What if neighbourhooods that have been dismissed as slums for decades, where 70% of Mumbai’s population reside, were in fact the city’s biggest stock of good quality affordable housing? This is the hypothesis being explored in a workshop currently been conducted at Sir JJ College of Architecture by the URBZ/Urbanology team.

This 3 days workshop follows a seminar at JJ, which was taught conjointly by JJ Prof. Mustansir Dalvi and Yashwant Pitkar and URBZ’s Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava. For 6 weeks 9 groups of students followed contractors in various parts of Mumbai: Shivaji Nagar in Deonar, New Transit Camp in Dharavi, Bandhup West and Nerul in Navi Mumbai. They studied construction techniques and methods, including their relationship to clients and laborers. They modeled houses costing between INR 3 lakhs and 10 lakhs (US $6,000 to 20,000) being built in these locations, focusing mainly on the construction process.

Left: Students interacting with contractor Chand Bhai in Shivaji Nagar, Deonar. Right: Detail of one of the students’ panel features the contractor.

Panel showing the timeline of a house construction in Dharavi. Click to enlarge.

Construction materials used in a site at Shivaji Nagar, Deonar.

During the 3-day workshop each group was asked to revisit the houses they studied and to suggest ways in which the construction process can be optimized or improved.

Resource people from top practices in India and abroad have been invited to help students fulfill a task that will not be as easy as it may first appear to be. This is because the contractors that have produced these houses are in fact experts at optimizing the construction process themselves. Many of them build up to 3 small houses a month - more than what any architect ever would. On the last day of the workshop students will present their ideas to a jury composed of the contractors they have followed. Successful projects will be those which catch the attention of the contractors to the point that they decide to include the students’ suggestion in their next projects!

Ritu Mohanty discussing with students on Monday afternoon.

Guest resource people include: Sameep Padora, Founder of  sP+a, Mumbai; Marco Ferrario, co-founder of MicroHome Solutions, New Delhi; Poonam Mulchandani, independent architect, Auroville; Alexis de Dulca, head of Affordable Housing at Lafarge, Chennai; Rajeev Kathpalia from the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, Ahmedabad; Thomas Demschner, senior structural engineer at Lafarge, Lyon and Ritu Mohanty, urban designer at Edifice, Mumbai.

The workshop will be followed by a studio and an international conference on Affordable Housing to be held at Sir JJ School of Architecture in end March.

Click here for more information on the program, seminar, workshop and conference.

And here for photos of the seminar and workshop.

(Photos and collage: Martina Mina)

Akurli on left(before) , Fields in between villages in centre(now), Kamothe on right(after)

Navi Mumbai, the twin planned counterpart of an expanding Mumbai has had stories since 1972 which are now being replicated at it’s peripheries. The exploration of these tales as they were before, as they are now and as they seem like they will become soon speak volumes about the patterns in which our cities are growing.

My family moved from the Middle East (Oman) to Mumbai in 2000 – Navi Mumbai, to be particular. In this post i narrate instances from my growing years, with the city growing up alongside me as a playmate first, and then a mere acquaintance. But that was before our disagreements finally lead to estrangement.

The Decongesting Twin

Navi Mumbai is a Planned Satellite City on the west coast of the Indian state of Maharashtra (Presently, the world’s largest). It was developed in 1972 as a twin city of Mumbai. It was initially planned with a specific purpose: to decongest Mumbai and become an alternative haven for the multitudes that throng to Mumbai from all over India. The City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) was formed on 17 March 1971. It was given the mandate of converting about 344 square kilometres (133 sq mi) of marshy land lying between the village of Dighe in Thane district and the village of Kalundre of Raigad district into a new city. The area covered 150 kilometres (93 mi) of the total 720 kilometres (450 mi) of the Konkan coast. The villagers of the area lived a calm life much different from the life in the neighbouring city of Mumbai. Privately owned land conisisting of 86 villages covering 15,954 hectares (39,420 acres) within the present limits of Navi Mumbai and further villages measuring an additional 2,870 hectares (7,100 acres) were acquired by the government of Maharashtra.  By 2000 CIDCO had developed about 117.60 square kilometres (45.41 sq mi) of land.

Map of Navi Mumbai, Indian Institue of Geomagnetism

CIDCO carved out 14 nodes – small townships – of the land with a view to facilitate comprehensive development and to give it an identity of a new city. These nodes are named Airoli, Ghansoli, Kopar Khairane, Vashi, Sanpada, Nerul, CBD Belapur, Kharghar, Kalamboli, Jui Kamothe, New Panvel,Ulwe, Pushpak and Dronagiri. Vashi and Nerul were the first to be developed and the most densely populated.

