts that have their own
distinctive genealogies, are spaces in the making and a form of making theory. While her
theoretical projects offer an alternative to the vocabulary of the slum and potentially a departure
from slum as theory, this paper suggests that what is perhaps more useful is not a disruption of
subaltern urbanism and a complete ontological break with existing understandings of subaltern
subjects, but a different kind of topological investigation. For, one need not reject completely the
epistemic and political location of subalternity to overcome the fashionable discourse of
‘slumdog cities’. Instead, what is useful is a shift from a single lens focus on slum ontologies to
tracing the circulation of the subaltern subjects and their various spatial negotiations within the
city that uncannily involves cutting across the very spaces in the making identified by
Roy (2011). For, the four concepts she outlines are not unreal sites by themselves, but appear
hyper-real because of the rather dream-like topography she sets them in. If they are to be useful
as categories, they need to be illuminated in a more ordinary way. The next section thus locates
these seemingly hyper-real conceptual zones in the real urban landscape, where one can find
them converging rather neatly in the resettlement colonies, sites that are in every way Roy's grey
spaces located at the peripheries, which, as zones of exception submit the urban poor to new
kinds of marginality.
Shifting spatialities of the urban poor
Post-independent urban planning in India has for the most part struggled to cope with the
challenges of ‘urban explosion’ (both in terms of capital and labour), as a result of which spaces
of absolute deprivation developed cheek by jowl alongside symbols of capitalist accumulation.
Shanty towns in particular reflected the unpleasant side of Third World capitalism marking the
hyper-urbanisation of the haphazard or the unintended city, and serving not only as a spatial
expression of deprivation, but also as a barrier to the capitalist project of accumulation
(Chandoke, 1991). In response, early planning policies pursued slum clearance programmes that
sought to replace the impermanent structures with more robust tenement buildings. In the wake
of its failure to stem the growth of slums in other parts of the city, the government, often on the
advice of international agencies, adopted a slum improvement policy involving in situ upgrading
schemes. Postcolonial urban development policies thus alternated between resettlement and
upgrading as two distinct ways of addressing the ‘slum menace’, both of which came to
constitute an eerily familiar experience for the urban slum dweller. With the introduction of
neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s, political attitudes to slums have changed yet
again. A market-driven approach has emerged where slum dwellers are rehabilitated while slums
are made available for private redevelopment. Slum evictions are central to this strategy, but are
of an entirely different nature to those pursued in the mid-20th century not just in degree but also
in kind.
While it is important to note that this version of post-millennial evictions is tied to a larger
critical shift in urban politics amidst a changing representation of the urban poor (Bhan, 2009), it
is equally imperative to understand the resettlement options that are available to the slum
dwellers in this context. For, as Rao (2010) has pointed out, most academic research in India
stops at describing the ideologies and practices that inform urban renewal and slum eviction but
rarely pay attention to what happens to the urban poor after they are removed. Increasingly, only
a small proportion of slum dwellers are offered resettlement and little is known in terms of what
happens to the evictees who receive no compensation. Earlier, those who did not qualify for
resettlement would return to resquatting at the evicted sites. However, with these locations now
being viciously fenced-off and prepared for redevelopment, such a possibility is thin. Moreover,
contemporary resettlement sites epitomise spaces of advanced marginality at locations so far
removed from the city, disconnecting inhabitants from the hubs of the labour market and
intensifying their socio-spatial isolation. The option of relocation becomes uneconomical, with
households having to bear the high socio-economic costs related to poor infrastructure at these
sites (Jha and Khosla, 2003), with many preferring to return to the city, squeezing into already
overcrowded slums or even opting for the private rental market. Thus, unlike earlier times when
resettlement schemes were seen as a benevolent project of urban modernity, the latest efforts
intimidate the urban poor with new kinds of spatial injustices interrupting their participation in
the city's social production processes. In the context of Indian cities striving for ‘world-class’
status through their slum-free cities propaganda, it is obvious that slum evictions and resettlement
are no longer about reducing poverty but about rendering the poor invisible.
There is a complexity embedded within the current politics of eviction and resettlement that
makes it too simplistic to assume that squatters are only too happy to move if suitably relocated.
