View from Ground Zero: Moving Up the Urban Ladder

India has been championing the theme of ‘vocal for local’, with reference to the three crucial elements of economy, sustainability and inclusiveness, as stated in its own reports. This also aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda of 2030 — ‘leave no one behind’. Last year, the theme of the United Nation’s Urban October was contextually, ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’. Given the vast scale and diversity of India, what constitutes as ‘local’ is a complex question. Variations in geo-climatic zones, functional roles, and size of city, all overlap to define unique urban contexts, very different from one another. While the few mega city regions of the country house a disproportionate share of the urban population, the number of settlements in the form of lower order towns and cities is huge.

The contexts vary significantly as we move away from the world’s most populous cities located in India to smaller cities dispersed across India. With an inherent big-city bias in the State’s responses to urban problems, how the narrative unfolds in small and medium towns without robust economies, stagnant land markets, weak technical and financial capacities of urban local bodies and an aspirational population, forms the thrust of the research. This research looks at how households negotiate the urban landscape trying to balance their priority of accessing livelihoods on one hand and fulfilling shelter needs where housing choices are few or sometimes none, on the other. The inevitable tradeoff between housing location and quality of housing environment results from barriers to equitable access to serviced land, housing and mobility options in most Indian towns. This paper captures some of my experiences of interacting with households living and working in the informal sector in Bhopal, an Indian city of around 1.8 million population as of 2011, as a case representing the housing-mobility-livelihood de-links in medium sized towns of India.

Mike Davis in his celebrated work Planet of Slums predicts the new order with an ‘increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and economic specialisations’. He also points out that “if megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three quarters of the burden of future world population growth will be borne by faintly visible second-tier cities and smaller urban areas.” (Davis, 2006)

 

The Challenge of Slums report by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2003) was one of the first to emphasise the need for future policies to support the livelihoods of the urban poor by enabling urban informal-sector activities to flourish and develop, by linking low-income housing development to income generation, and by ensuring easy geographical access to jobs through pro-poor transport and more appropriate location of low-income settlements. Today, the SDGs (Sustainable Developmental Goals) 10 and 11 focusing on ‘reducing inequality’ and ‘sustainable cities and communities’ carry the same train of thought forward and urge nations to turn them into actionable targets through the agenda of ‘localising SDGs’. While availability of international frameworks to tackle the problems of the urban poor give an optimistic view, the perspective of life in cities from that of the urban poor themselves is complex and often unheard. The narratives of households as they struggle to juggle housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work and, sometimes, even personal safety, and yet aspire for a better life, are worth documenting. Their accounts provide vital information and perspective of looking at the problem from below, through the lens of the people themselves, for whom so many international and national policies and programmes are targeted.

The inevitable tradeoff between housing location and quality of housing environment results from barriers to equitable access to serviced land, housing and mobility options in most Indian towns

According to UN estimates, the proportion of urban population living in slums in India in 2009 was 29.4% while the Census of India figures for 2011 peg the slum population to roughly 65 million or 17% of urban India. The city of Bhopal with a population of 1.9 million (Census, 2011) is spread over a total area of 41,784.42 hectares and consists of 85 wards. The slum households constitute around 27% of the urban households (School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, 2021).

It is worthwhile to draw reference to John Turner’s very original model, based on his work in Peru in the 1960s, where rural migrants first try to move from the province to central locations in the city, paying any price, to find jobs. Then, with security of employment, they move to the periphery, where land or housing ownership is attainable. He coined the terminologies ‘bridge header’ to ‘consolidator’ to show this progression in the life of the migrants (Turner, Fichter, & (Ed.), 1972). The same cycle is still visible in cities across India, even after 60 years of Turner’s classical theory being tested in Peru.

In Bhopal, the manifestation of slums or informal settlements of various types are found in different locations. The progression in the life of the migrants can be derived from the location choices the households make and the type of housing they occupy.

Where do the Urban Poor Live?

An attempt was made to trace the trajectory of new migrants to Bhopal and find households in different stages of housing consolidation, living for different periods of time in the city. The study revealed the basis of housing preferences and location choices of different communities.

The first community studied consists of seasonal workers who migrate to the city with their livestock and use the city for rural occupations. These are nomadic communities, usually from the bordering desert state of Rajasthan, where water is scarce in the summer. These communities bring large herds of sheep and camel to the smaller towns of Madhya Pradesh and use the vacant land on the peripheries to graze their livestock. They squat on large land parcels, earmarked for urban land use, where no cultivation happens, setting up makeshift camps and staying for two to three months till the monsoons arrive. Even though they treat the towns as transit hubs, their numbers are large and their settlements are places of open defecation for humans and animals, serviced with no water supply or electricity. As this is a recurring annual phenomenon, one wonders why a more formalised system of earmarking pasture lands for them could not have been planned.

