A mosque in the Shivaji Nagar area that we have been asked to redesign. Michele Bonino (studio Marc) standing in front.

For over a year, URBZ has been documenting the construction process and providing design inputs for many small houses built in Shivaji Nagar (Govandi, Mumbai). Shivaji Nagar is a slum notified area, which is known for having both, very low development index records, and an extremely upwardly mobile population and a booming local construction market.

Most of the 10 x 15 feet houses we documented and got involved with, were built by Pankaj Gupta and Wasim Khan, two of the most respected building contractors in the area. Every project became a space for discussion and dialogue about structures and design between architects, contractors and homeowners.

Wasim and Pankaj are from the neighbourhood and have learned the practice of construction while working with other contractors. Construction expertise has been communicated and spread among generations of contractors and via peer- to peer learning, which sees high standards of construction.

There are inevitably many challenges. Maximum flexibility and use value, along with a safe, beautiful and solid house reflecting the client’s identity is the usual brief given to local contractors. The speed of construction is also important for families that need to stay with friends or family while the project is ongoing. The ground is shallow making and the monsoon runs high. Plots are of various shapes and sizes and the clients’ needs are just as diverse. Houses are highly customized and often built in stages. The complexity of the task makes collaboration with designers and other construction specialists all the more relevant.

Volumetric view of existing mosque and street.

Subhash Mukerjee and Michele Bonino from Studio Marc in Italy came on board, entering the discussion, enriching the process with their expertise in dealing with tight spaces, small areas, details, improvising structures and being culturally sensitive. They felt these could be applied in some way on the small family houses that were being constructed in large numbers in Shivaji Nagar. Together, URBZ and Studio Marc formed a new entity dedicated to small construction called “Marc Hood”.

The project started out with small interventions. These were often needed during the process of construction itself. Just as we started understanding the construction process and were getting involved in small projects, a big one came our way, to which we could not say no. Irfan Khan, a young, respected local politician and Secretary of the trust of a Mosque named Jamat Ahle Sunat Masjid & Madrasa Faizan-E-Raza asked us to help with the design of a mosque!

The new mosque will be built on the site of a 30 years old mosque nestled in the dense middle section of the neighbourhood.

Kids at the madrasa.

Like most mosques (and other religious institutions) in the area, it started off as a temporary structure. In the beginning it was mainly used as a Madrasa, where young Muslim boys and girls learnt lessons from the Quran. It grew in size incrementally and now has hundreds of members. The entrance is flanked by a string of shops on both sides – this is the income generating mechanism to keep up the maintenance of the mosque.  It presently just has one large room separated by a wall to demarcate the prayer space and a tank for religious ablutions called the Vazu Khana.

Irfan became central to the design discussions and to connect us to the community. The brief (which took definite shape after several meetings and discussions) indicated the need to develop an iconic structure, that kept in mind the space and site restrictions, community aesthetics and aspirations. It had to be flexible and adaptable, essential features working within the existing dynamic situation with potentially multiple future functions and many more users. Phase by phase drawings and renderings were generated with the aim of developing a body of plans and proposals that could help generate funds and kick start the project. Irfan is confident that the funds necessary for the construction can be raised locally.

Masoom Moitra and Rahul Srivastava discussing the design with the mosque committee.

Subsequently, for the next six months, regular visits focused on documenting existing conditions, and initiating discussions with present users of the space and the neighbourhoods surrounding it. Soon an understanding developed about the imagination of the mosque in the minds of the people who pray there as well as the priests and trustees who lead prayers. This was communicated internally to the whole team which regularly shared the design inputs back with the community.

Once the discussions helped fine-tune the designs, these were presented back to the mosque committee. Subsequent to the approval discussions moved to the actual execution of the structure. The complex process of working with drawings and developing paper work started. The team is joined by a local civil engineer who helped, to understand the actual site conditions like soil stability, load-bearing abilities of the structure, as well as issues of management of the structure on site.

The best part of the project is that we all understand very well that the design we are proposing now will evolve dramatically and probably become something else altogether in the execution phase. We intent to work directly with contractors and the committee throughout the construction period. One of the main learning from our involvement with contractors in Shivaji Nagar is that design cannot be reduced to desk work. It is only in the action and by being on site that an architect makes it alive.