For sure, this argument is used not just by the state but also by some of the civil society groups
involved in the resettlement process, convinced that this will provide stability and improve
enormously the rather precarious environment in which the poor live. For instance, Patel et
al. (2002) are resigned to the fact that displacement of the slum population is inevitable given the
pressures of development, and that resettlement is acceptable as long as it is people-managed
with low-income communities having a direct engagement in the plan and its logistics (cf.
Buckley, 2011). The scenario is different in the context of neoliberalism as its market-driven
nature affects local agencies, communities and processes involved in rehabilitation in its own
particular ways. Thus, even though Nijman (2008) presents a case study of what he considers as a
successful example of slum rehabilitation in neoliberal Mumbai, it needs to be emphasised that
this has been achieved against the odds, and is not an experience that is easily emulated at the
larger scale.
The reality is that these new resettlement sites located in the distant urban peripheries reproduce
new spaces of deprivation, a sort of ‘hyperghetto’ (Wacquant, 2008) or ‘hyper-shantytown’
(Auyero, 2000), marked by organisational depletion that contain neither an extended division of
labour nor functioning duplicates of the central institutions of the broader urban society. For
instance, in Chennai, in the recent spate of evictions, slum dwellers have been relocated to sites
such as Kannagi Nagar and Semmanchery (in the south) and All India Radio Nagar (in the north),
at least 20–30 km away from the city. Here, left to the unpredictability of lives at the urban
fringe, kinship links, social ties and cultural connections (constituting the backbone of the slum
economy) dissolve into dysfunctionality. As a result, slum dwellers after eviction are reduced to a
motley mix of the ‘underclass’, socially disqualified by virtue of their unstable position at the
extreme margins of the wage-labour sphere. And although they relocate hoping to bring some
semblance of formality and legitimacy to their lives through the security of tenure promised by
the state, it is clear that neither do they upgrade from population to citizen nor are they able to
invoke the rights of urban citizenship in any conceivable manner.7 Instead, resettlement sites
offer an uneasy fusion of formal and informal status defined by the state to its own advantage and
expose the relocated inhabitants to new kinds of vulnerabilities. For example, even though the
Indian government's National Urban Poverty Reduction Strategy promises secure tenure to slum
dwellers, eligibility to property rights is contingent on their participation in a 10-year programme
of slum renewal and redevelopment. As the socio-spatial relations of the urban poor in
globalising cities are restructured by the deep injustices of slum eviction and resettlement, what is
perhaps most useful is a detailed empirical investigation of the disruption that resettlement causes
in the lives of slum dwellers. One cannot help but wonder how ‘slum as theory’ can address the
anxieties of those facing this grim spectre, beyond being a provocation.
Conclusion
As the protests against the demolition of GKS tenements in Golibar peaked in May 2011, a
priority item in the residents' list of claims was curiously the demand that the government
immediately declare as ‘slums’ 19 settlements and any more whose paperwork could be
submitted within the next few days. Those settlements that could be identified as slums under the
Maharashtra Slums Act, 1971 would legally become eligible for redevelopment. In this way, they
would not remain invisible and hence, subject to an arbitrary demolition drive by the state. This is
surprising given the aversion slum dwellers generally show towards the indiscriminate use of the
term slum in describing their environment. In the case of Golibar, residents were realistic about
gaining as much mileage as possible from an unavoidable process, knowing well that either way
they were damned by the dialectic of visibility and invisibility. By registering their society as a
slum, they risk exposing themselves to a dicey redevelopment process at the mercy of the state
and real-estate development sharks. If they choose to remain as ‘illegal squatters’, they still have
to face the state's bulldozers. Thus, even though sensible academics have cautioned against
viewing slums as repositories of the urban poor, slums have ironically become a key entity
through which the latter negotiate their presence in the city.
