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.

View of Paspoli village from the Renaissance Hotel in Powai.

Take a slice of Mumbai city, thin or thick, narrow or broad, and you will find a bit of everything – tightly juxtaposed and cosily nestled.

A high-tech office space next to a dense exotic bazaar, with people sharing services and personnel are not trapped in contrasting typologies but cross-wired intricately into each other.

Imagining different worlds co-existing with cold indifference is a tempting interpretation to make about Mumbai – until you start paying attention to the way in which people traverse firewalls all the time. 

At first glance, the view from a permanently fastened glass window of a five-star hotel, in a recently developed northern part of the city, has potential to create a lot of medieval drama.

The view looks down landscaped gardens, bounded by compound walls. Just beyond the boundary, clutching a small hill, the average client of the hotel, sees a typical homegrown neighbourhood, which she has been conditioned to believe is a slum. The slum of global urbania – cesspools of crime and dirt and all that is gone wrong with cities today.

The proximity and contrast is disconcerting.

It is easy for her imagination to edit real and cinematic memory and visualize hordes of angry dwellers from the slums jumping across the water pipes and compound walls to dive straight into her room. She is suddenly relieved about the permanently shut window and well-guarded gates surrounding the hotel.

The client is here on a conference, which the hotel specializes in. Her accompanying colleague stays in a room with a more expensive view. It overlooks a lake surrounded by a skyline that seems to be a live projection of Hong Kong or Singapore. In reality it is made up of expensive real estate projects built on land reserved for low-income housing.

View of Powai Lake from the Renaissance Hotel.

When the two hotel residents take a break from the conference to buy gifts, they go there. They can be forgiven for believing that they have indeed traversed into a low-income housing complex, notwithstanding the Manhattan high prices of the neighbourhood. 

The same cross wiring of services and personnel, along with shabby maintenance, produce that effect. This expensive piece of real estate now has the same glorious messiness and general shabbiness that the city as a whole seems to revel in.

Hiranandani towers: Up-market residences built on land originally reserved for low income housing.

They realize that the neighbourhood on the other side of the lake is meant to be visually consumed, from a distance, through the coffee shop of their hotel, rather than at close-quarters. When they ride up an escalator, they glimpse similar homegrown neighbourhoods all over the hillsides immediately behind the bizarre Greco-roman facades of the expensive buildings.  Once again the proximity and contrast is disconcerting. It feels like living in one city but seeing another urban landscape everywhere around.

Back in the safe confines of the hotel, the two ruminate on their conference – on sustainable urbanism. The irony-rich complexities of this city, the rich hotel and the theme of the conference are not lost on them. 

Like many of the other participants, the two feel the need to speak about the world outside the hotel.  Urban poverty and slums become one of the main themes of the discussions happening on the margins of the conference, sometimes late into the night.

One evening they decide to continue their conversations over cigarettes while exploring the gardens and the grounds. Within minutes security guards zoom down and insist they go back to their rooms or to the walled-in 24 hour coffee shop, since all outdoor areas have to be shut at night for security reasons. 

This bit of information increases her anxiety – security from what? However, thanks to the few drinks, they decide to walk around the hotel and soon find themselves by the back gate of the buildings, from where all the daily hospitality necessities, including drinking water, are delivered. 

Over the gate they see the same neighbourhood she had seen from the window.

Map showing Paspoli village at the centre, tucked in between walled compounds. Click to enlarge.

Upon request, a polite guard opens the gate and lets them out. They find a little stairway that leads to a small footbridge that climbs over four huge water pipes leading them to the other side. 

Her first feelings are one of trepidation. But her instincts and the encouraging words of her friend, who has visited the city many time before, egg her on. Sure enough, she realises her fears are totally unwarranted.

They are welcomed by light, sound, music and people. The neighbourhood doesn’t seem to be asleep yet although it is well past midnight. They move closer to a blue structure with a wheel exactly like the one on the Indian flag. People are busy decorating the structure in and out. Kids, speaking in impeccable English, approach them asking where they come from.

Their smiles become wider when they realise the two gate-crashers are guests from the hotel. 

They point out people from the crowd who work there. Apparently about a third of the working adult population, are employed by that establishment as well as other hotels in the vicinity. She recognizes a waiter that served them breakfast in the morning and they exchange smiles.

When asked what are the festivities about, the kids inform her that it is in preparation for Dr. Ambedkars birthday and they are all going to go on a march as part of the celebrations. 

Suddenly the world seems different. She knows who Dr. Ambedkar is. The draughtsman of the Indian constitution and beloved leader of the Dalit communities of India, historically referred to, with prejudice, as untouchables, and now a vibrant, upwardly mobile part of Indian society, a society that may or may not have got over its hang ups about caste.

Her friend points out that he and Dr. Ambedkar went to the same universities abroad, London school of Economics and Columbia University. 

That night, from the vantage point of the settlement, the whole neighbourhood looks different. Her hotel looms on the horizon, a gigantic structure, looking like a castle atop a hill. She laughs on realizing that the strict but abstract security measures could not have been targeted at this settlement for sure. Since the two are clearly enmeshed with people coming in and out constantly.

