Informal settlements - Boon or Bane?

Architecture of Informality

Informal settlements - Boon or Bane?

Jacob George 

4060847

DIA

Guided by Prof. Ivan Kucina
















Prelude

At the entrance to Cama Chambers, a building in Bombay, hangs this prominent notice:

ATTENTION

This building is unsafe and likely to collapse. Persons entering the property do so at their own risk. The owner of the property will not be liable for any damage to life and property. 

Owners 

If you go up the narrow wooden steps, you can see the signboards of the offices in the unsafe building. They are law firms, accountants, merchant bankers. The offices themselves are sleek, modern, air-conditioned, with computers blinking and flashing. Only the building’s public areas are decrepit. Gaping holes mark the first floor where windows should be. The same notice is posted by the owners on the first floor. They are getting, by force of law, almost nothing in rent for their land. So they will put nothing into repairs of the building; all they can do is put up these cautionary signs, which they hope will frighten away the clients of the businesses within.

This is the case in a lot of Informal buildings around the world. Nobody knows when they were built or when it will come down.

The notion of what is a luxury and what is a basic need has been upended in Bombay. Every slum has a television; antennas sprout in silver branches above the shanties. Many in the middle-class slum have motorcycles, even cars. People in Bombay eat relatively well, too, even the slum dwellers. The real luxuries are running water, clean bathrooms, and transport and housing fit for human beings. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you live in the suburbs, you’ll either curse in your car, as you drive for two hours each way toward the centre, or asphyxiate in the train compartments, even the first-class ones. 

The greatest luxury of all is solitude.

A city this densely packed affords no privacy. Those without a room of their own don’t have space to be alone, to defecate or write poetry or make love. A good city ought to have that; it ought to have parks or beaches where young people can kiss without being overwhelmed by the crowd. 

 - Suketu Mehta, Maximum City.

Introduction

For the first time in our history, a half of the worlds population are living in cities. It is high time the Urban Age turned its attention to its cities. An increasing number of India’s population are rushing to urban centres across the subcontinent, with over 300 million city dwellers making up one tenth of the world’s urban population.

In contrast, it is also estimated that a third of the world’s population will by living in slums in the next two decades. This comparison is quite alarming, as it implies that the growth of the slum population is directly proportional to the growth of the city. In the next twenty years, one in every six people would be living in a slum, bringing the number of slum dwellers to a drastic 2 billion people. Slums and cities together contain large parts of Informal settlements and therefore these topics are directly related to our scope of study. 

Informal settlements although should not be confused with slums alone. Though slums are definitely the most extreme of conditions. A large number of towns and cities for that matter are informal, which mean that they have developed over time without any formal planning. We need to understand the complexity within the various layers of Informal settlements.

Rapid urbanisation places remarkable strain on housing and serviced land. By 2030, about 3 billion people, or about 40 per cent of the world’s population, will need proper housing and access to basic infrastructure and services such as water and sanitation systems. This translates into the need to complete 96,150 housing units per day with serviced and documented land from now till 2030.

Now this may come as a surprise, but India is not an overpopulated country. Its population density is lower than that of many other countries not thought of as overpopulated. In 1999, Belgium had a population density of 130 people per square mile; the Netherlands, 150; India, under 120. 

It is the cities of India that are over-populated. 

Singapore has a density of 2,535 people per square mile; Berlin, the most crowded European city, has 1,130 people per square mile. The island city of Bombay in 1990 had a density of 17,550 people per square mile. Some parts of central Bombay have a population density of 1 million people per square mile. This is the highest number of individuals massed together at any spot in the world. They are not equally dispersed across the island. Two-thirds of the city’s residents are crowded into just 5 percent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolise the remaining 95 percent.

In India, the greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 houses a year. The amount of new construction every year comes up to less than half the number needed. Thus these 45,000 households every year need to be accommodated elsewhere. In the words of the planners, their shelter needs “are satisfied in the informal market.” This population doubles every decade. There are also 400,000 empty residences in the city, empty because the owners are afraid of losing them to tenants if they rent them out. Assuming each apartment can house a family of five people, on average, that’s 2 million people—one fourth of the homeless—who could immediately find shelter if the laws were to be amended.