The second category are those who migrate to towns in search of jobs. Access to jobs at the minimum or zero cost of commute is the priority for the first-generation migrants and dictates residential location choices. Minimum or zero cost of housing is the second priority dictating residential choice, making informal settlements the only option feasible. Environmental quality and access to basic services of water supply, drainage, sewerage, electricity, is totally compromised, with many living on environmentally vulnerable sites. Health and education are the last priority, and no expenses are incurred for them. These migrants often do not have any form of identity proof such as voter cards or driving licenses, nor workplace identities as they work in the informal sector. Thus, government schemes for education or healthcare are not accessible to them, leaving them solely to their own resources, to survive and upgrade their lifestyle in the competitive environment of the city.

Minimum or zero cost of housing is the second priority dictating residential choice, making informal settlements the only option feasible

The fate of these makeshift housing arrangements made by new migrants varies from case to case. Some sites, if considered less vulnerable and on encumbrance free land, are converted to ‘notified slums’ and are then eligible for provision of basic urban services. These slums see massive building construction, with housing consolidation happening at a very fast pace, and households expanding their premises to not only have more space for themselves, but to use the house as an asset and rent out parts of it to tenants. With a good location and access to basic services, these slums have become the most sought-after locations for housing the urban poor.

Those sites that are considered environmentally vulnerable or on litigated land are chosen for eviction and relocation, sometimes years after the initial migrants settled there. If they are lucky, the resettlement happens at reasonable distances from transport corridors and access to workplaces. But more often than not, the resettlement sites are at far flung locations, with no access to livelihoods, taking the households to the bottom rung of their journey again. Thus, a formal housing unit is of little value to the first generation of migrants if it is far away from their livelihood locations. The search for a new site to squat on begins afresh, starting a new cycle of slum formation (Mitra 2022).

Linking Livelihood and Location Choice

The study revealed that the nature of occupation and earnings has the single most significant influence on the location and typology of the housing for the urban poor. While the occupations vary, the common thread of informality manifested in the form of meager earnings, lack of a stable income, lack of permanent job locations and access to support vending infrastructure, remain constant in all contexts. The diversity of occupations calls for a more nuanced study to respond effectively to their housing needs.

One of the main conclusions drawn was that a large section of households engaged in the informal sector are not employed but are entrepreneurs, producing goods and selling them themselves. The nature of produce determines the location of fabrication and sales. Products such as cane furniture and accessories, seasonal products like effigies of Ravan for Dussera are voluminous and difficult to transport. Artisans engaged in these trades form ‘workshops’ along main roads, near bus stands to get the locational advantage of production and sales at prime locations along arteries. The cost of freight transport is passed on to the buyer by virtue of being located on the thoroughfare. Residences of the artisans remain ‘on-site’ for security concerns and convenience of work.

Another large section of households engaged in the informal sector are vendors of various types of goods. A case of vendors negotiating significant travelling costs while setting up their carts in different locations was found worthy of documentation. Weekly and bi-weekly temporary markets or ‘haats’ occur at different designated spots of the city approved by the Municipal Corporation, selling perishable and non-perishable goods. However, setting up and winding up the stalls is the responsibility of the vendors, with no permanent storage space in the vicinity.

Innovating solutions of a ‘modular’ caravan of vending carts strung together to one tractor engine are regular sights on the city’s streets. Each caravan consists of 20 to 30 carts of vendors pooling their carts together. The vendors move their assets from one market location to another at minimum costs through a collective enterprise. The raw materials to be sold are supplied by wholesale suppliers at the market site. This system demonstrates an efficient and affordable cooperative mechanism of goods transport using minimum technology. Relocation projects in far flung locations disturb such transportation dynamics, affecting livelihoods.

The slum redevelopment happens only if the project cross-subsidy is viable with enough high end uses fitting into the site

Moving up the Urban Ladder: Negotiating the Shifting Boundary

The study analysed several slum sites and the relocation options available to households living there. It was seen that as households start consolidating financially, they remain in slums and informal settlements from compulsion but aspire for better housing and living conditions, serviced by physical infrastructure and accessible to social amenities. However, on the supply side, most of the mass housing projects are built progressively further away in the periphery, where cheap land banks are available, with limited amenities in the vicinity and unserved by public transport connecting to the core of the city.

