Mr. Tanmay Misra

Remarks at ―Is Development a Science? The Case of the Mumbai Slum‖

12 August 2014, Studio-X Mumbai

(Upon reaching a bolded and underlined phrase, click the mouse to move to the next slide.)

1. Introduction

Thank you all for coming tonight.

When I was thinking about how to begin this talk, I reflected on the last couple months where I

readthe very confident ideas of experts writing about Mumbai slum development. Some like to

begin by painting a picture of just how crowded a slum can be or how few toilets there. Other

experts will take a different approach. They will start by criticising this first group of experts for

making a slum sound ugly. A slum, they will say instead, is full of vibrant entrepreneurship. We

have to learn from it, not insult it!

I‘ll begin with something much more mundane. A graph.This is a graph from a report by an

American real estate firm about affordable housing in India. The red line represents the lowest-

income group. This graph is part of an argument.

Now, it‘snot common to hear experts call things with graphs‗arguments.‘ They tell usthat if

there‘s a graph involved, we can rest assured no one is trying to trick us with passion. If the

graph turns out to be wrong, it‘s only because the expert calculated the data wrong. Now we all

know you can manipulate a graph to show a lot of different things, but at least there is a right

way to do it. And when we use data, we can all agree on what is actually going on and speak

toeach other rather than just trying to force our own partisan interests on each other. Or so the

expert says…

It‘s this spirit—I‘ll call it the dream of a science—that I‘ll attempt to examinetonight. It‘s seems

as if everywhere you turn when trying to learn about interventions happening in Mumbai slums,

you find yourself confronted with a theoryor a model, and with an expert whosaysthat their

theory or modelworks. Oneway to put the question I‘ll explore tonight is‗What do we mean

when we say a certain model for slum development works?‘

Now, it will be tough to find experts who actuallythink that their model is a science. But many

do seem to share a faith, and a faith in that aspect of their work which they call ‗technical,‘ that

some outcome will necessarily follow some practice. That this practice can be generalised into a

theory to be copied-and-pasted somewhere else to produce that same original outcome in this

new place. This is the sort of sentiment that I am getting at when I say development expertise

aspires to become a science. The experts I refer to are largely economists, lawyers, and policy

and management academics consulting for or employed by organisationslike The World Bank,

the United Nations, McKinsey, Deloitte, and so on.

So - this is the itinerary for tonight. It is a highly condensed and edited version of the longer

paper I‘ve written.I‘ll first talk about titling and property rights, and then I‘ll turn to

microfinance. And, I‘ll conclude with remarks about architecture and development. I know I will

have succeeded in my talk if by the end, I have managed to offend some of you. Let‘s get started.

2a. Titling

Titlingfound its way into Mumbai slum interventionsas early as 1985 in the World-Bank funded

Slum Upgrading Programme and more recently in these other initiatives at the central

government.The logic is similar throughout.

With a title, slum-dwellers are said to be confident they won‘t be evicted. So, they will want to

upgrade their home, improving its market value. They willalso now be trackable, able to be taxed

to provide for infrastructure. Altogether, the expert tells us, this will improve their quality of life

and alleviate their poverty.

The question I am interested in is: What exactly it is experts think informal life in a slum is to

begin withthat it could be subsequently formalised?The 1985 Slum Upgrading Program and in

some part, today‘s vision of a ‗slum-free India‘ involves in-situ titling.Meaning we will give you

the title right where you already are. What is at stake here is something about legibility, about

mapping, about what this ‗where you already are‘ looks like.

This is a map of the hutments in a Mumbai slum. As basic as this looks, already it assumes a lot.

At least where ownership isconcerned. Urban planning in the slum often begins with a technical

appraisal to make such a map before titling can even occur.What exactly do experts picture is

happening in the slum that makes them want to send out an appraiser, another sort of expert, to

map it? You‘d have to read them very closely to draw it out.

