mumbai’s underworld: urban life beneath transport

Mumbai Reader 2017 345

Mumbai’s Underworld: Urban life beneath transport infrastructure1

— Andrew Harris

Republished from, Moving Worlds: South Asian Cities special issue, 13 (2), October 2013

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346 Mumbai’s Underworld: Urban life beneath transport infrastructure

Mumbai is a city that has undergone rapid expansion over the last decade. This is evident in the series of high-rises that have sprouted across its skyline, in the extension of new residential colonies and business parks out into its hinterland, and in the mushrooming of ‘slum’ settlements across any spare patch of land. The United Nations estimate that the Mumbai Metropolitan Region will be the third largest urban agglomeration in the world by 2025 with over 25 million people.1 Mumbai’s growth has been accompanied & facilitated by the widespread construction of new and upgraded transport infrastructure. In particular, over fifty elevated roads (flyovers) have been built across the region since 1998 and over 30 elevated pedestrian walkways (skywalks) constructed since 2008. This vertical emphasis is set to continue with several elevated metro-lines and mono-rails currently under construction or proposed.

Since 2009, I have been undertaking research into these flyovers and skywalks. I am interested in how they open up analysis of a variety of dimensions to urban change in a rapidly growing city such as Mumbai. They feed into and create aspirations of Mumbai as ‘world-class’ matching the perceived efficiency and predictability of places such as Shanghai and Singapore. They offer a highly visible (and often lucrative) opportunity for politicians to flaunt their developmental achievements. Furthermore, they are a clear example of the increasing three-dimensional fracturing of urban space, not least in how only those with access to private vehicles – under 10% of the population of Mumbai – are actually allowed to use the city’s flyovers.2

This photo essay investigates what occurs in the spaces that have been created under these transport projects. For many people in Mumbai, the underworlds of flyovers and

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skywalks are simply the unexciting and drab backdrop they endure while negotiating the congested traffic and streets below. But I have been keen to document the wide array of activities and landscapes I have observed under these transport structures. Between April 2009 and January 2010, I was able to visit the majority of these spaces across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and take almost five hundred digital photographs.3 This visual material presents an alternative repertoire in representing twenty-first-century Mumbai to a standard focus on crowded commuter trains, Asia’s ‘largest slum’ of Dharavi and the new Sea link bridge.4 But photography alone remains limited in what it can reveal about the histories and intricacies of urban space in Mumbai. For instance, one afternoon in December 2009, I came across a group of women sitting and chatting under the Northern end of the flyover along Senapati Bapat Marg (formerly Tulsi Pipe Road) in

Central Mumbai. My photographs might suggest this was an example of an informal use of space in Mumbai – women casually occupying an interstitial patch of land in a crowded neighbourhood. It was only through conversation that I learnt their presence here was connected to the formal transformation of the adjoining area; each were being paid 90 Rupees a day to clear away any debris falling off lorries arriving or leaving a large office and residential development site opposite, formerly Jupiter Mills. By using ethnographic and archival research together with my photographic catalogue, this essay seeks not only to detail what occurs underneath Mumbai’s elevated transport infrastructure but also to identify how the management and control of these spaces is indicative of increasing efforts to squeeze out and threaten the diverse qualities and characteristics of South Asian street-scapes.

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Although the construction of flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai has been widespread over the last decade, their impact on the city’s urban fabric has not been as dramatic as might have been expected. Rather than ploughing through existing built-up areas, as was common with urban expressways of the 1960s & 1970s, they have largely been constructed above existing streets. Unlike the post-War building of the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York - described as ‘urbicide’ by Marshall Berman in its destruction of whole neighbourhoods, including Berman’s childhood home - road transport infrastructure in Mumbai has tended not to involve mass displacement but to retain the street-scapes below.5

These street-scapes under Mumbai’s transport infrastructure offer important sites for the city’s founding raison d’être: trading and commerce. Although there are a few examples of ‘formal’ shops, such as Jeunesse beauticians below India’s very first flyover at Kemp’s Corner which opened in 1965, most activities fall within the city’s vast unregulated sector. Young men hawk

fruit and vegetables under the new bus only flyover into Thane Station. Women sell paan outside Kurla Station, directly underneath the large piers of India’s first double-decker flyover, which although commissioned in 2003 has yet to be completed. Their trays, trolleys and stools can be easily packed up or wheeled off in response to police or other authorities, and some of the nooks and crannies created by the flyover structures are used to store or stash material.

