The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series under the
Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely
to the speaker. We hope you enjoy.
>> We are really really excited to start this year's
season with a lecture by Mark W. Frazier.
Mark is a professor of politics at The New School and he's the academic director
of the China India, or I guess we should say India China Institute.
>> I always want to change the name, but. >> Okay. The China India-India China Institute.
He's also the author of a great deal of contemporary research and just among that
I will point out the 3 monographs "The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace,"
"Socialist Insecurity" which is about the PRC's pension system, and hopefully today
we're gonna hear, I suspect we're gonna hear something about his newest book called
"The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay"
which is coming out really really soon from the Cambridge University Press.
We're really lucky to have gotten Professor Frazier to speak to us today
and I hope you all give him a warm welcome.
Thanks very much for that introduction Nick and thanks
to the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative and to the Cornell East Asia Program.
It's great to be here. I've given a couple of talks at Cornell going back to I think
10 years ago. But this is certainly the biggest audience I've had and I'm really
looking forward to talking to you tonight about my book project and some of
the more contemporary parts of it. And I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute.
But the first thing I think I'd like to address is why this comparison. I, as you got
in the introduction, I've always worked on China. I've worked on China for 20 years
in doing the research and teaching the 2 books that were just mentioned.
But about 8 to 10 years ago I began getting really interested in India-China comparisons
for reasons I can talk about, maybe discuss with you afterwards. But I was hired in 2012
to come to the new school and work at a place called the India China Institute
which promotes scholarship and teaching and gives fellowships, postdocs, this kind
of thing, undergraduate travel grants to students who are interested in working on
comparing both places. And so I've been able to benefit greatly from the resources
and the colleagues that I've come into contact with not just at the new school
but in Shanghai and in Mumbai especially, which is a new place of research for me.
And when I began this project, going back to my work and interest in Shanghai labor
politics, textile workers, I kept coming across mentions that the city, as it was
called then, Bombay, in the 20th century, also had a very large textile workforce
and a very lively, in political terms, textile workforce. And so thinking about how that
comparison might work, I thought for sure that there would be a lot of research
publications and this sort of thing done that compared the 2 cities. And in fact
you come across a lot of casual comparisons. And I'm talking about
these consulting reports that come out from time to time on how to build
smart cities or what are the lessons of Shanghai that Mumbai can learn,
this sort of thing. They have kind of a similar skyline as you see there.
But more often than not what one sees, as I say at the bottom of this slide,
many people view the 2 cities as incomparable. And by that I mean,
whether it's Americans, Chinese, even Indians themselves, the first thing
that comes to mind with Mumbai is Mumbai has slums and Shanghai, along with other
Chinese cities, no slums, which is a claim we can get into later. It's much more
complicated than that. Shanghai, even with so many advances it has made as a city
in terms of urban development, has what you could rightly call slums today.
The other point that many Americans, Chinese, Indians make is that China has this
world-class infrastructure - the largest metro system in the world by number
of kilometers, among many other infrastructural projects, all the bridges,
the Pudong new area, that's the icon almost for 21st century China. Mumbai, yes it has
a skyline of sorts that's coming along much more gradually, a metro system
that's coming along very slowly. But another way that people say incomparable.
And then the third way in which people say incomparable is that you have electoral
politics, you have democracy in the city of Mumbai, India's national political
institutions, courts, free press, on and on and on, political parties. And of course
you do not have those in the case of Shanghai, in the case of China.
So these claims are not crazy, they're not completely misinformed, they are true
to a certain extent. But as I began looking at the long history of the 2 cities, I discovered
that maybe these divergences are relatively recent and in fact they had a quite remarkable
parallel trajectory over the course of the 20th century. Both cities were really built,
in the modern sense of the word, by the British. The British in Shanghai in consort with
a multinational governance called the Shanghai Municipal Council that ran the area.
You see here the international settlement. The French had their own concession area
here and the old walled city was here. And you had a very fragmented urban
sovereignty going on in Shanghai. You had constant debate. This is the classic
lilong, longtang, tenement housing that was built in many parts of the international
settlement, some in the French concession too. You had informal settlements, you had
millions of migrants moving to Shanghai in the 1910s, 20s, 30s to look for work,
being driven out of rural areas, working in cotton mills oftentimes, working in the
textile sector. In Bombay, of course not a multinational governance,
not an international settlement like you had in Shanghai as a treaty port but a more
old-fashioned kind of colony that the British established formally in the 19th century;
they had been there before that time. But you also have tenement housing called
chawls, which still exists in many ways today. And you have not so much fragmented
sovereignty but you have British running some parts of the town. You have a lot of
informal sovereigns operating in various parts of the city. And I can talk more about that,
but the subject of the book is this remarkable parallel and contentious politics.
