Spaces the city wants to forget

Not surprisingly, then, stereotypical images of violence, disease and degradation characterise depictions of urban poverty in the media, government reports and international development data. The stereotypes circumscribe these areas along with their inhabitants as ‘manageable’ spaces where developmental experiments, rehabilitation measures, service provision by NGOs and studies by international agencies can be carried out. They are separated from metropolitan space as a dark, unknown “other”. Applying Andre Gunder Frank’s theory of “core and periphery”, slum and metropolitan areas within the city are linked together in an unequal dynamic of development.

Slums are officially categorised as authorised, semi-authorised and illegal, with the majority falling into the last category. The state’s responsibility to provide habitation infrastructure is, therefore, similarly graded. Thus, large chunks of urban space and population lie outside the purview of official development planning, civic infrastructure provision and frameworks of law and order. This is a residual social policy, separating the poor from the elite, that goes against the notion of citizenship and the social contract between citizen and state.

Social security, in terms of universal norms of housing, employment, health and education, child support is accessible to all citizens in most countries of western Europe. India’s residual model of state support, while very effective in cases of famine relief and acute vulnerability, does not aim at equal and universal welfare provision to all citizens at all times. Consequently, the low-intensity but more pervasive deprivation found in urban slums is not dealt with in a systemic manner.

Further, the empowering notion of a citizen’s right to state support is discarded in favour of the state acting upon groups of people in terms of residual service provision and the most draconian of state policies: eviction. A relationship of power is clearly visible here, with the disempowered urban poor being subordinated by metropolitan culture acting through the state mechanism.

One way to address this is to demystify the entity known as a slum and separate its many strands of identity, region, community and gender that define it. For instance, women in slums invariably bear the brunt of the rural-urban shift, facing the combined pressures of the traditional roles of childbearing and homemaking with the need to augment family incomes. They struggle to survive and maintain their households in an environment of physical insecurity, breakdown of rural support structures, domestic violence and the fear of eviction. Inequalities of caste are very prevalent in urban slums, enhanced by the proximity of diverse social and regional groups removed from the “order” of the rural settlements they came from. In an environment of heightened competition for resources, services, living space and even air to breathe, such cultural faultlines cut vertically across slum communities, rendering each group a veritable powder keg. This also makes them vulnerable to political manipulation.

If urban poverty is to be tackled at a systemic level, this entire complex of vulnerability factors must be related to the metropolitan development mainstream at a policy level. City Master Plans, for instance, must equally provide for low-income housing and schools, along with business parks and shopping malls. The state must adopt a rights-based approach to poverty alleviation which does not simply call for increased subsidisies and the like, but must include the degraded spaces and their inhabitants within the framework of development planning, taxation and law and order.

Urban poverty is a problem of distribution of resources at one level but, at another, it is one of social hierarchies, perception of ordered space, issues of citizenship and the state and the maintenance of political constituencies leading to the institutionalising of inequality. They must be addressed by integrating, not separating, the poor from the rich as equal residents and citizens.

(The writer is a development consultant in the area of urban poverty)