CUGS Global Vantage Point Series with Ratoola Kundu

1. Sex, Lies and Red Tape:
The story of Redevelopment in Kamathipura
GLOBAL VANTAGE POINT LECTURE SERIES
CENTER FOR URBAN AND GLOBAL STUDIES, TRINITY COLLEGE ,HARTFORD
Dr. Ratoola Kundu
Centre for Urban Policy and Governance
School of Habitat Studies, TISS, Mumbai

2. Introduction
• Urban redevelopment as the site of urban
transformations and contestations – top down and
bottom up processes, state and market, intermediary
actors,
• Redevelopment is messy and unpredictable,
produces an uneven geography - outcomes are
contingent upon the circumstances
• Groups, multiple actors negotiate redevelopment in
contradictory ways, (support and resist) need to
study it in the context – homegrown neoliberalism?
• Alternative urban development trajectories?
• Durability or temporary permanence of
neighbourhoods in relation to space and livelihoods?

3. Structure of the talk
• Situating Kamathipura in Mumbai
• Spaces and livelihoods in Kamathipura
• Mumbai’s land and housing market
transformations
• History of redevelopment efforts in Kamathipura
• Resistance, opposition, and support for
redevelopment
• Socio-spatial outcomes

5. Kamathipura and the city of Mumbai
• Strategic central location in Island City, E ward, close to mills, dock,
central station- but peripheral to policy/investment/infrastructure
development
• 16 lane neighbourhood, bound by major roads, dense and
congested, 3 to 4 storey buildings, very little ventilation, or
sanitation, dilapidated , under Rent Control, 25 hecatres,
• 2nd
largest red light district in Asia, “tolerated zone” since 1880s,
zone of containment, synonymous with commercial sex work
(11,13,14)- not for ‘respectable women’, a 24*7 district, men from
all over the city come here
• Rest of the neighbourhood – Kamathis (migrant construction
labourers, Telegu community, Muslims, Bengali and UP migrants,
marwaris and jain community, Dalit sanitation workers)

8. Spaces and livelihoods in KP
• Dense networks of informal economy, economy of
“making do”, survival, (informal, illegitimate, illegal)
• Informal economy linked to sex work
• Circuits of capital flowing into more formal domains
• Commercial sex work interdependent on economic
structure of the city
• Activities and land uses that are dynamic -both temporal
and spatial
• Dependent on cheap rental housing
• Flexibility of space and its use, under the radar, complicity
of the police and planners,

11. Transformations in KP
• Demographic shifts
• Decline of brothel based commercial sex work post 80s
(AIDS, raids by police, communal riots, abolitionist NGOs,
decline of mills)
• From brothels to small manufacturing units – jeans dyeing,
recycling clothing, shoe and bag making
• Decline of economy linked to brothel based sex work
• Rapid dilapidation of buildings, multiple tenancies
• Redevelopment of individual buildings, but slow, case to
case basis, pressure from community, or smaller builders

13. Transformation of Mumbai’s land and housing market
• Inadequate housing amidst spiralling land and housing values
has remained a theme that has dominated the city from the
colonial to the contemporary period
• 3 broad periods of transition (state-market axis changing)
- Colonial (rise of propertied class, chawl like housing for
workers on the periphery, measurement and valuation of land
parcels, slum clearance, BMC, BDD, private players)
- Post independence to late 80’s (state intervention in housing
and land market, Rent Control Act, cessed buildings, MHADA
and MRRB, ULCRA, Slum rehab)
- Late 80’s onwards (commodification of land, high land prices,
pvt. Players, market based planning instruments, influx of FDI
in real estate, peripherlization of poor, renewal of core as well
as new housing development in preriphery), exacerbation of
socio-spatial inequality

15. Redevelopment
• Redevelopment has thus converted
residents and the State, as well as
politicians into entrepreneurs.
• Redevelopment is thus a key site where
contestations, negotiations, and conflicts
are being played out.

16. The Politics of Redevelopment in Kamathipura: coalitions and conflicts
Colonial 1957 - 77 1977- 2007 2007- 2010 2013
Rebuilding
tenements
Slum tag, old
buildings torn
down
urban renewal
scheme, and single
building redevt
DB realty scheme Landlord’s
associations, DCR
33(7), (9)
Infrastruct
ure added
building a few
amenities,
garden or
open spaces
Comprehensive
development of
amenities, single
building
restructuring of KP
– roads, sewers,
beautification
Proposal for a
Balajinagar,
cluster devt.,
amenities
Elites and
BMC,
landlords
State and
central
govt.,landlords
, pagdi, rent
control
MHADA, World
Bank, MRRB, BMC,
private trust,
politicians,
community leaders,
brothel madams
Private player,
MHADA. as
facilitator, got a
spl. Project tag,
builders, shop
keepers
Land lords,
builder, tenants,
agents , PMC,
lawyers,
developers , shop
keepers,
community
association
Grid
pattern
streets,
new
stalled after a
few buildings
torn down and
rebuilt
Stalled after survey
several families in
transit camp,
included sex
Abandoned,
houses and
tenancies bought,
excluded and
2 factions,
telugus/small
landlords versus
marwaris/jains,

23. Reflecting on the multiple redevelopment
processes in Kamathipura
• The strategies of redevelopment and the coalitions of actors and institutions
involved in the processes of redevelopment are diverse, often acting in
contradiction to one another. Uneven urban development.
• neoliberal urban development theories have focussed on the ways in which
the state and the market collude to displace and dispossess the urban poor
• Kamathipura case study highlights the experiences of stakeholders other than
the state and the market, focusing on the local mobilizers, the fixers, in
between agents who work in the realm in between the state and the market
and are yet working to redevelop the neighbourhood, but on their own terms,
a terrain of negotiated redevelopment
• agency of different stakeholders, their capacities to act and influence
redevelopment processes
• Strategies range from – visibilising and shaming sex work from tolerating it, the
circulation of lies, falsities, half truths and rumours about projects (especially
compensation, relocation, rehabilitation), deeply politicised
negotiations/exceptions around the regulations and rules – flexibilizing
territoriality

24. Durability of Kamathipura:
an alternative urban development trajectory?
•Not a large scale restructuring but a slow, graduated
processes with contradictory/opposing factions
•Change in relationships and power dynamics between
different groups, and the spaces and livelihood
practices that the place has accommodated
•Expulsion of certain activities – made illegal and
visible, more unprofitable, selective exceptions and
neglect by the state
•Accommodation of new interest groups and activities

26. Durability of Kamathipura:
an alternative urban development trajectory?
• push back against the singular ideas of redevelopment that
the state or the market has pushed onto the neighbourhood
• fragmentation of communities and conflicts of interests, new
configurations of actors collaborating together or contesting
redevt.
• The stakes are complex and interconnected, thus rendering
any effort by certain actors such as the state, market or civil
society, towards understanding these relations and at gaining
influence, impossible
• Creating possibilities for spaces of opposition, resistance -
alternative outcomes to displacement/dispossession

27. Kamathipura by night
O Kamatipura/Tucking all seasons under your armpit/You squat in the mud here/I go
beyond all pleasures and pains of whoring and wait/For your lotus to bloom. –
Namdeo Dhassal , Marathi poet and Dalit activist