My Own Interpretations on 2 Different Slums - essay

Slum is the Ideal City
2 Case studies: Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, and the Slum of Dharavi in Mumbai.


“With the successive folding of a handkerchief on itself: each fold doubles the layers of material, the density of experience.” (Correa, 77.)


What is a city? According to Charles Correa, a city is full of challenges and changes. It is a place “where different people meet, where things happen, where ideas incubate.” (Correa, 79.) The slums of Kowloon Walled City and Dharavi have fulfilled these requirements. They are self-regulating, self-sufficient and self-determining modern cities, which all inhabitants have participated due to one single goal: survival.

Slums always give people a false impression. Does it represent the worst of urban poverty and inequality? Do the inhabitants live without dignity, prosperity and peace? By studying these two slums, it is quite chaotic that “slum” is the reflection of a modern city. They are created by the inequality of the society and the city. It is very surprising that without enough supplies, organization, controlment and planning, the slums can actually achieve the basic needs of a modern city, which are both emotional and physical needs. Its organic mega-structure has robotically responded to the daily changes of its inhabitants. Their ideal goal is survival, and as a result they have created the most efficient ideal city in history. They are full of energy and enthusiasm. From its complexity, one can search of its beauty. It is the beauty where many modern cities lack of. One may wonder what the definition of a slum is. What are the needs of dwelling for the slum dwellers? Do the slum dwellers have to be responsible of decreasing the housing standards even though they have improved their living conditions without the help from the government? What is the meaning of ownership? These questions will be fully examined in this essay.

In Vaux’s 1812 Vocabulary of the Flash Language, the word “slum” is identical with the word “racket” or “criminal trade”. Charles Booth, an English Victorian writer (1840-1916), has characterized “slum” by “amalgam of dilapidated housing, overcrowding, poverty, and vice.” (Davis, 12.) For the perspective in the 21st century, in Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities, he stated 10 reasons from Peter Marcuse, an urbanist, that why squatting will not work:

1. Squatters will not provide enough resources to handle the immense problem.
2. Squatters are individuals and cannot deal with a host of issues that require centralized decision-making.
3. Squatters only produce temporary solutions to their immediate needs.
4. There is no evaluation mechanism and no way to replicate the success stories to allow squatting to be transformed from individual action into a program.
5. Squatters are inefficient and do not make use of economies of scale.
6. Squatters are economically regressive because they are not redistributing wealth.
7. Squatters lower housing standards.
8. Squatters are politically reactionary; they shield the status quo from anger that should be directed at it.
9. Squatters are socially divisive: the more aggressive squatters get more while less aggressive squatters get less.
10. Squatters are exploitative: they are forced to exploit themselves.
(Neuwirth, 295-296.)

One may wonder the level of truthfulness of the above extensive definitions of what slum is. By studying the slums of Kowloon Walled City and Dharavi, one may gain another perception and discover with numerous surprises. They are not only the reflections on the advanced “modern” cities; they have also elaborated numerous questions on what are the basic needs of dwelling.

The dominant similarity of the two slums is that they are created by accident and neglectedness from the government and the society. Both of them are the focus in the political issue of their cities. Both slums are titled as the biggest slums in Asia: KWC with 33,000 inhabitants within 6.5 acres of solid building, and Dharavi with 18,000 persons per acre. Due to the limited living spaces, both slums’ inhabitants have used spaces as multipurpose, both for dwelling and work. “They are remarkable architects because within their restricted spaces, they have designed the use of space in ways that few trained architects could.” (Sharma, 201.) One may wonder why people would prefer to live in those poor conditions. The reason is that they suffer from the inequality of the society, and thus they have found the slums as the magnet of opportunity. It is the opportunity to use one’s labour to maintain one’s living. It would cost so much higher outside the slums to start the business again. Another reason is that they came from a worse environment, and thus they do not consider the slums as bad living conditions. They see the place as their home with the sense of belonging. In KWC, one of the inhabitants, Yim Kwok Yuen, has stated:

I was not scared of anything when I came to Hong Kong. After all, no one ill-treated you here. I came from a poor village where the hygiene conditions were much worst. Only the air was better. Coming from such a poor place, I thought Hong Kong was heaven. The Walled City is all right; I came from a worse environment, so I’ve never really thought of it as bad.
(Girard and Lambot, 93.)

Furthermore, the inhabitants do not consider that they are living in the ‘slums’. In Dharavi, one of the inhabitants has argued, “How dare anyone claim that Kumbharwada is ‘a slum’ in need of rehabilitation! Kumbharwada is home to working people, men and women who have always made their own way.” (Jacobson.)

The process of their improvement on their living conditions is very impressive due to the development of self-administration. Without the help of the government, they have gradually solved the problems of the water supply, electrical accessibility, safe housing and building construction. In KWC, the methodology of water supply and electrical accessibility are quite outstanding. The residents paid private suppliers to pump water from wells that were beneath the City, and also stole water from the nearby mains supplies. As the water supplies were not enough for residents, they hired private drilling firms to make the drillings as far as 100 meters below the surface due to the overuse of water. As the people had more money, they used the water tank system, “Water was first pumped up to rudimentary storage tanks on the City roofscape. From there, a twisted congestion of pipes ran downward again, branching into blocks and flats.” (Girard and Lambot, 37.) Due to the year of the big fire, there was a big transformation of legal electrical supply during the years of 1977 to 1985. Because the City was a maze of pipes and wires all over the place, it was extremely difficult to carry the cables to all the required places. “Actually, in a few instances, we just supplied electricity to the power points on a lower floor and let the owner connect it to the floor above. You know what the buildings are like in the Walled City – they’re built one on top of the other, leaning here and there,” mentioned from an employee of China Light and Power, Mok Chung Yuk. (Girard and Lambot, 46.) As Hong Kong economy was blooming during the 1980s, the demand of electricity kept increasing. For the solution, they found a space with 250 square feet to locate two high-density cables and set up the electrical stations.

