Making Over Slumbai

When I first heard of the Mumbai Project, a series of articles tracking the progress of various urban projects in the city in the Hindustan Times – one of India's main papers – I was pleasantly surprised to hear of citizen engagement in the city's development. Launched in 2007 and revisited these past two weeks, the feature follows issues like airport redevelopment, transport projects governance and other facets of “Mumbai’s makeover.”

It turned out, however, that the articles exclusively summarize the perspective of the upper classes, who demand that their streets are smooth, their airports efficient and their city "world class." Never mind that that the majority of Mumbai's residents – 55% of whom live in slums – would be calling for a toilet, clean water and a secure place to live, if given such a platform. This exercise in citizen engagement unflinchingly makes clear who counts as a citizen, whom the city's "makeover" is intended to serve — and who is in the way.


This bias is unambiguous in the December 22 feature, which examined why reconstruction of pavements had not proceeded apace: “The reason? It’s more like 5 lakh reasons – that’s how many encroachers are currently hogging your pedestrian space across the city… With nearly 5 lakh encroachers, including hawkers, having made the city’s footpaths their permanent home, pedestrians are left with no space to walk on.” The header states that, "Encroachments by hawkers, squatters continue to plague pedestrians.” Clearly, the important question for an investigative piece on this subject is why pedestrians are troubled, not why so many people lack proper homes or spaces from which to sell goods conveniently to those same passers-by. The article quotes a municipal engineer as saying, "We had a huge demand for better footpaths from...citizens.” It is clear that those families forced to squat on the pavements do not fall under this definition of "citizen."

In "Tug-of-War Clogs Loo Project" on December 16, the series highlighted stalls in a state project to construct public toilets due to conflict over whether corporate or community-based interests would build and manage the toilet blocks. While the state handed the project to community-based organizations, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) wants private firms to construct the 227 toilet blocks. The article focused exclusively on this agency's misguided aim of building "five-star toilets" at the expense of community-managed ones. R.A. Rajeev, Additional Municipal Commissioner at the BMC, is quoted as saying: "We do not want to present the city as ‘Slumbai’. We need to construct toilets in a manner that reflects the changing culture of the city." Considering that most of the city's population continue to live in slums, and that these are the people who most need public toilets, this statement is laughable. The fact that community-constructed and managed toilets are more sustainable, more affordable and better managed has been demonstrated in India. The article also neglects to mention the fact that Mumbai's regional development agency has separately embarked on a community-based sanitation scheme in partnership with one of the pioneers of community-managed toilet construction, based in Mumbai. In fact, they didn't interview a single community organization or anyone lacking a toilet.

On December 22, the series examined the progress of a project to revamp the city’s drainage system to reduce flooding. The header was: "Slums still crowd areas around city's 150-year old drains, and unmapped utilities snake underground, delaying ambitious plans for flood-free monsoons." Slum dwellers would probably like more than anyone for the city to address its flooding problems, which can prove fatally dangerous. Slum residents – who often inhabit low-lying and flood-prone areas, have structures that are least resistant to rain and flooding and have little money to rebuild their homes – are most vulnerable to flooding. This article paints slum dwellers as obstacles to the goal of flood reduction, instead of portraying them as citizens who would also benefit from the project and presenting slum improvement and flood reduction as two sides of the same development coin.

The tone of the Mumbai Project highlights the frequency with which infrastructural and beautification projects are formulated in a way that pins city development against the shelter and livelihoods of the poor. Poor people who live in cities in the developing world often carve out space for themselves to live and work in the crevices of the urban infrastructure – along railway tracks, near airport runways, near sewage drains, on city pavements – because these are available spaces to set up shelter in the absence of formal housing options or vacant land while remaining close to the central city. When infrastructural projects emerge, these communities thus seem to "get in the way."

Mumbai does need infrastructural improvement – for everyone's sake – but this should be part of an approach that understands infrastructural upgrading and housing options for poor people as part and parcel of the same mission.

Otherwise, a perspective that portrays the poor as obstacles to development leads to demolition for the purpose of transforming the city to fit the needs and aesthetics of the upper classes. In some cases this is feasible with pure force, and in other cases, as with those slum dwellers who can prove themselves eligible for resettlement under certain policies, eviction takes place under a defined procedure and people are relocated elsewhere. Although Mumbai is relatively progressive for resettling those who fall in the second category, and this could theoretically be a win-win solution if proper accommodation in serviced and well-connected locations is available, most resettlement sites are peripheral and threaten to become "vertical slums." In the end, this is still a way of clearing populations who are "in the way" out of central urban space in order to reshape the city for its high-end users.

