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PROXIMATE DISTANCES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DENSITY IN MUMBAI

227BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 33 NO 2

Proximate Distances:The Phenomenology

of Density in MumbaiVYJAYANTHI RAO

Urban density is often taken to be self-evident and treated as an indicator orattribute of urban space upon which urban planning and individual planningdecisions are made. This article makes the case for thinking about density as arelational and social quality produced by identifiable associations, practices andsystems of human interactions, specifically with infrastructural technologies. Based

on ethnographic research in Mumbai, the paper will consider several differentsites at which density operationalizes an incessant sense of temporariness andanticipation within the frame of social relations. These geographies of densityyield surprising circumventions of functionality and planning but they also makepossible transformation within existing frames of relations. Much of the recenturbanist literature on Mumbai focuses mainly on the slum not only as an empiricalbut also an analytic geography. Based on the ethnographic work on Mumbai, thearticle suggests other sites beside the slum for theorizations of the multitude. Doingso might yield new insights into the relationship between built form and urbandesign as well as accounts of the city that are not trapped either by normative and

prescriptive models of the city or by the need to turn to a redemptive reading ofchaos and misery.

Thinking through Architecture

Questions of surface and landscape, ofdesign and activity have become centralissues for social science in the face of thespeed with which todays built environment

is being transformed. Whether through newconstruction or through heritage conserva-tion projects, the effects are the same aparticular formalization of the landscape asthe site of social transformation. In thecanonical genealogy of modern cities, think-ers as different as Walter Benjamin and leCorbusier have shown how formal gesturesof architecture and urban design play acrucial role as signs of social change. Inthe dystopian contexts of many of todays

cities, urban designs are being achieved notby using rational principles of planning butby the inadvertent designs perpetrated byspeculation or the unintended consequencesof self-planned communities. Speculativeprocesses and interventions now take place

through reconstruction as much as throughthe colonization of new territories for devel-opment.

Particularly in cities like Mumbai, theseprocesses are becoming increasingly prob-lematic because of the compactness of urbanterritory and the resulting problems of dens-ity. The official urban territory of Mumbaicovers a mere 468 square kilometres and isbound by natural barriers as well as poorinfrastructural connections to adjacent


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228 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 33 NO 2

landmasses into which peripheral expansionis occurring. As a result, the original islandcity developments retain a certain sym-bolic charge as the most desirable urbanlocations. Thus, speculative investments are

directed toward the vertical expansion anddensification of historic neighbourhoods. Inthis context, discussions about density andcrowding take on a symbolic charge andbecome proxies for discussions about thetransformation of the city.

While such discussions have intensified inrecent years as Mumbai struggles to acquireworld-class status, iconic images of modernBombay have always been associated withdensity and crowding. Consider, for example,

the following passage from the Mumbai-based novelist, Kiran Nagarkars book Ravan

and Eddie, set in a stereotypical Bombay chawl(tenement housing with shared facilities)with two protagonists belonging to differentcommunities. In an early description, Nagar-kar writes:

[Ravan] had reached the Byculla bridge. A localtrain swept past without stopping at the station.Like a sponge being squeezed, the people on theplatform shrank back. There were commutershanging from the bars of the carriage windows.Some stood precariously on god alone knowswhat between compartments. Every once in awhile a trousered leg or an arm swung wildlybut hurriedly got back to its owner when asignal pole of the support of a bridge rushedpast. The sides of the train were bulging withthe pressure of the people packed into it. (Howmany passengers does a Bombay local hold

anyway? Twenty-five thousand? Thirty? Forty?)Any moment now that speeding solid iron shell

Bombay Development Department (BDD) chawls, central Mumbai tenement housing for workers, con-structed in the early twentieth century. (Photo: Colleen Macklin)


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was going to split open and thousands uponthousands of bodies were going to be flung allover Bombay, all the way to Borivali and Virar,some falling into the Thane creek, others into theArabian Sea. Almost by rote, Ravan had stuck hishead into one of the diamond-shaped openingsin the gridiron of the bridge. This was, after all,one of the most exciting places in the universe.(Nagarkar, 1995, p. 20)

The sense of headiness and perverseexcitement conveyed in this passage is partof the mythos of Bombay, carried as part ofthe genetic make-up of its self-image, whichfeeds the imagination of numerous analysesand creative works of literature, film andcontemporary art.

The chawl itself in which the drama

of Ravan and Eddie is set is, of course, aclassic site in the descriptions of Mumbaias the very exemplar of crowding and lackof privacy. The tiny chawlrooms of Mumbaiseem endlessly elastic to many observers oflife in the city, seeming to accommodate everexpanding, multi-generational families. Thesharing of facilities as well as the need tokeep doors open in order not to stifle fromthe sheer numbers of people within the all-purpose single-room tenements, also turnsthe chawl into a particular kind of socialworld, allowing intimate relations betweenpeople not otherwise related to one another.The chawl often serves as a backdrop infilms and literature for emphasizing formsof community that are not based on kinshipattachments (and are therefore seen to bemodern) while at the same time beingintimate and trustworthy. These relationsare the half-way points between the familiar

social life of the village and the anonymityof the metropolis in the worlds of earlymigrants. At the same time, of course, thevery same features could turn the chawlintoa site of conflict and mutual contempt, bredby closeness and familiarity.1Ravan and Eddieis set in the Central Works Department chawlnumber 17 whose floors are divided betweenHindus and Roman Catholic families.

As another example, we might considerthe statement made by architect Daniel

Liebeskind during his first visit to Mumbaiin 2004: Mumbai is clearly a city that eludesarchitects who see the city as a material object.Its a city where human beings are far moreimportant than brick and mortar, concrete,

glass and steel.

2

In the logic of such remarks,Mumbai becomes a place where architectureitself disappears as a material fact, and issubstituted by sheer demographic densitythat constitutes its visual overlay, even takingthe more traditional place of infrastructure asits underneath.

This paper explores the phenomenologyand iconography of density and the crowdwith reference to various sites and spatialformats around which the problem of

the city is articulated in relation to theovercrowding and dense packing of sociallife into concentrated spatial formats. Itfocuses on Mumbai specifically because ofthe mythic dimensions that the crowd takeson in the image of the city, and seeks to buildan understanding of density as a concretemanifestation of the abstract, conceptualentity that we commonly understand underthe rubric of the city. In the conception of thesocial sciences, the crowd that ur constructof density, massing and spacelessness constitutes the effective subject and socialmanifestation of urban density. Yet, as thepaper demonstrates, the everyday experienceof space in the city and the manner inwhich the crowd itself is formed throughspecific events that produce proximity andjuxtaposition of disparate elements iscritical in developing a socially and culturallyinflected understanding of density.

