52% of the upcoming realty projects in Mumbai, spread over 8,600 acres, are slum redevelopment schemes, brokerage Anand Rathi Research said in a 4 October report. Another 18% will be factory and mill land projects, 4% will be redevelopment of old buildings, and 3%, urban slum renewal schemes. These figures are indicative of the tendency toward brownfield development in one the worlds largest cities.
It is hoped the schemes will rehabilitate families living in almost 300,000 hutments this year, and also open up substantial space for residential and commercial development.
According to the Anand Rathi report, Mumbai, India's densest city with 27,000 people per sq. km, would need an additional 324 million sq. ft of residential developments by 2021. But of the 468 sq. km in Mumbai, only 90 sq. km is actual developable land and the rest are non-revenue generating areas such as forest land, according to a survey by Pankaj Kapoor, chief executive of Mumbai-based real estate research firm Liases Foras and architect Hafeez Contractor.
"A huge amount of space can be freed through slum redevelopment but that needs to be incentivised by giving developers more construction rights," said Kapoor.
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Slum redevelopment drives real estate in Mumbai India
How will a huge amount of land released by slum redevelopment? By cramming the slum residents in 20 story 300 sq. ft. cubbyhole apartments without any regard for their life styles as is being proposed for Dharavi ( see article on Dharavi www.angelfire.com/indie/pmapte).In return for this "philanthropic" act of giving these apartments free to the slum dwellers, (cunningly the small apartments are so designed that 4 of them can be combined together to form 3 bedroom luxury apartments after the builder lures out the slum occupants by a large monitory reward and facilitates their occupying some public land elsewhere to start another slum! and the cycle continues!!) the developers will get 250% extra FSI to use for building luxury apartments to be sold at market price getting astronomical profits.
And what about physical infrastructure-water supply, sewerage, heath/recreational facilities? Anybody's guess!