And for those of you who are doing political science you may have come across this term
before, but it's basically you could define it as politics by other means. Politics in which
people are trying to get what they want not by using the courts, not by voting,
not by doing ordinary kinds of political participation using institutions
but going outside the institutional channels. So strikes, riots, uprisings, rebellions,
various things, all of these are covered in the book, and in the more recent years,
the latter part of the 20th century, student protests, these very significant riots
that took place in Bombay. And I will cover none of these events during the talk today.
If you wanna ask me about any of them I'm happy to provide information as best I can,
but I will recommend that this summer the book will be out with Cambridge University
Press. We have the cover so far only and I've finished the page proof so I'll show you
some tables from the book. But what I really wanna talk about is what happens after this
century of contentious politics, what does the 21st century look like? And I'm going to
read just a couple of short anecdotes that are actually in the opening of the book
that describe and try to represent what new contentious politics looks like
in 21st century Shanghai and Mumbai. By the way when I switch back and forth
between Bombay and Mumbai, the city was called Bombay throughout the 20th century.
There was a political party that came to power in 1995, and I can tell you more
about it later if you're interested, the political party when they came to power decided
to change the name of the city to more closely reflect the Marathi language term
for the city, and that's Mumbai.
So here we have, few years ago, Nanjing Road. On the night of June 10th, 2017,
a crowd of 1,000 demonstrators protested in the midst of Shanghai's busy central
pedestrian shopping street East Nanjing Road. The marchers represented a distinct
subset of Shanghai's property owning classes. They were waidiren, literally outsiders,
who were ineligible to purchase formal housing because they had not met several
stringent requirements, one of which actually is proof of marriage.
They instead bought housing in buildings that had originally been designated
as commercial use only. Savvy developers who couldn't sell the buildings for commercial
purposes sold them instead to these people by installing makeshift gas lines,
wiring for household appliances, bathrooms into spaces that were designated for use
as commercial, banks and so forth. But in late May the Shanghai Municipal
Government, late May of 2017, stopped its practice of looking the other way,
of condoning such illegal conversions of commercial buildings, and announced
that service providers will shut off the gas, shut off the waste water services
to these buildings. So these people, precarious homeowners, had bought
these spaces, had spent a lot, spent their life savings as they pointed out,
to buy a unit in these commercial use buildings, and they stood to lose not only
their homes, but their life savings, their investments, since these properties
were virtually unsellable because of the newly enforced regulations.
Using social media and video uploads the protesters stated in a comment
attached to one of their videos quote, "We understand that there could be
transgressions on the part of the developers, but we'd like to also ask the rule makers,"
the government, "to take into consideration our great predicament as the buyers
of such houses. Most of us," most of the buyers, "are just beguiled ordinary people
"who have spent generations of family savings just to have a place to live
"in the great city of Shanghai. And the newly issued rules would absolutely devastate
our hopes." The police quickly broke up the rally, arresting one participant,
but the Shanghai leaders were very quick to respond. And what did they do, did they
crack down on this, they find these people and arrest them? No. They responded
favorably to the protesters. Two days later they reversed course, the leaders did,
of Shanghai, and gave tacit consent to the continued conversion of these
commercial buildings into residential properties. Many observers in Shanghai
I happened to be there at the time, I did not get a chance to witness the protest
unfortunately, but everybody I talked to said that this was the work of Party Secretary
Han Zheng, who at that time was hoping he would get a seat on the top political body,
the Politburo Standing Committee. The 19th party congress was going to be held
in the fall of 2017 and he had made a big mistake in approving the crackdown
on commercial use housing, sparking protests, risking his possibility of getting
a seat on that Politburo Standing Committee, and so he quickly reversed course
and lo and behold he did get the seat on the Politburo Standing Committee.
Shifting to Mumbai a few years earlier.
In late July 2011 an estimated 50,000 mill workers embarked on what they termed
the "Long March." Maybe they knew something about Chinese Communist Party
history, I don't know. The Long March was from the textile district in central Mumbai
to the Azad Maidan, a big open space where a lot of protests are held, in the southern
part of the city. The march snarled traffic in the city's commercial and administrative
centers but otherwise saw no outbreaks of violence or police actions to arrest
the march participants. The march was remarkable in 2 respects.
