Squalor sits on prime real estate

Architect Mukesh Mehta has a bold, some say foolhardy, scheme for clearing Asia's biggest slum: sell it.

At first glance, Mumbai's Dharavi slum would not strike anyone as prime real estate. Roughly 600,000 people live in the square-mile warren of rickety shacks and sewage-choked gutters, with one toilet for every 1,440 residents.

Growing over the decades from a sleepy riverside fishing village to a hive of struggling rural migrants, Dharavi has defied all attempts to remove or improve it.

But where others see squalor, Mr. Mehta sees opportunity.

By selling off the valuable land the slum dwellers occupy, he hopes to transform Dharavi into an orderly complex of apartment blocks, factories and sports facilities where rich and poor live side by side in harmony.

If his vision comes true, it will boast a new cricket field, five major new roads, a modern hospital, new schools, a nature park, even a driving range for golfers.

Late last month, the state government placed advertisements in 20 countries inviting developers to grab "the opportunity of the millennium" by bidding on the right to transform the slum. Mr. Mehta says more than 40 developers from around the world have expressed interest.

It is a risky and audacious plan, the first of its scale in India. If the slum dwellers object to seeing their shacks torn down for malls and luxury condos, the potential for conflict in volatile, class-ridden Mumbai is real. In a first taste of possible trouble, 6,000 slum dwellers blocked roads outside a government office last Monday to protest against the scheme.

If it succeeds, though, Mr. Mehta believes it could be a blueprint for helping slum dwellers not just in India, but around the globe.

"If I can make Bombay slum-free, I can make any city in India slum free. And if I can do that, we can make any city in the world slum-free," he said.

Pie in the sky? Its critics certainly think so. Over the decades, Indian governments have announced countless schemes to clear or rehabilitate the country's slums. They just keep on growing, springing up in new places as millions of people flee backward rural India for a chance of a better life in the cities.

About 150 million Indians live in slums, which cling to river banks, hillsides, highway edges and airport borders in every city. In Mumbai, more than half of the population of 18 million live in a slum of some kind.

But Dharavi has an advantage that makes Mr. Mehta's scheme more plausible than most: the value of its location.

The heart of Mumbai is on a peninsula. With expansion limited on both sides by the sea, space is precious. Real-estate values have soared as India's economy booms, with values rivalling London or Shanghai despite India's relative poverty.

In one glaring sign of the boom, tycoon Mukesh Ambani is planning to build a 60-storey palace for his family in south Mumbai at a cost of more than $1-billion. Dharavi is in the centre of it all. It lies minutes from the airport. All three of the city's main commuter rail lines pass beside it. Two major highways begin nearby. A swanky business district, Bandra Kurla, overlooks the slum.

If Dharavi's real-estate value can be unlocked, Mr. Metha reasons, both slum dwellers and developers will benefit.

For the chance to develop a valuable location in Mumbai's heart, the winning bidder will be obliged to clear the area of slum dwellings and rehouse 57,000 families free of charge in new apartment blocks.

To entice developers, the state government has eased the conditions for building in the area, granting them more space for new buildings and allowing them to proceed if 60 per cent of the slum-dwellers agree, compared with the previous 70 per cent.

In return, the developers will have to provide all the new infrastructure usually built by government, including roads, drainage, hospitals, parks and municipal offices - in effect creating a whole new ready-built community.

The government expects the project to take seven years and cost about $2.3-billion (U.S.). When it is done, the former slum will have 20 million square feet of new housing for Mumbai's rich, 30 million for the slum dwellers and 20 million for offices, malls and stores.

"This is not just a dream," Mr. Mehta said, showing a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop computer as he sipped a beer in the lobby of a luxury hotel. "This is absolutely prime land."

If it works - and he is certain it will - he beleives he can repeat the experiment all over Mumbai and make the city slum-free by 2015. He is already advising other cities such as Bangalore and Nagpur on similar schemes. He sees no reason why his formula could not work in the slums of Nairobi, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the poor colonias of Mexico City.

Critics say he is being simplistic. Slums like Dharavi, they say, are complex organisms that support hundreds of thousands of people. Dhavari, for one, hosts dozens of thriving industries, from leather tanning to potting to soap making. Thousands of pairs of fashionable Pepe jeans start life in Dharavi, where workers in tiny rooms labour over sewing machines.

Mr. Mehta's scheme "will obliterate these flexible, home-based jobs," said Sheela Patel, who heads a support group for slum dwellers. "It's all very well saying you're going to give people nice new flats, but how are they going to live?"

