A Community-Led Analysis of Housing Production

Mumbai does not recognize thirteen million of it’s living population; the city regards them as Illegal. (India Census. 2011). The main goal for my thesis is to document emergent forms of knowledge, which are produced by sixty percent of the population, through everyday resistance to authoritarian housing and land rights policies.

Dual terms like Legal and Illegal or Informal and Formal are used in the current discourse of citizenship and land rights in urban India. State-institutions like ‘Slum’ Rehabilitation Authority uses this duality to map neighborhoods, grab land and allow global real estate markets to speculatively invest over it. This process displaces and disenfranchises low-income communities and severely degrades the environment analogous of urban renewal programs between 1949-1979 in America. ( Mena Report 2015) Existing government maps diminish the capacity of people to participate in political life (Venkatraman.2015)."Counter-mapping" refers to the development of alternatives to official development plans. I will create a counter-mapping tool through ethnographic fieldwork in native coastal communities and the ‘informal’ settlement of Mumbai to bring local identities and struggles to the forefront. Counter-mapping development in Mumbai is a severely understudied topic and rigorous research is required to develop such alternative discourse.

The contestation over land and housing rights is deeply tied to broader ecological threats and national political suppressions in Mumbai.Consider the case of the Koli community- indigenous fishing villages along the coast of Mumbai. The fisher's village is intrinsically tied to the marine ecology and thus protected by the coastal regulation zones, which do not permit any builder led development in these urban villages. In 2012, the State released development plans for 2034, where the coastal regulations were eased citing that the occupation in these villages was slowly fading. Now the land was made available by the state for development. This caused a mass furor by the Koli community, who started surveying land to mark demarcate their community boundaries

on city survey maps- separating itself from the expanding peripheral neighborhoods. Laws were changed to mark Koli communities as “ Urban villages” - legal settlement and the newer immigrant neighborhoods as “Slum”-illegal settlement. In protecting itself the Koli community reinforced the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the local right-wing Shiv Sena Party (Venkatraman. 2015) and of the national Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) furthering discrimination based on caste, religion and ethnic identities. It is thus critical at this moment to develop an anti-mapping narrative in Mumbai. Last month, the city cut down 400 trees in a single night in the center of the city in Aarey forest to build a new Metro line and any resistance was severely condemned including imprisonment for environmental activists.

Coastal regulations and environmental zones are being violated and highways are being built against Supreme Court decisions to protect coastal ecology. Thus recent development indicates a market-driven frenzy to capture the land value and exhausting the environmental ecology of Mumbai.