The core argument here is that a detailedanalysis of various sites of density in a placelike Mumbai, whose essence and natureare seen to be tied to this phenomenon,reveals the need to analyse the relationshiprepresentations, causes and effects ofdensity. In other words, while the problem ofcrowding, density and elasticity might easilybe manipulated to produce an overarchingcause for redesign and redevelopment, thesocial phenomena associated with these


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sites might produce a very different sortof picture of urban design and the builtenvironment and their social consequences.In other words, I suggest that rather than thebuilt environment driving density, various

forms of density, each with its uniqueset of juxtapositions and characteristics,give shape to the urban environment byactivating shared or familiar meaningsamongst residents of a city so vast as to becontinually losing coherence in the everydaylife of millions.

Various sites iconically associated withMumbai such as slums, chawls, ghettos,commuter trains might be associated withdistinct sociologies of density. In turn, the

dynamic interactions amongst these distinctsociological situations might be read andanalysed to produce new ways of imaginingthe city and new ways of understanding thedirection that the city might take. This angleor point of view is presented as the mainthread of this paper. Density is not treated

as self-evident but rather in a contextualmanner and the paper concludes with somespeculation on the need to think aboutdensity in this way so as to understand betterthe impasses of development and social

diversity in a city the size of Mumbai.

The Shared City: Density as SocialProximity

The image of the crowd on the local (orcommuter) train commonly described asthe lifeline of Mumbai, running along thelength of the island like a spinal chord isan extremely useful one in navigating issueof density. The scale and numbers associated

with Mumbais local trains (or locals as theyare simply called in Mumbai) are comparableto very few cities in the world. Jim Masselos(2003) quotes a study from the 1990s, whichclaims that in that decade Mumbais localscarried nearly five and a half million peopleeach day, or roughly half the number of

Crowds emerging from Mumbai local train. (Photo: Rajesh Vora)


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people carried by the entire national railwaysystem.

In the above quote from Nagarkar (1995),the local train is seen as a universal andneutral container, the speeding, solid iron

shell containing bodies that would be flungall over Bombay. This is an image of anamorphous mass, of bodies without identity,merely sharing a common destiny through acommon journey. The imaginary of the mass,which is associated in sociological literaturewith exceptional states like those of the crowdand the mob, mutates into an everydayreality in Mumbai. If the crowd and themob are treated in sociological literature asexceptions and are associated with violence,

the local train appears as a container for amass that is in fact peaceable on an everydaybasis. This understanding is further spelledout by Suketu Mehta, in his best-selling bookon Mumbai,Maximum City(2004):

If you are late for work in Mumbai and reach thestation just as the train is leaving the platform,dont despair. You can run up to the packedcompartments and find many hands unfoldinglike petals to pull you on board. And while youwill probably have to hang on to the door-frame

with your fingertips, you are still grateful forthe empathy of your fellow passengers, alreadypacked tighter than cattle, their shirts drenchedwith sweat in the badly ventilated compartment.They know that your boss might yell at you orcut your pay if you miss this train. And at themoment of contact, they do not know if thehand reaching for theirs belongs to a Hinduor a Muslim or a Christian or a Brahmin or anUntouchable. Come on board, they say. Welladjust.

In this passage Mehta adds a more nuanced

sociological dimension to the amorphous,pulsating mass described by Nagarkarthrough the eyes of the child-protagonist,Ravan in Ravan and Eddie. Although Mehtastake on the crowd has been criticized bymany as romantic, this passage is useful inthat it makes visible the fact that a philosophyof adjusting is a practice of citizens withdistinct identities rather than of modernmen without qualities, to use Robert Musilsmemorable phrase describing the citizens of

modern Vienna in The Man without Qualities.The badly ventilated compartment becomesthe site of another drama, that of physicalproximity between citizens whose ethos isgeared toward avoidance and social distance

between castes, communities and classes.The train compartment packed with thisseemingly amorphous mass is, in reality, acomplex intermingling of otherwise disparateuniverses. The idea of cohesive densities withcommon goals is supplemented by a practiceand philosophy of adjusting, which turnsout to be a key social practice in the creationof the everyday mass in a city like Mumbai.

In a comment on Ethan Zukermansarticle about Mehtas book on www.world

changing.com, another blogger, Rohit Guptawrites:

[b]eing a Bombay resident, I do not like the crudeexoticisms offered by tourists like Mr. MehtaThese hands that pull you upon the train is aparticularly interesting case in point. Normallywhen this happens, it is because you are beingpulled by a work-buddy, since you work in thesame office/factory, get on at the same station, orwhatever, and you do this everyday When theevening rush hour trains leave from Chruchgate,what people standing near the doors (these areopen trains) do is that they create a human door,an impenetrable blockade so that they can atleast breathe for the next hour of the journeyWhat he ascribes altruist motives to are mainlyphenomenon found everywhere in social chaos.3

These criticisms do not detract from theobservations regarding adjustment butrather add another layer to it. Instead ofspecific motives such as altruism guidingthe process of adjustment, we see micro-

dimensions at work within crowd behaviourthat highlight the underlying violence ofadjustment.

Ethnographic observation supplements thisliterary and journalistic sense that orderlinessis a hard-won and carefully achieved qualityof the Mumbai crowd. Thus, for example,when a recent poll conducted by the popular,international magazine Readers DigestvotedMumbai the rudest city in the world, therewas an outpouring of protest not only from


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residents of the city but also from admirersof Mumbai living in other cities. The tip-overpoint or the threshold at which the crowdturns into mob is thus a product of carefulmanagement, a counterpoint to the image of

sheer numbers and the magnificent, terrifyingdimension of being caught in the flow ofpersons in the city. The fragile reversibilityof the crowd from the violent substrate ofmodern society to its quotidian counterpartof adjusted differences is a key feature ofthe local train as a distinct site of densityand a shared destiny. Density here becomesa complex phenomenon involving dynamicintersections between the amorphous masscreated through the movement of persons

across city space and the embedded potentialfor social conflict and disaster.