By the end of the 1990s, the planning authority of Navi Mumbai initiated private participation in the developmental activity of Navi Mumbai. (source:www.cidcoindia.com)

Navi Mumbai and i

Mr.Banerjee, one of my dad’s colleagues invited us over for dinner the other day. He had moved to Bombay about a year back, when my dad offered him a job. His family stayed on in Delhi till he could arrange for the necessary accommodation. One year since, he has finally found himself a house he could afford and has asked his family to join him here. My dad’s office is located in Sanpada in Navi Mumbai and i have lived here, in Vashi for the past 10 and a half years. When i came for the first time in 2000, it seemed to be a much smaller place than it seems now. Our knowledge of the extents of New Bombay was limited to Nerul where my school was and Juinagar and Sanpada which we had to pass to get there in the schoolbus. Then there was Panvel where a few people in class used to stay and the Khargar where one boy had once invited us over for his birthday party and which we fell short sightedly in love with at that time. Belapur became popular by the time i went to Junior College(2004) and my dad’s office which was first in Vashi shifted to CBD(as Belapur is popularly known, visualized to have been the Central Business District) .In the first few years we used to go for drives to the sinister CBD with its strangely shaped abandoned buildings that we marvelled at. It looked to us like an epidemic stricken abandoned fantastic township and we used to attack our Dad with questions about why it was dead like that(the answer involved something to do with CRZ violations- boring details when one is 12). Koper khairane was nearby, though people who hailed from any place other than Vashi were looked at cockily and thought of to be ‘poor’ and ‘unfortunate’.

Triangle Building- Belapur, Tall-Tales

In the following years the built landscape around us morphed, turning out to be not so different from the one we had left behind in the construction fantasy that was Dubai. The pages in our local newspaper-The Twin City Times doubled, tripled and eventually quadrupled with classifieds about the shiny, affordable, chic new buildings with swimming pools coming up in every empty corner i knew around. When we started looking for our own house in 2003, i exclaimed at how wonderful the colours were and how awe inspiring, the shapes! Slowly it became quite the fad to be living in Nerul, Khargar, and even Koper khairane.

One fine day, my childish awe turned to adultish horror in an unexpected jolt. I went for my favourite drive, after a span of around 2 years along our very own Palm Beach Road and in the bargain, stumbled upon those mutilated cardboard box like creatures snaking along the roads that would haunt me long after. They chewed unapologetically on everything that dared to fall upon their path, not sparing even the mangroves of yore.

Nerul, the site of my schooling days had become unrecognizable in these intimidating new shadows, and the same could be said for Sanpada, Khargar, Koper khairane, Belapur (still warmer than the rest, with its shaded streets , hills and low rise houses) or Juinagar. I started becoming rather skilled at avoiding visits to these places and recently when Mr.Banerjee’s invitation came in, i jumped at the chance. He had found his home in this place called Kamothe which i’d never heard of or visited earlier. There was still hope. Or so i imagined.

Investigating the Innards: Kamothe

I don’t remember the drive down to have been much fun as the unending rows of buildings, none lower than 10 storeys, touched shoulders with one another and glowered at me for judging them so hastily. I turned my face away in guilt. Once we neared the place, i recognized with much difficulty what had been but an empty, isolated patch of land after Khargar. To my dad’s surprise and mine, it was crawling with residential towers, shops and malls. It had taken only a little more than a year for this to happen. A whole new civilization had ‘developed’ just a little distance away from us and we had not a clue about it. There were huge hoardings flaunting the work of this builder and that. We finally found our way to Mr. Banerjee’s place and i was thrilled at the fact that i had now been giving a chance to dissect first hand and reconsider my shallow judgements about one of the rubber stamp buildings that i despised with instinctive fury.

One glimpse at the underbelly of this building complex was enough to make one wonder about what really happened. When i entered, there was an amply large parking lot which accommodated a handful of 2 wheelers, a few rickshaws and 2 cars. It was silent and there was no sign of life around. The lift said that the building was 12 storeys high but that’s about all it did. We huffed, puffed and panted our way to the 11th floor and along our way found long narrow passages with about 8 flats per floor (mostly unoccupied)and peeling sun mica clad doors and freshly plastered walls. It was a new building, about a year old, we found out soon enough as Mr. Banerjee ran halfway down to meet us and take us up. The living room was of reasonable size and had a large window on one wall. Still, the lack of any kind of air flow or ventilation made it difficult to breathe. The kitchen was modular and bright green in a tragic, but admirable attempt at making it look cheerful. The bedrooms, systematically divided into rooms spanning 4 tiles, seemed inadequate for a family of four. But just the fact that there were 2 whole bedrooms, a hall and a kitchen kept everyone happy. As the compartments multiplied so did one’s social status. The slow suffocation in the still air was immaterial in relativity.