Street view of Marc Hood’s proposed design for the mosque. Click for more views.

Post by Masoom Moitra, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove

Image of big city life in Warli style: Sion road, Dharavi

The presence of tribal communities in the Mumbai Metropolital region is not so well-known. Warlis, Kathkaris, Thakkars, Bhils are some of the many forest linked communities that are as integral to the peripheral landscape of the city as are industries and concrete developments. The fact that Mumbai encompasses both, the most densely populated neighbourhoods in the world, along with a natural tropical forest within its municipal limits, is also a counter-intuitive complement to this story.

While Warli art has become as gentrified as an art gallery in a heritage urban precinct, the reality it represents is hugely significant. Tribal communities in India represent a relatively independent section of a caste-based society. Their loss of control over forest lands, which traditionally provided them the economic basis of social independence had a huge impact on their lives. Today all statistics on poverty are actually framed by a community based angle and the scheduled tribes constitute one of the lowest indicators in terms of economic status. And yet, they are at the forefront of political resistance in different parts of the country. Within the larger narrative of tribal India, the potency of even gentrified, over-exposed art forms from the Warli community tell something about the complexity of social life in India.

Warli art has historically been showcased on the walls of their homes. The stylized images are powerful expressions, and their simplicity only enhances the meanings conveyed. Bodies that are slightly bent express motion, arms and legs may consist of only a few lines but communicate much more.   The paintings are a way of telling stories and depict scenes of everyday life, mythological stories, events expected in the coming year, or just entertainment. The Warli style of painting is said to date back many centuries and may have migrated all the way from Africa. Today, many people have moved to the city of Mumbai and scenes of everyday life in this dense city are very different from the old paintings.

Warli paintings representing daily life in the village.

Later this year, probably in September, we are planning a one week event in which young people can learn Warli art. Warli artists will come and teach children, teenagers, and students how to tell stories of their own life in attractive drawings and paintings, a bit like in cartoons. At the end of the week, the paintings will be brought together in an exhibition which will show everyday life in Dharavi as seen by today’s young generation.

The event is about connecting art and everyday life. Warli painting will be connected to the city, and youngsters will learn an art that once was part of the life of their own family. It is about making connections between the city and tribal, the present and tradition.

It goes without saying that the exhibition will be opened with a great celebration in which all participants can proudly present their achievements to their friends, families, and the community. Although the event is primarily educational, the artists will have a good time too as Dharavi is an extraordinary place to make paintings of.

Cybercafe and city-style furniture

The images in this post are made by artists of the Adivasi Sahaj Shikshan Pariwar Center in Masvan Palghar. Their art work is a source of income from which the center can finance its activities: education, healthcare support, social forestry and farming, and women empowerment.

The event will be organised in a close cooperation of local schools, Warli artists, URBZ, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Contact Sytse de Maat for more information.

Post by Sytse de Maat, PhD student in architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and Urbzman.

India has experienced unprecedented growth in the past one or two decades. However, “New India”, liberalized, globalized and “shining”, has yet to define its model and the values it embodies. Becoming a megapower, home to some of the wealthiest individuals and companies in the world, cannot be an end in itself. If the “new” in “New India” is to mean anything then we have to make the effort to imagine what it could be. As of now the “new” seems to merely be about copying and supersizing the same old economic wisdoms that have produced unsustainable, polarized and crisis prone regimes in the West.

The age structure of India, where nearly 50% of the population is under 24 years old makes it clear that the aspirations and decisions of the youth will shape the country’s future in dramatic ways. In these times of transition when India is redefining itself, and asserting its newfound position in the world, we must look at ourselves anew, drawing as much from our roots as our collective imagination.

Youth are leaving villages and moving to the city –sometimes coming back with new means and ambitions; in the city the same youth gets absorbed as workforce in the booming private sector, where they seek to climb the economic and social ladder. Youth wants it all, here and now, fast and furious. They want what they perceive as Western standards for themselves. They are aware of their country’s problems, and either feel contempt and a need to run away. Or they want to make a change for themselves from within the system.

What they often forget in the process is the tremendous potential that lies deep in the civilization they are part of. Indigenous systems in homegrown villages and neighbourhoods for instance, which have survived multiple layers of colonization, modernization and globalization, could be a source of inspiration for new development principles altogether.