This ethos of adjustment and recalibrationalso prompts the development of bizarresenses of hierarchy within bureaucratic sys-tems. As an illustration, I offer the follow-ing story published in the Times of Indiaand reprinted in the British humour maga-zine, Private Eye involving a railway spokes-man talking to the newspaper about somemeasures that the railways were contem-plating in order to save money.

The official announces that:

from now on, our first class compartmentswill be fitted with hundred watt lights, but thesecond class compartments will only have sixtywatt lights. Considering that an average second-class fare is one-third of a first class fare, theyought by rights to be getting only thirty-threewatts. So in reality, our administration is beingkind and generous in giving them almost doublethat power, with no matching increase in fares

We have a number of ideas, which will be takenup in stages for implementation. Take the case offans. The second class already have fewer fans,naturally, but a commuter standing under thefan in second class currently receives as much airas a first class passenger similarly placed. So, toreflect the difference in fares, we are planning toreduce the speed of fan rotation in second classcompartments, and our engineering departmentis currently modifying their design.4

The fine-tuning of the mass and itsadjustment to various criteria of social

difference endows the crowd with socialattributes, ones that make it responsive to theprocesses of producing peace on an everydaybasis. Rather than an anonymous crowd,the literature of and on Bombay-Mumbai

reveals a highly socialized crowd, existing asa function of where one lives (Borivali, Virarand so on), or of adjusted social differences,or fine-tuned class differences within crowds.The very particular phenomenology thatemerges from unravelling the local as asite of density created by the movementof people across the city thus reveals acomplex, intersecting site that engages avariety of social criteria. A key feature ofthese intersections, I would argue, is the

maintenance and production of order. Thefragility of this order is the subject of thefollowing section.

Inside-Out: Streets and the Extension ofPrivate Life

While the Mumbai local train serves as acontainer for the crowd and a site for theplacid expression of density, the streetoccasionally becomes the site for a differentsort of experience of density. Apart fromgatherings and processions of various kindsthat commonly take place in the streets ofMumbai, there have been numerous occasionsin the recent past where different kinds ofgathering have turned into expressions of anew sort of experience of density. On tworecent occasions of what one might callnetwork failure namely, the great floodon 26 July 2005 and the serial bomb attacks

on the local trains on 11 July 2006 we seethis new form of density being expressed asan external manifestation of the city itself. Inthis section, I focus on the July 2005 flood.

On both these occasions, the infrastructureof the effective city turned into weaponry,in the hands of inimical forces forces ofnature in the case of the 26th July flood(which I focus on more carefully in thissection) and terrorist organizations in thecase of the bombings of the local trains on


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the Western Railway commuter system. Theseevents revealed the nature and form of thefunctional and effective city as socio-technicalsystem and brought that aspect to the fore

precisely in the context of network failure.More importantly, these events, in theirown way, underlined the fact that effectivecity space exists as a function of movement

Crowds returning home during the Mumbai floods, July 2005. (Source: Indian Express, Mumbai edition)


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rather than existing a priorias a normativeabstraction. Thus, the blockage of passagesof circulation extended the private immobilesphere into the street, creating an awesomemanifestation of the actually existing city.

This manifestation is socially significant ina very different sense than, for example, ina city like New York, which I discuss belowwith reference to the Blackout of August 2003which also emptied the city onto the streetyet did not disturb the essential interiorityof the street.

As any visitor to Mumbai notices, thestreets are used for much more than walkingand traversing. They teem with domestic andcommercial activities normally associated

with interior spaces in the modern city. Anynumber of observers, including tourists andresearchers notice that Mumbais visual fieldis characterized by a consistent reversalof inside and outside, private and public.Private, domestic space is conducted entirelyon the streets, sometimes either in the openor inside tiny, temporary shacks. Moreover,the pavements can serve as unfurling scenicbackdrops as the active, walking subjecttakes in a variety of activities unfolding inthe background, whether these are domesticactivities like cooking, washing, bathingor sleeping or work-related activities likeshoe shining, welding or general repairing.These forms of extending private space andactivities, and of reversing inside and outsidemakes the streets vulnerable to a kind ofliving that exposes and calls into questionthe true meaning of the interior as a spatialand cultural construct. To illustrate this

proposition, I turn to a recent literary work the autobiography of an Australian namedGregory David Roberts, of which Mumbai isthe true protagonist.

In Shantaram, as Roberts autobiographyis titled (soon to be made into a Hollywoodfilm), Roberts, a fugitive convict fromAustralia finds refuge in the city, losinghimself in its crowds, by living in a jam-packed slum to escape notice from the cityspolice. In one of the early chapters of this

massive tome, he describes his walks throughthe city at night:

For two or three hours after midnight, in anoperation known as the round-up, squads of plain-clothes cops patrolled the vacant streets in searchof criminals, junkies, suspects, and homeless,unemployed men, More than half of the peoplein the city were homeless, of course, and manyof them lived, ate and slept on the streets. Thesleepers were everywhere, stretched out on thefootpaths with only a thin blanket and a cottonsheet to keep out the damp of the night. Singlepeople, families, and whole communities whodescaped some drought, flood or famine slepton the stone paths and in doorways, huddledtogether in bundled necessity. (Roberts, 2003, p.179)

This classic, night-time image of sleepingbodies on the streets together with thecustomary exaggeration (more than half ofthe people in the city werehomeless) servesas a reminder of the activity and crush of thestreets in the day-time. As Roberts describesthe night,

The nights, at least, were quiet the beggars,junkies, and hookers who werent already homeor hiding were chased from the footpaths. Steelshutters came down over the shop windows.

White calico cloths were thrown over the tables inall the markets and bazaars. Quiet and emptinessdescended. In the whirl and crush of people andpurposes in Bombays daylight scramble, it wasimpossible to imagine those deserted silences. Buteach and every night was the same: soundless,beautiful and threatening. Bombay became ahaunted house (Roberts, 2003, p.179)

It is telling that Roberts uses the metaphorof haunting to describe the reversal of nightand day, of purposeful crowding and silence.

Night is not, in other words, radically unlikeday, rather it is like an afterimage of a streetby day, teeming with activities of all kinds,a mixed-use zone in the social sense ratherthan in the technocratic sense. The extensionsof the street, to make space for the slowlymoving or even immobile crowds during thetwo events of network failure that I talk aboutabove, can also, similarly, be read through theidea of haunting. What I am suggesting is thatthe incessant extension of private and other


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lives on the street creates its own texture ofdensity of and on the street against whichthe crowds created by incidents of networkfailure might be understood. In other words,the visibility of the middle-class masses,

most of them commuters, is made moreevident when juxtaposed against the existingsocial, political and cultural meanings of thestreet upon which it is superimposed like anafterimage.

