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Rhetoric of t he slumPushpa Arabindoo aa UCL Urban Laboratory, Department of Geography and

Development Planning Unit , the Bartlett, University CollegeLondonPublished online: 12 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Pushpa Arabindoo (2011) Rhetoric of the slum, City: analysis of urban trends,culture, theory, policy, action, 15:6, 636-646, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.609002

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Rhetoric of the slumRethinking urban poverty

Pushpa Arabindoo

Despite Gilberts recent identification of the return of the slum as a dangerous trend (2007), scholars such as Rao (2006) assure us that there is a broader theoretical interest inapplying the term slum in a normative sense, as it offers a new analytic framework for understanding the global cities of the South. Using the recent politics of large-scale slumevictions in Indian cities, this paper explores this tension, asking if a theoretical return toslums can help generate new narratives of poverty, serving as an important site in which his-toriographies of neoliberalisation in the global South can be unfolded and addressed. Itunderscores the need for a new direction in collecting ethnographies of the urban poor inIndia as they negotiate the current political and policy drive for creating slum-free cities, conscious that the resulting spatial articulation could possibly reveal how formal and informal geographies connect with each other in increasingly multiple and complexways. As this paper argues, what is needed in the context of contemporary urban changeinvolving harsh and often violent slum eradication strategies is perhaps not slum astheory but a sincere engagement with in-depth, empirical case studies that clarify muchof the uncertainty surrounding the spatialisation of urban poverty.

Key words: slum as theory, evictions, resettlement, urban poverty, India/ South Asia

The word slum is itself problematic. Itarose out of a specifically British experienceof the early industrial era, and . . . has

associations inappropriate to poor urbansettlements of Dhaka, Mumbai or Lagos.(Seabrook, 2009)

O n 1 January 2010, 178 residents of Ganesh Kripa Society (GKS) inGolibar, Mumbais second largestslum woke up to the prospects of a bleakyear, as they were served an evictionnotice by the Maharashtra states SlumRehabilitation Authority. Although a pro-posal to redevelop their slum had been inthe pipeline since the mid-1990s, andresidents had agreed officially in 2003 to

rehabilitation and resettlement, nothingmuch had happened since then. Whatcaught them by surprise was the noticecoming from a developer with whom theyhad not signed the initial agreement. 1 Asthey raised alarm over the use of forgeddocuments by the new developer, residentswere also concerned with the violation of several rehabilitation rules. The site ident-ified for their resettlement was on a con-tested property (claimed by the Indian AirForce), and the adjoining Western Railwayhad refused to give a no-objection clear-ance, issuing a stop-notice to the construc-tion. In addition to the residentscomplaining about the poor quality of the

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transit camps, there was also the fear thatnot all the 283 of the 323 tenements orig-inally identified for rehabilitation wouldbe resettled as only 550 of the 10,000homes demolished had been re-accommo-dated. However, by the end of the year,the High Court bench ordered the evictionof non-consenting slum dwellers reason-ing that more than half of the dwellingshad already been pulled down. Even as theresidents cobbled together resistanceagainst this forced eviction, their tenementstructures continued to be razed in small,yet consistent, numbers on a regular basis. 2

As such stories emerge from the shadowsof the more controversial yet high-profileplan to redevelop Dharavi, Mumbaislargest slum, it is not just Dharavi andGolibar that face eviction but a violentreality confronting nearly 200 of Mumbais 2000 slums.3 Earlier, this kind of state action was seen on a good day as awell-intended (albeit misguided) attemptby the government to provide bettershelter for the urban poor through reloca-

tion, and ona bad day as a knee jerk reactionto assert authority. Today, it would benaiveto assume so, as evictions form part of a cal-culated plan to recapture valuable land forreal-estate development. Since the begin-ning of the 21st century, major Indiancities have officially launched at an unpre-cedented scale massive and often brutaleviction drives amidst a national commit-ment to a slum-free urban India. An esti-

mated 300,000450,000 people were evictedin Mumbai between October 2004 and January 2005, with 200,000 more facing dis-placement (Bhide, 2009). In Delhi, at least200,000 of the citys 3 million slum dwellershave been evicted since 2004 to facilitate thecitys preparation for the (much-maligned)2010 Commonwealth Games (HLRN-HIC, 2011). In Chennai, the scenario isworse where alongside the 200,000 alreadydisplaced there are plans to evict anadditional 300,000. Given the citys 1million-plus slum population, this com-prises a worrying 50%.

