TALES FROM THE EDGES
OF THE METROPOLIS
Images from Savda Ghevra, Delhi

The photo project is part of a wider process of analysis and research carried out in the city of New Delhi, capital of India. The images were taken in an area in the extreme North-West of the city, specifically in the resettlement colony of Savda Ghevra. These types of colonies are places, where were directed or re addressed people forcibly removed from informal or semi-informal settlements, located in the most central areas of the city.
In October 2009 in Delhi were held Commonwealth Games: in preparation for that event since 2006 have been razed several areas and informal neighborhoods in the city. Together with them were destroyed the cultural, social and economic conditions that existed on theses pieces of land. These places hosted unique synergies because generated by the simultaneous presence of different groups of people coming from diverse Indian States.



The resettlement colonies are areas designed for people displaced by the informal settlements: commonly they are far from the areas of the removals and often they have no communication with the city center. These areas are smooth, that means disposed only for the creation of new residential zones and missing of all that goes beyond the simple division into lots and the geometric infrastructural grid for the electrical connections.
The captured area is called Savda Ghevra and represents the government's promise of a better housing space for the poor and the migrants arrived in Delhi from other States.
It was the promise of a new begin, regular and not informal, in a different part of town.
Actually reaching Savda Ghevra from Delhi, there is only the skeleton of this promise.
A series of brick houses, side by side, in the middle of nowhere; concrete pillars as a forest to demonstrate that at least the energy has been guaranteed to this new area of the city, where instead, have not yet been prepared the sewer and the drainage systems and the water that is available, has, a high rate of salinity and chemical pollution. People used to grow crammed into boxes of metal, plastic and bricks; in Ghevra are finding the space which have always needed and lack in their previous lives. Arriving there from slums, the colony looks plenty of space: streets are empty and big, long straight strips.
The land around is red, the building blocks of new houses also are red. The people who were transferred here have not received any amount of money to build a new home, but only a small lot of land where they built, at their expense, a new house or a first protective refuge with makeshift materials. In their memory, there are long fights: the battles for the right to have a lot in the new resettlement colony and the battles for not to be separated from their extended families, or from their relational, affective and working links preexisting in the areas of their origin.
In Savda Ghevra, regularly, after a number of homes, there is a rectangular space; in some of these areas from bare ground, are emerging iron playground, in others only sand: either a tree or a flower, or a bench.
There is no space designed for meetings, there is no place thought for a break from the work and there is no place thought for prayer of whatever credo it can belong to.
A group of people, arrived in the colony few months before, broke the time of waiting for a necessary intervention of the welfare state, by building a temple. They build it in a free piece of land still not assigned to anyone or to any peculiar use. It represented a reactive response to real shortages, a necessity embodied in reality.
A real positive reactivity: as a possible solution, as force required to give at least the ability to imagine and to desire to those who feel cheated of the right to exist, to live, to work.
Reactions to the deprivation and forced expulsion from the city are often stifled by suffered trauma, this it can turn into an uncertainty of life. Uncertainty that prevents anyone to imagine and to design a self-image, both, individually and as a community, that goes beyond the day that is following the day that it was just lived.
It is frequent reaction to the violence acted against them, before and during, the urban removal. Forced actions, threatened for long periods and then implemented without prior notice, are actual causes of lacerations of human and territorial relations.
The only resource is represented by the human resistance: people, like plants explanted from their natural habitat, attempting a rebirth, a change, a re-appropriation of the verb live, through the use of living knowledge that contains the memory of other places and the memory of what It was their previous idea of community.
Necessary for the new inhabitants it is to change their lifestyles, rewriting a new future starting also from new geographical distribution of the resettlement colony.
It is not a path without difficulties. The healthy answers to the violent movements of physical matter imposed on them, are, as written before, the awake of instinctive knowledge and the permanence of relational and reactive memory in a resilient form.
To these destructive actions do not match other measures to resolve or to alleviate the damage in an immediate way: the aim to be achieved, rather the improvement of some urban areas, it does not take in a sufficient consideration the related consequences especially in human and psychological terms.

After visiting Savda Ghevra I heard how was necessary, for the people who arrived there, to imagine a new reality. Consequently to the shock suffered after the demolition of their former homes, I considered important, at least to awaken in them, an awareness of the right of everyone to participate in the construction of a future city. An active participation that allows to think and look for solutions that will reshape the city according to their needs.
The images tell stories of places still undiscovered, recounting the transformations that interface with the current crisis of urban identity. Their usefulness lies in their ability to be useful means to document the contemporary reality, hoping in an awakening of attention and sensitivity necessary to improve the general conditions of life in these urban areas, who after several years of their birth, are still in a particularly difficult conditions.


Claudia Roselli is artist and researcher, she hold a PhD in Urban and Territorial Planning from the University of Florence and the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi (India).
Florence University, Architecture Department DIDA,
V.Micheli 2, 50121 Firenze
Email: roselliclaudia@gmail.com