The spatial and social dynamics of housing are pressing contemporary concerns for scholars, policymakers, and residents seeking to improve well-being in the twenty-first century city. Yet these issues have long occupied urbanists, social scientists, and historians of South Asia. A particularly robust literature offers theoretical and empirical guidance for tracing the colonial spatial histories, postcolonial political and social mobilizations, and patterns of environmental and human health associated with slum housing in South Asia. Two new books, The Durable Slum and No One Will Let Her Live, offer unique contributions to this extensive literature.
What unites these books is their common interest in resilience, another focus for those concerned with the twenty-first century city. The two authors address resilience from very different perspectives: Liza Weinstein considers the physical resilience of Dharavi as a sociospatial form in spite of myriad pressures to remove or reform it, while Claire Snell-Rood considers individual women who employ very personal strategies of social, moral, and physical resilience as they reside in, and experience the demolition of, a Delhi slum. Weinstein's study is centrally concerned with the surprising spatial stability of a distinctive and well-known Mumbai slum; Snell-Rood focuses on modes of creating health and well-being within it.
The Durable Slum opens with a vivid description of Dharavi, the settlement that punctuates dominant accounts of contemporary Mumbai and global-scale accounts of urbanization. Yet Dharavi's renown and massive scale also mark it as a formidable exception to the fate predicted for, and realized by, so many other slums in Indian cities. As Weinstein describes, urban theory and myriad policy initiatives would predict the reform and reinvention of a slum like Dharavi. Its potential real estate value, and its location in the heart of Mumbai, lead us to expect it to fall into the patterns theorized by noted urbanists like David Harvey—namely that such spaces will succumb to powerful forces driven by “accumulation by dispossession” (Weinstein pp. 13–14).Footnote 1
Yet in contrast to predictions derived from global-scale formulations of neoliberal capitalist urbanization, Weinstein demonstrates that the circumstances that have preserved Dharavi are highly contingent and place-specific. Not only is the Indian case of liberalization unique, but so too is the complex of circumstances that seem to have prevented the redevelopment of Dharavi.
The Durable Slum thus pivots on a critical puzzle for urban theory: how can land with such vast potential worth defy financial, political, and environmental incentives to clear and redevelop it? What has produced spatial and social resilience in a place so seemingly unstable as Asia's largest slum? Weinstein is careful not to romanticize the durability of Dharavi. “Staying put,” she notes, is double-edged; it perpetuates real forms of marginality and vulnerability even as it suggests forms of social and economic resilience. The result is an excellent analysis of the tension between global capital in the abstract and Indian urbanization and politics in lived experience.
The Durable Slum covers a vast literature and provides a comprehensive historical overview of slum development and slum policy in Mumbai. It then draws from an engaging ethnography to bring the complex of institutional, political, and economic forces that vie for power over Dharavi's development into view. What emerges is a multi-scalar portrait of an urban spatial form that defies our expectations: a Dharavi so deeply connected to the broader (sometimes integrated and sometimes highly fragmented) processes through which Mumbai itself has developed, that it has become, in Weinstein's words, “too big to fail” (Weinstein, p. 20).
A portion of the book reviews in great detail the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), which was launched in 2004 and was the most recent comprehensive attempt to reinvent the slum. After providing a clear sense of its historical antecedents, Weinstein describes the vast terrain between the DRP's vision of redevelopment and the actual attempt to enact it. Here, we glimpse the contours of political action in Dharavi, residents’ strategies and negotiations, and the fine details that allowed Dharavi to remain at a time in Mumbai's history when many other slums were being remade, relocated, or forcibly evicted.
The Durable Slum has critical implications for specialized studies of Indian urbanization, but also for broader theories of urbanization in an era of coupled financial and environmental vulnerabilities—a time when sociospatial resilience itself has become an organizing concept across a range of disciplines.
No One Will Let Her Live offers a view of resilience more grounded in sociality and self-making than in spatial reproduction. Snell-Rood examines the personal strategies for cultivating health and well-being employed among her women interlocutors in a Delhi slum. She queries modes of making “inner well being” (Snell-Rood, p. 3), assuming the variety of marginalizing social and physical circumstances that slum life represents. Snell-Rood sets out to understand how women with various caste, religious, and other differences, but who nevertheless reside in the same slum, cope with those circumstances. If Weinstein's analytical registers span from global to grounded, Snell-Rood's are profoundly personal and everyday: the narrated self, the family, the neighbor, and the always changing contours of “community” within the slum.
The analytic in No One Will Let Her Live hinges on broad formulations of “women” and “health” that allow Snell-Rood to make a wide-ranging assessment of connections between the social conditions associated with poverty, marginality, and slum life and her interlocutors’ personal strategies for, and narrations of, creating health and well-being.
Snell-Rood draws from participant observation in a slum that, in sharp contrast to the durability of Dharavi, was demolished during the course of the research. The demolition experience, and the notable absence of collective resistance or social solidarity in its wake, allow her to underline the importance and prominence of her interlocutors’ strategies of self-care and well-being-making. The overall portrait is one of individual, and individualized, resilience, in which the women she describes crafted forms of moral selfhood that created “a form of well being beyond the reach of those on whom they depended” (Snell-Rood, p. 3).
By her own admission, Snell-Rood's initial intention was to seek, find, and analyze cohesion and solidarity among her women interlocutors, presuming an automatic social collective that would emerge from a shared precarity of social, environmental, and economic circumstances (Snell-Rood, p. 17). Finding instead a volatile and dynamic complex of affinities, associations, and relationships, she refocused her ethnographic lens on individual women's personal agentive capacities and the manner in which each cultivated circumstances of health and well-being. The processes she describes often defied a single scale or category of social organization, involving strategic relationships, responses, and modes of self-care.
No One Will Let Her Live is organized across frames of family, neighbors, and the wider community, noting in each instance how women interlocutors positioned themselves in relation to one another—sometimes through affinity, and other times through calculated distance and separation. When the collective experience of slum demolition fails to produce a discernable collective, or even a defiant response, Snell-Rood argues that her interlocutors were motivated by an idea of citizenship more bound to imperatives of personal socioeconomic mobility than to a defiant quest for collective socioeconomic justice.
A final substantive chapter reflects on some ways that the cultivation of home spaces provided grounds for her interlocutors to contest external ideas of slums as places of filth and environmental disorder. This section uses a specific conceptualization of “the environment” that allows Snell-Rood to highlight ways that the fashioning of home related to narrations of well-being and health.
Snell-Rood draws on a wide range of literatures and observations to produce a compelling, if sometimes uneven, work. Read together with Weinstein's study, it provides ethnographic portraits of slum residents’ everyday strategies for creating well-being under conditions of poverty, social marginality, and spatial precarity. The books inform one another: we might understand the absence of social solidarity in the Delhi slum, for instance, with the historical, economic, and institutional analyses that aid Weinstein's approach. Likewise, Weinstein's account of Dharavi would be enriched with a gendered and narrated understanding of its residents’ experience of health and well-being there.
Together, No One Will Let Her Live and The Durable Slum offer valuable portraits of urban resilience: of a specific slum as a spatial form, on one hand, and of the physical, moral, and agentive self under conditions of precarity and marginality on the other. Both are suitable for undergraduate courses in urban studies, anthropology, sociology, and geography, as well as more specialized courses in regional urbanization. Weinstein's book also speaks directly to theoretical and empirical issues in urban political ecology, while Snell-Rood's is relevant to urban public health and women and gender studies.
