All the kids and volunteers of the Dharavi Shelter have settled on Facebook where they are alimenting a page with photos of recent activities at the Shelter. The Shelter has a huge fan club of 336 people -and growing! Please do check out the Shelter’s Facebook page and don’t forget to support the Shelter via the Shelter’s Paypal account. Visit the Shelter page on URBZ for more info.

Participants at Work

Art has been a favoured tool in the hands of sensitive pedagogues. Our small initiative in Dharavi takes art seriously – for its own sake. We are sure that our little moves will ferret out tremendous talent from the rich locality in which it is situated. Many children coming to the Shelter also go to regular schools but love its special focus – which allows them to channelize the rich experience of living life in the city into new creative expressions. We want all kinds of artists to walk this street, visit the Shelter and inspire them to relate to artistic practices in passionate ways.

At the same time one part of us wants to extend this space into other terrains as well. After all, there are those who also value the learning dimension inbuilt into artistic expression. We have special sessions where the acts of drawing and expression specifically help reflect on the streets, homes, lives and communities of all those who belong there, by using creative landmarks and creating new uses of space. We would like to blur the boundaries between art and craft, science and maths and let the imagination translate into learning new skills – whether it be plumbing, water management, construction and roofing. Skills that are best learned in this special part of the city, which can sprout a building with so little resources within a week. We would like to take the Shelter into a space where elders and children converse across community, class, gender and ethnic divides and learn about the intricacies that made the locality of Dharavi so rich, so that the aspirations of the newer generation get energized in fresher ways.

We would love more visitors – from around the world – to come and interact and learn and inspire. We are pretty sure that much learning will take place in the Shelter, a learning that combines expression, knowledge, creativity and science about living in cities.

Pay us a visit soon!

The URBZ MASHUP Mumbai was automated by an enthusiastic bunch of creative urbanists from Mumbai and around the world. They mixed and matched their experiences to re-locate these old neighbourhoods within a contemporary context through their own histories and experiences.

They decoded the by-lanes of Chor Bazaar and re-arranged them in an alternative map that respected the flea-market’s self-made rules. They connected its grammar to markets from Goa and elsewhere.

They  suggested signposts and made new maps that gave legitimacy to the informality of Abdul Rehman Street.

They made toys inspired by roadside knick-knack sellers and hawked them for older images, photographs and memories.

They cast creative projections beneath the JJ Flyover that snakes through the neighbourhood like a gigantic beast and opened up possibilities inspired from New York – possibilities that included performance and alternative uses.

They transformed the walls of Khotachiwadi into canvases for painting dreamscapes inflected by Byzantine, Mexican and popular art.

They walked through the labyrinthine Bhuleshwar  and coined words, phrases and narratives to describe the experience that coalesced into new meanings by different users.

They documented the existential crisis of Crawford market that is trying to reinvent itself and suggested alternative ways of doing so – by mashing up the internal logic of the market with its new aspirations.

They figured out that ‘Bazaarchitecure’ was the main motif of the formal-informal market-dense neighbourhood such as the Municipal C and D wards which incorporates the ‘Mashup Area’ and suggested new policy frameworks for their future.

They were invited to walk into a living heritage of ‘Old Bombaye’ – Edward Talkies and managed to capture a World-War II-style cinematic experience that co-exists in a perfect Mashup moment with a contemporary multiplex down the road.

They focused on the patterns made by the shadows of the thousand odd users of the lanes and captured the busy street-life through a refracted photographic gaze.

Some of the output was exhibited at the Girgaum Catholic Club in Khotachiwadi on November 1st – the final day of the Mashup.

We are grateful to Art India Magazine for having sponsored the printing of the output for the exhibition.

The press covered the event with pithy one-liners. ‘Whose City is it anyway?’, ‘Heritage Hunt’, ‘The Great Mumbai Mashup’, ‘How to Make your own Mumbai’ and ‘Mumbai – Tailor Made’.

A full report of the workshop will soon be available on the site. Meanwhile, you can start browsing the mashup’s output here. More images on the URBZOO Flickr page.

In an email sent to all registered participants on the 22nd of October, 2009, the URBZ team wrote:

Please come with whatever equipment you plan to use in the workshop – laptops, USB modems, cameras books, pens, drawing materials.