“Slums are the problem of failed policies, governance, corruption in appropriated regulations, dysfunctional land markets, unresponsive financial system and fundamental lack of political will.” Arif Hasan (An urban architect, activist social researcher and writer) 

In some cities, up to 80 per cent of the population lives in slums. Fifty-five million new slum dwellers have been added to the global population since 2000. Sub-Saharan Africa has a slum population of 199.5 million, South Asia 190.7 million, East Asia 189.6 million, Latin America and the Caribbean 110.7 million, Southeast Asia 88.9 million, West Asia 35 million and North Africa 11.8 million.

Slums are a clear manifestation of a poorly planned and managed urban sector and, in particular, a malfunctioning housing sector. Each day a further 120,000 people are added to the populations of Asian cities, requiring the construction of at least 20,000 new dwellings and supporting infrastructure. In Latin America and the Caribbean current housing needs are estimated at between 42 million and 52 million dwellings, respectively. Estimates concerning total housing needs in Africa have been set at around 4 million units per year with over 60 per cent of the demand required to accommodate urban residents.

Understanding the necessity is the key to any design.

Suketu Mehta gives a vivid description about the slums in Mumbai in his “Maximum City”. 

Much of the slum is a garbage dump. The sewers, which are open, run right between the houses, and children play and occasionally fall into them. They are full of a blue-black iridescent sludge. When the government sweepers come to clean the drains, they scoop it out and leave piles of it outside the latrines. I couldn’t use the public toilets. I tried, once. There were two rows of toilets. Each one of them had masses of shit, overflowing out of the toilets and spread liberally all around the cubicle. For the next few hours that image and that stench stayed with me, when I ate, when I drank. It’s not merely an aesthetic discomfort; typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral—fecal contact. Pools of stagnant water, which are everywhere, breed malaria. Many children also have jaundice. Animal carcasses are spread out on the counters of the butcher shops, sprinkled with flies like a moving spice. The whole slum is pervaded by a stench that I stopped noticing after a while.

“Recognising the need is the primary condition for design.”   -Charles Eames

Even after somebody clears a slum colony, it will promptly be rebuilt with substandard material in the same place. “Settlement colonies cannot really be destroyed. They will reappear.” A slum was once determined to clear a section of footpath in Mahim of the slums built on top of it. Every time he would knock them down and leave, they would be rebuilt in hours. “We used to clear them twice, three times a day. They would keep reappearing. They would run away behind the railway tracks and come back after they left.”

Understanding Informal Settlements and Slums

As per the Oxford Dictionary, informal settlements are a place where people decide to live and build temporary shelters, often followed by more permanent houses. Sometimes informal settlements are supplied with water, electricity, etc. and people can become owners of individual pieces of land. This would mean that slums are just an extreme condition within the definition of an informal settlement.

Informal settlements vary from slums to thriving towns that have just developed informally. While slums house the poorest of any society, informal towns are hosts to people from various financial backgrounds. Slums are a result of bad governance, lack of empathy, corruption. Therefore slums are created out of necessity, just as an informal town, but the difference is that since slums house the poorest of the poor, the land is usually wasteland that nobody is really bothered about, the government or the people. This is obviously because these inhabitants do not have the money to buy land for themselves. There are no sanitation, drainage, waste disposal facilities as these people barely get by with their lives, with their first objective being to provide their families with a meal a day. Therefore these other issues mentioned above are the least of their problems. 

But as discussed, Informal settlements do not always mean slums. There are towns that are informal like Varanasi, that are developed informally, but is legitimate in every way. These cities have been created by architects, engineers and contractors and yet there is a lack of planning in these developments. 

The World Bank recently flew in a group of experts to solve Bombay’s sanitation crisis. The bank’s solution was to propose building 100,000 public toilets. It was an absurd idea. I have seen public latrines in the slums. None of them work. People defecate all around the toilets, because the pits have been clogged for months or years. To build 100,000 public toilets is to multiply this problem hundredfold. 

Maintaining public areas is of the biggest challenges in Informal settlements.

