Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site is where Bombay’s monumental ambition and its precarious laboring world rise side by side. The two thirty-five-floor towers were built on the shore of Back Bay, but their construction shaped far more than the skyline: it generated a workers’ settlement that expanded into a vast, socially entangled slum. The site’s significance lies in this intimacy between the city’s celebrated modern buildings and the insecure lives, labor, and housing that made them possible.

Setting and the tower project

The construction site occupied one side of a stark urban divide. From the road, the modern, air-conditioned World Trade Centre, with shops displaying jewels, silks, carpets, and craftwork, stood opposite a ten-acre expanse of roughly seven thousand small huts. About twenty-five thousand people lived in the slum, where there was no electricity, running water, or toilet provision, and residents could not be sure the authorities would not clear their homes. Floodlit fountains and neon lights on the commercial side sharpened the contrast with the settlement’s deprivation and uncertainty.

The towers were planned as the tallest buildings in Bombay. During construction, their unfinished grey masses had no windows, doors, or fittings; rows of future windows opened onto the work inside, making the structures appear like vast cross-sections of a laboring world. Generators, hammers, drills, and grinders filled the ground-level site with noise. Women in saris carried gravel in shallow dishes on their heads, moving stone, steel, and cement through the work areas one load at a time. They worked beside men even on the upper floors, thirty-five storeys above the ground. The scene makes the towers’ scale inseparable from the repeated physical effort of the people building them.

The workers’ settlement and its expansion

The slum began as housing for the tradesmen, artisans, and laborers employed to build the towers. Companies were required to set aside nearby land for workers’ huts. Many workers had come from other states in pursuit of employment; some Bombay-born workers had no home apart from the shelter available through a job. For them, the construction work could offer not only wages but a place to live.

When the towers were first planned, more than three hundred hut-sized plots were marked out. As workers were hired, each received a plot and money for bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Families and friends helped build the houses. Underground wells supplied water, rough lanes were cleared, and a high barbed-wire fence enclosed the compound to keep out squatters. This organized, company-linked workers’ settlement was the legal core from which the wider settlement grew.

The arrangement served employers as well as workers. Housing people beside the project removed the journey to work, while the kinship and solidarity of the compound encouraged loyalty to the company. Workers’ wives, children, and other dependants also formed a nearby pool of people who could be hired when additional labor was needed. Keeping thousands of workers in one community made the workforce easier to influence and, to some extent, control. The settlement therefore offered shelter while also organizing labor in ways useful to the companies.

From fenced compound to shared neighborhood

The regular wages and available water attracted businesses and new residents beyond the fence. Chai shops and small groceries appeared first, followed by vegetable shops, tailors, and restaurants. Gambling and alcohol-selling dens also opened. Shops clustered along the fence until its edge was full; then the squatters’ settlement spread into the surrounding open land toward the sea. New gaps in the wire linked the two sides: residents of the informal settlement entered the workers’ compound for water, while workers crossed out to shop or visit friends.

The settlements developed differently. The workers’ compound had neater lanes and a planned layout, while the squatters’ area grew in a more improvised response to immediate needs. Over time, there were eight squatters for each person in the workers’ compound, and the two areas together held more than twenty-five thousand people. The distinction between legal and illegal housing became difficult to see amid the crowding. Although the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the informal settlement and construction-company officers discouraged contact across the divide, residents understood themselves as one community. Relatives, children, and couples crossed the boundary in daily life; celebrations drew people from both sides, and fires, floods, and epidemics required cooperation regardless of the fence.

Labor, access, and narrative significance

The construction site’s immense vertical scale contrasts with the intimate, practical spaces around it: narrow passages through a fence, huts assembled from purchased materials, and paths negotiated after dark. On a visit to the site, Lin and his companions reached the perimeter before looking up at the unfinished twin towers. Lin arranged lunch on the twenty-third floor, reached by elevator rather than by climbing the unfinished building. The encounter connects the tower’s height to the people and infrastructure below it, while making the building a vantage point from which the settlement and its labor can be considered together.

The site also shaped Lin’s everyday work in the adjoining slum. Children who knew Lin accompanied him through the workers’ compound; he had cleaned and bandaged young children’s cuts, scrapes, and rat bites. Some construction workers came to his free clinic for minor injuries rather than report to the company first-aid officer, fearing that an injury might cost them their jobs. In this way, the building project’s work continued into the nearby community, and the risks of that work shaped where people sought care.

The location is not merely a backdrop to the settlement’s poverty. The towers’ construction brought workers, housing, water provision, businesses, and a much larger population into relation, while the fence attempted to separate people whose needs and lives increasingly overlapped. Its two adjoining landscapes—the celebrated commercial building and the insecure slum—show how urban development can create both monumental architecture and the conditions of precarious survival around it.