The media's attention centered on the fact that workers had the support of otherwise
heated rivals across multiple political parties. One of them was the Bharatiya Janata Party,
the BJP, and its supporters in the Shiv Sena, and the rivals, the Communist Party of India
and its left-wing allies, also were supporting. So you kind of had the right and the left both
supporting these former mill workers. The extraordinary feature of the march
was the act itself. By 2011 it was very rare to see large-scale labor protests in the city
of Mumbai. The Long March, as one commentator put it, was quote "a throwback
"to the last century when South Mumbai, with its administrative buildings and
corporate offices would witness frequent demonstrations" close quote. An account
from the "Times of India" remarked that quote, "The scene was straight out
"of the 1960s when Mumbai was seen as the center of the labor movement" close quote.
This march had been organized by a group of labor unions led by a socialist union
called under the acronym GKSS, which stood at the forefront of a campaign
to provide housing, here's the connection with the first story, provide housing
for the city's laid off textile workers who numbered 145,000. Promises of free
housing for all the city's poor and low-income residents, including slum residents
and ex-mill workers, stretched back to 1995 when a Shiv Sena backed coalition came
to power in the state government. That was the same party that changed the name.
They also promised free housing for everyone in the city. This is electoral politics.
Free housing for slum residents and mill workers to be specific.
So housing for mill workers and land to build on had been a source of contention
over municipal development plans and court cases that followed as mill companies
sought to convert the land for high-end commercial and retail functions.
Again this is trying to convert mill land, industrial use land, into commercial land.
At these protests, at the rally where the march ended, the wife of a mill worker
declared, "Chawls," that's those worker tenements I showed a couple of slides ago,
"Chawls in central Mumbai have been replaced by malls." It rhymes.
"The state government should provide us with a roof over our heads" close quote.
And the chief minister of the state, this is like the prime minister of the large
state of Maharashtra, responded by setting up a committee to identify scarce land resources
on which worker housing could be built, and by 2017 15,000 out of the 145,000
workers and their families had received for free a 225-square-foot housing unit,
many of them situated on the former land occupied by mill compounds. The other
130,000 workers and families waited their turn, and the GKSS held occasional
demonstrations like this to speed up the pace of building without further delays.
So these 2 protests are representative, as I said, of a new pattern of contentious
politics in the 21st century about who gets to live and who gets to work in the city
and under what conditions. And it's really, as I'll say in more detail in a few slides,
it's about the question of almost citizenship. Not about who's Indian and who's Chinese,
everyone's a national citizen, but who belongs, who has the right to inhabit and work
in the city. And these are really important debates going on in both cities now.
Shanghai protests in the 21st century. The most prominent have been a couple of
nationalist protests that made lots of headlines. One 1999, an anti-American
protest. 2005, anti-Japanese. These of course are related to foreign policy
much more and nothing having to do really with local politics. Lots of stories about
nail households, families that refused to accept the unfair price and unfair
compensation offered to them by developers and stayed in place
as the land around them, the buildings around them were were dug up, excavated, and
hence the term nail household. It looks like a nail sticking up out of a board.
Not in my backyard kinds of protests. The one seen here in the picture is in 2008
when many many, I mean several tens of thousands of Shanghai residents,
protested against the plans to build the high-speed maglev train right through
their neighborhoods on the west side of the river. As many of you may know
there is a maglev train in Pudong going out to the airport. And these days
more increasingly lots of home sale swindles going on as people are persuaded to buy
at a certain price. When their building is finished they're thinking the price
will be higher. Turns out nowadays that after their unit has been completed
and the building's ready to be moved in to, the market price is way below what they
agreed to pay, what they did pay a year before. And there are many kinds of fights
over that for being ripped off. In Mumbai, lots of hawkers' protests,
street vendors who want to work in the city and want to sell their wares on the streets
and sidewalks; mill workers demanding housing as the case I just read you about;
many NGOs are very active in India and especially in Mumbai. Many of them advocate
for slum residents and for low-income, for the poor. Just as many NGOs are more
middle-class driven and are quite interested in creating what they call the slum-free
Mumbai. And the courts are supportive generally speaking of claims to kick out
people who have only moved to the city very recently. And as one of the people
I interviewed thinking about protests in Mumbai over the century and especially
over the last few decades said, the era of the big march, the big morcha, is over.
