Flaneur's Diary: Living on the Edge

In research of this city of Mumbai, I have found that the uniqueness of this place in it's intersection of the slums with the skyscrapers in the city proper. Vernacular architecture is shown in Mumbai with it's ode to the pre-colonial and post colonial art deco and gothic representations that are unique to Mumbai. The Transnational transplants of skyscrapers and European/Western themed malls insert themselves into the center of the city that is surrounded and intermixed within the slums of Mumbai.

Slums in Mumbai have a uniqueness within them with proliferation of the middle class moving into slum cities is apparent in the last ten years with a difference of other slums that are seen Globally. There is a movement of middle class homeowners selling their small houses located outside the city to live within the city in the illegal settlements that keep them from having to commute. The wave of gentrification and slum clearance by developers is pushing many traditional, poorer slum-dwellers out of the city and into sprawling new illegal settlements. The financial capital of India known as Mumbai is home to estimated 6.5 million slum people. Nearly half of Mumbai's Population lives in small shacks surrounded by open sewers. Nearly 55% of Mumbai's population lives in Slum areas. Rent prices in Mumbai's city proper that includes the high rate financial population and the uniqueness I eluded to before in the the population of slums intertwine within the walls as well. In Des Moines, IA, average rent is $895.00 USD per month and the living rate in Mumbai is 38.73 % lower than Mumbai when the slum-dwellers rent out of official and unofficial habitat are all taken into account. And this includes the official and unofficial.

The transportation system of Mumbai is quite unique as well. During rush hours (it's hours here, not an hour), around 500 people stuff themselves into train cars meant only for 188. As if this incredible little fact isn’t bad enough, around 3,000 people die in train related accidents each year. They either fall or are pushed off carriages traveling too fast or too full, or are injured while crossing railway tracks. Over 4.3 million people ride the subway system every day Mumbai’s trains carry almost seven million passengers a day.

Water is a big problem for Mumbai's population; standpipes come on at 5:30am for 2 hours as water is rationed. These standpipes are shared between many people. Garbage is everywhere and most areas lack sanitation and excrement and rats are found on the street. 500 people share one public bathroom “Because the Municipal Corporation Act of 1888 gives the BMC the right to sell piped water as “movable property,” a senior, now-retired municipal engineer said the water department is actually allowed to provide water to whoever agrees to pay for it. Sometime in the 1960s, the water department decided that the Municipal Corporation Act gave the department the right to sell water even to residents of unauthorized structures.

Indeed, the dual compression is affecting Mumbai's original inhabitants both economy and culturally. Changes for the indigenous residents have seen in their cultural until recently, it is a new form of cultural expression that has been released as a transnational form in which causes a displacement of their original cultural expressions that were on the streets or at most, within a one cinema theater. The affect of the economy by global corporate entities, citizens are in the midst of dual compression, these Mumbai hawkers have organized business transactions that are contrary to the flow of the global corporate finance because these systems are the continued local form of the economy based on the hawking activities on the slum dwellers in the this Mega-city. Affects of the global transitions for this city are apparent in the sea of slums that are surrounded by super-tall (over 50 stories tall) residences and a many skyscrapers. Mumbai is a a unique mixture of the slums and the skyscrapers together in one place that is the state Maharashtra.