Environment & Urbanization

World leading environmental and urban studies journal

Urban Poverty, Local Governance and Everyday Politics in Mumbai

Author(s): 
Joop de Wit

Publisher: 
Routledge

Pages: 
320

Year: 
2017

In many ways this is a book about relationships – for instance, between Mumbai’s urban poor and local government, between recent migrants and longer-term slum residents, and between property developers and politicians. These are not homogeneous groups, and this book shows the extent to which their relationships are subject to contestation and negotiation.

The book draws on de Wit’s decades of research in Mumbai, tracing the changes in Mumbai’s infrastructure and policy processes since the 1980s. In de Wit’s analysis of the past few decades, the Mumbai Municipal Corporation has developed cosier relationships with the private sector, with more incorporation of user fees in schools, clinics, housing, and basic services. The concomitant neglect of public services has led to increasing political mobilization of the urban poor. Like low-income groups in other cities, those in Mumbai rely more heavily on the local government, as wealthier people can turn to private services. This is particularly true of Mumbai’s slum dwellers, who make up half of the city’s population. Slum residents have thus become a powerful force in urban politics, where “it is poor people who vote most, illustrating the awkward situation that they may help to power politicians who care less for them than for most other city groups” (page 24).

The book dedicates chapters to Mumbai’s urbanization processes, the organization of its government institutions, theories of urban poverty and governance, slum conditions, and the workings of Mumbai’s 227 municipal corporators (the officials de Wit considers central to local governance). This culminates in an analysis of the 2012 elections, which de Wit describes from numerous angles: candidate selection, campaigning, voter motivations, financial interests, and more.

Overall, this is a detailed account of how different actors interact to shape a city in their own diverse interests. It is politics-focused in that it remains very attentive to power relations in determining both informal (e.g. vote buying) and formal (e.g. municipal elections) spaces of democratic engagement, and how these vary according to gender, income level, and other differences.

Ultimately, de Wit argues that political interests of both voters and politicians are marked by short-termism, and are not ideologically grounded. He seems to see little space for strong collective action arising from Mumbai’s slums. He identifies several factors limiting the effectiveness of organized advocacy among slum residents, including sharp divisions between groups, weak leadership, and defensive rather than rights-based action. If this view is pessimistic, it reflects a larger point about the difficulty of substantially reducing inequality in Mumbai. As the conclusion notes, regarding the aims of this book:

“I have tried to uncover and illustrate the operative mechanisms, zooming in on micro-level relations within slum households, moving up from streets, ‘communities’ and wards to present a helicopter view of the massive urban conglomeration with its administrative and political organisations. If we zoom out even further, trends towards increased inequality as shown for Mumbai are at work in most if not all countries…On the one hand this book wants to endorse and advocate the urgency to arrest such trends, on the other it hopes to have made it clear that changing things will be very complex…it is for the politicians of the world’s democracies, including those of Mumbai and India, to take the lead in urgent repairs in both democracy and governance.” (pages 293–294)

 

Further reading:

Appadurai, Arjun (2001), “Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 13, No 2, pages 23–43, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095624780101300203.

Chaplin, Susan E (2011), “Indian cities, sanitation and the state: the politics of the failure to provide”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 23, No 1, pages 57–70, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956247810396277.

McFarlane, Colin and Renu Desai (2015), “Sites of entitlement: claim, negotiation and struggle in Mumbai”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 27, No 2, pages 441–454, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956247815583635.

Patel, Sheela and Jockin Arputham (2007), “An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai?”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 19, No 2, pages 501–508, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956247807082832.

 

Book note prepared by Christine Ro

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