Mumbai by comparison

I was surprised as I talked to people in Tarlabaşı by how little information most of them had about the project. Neither the municipality nor the contractor had provided even those living right across the street from blocks being demolished with any information about what was happening or what the timeline was. There were no community meetings organized, whether by those opposed to the project or by those implementing it.
I was in Mumbai this past winter tagging along with some sociologists doing research on slum redevelopment projects there, and the differences in civil society between Turkey and India are incredible. The following is an excerpt from a mass email I sent out while in India:
(for some reason the font is coming out either too big or two small no matter what I do)

One thing that's struck me is how diverse the slums of Mumbai are socioeconomically. They're not just full of lumpenproletariat types. We've met lots of middle-class and especially upwardly mobile professions and entrepreneurs who grew up poor but are now doing pretty well for themselves (one guy was an artist who does story boarding for Bollywood films), but still can't afford to get a place elsewhere yet because of Mumbai's crazy inflated housing market (see below). Plenty of civil servants, policemen and teachers also live in slums. Alongside them are more working class people and also lumpen layabouts. But even they aren't "the poor" in the sense of being a disorganized mass of marginalized people the way the families sleeping on the side of the road and along railroad track seem to be (though maybe a closer look would show that the latter are organized communities in interaction with others and not just the efflux of society--at any rate slum dwellers seem to have it much better off than the homeless). The slums seem like some of the most neighborly places I've been in the city (as in everyone knows everyone), I think in part because neighbors are in constant interaction because they have to collaborate on receiving utilities, keeping shared toilets clean(ish), etc. Some residents get their water and electricity legally, and others reach informal agreements with them to siphon off some of their water/electricity. (According to Naresh there's a big advantage to being one of those who get the utility bill because you can turn a neat profit overcharging your neighbors for your water/electricity. What isn't clear to me is how some are eligible and others ineligible for receiving utilities legally, or who if anyone has legal deed to the land they're living on--I thought what makes a slum a slum is that it was built up without regulation or land ownership)

The slum redevelopment issue is connected to a housing shortage throughout the city. There's strict rent control so those whose families have been in Bombay from before it became an economic boom town pay almost nothing for big places in the most desirable parts of town, while private developers scramble to build on new plots of land where they can rent or sell at incredibly high market prices (inflated because nobody wants to give up their rent controlled apartments or are holding out on selling the houses that they own because they expect prices to continue to rise). So the most attractive places to build are slums, where residents can (the developers hope) be enticed by the promise of affordable high-rise housing with access to the facilities that are lacking in the slums (esp sanitation) that will exist on the same plot of land side by side with luxury apartments (since building vertically means space for many more people on the same area of land).

In some cases the slums include fishing villages that got swallowed up as the city expanded, but the land of which is owned by the fishermen through 999 year leases signed with the British or Portuguese that are still honored. Apparently they tend to drive a harder bargain because they're all from the same village and more unified than slum residents who might know each other as neighbors but are very different from one in terms of ethnicity, class, etc even as they are thrown together into a housing coop.

The way it works is that residents of the slum have to form cooperative associations to reach a deal with the developers that includes a buyout of the land and the provision of housing for the residents on the same plot of land. So in theory this sounds great: on land that previously held only low-storied houses not built up to code two sets of high-rises would be build--one as low-rent housing for the slum residents, and one as fancy residences to be sold at market price. 

To prove oneself a legal resident eligible for housing (and membership in the coop?), one has to (in the case of the Dhavari project) produce utility bills or a voting registration card showing one's address as in the slum dating back to 1994. When I commented that 17 years seems like a long time to hold on to a utility bill, Naresh said that most people do in fact hold on to their bills, in part generally across India because things are so bureaucratic that one has to hold on to all one's documents and records, and in part because they knew that as slum residents they would one day be forced to prove their squatter's rights (though it seems a stretch that residents would have in 94 predicted a redevelopment project a decade and a half down the road). Still, that excludes (unless they were registered to vote from the slum, and I didn't get a clear sense of what proportion of people are) those who have been stealing electricity/water or striking up deals with their neighbors and so don't have any utility bills in their name.

So again, the coops tend to represent specific and more middle-class interests within the slums, since the middle-class residents are (I'm guessing) the one's more likely to be officially paying for their utilities.

One issue is that one-stories houses can double as store-fronts for the fruit vendors and petty artisans who make some of the slums seem so economically bustling when walking through. If a fruit vendor is moved to the 10th floor of a high-rise, his cost of living just went way up because he'll have to rent a place or pay off police to allow him to hawk on the street without getting shut down. This of course isn't a problem for the professionals commuting to jobs in other parts of the city, who are the ones who head both of the housing coops that we met with.

For my two cents, though, it seems like high rises wouldn't be a bad solution (there are only so many ways to efficiently pack 12 million+ people into a geographically pretty small city where jobs are concentrated on a peninsula that takes inhibitively long to commute to from the outskirts) if only there were more accountability and the developers were forced to follow through on their promises. 

When asked how redevelopment project could be better implemented, the last group the sociologists talked to (in Gholibar) all agreed that it would be better if the government were doing it, surprising given all the complaints of corruption and that fact that the existence of these slums lacking proper sanitation and utilities was a result of the failure of the government to guide the growth of the city.

The coop members said they'd talked with residents of other slums that had been redeveloped and the common refrain that once they got approval and rights to build on the land, private developers cut corners and did nothing to maintain the low-rent housing, focusing only on the huge profit-generating luxury apartments.

The Gholibar residents were filing suit against their private developer for fraud--something to do with him fabricating documents to show that a whole bunch of people were living in the slum who actually weren't in order to tip the balance within the housing coop association so that the deal he was proposing would get the required 70% approval from slum residents for the government to grant him the property to bulldoze and then build on.

I can't remember exactly how Naresh translated this (I'll break out Hindi dictionary later), but the first sentence is something like "We will not leave!" There's the same graffiti and fist--the latter a symbol of a broader populist movement that has supported the Gholibar residents with a hunger strike, among other things, whose name a can't remember--all over the neighborhood.