Rethinking Housing in Emerging India Som-1 PDF

Work-in-progress, November 2018 draft
Rethinking Housing in Emerging India

Some reflections on thought and practice
1
Jai Sen, with deepani seth, November 2018
jai.sen2000@gmail.com
I first presented many of these thoughts at a conference in Bombay in March 2018, organised by the
Urban Design Research Institute and the Architectural Foundation. Although I do have some questions
about the way this was done, I would like to start by congratulating Rahul Mehrotra and the Urban
Design Research Institute2 not just for convening the Bombay Conference with the focus that it implicitly
had but for having the vision and ambition to organise the much larger initiative of which the Conference
was just one part, titled ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’.3 I say this
for the following reason. As I see it, and although this did not specifically feature in either the title of the
session I was invited to speak at (on ‘Home and Homelessness’) or of the Conference as a whole, or was
mentioned anywhere in the Concept Note that was circulated for the Conference,4 by focussing on what
is commonly referred to as ‘the housing crisis’ in the country, this initiative brought focus on the living
conditions of the huge majority of people in India, the labouring and working poor – but where this is no
longer something that mainstream society in India talks about much any more. And for successful
architects and design professionals to do this is in my experience at least, even more unusual. And so,
and as an architect who has spent much of his life in this field and who has specifically argued for this
within the profession,5 I would like to warmly thank the organisers.
Indeed, as I see it the larger initiative (which I will refer to as the ‘Bombay Initiative’) – an
Inaugural Seminar back in February 2017; a major public Exhibition that opened in Bombay in February
2018; commissioning a major film by Sanjiv Shah on the state of housing in the country (perhaps the first
time that this has ever been done); organising a series of public lectures on the subject in Bombay
running through February-March 2018; culminating with the major Conference in Bombay in March 2018,
1
JS : This essay is a heavily revised and developed version of the notes I prepared for the Conference on ‘The State
of Housing in Emerging India’, organised by the Urban Design Research Institute and the Architectural Foundation at
the Cama Hall, Fort, Bombay, India, during March 15-17 2018, and of the talk I gave there. Originally prepared for a
book to come out of the Conference, at the invitation of Rahul Mehrotra the main organiser, the essay turned out to
be too long for the book, and so we agreed that he would publish a shorter and heavily cut version in his book and
we would separately upload this larger essay as a work-in-progress document, with the link to this given in the
published version – and with the idea of later also publishing this full essay. The shorter, published version, titled
‘Rethinking Housing in Emerging India - Some Key Issues : Reflections on thought and practice’, is coming out in :
Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, eds, 2018 - Housing in India : Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities, Volume 1.
As also mentioned within the text, please note that this essay is still work-in-progress, and puts forward and
explores what are still rough thoughts towards opening conversations on what I believe are some crucial questions.
I would like to acknowledge here the huge contribution to this essay of my collaborator deepani seth, who helped
not only to very substantially carry forward my earlier thinking but also, by critically engaging with my arguments, to
formulate some propositions that are new for me. This essay is therefore in many senses shared work, and indeed, in
some parts is really hers.
I also express my profound debt here, on the one hand to my co-workers and comrades in the social organisations
and initiatives that I worked with during the 1970s through to the 90s, and in particular in Unnayan and in the
National Campaign for Housing Rights, for all that we learned and forged together – for much of what I have to say
here was in fact collectively forged; and on the other hand, to John F C Turner, an English architect, housing activist,
and organic theoretician, who first opened my eyes and mind to other ways of seeing housing.
2
www.udri.org/.
3
Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote, and Kaiwan Mehta, February 2018 – ‘The State of Housing in India’.
4
Anon (Architectural Foundation and the Urban Design Research Institute), nd, c.February 2018.
5
Jai Sen, January 1989 - ‘Architecture is Struggle : Some Reflections on Architectural Awareness, focussing on
Architecture and the People’
Work-in-progress, November 2018 draft 2
followed by two books coming out of the Initiative – collectively constitutes a very major and significant
public initiative and intervention in the field, one that has the potential of having significant ramifications.
Having said this, I feel that I should point out here itself in my introduction, a couple of issues
that I would like to request readers to keep in mind, and that I will return to in this essay :
• In a country that is still – and stubbornly - 60 per cent rural, an overriding focus on the urban :
Shortly before the Conference started, the term ‘urban’ was dropped from its title. On the one
hand, I welcomed the principle of this change, as will become evident from this essay. I feel it is
vital that we in India not focus on the urban alone – if nothing else, because of the reality of ‘the
rural’ in our midst, where even in 2030 fully 60 per cent of the country will continue to live in
villages. On the other hand however, simply changing the title could not – and did not - of
course change the character and content of the Conference, and I believe that to the contrary we
need to also consciously and critically engage with the enduring, underlying focus that architects
and planners have on ‘the urban’ (understood not only in terms of its literal meaning but also its
larger symbolic and cultural meanings). I say this because as I see it, this is only a bias that that
architects and planners are trained to have and to relentlessly develop, as a default setting within
a larger drive towards modernity that are based on 19th century isms – both capitalism and
socialism -, which rendered ‘the rural’ as just a residual category, an all but dead category, the
past that we have left behind and/or must, at all costs, leave behind.
• I would argue that to the contrary, given the nature of India as it is and continues to be, given
the state of the world today, and given moreover what we have now learned about the
interdependence of the web of life on Mother Earth - as well as of the devastation that
anthropocentric urbanisation and industrialisation have wrought on Mother Earth -, we need to
move on from these 19th century isms that we still subliminally obey and embrace the new
modern, which is the larger whole, the web of life, and including the rural; and we therefore
need to make it our responsibility to critically engage with this bias that guides us.
• The absence, and absenting, of ‘the people’ from the Exhibition and the Conference, and in
general from this initiative, with one exception : In a country where the vast majority of ‘housing’
is done by ‘the people’ themselves (a point I will return to), I was among other things struck by
how much the Exhibition focussed mostly on the work of architects (and then too, famous
architects), and how ‘the people’, and also the ‘Popular’, ‘Informal’, or ‘Community’ sector, were
almost totally absent (and even if the film commissioned by the Bombay Initiative is very much
about ‘the ordinary people’ of India and their struggles for a place to live).6 It only gradually
dawned on me, starting from the opening day of the Bombay Conference and while listening to
two of the curators of the Exhibition, Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, walking visitors through
it, that the Exhibition was in fact perhaps designed primarily for architects and architectural
students – and where I then came to understand that the Conference too was a discussion
exclusively among professionals, teachers, and researchers, about the work that they do. But as
I see it, even this desire for a focus need not, of course – and surely should not -, mean the
absenting, and othering, of the main actors in the drama of what we call ‘housing’ ? And so
where indeed, I argue in this paper that we need urgently not to just ‘correct the balance’ but
also, again, to critically reflect on the dynamic that led to this.
I return to these points in this essay, but perhaps need to explain here why I see these as major
issues. In short, I do so because of my experiences in the field, the social position with which I went in
to my work in this field as an architect in the mid 1970s, and what I learned from my work, which I
would like to spell out a bit as a background to my arguments.
6
Sanjiv Shah, 2018 - ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’.
I am an upper middle class and caste and now aging male from India, who was largely educated
outside India and/but who chose to drop out of a successful practice in mainstream architecture and
urban design in Canada to re-educate myself about housing as ordinary people understand it, and where
I moved to Calcutta (now Kolkata) to do this.
I then worked for many years, from 1974-1991, in direct community and mass organisation with
communities of the labouring poor in Calcutta – now Kolkata - around social housing and planning issues,
at first independently and then through a social organisation named Unnayan (meaning ‘development’ in
Bengali, but in the other sense however, of unfolding, self-realisation) that some of us set up in 1977.
The issues we addressed focussed on supporting communities of the labouring poor in the city to
incrementally gain their dwelling rights, resist eviction and displacement, and manage the consolidation
of occupation and in some cases the re-occupation of land (which included building their lives through
building schools, other common facilities, and more generally their lives and livelihoods). The work we
did included the documentation of the living and working conditions of such communities, towards
making these invisibilised people visible; developing and advocating planning and policy alternatives, and
supporting communities to organise public demands for recognition, for respect, and for rights; and work
on improving technologies that people were already using, including in post disaster housing
reconstruction and disaster mitigation, and of manually powered urban transport; and where in the
course of all this, I was at all times trying to understand how ordinary people saw things and understood
them.
Through our work in relation to housing, I later came to be involved - along with many others in
the country - in building an all-India campaign during the 1980s called the National Campaign for
Housing Rights,7 and through the NCHR working on a progressive national housing policy8 and on a
People’s Bill for Housing Rights.9 I then came to be also involved in building an international campaign in
the field, through an international organisation, the Habitat International Coalition, which over time led to
the idea of a ‘right to housing’ being accepted in international institutions.
Now that I look back, I see that over time I was therefore very involved – and without really
being conscious of this at that time – in the articulation and practice of what were in many ways new
fields : One that came to be called, for good or for bad (I will come back to this), as ‘housing rights’; and
also, and in a more general sense, and along with some others in the country such as Madhu Sarin,
Kirtee Shah, and P K Das, of a practice in social housing, architecture, planning, and policy advocacy.
It was through this sustained and extraordinarily rich period of work that I came to understand
‘the city’ and ‘housing’ in completely different ways, and also to recognise that the main reason I
instinctively chose to drop out of my earlier practice in architecture was because of how alienated it was
from ‘the people’ that it was supposedly all about - which led me to reinvent my practice.10
Among the many things I learned from my experience, there is perhaps one that came to be of
primary importance to the way in which I came to now see these questions and issues : That the very
essence of what we call ‘housing’ is in fact ‘dwelling’, or ‘to dwell’. I tried spelling out this shift of
thinking only some years later on, in some reflections on this issue :
Indeed, I would venture the thought that perhaps in all cultures, ‘dwelling’ is one of the most fundamental
parts of the act of building our world itself, and thus of building order in our lives and gaining some degree
7
NCHR (National Campaign for Housing Rights), July 1990 [July-August 1986] - ‘For Housing as a Basic Right !’.
Basic Declaration of the National Campaign for Housing Rights.
8
NCHR, March 1988 - ‘Framework for a Democratic Housing Policy’.
9
NCHR, July 1992a - Housing Rights Bill, including a Proposal for a Constitutional Amendment.
10
Without being entirely conscious of what I was doing, I first tried exploring what I was learning – first, about other
ways of seeing ‘the city’ – in an essay titled ‘The Unintended City : An Essay on the City of the Poor’ (Sen, 1975). I
then worked intensively on housing and urban issues over the subsequent fifteen years, and periodically reflected on
housing and planning issues.
of control over it. Where we dwell, after all, is – or becomes, if we can live there for long enough – the
centre of our cosmos and universe, at that stage in our lives; and indeed, our home is the place from which
we establish many and even most of our social and economic relations, and from which we claim two of our
most basic political rights and freedoms : Our right to vote (and thereby to participate in institutional
governance), and in a sense even more fundamentally, our freedom to build community and so to exercise
governance over our individual and collective lives. Equally, where we live also contributes strongly to our
cultural and social identity, and in a very real sense, all our social, economic, and other relations are
constructed around and from this ‘place’. And – very importantly - it is in fact the case that in India, many
of our Constitutional and other human rights are linked to where we dwell.11
This realisation led me to see ‘housing’, or a house, essentially as being only the physical
manifestation of the act of ‘dwelling’ - and where once I realised this, it became fundamentally important
for me to also make this distinction between housing and dwelling in my work as an architect and an
activist.
I also came to realise that a further advantage of using the term ‘dwelling’ - and also the phrase
‘a place to live’ – is that they are also much closer to vernacular conceptions in India, such as basustan in
Bengali (literally, ‘a place to live’, as distinct from the much more formal term referring to built housing,
abasan); or ghar in Hindi, rather than awaas or niwas, or makaan. I will come back in this essay to the
question of why searching for the right vocabulary, and in particular understanding and using vocabulary
that is close to vernacular terms, is so important for our work.
My discussion of housing in this essay therefore, is through this lens, and about what I learned
from the very particular and intense engagement I had with ‘housing’ in my various roles as an architect,
planner, activist, and advocate; and also as I say, as an upper class and caste male. I therefore also
write here primarily from this experience and from this position, this location, within the production and
reproduction of what is commonly called ‘housing’ (but which I argue can be more meaningfully called
dwelling) and within society and social relations.
Given this location and history however, I propose to engage in this essay both with the subject
at hand and also with the larger initiative that this book has come out of, and in particular with the
Exhibition and the Conference. I do so from two positions, or points of view : One, as a member of the
public and profession, and because of what I see as the intrinsic public and professional significance –
and responsibility - of the Bombay Initiative; and two, as an invited speaker at the Conference. From
both these points of view, I feel I have a duty to also engage closely with the initiative and with what it is
saying to us. It is too significant not to do so. I therefore interweave my comments on the initiative with
my discussion of the field.
I believe that if we are to seriously and sensitively address the complex issues involved in the
subject of ‘Home and Homelessness’ in the times we live in, and more generally the subject of the
Conference, the ‘State of Housing in Emerging India’, we need to ask ourselves several questions not
only about the material realities of housing and dwelling but also about the way in which we see and
define the question of what we call ‘housing’ and locate ourselves in relation to it. We also need to accept
that there may be some key shifts required in the way in which we view the subject, and be open to the
possibility of reframing the subject itself and our relation to it.
To my understanding, this is important not only for the conversations we can have through this
Conference and the larger initiative that it is a part of, but also for the wider conversations that the
Initiative may be able to generate around the subject - among those for whom we seek to provide
‘housing’ (the dwellers); among those engaged in framing policies and practices around ‘providing
housing’; and among all those who fall in-between, including architects, scholars, students, activists, and
11
From : Jai Sen, April 2002c [May 2000] – ‘“It’s ‘dwelling’, stupid, not ‘housing’ !”. The title of the essay came from
what I said to myself at that eureka moment.
the public at large; and at the levels of professional practice, community engagement, scholarly work,
and public policy.
I have therefore structured this paper in the form of a series of questions that are aimed at
opening up discussion not only on ‘housing’ but also on some of the ways in which we see (and don’t
see) the housing question; on the biases that I believe are inherent in our ways of seeing; and on the
impacts of these biases :
v What is ‘housing’, anyway ? (Or, is the issue not ‘housing’ anyway, but dwelling ?)
v What is ‘homelessness’ ?
v Where are the people ?
v Where are women, the primary homebuilders ?
v The imperative of addressing the larger whole : ‘The rural’ as well as ‘the urban’
v The imperatives of reality : The need to critically rethink our engagement and praxis
v What then, is the nature of the housing crisis emerging in India today ?
v The question of rights and struggle in housing : Exclusions and the need for reframing
v Interrogating our goals and assumptions
v The gathering storms : In search of understanding home and homelessness in emerging India
v In conclusion : Rethinking home and homelessness, rethinking housing
A key argument that threads through these questions and the discussions that I present around
each, is the polarity that I believe we as professionals and researchers create between ‘housing providers’
and those who we believe require ‘housing’. Another argument concerns the overriding focus that
professionals end up placing on what ‘we’ do, rather than on what ‘they’ do.
Finally, in this introduction, let me underline two things. First, that this essay only puts forward
and explores rough thoughts towards opening conversations on what I believe are some crucial questions
that seem to constantly get lost. One important reason for my also underlining the roughness of this
essay is that all said and done, I am drawing here on a fading memory of work from many years ago in
the 1980s and on (my memory of) conditions that prevailed at that time. The thoughts and proposals I
put forward here are therefore necessarily both tentative and exploratory, but with the underlying belief
that the body of work from the 1980s that grounds many of these ideas is perhaps still relevant. As
such, and as noted on these pages, this version of this essay is therefore also only work-in-progress, and
I welcome comments and engagement.
The second point I wish to underline is that what I have to say here is based on experiences and
conditions in India and therefore perhaps really only applies, in my understanding, to this context; and
that what I say here has no pretensions of trying to be ‘universal’. I underline this because I once had
the unfortunate experience of seeing the ideas that we had generated in India during the 1980s - and
specifically on the basis of intense exchange across much of the country on ‘domestic’ social, economic,
political, and ecological realities - then being taken on board and institutionalised at the international level
on what seemed to me to be a somewhat uncritical basis. Even if it was of course gratifying to know that
our proposals from India seemed to others to be relevant to all contexts, I believe that we should be
cautious about universalising context-specific formulations, and rather should always go back to asking
basic questions rooted in specific realities; and in taking on the task of developing universal formulations,
must base those on our understanding of multiple specific ones
And third, I want to thank Rahul Mehrotra and his colleagues once more, this time for giving me
this opportunity to revisit what were some of the most defining years of my life. I had in fact already
been planning to go back and pull together my work of that time, and especially around housing issues;
this essay therefore in a way constitutes my beginning to do so, and to that extent its main title could
well have been ‘Rethinking Housing, Part 1’.
What is ‘housing’, anyway ?