On the other hand, most of Dharavi's residents are piqued by the proposal to create a sustainable,
‘slum-free Dharavi’. Despite its infamous reputation as Asia's largest slum, its inhabitants do not
take kindly to this tag. The squalor of the slum that is generally thought of as Dharavi is in reality
an urban legend representing a crucial space for ‘poverty capital’ and its subaltern
entrepreneurialism (Echanove and Srivastava, 2009; Roy, 2011). Yet, for those working on
Dharavi, this is the main draw—the fact that it is not only a slum but also carries the hyperbolic
distinction of being Mumbai's, or even better, Asia's largest slum. This fascination with Dharavi
as a one-stop shop for anyone interested in ‘slums’ (Echanove and Srivastava, 2011) is seen not
just in the wave of recent television documentaries or newspaper articles in the post-Slumdog
Millionaire period, but extends back to earlier years as in Sharma's lucid narratives of stories
from Dharavi (2000). In fact, most scholars unabashedly set their argument around Dharavi being
the largest slum in the city without really probing or reflecting on local sentiments towards this
derogatory toponym. There is a clear lack of sensitivity in understanding the intricate politics
influencing and determining subaltern engagement with the term slum, almost as if indulging in
such a discussion would undermine one's own research prospects. A certain carelessness has thus
come to mark the way this term is used in academic literature—a homogenising label obscuring
the underlying complex relations of social and political inequality (Angotti, 2006).
It is therefore not surprising that Gilbert (2007, 2009) does not feel enthused about the return of
the slum to the centre stage of academic and policy discussion. However, while he worries about
the way researchers and practitioners shed their prudence and milk the term for its popular (and
less scientifically rigorous) appeal, slums have nevertheless come to constitute a major
preoccupation of early 21st-century social thought. Despite policymakers and academics alike
playing a part in emptying the term of its historical meaning, there is a strong urge to re-polish it
around a sophisticated discourse of ‘slum as theory’, amidst a greater desire to use it as an
empirical and analytical point of departure for understanding the cities of the global South
(Rao,2006). While not denying the need for theorising such cities, the argument that this can be
achieved by theorising the slum is not entirely convincing as its ability to provide a critical frame
that addresses the larger urban question of struggles over social production seems overstretched.
This paper followed the argument that slums are epistemologically inadequate in terms of
conceptualising urban poverty thereby leading to distortions in crucial policymaking decisions.
With contemporary urban development policies continuing to force an absolute definition of
poverty and slums, enumeration remains a key element in national strategies. This is evident in
the Indian government's emphasis on conducting a Slum Census as well as its recent
announcement to undertake a comprehensive GIS-based systematic mapping of all the slums in
urban India. The latter is of particular concern for, unlike recent scholarly efforts employing GIS
mapping to disaggregate the complex spatiality of urban poverty in Indian cities (Baud et
al., 2008, 2009), the state's effort amounts more to a notion of redlining slums than mapping
urban poverty. In the current context of neoliberal urban planning, such initiatives are especially
worrying, as they become sinister instruments under a new regime of spatial regulation and social
discipline that seeks to eradicate these ‘neoliberal camps for a surplus humanity’ (Muzio,2008, p.
308). The urban poor as a result find themselves in violent transit between slums, resettlement
colonies and various other unmapped spaces within the city.
With the recent proclivity for large-scale slum demolitions in Indian cities, theorising the slum at
this critical juncture seems inappropriate and even cruel, unless its refined jargon can somehow
help the evictees build an effective counter argument. Against this enhanced vulnerability of the
urban poor, it is important to trace the new trajectory of their everyday networks and how this
reshapes their marginality, particularly when they are injudiciously relocated to resettlement sites
at the metropolitan peripheries. If ‘slum as theory’ is to be more than an intellectual playground
for academics, it is crucial that scholars abandon the ‘spatial fix’ that most studies on slums are
limited to. Instead, what is needed is the charting of a conceptually detailed topology of the urban
poor whose social relations criss-cross an intricate set of connections and flows stretching across
multiple physical spaces. Enmeshed within an array of innumerable layers, there is a deeper
spatial inscription hinting at a relational analytic of ‘translocal assemblage’ (McFarlane, 2009). If
the master concept of slum as theory is to serve as an organising logic it needs to shed its loose
set of presumptions and explore in detail the history, labour, materiality and performance of the
multiple spatial imaginaries and practices (ibid.). Here again, caution needs to be exercised in
terms of pursuing theoretical ambitions to produce grand metanarratives. For, even though,
concepts such as assemblage can be a heuristic device in understanding the socio-material
geographies of informal settlements (McFarlane, 2011), a precise circumscription is needed, both
methodologically and empirically (Brenner et al., 2011).
