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.

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 URBZ Office (graphics by Cole)

The tool-house is one of our recurrent obsessions. In very basic terms, the tool-house is a space for living and working. It is the habitat of the artisan where work and residence co-exist amicably. Conceptually located between Le Corbusier’s machine for living (also translated as house tool) and Ivan Illich’s convivial tool, the ‘tool house’ is an apparatus that fulfills economic and sheltering purposes.

It is the dominant architectural typology of homegrown neighbourhoods such as Dharavi, and hundreds of thousands more in India and the world. Yet it would be a mistake to associate the tool-house with poverty. Quite on the contrary, it is a symbol of autonomy and entrepreneurship. Across the east and west, fashion designers, writers and doctors live and work in tool-houses.

We believe that the tool-house is the most enduring artifact of pre-industrial society in contemporary times. It is also a central feature of our post-industrial world. When the industrial mills shut down in Mumbai, many disbanded workers turned to home production. Dharavi became the hub for embroidery and garments, while other centers with which Dharavi has active connections with, became sites for weaving and looms.  Today this industry is not organized in large factories and assembly lines, but in hundreds of tiny workshops in as many tool-houses that are connected to each other as by swarms of agents, contractors and transporters.

A fundamental characteristic of the tool-house is the way it is embedded in its environment. The street seamlessly flows in and out of it, as users come and go. It is rarely a lonely structure, but is shaped more by its relationship with the neighbourhood and the city, than by any internal force. Versatile and networked, tool-houses tend to cluster around each other to achieve an effect of scale.

They come in different forms. Their evolving multiple personalities make for very useful insights into the way neighbourhoods grow incrementally. They mix and match history and biography, form and function, needs and aspirations, to produce an unpredictable template for a constantly morphing urban fabric.

The URBZ office located in a building on M.G. Road, Dharavi, demonstrates how the conviviality of the live-work dialectic actualizes itself in this particular case.

Here is a glimpse into the various stories that circulate in our very own tool-house.

Who’s who in URBZ’s tool-house. CAD work by Miriam Bonino, Fabio Colucci and Masoom Moitra @urbz. Click to enlarge.

Ground floor:  Raphael’s family – The Owners
Raphael has lived in the area since 1957. During that time, the neighbourhood  was all mangroves and the creek came right up to the edge of the current street. His house was given to him and his family in 1973 by the government and was one of the first housing blocks to be built in the area. Although Raphael owns the building, he and his family, in all 7 members, live in just 3 small rooms while the rest of the building is rented out. These 3 rooms have been incrementally adapted over the years to allow for the growth of his family through the marriages of his 2 sons and the birth of his grandson.

Ground floor: Razak –who rents the kitchen space
Although Razak does not live in the building, he has been running his food business from a small kitchen on the ground floor for 5 years. He has seen many changes to the area, with most being improvements. 5 years ago this street was much dirtier and felt less safe. He has made changes to his kitchen during this time by adding a low, brick and cement partition between his kitchen and street, giving it a more professional, shop-like, appearance. Although he has no way to shut up his shop at night he is not worried about anything being stolen and says that it is a safe neighbourhood with strong community ties.

First floor: Mohammad Mumtaz and Mohammad Jaium
Two of four young men live and work in one room on the middle floor of this building. Mohammad and Mohammad have been renting this room for a few months now. They used the room above, presently the URBZ office, two years ago. In the day they run an embroidery business, turning out beautiful clothes, and at night the space doubles up as a bedroom, with them folding away the intricate wooden mechanism they use to embroider. Like Razak they too feel that the area has greatly improved, even just in the last year, and that it is now a much cleaner and safer street.

First floor: Malar and Jaffia
Malar is the young mother of Jaffia, 9, and has been living in this building for the last 6 years. Her husband is currently working in Africa so most of the time it is just the two of them. She too feels that the area has improved since she has been living here.

Second floor: Sanganamma’s family
Sanganamma’s family came to Mumbai 25 years ago. First they were in Ghatkopar and then moved to Dharavi in the early 1990s, when the place was much more basic and bare. They rented different places before settling into this house five years ago. Her husband used to work in the mills and when the mills went bust the family fell into hard times. Her most intense memory is about the 2005 floods in Mumbai when some parts of the lane were immersed waist deep in water. She remembers fondly the collective celebrations that still happen in the lane, especially of weddings, which remain a neighbourhood affair.

Second floor: The URBZ/Urbanology office
We moved into this room two years ago. Over this time we have had windows put in, installed a toilet and have plans to change the roof (which is now made with cement-asbestos sheets, a common material in Dharavi), in the interests of both health and comfort (cement roofs tend to become terribly hot in the Indian Summer). We built tables with pallet racks and bought plastic chairs. We installed an AC and wireless Internet. It is a pretty comfortable place to work and meet. We can easily have up to 10 people together in the office (and more if we need to)!

Artist Natalia Rodriguez along with URBZ’s Shyam Kanle and the kids of the Dharavi Shelter have produced this photo novel, which is the first of a series. The story was entirely invented by the kids. This fiction says as much about their reality as about their creativity .

In this series, the kids speak about their neighbourhood and lives. They tell us how Dharavi is an ancient place that is surprisingly able to rethink and transform itself again and again

Giving a voice to the kids is urgent and inevitable. Whether it is to talk about communal tension, the arbitrariness of the state or the daily struggles of Mumbaikars. They are not only our future, but also our bright present!

Toronto born band LAL Forest will be playing at the Ambedkar Hall, on MG Road, Dharavi, Mumbai this evening at 7PM. All welcome! For directions see the map.