The development we are thinking of is based on small, thoughtful, sustainable solutions, rather than huge, “time changing”, “mega” stream of thinking; on individuals and communities, rather than corporations, departments and agencies. It is the kind of development that could ensure a bountiful of resources for generations to come. It is the kind of development that takes as its measure individual happiness rather than the GDP of the country.

Because we seem to have left them behind as we rushed for the gold, it has becomes necessary to expose these persistent and widespread (yet undermined and threatened) systems all over again. This is why we are committed to a long enduring search for the buried organizational structures that still follow common-sensesical economy principles, and which are connected human needs and mother earth’s means. We do this by documenting the lifestyle and architecture of existing indigenous villages. We propose to go back to the village and explore its intense and simple livelihood principles. Based on our observation, we brainstorm on the best way to take some of these principles to scale in their own small ways.

The research program called “The Umbilical Connection” is a first step in this direction. For a month we will research and document the village of Murbad near Dahanu (a few hours from Mumbai), and speculate on the future the village and on the relationship between the village and urbanization. This program is intended as a discovery more than as a teaching experience. The conductors of the workshop (Design Jatra) are themselves not equipped with full knowledge of the village’s systems. We commit ourselves to this research along with the participants and villagers. We therefore do not have a preset agenda and objective. We hope to engage with the village, and hope to become ourselves actors in its development.

The workshop starts with a detailed documentation of sustainable local practices, which enrich the life of the village. The second step is a documentation of two structures in the village, which are built according to different construction principles. The third step is to use the knowledge gathered in the first and the second steps to co-produce with the villagers a twenty-year vision for the village. The fourth and the final step is set our vision in motion. It can be anything from a landscape element, to an architectural intervention, to planting a tree, or organizing a small exhibition.

The workshop is open to anyone who wishes to commit to the journey we expect to begin. This means developing a deep relationship with the village of Murbad, and thus it will enable the participant to become a part of the village now and in the future.

The workshop is be held from 1st of May to 5th of June. It is a come in and out workshop which means that participants can join the workshop at whichever stage they want. However, we would really prefer that participants join with the journey for as long as possible and as far as possible.

For more information about the workshop, contact Shardul Patil via this page.

Shardul Patil is a student at Academy of Architecture in Mumbai and a member of URBZ. Pratik Dhanmer, a practicing architect and fellow member of URBZ is a co-organizer of the workshop and co-author of this post.

Shop selling leather goods on Sion Road.

Vishal sits, his head hunched, over a sewing machine. Next to him are two other men; a half-metre across two more workers are sitting. Theirs is a typical clothing workshop in central Mumbai. On the first story of a residential area with many migrants, the room barely holds the five men, their sewing machines, bags hanging from the ceiling, and various piles on the floor. It is typical of small-scale manufacturing workshops throughout Mumbai. In Dharavi’s leather workshops, for example, workers sit amidst piles of raw material and finished goods. In the area’s plastic recycling units, value is derived from the act of sorting large barrels and grinding tiny pellets.

At first sight, Vishal’s workshop seems, like these other places, unnecessarily disorganized and cluttered. Why are there all these piles on the floor, some wrapped in cloth, some tied with string, and some contained within large blue plastic bags? The men, deeply engrossed in their work, moving rhythmically to the mechanical staccato of the needles, seem to be half-submerged in stuff. One pile merges with the next; each mound seems to have layers beneath it; and picking your way through the cramped space, each bundle threatens to topple over.

The workshop’s internal organization seems indicative of popular areas in Mumbai at large. It is no accident that small-scale industries proliferate in the city’s slums. Workshops and homegrown neighbourhoods are seen as polluting eyesores, as cloistered confusion. Bureaucratic planners, real-estate developers and liberal critics promise a different vision: order, neatness and efficiency.

This understanding of cities owes much to the modernist script of classification. Clutter, in this view, is not simply a product of makeshift circumstance or deficient governance. Rather, it is an insult against reason and order. Robert Moses, whose segmented vision informed New York’s post-war layout, was obsessed with demarcating form and function: ‘people here, traffic there; work here, homes there; rich here, poor there’ (Berman 1984: 168). The reigning idea of a desirable city is, in this sense, a precisely delineated panorama. When threats to this vista emerge – say, with hawkers in a residential zone – the whole city seems, despairingly, to fray.

