At a two-day conference on climate change in February, Mumbai’s Municipal Commissioner announced that densification – essentially, increas...
At a two-day conference on climate change in February, Mumbai’s Municipal Commissioner announced that densification – essentially, increasing Floor Space Index to construct high-rise buildings – is the only way for Mumbai to meet the twin challenges of environmental protection and housing.
People complain that through the process of slum redevelopment that accommodates residents of informal settlements in high-rise buildings, “we are creating urban vertical slums”, he said. But, he declared, we must look at the “big picture”. Building vertically allows us “to free up some land” for other facilities like sewerage and sanitation. Moreover, if we don’t “densify like this” we will have an “urban sprawl which [goes] 150 km outside Mumbai”.
Four months later, the pendulum swung the other way. As the number of Covid-19 cases in informal settlements like Mumbai’s Worli-Koliwada and Dharavi began to rise, “density” became a dangerous idea. Dharavi was described as “a ticking time bomb” – a “fertile ground for the virus to spread rapidly”.
The media hammered home the notion that informal settlements have been responsible for Mumbai’s spiraling Covid-19 numbers. Almost every article on Dharavi began by citing its density in comparison with Mumbai’s overall density. It is no secret that informal settlements have higher densities than the city average – Mumbai’s...