Or, is the issue not ‘housing’ anyway, but dwelling ?
In short, I would like to suggest that if we are concerned with the quality of people’s lives (and not just
with building buildings – which is a question in of itself that I will return to), then the fundamental issue
at hand is not ‘housing’, but dwelling.12 (Just imagine, for instance, if the title and focus of the Bombay
Conference had been ‘Dwelling in Emerging India’ !)
I assert this because in my view, what is commonly called ‘housing’ in fact more fundamentally
means the actions that human beings take to dwell somewhere, and to find a place to live in security and
dignity.
Referring again to the struggles for housing rights that I was involved in during the 1980s, it was
only when we were well into our campaigns that it gradually dawned on me that even though we were
using the term ‘housing rights’, everything that we were doing was in fact about what in English is called
‘dwelling’, and not about ‘housing’.
To quote again from my essay on this shift of thinking :
I myself, along with a large number of other people in India and internationally, was very much a part of
this movement and of the articulation of the proposal and demand that housing be recognised as a
fundamental human right. But I now argue that we need to change our demand in a small but very
important way : From demanding that housing be recognised as a fundamental human right, to demanding
that not ‘housing’ but dwelling be the fundamental right.
Why and how should this be the case ? Most fundamentally, I argue it must because ‘housing’ – as it is
commonly understood - refers merely to the four walls and roof (and floor) in which we may dwell, the
building, whereas ‘dwelling’ refers to something far deeper : To the existential relations of living in a place,
and to the wider social and cosmological meaning of this action. It refers to the act of ‘settling and residing’
somewhere, of in-habiting it, and of making it one’s home; and ultimately, of struggling for and building
‘one’s place in the world’. And – I propose – it is this (and not the gaining of the mere object called
13
‘housing’) that we, as living, sentient beings, all really struggle for.
In short, what we call ‘housing’ is therefore only one part of the act of what people – all people,
and perhaps especially all women – are struggling for and attempting to build, which is a home, a
dwelling, where they / we may dwell with their / our families in peace, security, and with dignity; and
where the physical correlates of ‘four walls and a roof’ are of course only a part of what it takes, in
reality, to achieve this. (I highlight women because as I think is widely accepted, women are the primary
homebuilders; and / but where I again come back to this.)
Another way of putting this is that built housing is only the physical manifestation of the social,
economic, cultural, ecological, and cosmological relations that underlie the multiple actions involved in
dwelling and that produce it (and where, to my understanding, this is also what architecture is, when
looked at more closely, and fundamentally); and that it is therefore the underlying social, economic,
cultural, ecological, and cosmological relations that we need to focus on, and not just the physical
manifestation that we call ‘housing’. The simple question we need to always ask ourselves is : What does
a ‘home’ really mean - to anyone, at any stage of struggling for or living in one ?
12
I once again express my deep gratitude to Rahul Mehrotra, here for generously quoting me at length and saying
just this in his opening remarks to the Bombay Conference in March 2018.
13
From : Jai Sen, April 2002c [May 2000] – ‘“It’s ‘dwelling’, stupid, not ‘housing’ !”.
Let me also try and illustrate the paradigm shift I am suggesting in this area with an aphorism :
That we need to begin to perceive and to understand that all of us, but most especially all those whose
lives are economically, legally, or socially precarious, are in a daily struggle not just for the foundations of
a building but for the foundations of our lives.14
This dialectic of dwelling is something that all people - of all castes and classes - who are
struggling for a place to live understand well, simply by dint of struggling for it and towards defending it
on what is sometimes a day-to-day basis. It is something however that the labouring and working
classes and castes (in other words, Dalits, Adivasis, ‘the poor’) know especially well, since they have to
struggle with this at every stage of their lives. It is something that those who belong to the middle
classes and castes also face but tend to be less aware of, simply because – and at the risk of excessive
generalisation - they / we are more likely to have the financial and social standing that allows them to
buy their / our way in in ways that can insulate and protect them / ourselves, at least to some degree.
But for those whose situation is more precarious, and especially for those who belong to minorities, and
women in general, the experience of trying to build a home is – throughout their lives - marked by these
social, emotional, material, and economic needs and constraints and by the constant need to make
decisions to best fulfill only some of what they seek. These needs, struggles, and negotiations form an
integral – and fundamental - part of the act of dwelling, or of creating and keeping one’s dwelling, one’s
place in the world.
Thus, and contrary to what architects, planners, developers, policy makers, and politicians tend
to project, knowingly or otherwise – and that is projected even to children, through fables and stories -,15
‘four walls and a roof’ do not by themselves provide security (or dignity). Achieving this requires a much
wider set of conditions to exist – or to be put in place. But precisely because what is called ‘housing’ is
now so widely seen and projected as a commodity, all efforts to think about ‘housing’ tend to remain
mired in the production of commodities and related services – in whatever shape or size; and where all
the rest of the issues that are key to making ‘housing’ meaningful are then sidelined, absented.16
In relation to this, the use by professionals of the word ‘dwelling’ in the term ‘dwelling unit’ does
not of course take away the focus from the built object, the ‘unit’ or ‘the house’; indeed, it only helps to
underline our emphasis on the materiality of the unit even as we seem to foreground the focus on its
larger, intangible purpose, which is to dwell in it.
Some important and influential challenges to this idea of housing as commodity were made in
the 1970s by the English architect John Turner and by the anarchist historian Colin Ward.17, 18 One of
Turner’s key arguments was that ‘housing’ is, and must be understood, not as a noun but as a verb (as in
running, and swimming) – and where in its time, this was quite an influential idea in the world of social
housing.
14
For my first discussion of this idea, see : Jai Sen, February 1996 - ‘Foundations of our lives’.
15
There are so many examples, and perhaps in all cultures and languages. In the English-speaking world, think for
instance of the story ‘Three Little Pigs’. A little reflection will quickly reveal the key message of this story : That the
house built with bricks is the only one we should aim at – and implicitly, that the pig living there is the brighter one,
the more accomplished one; and where the pig with the home built with straw is… I leave the rest to your
imagination. So this is not just a subject of active discrimination at later stages of life; we even impregnate young
children with these thoughts, as a part of ‘educating’ and ‘civilising’ them.
16
For a classic discussion of how this happens in cities and through misguided urban planning, see : Jane Jacobs,
1961 – The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
17
Turner’s ideas and proposals went much further than this, but for this point, see : John F C Turner, 1970 –
‘Housing as a Verb’. For his wider work, see : John F C Turner & Robert Fichter, eds, 1972 - Freedom to Build :
Dweller control of the housing process; and Richard Harris, June 2003 – ‘A double irony : The originality and
influence of John F C Turner’; and for an example of Turner’s early work, set in the ‘Third World’ and that led him to
his thinking : John F C Turner, 1968 [1966] – ‘Uncontrolled urban settlement : Problems and policies’.
18
Colin Ward, 1976 – Housing : An Anarchist Approach.
But, and although Turner’s ideas were influential, convention was stronger, and the term
‘housing’ continues to be used to refer to objects, not processes; and indeed, where even someone like
me, steeped as I was in Turner’s ideas and also immersed in the struggles of ordinary working people in
Calcutta for a place to live, reflexively chose the term ‘housing rights’ when we were giving shape to the
National Campaign for Housing Rights in the mid 1980s. Even though we in the NCHR came to
fundamentally redefine ‘housing’ as ‘a place for every woman, man, and child to live in security and
dignity’,19 and where that definition in turn came to be accepted quite widely within the country, in
international circles, and in international institutions such as the UN,20 I later realised that this simple
issue of a choice of wording was a fateful slip that served to propagate the wrong idea.21 In a way, we
missed the wood for the trees. And where ironically and tragically, even if expectedly, this new idea was
in time concretised at the UN level as the ‘right to adequate housing’, which was a useful step but a far
cry from what we had wanted and intended.22
In spite however, of this knowledge and this understanding having been generated and widely
adopted, and at one point even having been quite influential, it is as though they have been forgotten by
those working today with the question of housing. Is this forgetting merely incidental ? I would like to
suggest otherwise, and that this forgetting is deep-rooted; I have come to believe - and to now suggest
here - that it is the reflection and manifestation of deep, underlying class and caste bias, and also of
vested interest in the idea of ‘housing’ among ‘housing providers’. And where these biases - often
invisible even to the providers - only exacerbate the problems that those in more precarious situations
face in building their homes and in defending and maintaining them.
Let me expand on this.
Our inability as professionals and researchers to see ‘dwelling’ instead of ‘housing’ as the larger
need is because we seem to believe that those who we think need housing are different from those who
provide it. We seem to believe that a different kind of skill set, and point of view, and indeed a different
kind of knowledge, is required for creating housing, and which only professionals have and is not
available to those who we say need housing. We are unwilling to recognise what people build for
themselves as really being ‘housing’, or at least, ‘adequate housing’. Not coincidentally, this idea - that
we alone have the knowledge required to create and provide adequate housing - fits conveniently with
the knowledge that we as professionals have, thereby legitimising our roles and our professions and
allowing us to assume the mantle of those who are exclusively equipped to provide housing. In seeking
and creating legitimacy for ourselves, we thereby other and then absent those we are purportedly
working for and providing housing to.
What leads to this othering – and is maybe even its underlying foundation - is, simply put, the
difference of class and caste; and where this ‘othering’ is in itself a subtle but powerful, modern
manifestation of caste. Here I mean not only socio-economic class but also intellectual and cultural class
and caste, and therefore the class and caste biases that are inherent in the training and practice of the
architect (or scholar or administrator or entrepreneur) who considers herself an expert at building a
19
20
For instance, in : UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, December 1991 – ‘General Comment No
4 – The Right to Adequate Housing’; and in : UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1997 – ‘General
Comment No 7’.
21
And where I formally wrote up these thoughts only much later yet, in the essay I have already referred to, Jai Sen,
April 2002c [May 2000] – ‘“It’s ‘dwelling’, stupid, not ‘housing’ !”.
22
See, for instance : Rajindar Sachar, June 1994 – ‘The right to adequate housing : Second progress report
submitted by Mr Rajindar Sachar, Special Rapporteur’. Justice Sachar was the first ‘Special Rapporteur for the Right
to Adequate Housing’ appointed by the UN. My comment here is directed not at the late Justice Sachar as
Rapporteur alone, but also to those who formulated the right in these terms and not in a more generic way; and
both those campaigning for the right and within the UN.
building. This is only compounded by the socio-economic difference between a middle or upper class
architect and her lower class, migrant worker client. And so, every time we as professionals think of
those who we think ‘require housing’, we immediately think of them as separate from us and choose to
forget their need for a dwelling, and focus on their ‘housing’. At a merely technical level, we do this
because it is much easier and simpler to provide a housing unit, a commodity, a service for a beneficiary,
that can be built, delivered, and the project closed. This is only more the case when we understand and
project the ‘need’ to be on a large scale, and think of the project as ‘mass housing’. And where the
othering also goes wider, and deeper.
(This is perhaps a good time to step back and ask ourselves : Would we create homes or houses
for our loved ones, or for people of a class that we respect, using this approach ?)
As I see it, this is a key problem that finds one of its roots in the profession’s choice of the term
‘housing’ over ‘dwelling’; and which is why I believe it is so crucial that we in this initiative move from
looking at housing predominantly in terms of its physical and material aspects to thinking of ‘dwelling’ as
the bigger - social, political, cultural, cosmological, and ecological - picture within which housing resides.
This shift has many potential outcomes. It can help counter the othering and the invisible biases
against and dismissal of those who we think require housing. It can also help us see that ‘dwelling’ is
something that only those who are dwelling can do; whereas ‘housing’ on the other hand – other than
when insistently used as a verb – is something that anyone can ‘do’, or produce. Working with the idea
of ‘dwelling’ thus also forces us to recognise the agency of the dwellers, the women and men who are
struggling towards creating a dwelling. It speaks of the knowledge and actions and thus also of the
agency of the persons involved in the struggle for dwelling, whereas other than when used in a
Turneresque sense, this agency and primacy is absent in the term ‘housing’, which occludes the
relationship to the housing unit of the people dwelling in it.
The recognition of agency, and importantly of the knowledge and actions inherent in it, can also
help change the roles of the interventions and of the interventionists, from ‘providing’ housing (because
housing can be provided) to helping with creating dwelling - because dwelling cannot be provided and
given, it must be created or co-created; and where in recognising the agency of those who say require
housing, we also learn – and in spite of our inherent class and caste inequalities - to view our own
positions with greater humility and the purpose of our work with greater clarity.
Through this, we also begin to recognise that housing is not an end in itself, but only a means to
the end that all people aim at, to live in security and dignity. It makes us rethink the nature as well as
the duration of the intervention that we seek to make, perhaps choosing to not limit it to making and
delivering a dwelling unit, but rather helping to ensure the security and dignity that is sought from that
unit.
The shift can also help us question and review the ways in which our work interacts with those
we are working for. For instance, by focussing on ‘dwelling’ (and so seeing that a house or dwelling unit
is only a means towards the conceptually larger and less material end of dwelling), we can come to see it
as a continuous act, an ongoing process, and an incremental and lifelong process. This is in fact
something that was repeatedly pointed out during the sessions of the Bombay Initiative, such as by
Aromar Revi in his presentation in the Inaugural Seminar,23 and then again by Solomon Benjamin in his
video presentation to the Bombay Conference.24 It is something that we ourselves know as householders
and homemakers, but that as housing providers we tend to forget. And so where what may appears to
us as outsiders to be incomplete and therefore inadequate, changes if we look at it from the ‘inside’ as a
23
Aromar Revi, nd c.February 2017 – Summary of Presentation at Inaugural Seminar on ‘The State of Housing in
India’.
24
Solomon Benjamin, March 2018 – ‘Delivery as Space : Substantiating In-situ Upgrading as Value and Process’.
dwelling, as a home, that is always merely at a certain stage of evolution, its form corresponding to
needs, means, and desires of the present, and that will change as needs, means, and desires change.
This shift in view therefore makes us question the way many of us presently work towards
creating and delivering ‘housing’ - as a single, complete unit that can be built and has to be delivered at
one go. Not only does this way of working not fit with the evolving nature of a home, but it is also
seriously problematic because this approach - of seeing ‘housing as housing delivery’ – is something that
is primarily in our own professional and commercial interests, and not primarily or necessarily in the
interests of the dwellers. As such, the ‘housing’ we do tends almost inevitably to become obsessed with
projects that are time bound and with a set of completed ‘deliverables’ at the end of the engagement,
where providers – from government to private initiatives - frame the ‘requirements’ of those who they
say need housing not in terms of their needs but, primarily, of the ways of working of their own
industry(s).
Finally, the shift also helps us to face the reality that looking at dwelling as ‘housing’ reflects
vested interest on part of housing providers to create markets in which they can find a role, and reveals
that this othering of those who they argue need housing is an intrinsic and necessary part of the framing
of ‘housing’ as it is dominantly practised. It forces us to see that the conversations that emerge from
such a framing focus on housing delivery - and lead to theorisations which leave no role for people other
than those of consumers or users, a theory exemplified in the panel titled ‘Institutional Ecology for
Housing Delivery’ at the Exhibition on the ‘State of Housing’. I come to this in the discussion of the
question after next, on ‘Where are the people ?’.
What is ‘homelessness’ ?
The central question in this initiative, and a key question that defines the work of many housing
providers, is the perception of a ‘housing crisis’ in India. Which, translated at a very general level, implies
a lack of ‘adequate housing’ for a large section of the population. But if we agree to complicate the idea
of ‘housing’ by looking at it as a part of the larger construct of dwelling, then we also need to understand
what we mean by the lack of a dwelling as opposed to the lack of ‘adequate’ housing, and even the lack
of a house or housing. In other words, I would therefore like to urge us to more generally take a step
back and look at what we mean when we use the terms ‘homeless’ and ‘homelessness’. This is also
fundamentally important to do at a conceptual level, because homelessness is of course the antithesis of
home and of dwelling.
There are many dimensions to this. First, I would like to suggest that in the Indian context
anyway, the term ‘homeless’ should not be generally applied to refer to people who live in materially low-
standard dwellings or settlements, primarily because this term does not refer only to the material
conditions of the dwelling people live in but also reflects a social and all-but-moral judgement,
subliminally or explicitly looking at people tagged with these terms as being on the end of a spectrum
that lists ‘failures, deviants, and criminals’ - and where this judgement is then often also used to subject
them to legal-procedural subjugations.
By using the term ‘homeless’, I believe that we are all too easily adopting a (western) sociological
term that applies to conditions in certain very particular contexts (the industrialised, capitalist countries,
and especially those of the West) and that refers to a very particular socio-psychological state that
applies especially to such contexts – of social alienation and isolation, in large part a state that comes out
of a breakdown in social relations. I suggest that although this condition certainly exists in India, it is not
widely the case in the country (as yet anyway; I will come back to this, in relation to ‘emerging India’) -
and in uncritically applying this term to conditions in this context as a blanket label for a wide range of
what are more correctly poor housing conditions, we predicate a whole series of misguided follow-up
policies and actions on this false premise.
(Sadly, one instance among many of our doing this was in the Exhibition in the Bombay Initiative,
where all those living in materially substandard housing units seemed to me to be automatically labelled
‘homeless’, and the total number of such units – according to whatever survey – was considered as the
‘housing deficit’ that was then said to constitute ‘the housing crisis’. Unless I misunderstood their
argument.25)
To the contrary, I would argue that for those who have created dwellings them or who are in the
process of creating and developing them over time, such dwellings are - and even if they are materially
and structurally poor, and without romanticising things – indeed their homes; and so where they are by
no means ‘homeless’. The dwellings they live in are what they have been able to put together within the
extremely severe constraints of their resources and also, very much, in the context of the extreme social
and economic marginalisation and exclusion they suffer and the extreme precariousness of their lives.
Their homes therefore almost by definition correlate to their needs and possibilities of their present,
however incomplete they may seem to us.
By labelling those who live in such settlements as ‘homeless’ (and thereby, such dwellings as
non-homes), we do them much greater harm than good. For in doing so, we dismiss what they have
achieved in their lives in creating and occupying these spaces, and thereby undermine their agency, their
struggle, and their knowledge; and where we thereby also marginalise them in social and cultural ways,
and crucially, also in legal ways. And indeed, by doing this we ourselves are responsible for in effect
rendering them ‘homeless’.
This labelling, and this entire scenario, fails to see and thereby undermines the connections of
family, caste, religion, and place-of-origin that people living in the housing and settlements that we see
as ‘inadequate’ or ‘precarious’ still have, and where it is often the case in the Indian context that they live
robust social lives even in such environments and are, by and large, well rooted; and where they are
therefore not by any means ‘homeless’, alienated individuals, as implied in the western social science
sense.26
Beyond this, this labelling and categorisation, coming from people who in class and caste terms
are relatively powerful, also has powerful downstream ramifications in the real world. These include
contributing to public policy and mentality that justifies - and even demands - the razing of people’s
settlements, the callous evictions of so-called ‘pavement dwellers’ (and in rural areas, of villagers, on the
same argument), and also the forcible and involuntary ‘resettlement and rehabilitation’ of dwellers into
settlements not of their choice in the very rare cases where resettlement is offered; and all too often in
the name of ‘doing good’ for the people concerned. Our labelling of them as ‘homeless’ thus contributes
to ripping apart and destroying the social fabric that people build.
So what then is ‘homelessness’, in the Indian context, and how should professionals and
academics relate to it ? In order to define this, I believe we need to consider the difference between
poor housing and homelessness, and for that we need to take into account the difference between
25
In the course of editing and producing the shorter, published version of this essay (Jai Sen, with deepani seth,
November 2018a – ‘Rethinking Housing in Emerging India : Some Reflections on Thought and Practice’), Rahul
Mehrotra as editor replied to me saying “in the text I [have] edited out the comment on the Homeless number that
you had made because we have quoted the homeless population number of 1.77 million from the Census. Will have
to dig out the exact methodology used by the census to count homeless people. But I don't think they have counted
slums in the homeless population because the number speaks for itself - 1.77 million can't possibly accommodate all
slum dwellers of the country!”. I have to say that I didn't notice this figure in the Exhibition – otherwise I would
have come to the same conclusion – but perhaps I missed it. I therefore agreed that's this comment could be cut in
the published version. But I am nevertheless leaving it in here, in the work-in-progress essay, because this was the
distinct impression I was left with, and I would like to explore it further.
26
I’m not in a position at the moment to reference this assertion with social science literature more rooted in our
realities, but I can refer those interested to my own writing in this area. See : Jai Sen, April 1975 - ‘The Unintended
City : An Essay on the City of the Poor’.
housing and dwelling. Second, we need to develop a vocabulary by which we can distinguish between
those who are truly alienated and homeless and those who have homes that are merely of low material
standard – and develop separate approaches for the two categories.27 And third, just as working on and
shedding our class and caste prejudices is key to understanding the difference between housing and
dwelling and the relationship between them, I believe that we also need to do this to be able to better
understand the difference between those who are without homes and those who live in poor, inadequate,
or precarious conditions.
In investigating and comprehending the reality of home and homelessness however, I believe
that we also need to anticipate the possibility of radical changes in social and economic conditions in the
country from what it has been to what it is perhaps becoming - on account of broader storms that are
accumulating -, and to a resulting massive increase in alienation and anomie given the changing
circumstances; and to see how to address this within our very particular social and cultural context. I
develop and explore this point in the second but last section of this paper, ‘The gathering storms : In
search of understanding home and homelessness in emerging India’.
Where are the people ?
These questions of housing vs dwelling, the meaning of homelessness, and our inability to make these
questions important amongst ourselves in our scholarship, our policies, and our practices, is also – I
believe – accompanied by a massive gap in the fundamental framework within which we see ‘housing’ :
Which is the absence, and absenting, in our work of the very people whose lives and homes are
supposedly the subject of our work. It is like undertaking a real-world housing design project without a
client, or worse, making a client absent in the assumption that she has no role to play in the design and
planning.
This is unfortunately all too standard in many and perhaps even most professional and public
housing projects involving ‘the poor’, as well as in all ‘development’ projects - but sadly, this was also
reflected in the Bombay Conference and Exhibition. For instance, the concept note for the Conference
said :
“Few attempts have been made to bring together the varied interests, perspectives, and contexts that go
into the understanding of Housing in India, which straddles a spectrum of stakeholders and actors including
architects, urban designers, planners, local governance bodies, private real estate developers, financial
institutions, and policy-makers.”28
Here, the people who we think ‘need housing’ were glaringly absent from the list of stakeholders
mentioned. As was the State. Similarly, this absenting was also visible in the opening panel of the
Exhibition, which said :
“… [all the] various stakeholders are brought together [in the Exhibition]. These include architects, urban
designers, planners, local governance bodies, private real estate developers, financial institutions, and
policy-makers, with the State as facilitator.”29
This absence, and absenting, was also evident in the otherwise impressive and interesting
housing design that was presented at the Exhibition, in the major panel titled ‘Chronotopes’ that was a
prominent (and again, otherwise interesting, and educative) part of the display. The Chronotopes were
essentialised isometric diagrams of housing types, arranged chronologically, and thereby suggesting the
possibility of some kind of cross learning and evolution. These were interesting enough in of themselves
27
In reality, there are many more than these two categories, and with the latter ‘category’ in turn being defined by
many characteristics, such as whether on public or private land, legality of occupation, and so on. This division into
two categories is therefore only put forward here to focus on the misuse of the term ‘homeless’.
28
From : Anon (Architecture Foundation and the Urban Design Research Institute), nd, c.February 2018 – Concept
Note for ‘Housing in the Emerging Urban India’, para 2.
29
From a panel in the Exhibition ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’.
until it dawned on me that all the diagrams were of formally constructed housing units (and then too,
mostly or all designed by architects), in other words, all from within the formal sector, and with none of
ordinary people’s housing, the vernacular, the informal. In short, I could not understand how and why
people’s own dwelling units were not included within the Chronotopes – unless it was for some reason
assumed that people’s own housing cannot be the basis of drawing lessons for future and more
‘adequate’ housing.
This exclusion and occlusion took place even more dramatically however, in a giant panel in the
Exhibition titled ‘Institutional Ecology for Housing Delivery’. This panel depicted two huge ellipses,
overlapping as in a Venn diagram, respectively titled ‘Public Sector’ and ‘Private Sector’. And where there
was again, to my way of looking at things, an absolutely stunning absence of the natural third ellipse in
this diagram, of what has now for decades been variously called the ‘Popular Sector’, the ‘Community
Sector’, or the ‘Informal Sector’.
Panel on the ‘Institutional Ecology for Housing Delivery’ at the Exhibition ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries,
and Realities in India’, in Bombay, India, February-March 2018
Quite aside from my own perspective on this issue, this absence was for me especially striking
because so many participants in the run-up to the Exhibition and to the Conference had brought out the
reality that the vast majority of dwelling units in India are designed and built by people themselves
and/or within the Community or Informal Sector. This included the presentations made by Aromar Revi
and Gautam Bhan of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements at the Inaugural Seminar30 and in the
interview in the Film for the Initiative made by Sanjiv Shah with Sheela Patel of SPARC, a veteran in the
field of people’s housing and another participant in the Inaugural Seminar;31 and perhaps most powerfully
and comprehensively by Sanjiv himself in his film for the Bombay Initiative.32
Specifically, the report of the Inaugural Seminar in the Initiative quoted Gautam Bhan saying
something along the following lines in his talk there, making clear that this sector is by far the largest
sector in the production of ‘housing’ in urban areas :
“Auto-construction is not just housing built by people but a mode of producing cities. Bhan argued that if
70% of our cities were built on this model, then how is it termed illegal. What we should question is the
fundaments that constitute law, the fundaments that define how a city is planned and the policies that
govern it. …”33 (Emphases supplied.)
I was therefore also left surprised that the Exhibition had not drawn on the inputs made by
participants in the Bombay Initiative.
Beyond the discussions that have taken place within the Bombay Initiative itself however, it has
also been a well-established convention all over the world ever since the UN’s landmark Habitat
Conference over forty years ago in 1976. At this Conference, it was proposed and accepted that the
Popular Sector is an equal, third sector in the production and maintenance of human settlements, along
with the Public and Private sectors, and where the term ‘CBOs’ (Community Based Organisations) then
came to subsequently be embedded in national and international ‘housing’ policy all over the world during
the 1980s.34 This was a historic gain.
Beyond this, what was also extraordinary about the exclusion was that there have been so many
very well-known and pedigreed architects and other fellow travellers who have also, at different times
over the past several decades, brought this knowledge to the surface. I will cite just two examples. On
the one hand, and in relation to the idea of Chronotopes. there is the directly related, classic work by
Christopher Alexander and his colleagues Shlomo Angel, Sanford Hirshen, Sara Ishikawa, and Christie
Koffin in 1969, where they tried to discern an organic pattern language in popular, vernacular housing
construction, towards developing a science in the field, and in turn towards contributing to architects
being more knowledgeable about and sensitive to local people when they tried intervening in their lives
with suggestions of ‘better housing’.35
30
Gautam Bhan, nd c.February 2017 – Summary of Presentation at Inaugural Seminar on ‘The State of Housing in
India’; and Aromar Revi, nd c.February 2017 – Summary of Presentation at Inaugural Seminar on ‘The State of
Housing in India’. And where Aromar Revi again spoke powerfully to this point in his introduction to the first session
at the Bombay Conference.
31
In : Sanjiv Shah, 2018 - ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’.
32
Sanjiv Shah, 2018 - ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’.
33
From : Gautam Bhan, nd c.February 2017 – Summary of Presentation at Inaugural Seminar on ‘The State of
Housing in India’.
34
I don't have the precise citation at hand right now, but I was present at the meeting of the UN Habitat in
Cartagena, Colombia, in 1988, where the historic acceptance of CBOs as a formal partner in human settlements was
formally adopted by the UN, after several previous meetings through the 1980s. There was then however an
attempt to dilute this specificity during the 1990s, and specifically to smuggle so-called ‘NGOs’ in within this category
at Habitat II in Istanbul in 1996, a move that I publicly critiqued. See : Jai Sen, June 1996a - ‘‘Participation of the
People’ - Intentions and Contradictions : A Critical Look at Habitat II’, and : Jai Sen, June 1996b - ‘Participation of
People, but Which People’.
35
Christopher Alexander, Shlomo Angel, Sanford Hirshen, Sara Ishikawa, and Christie Koffin, 1969 – Housing
Generated by Patterns (see the full citation for a link to a free downloadable copy, and for illustrations); and followed
by : Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, 1977 - A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings,
Construction.
And on the other hand, and preceding this, there is the equally classic work by Bernard Rudofsky
in 1964, Architecture Without Architects : A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture, which
demonstrated so brilliantly that what ordinary people build – all over the world - is just as beautiful as
anything that architects design, and often far more so.36
In other words, it has therefore been established knowledge and wisdom for many decades now,
both within the country and worldwide, that it is the Community Sector that is the primary stakeholder in
housing activities - and must be seen and treated as such. In short then, and to my understanding at
least, if we are interested in addressing the housing crisis that we perceive, then we must accept that
‘the people’ must be front and centre in what we are doing and thinking about, and where for a subject
like this it is not just ‘useful’ but fundamentally necessary to involve and engage both ‘the people’ and the
State in this discussion. This needs to be the case in any initiatives that architects and planners want to
take in this area, and more generally, architects and planners interested in working in the field need to
keep abreast of ‘conversations’, developments, and struggles already going within the field, including
between the people and the State - and as far as possible, take part in them.
Given all this – and where I am here of course only touching the surface of several major fields
of work over several recent decades - it is vital, given the knowledge that we already have access to, not
just to note the omissions and even to correct them, but to enquire into why this absenting persists; and
to reflect on it. This gap or omission on our part is clearly not for lack of knowledge that has been
generated. In my view, it again points to something deeper, systemic, and therefore even more
problematic than a mere slip in our understanding or memory.
Where are women, the primary homebuilders ?
As a specific case in point of the absenting or invisibilisation of people in our conversations, I would like
to raise the question of the absence / absenting in the Bombay Initiative not of women but of their
fundamental roles in housing and homebuilding, and also of what feminists have termed “the essential
homelessness of women”.37
I point this out, of course, because in many circles anyway, it is so widely accepted that women,
and girls, are - within the Community / Popular Sector but also more generally -, the primary
homebuilders and therefore also the primary stakeholders in housing. To my mind anyway, I think we
then again have to ask ourselves how and why it is that this question, and its force, found little or no
place within the Initiative ?
Beyond this – and where this perhaps speaks also to the question of widening our community of
exchange -, how and why is it that the other side of coin did not arise in the Initiative : That even though
this situation is slowly changing as a result of struggles by feminists and by some popular movements
over the past several decades, women and girls in India are still essentially homeless ? Because of
patriarchal custom and because of the inadequacies of existing laws ?
And especially when we know that even high caste, access to class, wealth, or even ‘adequate
housing’ does not necessarily provide and/or guarantee women and girls security and dignity ?
Posing these questions in turn leads us in turn to asking the further question of how to address
not just this reality but also this fundamental contradiction : Of if it is agreed that the primary
homebuilders in society, how is it that women – and at all levels of caste and class - nevertheless remain
36
Bernard Rudofsky, 1964 - Architecture Without Architects : A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture.
37
See Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi, July 1987 - ‘The Sky for a Roof : The Essential Homelessness of Women’;
Ruth Vanita and Madhu Kishwar, 1987 - ‘A woman’s home is not her own’; and : Leilani Farha, nd (a) - ‘Is There A
Woman In the House ? Women and the Right to Adequate Housing’, Final Draft.
essentially homeless ? What is the problem with the way we look at ‘housing’ that allows this profound
irony, paradox, and contradiction to persist in what we do ? And how can we work to overcome this in
our practice ?
I ask these questions because for me, this example starkly illustrates my earlier arguments.
First, that reframing the question of ‘housing’ to one of ‘dwelling’ can help us understand the housing
crisis differently. It can help us to understand the precarious reality of dwelling, and to the realities of
the roles that women play in the struggle for building the foundations to their and their families’ lives,
and not just to foundations to a building. And where making this shift can, I believe, help us perceive -
and in time, work with - the more fundamental issues that people face in gaining and retaining a place to
live in security and dignity.
And second, they remind us of our need to face the reality of continuing gender blindness in
what we do, and more generally our inability to see, accept, and work on the structural discrimination
that is all around us.
The imperative of addressing the larger whole : ‘The rural’ as well as ‘the
urban’
While, as I have already said, I very much appreciate the initiative that Rahul Mehrotra and the UDRI
have taken, with all due respect I would like to also suggest that if we are to seriously address the overall
theme of their larger initiative, ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’ (in
other words, not only in ‘urban India’ but in the country as a whole), then I think that the almost
exclusive focus that is so far there on the urban alone – both, as I have argued, in the earlier title of this
Conference and also insofar as architects and planners tend to have ‘the urban’ as their default setting -
is hugely inadequate. I would go as far as to say that it is of fundamental importance that we shift our
focus to also looking at the rural, and beyond this not at ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’ separately but at the
larger ecological whole.
Having said this, I would like to suggest that this Initiative – with its broad vision and ambition -
could also be an excellent place from where to challenge this bias and to lead a process of a change of
thinking in India. It goes without saying that we of course need to recognise that this is not a function of
changing the title alone. As I have already said, this is more fundamentally a question of focus, of where
our instincts as architects lie, and of how we are educated and trained to see and think of ‘housing’ – and
only increasingly so, in the age of postmodern neoliberalism in which we live. Can the Bombay Initiative
be an incubator for the new thinking that is required ?
Why is it so important that we address this ?