Can we imagine another way of understanding the city’s form and organization? Mumbai’s competing visions generally depart from an external, God’s eye vantage point. When we peruse municipal Master Plans, or newspaper advertisements for gated enclaves, we are suspended above an already existing form. Yet seen from a different vantage point, the city is never already there; it is a perpetual work in progress. Rather than emerging out of a tangle of impoverishment or ignorance, the city is made through daily acts.

A return to Vishal’s workshop demonstrates this point. What seem, at first glance, to be random piles scattered on the floor are actually deliberately arranged. In the desk immediately surrounding Vishal, for example, is one pile of men’s shirts that he has begun to assemble; the man to his right will do the collars and cuffs, and then pass it on to another to do the buttons. Another mound contains shirts that require some unique stitching on their front pockets. Yet another stack is of nearly completed garments requiring one final touch; a recent fashion is for buttons to be attached between the elbow and shoulder, for a rolled-up sleeve. Some piles bound with string come from a supplier of material; other piles in blue plastic bags will go to a distributor. When Vishal and his co-workers work towards a particular deadline, or are visited by their contractor, they know exactly which pile contains what. They work on several contracts simultaneously, each pile an archive of an order’s movement from raw material to completed shirt. What seems, to the untrained eye, confusing or confounding, is, when inhabited from within, perfectly sensible.

One might argue that Vishal’s workshop is a by-product of necessity, not of choice. Surely, a more sophisticated, better-equipped work place, like a better-planned city, would offer more regimentation? Evidence suggests otherwise. As scholars of piling behaviour note, professional, white-collar workers are usually surrounded by anarchic-seeming agglomerations of paper (Sellen and Harper 2001). These piles are organic entities whose sifting and sorting make sense to workers.

In other words, a small-scale workshop and large corporate office are not separated by their degree of organization. The collecting, sifting and prioritizing of piles is remarkably similar. We can extrapolate from this point to the widespread distinction between popular areas and gentrified ones. Conventionally, violation of zoning strictures is thought to define homegrown neighbourhoods, such that workshops, residences, temples, and public spaces overlap helter-skelter. Yet it is obvious that upmarket neighbourhoods display a similar disregard for segmentation. Indeed, in Mumbai’s officially residential middle-class colonies, one finds plenty of consultants’ offices, Internet cafes, yoga studios, commercial bakeries, doctors’ clinics, and the like. As in popular areas, such overlap between form and function makes eminent sense.

To a remarkable degree, we still unnecessarily fetishize a disembodied ideal of urban order and form. I’ve suggested here that we would do well to acknowledge clutter – whether inside homes and workshops or across urban neighbourhoods – as a universal practice. What seems disorderly to the untrained eye is in fact often perfectly sensible.

Ajay Gandhi is a post-doc fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. He is also a part of the homegrown neighbourhood workshop held by the Institute of Urbanology in January 2013.

The ongoing Istanbul Design Biennial (October 13th 2012 – December 12th 2012) builds on two complementary ideas – Imperfection and Adhocracy.

Adhocracy, a term coined by seventies sociological futurist Alvin Toffler, critiques the idea of Bureaucracy by posing as its counter-point. It becomes  a set of processes functioning without the mediation of heavy handed rules and regulations.

Curator Joseph Grima, who invited us to be part of his Adhocracy section of the exhibition, took over this concept.

‘If design is no longer the domain of a select few creating products of consumption for “the many”, according to the top-down model of bureaucratic industrialism, what is it? This exhibition argues that rather than the closed object, the maximum expression of design today is the process—the activation of open systems, tools that shape society by enabling self-organisation, platforms of collaboration independent of the capitalist model of competition, and empowering networks of production. Design is on the move: it is migrating from the rigid domain of bureaucracy towards the rhizomatic realm of adhocracy’.

As we used this concept to reflect on our work, drawing from a range of experiences based largely in Mumbai, Adhocracy became an increasingly useful concept.

For long we have questioned the idea of using euphemisms like ‘informal’ to understand so-called ’slum’ settlements in the city. Or to refer to its economy with the same label. Over the years we realised that bureaucratic and conceptual confusion was at the heart of the matter. In fact the overwhelming overlap of processes between the apparently formal and the supposedly informal became  something difficult to ignore.

