About URBZ
URBZ facilitates the production and exchange of information, knowledge, ideas and practices towards better cities for all.
We organize participatory workshops, designs adaptable structures and develops web tools for urban communities and practitioners.
User-generated Cities!
URBZ believes that residents are experts in their neighbourhoods. Their everyday experience of the places where they live and work constitute an essential knowledge for planning and urban development.
For policy-makers, urban planners, architects and real-estate developers, accessing this knowledge is the best possible way to enhance the quality and impact of their work. Understanding a locality from the point of view of those who inhabit it improves the chances of success of a project at several levels:
. It provides a deep assessment of the ground-level situation
. It identifies local stakes and players
. It opens multiple communication channels
. It generates new ideas and solutions
. It improves social impact and environmental sustainability
. It lifts up the image of the project and increases support
URBZ is engaged in communities in various parts of the world. We support individual expression, grassroots involvement and ground up development and are committed to information sharing, open access and public participation.
Tools & Methodologies
URBZ uses web-based tools for the production and sharing of information by residents and stakeholders. URBZ develops “mashup sites”, comprising tools and applications such wikis, blogs, interactive maps, photo and videos albums and dynamic web pages.
Based on the experiences of its team, URBZ believes that – notwithstanding the digital divide – the Web remains the best medium to archive and spread knowledge and information on localities. It is cheaper than the print medium and allows many people to contribute over time.
More than the medium what matters is the content. This is where the URBZ team is the most innovative. We organize participatory workshops that last 2 to 7 days where local residents work in small teams with guests from various fields to produce documentation in the form of surveys, designs, multimedia products, or documented action.
We then upload all the material produced on a website that all participants can access. In the process, the output is edited, organized and summarized so as to make it directly useful to all interested parties.
The URBZ workshops are resolutely open and inclusive. We believe that play and fun are natural paths to knowledge and innovation. The success of our workshops is based on the motivation and creativity of the participants.
URBZ is also interested in other forms of engagements with localities. Thanks to the variety of expertise represented by our team we are as likely to work on architectural projects, as getting involved in artistic or pedagogical initiatives. We have notably organized several conferences, seminars, studios and exhibitions.
The Team
URBZ’ main strength is its team, which is composed of extremely motivated and creative members from diverse fields including planning, architecture, design, anthropology, economy and information technology. We have offices in Mumbai and Geneva and our collaborators are spread around the world in places such as Mumbai, Goa, Geneva, New York and Santiago de Chile. In addition, we are lucky to have a constant influx of bright interns that join us to learn from our projects and unique methodology.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Curious to know to what extent URBZ is working on issues of production and manufacturing in neighborhoods. We will be holding a conference about the return of manufacturing to cities, and in Mumbai of course manufacturing never left. Is this an subject URBZ has been addressing?
thank you
September 21st, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Dear Stephen,
Our perspective on Mumbai is informed by the historical role that the city’s informal sector played after the decline of the textile mills from the 1980s onwards. That was when some activities of the industry got decentralized and dispersed in several poor neighbourhoods all over and around Mumbai. Notably the town of Bhiwandi in Thane District.
Dharavi too absorbed several processes of the industry – especially stitching and production of clothes.
Dharavi has been a traditional manufacturing base for leather goods, pottery and food processing. But it also housed local service sector that grew around its own self. Besides, it provided subsidised housing for hawkers and poor retailers who serviced large parts of the city. The tool-house typology that we talk about essentially looks at Dharavi as a composite of residential, manufacturing and retail activities as expressed in its built-forms.
This composite economic framework works equally well when seen in the context of Mumbai as a whole. The city grew around the docks – a service sector – in the 18th and 19th centuries and the sector continued to hold its own all through the 20th century – when manufacturing was at its heyday.
It must specially be noted that manufacturing in India was a complicated affair given that it was yoked to a colonial economy and accompanied a forceful displacement of artisanal production practices. In fact the mass migration of artisanal communities to cities such as Mumbai saw the emergence of neighbourhoods such as Dharavi – primarily through the experience of the leather workers and potters.
It is true that along with the gradual disappearance of gigantic 19th century industrial production complexes, one has seen the vanishing of a hundred year old evolving history of dignified labour practices. However, some would say the whole experience was unsustainable and so the dissolution was to be expected – especially when seen in the light of the larger role of industrial manufacture vis-a-vis traditional modes of manufacture.
Neighbourhoods like Dharavi lived parrallel lives to industrial sectors in Mumbai from the 1930s to the 80s – testifying to the fact that while manufacture was central to Mumbai’s history, so was the composite – service-artisanal manufacture economy of Dharavi. When formal industrial manufacture declined, Dharavi absorbed and subsidized the processes within its fabric.
We see Dharavi and other spaces in Mumbai as those which encompass a range of different co-dependent economic activities – manufacture, retail, services and others (in the case of Dharavi Koliwada, even fishing right until the 1990s)! We certainly dont see manufacture as ever having left Mumbai. And we dont see it as ever being the sole economic factor in the city’s history either.