Philosophy
Street vendors and informal settlements like Dharavi show cities thrive through everyday acts of dwelling and incremental urban creation, beyond formal planning. They transform chaos into vibrant, responsive, and human-centered spaces.
Every morning outside local railway stations in Mumbai, women sell flowers: strings of mogra and gajra, their fragrance announcing the day. They are probably “unauthorized.” Their space is probably “encroached.” In planning language, women like her are a problem to be solved, an obstacle to smooth pedestrian flow. But let’s look at what they actually do.
A flower woman transforms a transit point into a place. She creates an economy: buying from suppliers, selling to customers, supporting her family. She provides a service the formal economy neglects (where else do you buy fresh flowers at 6 AM?). She makes the city more liveable, more human-scaled, more responsive to actual needs. This pattern is universal. The street vendors everywhere, the tacos al pastor carts in Mexico City, the satay grills in Jakarta’s streets, the crepe stands in Paris, the hot dog vendors in New York, they are all doing similar work: making cities more human through countless small acts of space-claiming. In Metropolis, there is no room for the flower vendor. Everything is zoned, planned, and controlled. The workers enter through designated entrances at designated times, move along designated paths. No spontaneity. No improvisation. No claiming of space for unplanned purposes.
But real cities are made not just by master plans but by these millions of small acts. The dabbawalas in Mumbai have created an impossibly efficient delivery system without algorithms or apps. The bicycle repair shops that occupy São Paulo sidewalks. The book vendors along the Seine have been there for centuries. The shoe shiners in La Paz. The coconut water sellers who follow the heat in Dhaka. Official planning sees them as violations: inefficiencies to be eliminated through formalization or removal. But what if we saw them instead as city-makers? People actively engaged in shaping urban space to meet needs, operating outside official channels precisely because those channels are unresponsive? The smart city cannot account for this because it treats the city as a closed system where all needs are known in advance and can be met through proper planning. But cities are open systems, constantly generating new needs, new uses, new possibilities. The street vendor represents this openness: the city’s capacity to respond to needs the planners never anticipated.
This is dwelling in action: not consuming the city but actively making it, claiming the right to shape space through everyday practice.
Here is something that troubles every framework: Dharavi works.
One million people in less than three square kilometers. Asia’s largest “slum.” No master plan. No zoning regulations. No smart sensors. And yet: industries thriving (leather goods, textiles, pottery, recycling), homes built, lives lived, communities formed. Recycling systems are achieving 80 to 85 percent rates that formal waste management envies. Economic output is estimated at $1 billion annually. Pottery from Dharavi’s Kumbharwada supplies Mumbai’s restaurants. Urban planners study Dharavi, usually with an eye toward “redevelopment”: demolition and replacement with something legible, controlled, proper. The assumption is that Dharavi represents failure, chaos that must be corrected in order.
But what if Dharavi has something to teach rather than something to be corrected?
It represents radical incrementalism: the city building itself through countless small decisions, adjustments, and innovations. It’s illegible to the state’s gaze, which is precisely why it’s so responsive to inhabitants’ needs. Need to expand your workshop? You negotiate with neighbors and build: no permits, no waiting. Monsoon floods your lane? You organize collectively to raise the ground level: no municipal department, no contractor. This is dwelling at scale: people don’t just live in Dharavi, they continuously make Dharavi. The city remains plastic, responsive, alive in ways planned developments never achieve.
The pattern repeats globally.
Kibera in Nairobi: 200,000 people, no official recognition for decades. Yet thriving businesses, social organizations, schools, and health clinics, all created without state support.
Rocinha in Rio: Brazil’s largest favela. Dense networks of economic activity, cultural production, and community organization. Subject to constant “pacification” attempts that never acknowledge its organic sophistication.
Orangi Town in Karachi: 2.4 million people who built their own sewage system when the state wouldn’t, more cost-effective and comprehensive than formal alternatives.
Neza-Chalco-Itza in Mexico City: Started as an informal settlement, now home to 4 million. The residents incrementally built everything: water, electricity, paving, and schools.
These are not aberrations. They are the way most of the urban world actually works. The UN estimates that one billion people live in informal settlements, about 1 in 8 humans. By 2050, this could be 3 billion. These aren’t failures of planning. They’re alternative modes of city-making that planning doesn’t recognize. The irony is profound: the “slums” targeted for redevelopment often embody more authentic city-making than the planned developments meant to replace them. Dharavi’s residents have exercised their right to the city more fully than residents of Mumbai’s gated communities or Singapore’s planned towns or Songdo’s sensor-filled apartments ever will. They have built the anti-Metropolis: horizontal rather than vertical, collaborative rather than controlled, messy rather than ordered. And it works, not perfectly, not without problems, but it works in ways the perfected city often doesn’t.