Closing down of textile mills: a break-through in the real estate or a curse to mumbai

The central idea of this paper is to study the life of the Mumbai textile mills through a series of events that occurred, keeping the Great Strike of 1982 as the center point of all the events. The study would give insight in the internal conflicts, contestations and daily negotiations with life occurring in the mill land area. Along with this, the sudden growth of land values in the neighborhood and its surrounding areas due to the closing down of the mills play an important part in making arguments as to why private developers found this particular land a ‘hot pot’ for redevelopment into luxury spaces. All these put together resulted in the resentment and anger among the workers and the residents of the mill housing. In this paper, these aspects will be looked at as tension creating issues between developers, politicians, the elite class and more importantly the existing residents. How the area has been transformed throughout the years, reshuffling the socio-cultural structure of Mumbai would be used to base argument and points of interest throughout the paper.