urbz : user-generated cities

We continue across the border to Karail, a basti (neighbourhood) in Dhaka, Bangladesh to understand homegrown settlements and their formation. 

In the 6th Issue, we do what we do best - workshops! Take a peek into the one we organized with the residents of Vithal Bhaskar to discuss the design.

Dharavi is a frenetic engine of entrepreneurship characterized by variety, innovation, recycling, and reuse. While the Indian economy is in a historic slump that is predicted to take years to recover, residents and workers in Dharavi are starting to return to the city as industries and their allied supply chains are beginning to open up.

As a continuation of the Makers of Homegrown cities series, we come closer to home and take a look across our borders. Homegrown settlements in Kathmandu Valley are dotted along the highly revered Bagmati river. This article delves into the establishment and lives of the Paurakhi Basti.

Dharavi embodies an efficient pre-industrial live-work paradigm. This is now desired and interpreted in post-industrial societies, and more so in the Covid-19 era, as a sustainable lifestyle.

In Issue 5 we follow the urbz team as they negotiate the site and ensure that all residents needs are met through the design.

More than a third of Bogota, the capital of Colombia, is estimated to be self-built by the inhabitants, mainly in the periphery of the city. In this article, we learn from Andrés Sánchez of urbz Colombia about the emerging forms of organisation and constant transformation in these self-built neighborhoods.

Issue 04 - The Brief, illustrates all the preliminary steps taken by urbz and residents of Vithal Bhaskar Chawl to ensure that the design meets their social and spatial needs. 

Colima city in Colima State of central-western Mexico is home to disjointed and fragmented homegrown settlements, also known as colonias. In this article, we learn from Tobias Jimenez about the origins and functioning of a colonia on the outskirts of Colima city. 

Issue 3 is out now! We open Pandora's box to discover the residents concerns.

In this article, we situate ourselves in Chile and examine homegrown neighbourhoods in various terrains.

The second issue of the graphic novel will take you through the history of building and rebuilding of the Vithal Bhaskar Chawl.

The second article in the Makers of the Homegrown series takes a look at Ciudad de Barrios (City of Barrios) in Caracas, Venezuela. It is a compact and clustered neighborhood with a multitude of residents engaged in producing homes, urban space, and the city.

We are excited to present the first issue of a graphic novel about the Vithal- Bhaskar Chawl in Dharavi Koliwada. This issue sets the historical context for the issues to follow - where we draw and tell you more about the participatory redevelopment project initiated by the residents.

The homegrown neighbourhood is an expression of local organizational skills and maximum optimization of resources in the creation of built environments. In this series we attempt to understand its chief personnel, their tools and the processes involved in the making of such settlements.

In this article, published in The Architectural Review, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava discuss the significance of local builders and contractors in preserving the functionality of the neighbourhood.

We at urbz researched the circumstances in Dharavi from April to November. We now present a collection of four pandemic-focused articles, fifteen Dharavi Weekly issues, and five Dharavi Fortnightly issues.

The urban design competition EnteKochi 2020 focused on integrating a participatory approach within the planning process for the city of Kochi. The competition was planned for, announced and conducted during the pandemic induced nation wide lockdown. This article provides a glimpse of the process. 

Inviting contractors from all over Mumbai to collaborate on designs for homes in Dharavi with residents, architects, and artisans.

urbz @ Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis.

Through the workshop, graduate urban design students applied the concept of “in-formation” to various social and cultural contexts.

The ‘New Ways of the World’ exhibition was a rich showcase of the ways humanity inhabits spaces presented through a fusion of architecture and social realities.

In this issue of the Dharavi Fortnightly, we aim to understand the experiences of people now returning or seeking to return to Dharavi, the connections they have to their hometowns, and ways in which they are keeping these connections alive in the fast-paced world today. 
 

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Dharavi has received much attention from the media, first for a steep increase in the number of Covid-19 cases and then for it’s commendable strategies to control and deal with its spread. In this issue of the Dharavi Fortnightly, we interviewed 30 people that included NGOs and beneficiaries to understand people’s strategies to deal with in-migration, unlock process and the new rise in

While public transport is slowly resuming in the city, it is still inadequate to meet user needs. This issue of the Dharavi Fortnightly seeks to explore how restricted mobility due to the lockdown has affected the movement of people and goods within and around Dharavi.

One month after the extended lockdown ended on August 31st, we speak to our respondents to know how they are coping. Based on their responses, and first-hand observations of our very own team member in Dharavi, it seemed like life had bounced back to normal. We explore how the Tool-house, a live-work housing typology, may have contributed to this. 

As the new normal sets in, and Dharavi gears up to resume business as usual, its vital workforce is on their way back or have been here for some time now. With various discourses about India’s lockdown policy claiming an exodus of workers from cities, our first issue of Dharavi fortnightly attempts to present a parallel narrative through the lens of circulatory urbanism. 

This issue of the Dharavi Weekly takes you through 11 personal accounts of religious and cultural celebrations from the people themselves, as a culmination of our now, 15-week long endeavour to document their lives. Moving forward, The Dharavi Weekly will transition into a fortnightly issue wherein we hope to give to you, our readers, a much more in depth ethnographic representation of these communities. 

For this week’s update, we spoke to 27 young adults from Dharavi, aged 18-25 years, about their experience in the lockdown and how they deal with it.

This week we take a look at water-related issues and uneven distribution systems across neighborhoods.