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State of Housing/A Place to Live (2018)

A documentary film by Sanjiv Shah

Published onMar 17, 2023
State of Housing/A Place to Live (2018)

There exists a longer and a shorter version of Sanjiv Shah's documentary (41:34min and 100min respectively). In the following, I will refer to the 41min version, which was shown under the title State of Housing, as part of the exhibition of the same name, which Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskoté and Kaiwan Mehta jointly curated and showed in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Bengaluru between 2018 and 2020. However, A Place to Live, the long version of the film, was also screened in Bengaluru when the exhibition was shown there in September and October 2020.

In several respects, this commissioned work for the context and framework of an exhibition was a novelty for Shah, not least because there was funding available for this film (through Tata Trusts; the film was produced by Urban Design Research Institute and the Architecture Foundation), which was unusual for him as a predominantly independently working and self-funded documentary filmmaker, as he states in an interview with IIHS (Indian Institute of Housing Settlements, Bengaluru).

Also, in order to not focus only on one local context, the filming had to be done simultaneously by two film crews in different locations in India, given the very tight shooting schedule. Just a few weeks before the first opening of this traveling exhibition in Mumbai, it became clear that the form had to be reworked once again in order to accommodate the viewing habits or possibilities of the viewers in the context and space of the exhibition as much as possible. For this reason, the decision was made in favor of an episodic structure of the film that allows viewers to see the individual 3-4 minute episodes instead of the entire film. Each episode is announced by a black slide with a short title, brief information on the topic and some conceptual associations.

Many of the episodes/chapters initially take statistical data from the surveys conducted as part of the Census of India 2011 as a starting point. They contextualize these in the concrete lived realities of marginalized people and, above all, let them speak for themselves. Another focus, which at least in the short version of the film could be perceived as slightly overrepresented vis-à-vis the ‘peoples’ perspectives’, is on the statements of experts and activists.

The film begins first with a prologue in which we look through the camera and window of a slowly moving train as well as a thick layer of smog at residential buildings in Mumbai, while hearing the voice of Rahul Mehrotra who introduces the topic of the contemporary housing crisis in India. His central argument, as stated by Mehrotra in a wide variety of other formats too, is that this problem cannot be solved by an “absolute solution” (00:49min) “that is either propelled by ideas of mass housing or political ambitions by the state represented by statistical hubris (00:49min).”1 Instead of focusing primarily on the construction of new housing, upgrading, restoring, retrofitting and improving what is already there should receive much more attention. More rental housing for mobile urban dwellers is also badly needed, as well as a wide range of solutions that could strengthen sustainable communities in the emerging urban-rural continuum.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

The first episode begins with an aerial view2 of an informal settlement in Mumbai and captures voices and images from different cities of people describing in their own words what ‘home’ means to them.

Stills from the film State of Housing (2018).

This already underlines an important statement in relation to the topic of housing: the provision of living space alone is by no means the basis for it to become a home for its inhabitants.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

In addition to many refugees from other nation states, India has a very high number of internally displaced persons, but they are not really visible to the public. Environmental disasters and, to a large extent, the government’s large-scale infrastructure projects are mainly responsible for this. The fiercely controversial Narmada Valley Project can be considered as an, perhaps even the exemplary case. It included a large number of major, medium and minor dam projects, among them the two major dams Sardar Sarovar (Gujarat) and Indira Sagar (Madhya Pradesh), with the aim of supplying water and generating electricity. Its construction has dragged on for over three decades, and opposition to it has existed for just as long3, but when Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally inaugurated the dam in 2017, he spoke of a “massive disinformation campaign” by activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement, NBA) in reference to the countless families, many of them Adivasis, and more than 40,000 individuals who were at risk of losing their homes due to the flooding of the Narmada River. The episode titled HOMELESSNESS draws on two film clips from earlier documentaries, one from the film A Narmada Diary (1995) by Simantini Dhuru and Anand Pathwardan which was made between 1990 and 1993, and the other from the Prakrit Media Collective's documentary Famine '87 (1988), which used the example of the pastoral Banni community in the desert region of Kutch in western Gujarat to highlight the environmental impact of misguided modernization and development policies. The famine of 1987 in Gujarat, especially in the regions of Kutch and Saurashtra, had devastating consequences for people and animals.

After Sanjiv Shah dropped out of his architecture studies, he became actively involved in the field of refugee housing and eventually took up film studies, as he was looking for an effective way to communicate and inform about the issues that were important to him and hardly represented in the media at the time. For this reason, he decided early in his film studies to pursue documentary filmmaking as a suitable medium. The personal experience of collective filmmaking and supporting each other in this process, as Shah himself experienced in connection with Famine ´87, was formative for him, as he explains in the IIHS interview.

