Urban Involuntary Migration

Kshitij Shah [PA 102114]

Urvi Desai

Orientation in Architecture

12 September 2014

Case title:

Rehabilitation of the urban displaced – A case study of Mumbai

Research Area:

“Cities like Mumbai may pursue projects on command and control functions, invest in infrastructure, cultural facilities and urban spectacles encouraging gentrification, and inter alia displacement of the poorer sections.” (Swapna Banerjee Guha 121)

Urban involuntary displacement is a silent companion of urban growth. The paper tries to understand the form of architecture and urban environment manifested within and due to these rehabilitation colonies in the city of Mumbai.

Aims:

• To study the nature and form of urban rehabilitation in the case of Mumbai, involving

The slow pace with which planning, enforcement and implementation catches on, ensures that these settlements get enough time to turn into full-fledged communities, often contributing to the city by means of their enterprise or labour, albeit as encroachers, with no secure tenure but also not one to be wished away.

Hence a growth oriented development, results in the displacement of these informal settlements as an inevitable outcome, assuming significance in light of urban development becoming more accommodating of the poor and their settlements over the years.

Mumbai is the commercial and financial capital of India and home to over 16 million people. It generates 1/3 of the country’s tax revenue and 5% of its GDP. However, of the entire population, approximately six million live in slums, alongside roads, railway tracks and on pavements. Sixty percent of Mumbai’s slum dwellers also operate a large and robust informal market economy. The lack of housing provision has occurred in Mumbai for many reasons, however decades of rising migration has not been met by a governance system or a housing market that can provide for a large proportion of the urban poor.

02. HISTORY OF DISPLACEMENT IN

The research here is an exploration into the fundamental concerns of development – displacement – rehabilitation and an alternative articulation of urban development and strategy for rehabilitation especially seen in the light of the absence of a national policy, and the enactment of one in some states, only when brought to notice of the policy makers by the World Bank.

Almost every city had its own resettlement policy. Delhi moved from giving alternate 80 sq. Yard plots on leasehold basis in 1956, to allotting 25 sq. Yard plots with minimum facilities in 1970, to the current policy of rehabilitation in constructed units. Mumbai too shows a similar pattern of moving from allotment of larger plots to sites in developed/undeveloped layouts to subsidized/free allocation and from settlements on the fringes of the city, to in-situ or in vicinity resettlement. These shifts in policy over a period of time ultimately resulting in the Rehabilitation policy framework created for the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) under the directives of the World Bank has helped in creating a framework for resettlement, as ‘relocation of individuals or groups away from their place of residence’ to being understood as ‘systematic alienation’ of an individual livelihood and habitat’