There is a general lack of civic sense.  The boundary of the space you keep clean is marked at the end of the space you call your own. The apartments are spotlessly clean inside; they are swept and mopped every day, or twice every day. The public spaces—hallways, stairs, lobby, the building compound—are stained with betel spit; the ground is littered with congealed wet garbage, plastic bags, and dirt of human and animal origin.

Restaurants are another concern in Informal settlements. On a busy street you can find make-shift restaurants at night and you can see them mysteriously vanish during the day. These restaurants are usually almost full as they provide for the common man and hence are usually dirty, attracting insects and dogs. 

But there are similar restaurants in similar scenarios that thrive in their business. They happen to work as a meeting point for various people when people may gossip about a days work or talk some serious politics. These are among the most dynamic places in a city, full of life and energy. 

The clientele of the restaurants come from immigrant labourers in the city, who lived eight in a room and needed cheap basic meals.

“We have a special problem as planners in Bombay,” says Rahul Mehrotra. “If we make the city nice, with good roads, trains, and accommodation—if we make the city a nicer place to live—it attracts more people from the outside.” Then the city’s screwed up again, from too many people. It’s like building roads. The more roads you build, the greater the number of new cars that will rush in to use those roads, and then they’re jammed again. “Planning in India has to take into account the whole country, the rest of the cities.” Unless entry to Bombay is restricted, it’s an exercise in futility to make this a more liveable city. The number of people in the slums will continue to swell, all the more so if they think they can get off the train and be housed by the government.

But these are the sharp focus landmarks in the daunting world of slums and hostels geared towards single male migrants and the huge red-light areas that cater for them.

In Mumbai, a city in which water and power are erratic, in which the suburban

railway network is so overcrowded that commuters who fall off the trains are killed

every day, the private sector has been asked to create alternative forms of settlements that can provide solutions. All this is occurring in a highly centralised political context where, even though the councillors of Mumbai’s Municipal Corporation are locally elected, the state still holds ultimate control. Other liberal attempts to deal with Mumbai’s chronic overcrowding, its constrained site and continuing attraction to rural migrants have also been questioned, including the issue of the city’s 300,000 street vendors, of whom just a few thousand are licensed. Yet of the 12 million residents of Greater Mumbai, almost 6.5 million live in slums. Mumbai’s slums are of two kinds: the authorised, for which the municipal authority has a responsibility to provide basic services, and the unauthorised, which are subject to demolition, and for which there is no duty for the city to provide power or water. There are impossible densities, 80,000 people per km2  in Dharavi, the largest of the slums. Authorised slums are outnumbered by the 60 per cent that are illegal. Some of the illegals rely on unauthorised standpipes, and a few have no water at all.

The sluggish growth in manufacturing employment in urban areas can also be attributed to the location of large units outside the municipal limits. This is due in part to the impact of the environment lobby in big cities that has campaigned against the dangers of pollution in urban areas. Industrial dispersal in non-urban areas is likely to continue due the availability of land and access to unorganised labour markets, as well as less awareness of the environmental agenda and less stringent implementation of environmental regulations in peripheral areas. As a result, the poor will continue to be pushed to out to these ‘degenerated peripheries’ and commute to the city for jobs in the industries driven out of the central areas. The middle and professional classes, however, are likely to stay in the inner city. This segmented structure of demographic growth could divert prospective migrants to the urban peripheries, swollen by increasing numbers of evicted urban slum dwellers.

Empirical evidence suggests that the profile of the emerging informal sector will be different from the recent past, experiencing a degree of formalisation

resulting from regular forms of employment. Employers and entrepreneurs seeking to take advantage of increasingly global markets have come to recognise that they

would loose their competitive edge unless they standardise their products to meet the specifications of the customers and respect delivery schedules. As a result, they are seeking to establish a degree of ‘formalisation within the informal sector’. Most of the rapidly growing businesses in Indian cities engaged in small-scale manufacturing, trade, commerce and finance that have direct or indirect global linkages are beginning to employ workers on a more regular basis.

Furthermore, professionals working in global businesses, who work long hours, are

increasingly searching for higher levels of certainty in their living arrangements in order to meet the demanding job requirements. As a result, domestic help and other supporting household services are likely to follow a similar process of regularisation.

