The author points out that the city was a product of merchant-capitalists, professional expertise, and abundant cheap labour. The migrant workers were poorly paid and settled down near poor housing near their place of work. The dock workers lived in huts close to the port and the mills workers in the ahatas (corridors) of mill boundaries. In the 1920s through the Bombay Development Department (BDD) the municipality erected some one-roomed chawls. Over a period of time these areas found themselves flanked between the commercial areas and regular housing colonies. The mixed use of urban land became part of Mumbai’s cityscape.

At the same time, the fast growth of the financial and industrial city carefully hid the fact that the textile manufacturing base had collapsed and that there was flight of manufacturing capital. The growth had reached a plateau and slowly Vapi, Surat, Pune and Ahmedabad were coming up as the beneficiaries of this flight. “This declining phase, which began in the 1980s itself, is relevant to recall here as it corresponds to the stagnation of the city, its aging housing stock, growing housing poverty, collapsing infrastructure and rapid growth of the informal sector” (Sharma 2010: 75).