A contrast might be helpful to understandwhat I mean here. It is generally reported thatduring the New York blackout of 2003, thecrowds that filled the city residents walkinghome were orderly and obedient, especiallyin contrast with the events marking the

earlier blackout in the 1970s. The contrast isa measure of how the city itself has changedduring the interim, especially in terms ofits demography and the material qualitiesof its space. Space itself is increasinglyprivatised both in terms of developmentand occupation with the withdrawal of thestate and the increasing gentrification ofmixed and low-income neighbourhoods.Thus, one might suggest that the orderlyfiles of residents walking home during theNew York blackout of August 2003 were ina space already transformed and renderedinscrutable to the manipulation of the massesas a political force.

The downpour of nearly a metre of rainon the afternoon of 26th July 2005, led to thesudden flooding of the streets in the northernparts of Mumbai. Blocked storm water drainsmade it impossible for most of the water todrain into the sea leading to situations where

naturally low-lying areas and areas renderedlow-lying due to the construction of newroads, buildings and other infrastructureturned into lakes trapping people, animalsand vehicles. Almost 500 people drownedwhile millions of commuters who used therailway and bus system were trapped withno alternative but to walk home from theirworkplaces, traversing distances of between10 and 40 kilometres on foot. The flooding inmany parts along their path led to a massive

slowing down, some people taking as muchas three days to reach home. Their paths weremarked by the kindness and comforts metedout to them by strangers who opened theirhomes and passed out food and drink to the

walkers. All these actions were lauded by thepress, citizens and politicians as exemplaryof the spirit of Mumbai, its essential kind-ness and cosmopolitanism. According tothis rhetoric this spirit was manifestedin the breakdown of many barriers, withslum-dwellers along the highways helpingstranded motorists even as their own homeswere sinking, and with middle-class house-wives opening their homes to strangersdisregarding the usual fears surrounding

strangers in the home.But in Mumbai, the quality and experience

of the flood of July 2005 by the masses onthe street was also heightened by thecontemporary experience of the space of thecity as its history of deindustrialization,ruin and the spectacle of conspicuous wealth writ large. As the historian Gyan Prakash(2006, p. 78) writes, it was as if the waterhad forced the city to bring its innards outin the open, exposing its decaying, putridsecrets. Yet this brief, and for some, all toobrief exposure of those innards and secretswas immediately covered up by a discoursecelebrating the spirit of the city, and, morespecifically, the unifying effects of the floodon the deeply divided citizenry. A popularnews channel, broadcasting flood stories liveserved up headlines like Dreams of Shanghaiare broken. Such headlines suggested thatthe flood had exposed the fundamental

inability of the city to improve or catch upwith Shanghai, its most recent role modeland ideal. Shanghai dreams were particularlysignificant from the standpoint of politiciansand elites engaged since 2003 in a massiveurban renovation project to turn Mumbai intoa world-class city. The stories of the citysspirit were especially important to sell theidea that these dreams could not be brokeneven if practical difficulties like the floodwere a setback.


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The generally poignant imagery of theorderly crowds trudging homeward throughwater and mud, amid floating animal car-casses, garbage and the debris of householdgoods, and the stories of help received by

these unfortunate thousands (many of whomspent more than 24 hours returning home)are subsumed in this discourse of the spiritof Mumbai. This spirit, of course, became allthe more evident when contrasted with theexperiences of residents of New Orleans afterHurricane Katrina wreaked similar havocupon their city. Buried within this discourseabout the spirit of Mumbai is an image of anorderly density, able to function even in theabsence of the effective city.5

The effective city, in the reading ofhistorian Jim Masselos, is one defined andpatterned by the daily commuter journeythrough which,

every morning, Mumbai redefines itself in animmense collective awakening the daily com-muter journey constitutes a defining moment inurban life; an affirmation of city unity. (Masselos,2003, p. 31)

This daily commuter movement thus givesa pattern, purpose and destination to thecrowd constituting the effective city. In astartling inversion, the effective city, formedby movement through the streets ended upoccupying the street as an immobile mass,thereby turning the street into a concrete,visual expression of density instead of aconduit for its circulation and dissemination.Network failure thus rendered the effectivecity into a city on the street and the effectivecity became a delivery system of victims as

infrastructure turned into a weapon againstthe city.Thus, we might say, the effective city was

temporarily suspended in the moment of theflood. Tales of the flood also evoke a differentsense of orderliness and effectiveness, onethat is patterned by the floating debrisof household goods and shack frames,animal carcasses and human waste whosepresence in the water brought to the forethe citys intimate spatial formation through

reclamations of various sorts of land fromthe sea, of land from marshes and of landfrom landfills of garbage and constructiondebris. All of these reclamations were exposedeffectively as the foundations of the city over

which the unifying commuter communitiesthat Masselos speaks of were formed.The experience of density in the moment

of the flood is therefore qualitatively differentfrom that in the daily journey which Iexamined in the earlier section both from theoutside (through the eyes of, for example, thechild-protagonist Ravan) and from the inside(as in the descriptions of Suketu Mehta).The inside and the outside of the crowd that ur construct of density, massing and

spacelessness which constitutes the effectivesubject and social manifestation of urbandensity formed by the flood can similarlybe analysed through the lens of the effectivecity. From the outside, this mass formation,the manifestation of urban density turnedinside out, appears orderly and appears tobe following well defined paths, mappedthrough the experience of countless dailyjourneys. Viewed from the inside, however,this formations sociality can be describedthrough its encounter both with the materialdebris and with the everyday life-world ofthe street, both described above.