This process of ‘formal informalisation’ has several other implications. Many of the

rural migrants, lacking in basic levels of literacy, communication skills or market

awareness will find it increasingly difficult to get a foothold in the more demanding urban job market. Consequently, urban India faces a paradox. Despite unprecedented growth in employment, it will continue to experience high levels of unemployment in the future, especially at the heart of its cities. The decline in real wages of casual urban workers in the five-year period 1999–2004, among both men and women, further questions the benefits of this growth on the informal workforce. There has also been a decline in real wages of regular workers in the formal employment sector who seem to be missing out on the benefits of globalisation. Only a fraction of the total labour force in India, made up of educated professional classes, has been able to maintain their real wages. Local governments in many of the Indian cities are currently facing two serious problems in attracting foreign and national businesses and investment. The first is the land scarcity in inner city areas, especially in prime urban locations. The second is lack of capital. Many cities employ ingenious planning and fiscal methods to attract companies, in an attempt to solve this double problem. The Floor Space Index (FSI), which regulates the level of high- density development allowed in the central areas for commercial offices and

high-income residential units, is designed to promote vertical growth in high land-value areas. The aim is to provide much needed space for businesses and, at the same time, generate resources to pay for improvements in infrastructure by selling the extra FSI – or, in other words, allowing much higher levels of development to pay for public infrastructure. In addition, increased FSI is being required by more and more companies since the sanctioning of loans by the international agencies are becoming contingent on the acceptance of higher FSI in city centre areas. The impact of these regulations on the levels of density and the skyline of Indian cities is becoming very apparent.

Relative Contribution of Informal Settlements to Society

Dharavi, Mumbai

Dharavi is one of the world's biggest slums, and one of the most notorious. Look beyond the stereotype, however, and you'll find a successful settlement with a vibrant community and economy. A community that has an annual turnover of 600 Million USD. But developers want to raze it all and start again. Dharavi is a model that should be replicated, not redeveloped.

Located in the heart of Mumbai, Dharavi has a population of more than 600,000 people residing in 100,000 makeshift homes, and one of the world's highest population densities at more than 12,000 persons per acre. It is just across from the Bandra- Kurla Complex, a fast developing commercial centre that has overtaken Nariman Point, the current downtown of Mumbai – and is also located close to Mumbai's domestic and international airports. Despite its plastic and tin structures and lack of infrastructure, Dharavi is a unique, vibrant, and thriving 'cottage' industry complex, the only one of its kind in the world.

This is in fact the kind of self-sufficient, self-sustaining 'village' community that Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, dreamt of and wrote about in his books on India's path to development.

Dharavi pulsates with intense economic activity. Its population has achieved a unique informal "self-help" urban development over the years without any external aid. It is a humming economic engine. The residents, though bereft of housing amenities, have been able to lift themselves out of poverty by establishing thousands of successful businesses. A study by Center for Environmental Planning & Technology indicates that Dharavi currently has close to 5,000 industrial units, producing textiles, pottery and leather, and performing services like recycling, printing, and steel fabrication.

A unique characteristic of Dharavi is its very close work-place relationship. 

Productive activity takes place in nearly every home. As a result, Dharavi's economic activity is decentralised, human scale, home-based, low-tech and labor-intensive. This has created an organic and incrementally developing urban form that is pedestrianised, community-centric, and network-based, with mixed use, high density low-rise streetscapes. This is a model many planners have been trying to recreate in cities across the world. A simplistic re-zoning and segregating of these activities, common in the United States, would certainly hurt this very unique urban form.

The 'unplanned' and spontaneous development of Dharavi has led to the emergence of an economic model characterised by a decentralised production process relying mainly on temporary work and self-employment. The multiplicity of independent producers makes the production process extremely flexible and adaptable. Its viability is proven by the national and international market its products command.

Unfortunately , Dharavi is depicted as a 'slum' that lacks residential infrastructure (roads, housing with individual toilets, public conveniences, etc.). In fact it is not a residential slum, but a unique self-contained township (in the sense of close work-place relationship so eulogised since the days of Patrick Geddes, but which has never been achieved in any of the new towns). Because of all these community-based successes, Dharavi needs to be replicated (albeit with adequate physical infrastructure). Instead, the state government wants to force the relocation of Dharavi's population into tiny cubby hole apartments in high rise towers so that the vacated land can be commercially exploited by developers through the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan. At a conservative estimate, a development of this magnitude could fetch $460 million for a developer, a profit of at least 900%.

