Bringing 'The Projects' to Mumbai

By next January, history's most ambitious slum-clearance project will have completely eliminated Dharavi, the astonishing hive of human activity that houses between 600,000 and a million people — nobody knows for sure how many — in an area the size of a university campus along a sewage-choked river in Mumbai.

Dharavi, possibly the world's most-written-about slum, is famously the source of billions of dollars in economic activity, most of it involving the transformation of waste into useful new products in jury-rigged factories packed into a lawless, spontaneous mountain range constructed over 60 years from found bits of wood, corrugated metal and plastic sheeting, rising four or five storeys above the chemical-and-sewage-clotted mud.

It will all be gone this year, replaced with a master-planned community that gives each slum family a 225-square-foot house with running water, a toilet and electricity. These tiny homes, devised by the city's powerful Slum Rehabilitation Authority, will be located in multi-storey concrete buildings provided by developers, who will have to provide and maintain 30 million square feet of this housing in exchange for the right to build 40 million square feet of commercial developments and condominiums on the remaining land.

This trend is not limited to Mumbai...The largest cities in the world, which have heretofore grown like untamed fields, are using their recent fiscal success to impose the discipline of the planner upon the imponderable chaos of the slum...In every case, the "improvements" are being carried out by high-minded planners who have given no more than a token listen to the well-established communities that will be subject to their plans.