The sustainable surviving means for informal settlements in developing countries
The outline of the assignment: What do you consider to be the single most pressing research issue on cities in the next decade? Why? How would you frame a research agenda to address this priority issue for cities in a global context? Create an annotated bibliography of four core references that frame this research agenda. As part of this final assignment, draft three research questions (one primary and two secondary research questions) to guide this new research agenda. So I wrote about this subject as you can see it on my title. To create a framework for this essay. Please before start to write read the attached PowerPoint file first. about the sources: please only use the third and forth references. thanks,
Mumbai: Planning Challenges for the Compact City
Rahul Mehrotra
Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in Cambridge, MA, USA
This paper is an attempt to capture the lessons which the particular condition of Mumbai offers to the thinking on urbanism generally. More particularly, it builds a case to argue that the compact city in the case of Mumbai goes beyond its formal or informal manifestations and can be understood as a hybrid condition: the Kinetic City. A condition which transgresses economic exchange as the sole criteria for discussing if a city and its urban form are sustainable. The paper suggests equity, density and democracy could be simultaneously considered - if a city like Mumbai, has to be imagined as a sustainable entity.
1 Informal city: compact and economically efficient
Informality is a state of being that is outside the formal or often implied legal system. This term perhaps originated in its use in economics and was extended to the physical manifestation of this fringe condition in the form of the informal city; a response to what the formal system could not deliver. Historically and largely starting in the 1950's as the critical mass of the "informal city" globally increased, it was sharply juxtaposed in the form of a binary with the formal city. While these were totally interdependent in their evolving relationship, the economic and physical characteristics of each of these worlds were well-identified and tied in space and physical manifestation. The cast of characters that engaged in the informal economy were imagined to most often reside in the informal city and vice versa. In the messy, mutinous democratic condition of Mumbai, and most parts of India, this is not such a neat relationship. In Mumbai often people employed in the formal sector reside in the informal city and vice versa.
But while the densities of the informal and formal cities are similar,1 the informal city has come to epitomize the dense and compact city and is celebrated for its economic efficiency as well as humanity in the face of the extreme conditions of the challenges of sanitation and other infrastructural needs. It is for this reason that Mumbai has been at the centre of the world's imaginations in the last few years for all the wrong reasons!2 While its economic energy has been celebrated, what has not been adequately articulated is its failure to cope with infrastructure, housing and governance. The manifestations of these failures in the form of slums, the informal city, garbage on the streets, squeezed space; bizarre adjacencies have in a strange way become the new mythical images through which the city is celebrated globally! Interestingly, architects and designers are pandering to this abject failure through its representation in different media -installations, writing, photography and of course films! The fetishizing of this condition has shifted the gaze in recent years to planning strategies of incremental growth and improvement and upgrading of the present conditions in the existing built environment rather than speculating about the opening up of land or other urban centres to disperse growth.
Over the last three decades in Mumbai, planning has largely been about rear-guard actions versus the avant-garde approaches that have traditionally led planning. Thus today most infrastructure follows city growth rather than leading development by facilitating and opening up new growth centres within and outside the city. Planning in contemporary Mumbai is systematically "posterior" as a recuperative and securing action.3 And like the narratives that developed around the preservation debate that froze architects and planners into inaction, these new descriptions and re-descriptions of the informal city are creating a similar paralysis! Of course the critical question becomes - how do we spatially and physically covert this supposedly wonderful energy and innovation that the informal city produces into a just, equitable and humane environment?
Mumbai (as it is now referred to), in the post-industrial scenario, like several cities in India, has become a critical site for negotiation between elite and subaltern cultures. The fragmentation of service and production locations has resulted in a new, bazaar-like urbanism, which has woven its presence through the entire urban landscape.4 This is an urbanism created by those outside the elite domains of the formal modernity of the state. It is a "pirate" modernity that slips under the laws of the city to simply survive, without any conscious attempt at constructing a counterculture.5
This phenomenon is critical to the city being connected to the global economy. However, the spaces it creates have been largely excluded from the cultural discourses on globalization, which focus on elite domains of production in the city. It is not the regular models of the formal and informal and other such binaries (often used to explain cities developing in South and Central America, Asia and Africa) but it
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The most pressing research issue on cities for the next decade: The sustainable surviving means for informal settlements in developing countries
There are various research issues that would warrant deep study in the urban centers and cities in the next decade due to various problems that face the developing world. In this study, I chose to select informal settlements and the problems they face in the cities. Informal settlements have posed a major problem in the recent past, and the trend does not look to be going down anytime soon. This is as due to instances of rapidly growing populations in these countries as well as the mass movement of many individuals from rural areas to the cities so as to seek better lives or employment. Where the populations of the city increase, and the rates of employment and housing plans are not adjusted to embrace the new arrivals, informal settlements come up really fast besides other negative developments as seen in the rates of crime (Mehrotra 50).