In sharp contrast to the reports in themedia, some have described the fear theyexperienced during their nightmarish journeyshome. This fear was not just of beingelectrocuted by a stray live wire or offalling into an open drain (as did happen)or of being trapped in ones own car and

drowning, but it was described as a fear,specifically of strangers. The very strangerswith whom accommodations or adjustmentsmight be made in a train compartmentdespite suspicions harboured, are the oneswho were feared out on the streets. Youthgangs roaming the streets, ostensibly ex-tending a helping hand, were doubly suspect.Their mischievous, violent and dangerousabandon, an extension of their normalbehaviour interpreted sometimes through


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the concept of masti6 was also in evidenceas their everyday life-world in the street wastemporarily extended by the flood to includepeople normally considered too respectableto share in their own, dystopic and violent

experiences of the city.Journalist Dilip DSouza wrote in hiscolumn on Rediffa few days after the flood,

I found myself accosted on the flyover by a gangof drunk toughs, laughing but faintly threateningas they demanded I take a photograph of them.You didnt take it, said one belligerently whenI was done, you just looked at us through yourlens!. Yeah, yeah, go on, said another, with ahint of menace, youre going to show the worldhow dirty Bombay is! (DSouza, 2005, p. 28)

This idea of being looked at throughanothers lens is clearly intriguing for awhole social group of disenfranchised youthwho know that their own experiences aremade available to the public only as emblemsof the citys problems while the suppressionof their voices and images is necessary foranticipating the citys future.

Predictably, such encounters within thecrowd, between, for example, youth gangsand walkers, normally removed and pro-tected from such encounters with the faces ofviolence, brute, masculine physical strengthand hooliganism, were quickly suppressedin favour of more celebratory stories of theindefatigable spirit of Mumbai. This spirititself is considered the means by whichthe poor and disenfranchised citizens ofMumbai are expected to pull themselvesinto the emerging world-class Mumbaishaped by dreams of Shanghai. Viewed from

the inside, the flood orchestrated multipleencounters, juxtapositions and proximitiesamongst groups normally carefully separatedand socially distanced despite their physicalproximities. We might thus say that theexperience of density is, therefore, not justabout physical proximity but the socialengineering of proximate distancing.

Two days after the flood, rumours of atsunami directed only towards the poor inslums, caused a stampede in Nehru Nagar,

a slum colony that was already very badlyaffected by the flood. But such events onlyserved quickly to re-establish the socialdistance as they reinforced the views andstereotypes held by the rich about the poor,

by the middle-class about migrants andsquatters and by the poor about the elite,and by pushing all against the awesomewrath of nature. The close brush betweenclasses and groups that had occurred aspeople sheltered wherever they could onlyserved to highlight actual distance eventhough many, if not most, slums intimatelyshare physical space with more permanentstructures, through the practice of packinghousing into every available open space,

through sanction or aggression. NehruNagar, for instance, is packed up againstmore prosperous western suburbs like SantaCruz and Juhu. Many middle-class familiesin these areas, for instance, were dismayedto find the families of their household helpsheltering in the public spaces of theirbuildings as their shacks were drownedor washed away even though these peoplehad intimate connections to their everydaylives and entered and exited their buildingsfreely as household labour. Thus, the un-differentiated mass of those making up theeffective city in Jim Masseloss terms, can befurther distinguished by the nature of theseencounters that reinforce what we might callthe experience of proximate distance as asocial diacritic of urban density.

Similarly, one can analyse the encountersof the crowd with the debris describedabove, each of which might be read as

fragments of a social history of existing inthe city. The mattresses, pots and pans, thetelevision sets, radios and armoires, thecorpses of animals kept at the abattoir or athome, the tarpaulin, sticks and tin framesfrom which the temporary architecture ofthe city is fashioned and the abandonedbicycles, cars and scooters, marooned busesand trains stopped dead in their tracks areall turned, in the moment of the flood, intoephemera, material ruins through which the


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life-world of the city could be grasped by itsweary masses. Here, the phenomenologicalexperiences of adjustment encounter thoseof aspiration and achievement, through thelife and death of objects that may have been

discarded anyway through the cycles ofpersonal histories of consumption or mayhave been picked up as debris by others toopoor to consume except the trash and debrisdiscarded by the better off.

Expendability: Toilers, Toxicityand Infra-Spaces

Turning to a very different site one ofsettlement rather than transition I would

like to think more carefully about anotherdimension of density as juxtapositionsthat permit and make systems workable.

Specifically, I will describe a different kindof density, perhaps not unique to Mumbaibut certainly crucial to its infrastructuralorganization. My own visual research docu-ments the close proximity between settle-

ments of rag-pickers and the 110 hectaremunicipal dumping ground at Deonar innorth-eastern Mumbai. In the life-historiesof these rag-pickers, proximity to the site isa critical factor in surviving the city as wellas for the citys survival. For over 30 years,nearly two-thirds of Mumbais garbage nearly 4,000 tonnes out of a total of 6,000tonnes is dumped at this site everyday.Over the next few years, this dump will becrammed with so much garbage that it will

not be able to take any more. It will die anatural death, its capacity exhausted (Ghogeand Iyer, 2004).

Shacks inside the Govandi municipal dumping ground, at the edge of a river of garbage. (Photo: DeepakDhopat)


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Picking at its edges everyday as themunicipal trucks roll in with the garbage,the ragpickers of Rafique Nagar the slumadjoining the dump are crucial to keepingthe dump alive as their work incessantly

renovates the space of the dump. The dumpas a living, breathing entity is a piece of urbannature or, in other words, of naturalizedtechnology. The dump is infrastructure inthe sense of the classic definition of infra-structure: an underlying base or foundation,especially for an organization or a system(American Heritage Dictionary). The system ororganization for which it serves as foundationis what we might view as a system ofworkable densities. In other words, the dump

is not merely a facility, but a foundation fora system for making density work as well asdensity being the condition of possibility ofits functionality.

In its informality, this relation betweenthe huge dumping ground on the surfaceof which garbage has carved out a distincttopography of rivers, hills and valleys andthe settlements around and perhaps evenwithin the ground are embodiments ofdensity as a manifestation of intersectionscharacteristic of what urbanist Abdou MaliqSimone calls cityness.7 This juxtapositionof densities of bodies, infrastructures, andaffects makes possible incessant intersectionsthat characterize the ontology of the informal.These intersections, or this cityness, in turnmake possible the continuous engagementof the excluded majority with the city. Theformal sector in turn is formed by its abilityto shield itself against these intersections,

in other words, through its locking out thepotential of these juxtapositions.Here, the density of the human-nature-

technology intersections reflects, as does ashape, the particular processes, money andactors mobilized in keeping the city alive,as a living entity. For the citys breathabilitydepends upon keeping its waste fieldsalive through the very human activities ofpicking, sorting and recycling. The faintlymenacing competition that exists amongst

the rag-pickers is mobilized on a daily basisat the points at which trucks dump thegarbage where the rag-pickers, mostly dalit(untouchable) and Muslim women migrantsfrom all over India but largely from drought-

prone districts of western and southernIndian states, wait for hours for the trucks tounload collections from all over the city.