While the freeing up of inner-city slum-land to the speculative exuberance of private capital is a key reason for the relent-less pursuit of evictions, the official argu-ment is couched in a nobler discourse.Following its commitment to meet thetargets of poverty-related MillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDG), the centralgovernment issued a seemingly pro-poor National Urban Poverty Reduction Strategyin 2009 announcing a new deal for theurban poor with loud promises of makingcities and towns slum-free by 2020. As astrategy that has basically co-opted the2001 draft National Slum Policy (one thatwas never adopted), its emphasis on redu-cing urban poverty through a spatial recast-ing where there is no place for slums is notsurprising. What is puzzling is its rathernaive argument that slums are a viableentry point for addressing the visible mani-festations of urban poverty when accordingto its own estimate only 43 million of the 86million urban poor are supposed to reside inslums. There is of course a great degree of

ambivalence surrounding these figures asthe criteria for determining poverty anddefining slums keep changing. The exactnumber of those living below the povertyline (BPL) is in constant flux as parametersare redefined. Following revised criteriabased on the Tendulkar report (2009), thenational government has commissioned inMay 2011 a brand new BPL census. What-ever the estimate, it can be safely concluded

that while a considerable number of theurban poor live in slums, not all slum dwell-ers are poor, and more importantly, a sig-nificant proportion of the urban poor donot reside in the slums. Recently, a Govern-ment of India report (2010, p. 7) revised its2001 Census definition of a slum to acompact settlementofat least 20 householdswith a collection of poorly built tenements,mostly of temporary nature, crowdedtogether usually with inadequate sanitaryand drinking water facilities in unhygienicconditions. While this definition wasintended to be broad and all encompassing,

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it fails to address the fact that the mostextreme levels of poverty arenot necessarilyfound in the slums. Reports and studies onthe urban poor in India acknowledge thisbut ignore it when it comes to assessingand analysing urban poverty. For instance,the National Urban Poverty Reduction Strat-egytoes a modernist line that one can get ridof poverty by simply eradicating slums. Itthus conveniently chooses slum-free citiesas the mainframe, mainly because slumsettlements are spatial entities, and theyare possible to be identified, targeted andreached (Mathur, 2009, p. 11).

This is precisely what Gilbert (2007, 2009)cautions against in his thought-provokingarticles on the return of the word slumwith all of its inglorious associationswarning that it is being used as a slogan toconfront urban poverty. In the process, notonly is much of what we have learned abouturban poverty being erased, there is also a ten-dency to distort our understanding of thenature of poverty, reducing the lives of allpoor people to the lowest common

denominator (Gilbert, 2009). Extending theargument, this paper suggests that as the con-ceptualisation of poverty continues to bedominated by the challenges of measuring it,slums have come to act as a stand-in for ana-lysing and representing poverty. In a contextwhere measuring poverty is increasingly rela-tive, governments are opting to use the moreeasily quantifiable slum population as thekey indicator of poverty. Thus, establishing

a slum line has proven handier than themuch-contested poverty line. Social scienceresearch has equally developed the bad habitof overlaying the social category of theurban poor over the spatial terrain of slumsanticipating a neat fit. Few actually go thatextra mile to unpack qualitatively the hetero-geneity of the urban poor and the spaces theyinhabit. As Auyero (1997) wryly observed,academic doxa fusses so much aroundgetting the arithmetic of the misery correctthat they fail to take note of Wacquants insis-tence on forms instead of rates of segregation,unemployment or destitution (1997).