In the case of Dharavi, it is less advance than the KWC in terms of the technical aspects. However, their ideology of combining investment and improvement is the most fascinating. “Even without any aid from the government, one can see how people have successfully replaced thatch and bamboo with brick and mortar.” (Sharma, 200.) With confidence, they transformed the no-man place into a powerful industry. “They scraped, they borrowed, and they improved.” (Neuwirth, 108.) In other words, they build as the money is available. “Each wall is turned from mud to concrete separately, over time. No interest costs. No overhead. No problems with storage and site security. No accounting headaches.” (Neuwirth, 114.) It is a very efficient way to construct the dwellings permanently. The slum dwellers have also developed the skill of savings. Each squatter community will create a savings association where each family can join and pay as little as a rupee per day. The collected money will be used in the community for loans such as the medical treatment or small businesses. “Savings brings confidence to the people. Through savings, we don’t have to demand that the politicians to improve living conditions or economic conditions or homes. We can do what we want to and achieve what we want to. Because of savings, you empower yourself,” said Jockin Arputham, the head of the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Slum Dwellers International in Mumbai. Up to this point, it is very obvious that Marcuse’s opinions on the squatters are his false perceptions, especially from his reasons numbered 1 to 3 and 7.

The idea of the ownership is very critical. The four important things that the slum dwellers need are security, stability, protection and control. As long as they know that they would not be removed, they would establish a market. “They buy and sell. They rent. They create. They develop. Actual control, not legal control, is the key. Give squatters security and they will develop the cities of tomorrow.” (Neuwirth, 302.) For both of the slums, the dwellers have to pay rent or they have purchased the property. In KWC, after the demolish in 1993, a 73 years old inhabitant, Kwok Lau Hing, has recalled, “The flat cost about $4000 HKD then. My cousin contributed a quarter and took one room. My sister also put up a quarter, but she rented her room out for $50 a month. I had a half share, so I had two rooms, one of which I rented out. Water and electricity were supplied properly there and I paid the bills monthly to the right authorities.” (Girard and Lambot, 136.) In Dharavi, the slum dwellers have to even pay the rent to the city. “Squatter Colony started with a ground rent of 3 rupees a month. Today, residents pay 100 rupees a month. Given that there are 1000 homes in Squatter Colony, the City of Mumbai receives $1.2 million rupees a year, or a bit more than $25,000 US, from these illegal residents.” (Neuwirth, 114.) They earn the money from all types of factories especially from recycling. “Dharavi has also been mirroring India’s economic revival and it has done so largely by rejecting a local government that has ignored it and by recycling its own resources.” (Jacobson.) There are approximately 2 million squatters in Mumbai, more than 50 percent of the population in the city. The most important of all is that they are the productive engines of the country with numerous successful stories from the inhabitants. “This is the only state (in India) with a slum rehabilitation policy. This is the only state where pavement dwellers have rights. And why do you think this has happened? It is a direct result of our work. We very strongly believe that the problems of the urban poor can be solved by the urban poor, not by anybody else. People always see the change agents as the intellectuals. I don’t agree with that. The urban poor will be the change agents of the city,” said Jockin. (Neuwirth, 138-139.) It is quite interesting to see that they are gradually gaining the power to a level of participation in politics. In their unconsciousness, they are challenging the power structure while contributing in it. From the surface, the Mumbai’s middle class and wealthy constantly criticizing the unhygienic conditions and the horrible crime in the slum. However, it is quite chaotic that many of them hire the slum dwellers in pitiful wages, such as the positions from maids to drivers to baby sitters. As a result, from all these incidents, they have been proven that Marcuse’s reasons numbered 4 to 6 and 8 to 10 are not realistic.

Regardless that Kowloon Walled City as the city within the city, and Dharavi is the city itself, they have both fulfilled the needs of what a city requires. They are the examples of the ideal cities in vertical and horizontal developments, which have indicated what are the origins of all the modern cities. Its complexity reveals its beauty as a “city”. Charles Correa once stated, “As a biologist, he felt the move towards complexity is as compulsive and as irreversible as the blind drive that caused life to develop from single cells to more and more complex forms.” (Correa, 77.) In the case of Dharavi, higher-class residences are agreed strongly to take down the slum. But it turns out to be a very dangerous perception, due to the idea of treating the inhabitants of the slum as structure instead of lives. “The ugliness of the structures is all the people can see, not the vitality of those who live in these tenements. As a result, people glibly talk about slum removal and city beautification without a thought to the dislocation and anguish that this cause to thousands of families.” (Sharma, 194) People should once again question themselves seriously of their limited observations. It is quite chaotic to limit the word “slum” that describes a place with production, energy and enthusiasm.





Works Cited List

Correa, Charles. The New Landscape. London: Butterworth Architecture, 1989.

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso Press, 2007.

Girard, Greg and Lambot, Ian. City of Darkness- Life in Kowloon Walled City. Hong Kong: Ernst Et Sohn, 1993.

Jacobson, Mark. As Mumbai booms, the poor of its notorious Dharavi slum find themselves living in some of India's hottest real estate. 2 Dec. 2007. National Geographic. May 2007.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0705/feature3/index.html

Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities- A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Sharma, Kalpana. Rediscovering Dharavi- Stories From Asia’s Largest Slum. India: Penguin Books, 2000.