What was observed can be termed as ‘the case of the shifting’ boundary. The households in search of housing are constantly negotiating the fight between rising financial prices in ‘good’ locations versus increasing distances with reduced or no mobility choices for housing fitting their budget. The housing that they prefer in acceptable locations with all amenities, are just out of their financial boundary and the housing units available within their financial affordability are just beyond the city’s transit serviced boundaries. Thus, most households spend much of their lives negotiating the two boundaries: financial and spatial, before they can move from informal to the formal housing options.

In recent times, housing has been supplied under various Central and State funded programmes on redeveloped slum sites within the city. However, slum redevelopment projects work on market valuation of the land as projects undertaken by private developers. The mandate is to redevelop the slums as formal housing on a part of the land they now occupy and use the remaining for ‘for sale’ uses with high market prices. Thus, the slum redevelopment happens only if the project cross-subsidy is viable with enough high end uses fitting into the site. While this appears to be a good model on paper, case studies show that even low-income units are priced higher than projects at non-prime locations and as a ripple effect, they also increase land values in the neighbourhood, eventually outpricing low-income families from there. Thus, these market-based models, while viable in the larger metropolitan cities, have not been very successful in small and medium towns across India (Bhan et.al, 2014).

Hence, if the urban poor aspire to move up the ladder, by shifting from the informal to the formal, their choices are limited. They either shift to mass housing at the urban periphery, negotiating their transit needs through private vehicles till a time these peripheries are serviced by public transit, or choose to make their own houses incrementally if access to serviced land is made available, albeit in far flung locations.

Under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), India’s largest national housing programme till date, the option of extending financial support to families constructing their own houses was present as one of the four components, namely, Beneficiary Led Construction (BLC), provided they had access to land titles. In some states such as Madhya Pradesh, where land markets are not yet sky rocketing, the state chose to distribute land titles through a legislation, the MP Patta Act of 1984. Land titles (Adhikar Patra) were distributed to 2.80 lakh households under Nagar Uday Abhiyan. This enabled these households to qualify as beneficiaries for the BLC component of PMAY. Therefore, many families chose to build their own houses availing this scheme instead of purchasing a unit from a mass housing project. Even though the locations of these housing colonies were not in prime areas, households preferred this option of owning land and building their own house exercising their choices of design, material and aesthetics giving them their cultural identity in a city where they are migrants. It also had the advantage of building incrementally and expanding the units based on flow of income and changes in family structure (Mitra, 2021).

In conclusion, the study gave rare insights into how a large section of the urban citizens in India negotiate their journey of moving up the urban liveability ladder. Policies and progammes follow a top-down approach, often leading to missing target outcomes and leading to unintended consequences for the city too. Such studies from the perspective of those intended to be benefitted hope to inform policy and bring mobility choices as a prime concern at the centre of the discourse on housing. Making a diverse range of mobility options for people and freight affordable and accessible can help solve the housing problem for many for whom access to livelihood from their homes remains the main priority and the very reason for aspiring to be an urban citizen.

References:

1.Bhan, G., Anand, G., Arakali, A., Deb, A., & Harish, S. (2014). Urban housing and exclusion. In C. f. Studies, India Exclusion Report 2013-14 (pp. 77-108). Books for Change.

2.Bhatnagar, K. (1996). Extension of Security of Tenure to Urban Slum Population in India: Status and Trends. Shelter, 22-28.

3.Davis, M. (2006). Planet of Slums. London, New York: Verso.

4.Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. (2019). Urban Transformation through Housing for All - 1 Crore and more. New Delhi: Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India.

5.Mitra, S. (2021). Policy-implementation dynamics of national housing programmes in India – evidence from Madhya Pradesh. International Journal of Housing Policy.

6.Mitra, S. (2022). Livelihoods, Mobility and Housing: In Search of Missing Links in Indian Towns. In ed. Banerji P. and Jana A. Advances in Urban Design and Engineering: Perspectives from India, 2022 (pp.45-73) Springer.

7.Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India. (2011). Primary Census Abstract Data Tables- Madhya Pradesh. Retrieved April 7, 2019, from censusindia.gov.in: https://censusindia.gov.in/pca/pcadata/Houselisting-housing-MP.html

8.School of Planning and Architecture Bhopal. (2021). Assessment of BDP 2031 (Draft) using City Scale PAT. New Delhi: UN Habitat.

9.Turner, J. F., Fichter, R., & (Ed.). (1972). Freedom to Build: Dwelling Control of the Housing Process. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company.

10.United Nations Human Settlements Programme. (2003). The Challenges of Slums-Global report on Human Settlements 2003. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

All photos BY THE AUTHOR IN BHOPAL, INDIA, BETWEEN 2019-2022