Bombay

Bombay is a young town, with its history as a trading port beginning when in the 1600s the British were looking for a new deep water port for large ships, and decided to develop Bombay. The center of Bombay is on a peninsula that forms protects the harbour. Here are many skyscrapers and important buildings facing west and overlooking the Arabian Sea. In its 400 years of contact with the west it has become India's most populated city, and is 8 times as densely populated as New York City.

It was raining as we got off the train in Bombay. The comparison to New York was easy and immediate. The streets are wider and there are no cows on them. The town was hopping with activity of all sorts even late at night. There were a lot more people wearing western dress. There were more taxis and fewer rickshaws. The buildings have a more classic colonial look to them, like I would expect in an older English town. The local black basalt stone is used in many of the buildings and as paving stones for streets and sidewalks (yes, Bombay has sidewalks). There are skyscrapers, and most importantly, a five-star hotel with a room reserved for me. We stayed in the downtown section of Bombay, where everything looks like Union Square in SF or what I imaging Manhattan looks like. There are lots of shops, every area is very walkable, and there are buildings of every style and age.

The other part of Bombay are the squatter settlements. These are areas where the land was either owned by the government or by absentee landlords, and the poor and in-migrants from rural areas built shops and homes on the land. Bombay hosts the biggest such settlement in Asia, called Dharavi. Dharavi was until recently Asia's largest slum, and with a population between 600,000 to 1,000,000 in approximately 450 acres, it could be the densest community in the world. I had expected a slum where there were a lot of poor, homeless, and unemployed people, but I found a self organizing community of people very busy earning a living. Their housing and retail shops were of poor quality, but they were functional. There are a lot of proposals of different ways to help the residents improve their quality of life, but I think that they could take care of a lot of the improvements themselves if they just got some help with water and sewer infrastructure, and if ownership issues got cleared up. We drove around the outside of it, but our guides would not take us inside, saying that it would take too long to go through it once in.