When thinking about the attitudes of people living in slums, an assumption that seems easy to make is that the people forced to live in slum conditions will be bitter, depressed, and aggressive to get what they need. This would be linked to crime and violence that should be a regular occurrence in a place packed full of people with an attitude such as this. When compounded with religious tension and rivalry, it should only make matters worse. However, when reading about the slums in Mumbai, India, the opposite is true. Kalpana Sharma describes in his book Rediscovering Dharavi this assumption: “it is this deemed illegal status of informal settlements like Dharavi that makes people presume that they are breeding grounds for criminals and other ‘antisocial’ elements. It is also assumed that the spatial layout of such settlements, where people have no place to breathe and live literally on top of each other, exacerbated tensions – communal, class or caste….[yet] Dharavi explodes these myths.” Even though clashes have happened between the groups of Muslims and Hindus living together, Sharma demonstrates that the statistics are drastically low for this area.

A sense of community and dependence on others and the avoidance of conflict makes sense to cultivate in a slum environment, which benefits all parties involved. When trying to survive and provide for your family and yourself, fear of violence and crime is understandably something to avoid at all costs. In what may be seen as a benefit of this understanding is the link that the Mumbai slums have with the formal city. The connection between the “static city,” the formal, legal construct of Mumbai, and the “kinetic city,” the informal, always-changing slums, can be seen as desirable. Described by Rahul Mehrotra in Living in the Endless City, the attitude of being able to live together despite differences within the slums has become a conduit for the interconnectedness of the poorer class in the kinetic city living and inhabiting Mumbai alongside the static city.

The shared sense of community and survival of the kinetic city, with its drastically impermanent environment and the need to adapt to different neighbors and people groups is something that is worth studying more. In different places where kinetic-static city relationships exist, it would be interesting to observe the relationships between the communities and the individuals who share the same heritage and cultural backgrounds and locations.

In an interesting related post, this article notes the ways in which lower-income families in the Unites States have historically and consistently been more generous in terms of giving money, despite a lacking of it.

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20120826/LOCAL10/308269954