One vision of the slum seems to be as a place without any order or coherence altogether.To

suggest that only formalisation could provide real tenure security, or economic value, or property

delineations, is to suggest the slum-dweller knows nothing about shelter or valueor borders at

all.When these experts imagine the slum as an informal space, they seem to be picturing

something like chaos embodied where maybe the only law is the law of the jungle.

Other experts proceed with the image of the slum as a rich place, of dreamers, of community

solidarity. The slum untouched by a possibly bleak modernization but full of the entrepreneurial

activity that comes before and within modernity nonetheless.When these experts imagine the

slum as an informal space, it does have an internal order, that of a market, which the law would

only, but significantly, amplify.

These two visions look quite different from one another. We haveThe Jungle Bookon the one

hand andSlumdog Millionaire on the other. But there‘s something they both have in common.

They are united in their belief of formalisation as intervention without interference.Like a

laboratory scientist, the designer of the titling scheme apparently exacts his target with precision,

affecting only it and nothing else. For this to be possible, the scientist must be able to conceive

the slum as something that he need only to trace to make a map of ownership.It‘s just a technical

activity. Copy-and-paste.

But what appears clear in the slum is not always so clear. It must be made to appear clear. And to

do so, especially for titling, involveslots of questions. And questions which can be answered in

many ways.Who really squats in that sector? The owner?The tenant? Perhaps we should say the

tenant is de facto owner? What would it mean to put the mother‘s name on the title? What about

inheritance? Renting?

Indeed, when we say we want to formalise property rights in the slum, it can be useful to think of

property as more than just ‗the thing that I own.‘ Property rights will arrange entitlements

between me and other people with respect to the thing.1 I might live there, making you live

elsewhere, or I can rent it out to you, let you use it, or exclude you from entering altogether.

Property constructs a messy and intricateweb of social relations.Titling therefore is not just

about assigning a name to a hutment in a given slum. Whether you want to or not, you‘d end up

re-organising this web. And you‘d have to decide how.

How you decide will distribute entitlements among people, favouring some at the expense of

others. That titling could somehow bypass all of these questions and go straight to just handing

out deeds to slum-dwellers is exactlythe dream of a sciencefor some development experts.

Instead, titling is through and through a political activity. ‗Political‘ in that intervenes into this

existing social web and re-arranges it, to describe who can do what to whom and under what

conditions.

2b. Property Rights

Mumbai‘s Slum Rehabilitation Authority today is different from the Slum Upgrading

Programme in1985. A plot of the land in an existing slum is divided and cleared. On one part, a

private builder will construct a high-rise to rehabilitate the slum-dwellers who will live in transit

accommodation in the meanwhile. On the other part, this same builder will construct, in most

cases, a luxury high-rise residence for sale on the open market. The builder has to provide the

high-rise to the slum-dwellers for free. But to make up for it, he gets loosened floor-space-index

regulationswhich say how much he can develop on the plot and transfer-development-rights to

build elsewhere in the city. The builder also gets profit fromselling luxury hi-rises on what can

sometimes be lucratively-valued land.

Now we can start to see the makings of a model. The arrangement of incentives and

disincentives to get actors to head one way and divert them from heading another.There are

various ways to set this up. And law could help youbecause it not only defines what counts as an

asset but also what counts asa user, and therefore, how users might generate value from these

assets. In other words,law sets up what we know today as the formal economy.

Law was not always integral to generating value from assets – agriculture for example has

existed long before law. But even then, it‘s difficult to imagine value generated outside of any

distribution of entitlements altogether. Someone, for example, has to have already laid claim to

some land. Maybe by seizing it, or inheriting it, and then, through their own effort or their claim

over someone else‘s labour, cultivate this land. They have to devise how the revenue of the yield

should be allocated between themselves and others: a family, a ruler, an ally, a serf, a slave.

I tell the story this way for a reason. I want to emphasise thatthere is nothing natural about

entitlements. They might have an internal logic once established, but they have to be won, be

1David Kennedy, ―Some Caution about Property Rights as a Recipe for Economic Development,‖ Accounting,

Economics, and Law 1, no. 1 (2011): 31.

seized, be stolen to subsequently be inherited, be transferred, be distributed.2What this means is

that a marketis indeed a functionof entitlements, formal and informal, about who can claim

access to which resource, how they can have that claim enforced, and the scope of what they can

do with it.It‘s contestation and distribution all the way down.

