Yet, the architects were somehow able to design builidings that are simultaneously unfriendly to the user, difficult to maintain and astonishingly ugly. To socialists and fascists alike, the industrial starkness of reinforced concrete had a great attraction that is difficult to understand. One of the unfortunate aspects of urban growth between the mid-fifties and the mid-eighties was the influence fo 'brutalist' modernism.

The point I am making is that real slums are not the places of static hopelessness portrayed in popular movies like Slumdog Millionaire. Clearly, we need to provide the urban poor with better sanitation, public health, education and so on.

I am not glorifying slums or arguing that they do not need help. Life may be hard but, in a rapidly grong economy, there is enough socio-economic mobility to keep slum-dwellers hardworking, enterprising and law-abiding. This cohesion comes from the fact that migrants do not view slum life as a static state of deprivation but as a foothold into the modern, urban economy. Most readers of this book will be able to walk through the average Indian slum even at night without fear of being harmed.

In contrast, as writers like Jeb Brugmann have pointed out, Indian slums are full of enterprise and energy,“ Indeed, Indian slums are remarkable in how safe and cohesive they are. Urban decay describes the condition of blight and abandonment that one sees in Detroit, New Jersey, and northern England. We need to distinguish here between urban decay and slums. The slums of New York and London were legendary in the nineteenth and early twentiethĬentury. As we have seen, slums existed in Harappan Dholavira, Mughal Delhi and in colonial Bombay. In doing so, they provide the urban economy with the armies of blue-collar workers- maids, drivers, factory-workers-who are essential to theįunctioning of any vibrant city. They absorb poor migrants from the rural hinterland and naturalize them into the urban landscape. Important role as 'routers’ in the urbanization process. Jobs inside the slum, information about jobs outside the slum, social networks, security and so on. Schemes view slums as a static housing problem whereas slums are really evolving ecosystems that include informal More often than not, the former slum-dwellers sell, rent out or abandon the new housing blocks and move back into a slum. Yet, almost all these efforts have failed. Over the decades, we have seen many well-meaning slum re-development projects that have attempted to resettle Slum-dwellers into purpose-built housing blocks (often on the outskirts of the city). The usual reaction is to treat this as a housing problem. Most people tend to be overwhelmed by the poor living conditions that prevail in Indian slums.

Land of seven rivers sanjeev sanyal