When urban planning gets taken over by bureaucratic procedures they get expressed most strongly in zonal, spatial, temporal and structural regulations. Consequently, it is easy to label anything that slips in between them as ‘informal’.

Yet, unplanned urban regimes in cities such as Mumbai, remain functional, economically productive, domesticated or industrial and contribute substantially to the city. What makes them so? What are the adhocratic processes and structures that they rely on to exist and persist?

The tool-house for us represents one such process-structure.

It is a concrete manifestation of adhocracy in the realm of urban living. It combines working and living conditions, it plays around with time and space, is domestic and work-centered and in many homegrown neighbourhoods in Mumbai, is ubiquitous.  It also emerges from a history connected to artisanship. However, as part of contemporary urban life, it takes the idea of artisanship and craftsmanship into a realm that combines new technologies and economic needs, labour and energy systems to become a firm part of the future of uses, needs and objects.

It allows us to see through the exaggerated claims of capitalism in the world of production and its relations with technology and labour. It forces us instead to look more carefully at what constitutes these processes.  If for a moment, the tool-house is idealized, just so that we can get a glimpse of its possibilities in a world run by adhocratic principles, we step into another kind of a city.

Where regulations are not imposed through a bureaucracy but emerge through practice. And a practice that somehow addresses modern values more effectively rather than merely through rhetoric.

For one part of our installation at the Istanbul Design Biennial, we asked Mumbai’s wood carvers to make tool-houses in an idealized form. The suggestions to them were on purpose vague and unclear. This was done in order to find out a moment in their discourse, which would let them reflect on and play with their skills in a freer way. Their responses were a combination of enthusiasm and irony.

‘If only tool-houses existed like this – as dignified spaces’ was their wistful, common refrain.

Everyone knew that what was being produced was a fantasy. At the same time, in their conception of the object, there were traces of both memory and contemporary perception. One carpenter wanted us to film the process of making a model of the tool-house in two hours flat. This became part of the video that accompanies the installation.

The little wooden structures made by wood-carvers framed the larger story of the 5 narratives that make up our installation. The tool house is the context in which all the different stories of artisanship unfold and acts as a common element linking people to the urban form. The first 4 protagonists include a furniture maker, shrine maker, artificial jewellery maker and leather-product maker. The many layers of meaning that involve social history, caste, spatial politics and productivity have to be read and re-read in their simple narratives that encompass the movement of goods, specialization of skills, the presence of the tool-house and so many other factors that make up their lives.

Multiply these a hundred thousand times and you see Mumbai in a more accurate way. What struck us was that the process of designing itself was adhocratic – emerging through conversations, references, oral exchanges and gestures. This was a frequent observation we made when dealing with our fifth artisan in the installation – the ‘Contractor’ or the maker of tool-houses.

The contractor shapes neighbourhoods brick by brick quite literally. Each peculiar desire of a client gets a concrete form. The leather using artisan may want a slightly different kind of a workshop over his residence compared to a furniture maker.  The adhocratic processes that make up clusters of tool-houses in a Mumbai neighbourhood run on their own rules and regulations. Their design emerges in a similar way. A hurried sketch, an activation of common memory through a gesture and a word are some components of unmediated design.

When we find ourselves mediating between professional architects and contractors – during the course of our work in Mumbai, it is often about figuring out ways of incorporating such ‘unmediation’. We have to blend into a process where designs get projected into each others, where they are transformed with words and gestures, and are constantly improvised through the making of objects. The user, the client, the maker and the seller become part of a shared creative world that deals constantly with the materiality of the objects produced.

The installation on display involves a graphic representation of a tool-house cluster, focusing on the Waghmare family’s leather product making and living in unit. That spawns out into the stories of the  artisans and the objects they produce. Each object is part of a world wide web of operations through exchange of components and goods, which are mapped out. At the epicentre of each web is the artisans tool-house. Their idealized versions are displayed and a short six minute video explores the unmediated theme through conversations. Unmediated design became a spontaneous expression of adhocracy, the tool-house became the symbol of it and the stories of the artisans fleshed it out.

(This blog entry includes the graphics, designs and images made by Giacomo Ardesio and are  displayed in the ongoing exhibition. The text was written by him along with Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava who conceived the installation. Rahul and Matias will be attending the Biennial on Nov. 22nd to 25th).