So now things get more interesting. The question is no longer to title or not to title. What will

matter for slumdevelopment ishow entitlements are distributed and what contestation and re-

distribution happens as a result.And,big surprise, there‘s plenty of experts who say they know

just the way to do this.

I chose two frameworks in particular. Named after development buzzwords, one I‘ll call pro-

efficiency and the other pro-empowerment.

Efficiency

I‘ll start with efficiency.Efficiency demands government should refrain from regulating market

activity because private actors are supposedlybetter in producing an outcome that

maximiseseconomic performance – which efficiency experts define as development.

Efficiency is premised on the belief that buyers and sellers already know what is best for them.

What they need is the right signal to transact. That signal is the price of the good or service in

question.Only once the government‘s market regulations are removed could this price finally be

undistorted to reflect the buyer and seller‘s actual willingness to transact.

An expert might arguethat as a public-private partnership, SRA‘s modelis based on the idea that

the market as opposed to the government will produce efficient, and therefore better, outcomes

for slum development. If this is true, we can try to imagine what these efficient outcomes might

be.

One scenario might involve displacement. Of either the slum-dwellers‘ businesses or their usual

clientele, due to the new wealthier neighbours who would move in and price them out, or

displacement of the whole slum altogether because of gentrification

Another one could involve slum-dwellers‘ illegally renting out their apartment, either by

themselves moving out of it and squatting elsewhere or just making room for new squatters

within whatever vacant space they can find in the new building. Or these new squatters might

settle near the building without explicit consent.

Or, third, perhaps everything goes according to plan. The government earns a significant

premium when the developer constructs on its land. The slum-dwellers get a free apartment. The

developer makes a profit. And upper class citizens get luxury housing.The SRA calls this a win-

win scenario.

What I wonder is: is this 3rd

scenario in fact the most efficient scenario? It could be that there are

multiple efficient outcomes. Or it could be that efficiency would run counter to our idea of

development. For example,if it is reducing the number of slums that we define as successful

development, gentrification could mean just relocating the problem somewhere else.If it is

2David Kennedy, ―Some Caution about Property Rights as a Recipe for Economic Development,‖ Accounting,

Economics, and Law 1, no. 1 (2011): 11.

economic growth we desire as development, the most efficient outcomemight only be a one-time

increase, or it very well could be the gentrification.

The point is: if it‘s efficiency which is your guidepost for how to make a decision regarding

policy design, just letting buyers and sellers do their work tells us nothing about how to make

those choices or decide among possible outcomes.

Instead, you would have to resort to something outside of efficiency to actually make those

decisions. Perhaps it isa theory which could tell us in whose hands the value of resources would

most accumulate to benefit everyone. Or a theory that moving slum-dwellers somewhere outside

the city would be a disaster in terms of its media coverage. Or one whichsays the government‘s

budget is limited to argue against the state‘s financial involvement in the scheme.

You could indeed try to develop a really robust model that takes all of these factors into account,

quantifies them, predicts a greater variety of outcomes, and lets the most efficient one emerge.

But you would still have to decide how to prioritise the relative importance of these factors. For

example: why you think less government spending would produce a good outcome, orwhy you

think this factor should be quantified as less or more risky than another factor, and so on. No

matter how complicated and complex your model is, it would be very difficult to escape the

intense need to debate it out among competing and equally logical methods that could all be

argued to produce a type of market efficiency.

Empowerment

As for empowerment, it might seem that at least we know the end goal – poverty alleviation for

the poor, whether efficient or inefficient. The priority in designing the policy would be to

maximise the gains for the slum-dwellers.

