Slums better equipped for challenges: Charles - The Hindu

- Hasan Suroor

Warns against attempts to impose a “single monoculture of globalisation”

Prince Charles

LONDON: For millions of India’s slum-dwellers, it might sound like a joke but Prince Charles seriously believes that shanty towns such as Mumbai’s Dharavi, depicted in the film Slumdog Millionaire, are better equipped to deal with the “challenges” of a growing urban poor population than western-style high-rise buildings.

The Prince, who visited Dharavi in 2003, cited it as a model for environmentally and socially sustainable settlement because of the way it was organised around people’s needs. He was struck by what he described as the “underlying intuitive grammar of design” that, he said, was “totally absent from the faceless slabs that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor.”

Speaking at a conference organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment, the Prince said: “I strongly believe that the West has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms, are infinitely richer in the way in which they live and organise themselves as communities.”

The Prince, known to loathe modern western architecture, warned against attempts to impose a “single monoculture of globalisation” on the rest of the world.

Arguing that traditional settlements such as Dharavi would deliver more “durable gains” than were likely to be delivered through what he called the “brutal and insensitive process of globalisation,” the Prince said: “It may be the case that in a few years’ time such communities [as Dharavi] will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”

Jockin Arputham of the National Slum Dwellers’ Federation of India criticised attempts by foreign investors to demolish Dharavi in order to build high-rise luxury apartments.

“I am a slum-dweller, not a slumdog,” he said protesting against the title of Danny Boyle’s film. He said: “Many developing countries look to the West as a model but that cannot be the model. These [western] buildings use too much power and would not be affordable in India.”

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