Even this, this is also from the 2011 Long March. This was a rare event
and really we don't expect to see future such mobilizations. What's happened here
is that the politics of the workplace is being supplanted by the politics of the neighborhood
and the city. Fights in strikes over wages, benefits, condition being supplanted
by disputes over residents, disputes over being relocated. I'm not saying that there are
no more disputes over wages and benefits. Of course we know in Chinese cities
there are many cases where unpaid migrant workers have to publicly protest against
the fact that they haven't been paid. But generally speaking we see much more
residents and neighborhood politics rather than wages, benefits, conditions.
Labor capital contention being, again, not completely eliminated
but citizenship contention, who belongs in the city, becoming just as hotly debated.
as old-fashioned labor capital contention. And housing becomes a marker
of citizenship, where you live. What kind of place you live in almost defines your
legal claims and status in the city. Housing of course has been a key area
of social policy, which I worked on in my earlier project. And I highlight 2 comments
here by prominent specialists in urban India and urban China. One, Arjun Appadurai
who said a while back that "housing is the single most critical site of this city's,"
of Mumbai's, "politics of citizenship." And Zhang Li, who has written lots about
migrant workers and urban citizenship, said in 2002 that "expanding home ownership
will produce new forms of social inclusion and exclusion and will thus become
a new site for contesting urban citizenship. so these claims they've been out there
for a while, but what I'm doing in this project is really showing empirically how it works
in practice. And a brief couple of slides for general background. Urban China,
urban India. You know, I'm sure, about the urban hukou, the urban household
registration versus the non-urban registration, that being a big divider in terms of what
access migrant workers can or cannot get in terms of access to the city. Chinese cities
in international comparative perspective, decent public services - water, electricity,
sewage, waste removal, schools - especially compared to India a better overall distribution
and delivery. And social policies - unemployment, pension, medical care,
health care expanded really rapidly, insurance anyway. There are many
problems remaining with the actual costs of health care and this sort of thing
and access to various clinics. In urban India you have, as I alluded to earlier, cutoff dates
so that if you arrive in Mumbai after the year 2000 it's almost like you are a migrant worker
in a Chinese city without an urban household registration. You're just eliminated
from many kinds of benefits - you can vote. Okay you can vote. You can go to court.
But in terms of the housing stuff I'll talk about, I'll show you, you have no chance.
Poor public services, again relative to China especially, and electoral politics, voting,
very important in urban India, as well as in recent years, like China, an expansion
in social legislation. Comparing the 2 cities, Shanghai has about twice the population
but it has a much larger, if you look at the top line, it is a provincial-level entity
and even the mayor and the party secretary of Shanghai has the equal rank of a provincial
governor or party secretary in China. Mumbai, much smaller area, very dense
as a result, very high densities in population. Formal housing, not even 60% live in places
that are actually registered and regulated and so forth, and 42% of the population
lives on 8% of the land in these highly dense slum settlements. And as best some people
can gather that as of 2011, this number may be a little higher, that 2 million,
maybe it's 2.2 now, have come after the year 2000 cutoff date. In Shanghai we have
about this 60-40 distribution in terms of having urban hukou not having urban hukou.
This is from 2015. People living in the urban periphery of Shanghai, generally speaking
recent migrants to the city, something like 5 million out of either of these, mostly
out of this one. In recent years the number has reached 27, 28 million and there's a big
campaign on now to reduce Shanghai's population by evicting people, by evicting
migrants, so that by 2020 next year we're going to have 25 million people in the city.
I can come back to this if there's interest but this just shows you some other Indian
cities. Extremely small land area from Mumbai, very high density in population,
really poor water connection, really poor sewage treatment as a percentage
of water supply, and very low road density In terms of road infrastructure.
For this project, again it's an extension of the book, but in more recent visits
I've been doing site visits along with local scholars from research institutes
and universities, interviewing a few experts, collecting policy documents, nothing unusual
or unique in terms of methods here. Though I hope to in the future, depending
on conditions in China, do more systematic work by particularly interviewing migrants
who have relocated from urban villages. And I'll show you more about what the urban
villages demolition looks like in relocation in a moment. So how does this all get started?
I would say we could call it the financialization of land or commodification without
privatization. Various regulations passed interestingly almost at the same year
in each city that transform the way urban land is dealt with. In China, in Shanghai
all urban land is owned by the state, but these regulations allow district
governments to lease land over long-term periods to commercial developers.
