Introduction

The Sahar Elevated Access Road – or SEAR – is a seemingly ordinary flyover that takes you from the newly built Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai into the island city. Built in 2015, the road cuts travel times between the airport and the highway from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. Flanked by tall palm trees, it is an impressive aesthetic feat in an otherwise concrete jungle. Yet the road hides beneath its eight-lane expanse narratives of displaced homes, forced evictions, and homelessness. This plays into a politics of invisibilization that seeks to hide from sight the urban poor and create “urban archipelagos” that “fly over” zones of underdevelopment.

Beneath The Beautiful Flyovers seeks to complicate the jubilant narrative surrounding infrastructure development in Mumbai by questioning the demographic basis upon which it is propelled. Through an examination of the Sahar Elevated Access Road, I seek to understand how the construction of flyovers is driven by an urge to beautify a city and imprint it within the popular imagination as a site of progress. By demonstrating the integral role played by the SEAR in connecting the international airport to upper class and upper caste zones in the southern part of Mumbai, I aim to put into perspective how urban archipelagos connect posh airports to posh hotels without the need to observe marginalized communities that lie in between.

Situating the SEAR in an extended history of the steady deterioration of public transport in Mumbai and the construction of a record number of flyovers in recent decades, I will also trace the gradual shift from the use of flyovers as an instrument of surveillance to their mobilization as a tool for invisibilization. Using the SEAR as an example of the type of infrastructure projects being currently undertaken in the city, I will attempt to understand how new politics of re-occupying space and re-using architecture are responding to policies of displacement and concealment.

Flyover City

Mumbai is a city of flyovers. Criss-crossing India’s de facto financial capital are a vast network of elevated roads that have been constructed with gusto (over sixty in the last two decades) as signs of development and progress that cut travel times in the congested island city. These have been constructed despite widespread critiques of flyovers in other metropolises across the world and growing frustrations with failed flyover experiments in other cities in India. Yet, they have become beacons of development that are used during election cycles as examples of good governance and efficient planning. They are part of a large number of infrastructure mega-projects initiated by a political elite keen to make Mumbai a world-class city and put the de facto financial capital of India on the map as a cutting-edge hub for global investments.

Recent depictions of Mumbai in international popular culture, however, have hardly focused on economic growth or development narratives. From Slumdog Millionaire to Behind the Beautiful Forevers, portrayals of the city have focused instead on its sprawling slums (with the image of Dharavi being firmly welded to the image of Mumbai). The aspirational nature of the city has been steadily eroding too: Mumbai is quickly going from a city where dreams are realised to a city where dreams go to die. Large scale infrastructure, therefore, offers a visible solution that makes concrete abstract notions of growth, development, and progress. Such projects also attract international funding from agencies like the World Bank, which has committed towards the creation of a new airport in Navi Mumbai (that will remain steadfastly out of reach of a majority of the city’s residents, 62% of whom live in slums and 20% of whom survive off of less than 35 cents a day).

Infrastructure – predominantly upscale, aesthetically pleasing infrastructure – has become weaponized and deployed in this battle against popular perception. Airports, the gateways to India for those coming from around the world, have become particularly important sites of prestige wars: billions of dollars have been spent in the past decade on massive revamping of international airports in Delhi and Mumbai. At the same time, other public infrastructure – particularly the railways – has been left with little funding and limited modernization.

This has come at the cost of improvements to public transport, which most Mumbaikars depend upon for their daily commute. The city has historically been associated with the most intricate and well-connected public transport system in the country: the “Mumbai local” trains are called the lifeline of the city and service over 7.5 million people per day. Despite this, the construction of road projects has consistently drawn extraordinary sums in annual budgets, with individual projects increasing exponentially in cost as compared to a decade ago (even after adjusting for inflation). For instance, the SEAR – which is 2 km long – cost USD 65.5 million; the JJ Flyover on the other hand, which is 2.4 km long and was constructed in 2001, cost only USD 16.3 million.

These numbers dispel the myth created of Mumbai being a predominantly middle class city, drawing attention to its working class roots and prompting a rethinking of urban infrastructure policies that centers the needs and perspectives of the majority of the city’s inhabitants.

The Sahar Elevated Access Road

“Mumbai terminal will establish new global benchmarks. I compliment Mumbai International Airport Ltd. for building a state-of-the-art airport,” said then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the inauguration of the new Chatrapati Shivaji Mumbai International Airport.

Designed by New York’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) – the same architects who designed Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and Chicago’s Willis Tower – the airport was funded through a “public-private-partnership” with Indian conglomerate GVK. Meant to seamlessly integrate a traditional Indian aesthetic with modern efficiency, it sees an annual traffic of 40 million passengers and has been described by the designer as a significant part of a “renaissance” in Mumbai. The airport, for SOM, serves as an “infrastructural anchor for the neighborhood, and as a landmark within the surrounding community. However, it has been constructed by the systematic forced eviction and displacement of thousands of families over a decade.

This has dramatically changed the demographic landscape of the neighborhood. Created by the demolition of 750 houses (these are official figures; the real numbers may be much higher) in the Bamanwada colony and Ambedkarnagar colony lying near the airport, the $65.5 million SEAR was constructed despite opposition from local communities through rights to eminent domain exercised over “illegal” settlements. These are communities that had originally reclaimed what was a swamp, draining it and slowly making it habitable; communities who have been denied adequate compensation for their labor.

