Contemporary Issues in Architecture and Urbanism

part vii

THE HIGH-RISE AND THE SLUM: SPECULATIVE URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN MUMBAI

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THE HIGH-RISE AND THE SLUM: SPECULATIVE URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN MUMBAI matias echanove and rahul srivastava

Introduction
There seems to be a prevailing perception that apart from its southernmost colonial quarters, Mumbai is essentially a schizophrenic urbanscape where emergent islands of modernity are surrounded by an endless sea of informal shacks. This image of a city sharply divided between opulence and poverty is used across the political spectrum to justify redevelopment projects in the name of equality. The intuitive but misleading parallels slum = poverty and high-rise = middle-class, coupled with an incapacity to recognize the variety that actually exists in between these extreme categories, has allowed countless acts of injustice to be perpetuated in the name of slum upgrading and redevelopment projects. In the process, the incremental development of many so-called slums in Mumbai has been curtailed, with dramatic consequences for the concerned populations and for the long-term social and urban sustainability of the city. Mainstream conceptions of what a world-class city should look like and a tendency to understand urbanization from the point of view of form rather than process

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international settings

have given a free ride to the real estate construction industry. In this chapter, we redefine the conceptual fault line that runs through the typologies of the high-rise building and that of the slum and propose a new planning paradigm based on neighborhood life and local economic activities, including the production of habitats themselves. While this chapter centers on Mumbai, we refer to Tokyo as an example of a city that has blurred many of the categories traditionally used to conceptualize urban space while

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