And the deal is that the district government will remove the residents and the commercial
developers will come in and build malls, high-end retail, hotels, etcetera. You know
the story if you've been to Shanghai or any large Chinese city. And in Mumbai
we have a similar kind of process going on. For a period there in the mid-1990s
the property values in Mumbai were the highest in the world. I haven't checked
recently but they're both really quite high. The question is who gets to use
the repurposed land, where are the residents relocated, and who gets compensated
and how and who does not?
As I just mentioned you got state-owned land in Chinese cities, urban land being
owned by the state, leased long term to real estate developers. So you have the demolition
and relocation of inner city residents on a mass scale, I'll show you a table
in a second that depicts that. In Mumbai on the right, in Parel district the photograph
is from, it's hard to see but there are chawls here in the foreground and a tower coming up
behind them. This is on textile mill lands. This is from the book and that's a page proof,
it's that large "F" in the background. But this table, if you look at the middle line,
you see that the peak was between the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century,
about 825,000 families. If you multiply that by 4, even maybe 5, you're talking 3 to 4 million
people being pushed out to suburban extensions and, by the latter part
of this period, to around the outer ring road. These days you're still getting pretty high
numbers of people being relocated, and now it's beyond the outer ring road
in the suburbs. In Mumbai the statistics are really shaky and difficult to come across.
But as best this estimate can tell from this source, about 450,000 families,
remember Mumbai is half the population of Shanghai so we're getting into almost
comparable territory when we're talking about half the number of households.
Other people say that it happens really in dribs and drabs, and you get over a 10-year
period maybe up to a million households being relocated. So this is another point
where the conventional wisdom says Shanghai, authoritarian government,
Chinese Communist Party, easy to move people out, therefore shanghai develops
the way it does. And in Mumbai we have voting, we have NGOs, we have courts,
we have democracy, can't move people as easily, when in fact the statistics show
some people are being moved in this period. So it's more difficult to just attribute it
to democracy versus authoritarian government. Who gets relocated and where?
Yangpu is the old textile district in Shanghai. There are many blocks, many neighborhoods
that still have this really old 1930s, 1940s housing. Textile workers still living in there
waiting to be relocated. The people who live in this Sanlin town in Pudong, this is taken
from 2017, they were moved not in 2017, they were moved in say 5 years earlier
in 2012. And as I talked with several of these relocated families they would say
something like "I have an 80-square-meter apartment now. Back there it was about
"10 square meters for 5 or 6 of us with shared toilets and shaky electricity.
"We now have an 80-square-meter apartment. We got here we had an 80-square-meter
"apartment, the property price then was about 8,500 renminbi per square meter
"so it was about 600, 700 thousand renminbi, 100,000 U.S. more or less, in 2012
"And now in the 5 years I've been sitting here, look at the price, the price has gone through
"the roof and now I have a 3 and a half million renminbi property, I have a 400, 500 thousand
U.S. dollars property." I mean they didn't put it in those terms, they were thinking
in renminbi, but it's an interesting process. So it's not surprising when I go with these
local researchers to talk to people in these neighborhoods they're not saying, as I think
sometimes the conventional wisdom would be is that we wanna stay here we're gonna be
a nail household. They desperately want to, I wouldn't say desperately, but they are
let's say amenable to being relocated to Sanlin when they can have that
as the compensation. And this is very different. Say 15, 20 years ago
they would come through a neighborhood like this, relocate people with buildings that were
unfinished, buildings that didn't have water yet, buildings that didn't have electricity or gas yet.
And that's where you saw a lot of the protests and disturbances, over the unfair process
of relocation. But now there is this, for now anyway while property prices remain super
elevated, there is this. Turning to urban villages where migrants to Shanghai live.
Here is the Zhayincun urban village. Not so far from Fudan University,
some of you may know, or Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
I've given talks at both places. They go wait where is that I've never heard of it,
I say it's across the street you should go over there sometime and look.
Migrant workers here, this is one of 36 urban villages in Shanghai on collective
land. It's still agricultural land owned by the members of the rural collective,
surrounded now of course by urban land. But in some respects it's its own self-governed
area where the members of the collective make certain decisions. They don't have
complete sovereignty of course but they make decisions on the grassroots governance
and the management of the space. You can see they're not so keen on electric
code safety. And this means that this is gonna be demolished soon, this character 差.