Now, some modifications to the current SRA model might appear obvious. We could not put a

limiton the size of the individual flats which the slum-dwellers would receive. We could keep

the current practice ofinsisting thatslum-dwellers‘ be organised into co-operatives out of a belief

in power from greater numbers or ‗solidarity‘ as it is called elsewhere. And we could mandate

that 100% rather than just 70% consent of the slum, as it is now, is required for a builder to start

a project. Consent is often said to be crucial to determine if the policy is prioritising the

beneficiary in question, who in our case, are the slum-dwellers.

Now, I‘ve been using the term ‘slum-dwellers’ throughout this presentation as if I am referring

to something that is a monolith. Butwe know that any slum is rife with all sorts of differences

that we associate with diversity.It could be true slums have self-segregated by caste or religion.

But within a particular caste or religion, we know there are meaningfuldivisions and moreover,

there‘s the community’s own power hierarchy. There is also the desire to participate or not to

participate, or how to do so, in a rehabilitation scheme. We don‘t normally call this‗identity,‘ but

it‘s among the many differences that also mark any community.

Now the tricky thing is: the more you recognise the diversity of the community‘s desire, the

more attractive coercion could appear as an option to unify this diversity into solidarity to then

move therehabilitation process along. This coercion could mean anything from gentle

encouragement, to impassioned persuasion, to an aggressive overthrow. I say ‗coercion‘ only to

emphasise that aspect of it which requires power and the sort of power that means seizing the

hearts and minds of a collective to make it a collective interest.

It does seem rightthat ensuring that a co-op is present and taken seriously at stakeholder

meetings would encourage the possibility that their gains are maximized in the new property

regime. But political questions about organising the co-op are not answered just by virtue of the

co-opbeing presentat ‗The Decision Table.‘ There are many decision tables internal to the co-op

itself.3

For example: Does ‘maximisation of gains’ mean each co-op should grab as much it can in

terms of flat quality and low cost or would such a free-for-all mean rehabilitation would

onlyfavour thosemost powerfulto get the best apartments, in which case perhaps we should

emphasize quality?

If there is gentrification, shouldthe co-optake advantage of it preserve the financial gains or

should it prevent gentrification as part of some larger social movement with of other non-

organised slum communities?

These are questions for the policymaker too. If we don‘t want the private developerto only target

land where he can make a high profit,should weprioritise the most upwardly mobile slum

communities who we think can be more easily integrated into the middle class or should we

target those at the very bottom whom wethink are most in need of rehabilitation?

All of these dilemmas: the costs of gentrification, of what type of slum to target, of how to create

a collective interest. These are all questions about allocation. And there is no technical consensus

or best practicefor how to proceed with these choices.

Whether you have a theory of efficiency or a theory of empowerment, you wouldnot be able to

decide as a general rule of thumb ―in whose hands property rights would most realize the gains

with your definition of development without rehearsing through these very intimately political

questions. Questions about allocation and distribution.This questioning doesn‘t stop once we‘ve

decided on design, it goes throughout implementation,and it will chip away at the capacity for

efficiency or empowermentto emerge as a rule, as something generalisable, predictive, and

indeed, scientific.

3. Microfinance

Now the last approach: microfinance.Microfinance looks like a different beast altogether.

Microfinance largely claims to derive its effectiveness by chastising law and putting to workthe

informal norms of a poor community.

The idea is to give small loans, called microcredit loans, sometimes without a contract, and often

timeswithout collateral – collateral whichlow-income applicants often cannot provide. In our

case, slum-dwellers might be looking to purchase a home, so that is the very thing they cannot

provide proof of to qualify for a loan.

It‘s more often you see microcredit in rural rather than urban India, to groups rather than

individuals, and lent for anypurpose rather than strictly for housing. That being said, housing

3Duncan Kennedy, ―The Limited Equity Coop as a Vehicle for Affordable Housing in a Race and Class Divided

Society,‖ Harvard Law Journal 46, no. 1 (2002): 85-125

finance is now on the agenda for slum development in a big way. As is ‗financial inclusion‘ – a

way to poverty alleviation by getting the poor into the circuitry of the formal credit economy in

the hopes of integrating them in the formal economy at large. Poverty alleviation

throughfinancial inclusion is the end vision for the microcredit expert.A slum-dweller‘s ability

to purchase a home is on that route.