In the slum itself, residents share the worry about jobs. Naimal Qadir Shaikh, 37, lives with his wife and two daughters in a single room reached, like a children's treehouse, by clambering up an iron ladder.

He likes the sound of Mr. Metha's plan and its promise of a new 21-square-metre flat, twice what he has now. He hates living in the stink and mess of the slum, where ditches full of murky sewage flow past doorways and children play cricket on a garbage heap amid clouds of flies.

On the other hand, he worries that the redevelopment might threaten his living making children's clothes in a room down the alley or his wife's running a beauty parlour in their home.

Mr. Mehta calls those fears groundless. His plans call for the bottom floor of apartment blocks to be set aside for workshops and businesses, so a resident could live right above his workplace.

He said that that giving private developers more liberty to build will make his plan an improvement over previous renewal efforts, in which developers plunked seven-storey apartment blocks in Dharavi that almost instantly became "vertical slums."

The son of a wealthy businessman who worked himself up from nothing, he admires the millions who come to Mumbai with no more than "a dollar and a dream."

Society has to stop treating slum dwellers as parasites and start respecting them for their work ethic, he said. He accuses slum support groups like Ms. Patel's of "marketing poverty" and "keeping poor people poor."

When he goes to the slum, the well-dressed architect said, "I don't go there on a bus with shabby clothes and broken shoes. I tell them, 'You could be where I am today or even better.' Success is available to anyone who wants it."

All that the slum dwellers need, he said, is a dignified, healthy environment to thrive in. By selling off Asia's most famous slum, that's just what he hopes to give them.

THE TEEMING SLUM POPULATION

Spawned by the urban exodus of the second half of the 20th century, the slums of the developing world are among the fastest-growing human habitats.

One in six people, the equivalent of one billion, live in crammed quarters without running water or sanitation, where squalor and dilapidation prevail, United Nations' reports show.

By 2030, that number could rise to about two billion people, a 2003 report by the UN Habitat agency says.

And while only 6 per cent of the slum population live in the developing world, this phenomenon and the notion of slum originated during the industrialization period of Western Europe.

In fact, use of the word "slum" became common during the early 1820s to denote the overpopulated neighbourhoods where factory workers and immigrants from the countryside had settled.

Port cities like Sydney, Australia and Liverpool, England seemed prone to the formation of shantytowns, as did farmlands around cities like London, England, where houses built for one family were often overcrowded amid the influx of urban immigration.

While urban planning, as well as government regulation and control, largely stamped out slums from Western European cities, the same problem spread to the developing world during the second half of the 20th century.

It is estimated that the number of agricultural workers in developing countries has decreased by 20 to 30 per cent since 1950.

In developing cities with a precolonial past, the newcomers took over the old parts of the city as the well-to-do dwellers there moved into upscale neighbourhoods.

The newcomers settled in areas lacking modern amenities. The streets, which were too narrow to accommodate garbage trucks, deteriorated over time. Such is the case for slums in Karachi, Pakistan, and Cairo, as well as other old cities around the world.

In other cases, industry owners or state authorities built rental tenements for workers, but failed to maintain them or to prevent overcrowding, like in the Durban Townships, South Africa, or in Mumbai, India.

Slum dwellers as a percentage of urban population

World/31.6%

Sub-Saharan Asia/71.9%

South-central Asia/58%

East Asia/36.4%

West Asia/33.1%

Latin America/31.9%

North Africa/28.2%

Source: UN Habitat agency

Text: Alex Dobrota

KEY SLUMS AROUND THE WORLD

Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya

The world's biggest slum and home to 600,000 people who live with little running water and under the threat of floods and frequent outbreaks of violence.

Orangi Township,

Karachi, Pakistan

The city's largest squatter settlement with over 500,000 people, where residents organized in the 1980s to finance and build their own sewage lines and to force the city's government to connect to the central sewage system.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

More than 230,000 people, many of whom work inside the city, live on flooded land, or along rail lines in shacks without electricity, running water or sewage.

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Thousands live in dilapidated old residential buildings in the city's centre, known as tenement gardens, which deteriorated with the influx of workers drawn to the expanding packaging and shipping industry.

Favelas, Rio de Janeiro,

Brazil

About one million people live in settlements scattered on the hills of the city, where criminal gangs and police often wage protracted gun battles that have left dozens dead.