How India's Urban Centres Became Such a Mess

The State of Housing exhibition in Mumbai focuses on the country’s urban centres and the housing challenges faced by citizens, especially new migrants and low-income inhabitants in cities.

The state of housing in India, for the most part, should be self-evident to people who take a walk around any major city in the country. As builders work to populate the skyline with increasingly characterless constructions, you’re never too far from a slum, whose residents are crowded into houses made over time from material ranging from cement to flimsy tin and wood.

An exhibition, the ‘State of Housing’, which is running at Gallerie Max Mueller Bhavan in Mumbai attempts to illuminate how we got to this point, what responsibility the state has taken for housing its citizens and what architects and urban planners can do to alleviate the great divide.

Curated by architect and professor Rahul Mehrotra, poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta, the architect, educator and editor of Domus India, the show’s focus is ultimately on the country’s urban centres and the housing challenges faced by citizens, especially new migrants and low-income inhabitants in cities.

Charting a timeline from independence to the present, the exhibition moves through Nehru’s nation-building to the Emergency and ultimately to 1991’s economic liberalisation and where we stand in 2017.

Along the way, the exhibition, which relies heavily on text, data and historical records, draws viewers’ attention to the events both familiar (Nehru’s idea for planned cities, the displacement caused by large-scale infrastructure projects like the Bhakra-Nangal Dam) and lesser known (the establishment of the Building Materials and Technology promotion council to develop the application of build materials), that have led to where we are now.

The academic style and text-heavy format of the show is likely to put off casual showgoers and that is unfortunate, since the exhibition does a lot to put firm statistics to a problem that can sometimes seem hard to grapple with.

Organised by the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) and the Architecture Foundation, the show with the tagline, ‘Aspirations, Imaganeries and Realities of India’, aims to illuminate a way forward for the private sector, as it partners with the government to achieve its target of housing for all. To do so, the government will have to build 20 million affordable houses by 2022, it is pointed out. The current shortfall is of 18 million houses in urban areas while in rural areas, the number shoots up to 40 million houses.

To look at the state of the country as a whole means that the exhibition is more of an overview than a deep dive into city-specific or even large-scale problems that plague the housing sector. With its sense of optimism, the show doesn’t look at some of India’s underlying problems – of corruption in land allocation, the different permissions needed that naturally favour well-connected, deep-pocketed developers and the artificial scarcity of housing that this creates. Instead, the data-driven approach is one that seems to want to galvanise stakeholders, without laying blame for the present state of India’s cities.

Rural populations and their challenges are overlooked, perhaps in the belief that rapid urbanisation will only see the housing shortage in urban centres get worse as the country sees more migration in the hopes of a better economic future.

In the 35-minute film, also titled State of Housing, which is a part of the show, Pankaj Joshi, executive director of UDRI makes the point that the government is now “creating rights for private developers on slumland”. In fact, it is only in the film that architects, social activists and planners share any opinions – valuable to those that aren’t familiar with the sector and its challenges beyond the headlines.

But what gets left out here is a discussion on the implications of the push by the government and the private sector to build towers where slums used to be. The wholesale transplanting of slums to government land on the outskirts of major cities and the lack of transport or ties to the cities that population works in, the loss of community in many slum rehabilitation schemes as they move from sprawling but often courtyard-based constructions to enclosed buildings – these are critical issues that are not highlighted in the show. These fundamental issues are ones that must be addressed by any future housing interventions, whether public, private or a partnership between the two.

The film is set with its own polycarbonate ‘house’, with a second pavilion playing host to the 30 sq metre home, that the state has mandated for the poor. Within the ‘house’, the curators have effectively used the translucency of the material and photos displayed within each space to illustrate both the space constraints and the ingenuity with which Indian families engage with the spaces they occupy.

For architects, urban planners and students of the field, the chronotopes of about 80 housing developments offer the chance to get acquainted with plans, timelines and a standardised spreadsheet of projects ranging from Chandigarh’s sectors to Mumbai’s World Towers. Also useful is a schematic of a typical dwelling against the proposed 30 sq metre home. These chronotopes, as well as the timeline, gave a distinct impression that while the government collects data on housing via its decennial census, the implementation is lacking.

One of the most illuminating parts of the exhibition is how the government has changed its definition of housing from 1951 to 2011, and as a result, the evolution of what the state considers basic housing. Whereas in 1951, in the years following Partition, the household was taken as an aggregate unit instead of probing at the level of the individual by 2011 that had changed. The most recent census now asks about the household property, from laptops to white goods, and includes information about toilet facilities, materials used to build the house and more.

Ultimately, the statistics are what will stay with those who go through the show. That 40% of households in cities with a population of over one million are slums. That there are over 200,000 apartments lying empty all over India, despite the best efforts of the government. That there are three million homeless people in the country. The response needed to such an overwhelming endeavour should be from the industry and the various stakeholders as a whole.

By laying out the challenges with clarity, the exhibition serves as a call to arms for architects, urban planners and other stakeholders to come together and work to implement solutions to the task at hand.

The State of Housing exhibition will remain open till March 18 at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai.

Aatish Nath is a freelance writer based in Mumbai. He tweets @aatishn.