slumming it

I've spent a couple of fascinating hours over the past two evenings watching Kevin McCloud's Slumming It, a Channel 4 documentary in which he spent several weeks living in one of the most crowded places on earth: the slum of Dharavi in Mumbai.

Spread over an area of under a mile Dharavi is home to over 1 million people. Originally a fishing village amid mangrove swamp the industry died after a dam was built nearby and the marshes drained. As a result Bombay (as the city was called then) developed into the island city it is today. Migrants moved in to the area establishing communities and industries such as pottery and leather tanning. Today Dharavi is Asia's largest slum: a city within a city, hemmed in between two suburban railway lines and the Mithi River. It has become part of a wider consciousness in the West recently after featuring prominently in the film Slumdog Millionaire.

As a nervous McCloud discovered, conditions inside the slum are, frankly, frightening: tightly-packed corrugated-roofed buildings line a rabbit-warren of dirty, narrow streets, dotted with excrement; children play next to open sewers of toxic chemicals; rats scuttle everywhere; the strictly-rationed water is contaminated and, unsurprisingly, disease is rife; people queue to urinate and defacate in the local river. In the programme, the heat among the densely crowded streets seemed almost suffocating.

To his credit, McCloud immersed himself in slum life during his time there. Put up by a family of 21, crammed into a tiny living area, he chose to sleep on the floor rather than accept the offer of a bed (that said, after being disturbed by a rodent rattling around in a plastic bag at 5am one morning he seemed ready to quit). For two weeks he lived like a local and attempted to see as many facets of the settlement while he was there. After spending a morning with the city's dustmen McCloud visited a vast waste dump where men, women and children scoured Mumbai's refuse looking for any scraps of plastic and other materials to sell for recycling (consequently, 80 per cent of Mumbai's plastic waste is recycled). As each dustcart pulled up to dump it's load, crowds would race to search the refuse as it fell. It made sobering watching. Apparently, gaining permission from the authorities to film the site had taken a while to obtain and you could see why. Deeply shocked, McCloud could barely speak. Later on he toured tiny one-room factories (there are said to be 15000 of them in Dharavi) where workers seemed unaware of the hazardous and even deadly working conditions: paint tins were salvaged and restored to be used again; dangerous machinery was used with apparent disregard; a pile of plastic being being separated for recycling turned out to include hospital waste as a horrified McCloud found when he uncovered a collection of used hypodermic needles.

Apparently, architects and planners have claimed that Dharavi has the answers to some of the biggest problems facing Western cities: 85 per cent of the population is in employment; the numerous thriving small-scale industries (including pottery, leather goods and textiles) sell to domestic and international markets; the recycling rate is high; crime is low. McCloud discovered a highly organised society amongst what initially appeared to be chaos. At one point an entire crowded street stopped to kneel in a single direction, pray as one and then rise to continue their business. Despite the problems and the filth, Dharavi was not a bleak place: the streets were full of energy, spirit and colour - all things that, by comparison, seem lacking in our cities. Children played happily outside; people talked to each other as the world went by; beautiful women in immaculate saris sauntered past; many of the buildings were painted beautiful pastel colours. And there were no cars.

Quite obviously the programme offered a stark contrast to life in the West. McCloud thought the people seemed happy. Were they? Life looked extremely tough. Hanging over their heads are plans to demolish Dharavi and rehouse the population in high-rise flats to be built in its place - the kind of failed buildings we put up in the 60s and are demolishing now. Watching the developer talk about his plans was like watching a car crash unfold in slow motion. McCloud was given a glimpse of what could become Dharavi's future when shown existing tower blocks in Mumbai: they looked decrepit but were apparently just five or six years old. Each one was built excruciatingly close to the other, literally a metre or two apart so people lived in tiny dark rooms, shut away from their neighbours. Far better, surely, to improve conditions for the existing settlement (introducing proper sanitation for a start)? Unfortunately, there's no money to be made in that. Despite the filth, grime, shit, rats, refuse and the living and working conditions we'd seen until then, the prospect of Dharavi being razed so this planned redevelopment could go ahead actually proved, for me at least, the most disturbing part of the documentary.

Photo taken from Wikipedia entry on Dharavi