Modes and Models for the Masses: Drawing Lessons from Mumbai's Experiments with Affordable Housing

Over the past century, the “slum” has emerged as Mumbai’s dominant housing type and the foremost object of its policy interventions. With nearly six of every ten inhabitants residing in government-recognised slums, Mumbai is currently home to one of the highest slum populations of any city in the world. However, its built form also reveals it as a test bed for an impressive range of public interventions in the field of affordable housing. Starting in the late nineteenth century, these interventions have ranged from top-down strategies involving slum clearance, resettlement, and redevelopment to more experimental, bottom-up schemes that have encouraged in-situ upgradation, self-help, and the active participation of communities.

Through the deployment of multidisciplinary and overlapping lenses of “Policies,” “Physical Form,” and “Patterns of Inhabitation,” this dissertation traces the formation of these paradigmatic policy shifts from a global perspective while centring its attention on the physical form of these policies and their transformation over time in Mumbai. By positing the city’s policy and physical landscape as a fertile site for understanding the emerging urbanism of the twenty-first century, and by extracting evidence collected through historical surveys and fieldwork, the dissertation aims to create new metrics to assess the physical performance of past policies and programmes and to point directions for the future—a future in which policymakers, architects, and planners operating globally can learn from, and build with, people and communities.