The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai

Description

The Dharavi district, best known from Slumdog Millionaire, is one of Asia's largest slums where nearly one million squatters live in makeshift housing on one square mile of government land. Liza Weinstein draws on a decade of work, including more than a year of research in Dharavi, to explain how the slum has persisted for so long, achieving a precarious stability.

Liza Weinstein is assistant professor of sociology at Northeastern University.

"There remains a dearth of rigorous and creative monographs that present a sound analysis of urbanism and urban processes in Indian cities. The Durable Slum clearly fills this gap. In particular, Mumbai, often the subject of popular writing, does not have an iconic academic monograph that provides insights into the workings of the city. This is such a text. Liza Weinstein's work presents the sociological research and analysis that can transform the megaslum from a horizon of popular imagination into a field of inquiry." -Ananya Roy, University of California, Berkeley "An important addition to the work being done on urban poverty."-Economic and Political Weekly "[The Durable Slum] is a significant contribution to the literature on urban transformations and the durability of low-income residents and their settlements. "-Pacific Affairs "The Durable Slum not only adds to the scholarship on the political economy of Dharavi, but through analysis of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) also forms an important contribution to the question of how poor, seemingly-powerless slum populations respond to the totalising forces of global capital, and how they manage 'to stay put'."-South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies "Weinstein has produced a noteworthy book, which reminds us of the importance of long-term research in grasping the entangled and locally varying facets of urban processes."-disP: The Planning Review "The Durable Slum is well worth reading and teaching and provides novel insights that apply to urban contexts near and far, domestic and international."-Social Forces "A remarkable and stimulating study."-American Journal of Sociology