(Images from the Hindustan Times and Beaten Paths).

Why Do We Build Cities?

Against all odds, more than half of the citizens of New Orleans returned to their broken city after Hurricane Katrina to try to repair their homes and their communities. The process has been notoriously difficult, as the media continues to report, yet New Orleansians press on, living in FEMA trailers or under tarp roofs and trying to make sense of the legal nightmare of applying for aid.

Meanwhile, down in Pisco, those who lost their homes in the recent earthquake are starting to rebuild their adobe houses without any kind of supervision or safety regulations, Peruvian officials worry. At least part of the motivation is economic, as one can only build on the land that one owns or can lay claim to. These people need shelter, and they're addressing that need. But with the government promising aid and training for people rebuilding their homes, there is the suggestion that there is some other motivation, something below the surface, that is causing people to rebuild so quickly.

In fact, the rebuilding processes in both New Orleans and Pisco raise some interesting questions about the nature of urbanism. Why do these people rebuild instead of moving elsewhere? And if a city must be rebuilt, why start over in the same place? Why not build a new city in a place less prone to, say, flooding or earthquakes? What's the reasoning behind trying to rebuild a city that has been knocked down?

There is a social aspect to urbanism that underscores all of the other motivations for urban development. People, as has been well-documented by sociologists, generally like to be around other people (at least in close proximity, even if there is no direct interaction). Still, we generally think of cities merely as concentrations of power (both economic and militaristic) instead of what they are, literally: concentrations of people.

If our settlements can be leveled by natural forces regardless of size, and if their economic structures can be so easily toppled, why don't we all live in small towns or villages? They'd probably be easier to rebuild. They wouldn't be such a hassle to manage. In fact, one could make a convincing argument that a society made up of small towns, even operating with current technology, would be more sustainable than one composed of large cites.

So why the heck do we build cities, anyway?

A few weeks back, a research consortium with participants from Harvard and Cambridge Universities (among others) shared some interesting new findings from the excavation site at Tell Brak -- findings that seem to tell us a lot about the origins of urbanism. The researchers have found, by analyzing fragments of pottery scattered around what was essentially a core city, that the urban area around Tell Brak was developed in an organic way that suggests an entirely different reason for the founding of mankind's earliest cities.

Traditionally, the founding of these early cities has been attributed to various kings and religious authorities. In an article about the new findings, Scientific American quotes researcher Jason Ur: "Kings were quick to take credit for founding cities...We're taking royal inscriptions at their word, which could be a bad thing to do."

The informal growth of Tell Brak seems to suggest that, at their very beginnings, cities were founded because they provided a strong social network. This undoubtedly created economic and military power as early cities grew, but the original impetus was simply for people to gather in one place in order to improve their lives in some way (the researchers acknowledge that individual motivations were likely diverse). So Tell Brak illustrates at least one compelling argument for why we build large, impressive urban centers: we just like to be around each other.

In wrecked cities like New Orleans and Pisco, the large majority of citizens don't return because they look forward to the immense challenges of cleaning up environmentally devastated lots, tearing down the shards of their old homes, and rebuilding from scratch. They return because they are looking to rebuild the social places that existed before their city was ruined. They rebuild for the same reason that anyone builds in the first place.

They just like to be around each other.

(Photo from Flickr user mateollosa.)


Links:

Pay Heed to New Orleans' Plight (Associated Press)

Citizens in Pisco, Peru Informally Build Adobe Houses after Earthquake (LivinginPeru.com)

Ancient Squatters May Have Been the World's First Suburbanites (Scientific American)

Researchers rewrite origins of the urban sprawl (University of Cambridge)

WEEKEND READING: August 4-10, 2007

It's been humid here like you wouldn't believe this past week, but the weekend is supposed to get a bit cooler. (Note to self: stop starting every Weekend Reading post by commenting on the weather...)

ITEM ONE: The US Affordable Housing Institute's blog is both informative and hilarious. Quite a feat, hey?

ITEM TWO: Milwaukee Magazine has a great article up about the unsinkable Whitney Gould, the architecture critic who has played quite a large role in the development in Milwaukee's attitude (and thus, my own) toward design and architecture.

ITEM THREE: The headline takes care of this one - Asia's biggest slum set to turn into India's Madison Avenue .

ITEM FOUR: One Porteño's commentary on (and photos of) Buenos Aires' new $46 million, 16 block tram. Oy. (Found via the excellent Global Voices Online)

ITEM FIVE: Some good news out of New Orleans -- the city's population has reached 60% of the pre-Katrina level.