And in this email, they’d introduced all of the Team Advisers and their projects etc. I’d decided that I was going to work with Kaiwan Mehta – an architect and author of ‘Alice in Bhuleshwar’. And that photography was going to be my medium. 35mm +medium format (6×6). Black and white photos of this old neighborhood, Bhuleshwar. I carried all of this to the workshop on the 29th. And at the end of the day, I didn’t use any of it.

A couple of Swedish architecture students, Beata and Oskar were my teammates, working with Kaiwan in Bhuleshwar. And whilst we did the walk through the labyrinth, I realised that I had a lot to learn about Bhuleshwar, and that this workshop was the perfect opportunity. And so, I decided to spend all of this time trying to get to know this neighborhood better.

Kaiwan and the others love to work with text. And enlisted reasons why the textual medium overpowers photography. I listened patiently, and quietly, trying to absorb their point of view. I’d never subscribe to it though. Photography rules! Let me go a step further, the Visual Medium rules! The only book I’ve ever read in my life is ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ way back in the early ninetees. During school +college, I’d study just a day prior to an exam, only to avoid reading.
…but at [mashup], I decided to experiment with text. And enjoyed every bit of it. At the end of the four days, I had come up with some text. And no photos. I learnt a lot about books and different creative ways of presenting text.

Now it doesn’t mean that I’ll start reading stuff.

Each of us wrote short verses. Some twenty each. Printed each of them on an A4, and spread them across a table at the exhibition, on Sunday, at Khotachiwadi:

Beata, Oskar and I mixed all of our A4s and spread them across a table. All of the text is about Bhuleshwar, to be read in a random order.

I too do a blog. http://www.quarterbar.com/ .More photos and less text. I promise!

FIN

Bijal Vachharajani writes about the URBZ MASHUP Mumbai in this week’s edition of Time Out Mumbai

Politicians and the media have been debating the plan to build a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji off Marine Drive. The municipality has been busy considering proposals for towering hotels across the city. Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava and Geeta Mehta, on the other hand, have a different vision for Mumbai. They believe that the city should develop more organically, as a user-generated city. “When you are developing an urban design, you should incorporate systems that allow people to intervene in the planning,” said Echanove , who has started the research outfit urbanology.com with Srivastava. “Residents are the city experts. They are the ones who have the most pertinent and accurate data about their city.”

This fortnight, Echanove, Srivastava and Mehta, who is an associate professor of architecture and urban studies at Temple University, Japan, are organising a workshop that will help city residents put some of their visions down on paper. Urbz Mashup will give artists, designers, architects, activists, writers, photographers and just about anyone interested in cities and urban planning the opportunity to present their ideas about Mumbai in any form they want – music, videos, photo-collages, even short stories. “They can speculate about the future architecture, create a dream scenario or a nightmarish one,” said Echanove. “It could be a vision inspired by any place – a neighbourhood, another city or country.” The work will be exhibited online on the Urbz website, while selected plans will be displayed at an exhibition at the Sir JJ School of Art.

Over four days, the group will cover some of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, including Crawford Market, Bhuleshwar and Chor Bazaar, documenting their history, archiving the changes taking place and using their imagination and skills to re-interpret the area. “The workshop is an opportunity for urban practitioners to collectively explore localities, streets and neighbourhood,” said Srivastava. “They can bring in their own experiences to produce new ways of looking at, visualising and imagining the city.”

The Mashup idea emerged from the Urban Typhoon workshop that had been organised in Dharavi in 2008. “We felt this time we should focus on the creative element of urban practice,” said Srivastava. “Development laws are going to change the landscape of Mumbai. So we thought we’d have a small exercise that will find new ways of looking at a street.” He explained that the Mashup aims to transform the city in a creative manner “that does not destroy the spirit of the neighbourhood, its residents, their thoughts and feelings” .

Echanove added that the workshop would also concentrate on specific pockets such as the nineteenth-century Khotachiwadi village in Girgaum. “This historic site is threatened by real estate developers,” said Echanove. “There’s a lot of pressure to sell and once these bungalows are sold, they will be destroyed. However, we can use design strategies to preserve the neighbourhood.” He cites fashion designer James Ferreira’s house in Khotachiwadi as an example. Ferreira has restored his family home in a way that the ground floor functions as a living space and the first floor as an office. Another bungalow has rented out the ground floor to a gym. “It’s almost like a village economy operating in an urban space,” Echanove said. “This way, at least the income generated goes towards conserving the locality. At the Mashup we will work with the residents and try to find similar solutions.”