The Sahar Elevated Access Road connects the airport to the highway, seamlessly taking you from an airport lobby into a hotel lobby. The highway goes directly from the northern neighborhood, where the airport is located, to the newly constructed Bandra-Worli Sealink (a road built over the Arabian Sea that links Bandra, an increasingly affluent upcoming neighborhood, to South Bombay, the old upscale colonial area of the city). Through these two roads, anyone arriving in Mumbai and going to South Bombay bypasses both the airport slums and the predominantly Muslim lower-class neighborhoods that the Sealink circumvents. In essence, a visitor moves from a posh airport to a posh hotel – avoiding large swathes of marginalized communities that might disrupt the narrative of Mumbai as a global city.




The communities that inhabit the land below the SEAR are predominantly migrant communities from across the country that have come to Mumbai over decades in order to find better jobs and better opportunities. One of the major colonies that was razed to make way for the road was Ambedkarnagar, inhabited primarily by landless Mahar Dalits who migrated there from Jaalna (a district in Maharashtra, the state in which Mumbai lies) during a drought in the 1970s. They are part of a large informal labor force that feeds into the cooking, cleaning, and auxiliary needs (plumbing and carpentry) to the middle and upper middle class residents of the city.

In its displacement of Dalit communities, the SEAR stands out as another example of the housing crisis in Mumbai and the precarity of existing under the threat of constant demolition. Moreover, it is representative of how flyovers have been mobilized in Mumbai to render populations invisible and is in line with other constructions (like the JJ flyover, which bypasses Muslim-majority neighborhoods, and roads circumventing Dharavi) that are built over and on the backs of marginalized communities without providing them with any tangible benefits (for instance, all these roads have a single entry and exit – the areas they bypass cannot use the roads that rise above them).

Infrastructure Transformations

The SEAR, through its systematic concealment of slums that lie around it and through its integration into a network of infrastructures that prevent marginalized communities from coming in contact with their privileged counterparts, plays into a politics of invisibilization that creates upper class and upper caste urban archipelagos. Specifically, within the context of Mumbai, the SEAR marks a shift from a politics of surveillance and oversight into a politics of concealment and invisibilization necessitated by changing political dynamics and economic compulsions. In its design, the road resembles those found in emerging cities across the global south – suggesting a broader transformation in how infrastructure is imagined and mobilized in developing countries.

While the past two decades have seen a record construction of flyovers across the city, these have often been molded into forms of infrastructures of surveillance. Sarover Zaidi, using Eyal Weizman’s concept, calls this an attempt to assert “sovereign verticality” in her discussion on the JJ Flyover – which runs over a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, one of the oldest in the city. More recent constructions, those that have been built in the past five years, have demonstrated an urge to go beyond a politics of surveillance into an aesthetic project of concealment. The Bandra-Worli Sealink, which runs across the Arabian Sea, was constructed at a cost of USD 250 million in 2009 and bypasses coastal Koli (indigenous fishermen) communities. The SCLR, running from east to west and constructed at a cost of USD 70 million in 2014, glides over the central slums of the city.

The six-lane, heavily guarded elevated SEAR, too, completely invisibilizes the slums surrounding the airport. Moreover, it restricts entry and a possible subversion of space in myriad ways: autorickshaws and two-wheelers, which make up more than 60% of the total automobiles on the city’s roads, are banned from using the SEAR. Aspirational in its construction, the road rises up and connects to an elevated section of the airport terminal, giving the impression of rising up above the city and moving towards a higher status. Yet, the SEAR is indistinguishable from its counterparts in Istanbul or Kinshasa: as Vanessa Watson points out in her study of infrastructure developments across developing nations in Africa, projects like the SEAR are part of a “superficial exercise of cut-and-paste graphics” undertaken by predominantly foreign firms.

That the road connects to what Marc Augé calls “nonplaces” is significant: moving from airports, which are increasingly looking just like one another, to a highway, a ubiquitous design element of modernity, the SEAR plays into the creation of a homogenized urban experience that is being touted as the ideal end goal of development. Lined by palm trees, the road physically prevents you from observing the slums lying directly underneath. Simultaneously, it prevents those underneath the road or in surrounding areas from observing the cars that pass through it. The totalizing anonymity created by roads like the SEAR, a characteristic of nonplaces, prevents a mobilization on identity grounds. Disrupting this anonymity and decentralized homogeneity is an integral part of repurposing architecture and big-ticket infrastructure to acknowledge the needs of underrepresented communities.

Conclusion

How can we repurpose the SEAR to transform its invisibilization of marginalised communities? How can we convert a nonplace into a place? Where are the fissures that will allow for an inversion of the anonymity that the SEAR tries to create?

These are questions that activist communities working towards preventing displacement and eviction in Ambedkarnagar and Bamanwada can best address. However, these are also questions that can be responded to in a more oblique manner: through a rebranding of the SEAR as an urban planning failure, through a reconsideration of policies that divide cities on class and caste bases, through a consolidated effort among solidarity networks to chip away at a rhetoric of development that serves only a tiny proportion of the cities.

Nonplaces can be successfully converted into places despite the original framework within which they were converted: the example of generic shopping malls in Italy and sides of highways in India has demonstrated how individuals can transform the nature of the spaces they occupy. Beneath the Beautiful Flyovers is an attempt to start a conversation within solidarity networks as to how oblique mechanisms of resistance to nonplaces can be created, developed, and deployed in a manner that supports local communities.
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