The hip-hop Billy Elliot
Fish, comedy, terrorism, cycling, football, skywalks, leopards ... it’s been an amazing week for us in Mumbai. And no secret that among our favourite new people are the SlumGods hip-hop crew. Here is an amazing short film we’ve made about them - we really think it’s a must-watch for anybody interested in this city.
Tonight we’re also live at their hip-hop workshop, in the park opposite Assema School on Chimbai Road in West Bandra. Can’t wait for the rap battle.
Must be over 100 B-Boys in da house. And some B-Girls too. breakin Bombay style. Word. Kotha. @guardiancities pic.twitter.com/btL8tZiSTe
— Saptarshi Ray (@Saptarshi_Ray) November 28, 2014
Homies be throwin up some signs yo. Actually were in #Mumbai, so, yaar. @guardiancities #guardianmumbai pic.twitter.com/PlhERDMCzF
— Saptarshi Ray (@Saptarshi_Ray) November 28, 2014
Corkscrew. These Bandra boys have got some serious moves. @guardiancities #guardianmumbai pic.twitter.com/44D2Mandym
— Saptarshi Ray (@Saptarshi_Ray) November 28, 2014
This excellent piece explains why the SlumGods - and hip-hop in general - matter so much in a place like Mumbai.
Dhangar recalls feeling out of place at a trendy restaurant just a couple of years ago. “Looking at the other diners, we seemed shabbily dressed. From the moment we entered, everybody was staring at us. As I cut into my burger, the patty unfortunately slipped out, and it was obvious that people were judging us,” he says. Not any more.
Check it out here, yaar.
We’ve come to love Mumbai over the past week, and will be staying with all our stories as they develop. Drop us a line any time: cities@theguardian.com. Many thanks to the crack team at NDTV.com who made our live TV series so much fun to watch; to the Hive for hosting us so often; to the Juhu Beach YMCA boys shelter; and to the many other people and organisations who put up with us, in sickness and in health. From all of us on the Cities team - Mike Herd, Nick Mead, Saptarshi Ray, Francesca Perry and Chris Michael, as well as the many other excellent journalists, photographers, film-makers, urbanists, citizen reporters and volunteers who’ve helped make our content so special - a big thank you to all you Mumbaikars who’ve read and responded. It’s been an incredible week, thanks to you. You’re so yo. Over and out for now.
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Since we started, more than 4,000 people have moved to Mumbai
We began our week of in-depth reporting from Mumbai on Monday morning. We’ve met lots of fascinating people - and it scrambles the mind to think that since we ran our first story, at the rate of nearly one person a minute, more than 4,400 new people have moved to the city.
Many of these new arrivals end up living on the street. The luckier ones find a foothold in a so-called slum - which, as Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove write, aren’t the apocalyptic hellscapes we’ve been sold. They shouldn’t even be called slums.
A majority of homes in areas notified as “slums” by the government are built in bricks, steel and cement, by experienced teams of contractors, masons, plumbers, electricians and carpenters. What these individual initiatives lack is a framework proving better planning at a neighbourhood level. Many of Mumbai’s poorest neighbourhoods could become functional and even desirable with a little support from the authorities. ... Rather than “slums”, which in Mumbai is a political label, we call Shivaji Nagar, Dharavi and other such settlements “homegrown neighbourhoods”.
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Workshopping the city
Today we were at the Studio X workshop focusing on Mumbai’s Portlands, which brought together students, architects, social scientists and activists to work on ideas and proposals for the regeneration of this eastern waterfront area, a project which Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar also wrote about.
The simple idea is to create better waterfront public spaces, transport infrastructure and pedestrian connectivity, mixed income housing, social infrastructure and employment. But we all know regeneration is far from simple.
The event kicked off with what felt like a call to arms: urban academics and practitioners including PK Das, Himanshu Burte and Brinda Somaya stressed the importance of thinking inclusively when we plan for development, ensuring spatial justice, meaningfully communicating with builders and politicians - and making this project both integrate with the city and be a model for its future development. “Whatever you do in the Portlands affects the whole of Mumbai,” explained social scientist Himanshu Burte.
PK Das, an “architect-activist” based in Mumbai who is profiled in this book extract, is keen to help build up a citizen movement to effect positive change in the city. He commented that the culture of development over the last 30 years in Mumbai has been dominated by the real-estate market and focused on building excessively and exclusively, grabbing land and reducing open space: “public spaces are both physically and democratically shrinking.”
Himanshu Burte also spoke of this “tragedy of development”: he believes spatial inequality has been exacerbated by urban policy, denying the urban poor of basic space and liveability.
It’s clear that the aspirations for the Portlands are ambitious - and counter those of typical real estate development in the city. As well as public spaces, better connectivity, thriving industrial functions, cooperative housing and integrated nature, it was clear that retaining the public ownership of the land was the first crucial step to ensure inclusive development could take place. At the same time, as architect Brinda Somaya urged, “we need to have political will and bureaucratic backing or nothing will happen.”
As the participants broke into groups to further explore issues around resilience and social equity, heritage, housing, transport and policy, I went to listen in and find out what was being worked on. “The availability of affordable housing is crucial,” one participant told me, “but in order to ensure this we need to address the commodification of land.”
A student of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA) explained that dissolving the existing hierarchy of open spaces and actually encouraging a mix of people with different incomes to live in an integrated way would be a key challenge: “people are not used to mixing in Mumbai. How do we formally create mixed housing and mixed spaces?”
At the start of the workshop, politician Meera Sanyal had said that in Mumbai, “we are denied the space to dream, to breathe.” This project certainly hopes to create that space and help Mumbai to become a more inclusive and just city. Let’s see what happens.