The next step in my research was the formulation of the primary question that would guide my research. How can the informal cities be made sustainable? With the knowledge that informal settlements in the cities have been challenging formal settlements to reposition themselves so as to make space for the informal settlements that are coming up with urgent speed. The study seeks to develop an understanding in regards to the different solutions to the different problems that may rise from the development of informal settlements in urban centers and cities in general. The secondary research questions that this research would be seeking to answer and which guided my study include: what are the parameters in discussing the sustainable dimensions of informal settlement in cities? The second instance of secondary research question used in my research is: contrary to a sustainable form, is it possible for us to learn from Kinetic city as a hybrid urban space where both the formal and informal systems co-exist in the same space, so as to find a long lasting solution for these two forms of settlements to live together? (Hoskote 11).
My case study derives examples from Mumbai to help create a better understanding of the problem that has been stated above. This is because Mumbai appears to have both formal and informal settlements deep within its boundaries. The city can, therefore, be considered as one major Kinetic city from the demographic statistics that can be gotten as proof that the city has quite a large population as compared to many other cities in the world. For a city like Mumbai to be considered for the study of sustainable entity that presents the situation on the ground, it has to present various instances of democracy, equity and density. An informal city is a terminology that probably originated from economics. It came about when they describe the kind of a settlement that could rise from formal settlement challenges. Therefore, informal settlement could be seen by economists as the result of failure to establish formal system of settlements. When one reviews history, with specific regards starting from the 1950's when there was massive increase in informal settlements globally, the review will show the kind of binary existence that informal settlements have had alongside the formal ones. There were instances of independence in the kind of relationship that evolved between these two as various definitions of physical and economic characteristics from the two worlds appeared to be well defined through the manifestations of the same on the actual ground (Smith 21).
The informal settlements in Mumbai have been associated with messy surroundings, and poor democratic conditions and this kind of stereotype has lots of disadvantages that come along with it. A study of Mumbai has shown that the people who are employed in uptown formal places have had a tendency of getting residence in the informal parts of the city. The same applies to the ones who have employments in the informal sections of the city sometime get to look for accommodation and residences in the uptown formal settlements. This idea would, therefore, present an understanding that the density of both the formal and informal systems of settlements but it shows some form of fast growth in terms of the economy that is facilitated by the informal cities. Efficiency of the informal system is majorly celebrated besides the kind of hardships that humanity faces in these settlements including poor sanitation and other basic needs they lack. They have shown their resilience and determination to do better in such a way that is celebrated for rising above hardships to make life bearable in bad conditions (Smith 24).
Mumbai has had the rest of the world celebrating the economic energy of those living in the city, but the rest of the world frowns at the failure witnessed in governance, infrastructure and in housing. When these failures manifest themselves in the city, they lead to the development of more informal cities, more slums, squeezed space for infrastructural development and much more garbage heaped on the streets. It has led to a worrying trend that the negative aspects of Mumbai city have attracted world attention and the desire to thrive in bad governance has been the sole source of admiration instead of any other positive factors that the city has. The world media has represented the failures of the city's designers and architects to contain the situation especially by depicting these shortcomings through photography, course films or even through writing. Planning strategies that have been implemented to help curb the vice that rises from poor governance, and lack of democracy in the allocation of settlement space have been aimed at increasing growth, through upgrading the current conditions and to make them better. This happens instead of having to select open spaces elsewhere outside the city to be developed so as to ease the population density of the already overcrowded city. Planning that is being done in Mumbai has been systematically posterior in terms of speed of its implementation and the personnel involved in the expansion program. The question that would then come up is, how to physically or spatially convert the wonderful form of energy that has been shown by the informal city into a humane environment that caters for the needs of everyone involved?