Counter-Mapping South Asian Urbanism: A Case for Mumbai

Mumbai, India

By Aditi Nair
free housing schemes, displacement, human development index index

Analyzing local displacement, municipal governing units and superimposed global indices to problematize 'The Development Paradigm' in Mumbai.

Analyzing local cases of displacement, it’s relation to municipal governing units and superimposed global indices to problematize ‘The Development Paradigm’ in Mumbai.

In the wake of liberalization, the real estate explosion has triggered massive amounts of private investment in Mumbai. As real estate investment and the value rise it has severely endangered safe enclaves of self-made houses by low income and indigenous communities. To map on Mumbai it is critical to understand its colonial legacies, topographical shifts, and cultural assimilations. This project is divided into 4 cases, each case progressively narrates the gap in this post developmental state. (Shin, Chen.2019)

Case 1: Mapping on Mumbai: A medium to claim land

Mumbai was an archipelago of seven islands under the Gujarat Sultanate surrounded by the Arabian Sea, resided on by native fishing ‘Koli’ and ‘Agri’ communities as early as the 15th century. Between the 16th and 17th, it was invaded by Portuguese to form a naval and military base to colonize and trade spices to the southeast Asia inland. By 1734, the Dutch invaded to establish Dutch East India Company, building fortresses and enclaves on the islands. Exiting the Portuguese rule, Bombay was transferred as a Dowry to the British, who ruled the island between the late 17th and 19th Centuries. The British East India Company massively began reclaiming the land (expanding the land base by infill), expanding its trade out of Bombay port.

The earliest available maps of Mumbai are under the Portuguese rule, they are nautical maps to show trade routes to Bombaim- a Portuguese name. With a rapid imperial expansion in the late 18th century, maps of Bombay were made to highlight territorial holdings categorized as -‘British owned’, ‘Under British influence’ and free land. Rapid industrialization with the textile trade influenced demarcations of commercial areas, banks, and churches in maps and establishment of railway routes into the inland- making land reclamation a major investment. The trend of land expansion through infill continues to this day. The most recent development map-projected as a planning tool for the forthcoming two decades promises 4700 acres of new land for development.

Mumbai is the capital city of the state of Maharashtra. The map below shows the current state of the island as a cohesive stretch of land surrounded by the Arabian Sea.

Case 2: Real estate rise and displacement due to ‘slum’ rehabilitation projects

Existing bureaucratic tools in Mumbai, India allow for a hegemonic system of urban development, and any contestations are categorized along with dyadic categories, such as legal/illegal. Mumbai does not recognize thirteen million of it’s living population; the city regards them as Illegal. (India Census. 2011). Dyadic terms like Legal and Illegal, or Informal and Formal, are used in the current discourses of citizenship and land rights in urban India. State-institutions like the ‘Slum’ Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) use these dyads to map neighborhoods, grab land, and allow global real estate markets to speculatively invest over these areas. This process displaces and disenfranchises low-income communities, and severely degrades the environment, a phenomenon analogous to urban renewal programs between 1949-1979 in America. (Mena Report. 2015)

The global investment in real estate had peaked over the last three decades in Mumbai. To understand the current landscape, I started by analyzing population densities in municipal wards (smallest governing units). The maps below look at population densities in 24 municipal wards of Mumbai, to analyze displacement trends.

2001 Population Density:

2011-2001 Population density:

This map is quite revealing about the drastic reduction in population densities in southern wards. Although the highest density is in the southern ward, we can measure displacement through its reduced density a decade later.

The census data clearly records the ‘slum’ population as a category without giving finer details of affordances of the ‘slum population’. The Slum Rehabilitation authority built approximately 1450 projects in the last 3 decades, claiming to reduce the slum population. The maps below record the ‘slum’ population percentages in every ward to notice any trend in this reduction. We notice that the ‘slum population’ number increases over the decade and there is a rising trend of densities northward.

Percentage of ‘Slum population’ in 2001:

Percentage of ‘Slum’ population’ in 2011:

From a legal perspective, slums are unauthorized and illegal structures, where inhabitants do not have legal title to the land that they occupy. However, laws in Mumbai categorize ‘slums’ as legal and illegal. Legal ‘slums’ can be redeveloped through the free housing scheme by the SRA and the illegal ‘slums’ face evictions, or await a process of becoming ‘legal’.

Slum Clusters in Mumbai (Slum survey 2009, MCGM): It is seen in the maps above that ‘slums’ (neighborhoods ‘occupied’ by lower-income communities) are geographically interspersed and not assimilated locally in any particular ward.

Rising real estate trends:

Rental Rates for 1 Bedroom Mumbai (Data from 99 acres):

Buying rate for 1 Bedroom (Data from 99 acres):

The 2019 rental and buying rates show a stark trend of real estate prices lowering as northward and, and the city tends to expand peripherally upward and to the inland. I was keen on seeing the relation between real estate prices and the density of SRA projects built over the past three decades. My unit of analysis becomes the municipal governing unit of wards.

Case 3: Municipal governing units

As I looked more into the Slum Rehabilitation projects it became clearer to me to analyze by Wards to point at the trends of displacement by the slum rehabilitation project. We see a spike of building projects in the 2000-2010 decade and a spike in projects in the K/E and K/W wards. Why are such developments being planned excessively in particular wards? Are there larger incentives for private developers to build projects for the poor here? (The data gathered states these dates as the letter of intent, they might not indicate the building start date, however the intent of building it.)

Number of SRA Projects and Rental rates: On overlapping the SRA project with the rental rate trends I did not find an obvious correlation- a la the free housing scheme is built where the median rent is low. As I premonition, I feel this would be because the logic of the free housing project as a developer incentivized tool to provide housing for the poor, creates layered meanings of how the city responds to the complexity. With regulations like transfer of development rights and floor space indices, the state controls densities and allowable built-up areas, to negotiate profit-based state philanthropy.

Case 4: UNDP’s human development index in Mumbai Human Development Index :

As a measure to study the global response to the development state, I was intrigued when I read the human development report by Mumbai Municipal Corporation. In 1990, the United Nation Development Program mandated participating countries to come up with a National Human Development Index accounting for three indicators long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living. This index comprises indicators like life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling and gross net income per capita. Mumbai’s municipality took upon itself to come up with an index for Mumbai. The human development index is coded by the Municipal corporation, and we can see here how it relates to the slum population. Reading the slum population map, it is inversely related. The ward with the highest slum population: say for example M/E ward is given the lowest development index. I went back to see if there was a report on the index. The HDI in Mumbai accounts for education replaced by literacy rate, life expectancy at birth was replaced by the average age of death and infant mortality rate, income is replaced by the percentage of slum population and percentage of ‘marginal workers’. These are used as proxy, surrogate indicators, clearly indicating how ‘ slum’ as a category needs to be erased to achieve development; without any further reading of its affordances.