First, and most obviously, the demographics (and by the Initiative’s own figures) : By 2030, if 40% will by
then live in urban areas, then fully 60% of the country’s billion-plus population will still live in rural or
non-urban areas. This was one of the points that Aromar Revi of the Indian Institute for Human
Settlements underlined both in his presentation at the Inaugural Seminar to this initiative in February
2017,38 and then again in his interview to the film by Sanjiv Shah.39 If we want to understand and to
address the question of housing in India then – and in ‘emerging India’ -, it clearly makes no sense to
look at the urban alone, or even to focus on it.
(Yes, it is true that there is a general trend towards ‘urbanisation’ taking place in the country –
though far more slowly in India than in other parts of the world -, and yes, it’s true that even this
38
Aromar Revi, nd c.February 2017 – Summary of Presentation at Inaugural Seminar on ‘The State of Housing in
India’.
39
In : Sanjiv Shah, 2018 - ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’.
incremental growth adds up, in terms of numbers, to a significant growth in urban population;
but this should still then not mean, as it is right now, that we simply ignore and stop thinking
about ‘the rural’ and relegate it to the residual margins of our imagination.)
Second, ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’ are not separate or mutually exclusive, and must not be seen or
portrayed as this. As Doxiadis and others argued some decades ago,40 and as I think is still generally
accepted as a truism in perhaps all circles of professional and academic thought and even if not
practised, cities and towns are only a part of a much larger, and wider, ecosystem not just of human
settlements but of all aspects of human life and in every sense of the term : Socially, culturally,
economically, ecologically, and physically, and I would add, cosmologically. ‘The urban’ is thus just one
part of a larger whole that includes the rural, small towns, and everything in-between. To state the
obvious, for cities to exist we need ‘the rural’ – for food, for water, for electricity, for all so-called ‘raw
materials’ – and indeed, also for labour (and also for land to sprawl onto); but where the interrelationship
and symbiosis is of course much deeper than just this. We need to understand the interrelationships and
dynamics between them in a manner such that we see them as parts of human settlement as an
inseparable whole.
(It goes without saying that when talking of ‘the rural’, we are of course also talking of all the
coastal settlements as well, and therefore of the ecology and economy of the country as a whole,
including the coastal fishing zones.)
Re-thinking ‘the urban’ : Beyond the above, and on the basis of my own experience and analysis of
working on housing and related issues in Calcutta, I want to put forward here a very different picture of
what we conventionally see and understand as ‘the urban’ – and to argue that on this basis too, we need
to rethink the urban.
One significant shift is to realise that a large proportion of women and men who live in urban areas, and
especially in the labouring and working classes and castes, in reality live – dwell – simultaneously in both
‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’. They migrate to cities and towns from peri-urban areas and villages (the
‘other’ parts of the larger whole) and build what I suggested are in effect ‘unintended cities’ in what we,
as professionals and of the more privileged middle classes, say are ‘the interstices’ of our formal and
intended (if not always ‘planned’) cities - but where they as individuals, or as families, continue to also
live in their villages.41
In short, a large proportion of not only the sections of society that - as I have argued - this Initiative is
implicitly focused on, the urban labouring and working poor, but also of what is now a dramatically
burgeoning lower middle class in the country, lives simultaneously both in cities and in their village
homes and/or small towns, in a constant but dynamic relationship - and where their lives in the two
realities are therefore inseparable. To meaningfully think about the ‘housing’ of such people therefore,
necessarily means we must take both realities into account.42
Looking at ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ together – and therefore at larger whole -, in social,
economic, cultural, political, and physical terms, is therefore intellectually, politically, and ecologically
40
Constantinos A Doxiadis, 1968 – Ekistics : An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements.
41
Given that the labouring and working classes and castes now typically constitute the majority of the population in
most urban areas, it is a moot point as to whether ‘they’ live in the interstices of ‘our’ cities, or we in theirs… I first
tried exploring this relationship in the essay I have already mentioned, ‘The Unintended City’ (Jai Sen, April 1975 -
‘The Unintended City : An Essay on the City of the Poor’) and then worked with these ideas over the subsequent
decade and a half as a member of a social organisation in Calcutta, Unnayan. My sense is that at a fundamental
level, this broad characterisation has not changed much over these years.
42
Just to illustrate : They send money to their family members in their villages as often as they can, to take care of
their homes or to buy some land; they deliberately keep a part of their families in their village homes, to take care of
what little they may have there or to gain maintain a foothold; they tend to marry and therefore to dwell within the
districts and communities that they come from. And they even often keep their voting rights there, for crucial
strategic reasons.
imperative; but in addition, doing so may well offer a way to transform our present understanding both of
cities and of what is called ‘housing’.
All this is aside from – though related to – other fundamental questions such as city size etc, and
the massively negative impact that urban sprawl is having on the wider environment, and what the
alternatives to this are; and in terms of thinking about sustainable cities. These are old questions that
seem, tragically, to have been overwhelmed and forgotten by us as architects, planners, scholars and
policy makers – but which I believe that we, in an initiative of this concern, must also address, otherwise
we simply stand complicit with the ravaging of the country that is taking place in our times.43
Taken together, these points add up to a very different reality – and challenge - than the one
that architects and planners seem today to be imagining and working with. By focusing on the urban
alone, we cannot see this larger whole and therefore miss crucial aspects in relation to the question, and
struggle, of housing. We therefore need desperately to move past looking at ‘the rural’ as a residual and
backward category, and instead embrace it in a positive and holistic way. And as I said at the outset, we
need to shift to perceiving and regarding the larger whole as the new modern.
It is also imperative that we challenge this idea of urban-rural duality because this view leads to
an understanding of the housing situation that is in many ways severely skewed, jaundiced, and stunted.
As a case in point, the only recognition of ‘the rural’ in the Bombay Exhibition suggested that those being
displaced from big projects in ‘rural areas’ are the primary source of the homeless in cities ! This is not
only far from the truth, but also severely problematic because it again reveals our attitude towards the
rural as ‘the other’ and towards the urban merely as ‘a problem to be solved’.
This embracing of the whole is however also by nature a larger, conceptual question, and
inherent within it are several smaller and more specific questions, some of which involve questions
related to physical housing as well. For instance, it is crucial to recognise that housing in rural areas is
fundamentally different from ‘housing’ in urban areas, at multiple levels and in multiple dimensions. If
we want to engage with housing and dwelling in rural areas, we need to drop almost all our
presumptions and preconceptions about housing – which have been forged on the basis of urban realities
– and be willing to open and educate ourselves about this very different, other reality (and where this
too, varies hugely within the country).44
One very important dimension of this is that a very large proportion of households in rural areas
in India still live in intimate connection with their environments – including that their ‘housing’ is still
dependent on the biomass (soil, bamboo, trees, leaves, grass); and crucially, where access to the
biomass and to the commons are their customary rights and fundamental to their existence and their
housing.45 And / but where that very biomass – and therefore also their customary rights of access - is
43
These questions – which I believe are fundamental – of course require much more detailed discussion, but that is
beyond the scope of this essay. I therefore just want to flag them here, and hope that we can address them in more
detail in the course of further conversations that will take place both within the Bombay Initiative and outside.
44
I want to acknowledge that it would seem from the report on the ‘State of Housing’ Inaugural Seminar that took
place back in February 2017 that some of the speakers at least, and Aromar Revi in particular, did talk about rural
housing; but I’m afraid that I anyway sometimes found it quite difficult to understand just what they actually said –
from the way the report was written I think, which was highly stylised (and ‘urbanised’). Architecture Foundation
and the Urban Design Research Institute, nd, c.2017 – The State of Housing in India : A documentation of the
Inaugural Seminar.
45
For a discussion of the then-emerging resource base situation as it related to India in the mid 1980s, see CSE
(Centre for Science and Environment), 1982 - Citizen’s Report : The State of India’s Environment, and 1985 - The
State of India’s Environment 1984-85 : A Second Citizen’s Report. For something more specifically related to the
question of ‘housing’ and dwelling, see : Miloon Kothari, September 1989 - ‘Dwelling Rights and Nature in Rural India
- A Campaign’s Response’, and Miloon Kothari, 1989 - ‘Natural Resources and Rural Communities - A Housing Rights
Perspective’; and NCHR, March 1988 - ‘Framework for a Democratic Housing Policy’. Published by the NCHR,
Calcutta.
today under tremendous assault, as a function of hugely intensifying urban and industrial consumption as
an inherent aspect of neoliberal governance. And so to look at ‘housing’ in rural areas means that we
must also work to address the question of working to protect people’s customary rights to what, for want
of a better term, we can call their ‘dwelling resources’.
Things are of course changing in rural areas as well, with the penetration of industrial products
and with changing aspirations, but my sense is that this picture is still largely true for a still vast
proportion of people living in such areas, and in particular agricultural labour (who are largely but not
only Dalit), Adivasis, forest-dwellers, fisherfolk, and others. So among other questions, we then have to
ask ourselves : What can and should our roles be, in relation not to (built) housing but to these dwelling
resources that are so fundamental for them ?
The imperatives of reality : The need to critically rethink our engagement and
praxis
As I see it, our inability to view and include people, or the community sector more generally and women
in particular, and ‘the rural’ as a whole, as part of our fundamental framework is indicative of the way we
see ‘housing’ at present, and of dynamics at play in the background. And if our fundamental framework
is incorrect, then it is inevitable that we are bound to arrive at conclusions and directions that are
incorrect and even harmful to people.
I see this problem reflected in the many gaps that I have mentioned in the preceding questions,
in several ways. At the minimum, this includes the following : As a result of our not seeing housing as a
part of the larger need for ‘dwelling’, we have what I suggest is a blinkered understanding of the ideas
and concepts we use and propagate in our interventions and policies. We are also failing to comprehend
– let alone to depict – the totality of what we call ‘housing’, and of how what we call ‘housing’ actually
takes place in the Indian context, and we are therefore both working with and communicating a distorted
picture. We tend to take the position that what people build for themselves, and what they presently live
in, is ‘non-housing’ – and then go on to misrepresent this as ‘homelessness’. And we deny – and even
actively remove - agency to people in their efforts to house themselves, and thereby render ‘people’
purely as consumers of products called ‘housing’ and ‘housing services’; and where any inability on their
part to then fit into the role of ‘consumers’ leads them to be rendered homeless, both figuratively and
literally.
In doing all this however, we not only deny both people’s own efforts and struggles to create
housing, and also the reality that gaining and retaining ‘housing’ is a daily struggle, but crucially, what we
thereby also end up doing is to miss - and therefore hide - the existence of the powerful forces that they
are struggling against, and that are the causes of their living conditions. At the minimum, these include :
o The relentless structural struggle against caste, class, ethnic, and patriarchal discrimination that
the labouring and working classes and castes face in the Indian context, and have to wage every
day and night, and which is manifested in so many ways in their struggles for ‘housing’;
o The intensifying appropriation of so-called ‘natural resources’ across the country in the relentless
drive for neoliberal globalisation and development, and in the course of this, also of people’s
customary ‘dwelling resources’ in rural areas;
o The relentless social and economic precarity and marginalisation that such people face in urban
areas, as a consequence of which they are often forced to live life in what are labelled as
‘unauthorised’ or ‘illegal’ settlements, and for doing which they are ruthlessly targeted, exploited,
and criminalised, both by agencies of the state and by powerful local interests, including political
parties, and their homes and lives repeatedly destroyed;
o In particular, the combination of limited skills and earning possibilities and the viciousness of
speculation in the land and housing markets in urban areas, that forces the labouring and
working poor out of the housing market and into living in such settlements, and including through
the gentrification of areas and the subsequent relentless displacement (which all too many of us
personally take part in, both professionally and through our personal lives);46
o The criminally irresponsible legal distortions created by the State that criminalises people in their
struggles for a place to live, thus contributing to their living in even greater precarity; and –
o The environmental and health conditions and hazards that such people and their children are
thereby forced to live in, always precarious and with extremely high-risk levels of morbidity,
disablement, and death.
This is aside from the larger political-economic framework of a rabidly nationalist neoliberalism
and globalisation within which we all today live, which is hugely aggravating and intensifying all of the
above (and where resisting and changing which is a related but different story).
Unless I am wrong, none of this featured in the Exhibition, and I think that all this was far too
little discussed in the Conference. If I am right in this assessment, then I think that we are missing a
huge part of ‘the housing crisis’ as it actually exists out there in the real world : The forces that cause it;
the struggles of those who need a place to live in fighting against these forces and in terms of their
realities, and not ours or those of our professional preoccupations or preferences; and also the reality
that if we want to work towards creating viable, meaningful, and sustainable housing for ordinary people,
the labouring and working castes and classes, then – as I see it - this necessarily means working with
them and joining them in their struggles against these forces, and not cherry-picking as to what we will
or will not work with.
To this I would add that our inability to see these ‘others’ and the lives that they are forced to
live has an impact not only on them; it also impacts on us, in terms of the ways in which we view our
work, the solutions that we come up with, the allies that we choose, and the principles that we formulate
for ourselves.
The consequence of our missing such large pieces of the housing crisis is that we then, almost
inevitably, come up with incorrect directions for solutions - and ignore other potential solutions. For
instance, the Bombay Exhibition all but said that ‘the State has failed’ and that ‘the Private Sector’ must
now be the primary housing provider – but without offering any argument in support of either very major
proposition. But aside from the lack of substantiation for such important policy positions by such an
exercise, the result of this proclamation was – consciously or subconsciously - a picture where, since the
Informal or Community Sector had already been rendered absent and invisible, the hero of the future
was necessarily the Private Sector. And in its bid to support the celebration of the Private Sector, the
Exhibition also sidelined and ignored (or perhaps was unaware of ?) lessons from the many very
successful ‘alternative’ public / State ‘housing’-related programmes that have taken place in the country,
such as the site-upgrading programme in towns and cities in Madhya Pradesh during the 1980s;47 the
46
As far as I was able to see it, the Exhibition was silent about the vicious functioning of the land and built-housing
markets that ordinary people have to face the downstream consequences of on an ongoing basis, and moreover
where this situation is largely engineered by two of the ‘stakeholders’ that the Exhibition and the Concept Note have
however included – I feel very uncritically - as valid role players in the ‘housing delivery’ process they propose, the
private real estate developers and financial institutions.
I of course concede that there are (or can be) ‘good’ real estate developers and financial institutions, and ‘bad’
ones. But this is not the issue; the issue is to recognise the reality that we have a hugely skewed land and housing
market in the country, one that victimises all of us but most brutally those who are poor and of lower caste and
class; and within these sections, women. And so where this is structural. And so where it becomes essential that we
at all times exercise a critical awareness of the reality and functioning of this as process, and of the structural
positionalities and roles of actors within this.
47
Government of Madhya Pradesh, 1984 – ‘The Madhya Pradesh Nagariya Kshetron Ke Bhumihin Vyakti (Pattadhruti
Adhikaron Ka Pradan Kiya Jana) Adhiniyam, 1984’ (M.P. Act No. 15 of 1984).
Basti Improvement Programme in Calcutta in the 1960s and 70s (and despite all its many problems);48 or
the One-Lakh Housing Programme in Kerala in the 1970s,49 to cite just a few.
Most importantly, this conclusion in the Exhibition to me seemed to be a highly normative,