For many experts,the proof that microcredit works is measured in its low default rates, in how

the poor manage so successfully to pay back the loan plus possible interest. The consensusseems

to be where you forego contract and collateral, you can rest assured that the informal norms in a

tight-knit community will weed out risky applicants and make those who do borrow successfully

repay the loan.You don‘t need a contract because there is a social contract already at work in the

community – and apparently the communityknows who can be trusted to borrow and repay.

Now, housing finance for slum-dwellers in Mumbai does not necessarily always foregocontract,

and microfinance institutions (or MFIs)very well might lend to individuals rather than groups,

but this is not the case for all of them.Some MFIsin fact will require you to have successfully

repaid a group loan before qualifying for an individual one.

For the sake of time tonight, I‘ll focus specifically on the issue of collateral.Collateral is

typically the asset you pledge to a bank for a loan. It‘s something valuable that you would not

want the bank to seize in case you can‘t repay the loan but, for this very reason, you pledge to

show you are serious enough about repayment that you are willing to give up that asset.

Without collateral,the groupcan borrow from an MFIand lend to those it knows

intimately.Where you have MFIs giving loans to individuals, the MFI might locally hire loan

officers from the community itself to capitalise on this intimate knowledge. Or where this is not

possible or desirable, MFIsmight send their own loan officers directly to the community to

engage in the collection of what will be termed ‗data‘ to create a database where the MFI will

aggregate information to evaluate each new customer‘s capacity to repay.

Both thisdataand this intimate knowledge seem to serve as a sort of substitute for the need for

collateral because they are said to mitigatethe risk of default.

Now, like I said, low or no default is oftenthe expert‘s evidence that microcredit does in fact

work.An expert might say that whether or not either intimate knowledge or data is responsible

for increasing credit access among the poor, the mere presence alone of MFIs facilitates credit

access since prior to microfinance, commercial banks had strict collateral requirements that

excluded the poor.

In a sense, this is certainly true. More people now have access to credit because of microfinance.

Whether this outcome of financial inclusion is a type of poverty alleviation ought to be the

relevant question for the development expert.Microcreditcan be said to get slum-dwellers who

could not normally afford housing, the chance to finance a home. But to generalise this as a

possibility that will do more than just get low-hanging fruit is the specificaspect of microcredit I

am interested in. Especially when an expert presents replacing collateral with intimate

knowledge or data as a reproducible formula for poverty alleviation.

To get at what I‘m trying to suggest, we could imaginewhat features the risky borrowermight

have.Perhaps a volatile income, no fixed or stable place of residence, a weak if any social

network, and so on. The more this profile of the risky borrower appears identical to the profile

of the so-called ‗poorest of the poor,‘ the more default risk could appearas a sort ofproxy

forpoverty.

This contradiction is worth dwelling on. Foregoing collateral increases credit access, but

replacing it through a screening process – data or intimate knowledge –so an MFI can keep its

operations running, reproduces the dilemma for which the microfinance expertcriticised

commercial lending to begin with.

This is a strange, unresolvable sort of knot. Financial inclusion taken to its most inclusive limits

could mean also the end of the capacity to institutionalize microfinance.When you get down to it,

many programming models arrive at such a knot: where their desire to keep their operations

running goes right against the absolute fulfilment of their mission. These are things the experts

who present microcredit as a formula for poverty alleviation in the slum are not willing to

address, consciously or otherwise.

*

I want toconclude with architectural theory because where architecture is concerned, its theorists

have long since critiqued the field‘s unique scientific aspirations. And they have drawn out the

implications of what it means to treat architecture as a science.

Early modern theorists held that, among the arts, architecture was exceptional in that it has a

‗practical use.‘ It provides shelter and order. In particular, it composes the city as we know it

today.The city as a unifying grid. Thisis an architectural concept and it is intimately linked to

the development expert‘s idea of a formal economy into which property rights or financial

inclusion would usher in the poor.