One could only accommodate a foot (sideward) inside the narrow balcony and the view was a kitchen and a bawling baby a few metres away on one side and the stagnant mosquito breeding open creek/drain on the other. Promises of air conditioned gyms and power back up lifts in the glossy brochures never materialized. The building itself was less than half full, the rest merely bought on basis of speculation. Neighbours lived in apartments far apart and did not interact. They are mostly migrants from other states in search of jobs and must travel to far off places in the city for work. Water was scarce and power cuts abundant. There was no security yet and the building wasn’t a co-operative housing society. More like every man for himself, thus, only barely a neighbourhood. If a slum can be defined as a squalid urban area characterized by sub standard housing and lacking basic human requirements for living, this surely would qualify as one. Makes one wonder why migrants would choose this over the so-called informal settlements in the city-those with a clear idea of space organization, ventilation, security, community, economy and livelihood. And what are the other options? If this is the future of our cities, it is indeed a stark, dark one. The Dystopia of a New’er’ Bombay indeed.

What really happened

Termed as ‘Towers of Shame’ by NMTV(500 under investigation for illegalities in March 2011),Palm Beach Rd.,Navi Mumbai

Before the late-2000s financial crisis i.e. the global recession when the housing market suffered greatly, there was a big property boom in Navi Mumbai.  Within this 2005-2006 bubble, there was a massive demand for housing. Investors flooded the market and small builders rushed in to make houses available as quickly as possible to fulfil this demand, irrespective of poor quality and inadequate infrastructure. Nevertheless, prices escalated. Once the bubble burst and the market collapsed worldwide, the investors were stranded with houses that they could not sell at profitable rates anymore. This is what resulted in the hastily built, sparsely occupied rows and rows of sub-standard speculative housing in some nodes of Navi Mumbai.

Unaffordable Luxury

Affordable Luxury on sale in farming fringes of Navi Mumbai

As a result of this, in the last few years, a new market of ‘affordably luxurious’ housing has sprung up on the fringes of Navi Mumbai. These are mainly in agricultural areas outside the CIDCO jurisdiction, beyond New Panvel. The target consumers would be newly migrated families as well as second home buyers. The existing villages are placed at around 2km intervals interspersed with paddy fields on either side of the state highway that winds through to Pune. The villages are at this point under the Panvel Municipal Corporation(PMC) but have panchayats and are listed under the Industrial Zone in the Development Plan.  Due to this reason, the law entails that only a 200m belt of agricultural land surrounding the village be made available for conversion to non agricultural land and given an FSI(Floor Space Index)of 1 to develop upon. The remaining land only has an FSI of 0.3(meant for agricultural infrastructure) and hence is not profitable for a builder to build on. What makes this land affordable for the builders and hence the future owner is the fact that most of this development is on what used to be agricultural land. Deals with the local talati in charge mean that the builders acquire a farming licence by unscrupulous means like buying land in Rajasthan which bestows this right relatively soon. Once this is done, they use the licence to buy off land from these villages and then converting them to NA land. The methodology includes offering tempting lump sums of money to the farmers as compensation here but at the same time, allowing little or no scope for sustainable personal growth or investment. This also seems more preferable than waiting for CIDCO to acquire the land and then getting minimally compensated only a number of years and court cases later. The farmer as per trend succumbs, but only to invest in three main areas- A bigger home, a marriage in the family or in buying lands in villages a few kilometres away that still haven’t come under the stranglehold of the builders.

Land use and actors involved

All of these scenarios would eventually lead to the drying up of these unsustainable lump sum compensations. This would mean the much discussed move from the villages to the city in search of jobs, only adding to the urban sprawl and squatter settlements, thus kicking off a vicious cycle. Their families stay back in dying patches of land that are part of a now defunct village with only houses but no means of livelihood. Their 200 year old fields will soon turn into empty 2 bedroom flats. So who really is paying the price for this luxury? The protected areas shall too go under the scalpel as they ready themselves for complete Residential Zone status (greater FSI, higher buildings and larger swimming pools) thanks to the rising property value with the upcoming friendly neighbourhood International Airport.