While one would identify this as an urgentempirical problem that can be addressedthrough in-depth ethnographic studies of the urban poor, recent arguments suggestotherwise that theorising the slum is notonly an effective way of thinking throughthe social production of urban poverty butalso, more generally, about contemporaryurban change in cities of the global South.Following Buckleys argument (2011), itseems as though scholars efforts to talkabout slums in theoretical rather than empiri-cal terms indicate that they are after biggerconceptual fish. This paper questions thisepistemological fad given that the hegemonyof poverty (Roy, 2003) is reproduced inspaces other than slums, more so now withneoliberal development policies resulting ina volatile remaking of many cities. Theconcern here is whether slum as theory(Rao, 2006) is a helpful way of rethinkingurban poverty, particularly at a momentwhen a constant risk of eviction dominatesthe political and economic realities of theurban poor (at least in Indian/ South Asian

cities). Does it offer a reasonable, empower-ing discourse that can usefully challenge thisunfair pressure, or does it merely generatesurreal representations of their deprivationand exclusion? As this paper argues, captur-ing the social, economic and cultural com-plexities of their everyday life is demandingas one needs to sift spatio-temporallythrough a layered multiplicity that isperhaps better unpacked empirically than

theoretically.

Flirting with theory

The past few years have witnessed academicsreturning to the (use of the term) slum with arenewed fervour, reshaping it to fit the newcapitalist conjuncture and the spatialitiesproper to economic and cultural globaliza-tion (Cavalcanti, 2008, p. 996). Much of this effort is set within a framework to theo-rise the slum, an exercise that Rao (2006)believes will capture best the spatialities of

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than the excluded, invisible, weak and thelimited.6 More importantly, the excluded,invisible, weak and the limited need to beread in more imaginative theoretical terms.

This theoretical imagination is what Roy(2011) tries to provide through her rethinkingof subaltern urbanism, which as a newgeography of theory is supposed to help inthe unbounding of the global slum. Movingaway from the confines of spaces of povertyand forms of popular agency, she draws ondifferent scholars to introduce four epistemo-logical categories, that is, peripheries, urbaninformality, zones of exception and greyspaces, concepts that have their own distinc-tive genealogies, are spaces in the makingand a form of making theory. While hertheoretical projects offer an alternative tothe vocabulary of the slum and potentially adeparture from slum as theory, this papersuggests that what is perhaps more useful isnot a disruption of subaltern urbanism anda complete ontological break with existingunderstandings of subaltern subjects, but adifferent kind of topological investigation.

For, one need not reject completely the epis-temic and political location of subalternity toovercome the fashionable discourse of slumdog cities. Instead, what is useful is ashift from a single lens focus on slum ontolo-gies to tracing the circulation of the subalternsubjects and their various spatial negotiationswithin the city that uncannily involvescutting across the very spaces in the makingidentified by Roy (2011). For, the four con-

cepts she outlines are not unreal sites bythemselves, but appear hyper-real becauseof the rather dream-like topography she setsthem in. If they are to be useful as categories,they need to be illuminated in a moreordinary way. The next section thus locatesthese seemingly hyper-real conceptual zonesin the real urban landscape, where one canfind them converging rather neatly in theresettlement colonies, sites that are in everyway Roys grey spaces located at theperipheries, which, as zones of exceptionsubmit the urban poor to new kinds of marginality.

Shifting spatialities of the urban poor

Post-independent urban planning in India hasfor the most part struggled to cope with thechallenges of urban explosion (both interms of capital and labour), as a result of which spaces of absolute deprivation devel-oped cheek by jowl alongside symbols of capitalist accumulation. Shanty towns inparticular reflected the unpleasant side of Third World capitalism marking the hyper-urbanisation of the haphazard or the unin-tended city, and serving not only as a spatialexpression of deprivation, but also as abarrier to the capitalist project of accumu-lation (Chandoke, 1991). In response, earlyplanning policies pursued slum clearance pro-grammes that sought to replace the imperma-nent structures with more robust tenementbuildings. In the wake of its failure to stemthe growth of slums in other parts of the city, the government, often on the adviceof international agencies, adopted a slumimprovement policy involving in situ upgrad-ing schemes. Postcolonial urban development