The late modern theorists want to challenge these ideas. Where the modern building was thought

to derive its form purely from the logic of its practical use and where itwould liberate society by

heralding the future of the city, these other theorists had a sharply different idea. For them, that

geometry could be the axiomatic foundation of the building, and that form could correspond to

function in a one-to-one manner, were both theories that were full of contradictions even though

they present themselvesas the apex of rational design.History was proof that architecture was not

going to liberate society through its science. In fact, the modern building was just yet another

commodity form firmly within the economic mode of a society and not a way to transcend it.

Now this is a very particular reading of a certain place of history. And it starts to get at the

political attitudes of these late modern theorists. They are largely from Western Europe and the

U.S., writing after immense post-war social upheaval in theirsocieties1968 onwards. The

theorists I have in mind are ManfredoTafuri, who for me is the exemplar of this critical

atmosphere, but alsoa few others.

Where the Mumbai slum is concerned, what could we learn from these theorists? One way into

this discussion is an analysis of typology.To think of slum dwellings as an architectural type. But

in doing this, it‘s difficult to avoid two ideas that went against what these post-1968 theorists

critiqued. The firstthat design in the slum is not an aestheticdecision but instead purely derived

from functionality. Therefore it is to suggest there are more advanced, i.e. better, functional

designsfor slum-dwellers to aspire to.

The other idea hard to avoid is the reverenceof the slum as a distinct practice of architecture:

where this reverence becomes a fetish of some pre-modern authenticity, itvalorises the very

poverty which it claims to want to alleviate.

Betweenmaking the slumthe lowest aesthetic denominator or a fetish of the primitivethat never

lets go of poverty, the slum as typology becomes a static object in the eyes of the typologist.

Soinstead I conclude this talk with 2 separate thoughts.

First: Whenever the slum is considered as a distinct type, as a distinct entity, it seems to me to be

the imagined result of an expert – either from architecture or from development. I mean this in a

very specific way. The slum as something I am able to talk about in this room, or at the World

Bank, or the VeniceBiennial, seems to be an opportunityto project our own ideas about how we

should organise urban society. In other words, definingthe slum either as a problem or as a

unique designis a way to position yourself. Are you a wide-eyed dreamer enraptured with the

entrepreneurial possibilities that you think the slum contains or are you a neoliberal apologist

ignoring the open defecation in front of your eyes and nose? Are you a theorist of economic

growth ready to fulfill the demand for luxury living that will make Mumbai a world-class city or

are you a bleeding-heart activist who wants to ensure the gains realized from slum development

are channeled back into raising the class status of the poor?

Each of these people has a different idea of what is wrong with the slum, with what a slum is to

begin with. And each time they evoke what is really going on in the slum, as a foundation for

their solution, this ‗baseline truth‘ can be shown to be underwritten by decisions they claim their

expertise necessarily invokes, but decisions that ultimately could be contested and therefore

decided another way.4

Second: If we want to maintain a certain spirit ofTafuri‘s writings, it seems to me there are some

things when it comes to slum development that we are anxious to discuss. I imagine the desire

for mastery and liberation for which architecture has so long desired to be a science of building

is something those of us interested in slum development can learn from. I wonder how the desire

of development to become a science is not only about creating a terrain to master it. But also

how this desire isabout an aggressive optimism for liberating the poor.Specifically, a desire for

liberation through science that at the same time refuses to confront the more

uncomfortablequestionsabout what a world without a slum would mean: If there is no slum, what

does that meanfor the service economy of an aspiring world-class city like Mumbai? If there is

no slum, what does that mean for consumerism?What does that mean for the global economy?

And of course: If there is no slum, what does that mean for the international expertise-driven

funding apparatus that is working to eradicate it?

These questions arethe topic of an expertise yet to be born.In the meanwhile, I leave you to

ponder them.Thank you.

4David Kennedy, ―Challenging Expert Rule: The Politics of Global Governance,‖Sydney Journal of International

Law 5 (2005): 0-24