ITEM SIX: Great post this week on brain drain at the Burgh Diaspora blog.

ITEM SEVEN: In case you missed it, proposals for San Francisco's Transbay Tower from Richard Rogers (ouch), Cesar Pelli (double ouch), and SOM (actually quite good) were unveiled this week. Life Without Buildings points us to some gorgeous animations of SOM's tower and station buildings on YouTube.


That's all for now, folks. Enjoy your weekend!

(Photo from Flickr user fddi1.)

"A World of Refugees"

Video found via NewsTrust

Speeding Succession

I've been searching for over an hour trying to figure out how many trees are felled to produce the average suburban McMansion. I hope you enjoy fuzzy math because you're about to read some pretty hefty guesstimates.

To start out, Habitat for Humanity of Midland, Texas estimates that, to build a 1104 square foot home, they use about 600 two-by-four beams. Wikipedia's page on McMansions lists the average square footage of a suburban home today as being between 3000 and 5000 square feet! (Coincidentally, it also provides the image for today's post.) That means a McMansion requires something between 1630-2717 two-by-fours. An article at How Stuff Works that estimates how much paper comes from one tree provides some numbers that allow me to estimate that the average pine tree produces roughly 161 2x4s. That means that, lowballing the average suburban home at 3000 square feet, just over ten trees (with one tree being 1 foot in diameter and 60 feet tall according to HSW's formula) come down to produce the skeleton for one Mcmansion. That's right -- just the skeleton.

So what's with all of the numbers? We'll get to that in a minute. First, some news: I read last week about a plan by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to plant more than 9 million trees in areas of the world that have been deforested by refugee camps. This made me think back to an article I wrote for a local paper last summer about ecological succession, the process by which nature reclaims developed land that has fallen into disuse. It's easy to spot, even in urban areas -- just take a look at the shaggy grass growing through those endless miles of rusting, unused train tracks all over the US.

The UNHCR plan, then, sounds almost as redundant as it does brilliant. If nature will simply reclaim areas deforested by displaced humans over time (and it doesn't take as long as you might think for ecological succession to kick in), why bother wasting time and resources to plant a bunch of trees? What saves this particular project from being an exercise in ceremonial hubris is that the refugees are being involved in the replanting process. From the WorldChanging article: "They [UNHCR] are seeking to involve refugee populations directly in environmental management and rehabilitation activities, in the hope that such stewardship can have positive effects long after displaced populations are able to return home."

This is total and complete awesomeness on several levels. First, it's just a great project to get a large number of disenfranchised individuals involved in creating positive change in their immedeate surroundings, which always earns gold stars. More importantly, it creates this kind of souped-up, hybridized process of ecological succession that makes humans part of the natural progression of the earth's self-healing process. In other words, people, in this instance, are part of enhancing and actually accelerating a natural progression. It's all very warm and fuzzy and Circle-of-Life, I know.

And at last, back to the fuzzy math! (You'd almost forgotten, no?) In these post-Kunstler days of the "green" cultural awakening, the question of what to do with the suburbs does occasionally come up. And what, really, will we do with our vast swaths of tract houses and prefab, peaked-and-dormered McMansions if things get even half as bad as Mr. Kunstler has predicted? Assuming that the pendulum will eventually swing back, and the population flow will once again move toward dense, urban cores, something will have to be done with the suburbs.

Why not help along the process of ecological succession? As urban areas around the world begin to reimagine and reconfigure themselves as more localized, sustainable places, people stranded by a fuel crash or a series of eco-disasters could get work replacing suburban communities with trees. For every house torn down and mulched, ten trees could be planted. These sapling armies would grow into massive forests over time, knitting together to form fabulous greenbelts around urban centers. They would provide recreation and clean air to cities and, depending on the kinds of trees planted, even food.

Imagine if, just fifty years from now, visitors to the top of the Empire State Building could look out over New Jersey and see, not far past the Hudson, a seemingly endless expanse of tall pines and white oaks. If you had told someone in 1957 that in just half a century the view from that very point would be of houses as far as the eye could see, they probably wouldn't have believed you. If nothing else, human beings have shown that they are very capable of drastically altering the face of the planet in a relatively short period of time. But for almost (or more than?) a century, we've been swimming upstream, a fact that is reinforced every time we see weeds poking up through the cracks in the sidewalk. So let's try going with the flow, for a change. Imagine how fast we could change things then.


Links
Midland County Habitat For Humanity Statistics

Wikipedia entry for "McMansion"

How many sheets of paper can be produced from a single tree?

A Billion Trees to Help Refugees (WorldChanging)