Through these brief and impressive references to the alternative archive of a documentary movement in the 1980s and 90s which was highly critical of the state and its understanding of modernization, we are made aware of the many complex and closely interwoven causes of a permanent or temporary migration of millions of people to the cities, as well as of their long repercussions and existential consequences for subsequent generations. This, of course, also applies to the long history of migration resulting from the partition of India as well as the creation of Bangladesh, which have left many people and their families not only permanently homeless, but in many ways stateless, “because they don't belong anywhere (07:59min).”

Stills from the film State of Housing (2018).

Many of the refugees from other countries who are either ‘legally’ or unregistered in India, are also in this category of ‘stateless’ people. This includes not least many members of the Rohingya community.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

In this episode, Rahul Mehrotra’s voice is heard once again, broadening the concept and focus to housing, which can be seen as only one, albeit central, component of the culture that is created, as well as the spaces of inhabitation and relationships that are forged between members of other groups and communities. In this spirit the film addresses the problem again in the concluding episode that the focus on housing or affordable housing is too limited and that in terms of relationships and emerging forms of coexistence, we should actually be talking about dwelling and homemaking.

A second point in this episode is the way in which, in the imagination of an increasingly neoliberal landscape of cities, everyone is locked into a very static notion of habitat, and the houses or apartments in which we live and which take on the character of commodities.

„These images actually lock us into an imagination of the habitat (11:10min).”

“So Mumbai aspires to become Singapore and Dubai and then looking at Mumbai, Solapur and Nasik aspire to become Mumbai. It is a response really to capital and to the neoliberal landscape that we live in where the houses that we live in become commodities (11:14min).”

Stills from the film State of Housing (2018).

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

In this episode, three fundamental problems are addressed: on the one hand, that freedom of movement is subject to increasingly restrictive conditions, even in rural areas; among other things, this also restricts the search for suitable building materials for houses. At the same time, the resources for this are becoming less and less: after the wood suitable for building has become scarce, the focus in the desired construction method of ‘pucca’ houses now increasingly turns to building with bricks, for which more and more clay is removed. As a result, geological conditions in rural areas are changing profoundly and in many areas “the once fertile land has now become uproductive (14:13min).”

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

„The houses have become pucca but we are losing land (14:17min).”

Intervention is urgently needed against this, as well as with regard to the building materials which need to be differentiated.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

The episode emphatically criticizes the continuous neglect of paying attention to who the people arriving in cities are, what their needs are, and where they can live, or of the fact that their place of residence is tied to the availability of affordable transportation and accessibility to their work, which was already addressed in the mid-1970s by Charles Correa and others.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

As shown in the previous chapter on the basis of three Films Division’s films from 1954, 1972 and 1982, the state's view is focused on the construction of fortified housing and on the elimination of unplanned informal settlements from the urban landscape, and thus at the same time strongly influenced by globally circulating ideas of mass housing as a suitable solution in the postwar era - or, in other words, the idea of an ‘absolute’ or ‘permanent’ solution. However, as Sheela Patel, founder director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), an NGO that supports community organizations of the urban poor in their efforts to access secure housing as well as basic amenities, points out, at least a basic infrastructure and supply of water and sanitation should be provided by the state in order to significantly improve the quality of life of the residents (19:29min).

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

Gender-sensitive planning simply does not seem to exist for poor and multiply marginalized people, so that this episode first argues for seeing and acknowledging the specific needs of women and enabling solutions for them. In this episode, the feminist architect Neera Adarkar (Mumbai) reports on different interventions and concrete measures to bring about effective changes here, for example through a crèche, the establishment of women shelters or bathrooms for women. However, since a critical gender perspective should not be limited to the idea of two genders or ‘women’s issues,’ this episode and call for gender friendly cities could serve as a basis for including trans- and queerfeminist but also intersectional perspectives that take multiple and often intersecting forms of discrimination (based, for instance, on caste, class, religion, gender, sexuality, disability) into account.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

Following on from this, Amita Bhide (School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences) criticizes the state for recognizing the need for housing on the one hand, but not the problem of poverty and the associated vulnerability of people. As the most significant intervention, the Urban Land Ceiling Act of 1976 originally aimed at a more equitable distribution of land and housing in the city, while at the same time limiting the maximum amount of land that could be disposed of. However, as it turned out in the following decades, it did not benefit the poor, but only the non-poor classes (25:08min), so that private developers have de facto access to slum land, of which only 10 percent is used for the development of housing for poor people.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

