Mumbai: Housing for the poor and its constant change of usage By, Sheela Patel

Whenever the state government of Maharashtra has taken up new and interesting possibilities to address the challenges of housing the poor, it gets side tracked by a paradoxical impact of poor supervision of governance architecture needed to ensure it reaches the people it was meant for.  Housing possibilities remain in a constant state of crisis because any empty space gets used up for alternative uses; and because the construction industry which explores construction opportunities in the name of the poor fails to address solutions for the bottom 40% in the city.

Six years ago, the Government of Maharashtra took a bold decision to build small tenements which would be given to the poor for rent. The rental housing scheme would be taken up by the private sector and they would get a good TDR return for tenements which in turn they would give back to the government. MMRDA would then hand these tenements over to organizations to manage according to a governance framework to be developed alongside the construction.  A total of 500,000 units were to be constructed. The initial tenements were constructed but when a new leadership took office, the MMRDA preferred to sell rather than rent the houses.

The 500,000 houses were never built. But the ones that were built remained empty since the MMRDA did not develop the management strategy and framework for supervision. When buildings collapsed these were the only tenements that were available and thus were used as transits accommodation.  Transit accommodation generally knows several generations until the time when residents forget where their grandparents were moved out from and build their lives around these localities.

Dharavi tops upscale Lower Parel

The Economic Times of Mumbai recently reported that a flat in Dharavi generates a higher price than a similar flat in upscale Lower Parel.  The promise of a government redevelopment project has led to the price increase. The slum dwellers anticipate that the prices will increase once the DPR starts.Unfortunately, the Dharavi Redevelopment project has been stalling since 2004.  

KIM DOVEY FROM MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY IN SPARC, AUGUST 2012

Prof. Kim Dovey, an architect from Melbourne University, revisited with SPARC, NSDF, and MM for a week in August 2012. Although his earlier trip was focused on Dharavi, his current trip was to explore other dimensions while working with us.

Even though numerous issues were explored, the one which was significant and linked to our present strategy was ways to improve our ability to support incremental housing. The following issues were discussed:

Firstly, why incremental housing is crucial to develop and support both at policy and financial level to help a larger number of the poor manage and develop their own housing.

Secondly, to explore how to deal with possible conflicts between private households choices versus collective needs for settlements about community spaces. Clearly the challenge was to develop simple rationale that would appeal in logic and simplicity for collectives to maintain.

Finally, the challenge was to see if the professionals, architects, planners, and others could make real contribution to this process, or whether this should be left to the evolution that emerges from community incremental construction.

The Dharavi development options were also discussed and the realization that delayed responses to solutions only leads to more compromises as densities and populations keep growing was acknowledged.