Time in this locality is structured bythe experience of waiting for the trucks.The inability to be at home or, for thatmatter, even to engage in the indulgence ofseparating the domains of home and workconditions feelings of insecurity about leavingthe home unattended. In turn, the experienceof home is intimately tied to the next

generation, to its exposure to life amongstdebris and eventually themselves enteringthe dump as collectors either on a part-timeor a full-time basis. The architecture of homeis also anchored by articles collected from thegarbage heaps and to collected piles waitingto be sold as scrap. Further, the scrap businessitself is defined by its invisibility very fewscrap traders pay income tax, sales tax oroctroi (Katakam, 2001) thus rendering thebusiness invisible from the regulatory pointof view. The invisibility of the entire businessconnects intimately to the invisible nature ofthe work of keeping the dump alive whileremaining under the radar of city-planning.Yet, as methods of collection and disposal ofgarbage are becoming increasingly crucial forcity planning, and, therefore, increasinglythe efforts of self-conscious planning aremobilized to map out the potentialities financial and environmental of these

activities, the levels of insecurity amongstthis population continue to rise.During the massive slum demolition drive

in December 2004 and February 2005, theRafique Nagar slums in particular becameexposed to a different kind of attention. Inits haste to beautify the city and make itworld-class, the State government had infact dismantled a workable set of relationsbased on the dense juxtaposition of wasteand human settlement. It brought into view


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not only the abject conditions of this com-munity but also density as infrastructure, asunderlying base or foundation for the or-ganization of a system. Maximizing thepotential for relations amongst things and

people as objects of urban developmentthrough the densities created by juxta-position, the dumping ground representsa working infrastructure, made possible bythis juxtaposition of people and garbage. Theinsecurity experienced by the communityas a whole both due to the toxic workenvironment and the many scarcities de-fining their lives ties these poor urbanlocalities to the city and indeed shows howthis insecurity that defines the relationship

between these localities and the city as awhole is constitutive of the city itself.

It is this logic of the productive sacrificeof these individuals, as a superfluous popu-lation that is constitutive of the city.8Thesetoilers (Pendse,1995), whose existence inthe city is underwritten by various formsof degraded and destructive labour, thusproduce the city through the density of theirinteractions with the dump as both site ofwork and site of living. These interactionsin turn work at the margins to try to turnthis dense juxtaposition into a potentiallyproductive labour of keeping the patient (inthis case the dump) alive until another andbetter system can be found to take its place.

Thus, for example, new plans for revamp-ing garbage collection and disposal throughprivatization both recognizes the role of theselong-term professional rag-pickers while alsoactively making them invisible by excluding

them from various forms of protection avail-able only to properly employed workers.Yet, because the existing scrap dealing busi-nesses themselves tend to be extra-legaland invisible, there is little chance of beingattached as an employee to them. Organizingthemselves into interest-groups and tradeunions as a way of securing their entranceinto the new system may be the only optionavailable in the near future.9

The demographic transition inherent

in the new plans for garbage in the city isalso underwritten by chipping away sys-tematically at the density of the existingpopulation of rag-pickers in their relation tothe dumping ground. Without dismantling

those thick connections, the danger of theircongealing would threaten the incessant flowof the city itself. Intersecting with varioushistories of efforts at substantiating thepresence of low-income residents in cities,these densities of infrastructural connectionare being transformed into speculativedensities, which I will touch upon briefly inthe last section (Simone, 2006).

People as Currency: Speculative Densities,Modifying the Landscape

In this final section, I will turn the focusback to architecture, away from the phenom-enology of density as it is experienced andliterally shaped by various sites to thefunctional uses of density as nodes throughwhich architecture, infrastructure and theredevelopment of land are increasinglybeing used as new instruments to assessthe sorts of developmental strategies to beadopted by cities both to survive financiallyand to substantiate the presence of increasingnumbers of the poor. This explains theincreasing volume and speed of circulationof real estate capital evident in the rapidlymutating built forms of a large number ofcities, especially in Asia but also in LatinAmerica and Africa.

In post-liberalization Mumbai, the mani-pulation of physical form has become the

organizational site of speculative strategies.A new informational order is behind theradical changes to the urban landscape of thecity. An idiosyncratic skyline is the physicalmanifestation of various attempts by theState and the market to realize profits whilesimultaneously providing social housingto the poor. State officials and developershave been experimenting with the citysplanning roadmap and with zoning andother regulations as they work out algorithms


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that will provide satisfactory solutions to thehousing crisis while creating a profitablemarket in real estate.

The underlying currency of contemporaryspeculative activities is thus development

rules and regulations on the one hand andpeople on the other. The juxtaposition ofdifferent forms of housing slums andchawls especially adjoining middle-class,mid-rise and high-rise housing createnodes of density that in turn give shape tothe idea of availability of urban space, albeitin the dense, decaying and degraded form ofslums, chawlsand other forms that are notcommensurate with modern housing. Inanother paper, I have shown how this kind

of juxtaposition of forms in Mumbai createsthe contexts for making arguments about theneed to transform urban space to confirm tomodern norms.10These contexts become theoccasion for positioning self-built and other,

non-vertical forms as temporary, both in thesense of inevitable decay as well as in thesense of being slated for erasure on the wayto a more uniform urban design, representedby the vertical forms of the modern high-rise.

In turn this discourse makes available suchnodes of density of built form for speculative,investment activities, as incipient objects ofspeculation.

We have seen this process being playedout with respect to the chawlsof the islandcity inner wards where 1991 census figuresshow population densities varying between48,000 per square kilometre at the low endto 111,000 per square kilometre at the higherend.11 Slums located along infrastructure

installations like water pipes, railwaytracks, storm-water drains (nullahs) and othersuch facilities have also become targets forrelocation projects via new infrastructureinitiatives, making the land on which they sit

Slums at the edge of a storm water drain against backdrop of new construction. (Photo: Peter deBretteville)


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available for redevelopment. These spaces intransition exhibit what we might call formsof speculative densities.

These poorly housed masses are routinelybeing displaced into transit camps from

slums and dilapidated housing stock that hasbeen neglected for decades12in order to makeland available for redevelopment. Speculationin the redevelopment of the city is largelychannelled through the manipulation ofregulations and land-use reservations andthrough the availability of vast amounts ofcash flowing through shadowy, transurbancommercial activities outside the ambit ofmultinational, corporate capital.

