B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

A fear of slums was an essential part of the emotional background to the development of modern architecture. Both Friedrich Engels and the Salvation Army identified the slum as the most hideous outcome of the modern world. It was the breeding ground for sickness, degradation and crime.

Modernity was the means to eradicate slums and replace them with a utopian ideal of what the city ought to be. From Lord Rosebery, chair of the London County Council, to William Morris, much of the modern city was understood as a vicious monstrosity, to be treated as a diseased pathology, by surgical means.

‘Slum’ was a word that used to worry me. Jane Jacobs’s book The Life and Death of Great American Cities shocked me when I first read it as an adolescent. She painted a picture of the honest virtue of healthy urban communities, and conveyed a vivid sense of the multiple threats that faced them. The physical fabric of the city, apparently so reassuringly solid, was revealed in Jacobs’s urgent account as permanently on the edge of putrefaction. Apparently healthy urban tissue could be destroyed by even the most apparently trivial infection. It was as if the familiar streets around us were all in imminent danger of turning into urbanism’s version of zombies: slums. A huge effort went into dealing with the threat that they were believed to represent. When they were not described in medical terms, the urban task forces, the development corporations and the area initiatives were presented as military operations. Before the war on drugs, there was the even more fundamental war on slums. The fallout from the unforeseen consequences was just as damaging. The city was regarded as in need of drastic action to save it from itself. Roads were driven through noxious urban tissue in the name of hygiene and sunlight. New homes with bathrooms and balconies and electricity replaced overcrowded tenements. And, as Jacobs revealed, many of these cures had results that were as bad, if not worse, than the disease they claimed to have cured. The city was presented as dangerous, threatening and out of control. There are still many observers who see it in these terms. Some of them seem to have developed a taste for the wild side of the city. Mike Davis, in Planet of Slums and a litany of similar books, has relished an apocalyptic interpretation of the fate of the city. More interesting is the idea that slums are the unique products of their environment: an Indian slum is different from a Chinese slum. And that slums can be places to learn from rather than to fear. The density and complexity of a slum offers lessons about what makes cities work, and also what doesn’t. Closer observation of the rhythms of a slum reveals the creative, as well as the negative, aspects of urban life. A living city is not squeaky-clean, or hygienic; it’s a messy but vital range of possibilities.

The classic slum that engages attention now is no longer in London’s East End, where nineteenth-century reformers claimed to have discovered what they called the vicious poor, or New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. It is the shanty towns of Asia, Africa and Latin America that now attract the attention of reformers looking to draw attention to themselves. Responses to these places have followed a similar trajectory to their European predecessors: fascinated horror, followed by simple fascination.

As they blink into wakefulness, the perpetually jet-lagged have a way of starting each day with the same mixed feelings of doubt and certainty. They may never be entirely sure of where they are in the world, but they do know exactly which hotel chain they are dealing with. So it was for me one dislocated Sunday morning at the Hilton Towers. My surroundings, unmistakable as an international hotel though they were, at first sight could have been anywhere. The larger-than-average room was finished in several shades of the kind of cream paint that in my experience tended to be associated with Hilton more than, say, Hyatt. The desk by the window, the pair of sofas facing each other across a low table, the refrigerator stocked with excess calories, and bottled water that had been flown thousands of miles to get there, spoke of the very particular outcomes of the placelessness that comes with the international corporate hospitality business, with its nuanced dance between reassuring familiarity and carefully measured doses of the exotic. The taps in the adjoining bathroom, with its lurid red marble floor, when turned, obediently and effortlessly delivered a steady stream of cool, clean water. While my brain negotiated all these generic signals of international hotel life, I began to realize that I could only be in one very particular place in the world. And it wasn’t just the fact that when I arrived on the 2 am flight from Europe, room service had managed to deliver a dosa breakfast within ten minutes, and that I needed to remember when to take my malaria tablet. Through the window, I could see the hallucinogenic image of the University of Mumbai’s Gothic towers, a tropical version of South Kensington formed in florid carved stone of quite unrelenting and hugely impressive ugliness, emerging through the dawn. Just as impressive was the clock tower that chimed the quarters, exactly like Big Ben.

I could see neon advertising signs, and office slabs faced in white marble, with anxious files of Ambassador cars waiting outside. For the Indian official class it was the only choice, just as it was forty years ago, when the original production line was shipped out from the Morris factory at Cowley, on Oxford’s outskirts, after the model was judged irredeemably redundant for the British market.

This was a city that had changed enormously since I first went there thirty years previously. Then, it still had the musty, lingering smell of the 1940s about it. There were very few shops selling branded consumer goods, there were no shopping malls, no fast food, and not much advertising. What there was of it had been beautifully hand-painted in confident innocence.

