The walking classroom: Summer Abroad students learn about Mumbai on foot

Mumbai is a city where the contrast between wealth and poverty is bracingly stark.The massive Indian metropolis is home to 90 billionaires, and yet 60 per cent of the population lives in slums.

This dramatic contrast makes Mumbai the perfect place to study inequality and justice in the Global South. And in May and June of this year, an innovative U of T Summer Abroad program offered students the chance to do just that.

Urban Justice in the Global South — Walking Mumbai (URB 431) was created and taught by Aditi Mehta, an assistant professor of urban studies, teaching stream in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Geography & Planning.

This was the course’s inaugural year, and for Mehta it was a “full circle moment.” Shortly after completing her own undergraduate degree in urban studies almost 20 years ago, she travelled to Mumbai to work with a non-profit that provided legal aid to residents in informal housing, and took part in a participatory workshop about the future of Mumbai’s Koliwada, a historic fisherman’s village.

The workshop was offered by urbz, a research, planning, design and architecture organization located within Dharavi, a 500-acre neighbourhood that is both one of Asia’s largest slum areas, and a vibrant centre of economic activity.

Mehta says that the workshop “was a really transformative way to learn about the informal economy … I wanted to give my students a similar experience.”

The course was structured around a series of interpretive walks in various Mumbai neighbourhoods. As Mehta writes in the syllabus, walking is one of the most powerful of learning tools, in that it’s highly experiential, and engages all the senses.

The walks around Mumbai allowed students to explore everything from the politics of water consumption, to the queer scene, to the red light district and the relationship between gender and climate change. They learned about the city’s colonial history, wandered through an opulent neighbourhood, met with community organizers and much more.

“It was one of the most rewarding academic experiences I’ve ever had,” says Vijay Saravanamuthu, a health and society student entering his fourth year at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Saravanamuthu — who has worked for years in Toronto’s community health field — was especially impressed by the way community initiatives are carried out in Dharavi.

“We partnered with so many grassroots organizations for the course. And whether it was literacy, women’s rights or queer rights, we saw them taking an approach that was community-embedded and not paternalistic. That was very affirming to see,” he says.

Exploring the need for new approaches to urban justice is central to Mehta’s course.

“In class, we talk about urban justice in two ways,” she says. “We talk about it as distributive justice, in that everybody who’s living in a city should have equal access and rights to certain amenities, such as housing, transit, labour, livelihoods. Then we talk about urban justice as procedural justice: how do decisions in the city get made? What is the governance structure? Who is represented, whose voice matters, and who is heard?

“And one of the main lessons when we talk about urban justice is that just processes do not necessarily yield just outcomes. Our notions of urban justice are further complicated in Mumbai by legacies of colonialism, rural-urban migration, informality, caste as a socioeconomic structure, and religious diversity.”

In cities around the world, urban communities have often had to fight to secure justice for themselves. The world’s many Chinatowns, thriving historical neighbourhoods born of racial exclusion, exemplify this.

Course participant Kaitlyn Chan, a member of Woodsworth College going into her fifth year as an urban studies major, has done extensive research on such communities, and works closely with a non-profit planning organization in Toronto called Chinatown Land Trust. She was curious to know whether Mumbai, too, had a Chinatown; as she discovered, it once did.

At the end of the course, Mehta asked her students to design their own interpretive urban justice walk. In response, Chan designed a tour of this fascinating but little-known corner of the city. 

“I did a lot of qualitative and quantitative research, as well as looking at primary and secondary sources,” says Chan. “I also talked to the caretaker in the Chinese temple, and was even able to tell local people some things they didn’t know about their city.” Chan says she plans to continue researching Mumbai’s Chinatown long after the course is finished.

Mumbai is also the home of Bollywood, India’s huge Hindi-language film industry. For his walk, Saravanamuthu chose to look at how Bollywood tells queer stories.

“Through film we are always exposed to this idea that Mumbai is a queer haven of sorts,” he says. “On film and in real life, folks from other parts of the country go there to find safety or sanctuary. For my walking tour, I took three examples of cinematic stories that explored this idea of Mumbai and queerness. I then researched first person data of actual folks who live in Mumbai, to see how their own stories related to the films.”

Walking around Mumbai, the students also explored the lavish Ambani Cultural Centre, and learned about digital education in public schools through a visit to the Pratham Infotech Foundation.

But both Chan and Saravanamuthu cited their walk with urbz in Dharavi as a particular highlight. Though the area is known as a site of grave poverty, the students were impressed by its vigorous pace of community organizing and industry.

“They actually call Dharavi the heart of Mumbai, because the city relies on a lot of its industries,” says Chan. “Like the recycling of different car parts or plastics, dying clothes, recycling electronic parts, manufacturing and tanning leather.”

For Mehta, overseeing the success of this new course was challenging, but deeply rewarding. Building on its success, she hopes to establish research projects with partners working in India.

“As a child of Indian immigrants, I consider Mumbai to be a place that’s close to my heart,” she says. “The meaningful learning experiences I had there when I was young molded the work I do today. It was really great to be able to reconnect.”