The reinforcement of the agro industry can help stabilise and make agriculture more lucrative and create employment opportunities both at the production and marketing stages. A broad-based nurturing of the agro-products industry would support both social and physical infrastructure. Since it would cause diversification of crops and localization, it would also enhance the quality of land, create food surpluses and reduce transport expenses and damage. Localizing markets and production can lead to better quality food, better prices for the consumer and a bigger profit margin for the farmer.

As Stephen Corry of Survival International puts it, “The ‘development’ of tribal peoples against their wishes – really to let others get their land and resources, is rooted in 19th century colonialism (‘we know best’) dressed up in 20th century ‘politically correct’ euphemism. Tribal peoples are not backward: they are independent and vibrant societies which, like all of us always, are constantly adapting to a changing world. The main difference between tribal peoples and us is that we take their land and resources, and believe the dishonest, even racist, claim that it’s for their own good. It’s conquest, not development.”

Investigating the Innards: Akurli

But this is not the only reason to revise our present development models. On exploring and mapping this scenario, both physically and experientially, there are observations made (detailed in the drawings and pictures below) which set it apart from the present trajectory of development, explained in the first part of the post.The map, to be read from bottom all the way to the top, unfolds to reveal a physical as well as experiential narrative about a village named Akurli, that lies along the State Highway, 3 kms away from New Panvel in Navi Mumbai. Sometimes it also takes one into people’s houses and lives while at others, talks about existing village-at-the-brink-of-conversion archetypes.

Experiential Map for Akurli, beyond Navi Mumbai-by Masoom Moitra (Click to navigate)

Here are some perfectly well functioning civilizations being systematically wiped out by ones made on exclusively a profit motive with nonchalant disregard to social, economical, spatial or structural implications. In Mumbai, low quality high rise housing continues being used as a tool to generate more money from existing money for the rich to get richer. Meanwhile houses further lose their ability to, well, house. The much required expansion of the affordable housing typologies that have already evolved over years in villages and other such settlements which dictate the real needs of the expanding city are yet to be given consideration. A comparison leads one to wonder which model really is the more regressive one at this point. Are they are even two warring extremities or is a sensitive hybrid necessary? Maybe along with our obsolete city- building practices, our ideas of progress and development in terms of neighbourhood patterns are too in need of that long delayed intervention. But for now, let us just say-

Excerpt from ‘There You Go!’ by Oren Ginzburg

-Masoom Moitra, joining the team from Mumbai(These questions formed the premise of my architectural thesis. If interested, do contact for details on the subsequent proposal)

We didn’t realize when we entered into 2012 – so busy was our agenda. Right now we are in the throes of an exciting pedagogic exercise involving contractors from Mumbai’s unplanned settlements and about 60 students of the JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai. This is part of the institutions Affordable Housing class and along with the professors Dalvi, Pitkar, Alexis De Ducla, and others, the class looks at the techniques and processes of how each structure is built in neighbourhhods as varied as Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Uttkarsh Nagar, Bhandup and M.G. Road, Dharavi. The contractors, Pankaj Gupta, Amar Mirjankar and Anwar along with several others are the resource persons and the groups working with them are making new discoveries every week. These sessions culminate in the workshop scheduled between January 23-25th when we have more resource persons from all over the country who will join the discussion. Will keep you updated. Involved in the program from URBZ are, Matias, Rahul, Priyanka, Masoom, Benjamin, Shyam, Ajit, all of whom will be sending in updates in the coming weeks. A very happy solar new year to everyone!

Great article by Sonia Faleiro in the New York Times India Ink blog, about the work Pankaj Gupta does in Shivaji Nagar, Deonar, Mumbai.

Like Mumbai, the city where he lives, Pankaj Gupta’s success has been incremental.

Mr. Gupta started working at the age of 13, making paper bags out of old newspapers that he’d sell from house to house in his hometown of Saadpur in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He graduated to running a tea stall before leaving for Mumbai at the age of 14. He wanted to lift himself out of poverty.

Mr. Gupta is now a mustached 30-year-old with a hint of a belly. He dresses modestly considering that he’s a successful building contractor, and owns three houses and two shops.

I heard about him shortly after I arrived in Mumbai from San Francisco for a research project. I‘d wanted to meet migrants who’d found success in the city. I was particularly interested in those who recognized the role the city had played in their success and were, in different ways, repaying the city by changing it.

