Spontaneously Emerging New Property Forms : Reflections on Dharavi

Earlier this year I visited Dharavi in Mumbai, Asia's largest urban slum1. Pervasive economic and social disadvantage are endemic to any slum, a fact which leads inexorably to wider societal instability, representing a serious political challenge to those states in which they emerge. The underlying causes of slums can be traced to neoliberal capitalism — ‘a mixture of free-market economic thought, the elevation of self-interest as the guiding force of progress, minimal state intervention and, increasingly, invasive forms of biopolitical control' — and the politico-legal-economic structures of which it is both a part and which underpin it and, in turn, shape the world in which we live. As Mike Davis writes in his seminal exploration of the urban slum, states ignore these communities at their peril, for as social, economic, and political tensions increase, the only response of the residents of such communities may be revolt: ‘the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism.'