The formulation of complicated regulations

in which the displacement of people, theredevelopment of the land they occupy andthe promises to re-house them by turningthe rights they created by squatting or otherforms of occupation and settlement intoan equivalent amount of square footage

per person are some of the complicatedschemes aiding real estate speculation incontemporary Mumbai. In the face of all thisspatial speculation aided by masquerades ofpopulist justice, entangled in the aspirations

of the poor, the city is undergoing a massivetransition, which might be read as an ex-periment in an old fashioned sense. Thisis an experiment involving the empiricalmanipulation of the physical fabric, creatingpatches and pathways for the circulationof global capital. These activities closelyintertwine information as the underlyingmedium of speculation with the unstablesituation of residents, turning people intothe currency through which real estate

capital circulates. The symbolic capital of dis-placement in the name of making over thecity is producing an experimental landscapethat sets Mumbai territorially apart from therest of the country.

Such spatial transformations make the

Regularized slums against the background of high-rises, Mumbai suburbs. (Photo: Rajesh Vora)


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High-rise construction in the frozen-rent districts of south Mumbai; in the foreground old housing stockand narrow lanes. (Photo: Bart Orr)


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question of density, surface and landscapeand how we view them extremely important.In a city like Mumbai, the phenomenologyof density of juxtaposition and crowdingthat assaults the senses is the ground for

the relationship between architectural formand spatial imagination. The imagination ofwhat constitutes appropriate urban design isdominated and oriented by understandingsof what density signifies. For a writer likeMike Davis, for example, the architecturalexpression and arrangement of slum settle-ments exemplifies density that can be readdiscursively as the creation of a surplushumanity by a system of neo-liberal govern-ance. In other words, the form practically

dominates the imagination of the underlyingsystem (Davis, 2006).

The kind of architectural renovation andrearrangement of densities that is currentlyunderway in Mumbai under the auspices ofthe Mumbai Makeover initiative creates

the sense that the foundational logic of thecity of the future is based on the assumptionthat the rights of the urban poor (createdwithin the broader, functional framework ofcitizenship that is, created as a consequence

of claims and needs) are a kind of wealth thatcan be lavishly spent in the process of creatingthe market for space. The wasted lives of thepoor, their expendability and degradationconstitutes the foundational logic of thefuture. Here, we might raise the questionof what is the specific phenomenologicalstate created in the present by this highlyspeculative manipulation of the physicalfabric? As the various planning instruments like floor space index (FSI), the transfer of

development rights (TDR) and so on havebecome weapons enabling constructions, wesee bizarre mutations of the built landscape.13Defying all possible logic in terms ofinfrastructure and therefore of sustainableliving, these buildings have become a new

Rehabilitation housing built for slum dwellers in the northern suburbs. (Photo: Satya Pemmaraju)


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symbol of the politics of verticality whichmakes legible changes in the nature of urbancitizenship if one juxtaposes the daily lifeof the citizen and his/her struggles overspace, both public and private, against these

mutations of the built fabric.The verticalization of the island city (seeabove, note on the redevelopment of thechawlsand the frozen rent buildings of SouthBombay) has added a three-dimensionaltwist to the drama of hierarchy, exclusionand dispossession. Juxtaposed against theexisting built fabric, these new structurestransform not only the social and cultural lifeof the city but equally, the representationalorder within which space is conceived.

From the point of view of the market, theyrender existing built and yet to be built space the space of slums, of the rent-controlledbuildings, the factories, warehouses, thesalt-pans, the mangroves, urban villages,

and industrial housing stock inefficientand obsolete in their present condition.These spaces, in other words, are turned intospaces of severely diminished exchange valueby this process. This emerging vertical city

thus renders these landscapes obsolete by thesheer force of juxtaposition against this fabric,now perceived as one of dereliction.

Navigating a precarious territory betweenpopulist mobilization and corporate profits,these changes are significant as acts ofspeculation and also for serving as thespeculum, or mirror, within which the futuremight be viewed. The city of the future is afloating world which is being built on spacethat has to be created by being unlocked

from a labyrinth of regulations. This floatingworld goes with a floating population ofpersons subject to displacement categoriesof persons who could be moved in orderto make urban space more efficient. The

India United Mills, central Mumbai against the backdrop of changing skyline of the mill district. (Photo:Bharat Gangurde)


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most evident of these categories is the urbanpoor massed together in nodes of densitieslike slums and thereby recognizable as poor who serve as an instrument, the counterfeitcurrency for urban improvement. In the case

of Mumbai the culture of congestion, touse Koolhaass phrase, renders visible notwealth but immense poverty. The poor standboth as signs of the failure of the currentdevelopment process and as the vehicle, aresource to be deployed in the reconstructionof the city by elites and politicians.

Rights to shelter in the city are thusnot, by any stretch, rights to propertiedcitizenship. Rather they are rights thatreduce residence to remaining, as remainders,

as an effectively mobile population. Thenature of space inhering in property canbe read as a relationship to various formsof transitoriness and obsolescence. Theideology of flexible planning takes time tobe a purely temporal fact, not a social fact,implying a static and homogenous notionof future time. However, the sort of flexibleand speeded up landscapes that I have beendescribing are suffused with a sense of timein suspension, with the sense of suspensionthat is the social prelude to displacement,relocation and transience in general. Indeed,in defending the rights-based developmentschemes such as those offering free housingand rehabilitation to slum-dwellers whocould prove the occupation of their shantiesfrom a certain date in the past (which itselfkeeps shifting) in exchange for developmentrights to private developers, a prominenthousing rights activist declared publicly that

the scheme was agreed to in order to protectslum-dwellers from the threat of demolition.Where demolition is a constant and imminentthreat, the various slum redevelopmentschemes suspend the slum-dweller in a spaceof constant anticipation, sometimes lasting anentire lifetime.

