(image via geographyalltheway.com)
Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava have contributed a wonderful Op-Ed piece to the times about the realities of life within the slum portrayed in Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire.
Apparently, Dharavi (the mini-city used to portray the slum) is not only a highly functioning, safe, and prosperous place to live, it’s all completely homebrew. A D.I.Y. arcology made for the people, by the people.
(image via gudus.files.wordpress)
Successive generations of Dharavi residents have set up recycling programs, factories, and multi-use housing systems that rival the most modern cities. And they did it all themselves! No help from architects, city planners, councilmen, experts.
(image via informalcities.org)
Check it:
“Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.
Dharavi is all about such resourcefulness. Over 60 years ago, it started off as a small village in the marshlands and grew, with no government support, to become a million-dollar economic miracle providing food to Mumbai and exporting crafts and manufactured goods to places as far away as Sweden.
No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi. It was built entirely by successive waves of immigrants fleeing rural poverty, political oppression and natural disasters. They have created a place that is far from perfect but has proved to be amazingly resilient and able to upgrade itself. In the words of Bhau Korde, a social worker who lives there, “Dharavi is an economic success story that the world must pay attention to during these times of global depression.”
Click here for the full story.
An article in the Hindu Times quotes none other than Prince Charles praising Dharavi for its sustainability:
(image via nma1.us)
“The Prince, who visited Dharavi in 2003, cited it as a model for environmentally and socially sustainable settlement because of the way it was organised around people’s needs. He was struck by what he described as the “underlying intuitive grammar of design” that, he said, was “totally absent from the faceless slabs that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor.”
Speaking at a conference organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment, the Prince said: “I strongly believe that the West has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms, are infinitely richer in the way in which they live and organise themselves as communities.”
Thank you very much to Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, Hasan Suroor at the Hindu Times, Bonny Prince Charles, and to SuperForester Christine who sent this in!
Go Dharavi! Can’t wait to visit.
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