policies thus alternated between resettlementand upgrading as two distinct ways of addres-sing the slum menace, both of which came toconstitute an eerily familiar experience for theurban slum dweller. With the introductionof neoliberal economic reforms in the early1990s, political attitudes to slums havechanged yet again. A market-driven approachhas emerged where slum dwellers are rehabi-litated while slums are made available for

private redevelopment. Slum evictions arecentral to this strategy, but are of an entirelydifferent nature to those pursued in the mid-20th century not just in degree but also inkind.

While it is important to note that thisversion of post-millennial evictions is tied toa larger critical shift in urban politics amidsta changing representation of the urban poor(Bhan, 2009), it is equally imperative tounderstand the resettlement options that areavailable to the slum dwellers in thiscontext. For, as Rao (2010) has pointed out,most academic research in India stops at

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describing the ideologies and practices thatinform urban renewal and slum eviction butrarely pay attention to what happens to theurban poor after they are removed. Increas-ingly, only a small proportion of slum dwell-ers are offered resettlement and little isknown in terms of what happens to the evic-tees who receive no compensation. Earlier,those who did not qualify for resettlementwould return to resquatting at the evictedsites. However, with these locations nowbeing viciously fenced-off and prepared forredevelopment, such a possibility is thin.Moreover, contemporary resettlement sitesepitomise spaces of advanced marginality atlocations so far removed from the city, dis-connecting inhabitants from the hubs of thelabour market and intensifying their socio-spatial isolation. The option of relocationbecomes uneconomical, with householdshaving to bear the high socio-economiccosts related to poor infrastructure at thesesites (Jha and Khosla, 2003), with many pre-ferring to return to the city, squeezing intoalready overcrowded slums or even opting

for the private rental market. Thus, unlikeearlier times when resettlement schemeswere seen as a benevolent project of urbanmodernity, the latest efforts intimidate theurban poor with new kinds of spatial injus-tices interrupting their participation in thecitys social production processes. In thecontext of Indian cities striving for world-class status through their slum-free citiespropaganda, it is obvious that slum evictions

and resettlement are no longer about redu-cing poverty but about rendering the poorinvisible.

There is a complexity embedded within thecurrent politics of eviction and resettlementthat makes it too simplistic to assume thatsquatters are only too happy to move if suit-ably relocated. For sure, this argument is usednot just by the state but also by some of thecivil society groups involved in the resettle-ment process, convinced that this willprovide stability and improve enormouslythe rather precarious environment in whichthe poor live. For instance, Patel et al.

(2002) are resigned to the fact that displace-ment of the slum population is inevitablegiven the pressures of development, and thatresettlement is acceptable as long as it ispeople-managed with low-income commu-nities having a direct engagement in the planand its logistics (cf. Buckley, 2011). The scen-ario is different in the context of neoliberal-ism as its market-driven nature affectslocal agencies, communities and processesinvolved in rehabilitation in its own particu-lar ways. Thus, even though Nijman (2008)presents a case study of what he considersas a successful example of slum rehabilitationin neoliberal Mumbai, it needs to be empha-sised that this has been achieved against theodds, and is not an experience that is easilyemulated at the larger scale.

The reality is that these new resettlementsites located in the distant urban peripheriesreproduce new spaces of deprivation, a sortof hyperghetto (Wacquant, 2008) orhyper-shantytown (Auyero, 2000), markedby organisational depletion that containneither an extended division of labour nor

functioning duplicates of the central insti-tutions of the broader urban society. Forinstance, in Chennai, in the recent spate of evictions, slum dwellers have been relocatedto sites such as Kannagi Nagar and Sem-manchery (in the south) and All India RadioNagar (in the north), at least 2030 kmaway from the city. Here, left to the unpre-dictability of lives at the urban fringe,kinship links, social ties and cultural connec-

tions (constituting the backbone of the slumeconomy) dissolve into dysfunctionality. Asa result, slum dwellers after eviction arereduced to a motley mix of the underclass,socially disqualified by virtue of theirunstable position at the extreme margins of the wage-labour sphere. And although theyrelocate hoping to bring some semblance of formality and legitimacy to their livesthrough the security of tenure promised bythe state, it is clear that neither do theyupgrade from population to citizen nor arethey able to invoke the rights of urban citi-zenship in any conceivable manner.7