Despite the faintly ramshackle air of much of the city, where the central law courts were roofed in corrugated iron, and their interiors recalled a legal system that would have been entirely familiar to Charles Dickens, with shelf upon shelf of mildewed briefs, you could see the tell-tale signs of sustained near-double-digit growth, for better or worse, everywhere. As you emerged from the hotel, which a year later was the scene of terrorist atrocities, a huge Gucci store eclipsed the silver and leatherware shops. Glossy Italian brands were driving out the bespoke shirtmakers. There were Japanese cars on the roads, and new office buildings. The backlit supersize posters showed airbrushed pale-skinned models. Knowing irony had infected the TV commercials. In one that promoted mobile phones, a hipster in sunglasses was seizing the microphone from a garlanded traditional politician in a Nehru hat and taking a picture of himself.

The construction cranes were busy turning the old mills, which gave the city its first burst of growth in the wake of the American Civil War, into gaudy shopping malls. The cows which were once allowed freely to graze the roads around the airport had disappeared. The densely packed city fabric cracked and fissured to make way for elevated roads that allowed the 10 per cent of its citizens with cars to float above its packed streets and move between the golf clubs and country clubs, the airport and the business districts that defined their Mumbai.

Half an hour after leaving the hotel, I was in the midst of a different city; one in which an entire extended family could expect to live in a single space no more than half the size of my bedroom at the hotel. Not just the family - the workforce, too. For the potters I was meeting, home and factory were the same thing.

The drive from Sir Dorab Tata Road, which divides Mumbai’s hotel strip from the Arabian Sea, to 90 Foot Road, Dharavi’s main drag, unpeeled the layers of the city’s 300-year history. It started with Mumbai’s most recent incarnation, the financial centre of India (and of much of Asia and the Arabian Gulf too), where the hotels are moored like giant luxury liners blazing light tethered at anchor. They were self-contained worlds floating in the dense urban fabric around them, full of gold and cut glass, international chefs and grand dinners, film stars and visiting academics, ecologists and carbon-footprint specialists, doctors and accountants, performing tirelessly for one another. This was the world that terrorism invaded in the brutal attack on the Taj Hotel and its neighbours in 2009.

Then there was the Victorian municipal city, its fretwork skyline erupting over the Maidan Oval and its balletic cricket players. The ground is still ringed by statues of nineteenth-century worthies, with Zoroastrians and Jains rendered in the manner of nonconformist Bradford cloth merchants, remembered for their good works for the poor in their day. Today they keep watch over pavement dwellers and double-deck buses. Next came the art deco tenements of the early years of the twentieth century, interspersed with Tudor-style villas.

Modern and utopian but, at the same time, hopelessly conflicted, India was represented by the deft internationalism of the country’s veteran architect Charles Correa. Correa’s towers presented an idea of a city that looked as if it should belong to all its citizens but which only its elite could afford.

As the road leaves the city centre, it winds through railway tracks and elevated roads from which you glimpse the huge illuminated cross above the Church of Christ the Saviour, past mosques and Hindu temples, past business parks that aspired to the condition of an edge city, as a chance to provide India’s new business elite with a city that works.

The poor are never out of sight in Mumbai. They are in the city centre; they are clinging to the edges of the runway at the airport. They live on the fringes of the railways, on which scores of slum dwellers are killed every month.

Dharavi announces itself with abrupt suddenness; the road in is lined with densely packed shacks, their roofs piled high with the building materials that sustain their residents. At the entrance to the slum, where the stench of open drains is at its most extreme, past the electric pump workshop and the bicycle store, there is a shop selling gold, with a plate-glass window, white marble interior and big comfortable chairs covered in white vinyl for visitors to sit in. Despite the poverty outside the door, there were no security shutters, no visible armed guards, no security tags, no burglar alarms.

Life here stacks everything on top of everything else. The open kiln in which cotton waste was being burned to fire batches of clay pots might as well be in the backroom as the backyard of the slum dweller’s home. There were people sitting on the backstep, keeping an eye on the stock, carrying huge loads on their heads, squeezing past you as they moved deeper and deeper into the slum.

This is what a place looks like when it has 300,000 people living packed into a single square kilometre. This is what it feels and tastes and smells like. It is, through the blue haze that hangs everywhere, like cigar smoke uncoiling in a Berlin bar after midnight, hauntingly but unsettlingly beautiful to look at. The repetitive earth-red forms of water jugs, destined for wholesale markets, merged into a single sculptural composition.

