Heralded as interesting architects & creative urbanists, desperation-driven inhabitants of slums have lost their voice amid Western beneficence

What won U-TT the Golden Lion at Venice was an installation – a pop-up Venezuelan restaurant called Gran Horizonte, illuminated with extravagant multi-coloured lights, bringing ‘a taste of public life in Caracas’ and arepas to the Biennale’s visitors. Their Torre de David work is described as a ‘research and design project’, but whose design are we talking about here? 

Dharavi in Mumbai, one of Asia’s largest slums, has been pored over in photographs depicting its narrow alleyways and makeshift urbanity; desperation dressed up as architectural invention
Dharavi in Mumbai, one of Asia’s largest slums, has been pored over in photographs depicting its narrow alleyways and makeshift urbanity; desperation dressed up as architectural invention

This self-declared ‘mood poem’ struck a self-indulgent note, dressing up as slum porn the story of how people are forced to live in, and adapt to, the desperate situations that global capitalism, poor planning and rapid urbanisation foist upon them.

There was another film screened at the Barbican that night by Urban-Think Tank – Mumbai: Maximum City Under Pressure – which repeated the folly, and amplified it.

For 15 minutes, a succession of about 10 or 15 ‘experts’ – academics, urbanists and architects – talked to the camera about the Mumbai slums. A large majority of them were white men. They all extolled the slums’ dynamism, creativity and pioneering urbanism, and their interviews were intercut with footage of life and work in the Mumbai slums. The (white, male) co-chair of Urban-Think Tank was sent out to Mumbai, where he walked through the slums towards the camera like a Comic Relief host, gesturing in praise towards the bustling energy around him. Some people, he explained, wanted to put Mumbai’s slum dwellers into high-rise blocks instead – but this was a folly, an ignorance of the slums’ robust qualities: ‘they are so interesting’, he said. So interesting.

One expert told us with a beneficent smile, that the slums were ‘so full of hope’, while another laughed that there was no call for architects in the Mumbai slums, because there you have ‘18 million people – 18 million architects’.

Eighteen million slum-dwelling Indian architects, and how many were interviewed, profiled, alluded to or even acknowledged to exist as individuals in this film? Zero. Still, I’m sure there is a pop-up Indian street-food stall in the offing.