uncritical acceptance of the working of the market, which is deeply problematic not only because it is
based on normative assumptions but because it flies in the face of everything that we have learned about
social housing and land markets in cities in the past fifty years, from all over the world, in the South and
the North (in short, that a so-called ‘free market’ in land and housing is half or more of the problem, and
that especially in an emerging society such as India, the state has essential regulatory roles to play); and
also because it put forward its very own vision of ‘the state of housing’, devoid of all these lessons.
With all due respect, and without going into more detail, I think we need to ask ourselves as to
how and why this happened. I again take the liberty of venturing my reading : First, and as already
discussed, I think that this again happened precisely because of the play of class and caste in relation to
housing and dwelling; and second, and more specifically, because the specific class – and ‘caste’ – to
which many of us belong, including those who designed the Exhibition, has gained immensely from
neoliberalisation, the freedom of the market, and so on – and has therefore, consciously or
unconsciously, accepted the premises (and promises) of neoliberalism, and in the case of the Exhibition,
merely reproduced this and acted this out.
If we want to address this, then we again have to start by looking at our implicit biases – and
where we will perhaps find that they are deeply problematic. We need to look within ourselves first, and
as someone once famously said, “We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.” We also have to look
hard at the neoliberal stances that we are taking – consciously or unconsciously -, and consider the
possibility that the hugely skewed class and caste difference between ‘housing providers’ and the people
who are struggling for housing is a major source of this bias and of this stance.
Carrying this forward, we will also have to ask ourselves where – as professionals and/or as
academics – we feel we belong, in the now-expanded three-sector Venn diagram, the Public Sector or
State, the Private Sector or Market, and the Community Sector, and not - as it were – separate and
detached from all of them and inhabiting some kind of separate world (as academics anyway, are well
known for doing); and where, precisely because we are unrooted (and try to remain unaligned), we tend
to support or swing in favour of the State or the Market as and when they offer advantage to us.
This of course is simultaneously a personal, professional, and political choice, but it is a

