Dharavi, etcetera

"The further analysis moves away from the center of the Third World
City, the thicker the epistemological fog." ~ Mike Davis

India. Mumbai. 2006. A girl walks along a water pipe in the Industrial
Area of Dharavi. Although it functions as a throroughfare through this
area of the slum, the water in the pipes is headed for the more affluent
southern areas of the city. Dharavi is one of Mumbai's biggest and
longest standing slums. Home to somewhere between 600 000 and one
million people, it is a beehive of recycling and manufacturing industries.
However, Dharavi sits on prime real estate right in the heart of the
booming megapolis, and is in close vicinity to the new Bandra-Kurla
Complex, a new financial hub. Dharavi is now scheduled for
redevelopment, meaning everything in the slum, for good and bad,
is set to be demolished.
Photograph & Caption © Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum.

I have not seen Slumdog Millionaire the multi-Oscar winning film. I plan to see it though and, in the interim, have been reading about it a bit. Here are a few comments that popped out at me ~ you'll notice a convergence.

"What disturbs me about the Oscar achievement is the collateral fragrance it spreads around our mushrooming slums. We are told Dharavi is a slum of vibrancy, enterprise, the triumph of the human spirit and a model of inter-communal living. Another collateral boon: superpower India has at last come to terms with its penury. It is comfortable with its poverty. If you will pardon my French, that’s bullshit!

Slums, whatever artistic gloss you put on them, are ugly, dark, squalid, crime-infested locations—a sign of a failed state rather than a shining one. However many Oscars India might collect, we should never lend legitimacy and romance to scars which should make us hang our heads in shame. There is nothing nice about a slum, even a five-star one like Dharavi, and the Indian state must avoid flirting with the myth that a slum is a beautiful place, inhabited by beautiful people doing beautiful things—an example to the rest of the country of how hard work and honest toil can make the rags-to-riches story possible." ~ Vinod Mehta

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"The [Congress Party] claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over India ‘Achieving’. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India’s greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it’s beyond farce.

And here’s the rub: Slumdog Millionaire allows real-life villains to take credit for its cinematic achievements because it lets them off the hook. It points no fingers, it holds nobody responsible. Everyone can feel good. And that’s what I feel bad about. [. . .]

Politically, the film de-contextualises poverty – by making poverty an epic prop, it disassociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s poverty a landscape, like a desert or a mountain range, an exotic beach, god-given, not man-made." ~ Arundhati Roy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“But it's also clear that Boyle's version of the third world, complete with fetidness and depravity, is particularly gratifying to our UK and US sensibilities. Why? Because it grossly oversimplifies poverty and our relationship with it.

After watching the film, viewers are left to infer that slums are horrid, rancid places because of beggar masters, Hindu zealots and Muslim gangs. Of course these forces play their role in perpetuating misery. But in reality, slums are an international problem caused by an intricate set of entities: corrupt government officials, gargantuan multinational corporations and suspect IMF structural adjustment programs.

Playing it safe, Boyle doesn't implicate any of these entities. As a result, his movie does allow us to believe that we have been responsible global citizens by engaging with the intensity of third world slums. We in the audience even feel genuine sympathy for destitution. But at no point do we have to forsake the delusion that abject poverty and inequity are strictly foreign things for which we share no culpability.” ~ Hirsh Sawhney

I suppose these responses to the film are not really surprising. (Nor, I suppose, are the resentful, self-satisfied replies that Sawhney got at The Guardian.) And perhaps it is misguided to expect a movie to actually pay attention to the big picture - you know, to causes and culpability and such things.

That leads me to turn to Jonas Bendiksen's remarkable The Places We Live which is an attempt to capture something of the lives people who reside in slums actually lead. Here is how he describes the project and his approach to it on the Magnum blog:

"In 2005, I started work on The Places We Live, a project about urban poverty and slums. For three years, I visited dozens of families in four slums around the world.

The Places We Live was not a search for finding the absolute extremes of urban poverty—I wasn't looking for the dirties spot, the poorest hovels or the most crime-ridden street corner. My task was to find how people normalize these dire situations. How they build dignity and daily lives in the midst of very challenging living conditions.

In the project, I asked someone from each family to "tell me about life around here". Since I do not speak either Spanish, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi or Marathi, I had one rule-of-thumb during the recordings: As long as the subject talked, I didn't interrupt to get translations of what they were saying. Only when I got transcripts of the recordings months later did I see the wide spectrum of stories told. For me, the process was a sort of protection from projecting too much of my own preconceptions of what slum life involves—and meant the project had to be interactive and collaborative."

Insofar as Bendiksen is concerned not with causes and culpability - to say nothing of resistance* - but with how people who are engulfed in slums make a life there, he does not address the political issues that Mehta, Roy, and Sawnhey raise. That was not his aim. But as the caption above (also lifted from Bendiksen's blog post) makes clear, the story is incomplete if we do not attend to the factors and forces that will destroy Dharavi, precisely because those are the very forces and factors that, in the first place, have engulfed the slum residents and against which they struggle to make their lives. Where will the residents go when Dharavi is "redeveloped"? There is no need to romanticize life there now in order to conclude that displaced residents will end up inhabiting a place even more shrouded in epistemological fog. Without attention to causes and culpability and resistance, then, some future Bendiksen will have to begin from scratch if she hopes to extend the vision of rich denizens of the developed world to the poor and distant.
___________
* I will set aside the question, and that is all it is, of whether perhaps slum dwellers only adopt individual strategies for coping with their environments. If so we might at least have to complicate our standard views about the struggle for human dignity against adversity in order to recognize the politics that exists in the world. I've complained about related issues here before.

