By Michael Montella
Mukesh Mehta has a dream. He wants all of planet earth’s denizens to join the middle class. He thinks he has found a method and is ready to test the plan.
Mr. Mehta is a figure at the center of a storm in India-- he is the master planner for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. (DRP). The DRP is a plan to turn the squalor that is much of Dharavi into middle-class high-rise housing-- move the current million inhabitants from horizontal two and three story shanteys to modern flats on roughly half the land they currently occupy, and pay for this by allowing developers to exploit the other half for whatever the market will bear.
Mr. Mehta was a gracious host when we interviewed him at his Bandra-West offices. He gave us the latest version of his “slum-free India, slum-free world” power point presentation and allowed us to conduct a preliminary audio interview (our plan was to return several days later and videotape an interview at this apartment, but scheduling conflicts forced us to miss that opportunity).
Mehta made a bunch of money developing high-end properties on the exclusive north shore of Long Island, N.Y. before he returned to Mumbai twelve years ago, realizing Dharavi provided an opportunity to solve a problem the Maharashtra government and NGO’s could not solve (and make a fortune while he was at it.)
I won’t reproduce details of the plan here (see links to articles at bottom of this post). Instead, I’ll share my impressions of his presentation as best I can.
Two concepts seduced me then and stay with me now-- Mehta thinks he can make the world slum-free by 2020 (maybe just India by then) and with his plan, the slum-dwellers of Dharavi can be middle class, “just like him.” (and us).
His enthusiasm and the logic of his plan was infectious, I think all four of us agreed on that. “Wow! A slum-free India by 2020” Slums are everywhere in Mumbai, pockets of squatter-housing that seem to spring up overnight, like mushrooms in the forest after a rain. Metha said, “the aim is to turn today’s slum-dweller into tomorrow’s resident and citizen.” The logic of slum rehabilitation for Mehta is to “move people from bad housing and put them into good housing.” (For details of his plan see his website.)
Imagine a world with no poor people, no squalor, clean and tidy streets, no garbage, no sewerage!
With the right mix of free market and giving people the tools they need to succeed, these new citizens will most likely be introduced to the world a new stress-- wondering how to pay the rent and put food on the table as they are disconnected from the cottage industries they currently run out of their dwellings. Creating a condition the Austrian philosopher, social critic, and defrocked Roman Catholic priest, Ivan Illich called “The Modernization of Poverty.”
“Modernized poverty appears when the intensity of market dependence reaches a certain threshold. Subjectively, it is the experience of frustrating affluence which occurs in persons mutilated by their overwhelming reliance on the riches of industrial productivity. Simply, it deprives those affected by it of their freedom and power to act autonomously, to live creatively; it confines them to survival through being plugged into market relations.”
Toward a History of Needs, Ivan Illich, 1987. (see: http://www.primitivism.com/needs-illich.htm)
Loaded in the casual phrases we toss around all the time are many assumptions about various aspects of what I like to think about as “legitimacy.”
Success and “to succeed,” middle-class, poor and poverty, slums, “slum-dweller,” resident, citizen. homeless and most of all, “I” The ever-present western construction of the “individual.”
What would a middle-class world look like? Could it be sustained, would some have to give things up so others could have more? For Americans, the myth of “middleclassedness” transcends the traditional realities of “class.” It exists in a space somewhere between the American Dream, establishing identity through buying stuff and the next car or credit card payment. Is this what a planet of 6,773,181,852 billion “residents” will look like?
The United States houses 4.7 per cent of the world's population, but it uses 25 per cent of the world's resources. The billboards I saw in Mumbai were telling, “Infrastructure grows, India Grows!, and another, “India, from modernization to world power.”
How does all this resonate with claiming space and "legitimacy" in the context of the current western (American) reality. What are the similarities that the disempowered or marginally empowered in America share/have with those of highly organized slum communities in a place like Dharavi? Are the "stakes" higher for the urban poor in Mumbai or for those on the street or on the edge in the US?
Life in America is so intertwined with various measures of legitimacy; credit score, access to credit and loans, a drivers license, a lease, title, deed, mortgage, a job, “career” work history, all forms of validating the person. Resume, CV, portfolio, studio, portfolio. (financial portfolio). Is the fall from tenure in the aforementioned measures of legitimacy greater than the fall a slum-dweller faces? Does the slum-dweller have the means to recover more quickly than the disempowered westerner, absent of access to the validating and legitimating tools above?
Has the American way of life created a virtual slum, mentally, spiritually, psychically, just outside the realm of the validating mechanisms we are conditioned to embrace? A kind of “Modern Poverty” that Illich talks about?
I am not betting on the likelihood of the organic and thriving lifestyle that the people of Dharavi created through their own ingenuity surviving the DRP makeover. Much like the corporate and consumerist logic of conformity that the mythic, individualized western lifestyle demands, so to will the “master plan” for development and standardization of ways of life demand of the Dharavi residents.
I would like to see Mukesh Mehta’s plan succeed. I would like the people of Dharavi actually be participants in their future, I would like to see the wonderful nagas, of Dharavi, so full of energy, life and humanness survive.
Hey, while I am at it, I would like to see a world where we each use only what we need and redefine what those “needs” are. I would like to see a time where sharing is the norm, where the individual is just a bit less important that the we, where the commonweal comes to mind first. I would like to see a world where the incessant need to consume and make more stuff and more garbage and more human exploitation and more greenhouse gasses is not necessary.
The real “inconvenient truth” I fear, is that all this is not possible in a middle-class needs driven world.
Links about the DRP:
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