necessary one. And in making this choice, we will want to keep in mind not just our own positions as
individuals but also our families, our social and professional associations, and also the social networks
within which we are located, at home and at work, including those who work for us or with us; in other
words, the backward and forward linkages of the position we take.
As will be evident from what I said at the outset, my own choice, and that of the people I worked
with through Unnayan and others social formations, was that we aligned ourselves with the Community
Sector, and I would certainly like to urge that others also make this choice and consider themselves as
48
Jai Sen and Dilip Kr Roy, April 1980 – ‘Calcutta’s Bustee Improvement Programme – an overview’; and : Jai Sen,
April 1993 / 1995 - ‘Searching for Tomorrow’s Housing Strategy : An Epilogue for Calcutta’s Basti ?’.
49
Incidentally, the One-Lakh Housing Programme is arguably one of the only highly successful housing programmes
in India to have not only specifically come out of a protracted, twenty-year popular struggle for homestead rights,
but where those leading it (social and then political activists, backed by academics and professionals) accepted that
they were a part of the struggle and not outside it, and where the programme was so successful precisely because it
came out of struggle; and even if the programme had other problems. For a draft-in-progress of a critical discussion
not of the One Lakh Housing Programme as such but of the struggles that led to it being given shape, see : Jai Sen,
September 2001a [December 1996] – ‘Deeper Meanings, Complex Subordination : Explorations into the history and
dynamics of movement around the dwelling rights of the kudikidappukaran (attached labour) of Kerala, India’.
being part of the Community Sector. But whatever our choice, at the minimum we have to be willing to
ask this question of ourselves, and to put it on the table.
In order to contribute towards taking steps for doing this, I would like to put forward some
thoughts for what the Bombay Initiative and we as professionals and academics need to do :
o First, to deeply reflect on what this exclusion of ‘the people’ and of the Community or Informal
Sector from the Exhibition and the Conference means, in all its dimensions;
o Second, to recognise and internalise that ‘the People’ / the ‘Community / Popular / Informal
Sector’ is by far the most important sector in the production and maintenance of housing in India
today, and to reflect on the many meanings of this;
o Third, to accept the autonomy of this sector and build this understanding into the ways in which
we hope to engage and work with it;
o Fourth, to recognise that because of the enormous pressures it is forced to exist under from both
the State and the Market, the Community / Popular / Informal Sector is a deeply complex and
fraught world that has its own dynamics and vocabulary of so-called ‘development’, and where,
and aside from having a robust social life, this also includes rampant social and economic
exploitation – just as the State and Market sectors do; and so where we, coming from so-called
‘civil society’, must not assume that social and other codes in this world will be the same as the
other sectors that are more familiar to us and expect smooth cooperation (and where at the
minimum, we will need to learn the grammar and vocabulary of their world);50 and -
o Fifth, and as a consequence of all of the above, to also recognise from ahead of time the sharp
limitations in the possibilities of roles for external professionals in this world, and be willing to re-
invent ourselves in this other world.
And in case we have difficulty in accepting the above but still want to ‘do’ something, we need to
be aware that to push ahead and attempt to intervene in the world of the Popular Sector, even if meant
compassionately, will be an imposition, and will be seen (and resisted) as one, by those in the
Community / Informal Sector.
Assuming some agreement on the need for a more critically engaged approach, I want to close
this section by suggesting that attempting to do the above will however also have some further
background requirements; and towards formulating which I also offer the following thoughts :
• We will have to accept class and caste differences and work towards straddling them by learning
both about the other and about the nature of their dwelling, and how the meanings change as a
function of caste, class, gender, and access to political capital;
• We will need to become far more familiar with the precarious conditions that the labouring and
working poor live in, and accept that there are forces - whether the Market or the State, and
even our own actions - that cause and propagate these conditions;
• As a part of recognising the primacy of the Community or Informal Sector, and of this other
world of housing, some of the first tasks will, in my understanding, need to be :
o An attempt, drawing from all available knowledge, to delineate how this world works, for
the understanding of architects and planners;51
50
In some other work that discusses the concept and reality of so-called ‘civil society’, I have characterised this other
world as being made up of ‘incivil society’ and ‘uncivil society’, and where I explore the relationship of the civil with
the incivil and the uncivil. See : Jai Sen, 2018b - ‘Break Free ! Engaging Critically with the Concept and Reality of
Civil Society (Part 1)’.
51
To my knowledge at least, not much systematic work has been done in carefully delineating how what we call the
‘community or informal sector’ works in the field of housing or dwelling – and in ways that would be legible and
o A depth exposure and orientation for architects and planners of what the nature of this
other world is (perhaps best done through social organisations who work among such
people); and -
o Only to repeat, an acceptance of the autonomy of this sector, and that the rules of
working with it are going to be very different from working within the comfort zones of
the formal sector.
One of the important premises of the Bombay Conference was the question phrased in the
Concept Note : ‘How should architects and planners respond ?’.52 On the face of it, this is a reasonable
enough question, and leaves open the possibility of a wide range of responses, from detached to
intensely engaged. But in short, I would like to suggest that for those of us who want to take a more
engaged position, the question we will have to ask ourselves may perhaps be more like : ‘How can
architects, planners, and other housing providers meaningfully involve themselves in the development –
and sometimes defence - of dwelling as seen by, desired by, and struggled for by the people ? And in
the development of housing as seen, desired, and struggled for by those who will dwell in those houses
?’.
And where a further and more specific question might be : ‘How can we shift our perceptions of
our roles in ‘housing’ from involvement in production and delivery of ‘built housing’ to a commitment to
stand with the people in their struggles to gain a place to live in security and dignity ? And where the
improvement of material conditions and services will only be a part of this ?’.
To my understanding, there is also one more step : Where we will need to be willing to confront
the reality that because of the very nature of the political structure and the economy, the social structure
within which we live, and the nature of the existing legal framework,53 the Community or Informal sector
is necessarily (and almost by definition) always in constant struggle with both the Private Sector and the
Public Sector; and where to work with this sector, and in the actually existing world, will therefore mean
being willing to work in struggle and in solidarity with them, in one way or another – and therefore to be
willing to confront both the Private Sector and the Public Sector, as and when required.54
Finally, a small point : As will be evident, I have primarily phrased this discussion in relation to
practitioners. In short, this means that researchers, students, and policy makers interested in exploring
this ground will need to frame similar questions for themselves.
What then, is the nature of the housing crisis emerging in India today ?
useful for people like architects and planners; but where I may well be wrong in this assessment and would be glad
to be corrected. One such study, by someone who was then a student architect, revealed a whole, coherent
vocabulary that was then in use in such settlements in a part of Calcutta (now Kolkata) called ‘East Calcutta’, that
was distinct from formal sector vocabulary. (See : Rita Sampat, December 1981 – ‘Settlements of Migrants : 3 case
studies in East Calcutta’.) Similarly, Arif Hassan gives some idea of such systems at work in his writings on his work
in Karachi; see Arif Hassan, July 1987 – ‘The Low Cost Sanitation Programme of the OPP’, and Arif Hassan, October
1993 – ‘Government, International Agencies, and OPP Collaboration for the Replication of OPP’s Low Cost Sanitation
Programme’. But other such studies must surely exist, and need to be drawn from. Mukta Naik of the CPR (Centre
for Policy Research) in New Delhi, also referred to local vocabulary during her presentation at the Bombay
Conference on local informal housing in Gurgaon, India, but has apparently not yet systematised her understanding
of it.
52
As mentioned in the Conference Note : Anon (Urban Design Research Institute and the Architecture Foundation),
nd, c.February 2018 – Concept Note for ‘Housing in the Emerging India’.
53
See, again, Gautam Bhan, nd c.February 2017 – Summary of Presentation at Inaugural Seminar on ‘The State of
Housing in India’, and also : Jai Sen, August 1984b – ‘Criminalisation of the Poor’.
54
Just as examples, see : Jai Sen, September 1981 – ‘Planners or people : Who should be evicted ?’; and : Unnayan,
February 1983 – ‘Towards Planning for the Real Calcutta’.
And what can be done to arrest the worst in the present, and over time, towards what should
we build this initiative ?
That there is a housing crisis, we will perhaps agree. But we then need to ask the question, which in
some way includes and in other ways emerges from the questions listed above, which is : What is the
nature of the crisis ?
Recalling the questions we have already discussed, we have seen that the crisis is not only about
a question of a shortage of housing units of ‘adequate’ standard, or of the adequate ‘delivery’ and
construction of a given number of units and infrastructure, but far more fundamentally about deep-
rooted structural inequalities within Indian society (and with which many of us are complicit), the
manifestation of these inequalities in systems of governance and trade at local and global levels (as well
as in our own practices), and about people’s access to space and resources and the recognition of rights
that exist even within these systems. This sketch, crude as it is, perhaps begins to give us an idea of the
real architecture of dwelling as it is in India today.
More specifically, the ‘housing crisis’ is about the huge skews in the land market in cities and
towns, of speculation, and also the play of caste, class, and other structural biases, and the resulting
marginalisation and pricing out that forces huge numbers of people in urban areas to live in zopadpattis
and jhuggis-jhonpris – and which then leads to their being accused of illegal occupation, their
criminalisation, and then their often repeated eviction, along with the demolition of their homes and of
their lives. It is about the rapacious over-demand in urban areas for energy and for materials for
construction and the consequent ravaging of the rural areas; and which in turn – through the activities of
mining and of the production of energy to feed this rapacious demand - is contributing to the
dispossession, displacement, and pauperisation of huge numbers of people in such areas; in short, and
again, the destruction of their lives. It is about the absenting of women, and the consequent essential
homelessness of women. It is about the increasingly polluted, violent, and unliveable nature of our cities.
It is about indiscriminate, rapacious, growth, and about accepting this as a part of life. And it is about
caste, class, and ethnic prejudice and violence. It is about a governance and polity that increasingly
accepts that it is okay if some – and a very substantial majority - among us are forced to live out their
lives in the most dehumanised ways, and that all of us should be alienated from nature. And where it is
all this – and more -, collectively, that I argue are the underlying social, economic, cultural, ecological,
and cosmological relations that we need to focus on, to understand the housing crisis.
I therefore suggest that it is not just ‘important’ but vital for us to ask the questions that have
arisen in this discussion in order to understand what the nature of the crisis is and what could be our
place in it, so that we are not only talking about addressing so-called ‘shortages’. This is, of course, only
a brief sketch of certain dimensions of the housing crisis as I see it, but in short, what I want to highlight
by raising these questions is that to understand its full nature, we must look not only at the material
dimensions of the apparent crisis but also question all our assumptions about ‘housing’ and what it
means, in order to come up with ideas for addressing the crisis.
Together with others, I tried addressing this issue (or at least, as I understood it then) back in
1985, and among other things in the form of an essay titled ‘What is the Nature of the Housing Question
in India Today ?’.55 I don't know if there has been any subsequent such attempt to address this
question, but if not then attempting to do this could well be an interesting next step for the Bombay
Initiative to take.
In addition though, I would like to suggest that aside from articulating and addressing the full
range of questions, the urgent challenge for us also has to be to address the one single, specific question
: What – if anything – can we do to arrest the forces that are causing the crisis ? And towards which we
55
Jai Sen, April 1985 - ‘What is the Nature of the Housing Question in India Today ?’.
should start work even as we try to unravel and address the more conceptual, difficult questions such as
those posed above ? To at least arrest the worst of what is taking place ?
Learning from precedent : The history, and pre-history, of the National Campaign for
Housing Rights
As it happens, there is a very related precedent to the Bombay Initiative in the 1980s that we can
perhaps learn from, with which – as earlier mentioned - I was involved. By no means suggesting that we
were successful in all that we attempted to do, nor that the paths we took were necessarily the correct
ones, I think it may be of interest that back in 1985, some of us tried something along precisely these
lines – and where that initiative had many interesting and productive, and arguably quite significant,
outcomes.
In short, the organisation I was then with, Unnayan (meaning ‘development’ in Bengali, but in
the sense of unfolding, or self-realisation), and on the basis of a somewhat similar perception of the
existence of an emerging housing crisis in the country, convened what we called a ‘National Workshop on
the Housing Question’ in Calcutta (now Kolkata), in April 1985; which – along with many other related
things going on in the country at that time, including court cases (including the well-known Olga Tellis
case in Bombay),56 conventions, and demonstrations – led to the formation of an initiative called the
National Campaign for Housing Rights (NCHR) in August 1986. Over the subsequent some years, this
initiative in many ways changed the discourse on housing at the local and national levels in India (and in
time and through other related initiatives, also at the international level) – in many circles, anyway –,
including introducing the concept that housing was not just ‘four walls and a roof’ but ‘a place to live in
security and dignity’; and that housing, in this sense of ‘a place to live in security and dignity’, should be
made a Fundamental Right in the Constitution.
I try here to give a bullet point version of the emergence of this initiative, because I think that
there are perhaps several lessons in this process that might be relevant to us now :57
• In the early 1980s, we at Unnayan perceived a sudden intensification in evictions and state violence
on labouring and working classes in the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), in a variety of ways, starting
from the late 1970s (and responded to it by organising communities to defend themselves, raising
what was happening in public media, going to court, and writing widely about this). Aside from
evictions and the demolitions of homes, this included the banning of hand rickshaws, which
threatened to put a lakh (hundred thousand) pullers out of work, which we also helped build
resistance against.58
• Initially, we perceived what was happening merely as a phenomenon of ‘Banning the Unlicensed’,
and termed it this. We organised a ‘national’ seminar on this subject in Calcutta in March 1982, with
the title ‘Banning the Unlicensed : Planning for the Unorganised Sector ?’,59 and then started issuing a
56
Olga Tellis, December 2015 - ‘The crucial 1981 Supreme Court ruling on Pavement Dwellers case ensured
compulsory rehabilitation for the evicted’.
57
.Caveat : Please clearly recognise that this narration is not meant in any way to be a comprehensive or objective
coverage, and to the opposite is a very personal, subjective account, and moreover focussing only on those aspects
of the NCHR experience that I feel might be relevant to the Bombay Initiative. Given the scale and richness of the
initiative, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that there is, as yet – to my knowledge -, substantive study of the
National Campaign for Housing Rights. But for what I am hoping is going to be a comprehensive discussion of the
NCHR, see : Gautam Bhan, Anushree Deb, and S Nair, 2018 [forthcoming] - The National Campaign for Housing
Rights : A Case Study.
58
Unnayan, July 1982 – ‘Hand-rickshaws in Calcutta : Who Decides ?’; and : Shashi Anand, 1982 – Man vs Man. A
film on the banning of hand rickshaws in Calcutta. Unnayan’s raising this issue in public led to the celebrated trade
unionist George Fernandes taking it up, and to his revitalising an existing pullers’ union that successfully resisted the
ban.
59
Unnayan, April-May 1982 – ‘Some Broad Conclusions on Planning for the ‘Unorganised’ Sector, from the March
1982 Seminar’.
periodic newsletter with the name ‘Banning the Unlicensed’ (BTU). Our focus at Unnayan was at that
point only on the urban, and where the broader structural implications and consequences also only
became clear to us gradually.
• The practical consequence of this first meeting – along with the myriad initiatives that others in other
cities were taking - was the beginning of exchange on issues of common concern between concerned
people in cities and towns across the country and the beginning of crisscross travel across the
country by some of us, to try and comprehend what was happening.
• Some of the many encounters that took place around these issues were in Bombay, where I had
extensive meetings with people involved with the well-known Pavement Dwellers case, including with
the journalist Olga Tellis, Advocates Indira Jaising, Anand Grover, and Mihir Desai of the Lawyers’
Collective, and members of human rights organisations including the PUCL (People’s Union for Civil
Liberties) and CPDR (Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights) – all of whom were already
deeply involved in thinking out what had to be done to change the tide.
• One of the first national-level outcomes of all this exchange then took place in New Delhi in August
1984, where some of us organised, through an organisation that we helped take shape there, the
Jhuggi-Jhonpri Nivasi Adhikar Samiti (‘Organisation for the Rights of Hutment Dwellers’), a National
Symposium on some intensely anti-poor legislation that was then being given shape by the central
government, the Delhi Anti-Encroachment Bills.60
• Parallel to this work in urban areas, research and documentation of the massive displacement and
environmental destruction being caused by big dams and other infrastructure projects led to the
emergence of organised resistance in rural areas across India, first to the social and environmental
effects of the projects and then in time to the projects themselves.61
• Towards trying to comprehend the larger picture that was emerging in both urban and rural areas,
Unnayan convened a major meeting in April 1985 on the question of the housing crisis in India as we
saw it then, titled a ‘National Workshop on the Housing Question’ in Calcutta (now Kolkata). As my
contribution to the meeting, I attempted to address the question in the essay I have already
mentioned, ‘What is the Nature of the Housing Question in India Today ?’, in the form of a
background paper for the Workshop.62
The Calcutta Workshop brought together a wide variety of people from different professional and
other backgrounds, from many parts of the country : Social activists and community organisers,
architects, planners, and engineers, environmentalists, feminists, human rights activists, lawyers,
social science researchers, trade unionists, and others, for a sustained discussion over five days on
the nature of the housing crisis in the country. It also included community leaders – women and
men – from the communities with whom Unnayan worked, and also from the mass organisation that
we along with others had helped give shape to the year before, the Chhinnamul Sramajibi Adhikar
Samiti (CSAS, ‘Organisation for the Rights of Uprooted Labouring People’), and representatives of
tenants’ and small property owners’ associations in Calcutta. People from all these backgrounds
made presentations, some groundbreaking; we had elaborate discussions on perhaps each and every
presentation.
• It was perhaps at this meeting where collective concerns perhaps first started emerging, crossing
traditional boundaries and becoming more intersectional and holistic : Among others, the urban-rural
question; the idea – drawing from the parallel movement that was then emerging about dams and
60
Jai Sen, August 1984a – ‘A Background Note on the Delhi Anti-Encroachment Bills Passed by Parliament’.
61
Among the first such projects to be documented was the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Madhya Pradesh. See, for
instance, Kalpavriksh and Hindu College Nature Club, 1985 - ‘The Narmada Valley Development Project :
Development or Destruction ?’; and : MARG (Multiple Action Research Group), May 1986 - Sardar Sarovar Oustees in
Madhya Pradesh : What Do They Know ? - (1) : Tehsil Alirajpur, District Jhabua; and then : Narmada Dharangrast
Samiti, April 1986 - ‘Memorandum of Narmada Dharangrast Samiti, (A List of Demands submitted to the Government
of Maharashtra on 8th April 1986)’.
62
Jai Sen, April 1985 - ‘What is the Nature of the Housing Question in India Today ?’.
development - that so-called ‘development’, both in urban and rural areas, was in fact often very
destructive; the gender question, and in particular the role in ‘housing’ of patriarchy and what
feminist participants argued at the meeting was ‘the essential homelessness of women’; the issue of
dwelling and power; and overarching – or undergirding - all of this, that the struggle for what we had
by then already calling ‘housing rights’ was in many ways common to the labouring and working
people in both urban and rural areas, and across the country.63, 64
• The national workshop was followed the next year, in June 1986, with an all-India Convention called
in Calcutta on the rights and struggles of labouring and working people by the Chhinnamul Sramajibi
Adhikar Samiti [‘Organisation for the Rights of Uprooted Labouring People’].
• At some point during these series of meetings, it was the crystallisation of one specific tactic in a
meeting during 1984-85 that led to an idea by which we felt we could arrest the crisis that was
unfolding. In short, and if my memory serves me correctly, this happened at a meeting between
Advocates Indira Jaising and Anand Grover of the Lawyers’ Collective and myself in Bombay, when
we were struggling to understand how to turn the tide of evictions that were taking place, and where
we suddenly realised that instead of fighting case to case, we needed to come up with an idea that
had the potential to turn the tables; and in short, what emerged was the idea of a demand for what
we then were still calling ‘housing’, as a Constitutional Right. But crucially, and even though we
continued to use the term ‘housing’, not a right to ‘housing’ in the sense of a material object but a
right to a place to live in security and all that goes with that. Our objective was to forge an
instrument that would both set, orient, and dictate state policy and also be an instrument for those
struggling against evictions and for a place to live, and through this, to create ‘a direct relationship
between the governed and those who govern’.65
• We at Unnayan therefore took the opportunity of the CSAS Convention in June 1986 to piggyback a
tighter, related planning meeting to discuss the possibilities of a serious all-India initiative. This first
gathering in Calcutta in June 1986 was followed with a second meeting in Bombay (now Mumbai) in
August 1986, where a group of activists representing social and professional organisations from many
parts of the country established the NCHR, the National Campaign for Housing Rights, which
attempted to draw together all the threads of discussion we had been having over the previous five
years – and which in retrospect therefore became a preparatory process.66
• These two umbilically linked ideas - to forge an instrument that would set, orient, and dictate state
policy and also be an instrument for those struggling against evictions and for a place to live, and