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Instead, resettlement sites offer an uneasyfusion of formal and informal status definedby the state to its own advantage and exposethe relocated inhabitants to new kinds of vulnerabilities. For example, even thoughthe Indian governments National UrbanPoverty Reduction Strategy promises securetenure to slum dwellers, eligibility to propertyrights is contingent on their participation in a10-year programme of slum renewal andredevelopment. As the socio-spatial relationsof the urban poor in globalising cities arerestructured by the deep injustices of slumeviction and resettlement, what is perhapsmost useful is a detailed empirical investi-gation of the disruption that resettlementcauses in the lives of slum dwellers. Onecannot help but wonder how slum astheory can address the anxieties of thosefacing this grim spectre, beyond being aprovocation.

Conclusion

As the protests against the demolition of GKStenements in Golibar peaked in May 2011, apriority item in the residents list of claimswas curiously the demand that the govern-ment immediately declare as slums 19 settle-ments and any more whose paperwork couldbe submitted within the next few days. Thosesettlements that could be identified as slumsunder the Maharashtra Slums Act, 1971would legally become eligible for redevelop-

ment. In this way, they would not remaininvisible and hence, subject to an arbitrarydemolition drive by the state. This is surpris-ing given the aversion slum dwellers generallyshow towards the indiscriminate use of theterm slum in describing their environment.In the case of Golibar, residents were realisticabout gaining as much mileage as possiblefrom an unavoidable process, knowing wellthat either way they were damned by the dia-lectic of visibility and invisibility. By register-ing their society as a slum, they risk exposingthemselves to a dicey redevelopment processat the mercy of the state and real-estate

development sharks. If they choose toremain as illegal squatters, they still have toface the states bulldozers. Thus, eventhough sensible academics have cautionedagainst viewing slums as repositories of theurban poor, slums have ironically become akey entity through which the latter negotiatetheir presence in the city.

On the other hand, most of Dharavis resi-dents are piqued by the proposal to create asustainable, slum-free Dharavi. Despite itsinfamous reputation as Asias largest slum,its inhabitants do not take kindly to this tag.The squalor of the slum that is generallythought of as Dharavi is in reality an urbanlegend representing a crucial space forpoverty capital and its subaltern entrepre-neurialism (Echanove and Srivastava, 2009;Roy, 2011). Yet, for those working onDharavi, this is the main drawthe fact thatit is not only a slum but also carries the hyper-bolic distinction of being Mumbais, or evenbetter, Asias largest slum. This fascinationwith Dharavi as a one-stop shop for anyoneinterested in slums (Echanove and Srivas-

tava, 2011) is seen not just in the wave of recent television documentaries or newspaperarticles in the post-Slumdog Millionaireperiod, but extends back to earlier years asin Sharmas lucid narratives of stories fromDharavi (2000). In fact, most scholars una-bashedly set their argument around Dharavibeing the largest slum in the city withoutreally probing or reflecting on local senti-ments towards this derogatory toponym.

There is a clear lack of sensitivity in under-standing the intricate politics influencingand determining subaltern engagement withthe term slum, almost as if indulging in sucha discussion would undermine ones ownresearch prospects. A certain carelessness hasthus come to mark the way this term is usedin academic literaturea homogenising labelobscuring the underlying complex relationsof social and political inequality (Angotti,2006).

