Redeveloping Dharavi: Toward a political economy of slums and slum redevelopment in globalizing Mumbai.

摘要

While slums have once again garnered policy and media attention, research on global urbanism has remained virtually silent on the topic of residential informality. Based on historical and ethnographic research in Dharavi, Mumbai's largest and most notorious slum settlement, this dissertation seeks to construct a sociology of the slum, revealing the social relations and political and economic arrangements that enable, at varying times and to differing degrees, the creation, maintenance, and transformation of residential informality. Pushing past incomplete explanations for slums rooted "over-urbanization" and "bureaucratic failure," it highlights the structural reasons why bureaucracies fail and how certain levels of urbanization are deemed excessive.;Divided into two historical periods, the first section traces Dharavi's emergence and resilience from the late nineteenth century through the early 1980s, when tacit agreements between bureaucrats, workers, and industrial elites resulted in the illegal (but state supported) appropriation of land and formation of largely illicit social networks that sustained the settlements and provided their inhabitants with basic services. Amidst transformations associated with India's liberalization and global integration in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the state's response to residential informality began to change.;The second part of the dissertation examines the new context of state intervention through a case study of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, an ongoing effort to transform Dharavi into a middle class residential enclave and commercial area. It highlights three main ways that the character of state intervention has been altered, including a new set of state interests in slums; changes in the state's capacity to act in this area, and new forms of democratic engagement. Identifying this new context for state intervention in slums like Dharavi, this dissertation traces the changing political and economic conditions shaping the character and consequences of residential informality in India's largest and most "global" city.