The Shelter at Dharavi is gaining greater momentum with its various creative activities and more and more new children flocking into the shelter to see what is going on and requesting drawing classes. The energy and enthusiasm is incredible making our work seem even more worthwhile and significant.
We have now already painted the new entrance [...]

Observations on incremental development

Photo 1. House near Sion Station Mumbai. The yellow house on the right, in the back, was gradually extended with many add-on rooms. Studying the details of where buildings connect, reveals the historical sequence of this incremental development. Builders have to work around problems resulting from choices made in earlier [...]

Click here to enlarge the poster.
Periodically, Mumbai’s assorted set of concerned citizens groups and bodies cast their attention on Mumbai’s long and spacious Eastern Waterfront (EWF), occupied mostly by the Mumbai Port Trust Authorities as a source of land supply for urban infrastructure. The authorities themselves are not as enthusiastic about  all the [...]

The URBZ Team in Mumbai has embarked on a new project in Dharavi’s New Transit Camp nagar, where its office is located. Our landlord Paul Raphael has inherited a 200 m2 plot just down Dharavi’s MG Road. He built a simple structure to host activities for street children and elderly residents and asked us to [...]

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat organizes its big event in Mumbai this year. It has a clear agenda – believing that the move towards urban sustainability is one that should look at tall buildings as a means of accommodating growing urban populations. This releases land for other activities – including environmental preservation.

photo [...]