Rahul Srivastava, a co-founder of URBZ, an organization that researches the development of cities around the world, told me Mr. Gupta is positively changing the lives of families that live in Shivaji Nagar, a vast suburban neighborhood best known for its proximity to a government slaughterhouse.

In less than four years, Mr. Gupta has built more than 200 houses and repaired countless others.

Mumbai is home to an estimated 18 million people. Nearly every vacant piece of land from the pavements to the traffic islands is, at night, occupied by sleeping bodies. Before moving to Shivaji Nagar, many of the people who now live there suffered a similarly precarious life. They had occupied government land that was later claimed for construction projects such as railway tracks. In exchange for moving, each family was given access to a 10-foot by 15-foot plot in Shivaji Nagar.

Some resettlement colonies never become pleasant places. But Shivaji Nagar bustles with life and potential. Small businesses sell everything from shoes to motor parts. Those that cannot own a business, work for others, often at the slaughterhouse. One of Mr. Gupta’s clients belongs to a caste that has traditionally grazed animals for a living. The man offloads hundreds of goats from trucks and herds them toward the slaughterhouse for 150 rupees (about $3) a day. Doing this over many years, he has saved 150,000 rupees. Of the many contractors in Shivaji Nagar, it was Mr. Gupta he entrusted with building what he knows will be his most precious possession: his first home.

The impact of Mr Gupta’s life experience is clear in his work.

After moving to Mumbai, he started working for his uncle, a shopkeeper. A couple of years later, he was forced to leave following a trivial argument. He was 16, and the only job he could find was carrying bricks at a construction site. “There’s nothing my workmen do that I haven’t done,” he says. “So I know the limitations, but also the possibilities of human labor.”

Those experiences lead him to become a contractor – of a particular sort.

Pankaj with workers at one of his sites in Shivaji Nagar.

In Shivaji Nagar, neither lot size nor budget merits an architect. Design is left largely to the ingenuity of the contractor.

Unusually for Mumbai, Mr. Gupta favors uniformity. He’s currently building three adjoining houses and has managed to persuade their owners to make them aesthetically similar. He buys locally produced material, and hires local workers. He says, “They understand the client’s needs, because their needs are the same.” Since he was keen to use new material in his work, URBZ introduced him to a provider of ready-mix concrete. Mr. Gupta is now one of a handful of contractors in Shivaji Nagar to use it.

Most importantly, because his clients cannot afford to live elsewhere for too long, he has to work swiftly. On average, Mr. Gupta builds a house in just two months.

He says falling out with his uncle influenced how he works. “If you want to work,” he says, “Build, don’t break relationships.” When a mosque was built locally and the contract went to someone else, Mr. Gupta still asked to provide some of the material. He did this at no profit. “I’m a Hindu,” he says, “but I wanted my hand in that mosque, because it is place of God.” After a pause he adds: “And consider how many people enter a mosque every day. If 10 people every day see my work, at least one will think of me when he needs something made.”

But the most important way Mr. Gupta is changing Shivaji Nagar is by working ethically.

Shivaji Nagar is constantly being improved upon. As incomes rise, “kachcha” houses, which are made of mud, are converted into “pucca” houses, those made of stone or brick, and “pucca” houses upgraded with fresh paintwork and tiled floors. Demand for construction is huge. Although competition is brisk and the contractors many, Mr. Gupta is never short of work because his clients recommend him to their friends and family.

In Mumbai, many contractors have been known to leave work unfinished or, as hidden expenses emerge, to raise prices as they go along. Not so Mr. Gupta.

Matias Sendoa Echanove, another co-founder of URBZ, describes Mr. Gupta’s work as “exemplary.” He is a man who, when he’s paid to build a house, does just that.

That may not seem like much — to do the job one is paid for — but for the residents of Shivaji Nagar it means the world.

And this is how the boy who was built by the city of Mumbai, is now a man helping to build it.

Sonia Faleiro’s “Beautiful Thing” is a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer and Economist Book of the Year. She’ll be speaking at the Goa Arts and Literary Festival on Dec. 19 and 21.

Artist Natalia Rodriguez along with URBZ’s Shyam Kanle and the kids of the Dharavi Shelter have produced this photo novel, which is the first of a series. The story was entirely invented by the kids. This fiction says as much about their reality as about their creativity .

In this series, the kids speak about their neighbourhood and lives. They tell us how Dharavi is an ancient place that is surprisingly able to rethink and transform itself again and again

Giving a voice to the kids is urgent and inevitable. Whether it is to talk about communal tension, the arbitrariness of the state or the daily struggles of Mumbaikars. They are not only our future, but also our bright present!