As well as enterprise, the spaces created underneath flyovers and skywalks are also an integral component of Mumbai’s everyday social worlds. Many people use the spaces under these transport structures

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to rest, especially given the welcome shade they offer from the sun, and protection from the rain during summer monsoons. This might be a chance to sit down, or to have an afternoon snooze. Some people use these spaces to hang-out, loiter or ‘timepass’.6 Under the JJ Hospital flyover on Mohammed Ali Road, for example, I came across a gentleman who spends much of the day shaking his stick at traffic. These spaces can also provide improvised play areas for children, especially when water leaks down from above after heavy rain showers. And these spaces are not only used by Mumbai’s human population; further out into Mumbai metropolitan region, I found cows under the Kharghar flyover, donkeys under the Mumbra bypass flyover, and a dog feeding its litter of puppies at Mumbra.

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The piers, columns and ramps that support flyovers and skywalks provide extensive and often highly visible surfaces, often adjacent to busy thoroughfares, for fly-posting and painting, stencilling or writing messages. The array of symbols and materials on display provide an insight into the diverse visual cultures of the city and the intermingling of commercial, religious and political aspirations. There are adverts for beanbags and educational courses and institutions, such as Cosmopolitan College in Kausa, painted onto blank concrete, and banners for political parties slung onto bamboo pools. There are palimpsests of posters advertising the latest films, IT

academies, circuses, religious meetings, shopping malls, and opportunities for accommodation & ‘Management Trainees’. These structures are also used for more improvised scrawls & scratches; under the Princess Street flyover, leading onto Marine Bay Drive, I came across a declaration that ‘Jesus is Coming’. These signs and symbols on view, often layered over each other, are indicative of Mumbai’s dynamic entrepreneurial cultures and the importance of visibility in negotiating and claiming identity in a rapidly changing metropolis.

The spaces under flyovers and skywalks also offer shelter for many people to live, as attested by lines of clothes often drying along railings. Forty to fifty families squat under the northern end of the Senapati Bapat Marg flyover, where they face regular harassment by the police and the city’s municipal corporation, and have to walk to a local fish market to collect water. Until 2008, they lived by the side of the road, with their own tap, but their hutments were not regularized and they were evicted. Refuge has also been sought underneath the skywalk in Bandra East, Mumbai’s first, which opened in 2008. In June 2009, there was a major fire in the adjacent low-income area of Behrampada. A makeshift settlement, complete with a relief office, was established for those displaced under the skywalk, in a space that had been largely unused previously.

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This world of hawking, storing, resting, playing and dwelling under flyovers and skywalks indicates how Mumbai thrives and survives through improvisation & density. These spatial ‘off-cuts’ & leftovers from large infrastructural schemes, often bustling with social interaction and spectacle, are a clear demonstration of what the film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar calls ‘residual spaces’ in Mumbai – spaces that ‘do not fit into any vision of the planned city because they take on a life of their own’.7 They can be understood as part of an ‘occupancy’ urbanism in which the terrains of Indian cities are continually contested, subverted and reconstituted from original planned, developmental intentions.8 Through everyday practices of exchange and habitation these

infrastructural underworlds are integrated & domesticated into Mumbai’s wider fabric of neighbourhoods and localities.9

Nevertheless, the messiness and unpredictability of these urban underworlds runs directly counter to the visions and aspirations of many elite groups and affluent urban classes, including so-called ‘citizen groups’.10 Aesthetically they are not landscapes that are deemed to match Mumbai’s ambitions as ‘world-class’, while their hodgepodge of uses and users is understood as threatening the smooth flow and functioning of the city. When I met the head of the business lobbying organisation, Mumbai First, he spoke disapprovingly about the slums that have come up underneath these structures.11

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I was also often told that these spaces were ones of depravity and disrepute; one transport consultant mentioned how the body of a drug-user had been left for four or five days under a flyover in Borivali.12 The association of these spaces with illegality and criminality also extends to some cultural representations. In the 2008 Oscar-winning film, Slumdog Millionaire, scenes of the film’s two protagonists being inducted into a world of child-begging were shot in the large spaces under the Andheri flyover.13 The portrayal of such underworlds feeds into a broader global imaginary and understanding of Mumbai as a location for urban squalor and backwardness, despite India’s recent economic buoyancy.

