Sunday 29 January 2012
Wednesday 30 November 2011
Pictures: Twelve Car-Free City Zones
Tuesday 17 May 2011
Shanghai air pollution reaches record levels – how to track air quality around the world
Pollution in the southern Chinese city of Shanghai has reached record levels, pushing air quality levels to ‘severe' or ‘hazardous,' the highest level on the Air Quality Index Scale. Amidst long-standing concerns over pollution, governmental websites around the world allow members of the public to monitor air quality in their region.
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Wednesday 23 March 2011
Lammas: The eco-village that lives off the grid - video
Heydon Prowse visits the pioneering off-grid Lammas project in Pembrokeshire to learn how they blend green building technology and perma-culture economics to fuel a thriving community
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Sunday 13 March 2011
Battle over Mumbai's slums | Nishika Patel
Developers hope to raze the slums and make vast profits from commercial projects, but slum residents have other ideas
Ganesh Krupa Society is part of Golibar, Mumbai's second largest slum, spanning 140 acres. The site is at the centre of a fierce battle between its residents and a developer that wants to raze the area to make way for a commercial project.
Already concrete homes across this narrow maze of more than 300 dwellings have been demolished.
In January, violence erupted when the developer tried to evict 45 families following a high court order. None of the families moved, claiming their signatures consenting to the project had been forged. Devasandhan Nair, 47, a resident, says: "The basis of redevelopment is consent but our consent was forged. Even a dead woman's signature was forged. How can the court instruct the builder to evict us when a forgery case has been lodged by us with the police?"
Conflicts between developers and slum dwellers have been unfolding across the city for more than a decade, stalling slum redevelopment projects designed to pull 60% of Mumbai's population out of harsh living conditions. Under a controversial slum rehabilitation policy, developers can snap up land for commercial development in exchange for building free houses for slum dwellers.
However, slum residents are only entitled to free housing if they have lived in the area to be cleared since before 1995, or, in some cases before 2000, which is a huge stumbling block for state government officials who say they want to make Mumbai slum free. This caveat means almost 70% of slum dwellers in the city are ineligible for a free home and would probably end up in slums elsewhere. Simpreet Singh, an activist, says high levels of migration to the city due to a lack of rural jobs combined with a shortage of affordable housing means people have no choice but to flock to the city and live in slums.
So far only 100,000 homes have been built under the scheme in the last 12 years – and 35% of those rehoused have returned to slums because maintenance costs are too steep in their new accommodation. Around 1.2m homes are needed to house the city's slum dwellers.
Against the backdrop of Mumbai's rapidly changing skyline of malls and plush high-rise apartments, the common complaint among the poor and powerless is that the government, corrupt politicians and developers are colluding to grab their land and short-change the slum dweller. Slum activist Jockin Arputham says: 'This policy is about giving cakes and carrots to builders and developers. It's not in the interest of improvement of slum dwellers.'
In February, the Times of India reported that the Maharashtra state government had gifted 500 acres of land to a developer under a little-known rule that waives the requirement for the 70% mandatory consent to sell from slum dwellers.
The lack of trust and transparency over land procurement has brought some of the largest development projects to a standstill, while others have simply failed to take off.
In Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, which is located on prime land overlooking the city's new business district, residents are demanding larger homes and a guarantee of their livelihoods. With 80% of people self-employed in the slum's core businesses in leather, recycling, garments and pottery, residents say they will not agree to any development plan unless they are allotted the same amount of workspace they currently occupy.
A short distance away, the Mumbai's international airport is in the midst of the city's largest slum clearance. The airport is right next to scores of slums that need to be moved for security reasons as well as for the airport's expansion. About 88,000 families need to be moved, but the scheme has met stiff opposition from residents who are ineligible for rehousing – while those who are entitled don't want to be rehoused away from their community, schools and jobs.
Mumbai's policy on slum clearance puts it at odds with the central government, which wants to see a slum-free India. The government says slum dwellers should be given property rights. If they have property rights, they can access loans to improve their slum home so that over a period of time they will no longer be slums.
This would act as an incentive for residents to invest in their homes. Furthermore, if residents get property rights, developers can't evict them. At the moment, developers are buying the rights to the property from the landowner – so they can evict tenants and demolish the slums.
Maharashtra's new chief minister recently agreed with the central government that slum dwellers should be given property rights so they are encouraged to invest in their homes. And there are murmurs of a change in state policy.
'There is a complete mismatch between the state and central government policy,' says Chandrashekhar Prabhu, a former chairman of the state's housing authority. 'While the state wants to give free houses through the builder, the centre wants to empower people, give them tenure, which should be the essence of slum rehabilitation.'
It's too early to tell if all this will translate into action, but until state policies are drastically remoulded and slanted towards slum dwellers rather than developers, a slum free Mumbai will remain no more than a government slogan.
Monday 7 March 2011
Money, power and politics collide in the battle for Mumbai's slums
A controversial project to bulldoze Dharavi, the giant shanty town that formed the backdrop to Slumdog Millionaire, is reviving the fortunes of extremist parties
Ninety Feet Road runs through the middle of Dharavi, the area in the centre of Mumbai notorious for being southern Asia's largest slum. The street's name comes from its width – it is the broadest thoroughfare among the congested mass of homes, tenements, workshops and alleyways made famous by the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.
It has seen many battles, but few as acrimonious as this most recent fight: to claim the credit, money, power and votes that will come from levelling much of the neighbourhood in a multibillion-pound slum clearance programme.
The battle is heating up with the approach of civic elections in India's commercial capital in under a year. At stake is not just the future of Dharavi, but also lucrative building contracts and the survival as a mainstream force in Mumbai of the Shiv Sena, the radical rightwing party that has dominated the streets of the city for nearly 50 years. Poverty, vast sums of money and cutthroat slum politics are combining into an explosive mix.