Flickr Video
Dr. Ambedkar’s birthday celebration at Paspoli.

They respond to the invitation of a resident and come back the next day to the same place. After participating in the Ambedkar Birth anniversary march for sometime, they return to the neighbourhood to clearly see its physical and historical identity as a village that existed decades before the grand institutions surrounding it were even conceived. As if to make the point, some cattle wander around, herded by a young boy, coming from the lake nearby. The village is historically connected to a vast natural habitat, which has slowly been closed off to the public, though locals still find their way through.

Inside Paspoli village.

Farmhouse at the top of the village (Click to enlarge and see more photos).

An engineering college occupies another huge chunk of land at the back of the village. Its compounds are heavily gated and porous at the same time. They meet a man just outside the college wall in his small farmhouse. The house, complete with a cowshed on one side and a well on the other, is strikingly reminiscent of similar farms you see in villages of Uttar Pradesh. He points to a back door that leads into the engineering campus informing them that employees living in the village regularly use it. They enter the campus through this small side gate and are absorbed in another world altogether.

Lush greenery and monumental structures populated by self-important engineers and official looking academics with ballpoint pens tucked away in their shirt pockets. Before they can fully process what’s happening, security guards demand their identification and insist they must register at the main entrance. 

Feeling unwelcome they leave the campus and walk back to the hotel through the village.

Back onto the footbridge, that connects the village to the hotel, the two have the strange feeling of having walked through a secret passageway, of having broken through a firewall. One that exists between worlds that shares more than their inhabitants care to acknowledge. 

One wonders if that small bridge could not be turned into a honourable link between two quintessentially Mumbai urban forms: the globalized high-rise and the homegrown neighbourhood. Perhaps recognizing this co-dependency is also an important path to sustainable urbanism.

Bridge from Renaissance Hotel to Paspoli village.

Click here to see photo album of Paspoli village

Click here to see photo album of Dr. Ambedkar’s birthday celebration in Paspoli.

Laura Alonso, Bharat Gangurde, Shyam Kanle, Bo Tang, Geeta Mehta, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava have contributed to 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.

Quite a few architects and urban designers have cracked their heads on the urban phenomenon that Mumbai represents. What kind of logic keeps this big, bad city running despite all odds? How exactly does its urban fabric reflect the extreme disparities that have become inexorably attached to the city’s image? What does the mutation of colonial Bombay into global Mumbai mean for architectural forms and public life?

Rahul Mehrotra’s static vs. kinetic city story is one of the most compelling attempts at providing a general understanding of the dynamics and tensions at work in the making and perpetuating of Mumbai’s urbanism. According to him, the static is the official city of built forms, framed by monumental structures, birthed and nourished by broadly premodernist and modernist impulses. Sharing space, often unacknowledged and even unseen, but nevertheless very much present and active is the kinetic city, energized by the impulse of everyday human presence and activity, spilling over streets and public spaces, composed of transactions and the bazaar ethos, especially by resource and capital deprived inhabitants.

He accurately points out that Mumbai’s history and future are unimaginable without the dense trading culture and human interactions that spill in and out of its bustling streets and worn out habitats. Likewise, his critique of rigid notions of architectural heritage and urban futures that defend built space over lived space, is spot on. Anybody who comes to Mumbai and connects with its incredible street life, wrapped around and between its mongrelized Gothic colonial or post-colonial structures can immediately connect to the ideal types of the static and the kinetic city.

Mehrotra goes on to elaborate why Mumbai is essentially a kinetic city which cannot be tamed or reigned in by the static city. He does not fully buy into the standard dichotomization of the city into formal and informal sectors, which can mistakenly be overlapped onto his static-kinetic concepts. Instead, his perspective transforms public architecture into a sophisticated set of practices that involve a layered understanding of architectural heritage. He attributes a more creative role to intangible moments of public life like festivals and street economies. The transformation of the Kala Ghoda art district in Mumbai is a successful tribute to his framework.  It is to his credit as an architect that he uses imagination and a sense of history to co-produce a public project of this nature without investing in another expensive monument to celebrate existing ones.

Sadly, the concept of the kinetic city is threatened by the malaise of over-interpretation. Sometimes instigated by Mehrotra’s own hurried words. For example, it is easy to misread his observations that all structures of the kinetic city are made of temporary and recycled materials or that their limited but productive lifespan is connected to makeshift building techniques. This encourages a tendency to misunderstand some neighbourhoods in Mumbai as being disposable because of a surface reading of their dynamics. They seem to resemble the structures that Mehrotra is describing. We think that it would probably be wise not to let Mehrotra’s slippery concept slide over the blurry boundaries of South Mumbai, to become a guiding principle to understand habitats such as Mumbai’s so-called slums.

Read the full text on airoots/eirut

This post is the first a of series of short essays written by participants of the Homegrown Neighbourhoods Workshop, which took place in January 2013 at the Institute of Urbanology.