through this, to create ‘a direct relationship between the governed and those who govern’ - were the
sparks that lit the fire that the National Campaign for Housing Rights came to be, from 1986 on.
63
Unfortunately, although transcribed, the minutes of the National Workshop were never keyed in – simply because
we at Unnayan were simply so caught up in firefighting during those days that we never completed this vital task,
among many others. For those interested however, the original tape recordings and handwritten transcripts of the
proceedings of the Workshop are accessible in the stacks of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi,
India. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, nd, c.October 2017 – ‘List of the Papers of Unnayan’.
64
The NCHR, which was formed the following year, then took forward some of these concerns as the themes for all-
India workshops. See, for instance, NCHR, 1987 – ‘Report from the NCHR National Workshop on Gender and
Housing, held in Madras, July 1987’.
65
This phrase is from a book on a major – and very successful – subsequent initiative in India where this was also
the fundamental underlying principle; see : Aruna Roy with the MKSS Collective, 2018 – The RTI Story : Power to the
People. For how we in the NCHR proposed to interpret and manifest these same ideas through the act of ‘housing’,
see : NCHR, July 1992a - Housing Rights Bill, including a Proposal for a Constitutional Amendment.
It is perhaps important for me to underline and make clear that the NCHR’s demand was most definitely not a
demand for ‘the right to all to a housing unit’ but rather to the right of every woman, man, and child in India to have
a place to live in security and dignity. This was then spelt out in a Draft People’s Bill of Housing Rights that was
prepared by the NCHR’s Legal Working Group, chaired by the late Justice V R Krishna Iyer and with the chief
draftsperson being the late Justice P S Poti. See : NCHR, July 1992a - Housing Rights Bill, including a Proposal for a
Constitutional Amendment.
66
• The crystallisation of this organising principle then also led, in 1987-88, to some of us – like-minded
people from across the world - rebuilding an existing organisation called the ‘Habitat International
Council’ into the Habitat International Coalition, and to the new HIC undertaking the task of getting
this idea of a right to a secure place to live with dignity for every woman, man, and child embedded
into international law.67
• The National Campaign for Housing Rights, that worked from 1986 through to about 1992, was an
all-India platform for people and organisations of an even wider range of backgrounds and interests
than the all-India workshop called by Unnayan just a year before, now including policy makers,
political personalities and parties, organisations struggling against displacement, trade unionists,
professionals from many fields (including architects, engineers, planners, journalists, filmmakers,
doctors, and lawyers), and crucially also representatives of dwellers’ organisations from all over the
country, from urban and rural areas, including tenants’ associations. Active in some fifteen states, it
was perhaps the first such broad party, non-party, activist, and professional platform in the country.
Although it was ultimately not successful in achieving its primary goal of getting the right to a place
to live in security and dignity recognised as a Fundamental Right, it was successful in getting the
central government to bring in a progressive National Housing Policy in 1989 and in getting the
subject of a fundamental right to housing into all-India social, political, and professional discourse,
including being mentioned in their election manifestos by three of the-then four major political
parties.68
Even though this bullet form digest is a dull way of recounting what was an extraordinary story, I
have done so like this here because I have come to see this as a possible parallel to the Bombay
Initiative. It is beyond the scope of this essay to try and spell out the possibilities, but I am hopeful that
my sketching out this history may prompt others to consider doing so.69
If even some of this experience seems relevant, then an interesting step might be for the
Bombay Initiative to convene a workshop of those who were active in the National Campaign for Housing
Rights - along with some of those who have been involved in the Bombay Initiative -, to document and
present their respective memories of and takes on the NCHR process, and to draw lessons for the present
and the future. It could well be that the passage of time, and the attempt to now critically reflect on this
major experience, will yield important strategic insights.
The question of rights and struggle in housing : Exclusions and the need for
reframing
There is, unfortunately, one more absence that we need to put on the table and discuss. In one
important way, the Exhibition that was a part of the Bombay Initiative did seem to draw from the NCHR
and the discourse that it opened up in the country - and indeed, taking this point further, it even seemed
to indicate a solidarity with people’s struggle for housing, and with the history of the NCHR. It did this by
very prominently foregrounding, at an early stage of the display, a question that went something along
the lines of :
67
For instance : Scott Leckie, December 1994 - ‘Towards an International Convention on Housing Rights : Options at
Habitat II’.
68
NCHR, 1989 - The Right to Housing in the 1989 Election Manifestos; and : NCHR, May 1991 - ‘Housing Rights in
the 1991 Election Manifestos’. See also : Jai Sen with Miloon Kothari, 1991 – ‘Living Conditions and Party
Manifestoes’.
69
A link that already exists is that the filmmaker who has been commissioned by the organisers of the Bombay
Initiative to prepare a film on ‘The State of Housing in India’, Sanjiv Shah, and we at Unnayan also worked during
the 1980s on what was in a very limited sense a precursor to the film he is now doing, a series of films on the theme
of ‘a place to live’, and before that, on an entry for a film competition (Jai Sen, Sanjiv Shah, and Sundar Chaterji,
1978 - ‘A Place to Live’.)
70
Why is the right to housing not yet a constitutional right ?
On the face of it anyway, this prominent foregrounding seemed to suggest that the curators of
the Bombay Exhibition believed in the idea of a fundamental right to housing and therefore, at least in
principle, in the entire gamut of ramifications that follow from this, in terms of the right being an
instrument for ordinary people in their struggle to gain a place to live. And equally significantly, by
declaring this, the Exhibition seemed to implicitly align itself with those in the country who have struggled
over the past several decades for making housing a fundamental right – and are continuing to do so
today. Seeing this question up there on the wall, larger than life, was therefore of course music to my
ears.
But the invocation of rights and of the language of rights also carries responsibilities. I was
therefore left in astonishment after my first reaction, and frankly also in acute disappointment, to see
that beyond the slogan, there was no substantive recognition or reflection in the Exhibition of the idea of
housing as a right; and moreover, that just about all those who have been active in the field of housing
rights (including something as major and institutionalised as the National Campaign for Housing Rights),
or of those who are today active, found no mention in the Exhibition in what was otherwise a very
elaborate, major, and ambitious presentation of the history of ‘housing’ in India over the seven decades
since the country gained independence in 1947.71 Nor was the subject even obliquely mentioned in the
agenda of the Bombay Conference. In short, this entire history was rendered absent.72 How and why
was this the case ?
For me, it is impossible to see this absence – and absenting - separate from the issue I have
already raised, of not just the occlusion but the absenting from this initiative of ‘the people’ whose
housing we are talking about, people who constitute the Popular or Community Sector; and where as I
see it, these two absences taken together tell us something important about the Initiative’s present
understanding of how housing takes place and of the housing crisis – and therefore, of how it might be
addressed.
In short, at first look it would seem that the Initiative was – while willing to subscribe to the idea
of ‘housing as a right’ - perhaps not comfortable with the idea of housing as struggle, and with this mode
70
From the opening panel in the Exhibition ‘State of Housing – Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India’
(approximate wording, from memory).
71
I acknowledge that the Exhibition did mention, in the Panel on the ‘Institutional Ecology for Housing Delivery’ that
I have already mentioned, a handful of social organisations who have worked in the field of housing : ASAG in
Ahmedabad, SPARC and its associate, the National Slum Dwellers Federation in Bombay, SEWA again in Ahmedabad,
and Unnayan in Calcutta. This said, I think that it is fair to also say that among these, it was only Unnayan, and
perhaps also SPARC and the National Slum Dwellers Federation, that worked or continue to work specifically with a
vocabulary of housing rights, as such; and / but where on the other hand, there was no reference at all to the many,
many other similar initiatives and organisations in the country that have worked – and are still working – in the
struggle for housing rights.
In relation to this, to my eyes there was also a problem with the fact that the social organisations listed above
were shown in the Panel as belonging to the ‘Private Sector’. This is not how such organisations see themselves, and
is also, as already mentioned, not how the government or the UN and international institutions see them. To my
understanding, this is therefore again revealing of the perceptions and thinking of those who designed the Exhibition,
and suggests that some critical reflection on this categorisation is required, and perhaps also study.
72
It would be absurd, and ungracious, of me if I do not acknowledge the fact that by inviting me to speak at the
Conference, the organisers perhaps assumed – given my close association with it - that ‘the NCHR’ would be
represented. And where I of course appreciate this, and also then being invited to submit an essay for this book
based on my talk at the Conference. But, having said this, I think that it is not unfair for me to point out that ‘the
NCHR’ was much, much greater than any one individual; and that even if this was the understanding of the
organisers, the NCHR - and more generally the struggle for housing rights, and the wide range of actors that were
involved in it - should in any case have been mentioned in the Exhibition, given what a major phenomenon it was, in
its time. And that indeed, it might have been interesting to have had a session on the concept and practice of
‘housing rights’ at the Conference, and if some current practitioners had been invited to speak.
of engaging with and addressing the realities of the housing crisis.73 The question then however is
whether, if we as professionals are serious about addressing the housing crisis as we see it, we can
afford to absent from our approach to the subject whole sections of equally sincere people who are
struggling for improve dwelling conditions ? Including ‘the people’ themselves ?
This said, a lesson I draw from this discussion is that it is important to see the Bombay Initiative
not as an isolated or sudden activity, but as a part of a much larger and longer flow : Of the struggle, in
the broadest sense, in the country and all over the world, for ‘housing’ in the sense of a place to live in
security and dignity; and also for the struggle to understand the subject of housing – and, as I see it, of
dwelling. And it is in this light, and given my long engagement with these struggles, that I have tried to
spell out in this essay the questions that I think this initiative, and those who see themselves as housing
providers in general, seem to not be asking themselves, but which have emerged time and again in the
history of this struggle.
These are questions that we constantly need to ask – but this is perhaps precisely why we are
not asking them – because of our internal contradictions -; and / but which makes it even more
important that we do so.
More specifically, this is also why I have recounted the history of the NCHR, and where I would
like here to draw out some of the key lessons that we learned from that engagement, both those that I
think we learned from that process at that time and others that I can draw out now with the distance
that time has afforded me :
• Learning about the essential homelessness of women, and about the roles that housing plays in
the exercise and power of patriarchy.
• Learning about the intimate relationship between ‘housing’ – or gaining / struggling for a place to
live in security and dignity – and social power, and of the role that having a place to live in
security and dignity plays in the flowering of women, of children, and of communities, and in the
struggle for peace and justice for all.74
• On the other hand, the perhaps obvious : The profound roles that not having a place to live in
security and dignity – and precarity -, plays in disempowering people, and more generally in
social, economic, and political exploitation.
• The importance of learning from the people in struggle for a place to live, and of working directly
with them. Of understanding through struggling with them about what it was that they and thus
we were actually struggling towards - not just four walls and a roof. (And where there was
perhaps something deeply important in the very fact that we at Unnayan, and all the others who
were part of what became the National Campaign for Housing Rights, were either the people
struggling for housing/dwelling for themselves or were deeply engaged in solidarity with those
who were struggling for housing.)
• The importance of multiple different perspectives and experiences. For example, the
perspectives and experiences of feminists in being able to see housing as a feminist question and
the ‘homelessness of women’ as being very different from the ‘homelessness’ as it is otherwise
understood; and as another example, the understandable differences in perceptions and
73
I have certainly found this in my personal experience, where architects who were earlier friends all but distanced
themselves from me once I got involved with housing as struggle during the 1980s, and – not coincidentally, I think
– totally dismissed the idea of housing as a right; and continued with their practice of trying to constantly get
commissions for more, and larger, ‘housing projects’.
74
And which is why – though this is again a separate subject that requires more detailed discussion – ‘a secure place
to live with dignity’ (and not mere ‘shelter’) should, for instance, be included as a fundamental aspect of ‘human
development’, and also of the newer subject of sumak kawsay, the Quechua word for buen vivir, or ‘good living’ /
well-being. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumak_Kawsay.
perspectives of tenants, so-called ‘squatters’, and petty landlords – and yet their willingness to
agree, on a tactical basis, on the demand for housing as a fundamental right.
• The importance of time in movement, in terms of being able to come to see questions that later
seem obvious but were as good as invisible earlier. Such as the transformation of the ‘banning
the unlicensed’ into a fundamental question about security and dignity; such as moving past the
primacy of the urban and our embracing of the rural.
• The importance of having to come up with ways in which to arrest the worst of the present, even
when you may not know (as we did not, in 1981) whether it is ‘housing’ you are fighting for, or
something else.
• The importance of an audacity of thinking, and of vision – of thinking beyond the obvious, and of
turning the tables.
These were some of the key lessons, and important junctures in our journey, that in my memory
helped us question and in many different ways reframe the housing question back in the 1980s, and that
I hope may be relevant to where we are today. I therefore, and in all humility, venture the following
suggestions for the Bombay Initiative to consider, towards take steps to adequately frame questions for
our times :
o Working to understand the housing crisis in India at the present juncture in history, critically,
comprehensively, and collaboratively, and to collectively undertake a long-term commitment to
address it;
o Accepting that the nature of the housing crisis we face demands a broad, cross-sectoral approach
– and where we all are going to learn from each other. We must therefore draw on as wide
array of social, professional, and political actors as possible, and in particular from among those
most impacted by the crisis : Women, Dalits, Adivasis, religious minorities, forest dwellers,
fisherfolk, agricultural labour, small farmers, workers and trade unionists, urban dwellers’
organisations, and others;
o Undertaking a multilayered process that can comprehend, and respect, and thereby respond to
and address, the nature of the housing crisis in the country today; and -
o Applying our minds collectively as to whether there is any single idea, or few ideas, and actions,
that we can aim for, that have the potential of at least arresting the worst of the housing crisis
that we face, at least over the next decade, while we develop deeper tactics and strategies.
Interrogating our goals and assumptions
Finally, and in drawing this discussion to a conclusion, I believe that we need to ask ourselves : What is
it, more deeply, that we are trying to do through this initiative ? And are there some underlying,
background, assumptions that are guiding what we are doing and that we need to confront ?
As I see it, there are, in this initiative - in the Exhibition, the Conference, the Film, and also the
inaugural Seminar - two major strands of concern that repeatedly emerge :
a) A concern for what is perceived and projected to be people’s need for better housing – through
so many references to the conditions in which people live, including through the citing of what is
framed as ‘housing deficits’ (but which, as I have said, I think also signals something much
deeper); through the commissioning of the film by Sanjiv Shah; and through all of which the
initiative radiates a strong social and moral conscience; and -
b) The question of how architects and planners can intervene in what is perceived to be a grim
situation and play a role in ‘providing housing’ to address this crisis - but which, frankly, and as I
have already pointed out, can also be understood as architects and planners identifying a
professional market for themselves in this field.
While at one level these questions of course complement each other, it is also evident that at
another level there is significant contradiction between them, and I believe that it is important that we
open up and examine this. The contradiction arises because if on the one hand we are interested in
addressing the crisis and not merely its surface manifestations, then, and as per the arguments put
forward in this essay, the practice of thinking of ourselves as ‘housing providers’ and of housing as
material object – which separates us from and makes us unable to clearly see the very ‘people’ for whom
we are expressing concern – contradicts this and makes it impossible. In particular, it makes it difficult if
not impossible for us to see people as real, live agents of history, and indeed as the makers of history
(and also the minor fact that they, collectively, already build most of the urban fabric, and almost all of
the rural, and so where they are architects and planners too). And where this in turn also, and as
already mentioned, leads us to incorrect conclusions and to possible solutions - such as the absenting of
the Community Sector and the deification of the Private Sector.
And so, in asking ourselves all of these questions about housing and dwelling and people and the
crisis they face, it is important for us to also ask ourselves some difficult questions about our current
aspirations and desires for our role in this ‘crisis’. (Indeed, it might be fun – but also very informative -
to do a mock conference titled ‘Housing Providers in Emerging India : Realities, Aspirations, and
Imaginaries’ !)
Jokes aside, I would like to end this exercise in critical reflection on thought and practice with
some hard questions : If we take a step back, and all said and done, is this Initiative - and the
Conference that led to this book - in reality (and deep down) an exercise of architects and planners
searching for relevance, and also for new markets ? Is the veiled celebration of the potential roles of the
Private Sector, however subconsciously – and also in a context where ‘the crisis’ has exclusively been
defined as a ‘housing deficit’ of millions of housing units, with no other dimensions -, also a way the
identification of and framing of a possible major market ? And thereby for relevance for architects and
planners ? And is the celebration of the Private Sector also a function of individuals and organisations
that are today involved in creating and delivering formal housing as a commodity (now much more than
in earlier decades) being today a part of the Private Sector far more than of the State or of the
Community sector ? And a function of their enjoying the fruits of neoliberalism, and of seeing no
alternative ?
Especially given friendship and respect for the organisers, I feel awkward asking these questions,
but in all frankness these are very old arguments – and very discredited ones; both framing the question
in terms of so-called ‘housing deficit’ and also being focussed on the potential contributions of formal
sector construction and architects in such situations. At the risk of some over-generalisation, and even if
there may be a handful of positive projects that have taken place, most efforts - not only in India but
across the world - to address living conditions through major construction programmes have ended up
being disastrous, or something a little short of that. We have so many examples of this from within the
country; and where in our times, the huge numbers of unoccupied and abandoned new housing blocks –
and ‘housing units’ - in contemporary China are only one more massive example. In short, there are
good reasons why architects and planners across the world who have worked on social housing have
abandoned this approach and have moved on to search for other, alternative, and more sustainable ways
to address the issues at hand that also strengthen and empower dwellers.
This is such a well established and documented argument that I am not going to even try to
elaborate and reference this assertion here. What is more important, I suggest, is to try to understand
what lies behind this return to old and discredited ideas – and to move forward.
In my view, the problem is looking at the housing crisis purely in terms of deficits and of
delivery, and the only way to rectify the problematic nature of this approach is to move to looking at and
accepting what is already out there as being the foundations of valid living and dwelling, and to learning
to work with housing production processes that already exist, with all their warts, and with the people
who live in those dwellings. Yes, a substantial amount of new housing – and planning – is of course
required, but the fundamental task lies elsewhere; and where even any new housing needs to then
undertaken with very different principles.
This shift however, has several aspects, of which I think the following are rough outlines for
perhaps the most basic – and applies both to what exists and to any new initiatives :
• It requires that we need to learn to work with the actually existing world and not to try to rebuild it;
that we learn to respect what people have done and are doing for themselves; and that we include
people and make them visible in our imaginations, rather than absenting and/or invisibilising them –
and that indeed, we make them front and centre;
• It requires that we need to learn to not do things, even inadvertently, that occlude, exclude, and/or
invisibilise people, or that in any way worsen their housing and living conditions or destroy the
homes they have built or displace them from where they live, even if unintentionally or indirectly –
such as through gentrification; and where we can start by focusing on visibilising and including
women;
• It requires that we change how we as architects and as self-defined ‘housing providers’ perceive and
see those who we think require housing; and -
• It requires that we reflect on who we are in terms of caste, class, and gender, and all the privileges
and handicaps that come with that, and then critically locate ourselves with respect to those we
want to work with and for.
Finally, I think it also requires that we recognise that ‘housing’ – and more generally, architecture
and the results of planning – is therefore not what we are trained to see it as, nor what it is
conventionally portrayed as, the physical manifestation of design and engineering by professionals, but as
what it actually is, beneath the surface : The physical manifestation of the social relations involved in all
these processes and in actually existing social, economic, ecological, and political structures and
dynamics; in other words, a direct reflection of the architecture of society. And where the struggle for
the right to a place to live in security and dignity, in India and across the world, is not only a vital part of
this larger struggle to build a just society but where this struggle also offers an especially rich platform -
precisely because it is inherently so intersectional.
It is up to us as architects, planners, researchers, and students to decide where and how we

