The sustainable surviving means for informal settlements in developing countries

The outline of the assignment: What do you consider to be the single most pressing research issue on cities in the next decade? Why? How would you frame a research agenda to address this priority issue for cities in a global context? Create an annotated bibliography of four core references that frame this research agenda. As part of this final assignment, draft three research questions (one primary and two secondary research questions) to guide this new research agenda. So I wrote about this subject as you can see it on my title. To create a framework for this essay. Please before start to write read the attached PowerPoint file first. about the sources: please only use the third and forth references. thanks,

Mumbai: Planning Challenges for the Compact City
Rahul Mehrotra
Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in Cambridge, MA, USA
This paper is an attempt to capture the lessons which the particular condition of Mumbai offers to the thinking on urbanism generally. More particularly, it builds a case to argue that the compact city in the case of Mumbai goes beyond its formal or informal manifestations and can be understood as a hybrid condition: the Kinetic City. A condition which transgresses economic exchange as the sole criteria for discussing if a city and its urban form are sustainable. The paper suggests equity, density and democracy could be simultaneously considered - if a city like Mumbai, has to be imagined as a sustainable entity.
1 Informal city: compact and economically efficient
Informality is a state of being that is outside the formal or often implied legal system. This term perhaps originated in its use in economics and was extended to the physical manifestation of this fringe condition in the form of the informal city; a response to what the formal system could not deliver. Historically and largely starting in the 1950's as the critical mass of the "informal city" globally increased, it was sharply juxtaposed in the form of a binary with the formal city. While these were totally interdependent in their evolving relationship, the economic and physical characteristics of each of these worlds were well-identified and tied in space and physical manifestation. The cast of characters that engaged in the informal economy were imagined to most often reside in the informal city and vice versa. In the messy, mutinous democratic condition of Mumbai, and most parts of India, this is not such a neat relationship. In Mumbai often people employed in the formal sector reside in the informal city and vice versa.
But while the densities of the informal and formal cities are similar,1 the informal city has come to epitomize the dense and compact city and is celebrated for its economic efficiency as well as humanity in the face of the extreme conditions of the challenges of sanitation and other infrastructural needs. It is for this reason that Mumbai has been at the centre of the world's imaginations in the last few years for all the wrong reasons!2 While its economic energy has been celebrated, what has not been adequately articulated is its failure to cope with infrastructure, housing and governance. The manifestations of these failures in the form of slums, the informal city, garbage on the streets, squeezed space; bizarre adjacencies have in a strange way become the new mythical images through which the city is celebrated globally! Interestingly, architects and designers are pandering to this abject failure through its representation in different media -installations, writing, photography and of course films! The fetishizing of this condition has shifted the gaze in recent years to planning strategies of incremental growth and improvement and upgrading of the present conditions in the existing built environment rather than speculating about the opening up of land or other urban centres to disperse growth.
Over the last three decades in Mumbai, planning has largely been about rear-guard actions versus the avant-garde approaches that have traditionally led planning. Thus today most infrastructure follows city growth rather than leading development by facilitating and opening up new growth centres within and outside the city. Planning in contemporary Mumbai is systematically "posterior" as a recuperative and securing action.3 And like the narratives that developed around the preservation debate that froze architects and planners into inaction, these new descriptions and re-descriptions of the informal city are creating a similar paralysis! Of course the critical question becomes - how do we spatially and physically covert this supposedly wonderful energy and innovation that the informal city produces into a just, equitable and humane environment?
Mumbai (as it is now referred to), in the post-industrial scenario, like several cities in India, has become a critical site for negotiation between elite and subaltern cultures. The fragmentation of service and production locations has resulted in a new, bazaar-like urbanism, which has woven its presence through the entire urban landscape.4 This is an urbanism created by those outside the elite domains of the formal modernity of the state. It is a "pirate" modernity that slips under the laws of the city to simply survive, without any conscious attempt at constructing a counterculture.5
This phenomenon is critical to the city being connected to the global economy. However, the spaces it creates have been largely excluded from the cultural discourses on globalization, which focus on elite domains of production in the city. It is not the regular models of the formal and informal and other such binaries (often used to explain cities developing in South and Central America, Asia and Africa) but it