At the same time, there is a lack of infrastructure and good transport links, as marginalized groups are pushed further and further into the outskirts, where the land is cheap but not serviced land and thus hardly contributes to so-called rehabilitation.4

Shah’s film offers an excellent approach to this complex issue, as it also shows the impressive range of activisms and critical knowledge production in the field of housing and urban/spatial design through the interesting selection of experts. This also includes the legal level, where Bilal Khan, for example, has been campaigning for many years for the recognition and enforcement of a right to shelter as an integral part of a right to life (26:31min).

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

As the early Films Division documentaries on low-cost housing show, the state in independent India at most envisaged the participation of the residents in the construction of the house, but had little confidence in the craftsmanship or creativity in finding and using suitable building materials for their temporary or permanent housing units. This was all supposed to be centrally planned, controlled and based on the latest scientific research by the state and its institutions. Accordingly, it is hardly anchored in the public consciousness that the majority of dwellings in India continue to be built by the inhabitants themselves and expanded according to need and financial possibilities (i.e. incremental housing), not only in the rural regions, but also in the cities of India (28:05min). To overlook this as a “core mode of production” means at the same time not to recognize it as a cultural process.

Stills from the film State of Housing (2018).

Under the term TECHNOLOGY, the one-sided focus and use of environmentally harmful and expensive building materials, especially cement, is again pointed out (30:12min). An interesting reference is made to the fact that in the 1930s and 1940s, there was still an awareness of the large palette of building materials, through which at the same time a variety of construction methods and house types could be realized. Indeed, the early Films Division films from the first decades after Independence convey an awareness of the use of more diverse locally available and cheaper materials in low-cost housing. However, they simultaneously advocate for their industrial production, whereas this section in Shah’s film also raises the issue of preserving craft traditions and skills in working with materials that would nowadays be considered as ‘alternative technology’ (30:35min).

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

See on this question also the chapter in this collection on critical regionalist architects, who strongly support both the use of alternative building materials and the preservation of the crafts needed for them.

With the term TRANSITIONAL, the film, as well as co-curator Rahul Mehrotra in many of his public speeches or publications, points to the need to move away from a fixation on notions of housing based on ownership and permanent duration. Not only the circular migration of a high number of migrant workers from rural areas to cities, but also other mobile groups (“mobile populations,” 33:02min), such as students or single women, need temporary solutions, as in many cases they do not plan to stay in the same place or city permanently. Consequently, a large part of the affordable housing in cities of India would have to be made available as rental housing, which so far is not the case (34:19min). However, this in turn raises the pertinent of un/equal access to urban rental housing markets where Dalits and Muslims often experience discrimination.

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

Particularly in Mumbai, but also in other cities in India, housing types such as the famous chawls, the four to five storey buildings in which apartments were rented to mill workers, are now considered an example of affordable rental housing and could be used as a model for appropriate planning for the future.

Stills from the film State of Housing (2018).

Still from the film State of Housing (2018).

In the final episode, the one-sided focus on health and safety in relation to low-cost housing that has prevailed for a long time is criticized again, specifically as no attention has been paid to infrastructure and livelihoods, but also the question of living together in difference as a newly emerging community. In this sense, adequate housing encompasses much more than just the criterion of affordability and needs to take numerous other dimensions into account. All this could be conveyed much better by the term dwelling instead of housing (39:27min).

Currently (i.e. in March 2023), Sanjiv Shah’s film is available on YouTube and Vimeo in the 41-minute version conceived for the “State of Housing” exhibition.

A short talk - State of Housing Film

Although somewhat “compressed” in this version, the documentary nevertheless offers an excellent insight into current debates on the complex topic of (affordable) housing, homemaking and multilocal dwelling. One of its strengths is that people affected by extreme forms of spatial injustice and multiple marginalizations describe their situation in their own words. Their experiences and perspectives are complemented by an impressive variety of critical knowledge actors and activists who have been working for solutions and an urgently needed paradigm shift in this field for many years. As his own long-standing experience and active engagement is not mentioned in the film, I would recommend to also watch the interesting video idnterview with Sanjiv Shah on his film. State of Housing communicates the concern of the exhibition very vividly, but also works very well without its framework and content.

Dialogue with Filmmakers | Sanjiv Shah

I would like to thank Max Kramer for his valuable comments on the draft version of this article.

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