want to locate ourselves within these structures and in relation to these dynamics.75
The gathering storms : In search of understanding home and homelessness

in emerging India
In this concluding part of this essay, I would like to focus on two contemporary and emerging issues that
I believe have the potential to fundamentally redefine social relations in India, and through this to
massively deepen the housing crisis that is already around us – and also, perhaps, to change the very
meaning of ‘homelessness’, if not of home itself (though that too may be down the line) : Climate change
and demonetisation.
When I visited the Exhibition, I did not have a chance to thoroughly go through it all, but as far
as I could make out, nothing of the broader conditions under which we live – social, economic,
75
Again, for my earlier exploration of these thoughts, see : Jai Sen, January 1989 - ‘Architecture is Struggle : Some
Reflections on Architectural Awareness, focussing on Architecture and the People’; and : Jai Sen, August 1999 –
‘Where does beauty and ugliness lie ?’. I welcome feedback and also suggestions of other such attempts to critically
reflect on and engage with the subject and the profession of architecture.
ecological, and political - and that crucially, are emerging in our times, was mentioned; and where
although the Conference looked at certain aspects of ‘housing in emerging India’, we did not discuss
either of these issues, or others such as them. I would like to suggest that if we want to look at ‘Housing
in Emerging India’, then these too, in the turbulent times we live in, are aspects that must be discussed,
and must be a part of any follow-up to the Conference, and that the curators of the Exhibition could also
consider including in any follow-up versions.
My intent here is not to attempt a detailed analysis of these two issues, but rather to try and
draw out what I think are some of their fundamental underlying characteristics and why I think they are
emblematic of the changes that are taking place in the world today and that in my understanding are
going to hugely aggravate the housing crisis. And why they are therefore fundamentally relevant to this
initiative, including but not only in terms of our search for understanding and addressing issues of home
and homelessness.
One more point : Even as we embark on this exercise, we need to recognise that in one sense,
there is – unfortunately - nothing exceptional about these two issues; I could equally well have chosen
the Aadhaar card as an example, or the storm of Smart Cities that is now surging across the country. But
this is also precisely what should be worrying us : That there is now such a plethora of dystopian
initiatives that are surrounding us, penetrating us, engulfing us. (And where ‘physical housing conditions’
– and even though they hugely affect the quality of life - are always only a ‘small’ part of all this, and
where what happens is always an outcome, and never the cause.) It is not the Aadhaar card itself that is
important by itself, so much as the forces behind this and all the other ‘changes’ that are engulfing us,
and what they represent and want to achieve. And where, crucially, understanding this is, I suggest,
fundamental to where and how we as individuals and professions locate and position ourselves in relation
to the worlds that are emerging.
Demonetisation :
In short, the present government of India took a major step in November 2016 called ‘demonetisation’ ,
soon followed by certain other related high-profile steps such as encouraging all people in the country to
open bank accounts and to start using debit cards. On the face of it, these steps had nothing to do with
‘housing’; but in fact they had everything to do with ordinary people’s struggle to gain and to retain a
place to live in security and dignity.
On the surface, demonetisation involved the withdrawal of all existing high value currency notes
from circulation on the (false) argument that this would help break the ‘black market’ in the country, and
thus forced all those holding any such banknotes to deposit them in banks; and where the government
replaced these notes with fresh ones, but only gradually, and over time; thus causing huge inconvenience
to millions upon millions of people, and with some literally dying while waiting in queues to deposit their
notes and/or to get fresh money out, and huge disruptions in local markets..
This step was accompanied by a huge simultaneous and parallel drive by the government and by
banks to get people in the country, of all sections of society, to use debit cards and ATMs, and it became
very quickly clear that these steps were only the opening salvo in a massive concerted drive by
corporations and international capital, backed by the Indian State, to force all Indians to move towards a
cashless (or less cash) economy, and therefore an economy that is digitalised and, equally importantly,
formalised. The first, hugely populist, declared step of trying to control ‘black money’ was therefore in
fact only the harbinger of a much larger, and still ongoing, attempt to fundamentally re-engineer social
and economic relations in the country, and - I believe - that if this larger attempt is allowed to go ahead
unchallenged and unchecked, it is highly likely to produce, over time, social characteristics that are new
to Indian society but already common to advanced capitalist countries; including – but not limited to –
social alienation and ‘homelessness’ in the true sense.76
Let me try and open up this issue in relation to the question of ‘housing’ and dwelling. In short,
and in addition to its other characteristics that I have tried to outline above, the Popular / Informal
housing Sector is almost by definition dominantly – overwhelmingly – based on a cash economy, as an
integral and very important part of the so-called ‘informal sector’. Keeping in mind that something like 70
percent of all urban housing in India is built in the Informal / Popular Sector, as is 90 percent of all rural
housing (with the majority still based on the biomass and thus totally outside the cash economy, but the
rest within), demonetisation is therefore also, and must be seen as, a fundamental disruption of the
popular housing sector; and as the assault on it that it is.
As I have already mentioned, households in the popular or informal sector in urban areas are
already widely forced by prevailing economic and social conditions to living and working in extra-legal,
‘unauthorised’ ways, therefore opening themselves to further exploitation, including the constant threat
of criminalisation by the State. Even if a certain proportion will have already migrated to working in the
digital economy, when demonetisation hit a large proportion of the members of this sector not only had
no alternatives to cash since their community worked this way. It is useful to keep in mind that the vast
majority of such people also live not on salaries but on daily wages, at best, and on occasional income –
and so where disruption of their lives for weeks on end had huge consequences. This therefore means
that the sudden, overnight demonetisation that the Prime Minister announced not only massively
disrupted daily life, bringing in huge additional stress into their lives, but also forced people in this sector
– who had no alternatives - into further extra-legal means of surviving, and therefore overall caused
deeper marginalisation, pauperisation, criminalisation, and social division. And where because of the size
of the Indian population, this has happened on a scale that is unprecedented in world history, and is
continuing to play itself out
In particular, demonetisation was also, and remains, an attack specifically on women, and
especially on women of the labouring and working classes. As was widely reported at the time of
demonetisation, it was women of the labouring and working classes who were the strongest hit, by being
forced to openly disclose and deposit – in other words, surrender and give away - the relatively-small-for-
us (but big for them) amounts of savings that they had managed to stash away from their men, whether
for the marriage of their daughters, or for expanding their homes, or for hard times; and where
demonetisation was therefore also a massive attack on their privacy, agency, and autonomy. And where
at one level, this was of course just one more massive manifestation of patriarchy at play.
While on the surface therefore, demonetisation appears to those of us who belong to more
privileged classes as being merely a ‘probably good’ drive towards a more ‘modern’, cashless (or less
cash) economy, and to greater ‘efficiency’, I suggest that it instead needs to be seen as a first major step
towards the disruption, capture, colonisation, and formalisation of the means of all economic relations in
the country. In particular, it was a major step to take over and appropriate the huge commons that a
cash-based economy represents, and that ordinary people – and importantly, women – still have (or had)
some control over. And where those who either resist or who do not have the means or capacity to
participate, are then going to be ruthlessly excluded and then criminalised – only deepening the
structural (class and caste) discrimination that such people already face.
We also need to see this in a historical frame. What is taking place in India today in our times is
structurally equivalent to - but incomparably larger than - the enclosure of the commons that took place
in England from the 16th century onwards, which led to the forcing of the peasantry off the commons and
76
Even as I was writing this essay in April 2018, a new and publicly unannounced third step of this process was put
into effect : A so-called ‘cash crunch’, where for unexplained reasons there was suddenly a massive shortage of
banknotes in many parts of the country in April, but especially taking place (or aimed at ?) certain states. See :
Sucheta Dalal, April 2018 – ‘It Is Not about Cash, but Control, Stupid !’.
into urban areas and to becoming wage labourers; and to the production of the first truly ‘homeless’
people in history.77 So this is where we are now.
In other words, the implications of this drive are huge for people’s struggles for a place to live –
both in urban and rural areas - and therefore, necessarily, I would argue, for all of us as we search for
meaningful roles in relation to this new phase of the housing crisis.
I suspect that for those of us who shift easily from cash to plastic and back, and for those for
whom a small cache of cash hidden away as savings has no particular meaning, it is difficult to imagine
the enormity of what this change is meaning to those who are in the midst of the storm; and also the
enormity of the sharp vertical separation that this single action is bringing about in Indian society, and as
a result, the exclusion, dependence, powerlessness, anxiety, and disorientation that this is causing – as
well as bitterness, anger, and perhaps also resistance.
Other ideologically and structurally related contemporary policies of the Indian State and of
capital, such as taxes on artisanal, handcrafted products, have already produced a crisis of such depth
that they have led (as most of us in India are all aware) to successive massive incidences of suicides,
such as among small farmers and weavers. Demonetisation is thus only one more huge, and
premeditated, step along this path – and must be seen for what it is, a well-planned collaboration
between the Indian ruling classes, the Indian state, the US state, and multinationals, and also world
institutions of capital such as the World Economic Forum.78
I want to underline that by this, I do not mean ‘just’ deepening and widening unemployment, or
even ‘just’ a deepening vertical separation, which are bad enough, but along with the suicides that we
hear about because of their finality, I suspect that there may well be a less reported but growing
phenomenon of growing alienation and anomie, and where we may well soon be seeing evidence of a
breakdown of the close social relationships that have historically characterised traditional societies in
India. And as a direct consequence of this, it is likely that we are going to see the onset of variations of
disorientation and therefore ‘homelessness’ in the socio-pathological sense that applies in the west /
North – which will fundamentally change the ‘housing’ landscape.
At a more material level, this drive towards a digital economy – and the vertical separation it is
causing -, combined on the one hand, with an accelerated pauperisation and on the other, the
accelerated process we are also seeing of the unfettered appropriation of so-called ‘natural resources’ /
the biomass for industrial purposes and for urban lifestyle consumption goods, is also contributing to a
massive reduction of access to the commons and to housing resources they contain (water, reeds,
pasture land) by those who have had traditional access rights. As a result, and because of a lack of
affordable or appropriable alternatives for them, this is likely to also contribute to a massive deterioration
in dwelling conditions in rural areas, in other words for the majority of the people of India.
Given this, it is perhaps not overstating things to say that if we think that we are already in the
midst of a housing crisis, we have not seen anything yet. The storm is now building. And where, it goes
without saying, the problem is not about housing deficits, nor the answer to build and provide more
housing units. In short, if this scenario is at all true, then we need to fundamentally rethink what we
mean by a ‘housing crisis’ and our roles in relation to that. And to clearly recognise the forces at play.
77
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure. And for a discussion of what is happening in India today, see : Colin
Todhunter, June 2018 – ‘The Empire Strikes Back Leaving Indian Farmers in the Dirt’.
78
For a discussion of the meaning of demonetisation and the forces behind it, see : Norbert Häring, January 2017 –
‘A Well-Kept Open Secret : Washington is Behind India’s Brutal Experiment of Abolishing Most Cash’; and Norbert
Häring, February 2017 – ‘How India became Bill Gates’ guinea pig : A conspiracy as recounted by the main actors’.
Climate change – and war :79