The truth though is that there is no such thing as a rich 'slum'. Whatever economic output Dharavi produces gets annulled with the deplorable living conditions and human development. Being rich does not only mean creating economic output. There is one toilet in Dharavi for every 1440 inhabitants, that's lower than many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. 

I am not sure if the net impact of Dharavi to Mumbai's economy can easily be estimated too because there are many unobservables involved as well. We know how much Dharavi produces per year but we cannot estimate how much Mumbai loses every year because of healthcare subsidies or overall loss of efficiency because of the hundreds of diseases spread through open defecation by Dharavi residents in the Mahim river and elsewhere.

Dharavi can be a great example of a self-sustained development in an architectural sense, but in terms of humane living conditions, it is the sad reality of the common man in a developing country. 

Conclusion

Today there is a new type of informal economy that is part of advanced capitalism. This in turn explains the particularly strong growth and dynamism of informal economies in global cities. It contributes to explain a mostly overlooked development.

The proliferation of an informal economy of creative professional work in these cities,

i.e. artists, architects, designers, software developers. The growth of this new informal economy is also happening in cities of the global south. In those cases, however, the new is often submerged under the older informal economy. The new types of informalisation of work are the low cost equivalent of formal deregulation. The latter has occurred in finance, telecommunications and most other

economic sectors in the name of flexibility and innovation. The difference is that while formal deregulation was costly, and tax revenue as well as private capital went into paying for it, informalisation is low-cost. It is largely enacted on the backs of more vulnerable workers and their households.

In Karachi, which is the largest of the case study cities (presently at over 13 million inhabitants), has more than half of its population living in squatter settlements, or illegally developed informal settlements. It was discovered that this is primarily due to the fact that the formal sector was not able to meet the annual growth in housing needs (estimated at 80,000 units), the result was, therefore an increase in katchi abadis[5], and illegal subdivisions or densification in inner city areas (through the illegal construction of multi-storey dwellings. Yet due to the fact that this is such a long-established practice, dating back to the days of partition from India in 1947, that there are a lot of good quality houses which are developed in these informal settlements, and so, the local governmental bodies have earmarked some 70 percent of these settlements for regularisation. This means that there will be a provision of a 99-year lease and the development of infrastructure by the local government against a payment to the state.

Architecture cannot be understood without some knowledge of the society it serves - Sir Hugh maxwell. 

Yes, there was a building planned nearby to resettle the slum dwellers. But people from her neighbourhood wouldn’t move there. “There’s too much aloneness. A person can die behind the closed doors of a flat and no one will know. Here,” she observed with satisfaction, “there are a lot of people.” Be it ever so humble. . . . We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community, and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves, the village they have re-created in the midst of the city. Any urban redevelopment plan has to take into account the curious desire of slum dwellers to live closely together. A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people, is the empty room in the big city.

A city has to take the long view, the view for the common good. - Amanda Burden.

More often than not, these informal settlements are lively and dynamic spaces. Informal spaces bring out the true character and emotions of a society. They often reflect the culture and tradition of a particular town or city. Formal settlements usually are in new cities and towns, where modernity has caught on and hence is the future of a particular society and has nothing to show about its history. Of course that does not mean  that it is not good to look at the future but that is the very point of this comparison, to make it clear that the informal is as important as the formal, in helping a society remain in touch with its true nature.

As of today, it is almost impossible to do away with informal settlements because India is yet a developing country and there are bigger issues at hand than formalising every settlement. But apart from the fact that it cannot be done now, the point is that formalisation should not be done at any point in the future. Informal settlements definite cities and societies. Informal settlements make cities unique and personal and break away from the formal settlements that follow a similar language internationally. Informal cities hold the link between a modern society and its culture and tradition. Informal settlements give identity to their country.

“There’s a plague of sameness that is killing human joy”

Zita Cobb, Shorefast foundation.

References

Mehta, Suketu; Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found (2004)

U.N. Habitat; State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013

U.N. Habitat; State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007

Apte, Prakash M; Planitizen

Jacob George

DIA

4060847