Rebuilding Conundrum: Embrace The Dark Side

Santo Domingo Savio and Comuna 13 are to Medellin what Dharavi is to Mumbai. These sprawling slums in Colombia's second largest city were once the hotbeds of crime. Today, they surprise a visitor with their eye-catching assemblage of schools, libraries, community and day-care centres, a science centre, an auditorium, an art gallery and cable cars built right up to the shantytowns to connect them with the rest of the city. This change owes itself to the city's former mayor Sergio Fajardo, who often remarked, "Our most beautiful buildings must be in our poorest areas." He therefore chose to improve the most desperate slums of his city, not by supplanting them with new buildings, but by erecting cultural infrastructure right in their midst. Dharavi, its 520-acre sprawl accommodating between 6 and 10 lakh people, may not have the scale to emulate its Colombian counterparts. Yet, the ambitious Rs 15,000-crore project to redevelop Asia's largest slum, seeking to relegate the slum-dwellers to a third of their current space and selling around two-thirds of it for commercial development, must make us ask: Should redevelopment be about dismantling the present in order to regiment the future? Is it fair to assume that the present is always woefully wrong and must be dispensed with to make way for the future?
Urban redevelopment of our times is largely a result of our insistence to look at failures instead of warnings and obsess over deficiencies instead of potential. This makes it difficult to see anything between the two extremes of absolute status quo and total rebuilding. This is not to suggest overlooking issues of social inequity or squalor. However, in negotiating the ropewalk between planning ideals and commercial gains, it may make sense to spare a thought for today's needs as well. For, public consent and participation is most likely a product of the immediate present. Which is why Dharavi begs some answers: Is tearing down the present the sure-fire panacea for the future ills of urban density and deprivation? Can the physical form of the city be more important than the time-nurtured ease and efficiency with which people live in it? If cities are indeed the reflections of those who live in them, how well do urban makeovers metamorphose the inhabitants? As Medellin suggests, one way to address the darker facets of a city could well be to embrace them as they are and give them a chance.