Tune in for more from PK Das and a timely discussion about the future of Mumbai tonight: catch the live-stream of the NDTV show here at 1.30pm GMT / 7pm IST. FP
Miss Wheelchair India 2014
There are some great pictures from the Miss Wheelchair India pageant in Mumbai last night.
Seven women from across India participated in the country’s second wheelchair beauty pageant, which “aims to open doors for the wheelchair-bound in modelling, film and television”, according to the official website.
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The streets have no shame
Street vendors in the city face all manner of bureaucratic and intimidating tactics trying to ply their trade, and Prathamesh Mulye has been looking at new laws aiming to cleanse the corrupt culture surrounding small businesses in Mumbai.
Read his full story here and send us your thoughts as ever.
Here’s an extract:
Vendors are still handing over a chunk of their income every month. Hari Pujan is one. He sells fruit on the pavement in Dadar, one of the most expensive areas of the city for hawkers. Every month, he pays bribes of 1,500 rupees (£15) to cops and BMC officials, approximately one-third of his income. “Cops work in various shifts, so I have to pay them all,” he says.
According to the Ministry of Urban Development, there are approximately 250,000 vendors who sell retail and essential goods on pavements in Mumbai. The extortion takes a major toll on their livelihood. Despite trading for more than 12 hours a day, Pujan and his family live hand to mouth.
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Fresh fish, and obscene riches
As promised, Saptarshi Ray’s story of going out to sea with the Koli fishermen of Chimbai Village, landing the catch then returning home to cook and eat with them, is now up here. We are, it’s fair to say, pretty overwhelmed by the spirit of openness and generosity we have encountered throughout our time in Mumbai.
Meanwhile the Guardian’s economics writer, Aditya Chakrabortty, has been meeting some Mumbaikars right at the other end of the economic scale. In today’s piece, he draws parallels between this city and London, and suggests the wealthy Mumbai elite’s willingness to show off has reached new extremes:
What a visit to Mumbai shows you is the vast inequality in how those riches have been spread around. You see it in the physical infrastructure: all those new flyovers sprouting up around the city to enable the chauffeur driven classes to get about more easily, even while the commuter trains are still bursting; the crowded, chaotic public hospitals that get by while gleaming new private hospitals open up.
Aditya goes on to describe meeting a party planner who was angsting out loud about what kind of society Mumbai is becoming:
At the top, we’re creating a generation of brats. If they have iPads and birthday extravaganzas now, what will they demand when they’re teens? And at the bottom, can you imagine how much resentment they must be carrying?”
Tell us what you think @GuardianCities using the hashtag #GuardianMumbai.
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Catch of the day
Here’s a video clip of Saptarshi Ray’s trip with the Koli fishermen of Chimbai Village – article coming soon:
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Port in a storm?
Sounds like a fascinating event going on right now at Studio-X Mumbai in Fort. Rajeev Thacker has assembled a range of important voices to discuss the future of the port lands area. Read Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar’s report on the subject – here’s an extract of what she says:
The port land is widely seen by planners and citizens’ groups as the last big opportunity to revitalise the congested British-era island city and plug its considerable deficits in affordable housing, transport links and public spaces.
Mumbaikars are excited, but also apprehensive: opportunities like this have been hijacked and squandered in the past. A decade ago, the closure of textile mills in central Mumbai was supposed to give the best part of 243 hectares of land to city agencies to turn into public housing and parks. Then a quiet tweak to the rules ensured developers took virtually all of it.
Tell us what you think in the comments below, or @GuardianCities using the hashtag #NDTVguardianmumbai.
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Guardian Cities on NDTV: our live debates so far
Throughout the week, we’ve been enjoying nightly debates hosted by our friends Sunetra Choudhury and Tejas Mehta for NDTV’s Mumbai Agenda. Tune in tonight at 7pm for the final edition, looking at the future of Mumbai – is it possible to build a better future for all?
Watch previous clips here and follow tonight’s debate on Twitter using #NDTVGuardianMumbai.
Good morning Mumbai, for the last time in our wonderful, wearying Guardian Cities week here.
Back on Monday, we introduced you to two unused, unloved spaces in Mumbai. Over the past four days, these have been transformed by the Urban Vision and a team of artists and volunteers in a bid to use tactical urbanism to improve the liveability of the city and provide better public spaces for local communities. Yesterday afternoon we visited one of the spaces, Rivali Park in Borivali, for its grand unveiling:
Just visited Rivali Park, transformed by @theurbanvision & volunteers/artists into great public space #GuardianMumbai pic.twitter.com/svjt0iEeik
— Guardian Cities (@guardiancities) November 27, 2014
The Urban Vision’s founder Prathima Manohar explained that the project had involved 12 artists working over a 60-hour period, incorporating both their visions for the future of Mumbai and crowd-sourced public aspirations for a dream city into the painted designs surrounding a “wish plaza”.
Colourful tyres created an amphitheatre of seats for people to sit and watch performances. An NGO, the Kaivalya Education Foundation, arranged to use the space in Rivali Park to hold their after-school programmes for children from the streets and local slum settlements, teaching them maths and science in a creative setting.
Mumbaikars' wishes for their ideal city form part of the new Rivali Park Wish Plaza #ReMakeBBY #GuardianMumbai pic.twitter.com/ZUMnSfCUIh
— Guardian Cities (@guardiancities) November 27, 2014
Prathima urged the assembled crowd that, though the hard work of transforming the space had been done, it was now vital that people keep the space alive and look after it. The signs are promising: many local people present expressed their desire for more public spaces to spend time, meet friends, or play with their children. FP