This is a slum that stands on land close to the city centre, surrounded by middle-class villas, with a net of railway lines that makes Mumbai India’s city best served by public transport. It is land that could be, in fact is, enormously valuable. Beijing and Shanghai have similar issues to face. Slum clearance in India takes on an aspect familiar from the command and control activities of the Chinese authorities in their efforts to recast their cities. In India, too, the aim is to upgrade potentially valuable land by moving the densely packed slum dwellers to the city periphery. There are similar compensations: new accommodation to replace what they have lost; and similar problems. Maintenance costs will likely make it too expensive for many of the displaced to live in their new homes. They will be so far from their old neighbourhood that the victims of slum clearance will be cut off from everything that they depend on for survival.

The difference between China and India is that Britain’s former colony countenances dissent. The potters were fighting the attempt to move them as part of a wider slum-clearance plan on the grounds that they have legal title to the land on which their shacks stand. They came here before independence and partition, and have British land grants that should in official eyes exclude their settlement from slum status. ‘We have appealed to our Member of Parliament for help. We all voted for him, but he doesn’t want to do anything,’ they told us.

Within twenty-four hours I am back in London, where recycling is a lifestyle choice, not, as it is for Mumbai’s ragpickers, a constant economic necessity. Like all Dharavi’s Western visitors, I could step away from this world in which there is never an escape from the smoke and the dust, from the sheer press of people. But because there is running water at Dharavi for three hours a day, and there are second floors built on many of the houses, with gallows humour it can be described as a middle-class slum. For those who live there, education is not necessarily an escape route. The fourteen-year-old who translated his father’s words into English told me that, when he has completed his education, his family would need him back in Dharavi as an extra pair of hands.

For Mumbai, with its six million slum dwellers, this is the way that the majority of its people live, though the slums occupy just 8 per cent of the city’s area. For the shacks that are illegal and have no running water, or fixed latrines, it is worse. And for the hundreds of thousands who have nothing more than the pavement to live on, life is unimaginably harder than it is in Dharavi.

Mumbai takes justifiable pride in the way that its citizens pull together to cope with the flash floods that regularly leave areas of the city underwater, stranding motorists on the highways, cutting off large parts of the city. In the worst years, hundreds were drowned, but the slum dwellers took people in and fed them. They formed human chains to rescue drivers trapped in their cars on the highways that bisected their communities, they got blankets and emergency supplies distributed in a way that put First World New Orleans to shame. But life, even on a good day, for many Mumbai dwellers looks pretty much like a permanent version of the Hurricane Katrina-torn city.

Life is certainly hard for the single men who come flooding in from the villages to escape the tyranny of the caste system, and to make the few rupees that they can send each month to feed families in the countryside, and who in Mumbai are the customers for some of the most extensive, and inventive, red-light districts in Asia. They sleep in beds rented by the hour. They wash in communal latrines. They rarely see their families.

India’s slums are no place to become sentimental about the virtues of density and the kind of ecology that both come from extreme poverty. But in Suketu Mehta’s fine portrait of Mumbai, Maximum City, you find an account of the place that they occupy in the wider city, and the kind of life that they make possible. It is not in their form that the squalor of a slum lies. The traditional graphic analysis of city fabric is the figure-ground drawing. In essence, this is a representation of the space between buildings. Put such a drawing of Dharavi side by side with one of Shinjuku, the Tokyo bar district with its narrow lanes and courtyards, and the black blocks sitting on white ground split apart by white cracks and pathways are apparently all but identical. Treated as an abstract pattern in this way, they might have been the product of a city planned by the pioneer of picturesque urbanism, Camillo Sitte. Yet one is a reflection of a world of plenty, the other of poverty. What were once Tokyo’s slums have electricity, air conditioning and computers now. They have managed to decant some of their populations. The society that built them has been transformed by Japan’s post-war affluence. Dharavi’s plan is an abstraction of the realities of a precarious grip that often slips on what might be called the barest decencies of life. Is this a place and a way of life that proves the truth of the anger of Mike Davis in Planet of Slums?

A part of the conceptual apparatus that I have carried with me since I first began writing about cities is the comforting notion that, no matter how divided or deprived they are, cities are still, at one level, machines for turning the desperate into the not quite so desperate. They provide an essential first step in a process that will change their new inhabitants’ lives for the better. Bit by bit they are places that can allow their inhabitants a range of possibilities that the villages from which so many came never can. But can one be quite so certain of that essentially positivist view, faced with the realities of life on the pavement?

That figure-ground comparison is a sanitized analysis that hides the stench, and the fear. There are things about the lives of the slum dwellers that can seem comforting or even heartening. Life in a Mumbai slum could be seen as being almost all right when compared with certain other possibilities. The slum is a place in which Jane Jacobs’s street, protected under the constant gaze of hundreds of eyes, is an everyday reality. This is the polar opposite of the anomie and social isolation of a suburb in Phoenix. And it is nothing like a Brazilian favela or a Johannesburg shanty in terms of the daily level of violence. In terms of its ecological footprint, it does an amazingly good job, making up for the terrible mess that most of us westerners make of limiting our negative impact on the planet. That is why Dharavi has attracted the attention of such figures as the Prince of Wales. His visit to learn the virtues of grass-roots, bottom-up urbanism from the slums involved the construction, so it is alleged, of a special water closet should he have required one. And Kevin McCloud, British television’s most successful architectural popularizer, returned from Dharavi overcome by what he had seen.

