Reifying Dharavi: Derrida, Reification, and Slum Redevelopment

From the desk of Vitasta Raina

Dated: September 2025

Time: Irrelevant

Mumbai, India- March 22 2017: Man walking in an alley in Dharavi, the third largest slum in Asia. Image Source: Chris Piason

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There is something very uncomfortable in starting something new. That first stroke of paint onto a blank canvas, or the opening sentence on an empty sheet of paper. It takes an idea, yet just a prototype rife with infinite possibilities and transcribes it into a bounded form. It goes from a free-flowing nomad wandering through the shifting sands of vast, fathomless space into an ant marching through the narrow tunnels of determination, locked into its path. It goes from theory to thing, and it always brings with it a sort of hell.

This disconcerting phenomenon was described by Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács as ‘Reification’, which literally means ‘making into a thing’. Lukacs spoke about the transactional nature of social relationships and how human connections become commodities to be traded in a capitalist world. Thus, human beings become objects, and human creations become ‘things’, and the complexity, beauty and mythical aspects of an abstraction becomes a concrete artefact lacking aura.

On the other side of ‘things’ is Derrida's philosophy of cultural construction of meanings. Derrida asserts that there is no ‘naked thing’, and how every object or concept is understood or assembled through shared social constructions and interpretations of language. That the ‘thing’ is never free from these processes, and our understanding of it is built through layers of representations and contexts.

If we apply the lens of Derrida’s concept of a ‘thing’ to slums, we begin to understand them as beyond just the physical space they occupy and uncover the different layers that go into their construction. They move from being merely housing structures, to assemblages of urban policy, historical and cultural practices, economic marginalization, and lived histories. These narratives continually deconstruct and reconstruct the ‘thing’ that is a slum. And it is through these stories, and not only from their physical conditions, that slums are rendered visible in the urban imagination.

Derrida also forces us to confront how we think about slums in the language that we use. Derrida describes the world not as a self-evident reality, but rather as a product of language. The labels that we use to describe slums such as informal, illegal, dirty, all produce our perception and understanding of slums. And these are reflected in the slogans that are used to tackle the problem of slums such as “Slum Free Mumbai”. These slogans compel us to shift our imagination of slums away from the complexity of lived experiences, and towards the reification of the word slum as only a perceived physical reality that needs to be erased.

Let us take the example of Dharavi Redevelopment Project. Historically Dharavi, which was a mangrove swamp, was settled by lower-caste groups who moved there to work in the leather processing industries. Today, it houses a multi-cultural population and acts as a hub of informal economy. It is very interesting how this living neighbourhood with its layered history has been reified into a ‘redevelopable unit of land’.

The reification of Dharavi under the Redevelopment Project is intimately tied to the concept of commodity fetishism theorized by Marx. Here the lived history of Dharavi-the local informal economy, the labour of the people, their social relationships and community ties, are all transformed into commodified real-estate assets that can be marketed and sold. This process of reification and commodification also renders invisible the existing social and economic capital of Dharavi, and instead treats residents as mere beneficiaries of the redevelopment project.

The reification of Dharavi into a “World-class Township” thus erases a century of lived histories and stories of survival and human ingenuity. Instead these lived worlds dissolve into high-rise ghettos and glossy façades that in turn alienate the very people who inhabit them. After all, a high-rise building has no space for goats, pottery wheels, hidden courtyards, and the everyday textures of life found in narrow lanes filled with stories.

But what if redevelopment could be imagined differently? Could lived histories be integrated into world-classness? Or is it just a naïve notion. Ultimately, Dharavi’s redevelopment is not only about ‘prime real estate’, but also about how Mumbai chooses to narrate its story- where the creativity of informal economies is subsumed by glass facades and multi-storied parking lots. Derrida argued for destabilizing the binary, and for showing how what seems like the “inferior” term was central to the identity of the “superior”. Labels like ‘world-class’ and ‘developed’ rely on words like ‘slum’ and ‘underdeveloped’ to draw their meaning. A radical reimagining of ‘redevelopment’ could disrupt the binary systems that regard slums as symbols of dystopia and glass towers as emblems of triumph.

But such a reimagining requires first a refusal of reification, to see slums not as ‘physical things’ to be cleared, but as living spaces of cultural memory. As Derrida argued that no single reality can be truly isolated or erased, Dharavi’s redevelopment risks being a story told in steel and glass, but haunted eternally by the ghosts of that which it tried to erase.

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Bombay Love

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