Given the current academic (and theoretical) purchase of the term slum, the purpose of this paper
is not to reject its scholarly appeal, but to restrain it from becoming a rhetoric linchpin that
dehistoricises and depoliticises the experiences of the urban poor. It is important that researchers
stop treating it as a short-cut icon to desktop-based research on urban poverty and instead set out
in the field to build an ontology of slum practices. For, as Auyero (2000) has rightly reminded us,
the abundance of statistical analysis of poverty is only matched by the almost total absence of
serious ethnographic case studies. Rather than a grand narrative about slum as a meta-theory, it is
such investigations on the city as a site of everyday practice that provide valuable insights into
linkages between the coarser grain of macro-structural processes and the finer texture of human
experience.
Acknowledgements
I am thankful, in large doses, to Bob Catterall, Matti Siemiatycki, Alan Gilbert, Ann Varley,
Charlotte Lemanski, Andrew Harris and Matthew Gandy for their critical comments on an earlier
version of this paper.
Notes
The Slum Rehabilitation Authority was established in 1995 to oversee the redevelopment of all
slums in Mumbai through the participation of private developers. In exchange for rehousing the
slum dwellers, developers are allowed to redevelop the sites for market-driven real-estate
speculation, often at higher densities than normally permitted.
At the time of writing, GKS residents had gathered considerable support for their cause, with the
famed activist Medha Patkar from the National Alliance of People's Movements joining them on
behalf of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan. Although their houses have been demolished,
they continue to live amidst the rubble, organising rallies and protest marches across the city.
After a nine-day fast by Medha Patkar in May 2011, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra
intervened, agreeing to take into consideration the terms and conditions of those facing eviction.
Local media have been surprisingly measured with some reports even taking the side of the state
and the developer. However, extended international coverage and attention has been gained
through Internet propaganda (http://khareastandolan.wordpress.com) as well as a write-up in The
Guardian, 11 March (Patel,2011).
While this may seem like a small percentage, the size and population of slums vary considerably
ranging from a few hundred to few thousand shanties. The Mumbai Human Development Report
(2010) suggests that slums occupy only 6% of the total land, whereas Nijman (2008) believes it
to be closer to 12%. Depending on the figure, the total slum area in Greater Mumbai is anywhere
between 8900 and 17,800 acres, accommodating nearly 9 million people. The drive to free these
thousands of acres of inner-city land for development is putting millions of slum dwellers at risk
of eviction. This includes Dharavi spread over 432 acres with 67 communities comprising a
population of 550,000 (Nijman, 2010), the airport slums (276 acres of 31 slum pockets and
85,000 families) and Golibar (140 acres with 46 cooperative societies and 26,000 families).
Together these three clusters cover 850 acres of land with 1.1 million people.
This is quite different from the analytical concepts of the 20th century where ethnographically
grounded research (mostly set in Latin America) yielded useful epistemologies of slums such as
Portes's rationalisation of the slum (1972) or Perlman (1976)dispelling the myth of marginality.
Varley (2010), on the other hand, notes the almost complete absence of Latin America in recent
explicitly theoretical approaches to informality drawing mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia.
Architects while acknowledging the deprivation prevalent in the slums have exhibited a tendency
to view its physical environment positively within the cultural framework of the vernacular, some
more cautiously than others (Rapoport, 1988; Kellett and Napier, 1995; cf. Oliver, 2003).
Chalana (2010), for example, examines the squatter settlements and the more permanent
tenements of the urban poor in Mumbai as part of the spatial narrative of a vernacular
environment. Describing it as a classic example of ‘everyday urbanism’ that is devoid of the
‘spectacle’ of architecture, his emphasis on the vernacular nature of these settlements is a way of
highlighting the supposedly greater control that residents exert on the production and/or
appropriation of space and its architecture.
Lemanski and Oldfield (2007), for instance, argue that while interpretations of slums may act as a
critical discourse through which Southern cities are understood, in contrast, stories of gating and
walling off homes and communities provide an equally powerful but different lens to view the
Southern city and its urban experience.
The difference between populations and citizens derives from Chatterjee's distinction between the
two where he states that the citizens claim equal rights and operate through civil society while
populations make demands on the state's welfare policies via the domain of political society
(2004).
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