We are not yet 100% sure of what the future is going to look like, but a definite possibility – because of
massive resistance to policy change by corporations and by climate deniers, and the resulting inter-
governmental inability to make the necessary policy decisions and to implement them, and in the
meanwhile the continued ravaging of our planet, Mother Earth – is, as is well known, the onset of
cataclysmic changes in the world’s climate within the next few decades. Changes are already taking
place across the world, and are manifest in the constantly rising median temperatures each year, the
ever-increasing incidence of forest fires and hurricanes across the world, and the melting of glaciers
across the world and of the North Pole ice mass – and a consequent inexorable rising of sea levels.
Expectably, these changes also have huge implications for people’s struggles for a place to live in
security and dignity. It is now well known that we are looking at an average temperature rise of over 2º
and nearer 3; which will lead to huge changes in life on earth. India / the Indian subcontinent will be
one of the centres of this storm. As waters rise and other resources such as land are depleted, and the
huge numbers of people living along the coasts start moving inland and/or away from areas of water
shortage,80 and as the new ‘host communities’ both within the country and in neighbouring countries (for
boundaries will also start to dissolve under these historically new conditions) resist these migrations and
intrusions because of intensifying shortages of land, water, forests, and other resources, it is entirely
possible that we will move into a historically new stage first of widespread inter-state and inter-
community conflict and violence, and then in time, of unpredictable non-linear system collapse. Though
of course of enormous consequence, the standoff that is taking place today in Europe and the
Mediterranean Sea in terms of countries in Europe increasingly refusing to accept refugees,81 pales in
comparison.
In the meanwhile, both old and new actors are also already emerging on the scene, as a result of
these dynamics and to take advantage of the relentlessly unfolding situation, both in terms of the
exercise of control over restless populations and their insecurities and over land. On the one hand, we
are seeing the re-emergence of feudal warlords, so far limited to Africa and to West Asia but just as
possible in other parts of the world; on the other hand, the new feudal warlords of our times,
multinational corporations who now own, occupy, or have taken the rights to vast swathes of land across
the world ostensibly for the production of food and of goods, have already taken position. Among many
other steps, these corporations are hiring private militia to guard their holdings – and where that militia
will of course be used against the waves of migrants that are forming. (Again, as some countries in
Fortress Europe have already done in the past few years; as the US has now done, on its southern
border; and as India has also done, on its eastern and western borders.)
This onset moreover, is in turn likely to unleash forces in combinations that we as yet know
nothing about and therefore today, as yet, have no ways of addressing; for the so-far somewhat
predictable, linear systems and processes of ‘national’ social organisation, planning, government, and
decision-making that we so far know and depend on are likely to be completely inadequate in the face of
the non-linear changes that are opening up. As a consequence of this, we on this subcontinent – but
also quite possibly, more widely, and therefore human beings as a species - are perhaps going to be
faced not only with ‘natural’ storms of totally new magnitude but also with what in some ways may be
almost totally new forms, or manifestations, of war and violence, forms – storms - that will severely
challenge all known forms of social and political organisation and government; and perhaps even make
them increasingly irrelevant.
79
I am drawing here from earlier writing I have done in this area, including : Jai Sen, June 2014 – ‘Resisting the War
on Mother Earth : Towards Reclaiming our Home’.
80
See, for instance : Lauren Markham, June 2018 – ‘A Warming World Creates Desperate People’.
81
Margaret Wente, June 2018 – ‘The migration crisis will shatter Europe’.
I don't think I need to spell out the myriad and serial impacts that this kind of scenario will have
on people’s housing and living conditions; and not only on ‘their’ living conditions, but on the conditions
of all human settlements in the country and region; for we will all be in the same boat then.
We do not as yet fully understand the combined effects of all these tectonic shifts, and so as I
see it, an urgent task for us all, and architects and planners included, is to connect the dots, which
official reports on climate change do not fully do, at least in public – and especially in terms of the social.
What is happening is not just about ‘the climate changing’ or the economy, or the threat to life – severe
as these are. It is fundamentally also about what will take place as this happens. Among political
institutions, it is ironically – though tellingly – perhaps only the US military that has come closest to
putting this on the table :
... the projected impacts of climate change will be more than threat multipliers; they will serve as catalysts
for instability and conflict.82
It is perhaps self-evident that coming as this does from the military of the most powerful and
warlike nation on earth at the moment, this clipped, curt, and grim wording contains, and hides, many
levels of meaning and reality. And to repeat, where the new wars will be not only inter-state, such as
discussed by Gwynne Dwyer in his otherwise great book,83 but also internecine and inter-community.
It is vital also for us to grasp and to internalise – as professionals and academics, as in our
personal lives - that this is not about ‘the indefinite future’. We are talking about Now. There is now
already so much evidence that to tell us that this descent has already started, for instance in countries
such as the Philippines (including in terms of who is now its president and of how he is ruling) - but
where it is so far only being manifested sporadically. This is in the nature of the beast. The ‘perfect
storms’, when all hell breaks loose, are yet to come.
In the meanwhile, the pressure is building across the world in yet another and so far unpredicted
way – as a combination of popular reactions among electorates around the world to neoliberal
globalisation and, I believe, also as a deep sensing among ordinary peoples of the world of the
impending and coming effects of climate change : A retreat to seeing more familiar grounds of nativism
and nationalist politics. As we are seeing, in country after country across the world this is leading to a
majoritarian rejection of liberal politics based on globalisation (which has promised the world but
delivered far less, for ordinary people) and the bringing to power - both in the South and in the North - of
populist, ‘strong’ leaders who not only decry globalisation but also deny the very existence of climate
change and its effects.84 The countries now include major countries such as Brazil, Hungary, Italy, the
Philippines, and the United States of America. This reaction is of course only hugely exacerbating the
emerging crisis – but where this frenzy needs to be understood as an integral part of the rising storm,
and not separate from it.
82
CNA Military Advisory Board, May 2014 – ‘National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change’. This
has only been underlined by current news : Col. Larry Wilkerson interviewed by Dimitri Lascaris, April 2018 –
‘Pentagon Plans for Climate Change Despite White House’.
See also : Nafeez Ahmed, June 2014a - ‘Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target
peaceful activists and protest movements’; and Nafeez Ahmed, June 2014b – ‘Pentagon bracing for public dissent
over climate and energy shocks’; and : Jed Morey, May 2014 – ‘Pentagon Unilaterally Grants Itself Authority Over
‘Civil Disturbances’’.
83
Gwynne Dyer, 2010 – Climate Wars : The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats.
84
As I finalise this version of this essay (November 2018) the elections in Brazil have thrown up what seems the
most extreme of such individuals as President, Jair Bolsonaro; and where predictably, among his first actions has
been to announce a major assault on the Amazon and on the lands of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon, ‘to
release the resources that lie there’; with all the tragic consequences of such an action, and as an increasingly
helpless world looks on.
And so, and to re-ask the question that the Concept Note for this Conference asked : What is the
response to architects and planners to these two processes ? What should our response be ?
In conclusion : Rethinking home and homelessness, rethinking housing
As I have already said, demonetisation (and what it represents) and climate change (and what it
represents) are only two of the major forces that are now beginning to sweep across India and its region
and that I suggest are going to hugely impact the questions of housing, home, and homelessness. How
therefore, in this major initiative to address the housing crisis that we think we can see around us in
India, should we as architects, planners, and related academics look at the proposals that have been put
forward in this essay ? Not only in terms of the present but also of the future – and of these possibly
emerging futures ? What, in such a future, will in fact even constitute ‘home’, ‘homelessness’, and
‘housing’ ? And, and as I asked in my paper that I have drawn on for the previous section, how can we
even begin to reclaim our planetary home, Mother Earth ? And what are the implications in what is
emerging for what architects and planners should do ?
In short, and considering even just the two issues I have raised in the previous section, I would
like to suggest that we are at the beginning of a stage in history in India that we have never encountered
before – and where if that takes shape, no number of ‘housing units’ will even begin to address what will
be required. We need to see, and think about, the emerging situation differently; very differently.
It is also not a question of merely ‘mitigating’ the disasters that are coming, which is how
planners and policy makers (and architects; think of the landscaped wall proposed for around the
southern tip of Manhattan), and therefore also politicians and the public, are tending to look at climate
change. To address these issues, we need to address the root causes, and the forces behind them, and
to look for roles in relation to these causes and not merely to their effects. To my understanding, we in
this initiative need to try to comprehend what we are seeing as a ‘housing crisis’ as being just one part of
this larger existential crisis that is opening up in our times, and in relation to it. What are – can be,
should be - the roles of architects and planners in this ?
My raising these questions in concluding is in part to take us back to what I have already said –
that if we are interested in addressing what we perceive as a housing crisis, then our first step has to be
to develop a closer understanding of the nature of the crisis and of the forces behind it. Although I am
aware that I have critiqued several aspects of the initiative of which the Bombay Conference was a part, I
hope it will be understood that I have done this first, out of respect for what has been attempted and in
in order to try and push it further; and second, in order to contribute towards defining the imperatives for
us are, at this stage in history. As I see it, the most fundamental requirement is that we attempt to
better understand what our situation is; and accompanying this is that we confront ourselves and
overcome our detachment and distance from the people, both in our practice and our praxis. And
assuming rationality, I am working on the understanding that we will be willing to attend to what we
learn, and not work on the basis of underlying, normative, and possibly self-centred background
assumptions.
As I have argued, I believe that opening up the question of ‘dwelling’ can help us better
understand the housing crisis that is the reason for this initiative. It can help us to understand the
precariousness of dwelling, and to the idea of women and men housing themselves as a daily struggle for
the foundations to their lives, and not just to foundations to a building. It can therefore help us perceive,
and in time work with, the more fundamental issues that people face in finding and retaining a place to
live in security and dignity, and to negotiate roles for ourselves within this struggle.
In answer then to the question that the Concept Note posed, ‘How should architects and
planners respond ?’ – and for the moment setting aside my own attempt to reframe it -, I think that the
answer is simple : We need to recognise that for ordinary people, ‘housing’ is first and foremost a
struggle for a place to live; and so if we seriously want to address what we perceive as a ‘housing crisis’,
we have to be wiling to join them in their struggle. Among many other reasons, because the attack on
the commons that is opening up in India is a common struggle; it is likely to soon become our struggle
too – all those of us who, and beyond our professional goals, are also interested in peace, justice, and
well being for all.
I want to end by underlining, and insisting, that this is not a matter to be reduced to facts and
statistics. The demand by people – by women and by men – for a place to live in security and dignity, in
India and all over the world, is a claim, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it in an excellent article on the
massive ‘long march’ on Mumbai in March 2018 by Adivasi farmers and forest dwellers, is fundamentally
a moral claim :
… for economic agency and rationality, human dignity, political representation, and cultural visibility. It
needs to be engaged on those terms.85
Are we, as architects, planners, researchers, students, and teachers, alive and ready for this ? As
I see it, our not addressing the housing crisis so far, or addressing it with mistaken assumptions, has
been and remains a massive failure of our moral imaginations and critical faculties as professionals. It is
time that we address ourselves to this, but now with our eyes wide open to the realities that exist and
that are emerging, all around us.
References :
Nafeez Ahmed, June 2014a - ‘Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target
peaceful activists and protest movements’, in The Guardian, Thursday 12 June 2014, @
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
Nafeez Ahmed, June 2014b – ‘Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks’, in
The Guardian, Friday 14 June 2013, @ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
Christopher Alexander, Shlomo Angel, Sanford Hirshen, Sara Ishikawa and Christie Koffin, 1969 – Housing
Generated by Patterns. Berkeley CA : University of California at Berkeley, Center for Environmental
Structure. Available at http://sollyangel.com/books/houses-generated-by-patterns/
Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, 1977 - A Pattern Language : Towns,
Buildings, Construction. Berkeley, CA : Center for Environmental Structure, University of California at
Berkeley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language
Shashi Anand, 1982 – Man vs Man. A film on the banning of hand rickshaws in Calcutta. Pune : Film and
Television Institute of India
85
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, March 2018 – ‘A claim for dignity’. And why, as I complete this version of this essay in
November 2018, nothing less than one hundred thousand farmers are now following up by marching on Delhi on
November 30 2018; see : Rishi Majumder, November 2018 – ‘Enough ! Why 1,00,000 farmers are marching to Delhi
on November 30’.
Shlomo Angel, Raymon Archer, Sidhijai Tanphiphat and Emiel Wegelin, eds, 1983 – Land for Housing the
Poor. Singapore : Select Books. PDF copy available at http://sollyangel.com/books/land-for-housing-the-
poor-2/ (accessed js on 10.11.2018)
Anon (Urban Design Research Institute and the Architecture Foundation), nd, c.February 2018 – Concept
Note for ‘Housing in the Emerging India’, Closing Conference held at Cama House, Fort, Bombay, India,
March 15-17 2018
Architecture Foundation and the Urban Design Research Institute, nd, c.2017 – The State of Housing in
India : A documentation of the Inaugural Seminar. Bombay : Architecture Foundation and the Urban
Design Research Institute
Architecture Foundation and the Urban Design Research Institute, 2018 - ‘State of Housing – Aspirations,
Imaginaries, and Realities in India’. An Exhibition at the Max Mueller Bhavan / Goethe Institute, Flora
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Work-in-progress, November 2018 draft

Rethinking Housing in Emerging India

What is ‘housing’, anyway ?

To quote again from my essay on this shift of thinking :

Let me expand on this.

Where are the people ?

Where are women, the primary homebuilders ?

Why is it so important that we address this ?

Most importantly, this conclusion in the Exhibition to me seemed to be a highly normative,

This of course is simultaneously a personal, professional, and political choice, but it is a

Interrogating our goals and assumptions

It is up to us as architects, planners, researchers, and students to decide where and how we

The gathering storms : In search of understanding home and homelessness

Climate change – and war :79

In conclusion : Rethinking home and homelessness, rethinking housing

NCHR, May 1991 - ‘Housing Rights in the 1991 Election Manifestos’

Bernard Rudofsky, 1964 - Architecture Without Architects : A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed

Colin Ward, 1976 – Housing : An Anarchist Approach. London : Freedom Press

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