India
Slums now cover 7.3% of Mumbai, up from 8%: Study | India News – Times of India
The study shows that the area covered by slums in the Mumbai estuary – Greater Mumbai and Thane city – has declined from 47.7 sq km in 2005 to 43.6 sq km in 2022. This overall decline masks however, a more complex dynamic: some bastis grew larger, others grew larger. smaller, and a few disappeared over the twenty years. Slums shrank by a total of 10.2 km² in some places and grew by 6.1 km² in others, it found.
Many slums also became more densely packed after 2010. “While the slums grew in area in the first decade, they became increasingly dense in the second decade,” said John Friesen, lead author of the study.
The findings show that slums should not be seen “as areas of uncontrolled urban expansion, but as integral components of the city, undergoing constant deconstruction and reconstruction,” researchers say.
For the study, Friesen and others used high-resolution satellite images and other data to map changes in land occupied by slums in the Mumbai region between 2005 and 2022.
With a total land area of almost 600 square kilometers (including the national park), the reduction has reduced the share of land occupied by slums in the Mumbai region from 8% in 2005 to 7.3% in 2022.
Meanwhile, on the mainland, including Navi Mumbai and parts of Mumbra, the slum grew by almost 35%, from 12 km2 to 16.1 km2 between 2005 and 2022.
Researchers also looked at the spatial aspect slum densitywhich they based on the distance between structures. Slums with distances of less than 10 meters between buildings were categorized as high density, while areas with gaps up to 30 meters were considered low density.
Across the region, researchers found that the number of low-density slums doubled from 294 to 502 between 2005 and 2010, before falling again to 266 by 2022.
Conversely, the number of densely packed slums fell slightly before 2010, from 988 to 964, before rising to 1,359 by 2022.
These findings appear to support local observations that urban slums have grown vertically rather than horizontally over the past decade, and that any proliferation of informal settlements has shifted to the outer areas of the metropolitan region.
Interestingly, the study also found that the number of slums near water bodies and railways has decreased over the last seventeen years. Slum areas within 100 meters of water bodies decreased by 7% (1.8 km²) between 2005 and 2022, and within 100 meters of railway lines by 11.5% (3.7 km²).
This decline needs to be studied further, Friesen said, noting that the results could be different if they expanded the buffer zone from 100 meters to 200 meters. The study shows that the slum area increased beyond 100 meters near water bodies and railways.