Wedged into two square kilometres in the centre of Mumbai, Dharavi is home to somewhere between 250,000 and a million people, depending on the season and the estimate. For more than a decade, city authorities have debated razing Dharavi's largely illegal tenements, shacks and squats and rehousing the population in high-rise blocks with power, water and sanitation. Currently only one in 1,000 local residents has access to a toilet and the area is prone to flooding and disease.
Fire is a continual hazard, as was made clear this weekend when flames tore through a nearby slum and made around 2,000 people homeless, including Rubina Ali, one of the young stars of Slumdog Millionaire.
Tens of thousands arrive or are born in Dharavi each year. But progress on the ambitious clearance project, one of the biggest ever attempted, has been blocked by the competing demands of different interest groups – and the fear that the only people who will profit are builders, corrupt politicians and the extremists.
Chief among the latter are the Shiv Sena – the name means 'warriors of Shivaji', a former ruler of the region. Their tactics in Dharavi are simple. Having originally launched the redevelopment plan when in power in the late 1990s, the Sena are now seeking to block it unless residents are guaranteed homes with a living space of at least 37 sq metres (400 sq ft), almost twice that foreseen in the original designs. Ageing leadership and splits have sapped support for the party over recent years. Fighting for the rights of slum-dwellers – particularly on the issue of living space, which touches almost all Mumbai's 15 million inhabitants – is seen as a certain vote-winner.
'We are seeking justice for the poor of Dharavi. We are burying all our differences of region and community,' Baburao Mane, a former Sena member of the local parliament and one of the harshest critics of the development plan, told the Observer.
Yet the Sena face an uphill struggle. Around a third of Dharavi's residents are Muslims; another third are migrants from India's interior and poorer north. Both have been targets of Shiv Sena's rhetoric – and worse – for decades and are hardly natural supporters of the extremist group, which was founded in 1966 to fight for the rights of people born and bred locally.
Twenty years ago, Mane himself led meetings that helped to spark riots in which 900 died. Now, the politician and headteacher claims, he and the Sena 'have repented of all that'. 'We preach harmony. We teach four different languages in the school I run and we all worship together,' Mane, 58, insisted.
However, there is evidence that the old instincts of the Shiv Sena remain. Last year the party, following orders from its veteran leader and founder, Bal Thackeray, tried to stop the showing of a blockbuster movie because its star had made comments favourable to Pakistani cricketers. In October, Thackeray's grandson forced a local university to remove a supposedly anti-Mumbai and anti-Indian book by respected Indian-born author Rohinton Mistry from reading lists. Last month, the party threatened to disrupt the cricket World Cup final, scheduled at Mumbai's Wankhede stadium for 2 April, if it involved Pakistan playing India. Such trademark populism has now been extended to Dharavi, critics say.
'The redevelopment plan has become very politicised,' said Raju Korde, a lawyer who heads a group of local activists.
However according to Korde, who grew up in a tiny house in Dharavi, the real issue is elsewhere. Few politicians, he said, speak much about the most sensitive issue: the money private builders will make from the redevelopment.
The sums involved are colossal. With India's economic growth hitting almost 9% year on year, property prices in Mumbai, India's richest city, are among the highest in the world and the two sq kilometres of Dharavi represent a goldmine. One Mumbai newspaper last week called the redevelopment plan a "jackpot" and quoted gleeful officials claiming that £3bn that could be generated for the municipality. The profits for the major construction firms that look certain to win contracts for the work, however, could top £8bn.
Local campaigners argue that the builders, who will not have to pay for the land, should be allowed to sell only a third of the homes they build. The authorities say the proportion should be well over half.
According to Korde, the authorities' current resistance to the 37 sq metres demand – which he and other lobbyists formulated after extensive legal research – is rooted in the desire of senior politicians and bureaucrats to allow the builders to construct a larger number of smaller homes. This, he claims, would earn them much more money. 'There is not a member of the local assembly who is not linked to a construction firm,' Korde said. 'They can make tens of millions. The more flats there are the more they make.'
Historically, even small development projects in India have generated huge amounts of corruption as constructors compete to pay off officials and politicians, and politicians work to be in a position to make crucial and lucrative decisions. Land all over India has become a major driver of graft, with the unprecedented funds generated contaminating the electoral and legal processes on a massive scale. Without the prospect of material gain, the demand for units of 37 sq metres would have been granted long ago and the campaign of the Shiv Sena would have become irrelevant.
Instead, there are signs that the extremists are making headway. Along with the Shiv Sena, a splinter group is also doing well in Dharavi. The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) has already attracted younger, and often educated and affluent, local-born Hindus since being set up five years ago. The MNS also backs the 37 sq metres demand. 'There can be no compromise on that,' said Ganesh Khade, an organiser for the group. 'I already live in somewhere bigger than the units the government are offering, so why would I accept less?'
Whatever the eventual decision, priority has to be given to longer-term residents of the neighbourhood, Khade insisted, as 'there are already too many immigrants in Mumbai in general and in Dharavi in particular'.
Krishna, a 44-year-old house painter who lives with his family in a 4.5 sq metre room in Dharavi, said he had recently switched his allegiance to the extremists. His home was built by the grandparents of his wife, who hawks snacks on Mumbai's railways. 'I'm sick of the promises the other parties always make,' he told the Observer. 'We need someone with clear ideas who can make a change. The Shiv Sena gets things done.'
Last week, Prithviraj Chavan, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, announced that work on redeveloping Dharavi would start within months. Any decisions would be taken with the slum dwellers' interests 'first and foremost', officials maintained.
'I'll believe it when I see it,' Krishna the painter said. With so much cash, power and votes at stake, no one expects the battle over Dharavi and its redevelopment to end soon.