Thinking through Density

The various sites in which density has been

considered in this paper are both expressionsof density in the physical sense as well asnodes of dense intersections between thesocial and phenomenological experiencesof the city on the one hand and processes

of urban planning, design and urban en-vironment creation on the other. As I men-tioned in the introduction, I have beentrying to unpack the relationship betweenthese phenomenologies of density and theprocesses by which urban planning anddesign are actually taking place and how theyconnect diversities (or homogeneity) at thelevel of the built environment to the toleranceof social and cultural diversity as an ethicalvalue in urban life. I am suggesting that these

ethnographic forays into the experience ofdensity and the phenomenology of everydayurban life might suggest the emergence ofnew ways by which urban designs are beingachieved, outside the ambit of self-conscious,technocratic planning. Such achievementis always provisional and based on the ex-ploitation of the potentiality embedded insituations of density by individual subjects.This potentiality is, as I have tried to showthrough various examples, the result of theintersections between complexes of priorknowledge, new insights, shared meanings,shared effect and authoritative discoursethat take place in situations of proximity andspatial condensation.

The deployment of density as an imagewith which to decipher the city thus yieldsa rich ethnographic layer of the ways inwhich the city makes itself felt through theforms of the crowd, of its infrastructure and

through the abstract algorithms calculatedto transform and renovate the city. From themid-nineteenth century onwards, the earliestliterary and ethnographic accounts of the city such as the classic Marathi text,MumbaichyaVarnan (A Description of Mumbai) varioustexts of urban flnerie, emphasized densityas an experience and insisted on its saliencefor understanding the city. While that mightbe true of any modern city, I have tried tonavigate through some of the classic sites of


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density, historically particular to Mumbai including the train, a post-traumatic crowdand the slum.

This study is an exploration rather than anexplanatory exposition. In the classic manner

of ethnography, the idea is both to providea sense of the objects of observations and todraw some conclusions about the object ofinquiry namely, urban density. Throughthis exploration, we navigate specific socialconsequences of density in particular shapes the production of everyday peace, thecreation of superfluous populations speci-fically necessary for the production ofworking, infrastructural foundations of thecity and the creation of sensations of the

future, perhaps not especially a hopefulfuture, for substantial groups of peopleengaged in everyday struggles to survive inthe city. This last consequence, the creation ofsensations of future is especially interestingin understanding how formations of densi-ties might convey sensations and create dif-ferential understandings of ones place in thecity even whilst being part of an enormousand anonymous crowd. As the example ofthe youth defiantly staring into the lens ofthe journalists camera during the breakdownof the city in July 2005 shows, the sense ofthe future is always dual recognizing theneed of the other to categorize one as aproblem as well as recognizing the strategyof the other to suppress ones voice in orderto get on him or her self. The navigation ofdensities both in experience and in analysis thus provides a fertile ground to be furtherunpacked to reveal a phenomenon that is no

longer as self-evident as it first appears, toreveal sites where extremely fine-tuned andfast-paced calibrations are taking place in theproduction of everyday urban life.

NOTES

1. Chawlswere constructed by a number of privatetextile mill owners in the nineteenth century toaccommodate the workers and therefore wereoften in close proximity to places of work. They

were also constructed by the citys housing boardor by communities who formed co-operativehousing societies, thus choosing their neighboursfrom amongst familiars. Most definitions of thechawl a form of housing particular to Mumbai agree that chawlsmight be identified by theirlack of private toilet facilities. Generally chawlsin Mumbai tended to be one room tenementsarranged in a linear fashion with a common openbalcony running along one side of the building.Tenants shared facilities though most had aplumbing line for kitchen purposes.

2. Times of India, Mumbai Edition, 15 October2004.

3. World Changing, 23 October 2005.

4. Funny Old World, compiled by Victor Lewis-Smith in Private Spy(5 March 2004, p. 15).

5. As Jim Masselos points out, The effective cityis not necessarily that area delineated by finelycalculated precise boundaries but that definedby the movement of people within it Themovement of people to and from work representsthe life flow of the city and joins two criticalelements: the places where people live and theplaces where they work. In linking the two kindsof place, such movement signals the extent andspread of the city, its effective limits as trackedthrough those who work and live in it. In otherwords, the daily passage of people to and fromwork defines the effective space of the city ratherthan what is determined by legal definitions orgovernment authorities (Masselos, 2003, p. 34).

6. Which broadly means mischievous behaviouras well as behaving with reckless abandon.

7. Personal conversations, September 2006.

8. For a fuller discussion of these notions of pro-ductive sacrifice and superfluous populations seeMbembe, 2004, p. 16.

9. Such organizational work is actively beingsupported by NGOs like Stree Mukti Sanghatana(or, Womens Liberation Organization) in Mum-bai (see http://www.streemuktisanghatana.org/), whose activities include a comprehensivesupport system for women garbage collectors,under the aegis of their project Parisar Vikas.

10. This argument is made in my introductoryessay in a report presented to UNESCO titledHeritage, Habitat and Diversity. I take diversityin the built form as a point of departure andcompare the transformation of built form under


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the regime of new flows of speculative, real-estate capital investment to the more widelystudied cosmopolitan decline of the city. Theessay argues that it is equally important totreat diversity in built form as a value worthpreserving and not treat it as a matter to be takencare of by development. Rather, matters of di-versity must also encompass more mundanematters of development (Rao, 2004).

11. These figures about density in differentwards of Mumbai are taken from http://www.demographia.com/db-mumbaiward91.htm.Shirish Patel (2005) provides a succinct accountof the politics and forms that such redevelopmenttakes in Mumbai.

12. The lack of availability of housing for rentin Mumbai is well known. It is related to thedecades-old rent control bill from 1948 that

froze rents at the then prevailing rates and madetenancies heritable. As a result, since the sixties,there has been virtually no development forrental housing. As Shirish Patel a prominentstructural engineer and city planner haspointed out, this policy is directly responsible forthe growth of slums and for the fact that manymiddle-income families are also forced to residein slum colonies and settlements due to lack ofavailability of affordable rental stock.

13. Arjun Appadurai has used this formulation weapons of mass construction on several

occasions in his public lectures to characterizeand compare the situation in post-war Baghdadwith that in post-liberalization Mumbai whereconstruction related activities are among the chiefeconomic forces for speculative wealth creation.

REFERENCES

Davis, Mike (2006) Planet of Slums. London:Verso.

Demographia (nd) Mumbai: Population, Area &

Density by Ward 1991 and 1981. Available athttp://www.demographia.com/db-mumbaiward91.htm.

DSouza, Dilip (2005) Give me Bombay every time.Rediff, p. 28. Available at .

Ghoge, Ketaki and Kavitha, Iyer (2004) Climbingmount garbage. Indian Express, 7 June. Availableat

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