A range of strategies has been deployed to address, spruce up and regulate urban life beneath new transport infrastructure in Mumbai, and offer views from private car vehicles – often stuck in traffic – more commensurable with Mumbai’s global ambitions. By attempting to control these seemingly unruly and unsightly underworlds, a more apposite vision of ’world-class’ Mumbai can be staged. Most visibly, barriers and fences have been erected to limit access to the spaces created by new elevated structures. For example, the location in Andheri used to stage the child begging scenes in Slumdog Millionaire is actually closed off by bricks and large corrugated iron boards. This huge space, approximately 500,000 square feet and originally planned as a shopping mall

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and car-park, was occupied until 2007 by 200–250 people.14 After being evicted, many families have remained – out in the open – on the side of the adjoining road. As well as aiming to stop what one architect described to me as people who were a ‘nuisance to society’, fencing has also been constructed to discourage children trying to cross busy roads to play in these spaces, and to restrict animals grazing.

A second way that greater control has been sought for the spaces under flyover and skywalks is through regulations and surveillance. Security guards, working in shifts of eight to twelve hours, are employed under most large flyovers to monitor for accidents above and below and to stop encroachments, as part of what the

Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Corporation (MMRDC) calls ‘nominal security’. The managing director of one firm responsible told me that they prefer security guards to cameras as “in a month, [cameras] would be stolen” and “people are faster than video cameras”.15 There are regulations prohibiting fly-posting, and municipal campaigns mounted in these spaces, complete with banners, discouraging littering & encouraging greater pedestrian use of skywalks, subways and over-bridges.

Another effort at bringing order to bear on these spaces is through reserving them for parking. The Southern end of the flyover along Senapati Bapat Marg – where there are no squatters – is carefully maintained

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for pay and park schemes, many of them owned by nearby companies such as the Times of India Group. This has the added benefit of being a lucrative initiative, showing how urban exclusions have become part of Mumbai’s speculative economies. Parking schemes under sixteen flyovers across Mumbai were estimated to have earned over 19 million Rupees in 2009.16 Much of the space under the Southern end of JJ Hospital flyover along Mohammed Ali Road has also been given over to parking, although initially when the flyover opened in 1996 no charges were levied. Further out into the metropolitan region, however, there is less demand for car parking. Instead space is given to bus, van, bike and truck-parks and auto-rickshaw parking. Most auto-rickshaw drivers do not have access

to secure spaces by their residences, and often require storage when returning to their family homes in rural villages.

Perhaps the least obvious form of control is the careful landscaping of spaces under flyovers, often using assemblages of plants, grasses, rocks and stones designed to withstand a lack of access to water, minimal sunlight and bad pollution. This has become more widespread following terrorist attacks on 13th July 2011 and amidst heightened concern over risks posed by stationary vehicles under key transport routes.17 Although these green-spaces address a severe lack of vegetation in Mumbai, and offer a more pleasant landscape for passing drivers, it is important that they are understood as largely defensive measures to stop people squatting, as indicated by the frequently accompanying fencing. The rationale is given by one of the MMRDA tenders: ‘In order to maintain the underbellies of these flyovers clean, free from encroachments and enhance its appearance to international standards it has been decided to undertake beautification/landscaping.’18 The area under the Thakur Complex flyover, completed in 2009, for example, is filled with earth and flowers, matching the shading of the flyover structure and pavement tiles, and is gently undulating to further restrict sleeping bodies. Spaces like this reveal some of the paradoxes of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’, emphasising an environment that is green and ordered, yet instigated by the polluting automobile & precluding any social contact or mixing.19

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These increasing attempts at governing and managing the spaces under flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai through fences, security, parking and landscaping are an important indicator of wider social and political relations in the city. As Curt Gambetta and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay argue in their recent symposium on Indian streetscapes in Seminar, ‘the street is a window onto larger urban contestations, allowing us to speculate on the present and future of public space in urban India’.20 From my exploration of the underworlds created by new elevated transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai, it is clear that there is a growing emphasis on predictability over the fluid choreography of everyday life; on aesthetic qualities of order and ‘beauty’ over notions of public use. The ‘world class’

Indian city is deemed to require careful staging through attempts at excluding Mumbai’s literal and metaphorical under-class.