It is therefore not surprising that Gilbert(2007, 2009) does not feel enthused aboutthe return of the slum to the centre stage of

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urban poverty and instead set out in the fieldto build an ontology of slum practices. For,as Auyero (2000) has rightly reminded us,the abundance of statistical analysis of poverty is only matched by the almost totalabsence of serious ethnographic case studies.Rather than a grand narrative about slum as ameta-theory, it is such investigations on thecity as a site of everyday practice thatprovide valuable insights into linkagesbetween the coarser grain of macro-structuralprocesses and the finer texture of humanexperience.

Acknowledgements

I am thankful, in large doses, to Bob Catter-all, Matti Siemiatycki, Alan Gilbert, AnnVarley, Charlotte Lemanski, Andrew Harrisand Matthew Gandy for their critical com-ments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1 The Slum Rehabilitation Authority was established in1995 to oversee the redevelopment of all slums inMumbai through the participation of privatedevelopers. In exchange for rehousing the slumdwellers, developers are allowed to redevelop thesites for market-driven real-estate speculation,often athigher densities than normally permitted.

2 At the time of writing, GKS residents had gatheredconsiderable support for their cause, with the famedactivist Medha Patkar from the National Alliance of Peoples Movements joining them on behalf of theGhar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan. Although theirhouses have been demolished, they continue to liveamidst the rubble, organising rallies and protestmarches across the city. After a nine-day fast byMedha Patkar in May 2011, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra intervened, agreeing to take intoconsideration the terms and conditions of thosefacing eviction. Local media have been surprisinglymeasured with some reports even taking the side of the state and the developer. However, extendedinternational coverage and attention has beengained through Internet propaganda (http://khareastandolan.wordpress.com) as well as a write-up in The Guardian, 11 March (Patel, 2011).

3 While this may seem like a small percentage, thesize and population of slums vary considerably

ranging from a few hundred to few thousandshanties. The Mumbai Human Development Report(2010) suggests that slums occupy only 6% of thetotal land, whereas Nijman (2008) believes it to becloser to 12%. Depending on the gure, the totalslum area in Greater Mumbai is anywherebetween 8900 and 17,800 acres, accommodatingnearly 9 million people. The drive to free thesethousands of acres of inner-city land fordevelopment is putting millions of slum dwellers atrisk of eviction. This includes Dharavi spread over432 acres with 67 communities comprising apopulation of 550,000 (Nijman, 2010), theairport slums (276 acres of 31 slum pockets and85,000 families) and Golibar (140 acres with 46cooperative societies and 26,000 families).Together these three clusters cover 850 acres of land with 1.1 million people.

4 This is quite different from the analytical concepts of the 20th century where ethnographically groundedresearch (mostly set in Latin America) yielded usefulepistemologies of slums such as Portessrationalisation of the slum (1972) or Perlman (1976)dispelling the myth of marginality. Varley (2010), onthe other hand, notes the almost complete absence of Latin America in recent explicitly theoreticalapproaches to informality drawing mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

5 Architects while acknowledging the deprivationprevalent in the slums have exhibited a tendency to

view its physical environment positively within thecultural framework of the vernacular, some morecautiously than others (Rapoport, 1988; Kellettand Napier, 1995; cf. Oliver, 2003). Chalana(2010), for example, examines the squattersettlements and the more permanent tenements of the urban poor in Mumbai as part of the spatialnarrative of a vernacular environment. Describingit as a classic example of everyday urbanism thatis devoid of the spectacle of architecture, hisemphasis on the vernacular nature of thesesettlements is a way of highlighting the supposedlygreater control that residents exert on theproduction and/ or appropriation of space and itsarchitecture.

6 Lemanski and Oldeld (2007), for instance, arguethat while interpretations of slums may act as a criticaldiscourse through which Southern cities areunderstood, in contrast, stories of gating and wallingoff homes and communities provide an equallypowerful but different lens to view the Southern cityand its urban experience.

7 The difference between populations and citizensderives from Chatterjees distinction between the twowhere he states that the citizens claim equal rightsand operate through civil society while populationsmake demands on the states welfare policies via thedomain of political society (2004).

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Documents

Rhetoric of the ‘Slum’