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Slumming it is better than bulldozing it

DOUG SAUNDERS

Globe and Mail Update

January 12, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST

This is going to be a big year for the wrecking ball. By the time it's over, two of the world's most famous neighbourhoods will be gone, replaced with scaffolds, cement mixers and the sort of well-meaning mistakes that have scarred the cities of the West for decades.

The photo accompanying this article was taken on Christmas Eve in the sprawling Mumbai slum of Nehru Nagar. On an eerily quiet warm winter evening, photographer Subhash Kumar Sharma watched as a self-built, decades-old neighbourhood containing tens of thousands of people emptied itself out in advance of wrecking equipment. High-rise office buildings and carefully planned public-housing towers, some already built, are replacing this old, peaceful, rambunctiously squalid neighbourhood.