(images showing the placement of informal settlements across the city of Bombay, das, 2018)

 

So why does every second resident of the financial capital of the country dwells in slums? Reason being simple, as there are no affordable housing options in the city, which also leads to the question of why the city is not being able to produce affordable housing, to which it arises an important reason that as long as the cost of the land that is going to factor in the cost of the house, unaffordability is going to be there. Mumbai being an island city, also it makes one of the densely populated cities in the world and the land being scarce it has most restrictive land use constraints. Also, it has a political side of looking at it. Upon independence, India had pledged to be a socialist republic which means the government had taken upon itself some exclusive responsibility of promoting social welfare projects including affordable housing or social housing. Come 1991, the year of liberalisation, the government dumps that responsibility and role and talks about facilitating the private sector. It began depending on the privatisation as a means for undertaking development projects. Where that has been a major disaster leading to the current state of the city, where housing rates have hit the roof, where slumification of cities has begun to threaten the quality of life.  (DAS, 2018)

 

Carried out in a survey of 2017-18, the average cost per sq. foot in Mumbai was Rs. 21000 and the average per capita income was Rs. 2.5 lac per year. At this rate, 500 sq. ft house costs more than a crore, a sum out of reach for the average citizen. According to the report by the national institute of urban affairs around 95 per cent of the households cannot afford to buy a house in the formal sector and therefore slum housing was one of the responses to this issue. One would be tempted to think

 

 

that the proliferation of slums is due to a shortage in the housing. But in fact, Mumbai has the highest number of vacant houses in the country. But also, with the more employment opportunities, more human migration is happening everyday making it more crowdy for the lower income groups which by default has slum area for the settlement. Wherein the middle and upper middle now tends to grow further more extending the city limits.

 

The idea of slums meant a community living wherein people are habitual in working together, since it is a place of work and stay together. However, it has changed the idea since the people are getting away from the community living and started having an idea of isolation as an upgradation to the standard of living where now there is comparatively lesser interaction among the people which tends to make the houses away from each other which results into more spreading of the slum area and then tends the city to sprawl further (sanyal, 2018). Coming on to the recent episode of Covid-19 pandemic, since slums are becoming the focal point of the covid-19 outbreak, where now there are cases where a single house is a containment zone and where also an entire lane is a containment zone which would further led people to maintain social distancing reflecting in the ‘maintain distance’ housing typology and living pattern which would lead to sprawling of the slums and thus resulting into further sprawling of the city.

 

Informal settlements are essentially abandoned by urban elites, which means they rarely receive the care and attention they need. Governments must be sensitive to the fact that there may be low levels of trust in informal settlements, as well as alternate systems of power and influence. Proper affordable living-working housing schemes should be laid out and implemented as early as possible as an upgradation to the city life and pattern and also to cut down the contrasting difference between the rich, middle and the poor. The land in the city been scarce, it should be properly optimized on the urban level for planning including proper transit planning for the people to connect from their living to working places (one end to the other part of the city) which might treat the issue of slums having working-living together conditions. Although Covid-19 spread across the globe on airplanes and cruise ships, borne by the wealthiest residents of the world. All respiratory pathogens are very successful in crowded, densely populated environments. The trajectory of a lot of diseases in that they end up in the slum communities of the world and then they linger. And hence, the typology for the living-working spaces. Idea of verticality rather than a horizontal spread of the spaces would save lot of land and thus having an idea of compactness through verticality serves it better, thus, no letting the city to sprawl further.