Focus on what slums can do well and it is possible to take comfort in the power of human ingenuity and collaboration to achieve remarkable things. Take Mumbai’s armies of tiffin wallahs that each day pull off a feat of logistical complexity that would defeat the computer systems of a multinational, in order to collect the meals that are prepared across the city in domestic kitchens in every suburb and deliver them to the offices and workshops to feed hundreds of thousands of middle-class workers at their desks. With the intricate choreography of a ballet, covered colour-coded aluminium boxes of dahl, flat bread and cooked vegetables are picked up, taken on by stages to central collecting points, then distributed with extraordinary precision not just to the right building but to the right floor and the right person. Then, in the afternoon, the empties are collected up and returned by stages to the kitchens that will wash them and start filling them up again for the next day.

This is an object lesson in logistics that TNT could, and does, learn from, and it is all done without computers or bar codes. It is not just a convenience for the customers, it’s a livelihood for the cooks and the delivery men. But, ingenious though it is, are its foot soldiers really accorded their due?

And, as Maximum City’s author so engagingly describes them, the strips of green overlooking the sea at the heart of Mumbai are the subject of a no less skilful and impressive industrially organized performance. During the day, these precious patches of turf are used by countless thousands of aspirant cricketing stars, practising, playing, perfecting in their neatly pressed cricket whites. No sooner than bad light stops play, armies of infinitely well-organized teams descend to transform the lawns into wedding pavilions, decked with glittering, mirror-studded representations of elephants, garlands of flowers, cushioned alcoves, displays of fireworks and wealth. By the following morning this instant city has disappeared, without damaging a blade of grass, and the cricket teams troop out again.

These are not just the social rituals that shape Mumbai life and make it so distinctive. They support an industry, and a supply chain; they provide incomes for all kinds of skilled craftsmen and training for a new generation.

There are other things to take from Mumbai, such as the sense that perhaps not all of our views of the world are as secure and fixed as we thought they were in the face of the daily realities of life in Dharavi: bribery, for example, and political corruption. Are they really such an unambiguously bad thing when they may function as the only way in which slum dwellers are going to get legal protection and running water, when it comes to election times and the need for local politicians to buy their votes?

And then there’s democracy. India is not China. It believes in open and endless debate, a free press and the rule of law. These are things that are more secure in India’s cities, than in its village heartland. And yet there are some things that China has achieved because it can avoid the tangles and twisted disputes of democracy.

And how comfortable can we be about this world where conventional crime is as reassuringly absent as it was in the small towns of the America of the 1950s, but where, as Suketu Mehta says, there is still the threat of the monster of intercommunal violence. ‘And if that monster comes, it will be coming from the slums.’

Mumbai is part of the modern world even if there are aspects that look as if they have hardly changed in 200, or 1,000, years. There are terrible things being done in the name of modernization; slum clearance has resulted in some catastrophically grim housing blocks that would be unacceptable as prison accommodation in one of Stalin’s gulags.

Greed and expediency is squandering the chance to make Mumbai a more liveable city, as its remarkable seafront setting demands. The old mills and the docks are looking for new uses now that they have become redundant. They could be used for communal good. So far, that is not happening. Mumbai is the Maximum City but, in India, a country whose Ghandian roots predispose it perhaps to a certain antipathy to cities, the big cities are still not free to shape their own futures: political power rests with the states and the central government in New Delhi.

Is there any real difference in our understanding, as supposedly objective observers, of the agonizing fault lines between the glittering, gold-plated, chaffeur-driven luxury of Mumbai’s prosperous classes and the degradation all around it, and those who see it everyday and blithely ignore it?

Just because London is eleven hours in a Boeing away from Dharavi, and I can no longer see it or smell it, even as I feel the soot still in my hair from the potters’ kilns, does not mean that I am any less a part of the same universe. Mumbai is, as one Metropolitan Police commander observed by his definition, one of the markers that define London’s boundaries.

What if anything do I, and any of the other urbanists who come to see Dharavi in such numbers, have to offer such a city? Does our analysis really have any purpose? What kind of experts are we, when we belong to a society that is continually demolishing housing that far surpasses anything that Mumbai’s slum dwellers could ever dream of, simply because nobody wants to live in it. Do we have any business being here at all? It’s possible to take comfort from Suketu Mehta and his words that, if only because many of the next generation of Londoners are being born in Mumbai, it’s important for this generation of Londoners to know as much about Mumbai as we can.