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

Affordable Housing Seminar and Workshop

Residents keep intervening and changing their homes in the process of living, and this contributes to conservation

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 so-called slums of the city are in many ways attempts at increasing affordable housing units through a different construction and financial system.

In a global context, populations marginalized because of race, class, gender, creed, etc. are those most incessantly stripped of this right to design the city in their own image within formalized constraints. In this way, the “informal” urban process of self-construction is inherently a product of this same marginality that excludes these groups from “formalized” city-making.

 Social distancing in a participatory process

The competition for land, rather than the traditional competition for tenants, was especially exacerbated in sites of growing industrialization and development like Bombay. 

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.