The Durable Slum : Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai Paperback / softback

by Liza Weinstein

Part of the Globalization and Community series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

In the center of Mumbai, next to the cityâ€™s newest and most expensive commercial developments, lies one of Asiaâ€™s largest slums, where as many as one million squatters live in makeshift housing on one square mile of government land.

This is the notorious Dharavi district, best known from the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

In recent years, cities from Delhi to Rio de Janeiro have demolished similar slums, at times violently evicting their residents, to make way for development.

But Dharavi and its residents have endured for a century, holding on to what is now some of Mumbaiâ€™s most valuable land.

In The Durable Slum, Liza Weinstein draws on a decade of work, including more than a year of firsthand research in Dharavi, to explain how, despite innumerable threats, the slum has persisted for so long, achieving a precarious stability.

She describes how economic globalization and rapid urban development are pressuring Indian authorities to eradicate and redevelop Dharaviâ€”and how political conflict, bureaucratic fragmentation, and community resistance have kept the bulldozers at bay.

Today the latest ambitious plan for Dharaviâ€™s transformation has been stalled, yet the threat of eviction remains, and most residents and observers are simply waiting for the project to be revived or replaced by an even grander scheme. Dharaviâ€™s remarkable story presents important lessons for a world in which most population growth happens in urban slums even as brutal removals increase.

From Nairobiâ€™s Kibera to Manilaâ€™s Tondo, megaslums may be more durable than they appear, their residents retaining a fragile but hard-won right to stay put.