Two urbanists add stories from their world to a book remembering Jane Jacobs

Around the same time last year, Dharavi residents put off by the title Slumdog Millionaire joined larger protests against the movie across Mumbai. The word ‘dog’, it was believed, was what they took exception to. But it was ‘slum’, really, that they had a problem with.  

Slum — because it evoked the  Dharavi stereotype — dark, depressing, oppressive and unsafe — which the movie reinforced anyway. That was when city-based urban practitioners Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, who have been involved with the neighbourhood for over a year, were asked by The New York Times to put up their version. In their article Taking the Slum Out of ‘Slumdog’, they sought to reverse the imagery that refuses to leave an outsider, by demystifying the urban village.

Glorification is another easy trap, but “involvement is the way to appreciation,” says Echanove. He is echoing the influential urbanist of the 60s, Jane Jacobs, who, when she was alive, stalled many an expressway and developmental projects that threatened to tear through old neighbourhoods in Canada and the US. Her point of view — “the view from the street” — continues to shine through the practice and activism of many like Echanove and Srivastava the world over.

Elsewhere, in the US, friends and colleagues of Jacobs, in the process of collecting works that built up on Jacobs’s worldview, came across the New York Times piece and asked the duo to add a perspective from their side of the world. Their paper, The Village Inside: From Mumbai to Tokyo and back, will feature in the soon-to-be-released book What We See: Advancing the observations of Jane Jacobs.

The article, by tracing the rise, or sprawl, of Dharavi down to the historical economic, philosophical logics to the current one, makes a compelling argument for its preservation.

On ground this translates to the duo’s innocuous, relentless brand of activism. “I came across Matias’s model of ‘engagement on equal levels’ in  Tokyo where art and design interventions were used to protest against a road that was planned through Tokyo’s old neighbourhood, Shimokitazawa. I said why not do the same here?” says Srivastava.

They consciously discard the socialistic hangover. “The idea is to work not with the assumption that we have all the answers; the activism is informed by intellectual work, but it’s not activism of the patronising kind. We take the community into confidence,” says Srivastava. “This sort of engagement is a creative one.”
This month, a group of German and Italian students engaged with the residents of Dharavi to document how they ingenuously improvised with available materials to build their houses, referred to as tool houses in The Village Inside. After a week-long consultation, the students made visual representations of the evolution of the houses — incrementally put together, as most are — and imagined their future. “This is a way of paying respect to what has gone into making a house from scratch. If you remove prejudice,  you see a lot more,” says Srivastava.

Sending the sprawl, skyward “as the Dharavi Redevelopment Project plans — expected to leave 2/3 to 3/4 of the residents out of their tool-houses — is a “weak paradigm”, says Srivastava. “Once Dharavi goes vertical, the trades within it won’t survive; people will move away at some point or the other.” “We say you dignify the neighbourhood and people will reorganise themselves around that. Improving space is legitimising space.”

Jacobs was self-taught. She believed anyone could be an urban planner if she were observent and involved. “If Jane Jacobs was alive today, she would love Dharavi because it’s the street life that is the trigger for its development. She would have recognised its creativity in creating itself,” says Echanove. “Dharavi people are not fighting for status quo, but the possibility of affecting change.”