As I mentioned earlier the government is trying to reduce the population
by getting rid of these urban villages. The phrase you hear all the time is chaotic,
dirty, cheap. 差, shortcomings; and 黄, pornographic, there's illicit stuff going on
inside of these urban villages. So the members of the collective get compensated
very handsomely for when the urban government comes in and makes the deal
and it's brought under urban township or district management, but the tenants,
the migrants, get nothing. Migrants in Shanghai even, as this chart shows,
live a very precarious existence in terms of having only a verbal contract, very few
written contracts for their rental. The facilities are, if you've ever spent time
in Shanghai in the winter you know that heating is pretty much of an absolute must,
and hardly any to speak of in the urban villages in Shanghai compared to Beijing
where it's essential, Guangzhou maybe less important. Air conditioning, internet.
This is from Fulong Wu's study of urban villages. Here is a place in Minghang,
an urban village in Minghang District. And I know with the light in the room you
may not be able to see. This is the electric tower. That's the same one 6 months later.
So this urban village of Liujia Qiang has been wiped out. One of the farmers
who I talked to there had been receiving 400,000 renminbi in rent from the tenants
and he's the landlord so to speak. He was compensated 80,000 renminbi
per square meter and becomes a U.S. millionaire as a result of being dispossessed.
The migrants are out of luck. They're gone. This is the biggest urban village in Shanghai
that was demolished in 2016. Han Zheng, the guy I mentioned at the beginning
of the talk came by in the early part of 2016 and that was the signal for the company
that was doing this demolition to really kick it into gear, get moving, move out
31,000 migrants, find places for these wholesale markets and stalls to be relocated
way out in the far periphery. Just like the previous slide and the collective members
the just like the previous slide with the collective, members of the collective,
the village households, they get that 80 square meter, that's the standard,
80 square meter, 800-, 900-square-foot unit. This is taken from a tower that they took me
up to and we were looking down on the demolished urban village. But this was one
of the units that the people would be living in. I'll go through Mumbai quickly as we are
looking at 5:16.
Parel district, this is the old textile district, like Yangpu District in Shanghai.
And you see, this is a large textile mill compound, you see some trees,
you see some buildings that will be significant in a second. But basically
the way that the textile sector left Mumbai is interesting. By the 1980s the value
of the land is much greater than what you can make producing textiles.
And there was a strike in which the 250,000 then workers went out. But the mill owners,
knowing that the land was - it was a great excuse for them to not negotiate
with the workers and to essentially let the strike go on forever so that the mills
have an excuse to be shut down, go bankrupt, close for business.
But the question of who owns the mill land is interesting. The fact that the British
leased this land to private companies a hundred years ago for pennies
gets a debate going about when that land is commodified, like I said earlier,
who gets the money? The mill companies? Why should they get it? They don't own
the land, the government owns the land and it's supposed to be used for industrial
purposes. There are these regulations I mentioned earlier, the 2001 regulations,
and I will get into a lot of the details here. But basically it's worked out where
there was originally going to be a lot more floor space, but 100,000 square meters
available for workers to receive 25-square- meter units that they can sell after owning
for 5 years. So you get, right on the grounds of these old mill compounds, these huge,
this is a 24 story building with 25-square-meter housing units within it.
And not to the same magnitude, but a family that moved in in 2011,
500,000 rupees, that has risen tenfold now. So they have a 5 million rupee property
that they can now, if they wish, sell to someone and take the cash
and leave the city because there's no place that they could they could get to elsewhere
in the city even for 5 million rupees. So this is a map of basically the southern
half of Mumbai. This is the Parel textile district I showed you a few slides ago.
These yellow areas are so-called, as it says, slum clusters. And this one, Vasi Nagar,
I'll show you in a minute, similar process with the textile mill. A policy put in place
in 1995 to rehabilitate, to build on-site, in practice meaning that the slum residents
are moved to the northeast of the city. 70% of their approval is required of
a community, you have to get 70% of the households to approve of this deal.
This is this government, as I said, in '95 that had promised 800,000 units for everyone.
There are only 150,000, but even that surprises a lot of the observers.
And the interesting thing at work here, they kind of copied New York City
and some American cities where you use something called a transferable development
right. And you can basically, if the builder comes in and says I will build this housing
on the side of the slum, give it to the slum residents for free, and then you give me
a certificate to allow me basically an exemption so I can go to another part
of the city and build on land and build way far above what the building height rule
would be. And so what this has led to is dumping the poor, the slum residents,
in one part of the city and building vast numbers of skyscrapers in the other part
of the city. The developer here, look how close they put the buildings together.