Yet the emphasis on de-cluttering and sanitising the spaces under flyovers and skywalks seems limited and misguided. Mumbai will never match the order and control of a city such as Singapore; unintended and illegitimate uses of these spaces will continue to erupt within the complex and dynamic politics of urban India. Moreover, disconnecting these spaces from the city, even given their position within busy traffic, removes important opportunities for much needed sites for social reproduction in Mumbai. More imaginative & progressive ideas for managing these spaces might

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include public toilets, benches for resting, community billboards, areas for worship, and shelters for street children.21 They might also include leaving spaces to be reclaimed haphazardly by the city’s human and non-human life, part of the ‘alternative public life’ of ‘superfluous’ urban landscapes.22 Not only will this help protect the diversity of activities and landscapes found under Mumbai’s transport infrastructure, part of what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘great cultural and aesthetic plurality of India’s streets’, but it will play a small but vital role in facilitating and negotiating the city’s civic and collective potential.23 These spaces may be a minor and ‘left-over’ component to recent processes of urban transformation in Mumbai, but how they are managed will be indicative of the city’s social and political futures.

(All Images are by the Author)

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References

1. United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2009).2. Andrew Harris, ‘Vertical Urbanism: Flyovers and Skywalks in Mumbai’, in Urban Constellations, ed., Matthew Gandy (Berlin: Jovis, 2011), pp. 118-123.3. For more of this visual material, please visit www.verticalurbanism.com. The research was funded by ESRC award RES-000-22-3127. My thanks to Savitri Medhatul for her assistance on some of these expeditions.4. Andrew Harris, ‘The Metonymic Urbanism of Twenty-First-Century Mumbai’, Urban Studies, 49. 13 (2012) pp. 2955-2973.5. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983).6. Craig Jeffrey, Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stamford University Press, 2010).7. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 173-174.8. Solomon Benjamin, ‘Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32. 3 (2008) pp. 719–729.9. On ‘domesticating’ urban space, albeit in global North contexts, see Regan Koch and Alan Latham. ‘On the Hard Work of Domesticating a Public Space’, Urban Studies, 50. 1 (2013) pp. 6-21.10. Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, ‘Guardians of the Bourgeois City: Citizenship, Public Space and Middle-Class Activism in Mumbai’, City and Community, 8. 4 (2009) pp. 391-406.11. Interview with Narinder Nayar, 30 July 2009.12. See also ‘What lies beneath our flyovers’ DNA India 12 December (2007).13. In Salaam Bombay! (Director: Mira Nair, 1988), the main protagonist Krishna and his friend walk past the Byculla flyover and Krishna reports how he’s been told ‘the souls of Bombay’s dead children wander under this bridge late at night’.14. The estimate of total square feet is given in Sandeep Unnithan, ‘Shopping may be root of Andheri flyover’s troubles’, Financial Express, 24 Feb (1999).15. Interview at Aswini Infra Projects, 31 July 2009.16. This is approximately $350,000. Shashank Rao, ‘Security takes backseat as MSRDC allows flyover parking’, Midday 9 March (2009).17. Yogesh Naik, ‘Small gardens to replace car parks under 31 flyovers’. Mumbai Mirror, 29 February (2012).18. Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project, T&C/BQS/2006.19. For more on ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ see Amita Baviskar ‘the Politics of the City’, Seminar 516 (2002), pp. 40-42.20. Curt Gambetta and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Problem’, Seminar 636 (2012) p.12.21. See, for example, Ed Wall ‘Infrastructural form, interstitial spaces and informal acts’. Infrastructural Urbanism: Addressing the In-Between, eds, Thomas Hauck, Regine Keller and Volker Kleinekort (Berlin: DOM, 2011) pp. 145-158; Tim Edensor, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington and Norma Rantisi, eds, Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy (London: Routledge, 2009); URBZ, ‘Under the flyover’ (2011), http://urbz.net/workshops/mashup/mumbai/under-the-flyover/ ; N Ibungochoubl Dadar ‘Where the flyover is the roof.’ Times of India, 1 December (1995).22. Tom Nielsen ‘The return of the excessive: superfluous landscapes’. Space and Culture 5. 53 (2002), pp. 53-62 (p.60).23. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Street culture’. The India Magazine 8.1 (1987) pp. 2-22 (p. 22).

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mumbai’s underworld: urban life beneath transport

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