Missed Opportunity ~ Julio Bittencourt

God forbid that photographers heave overboard the vacuous clichés about capturing 'human dignity' and actually engage with people and the politics they engage in on their own terms! And god forbid that reputable publications stop letting photographers get away with the diversionary tactics.

Today The Guardian ran this short piece on a new book by Brazilian photographer Julio Bittencourt entitled In A Window Of Prestes Maia 911 Building (Dewi Lewis). I've not seen the book. You can find some of Bittencourt's photographs here. I suppose the notice in The Guardian is what now passes for a review of this project. It certainly displays not a wit of critical judgment.

The building in question was an abandoned 22 story skyscraper in São Paulo. It was occupied by hundreds of families organized by the Homeless Movement of Central São Paulo. The residents coordinated their own community life in many ways and resisted the government's efforts to evict them. That sounds pretty political to me: a group of people get together and collectively pursue a solution that will meet their need for a basic necessity and then defend themselves against those who don't like what they've done. Why couldn't Bittencourt acknowledge any of that? Instead he diminishes the people and their achievement, seemingly transforming a vital political movement into a human interest story.

This becomes clear as Bittencourt recites the trite justifications of non-committal documentary work. Here is how The Guardian notice ends:

The squat was always intended as a protest as well as a place to live, and it succeeded. Most of the squatters have been rehoused or compensated by the government. For Bittencourt, however, it was never a political project: it was about the people he met. "I wanted to show them in a different way. Even though the walls are dingy, you see a lot of dignity from the people."

Instead of agents seeking to fend for themselves and their compatriots by making claims on resources and on the state, we instead get bearers of abstract human dignity. You might think this is simply another of my tired left-wing efforts to find some political dimension everywhere. But go ahead and google "homeless movement Brazil." You'll get a sense of just how far out of his way Bittencourt has to go in order to divert attention from the politics involved. You don't need to read about the ongoing movements among landless and homeless in Brazil in any of the links to wacky leftist publications (although you can - should - do that too). You can simply have a look here at the BBC News. Among the photographs accompanying that story you'll find this unattributed image:

The residents hang banners stating their human rights
on the outside of the building.

In order to make his photographs Bittencourt must've had to walk right under these banners or ones pretty much like them. As he tells The Guardian "I spent three months studying the interior and exterior, the light, the windows, and getting to know the residents." I wonder how he could've gotten to know the residents without really listening to what they were saying.

Recycling Suburbia

"The leftover parts of San Diego's older subdivisions--standard framing, joists, connectors, plywood, aluminum windows, garage doors--are being disassembled and recombined just across the border. A few miles south, in Tijuana, new informal suburbs--some call them slums--spring up from one day to another. This river of urban waste flows across the Tijuana-San Diego to make something dramatically new.

On the edges of Tijuana, rife with poverty, social upheaval and a severe housing shortage, the detritus of San Diego's suburbs is reassembled into a fresh milieu, a city made of waste. But not only small, scattered debris is imported and recycled into makeshift housing in Tijuana. Entire pieces of one city travel southward as residential ready-made houses are directly plugged in to the other city's fabric. This process begins when a Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy up the little post-World War II bungalows that have been slated for demolition. The little houses are loaded onto trailers to travel to Tijuana, where they clear customs before making their journey south. On some days here, one can see houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting in line to cross the border." ~ Teddy Cruz

~~~~~~~~~~

About 18 months ago I posted on Teddy Cruz, an architect who works at the border of Tijuana and San Diego. This evening I came across a short essay of his - "A City Made of Waste" - in The Nation. It is accompanied by a film (lifted here) of the same name made by Laura Hanna. Ironically enough, I wrote a post yesterday and called it Recycling the Suburbs? where I complained that "design ideas tend to be class-blind." Well, Cruz comments on the underlying class and ethnic basis of the processes by which suburban San Diego literally is being disassembled and recycled in Tijuana.

Making a Point

From "24 Hours in Pictures" today at The Guardian:

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: The facades of houses in Providencia.
The pictures show inhabitants who have lost relatives in the
drug trafficking conflict. Photograph © Antonio Lacerda/EPA.

So, someone ~ there is no story accompanying the photo as far as I can tell ~ is trying to make the favela and what happens to people there less anonymous, less invisible. I'd appreciate any information or context readers might supply about this.

~~~~~~~~~~

Update: Much thanks to Eric Etheridge (see comments) for providing this link to a story on this project and an interview with its creator over at lensculture.

Thanks too, to an anonymous commenter (see thread) for even more links and information.

Planet of Slums

This book by Mike Davis offers a (not entirely) apocalyptic counterpoint to the new issue of PRIVATE I mentioned in the previous post. It connects well too with some of the work in Sebastiao Salgado's Migrations project as well as to work by Andre Cypriano (about which I've posted before).

Andre Cypriano

All three images © Andre Cypriano

I've just discovered the web page for Brazilian photographer Andre Cypriano. He has produced photo-essays on shantytowns in Brazil and Venezuala that are both stunning in aesthetic terms and extremely powerful as social comment. I lifted these examples of his work from various sources on the internet but really recommend his web page which has much larger and higher
resolution images.