This is for the slum residents, 21-square-meter units, 4,500
of them. This place has all sorts of problems with the engineering and the structure
and the foundations and there's a lot of concern about the safety of the buildings.
The residents, when I asked, I talked to the head of the housing federation
of this place and he says, "Yeah when we moved in in 2007 each unit was about
2,500 U.S. Now they're 20,000 U.S. This is a great deal for my community."
He's boasting. Well yes and no. There are all sorts of problems.
One of them is the safety issue. The other is the ways in which people are duped
into selling at prices that might be below what's the market price. And the developer
in that transferable development rights scheme has every incentive
to make these as cheaply as possible so that the money can be put towards
making the investment in the high-end real estate that will make them much bigger
profits. So huge debate over the slum rehabilitation scheme in Mumbai.
This one a negative view. This one a positive view, saying that some settlers,
there's the word citizenship, they have attained through civic mobilization strategies
and political institutions in order to get what they consider adequate housing.
This really needs to be tested more systematically to see if this claim is true.
And a way to do that is you just have to find more, survey or interview research
that you can do with different communities that have been relocated. In 2004 and 2005,
that year that there were really high numbers in that table a few slides ago,
critics called this Operation Shanghai because the Mumbai government
was looking at Shanghai and trying, there was even a McKinsey consulting report
about doing infrastructure, doing land clearance, kicking out residents
of the sort they had seen happening in Shanghai. And this fellow here, a municipal
official sounds very much like, well, certain American politicians these days.
"We want to put the fear of the consequences of migration into these people. We have to
restrain them from coming to Mumbai." And again he's not talking about foreigners
coming to Mumbai. He's talking about rural people or people from elsewhere in India.
coming to Mumbai. And the way he's going to put the fear of the consequences
of migration into them is by destroying the huts, the shelters, of about half a million
people who arrived, at that time there was a January 1995 cutoff date so anyone
who had moved to the city in the last 10 years was vulnerable to eviction.
So overall lessons. Summarizing, those who receive compensation for being relocated,
those who kind of have a citizenship status of sorts: former textile mill workers in both
cities; slum residents, some of them, even though the housing is as we saw
not so great for those who moved to Mumbai before the year 2000; inner city
evictees, the later the better the housing; the rural collective, the very few people
in the rural collectives, the privileged few, who become millionaires when they sell
their collective land or they're transferred into urban administration. Those who receive
no compensation and therefore are substandard or subclasses of citizens
are going to be the tenants: those who rent from slum, and slums are very interesting
complex systems and there are people who build their shelters and then they lease out
upstairs or side dwellings to residents; tenants in urban villages we saw;
and in many respects anyone who's moved to either city in the last 20 years are
underprivileged and discriminated against in housing terms as I've suggested.
Conclusion. Deindustrialization, financialization or commodification of land,
new infrastructures, these changing political geographies influence in many ways
the identities and the claims of the protestors. Citizenship depends on
when you've got and what you've got in terms of policies, or when you arrived
and how you arrived and what you did in the city before the 1990s. So for most
families who were there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s you have some citizenship status
some claim for this housing scheme. This has been talked about, the urbanist
Ananya Roy talks about the politics of compensation where citizenship
is produced through what are you going to give me for loss of jobs, loss of residence
one had prior to the reforms. The insiders make claims to policies. Post-reform
migrants are noncitizen, not compensated at all for loss of job or residence.
For people who look at cities at the macro global scale, some of them,
including many of my colleagues at The New School, you're gonna go
this is global capitalism, this is neoliberal developmentalism, this is just 2 stories
of the same thing going on, same theme globally. And they're right up to a point.
Accumulation by dispossession is another common phrase David Harvey talks about,
capitalism in the 21st century operating this way, and even has an essay where he talks
about Mumbai and Shanghai operating this way. But I would say that it's not all
dispossession. It's accumulation for sure but it's accumulation through forms
of compensation. It's not classic capitalism where you're kicking people off the land
and making them landless overnight and then they are the vast unemployed
ranks of the proletariat. Shanghai and Mumbai as post-industrial cities,
urban citizenship is extremely difficult to gain but we have a complex process,
politics of compensation, rather than outright dispossession by the state of those living
in the city.
Thank you very much and I look forward to your questions.