Yuva2019-09-252019-09-252011-06-241999-08http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/179454"The current literature on urban development, urban management and urban poverty alleviation is rife with paeans to the prospective benefits of partnership between the public, private and community sectors. Properly structured interactions among the three sectors, it is posited, will enhance governance, reduce poverty and protect and renew the urban environment for all. Many recently formed partnerships and collaborations of this kind have already been designated as best practices , and have been widely promoted for replication in other communities and countries. To date, studies showing both sustained co-operation among the different sectors and broadly positive outcomes, are rare. This Discussion Paper, Our Home is a Slum, is not one of them. Instead it shows how immensely difficult it is to establish and maintain a configuration of institutional support and social conditions favourable to collaborative relationships that benefit vulnerable groups in a truly globalized city. At the centre of this study is a conflict between tenants and subtenants in the Janata Squatters Colony, a densely populated slum on publicly owned but officially vacant land in the northern suburbs of Mumbai, India s largest city and commercial capital. Many of the tenants, to whom a second group became illegal subtenants, had been relocated decades before, from another slum in central Bombay.1 Under the prevailing legislation, the original tenants were given Vacant Land Tenancy (VLT) deeds allowing them to rent tiny plots on which to build homes. Many of the tenants, unbeknownst to and without permission from the Municipality, took over vacant space adjacent to their deeded property. On these parcels they also built structures and rented them out, illegally, to migrants and residents moving from other slum areas in Bombay. Those with deeds, though tenants in a legal sense, became landlords in practice and outlook. But their social and economic status remained precariously low, barely above that of their subtenants, which explains the desperation characterizing the struggle that the two sides were locked into. While some 3,000 households in Mumbai share a similar legal plight with the VLT (sub)tenants in this story, in a city with at least 5 million slum residents, 40 percent of whom live in poverty, the overall status of vulnerability is shared widely. This study chronicles a long-standing, if intermittent, struggle waged by a community based organization (CBO) comprised largely of subtenants seeking to put an end to eviction threats, verbal and physical harassment, and time-consuming legal proceedings heaped upon them by their tenant-landlords in the Janata Squatters Colony since 1975. Allied in this effort over a period of approximately two years was the local authority, the Municipality of Mumbai. For it, this is a story about implementing slum-upgrading while recouping some costs through user fees and coming to grips with the need to control public lands within its domain. For the landlords, this is a story about protecting property and income that they had established over decades of practice rather than legal sanction."(pg iii)Pages: 62engWith permission of the license/copyright holderfamily policyhomelessnesslegal positivismCommunity ethicsLifestyle ethicsSocial ethicsFamily ethicsSexual orientation/genderEducation and ethicsMinority ethicsBook