This conference aims at expanding the scope of affordable housing initiatives in India. For the most, affordable housing has been seen as the result of state interventions responding to the needs of the urban poor. More recently, non-state actors (both profit driven and charitable) have entered the market for the provision of affordable housing.  The government is now actively encouraging market driven interventions that cross-subsidize the construction of affordable housing stock.

The Slum Rehabilitation Scheme in Mumbai is an example of this approach where land is released from erstwhile occupied lands in officially designated ‘slums’ through relocating residents in vertical structures, while providing valuable “transferable building rights” to developers. In other cities developers are directly purchasing cheap land wherever possible and targeting new buyers from the lower middle-class sector who were so far unable to afford housing at market rates. There housing is made affordable by lowering construction costs, minimizing the footprint of individual units and scaling up the size of housing projects.

Yet, expectations are still far from being met, both in terms of quantity and quality of affordable housing. According to some projections India still needs 27 million more units, while managing to produce hardly 1 million in the past 10 years. This need is likely to grow to 35 million units by 2025. Even more dramatic is the poor quality of stock being produced today.

The logic that consists in making housing affordable by reducing the cost of construction has lead to all kinds of malpractices. After a few years in existence, affordable housing blocks typically start crumbling down, leading to rising maintenance cost and lowering real estate value. Very soon they look and function worse than those they were meant to replace, and ready to be redeveloped themselves.

Between 1997 and 2002, the government and the builders built 500 000 houses in urban India, when in the same time, people built 8.5 million units in so-called “slums”. This conference will discuss new ways of conceiving, producing, financing and designing affordable housing, which break the self-defeating logic in which affordable housing seems to be locked in today. It focuses on a much-overlooked aspect of Indian cities: the ability of so many neighbourhoods to produce their own homes.

The so-called slums of the city are in many ways attempts at increasing affordable housing units through a different construction and financial system. Of course the discussions will take into consideration many dimensions – legal, political and economic – but also issues of design, the history of urban planning, twentieth century visions of modern cities and other rarely discussed concerns that are pertinent to a critical and effective policy on and practice about affordable housing.

The conference builds on weeks of pedagogic exchanges with students of  the Sir J.J. College of Architecture, URBZ, leading practitioners from India and abroad, and local contractors and masons. They have documented existing construction practices in the neighbourhoods of Shivaji Nagar -Govandi, Bhandup and Dharavi and evolved their own visions through this learning experience.  The students’ work that will be exhibited and presented during the conference, includes an in-depth understanding of the local construction processes and examines physical construction and financial sustainability.

This study opens up the possibility of re-looking at affordable housing in a manner that transcends, statist, private sector and market driven approaches and strives for a realistic and more effective model based on user’s involvement, community networks and local economic dynamics. Can we develop new models? Think out of the box? Support effective affordable housing initiatives as they are already unfolding in our shadow cities? We hope the conference starts asking – and answering – such questions towards this end.

See the conference page, for full programme and speakers’ bios.

Mumbai Contra-CT: 
Techniques and Tactics of Local Affordable Housing Production

@ Sir JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai

SEMINAR & FIELDWORK Dec 5th 2011  Jan 22nd 2012
EXHIBITION & WORKSHOP Jan 23rd, 24th, 25th, 2012
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION March 30th – 31st 2012

Affordable housing is seen as both, a high social priority by the government and NGOs as well as an unprecedented financial opportunity by developers. The result is the large-scale production of low-cost housing blocks which quickly turn into vertical slums. In the meanwhile, local contractors and end-users are building far more numerous housing units of better quality at lower prices in Mumbai’s many unplanned settlements. Often dismissed as slums, locally developed neighbourhoods produce a powerful counter-narrative to the mass production of low-cost housing. This program brings together architects, engineers, contractors and end-users to explore this dynamic sector and innovate in the field of affordable housing.

Curated by URBZ/Urbanology
Faculty: Mustansir Dalvi, Yashwant Pitkar, Ayaz Rajgara, Ashley Fiahlo Supriyo Bhattacharya, Jal Arya, Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava, Poonam Mulchandani.
+ Guest Experts TBA

For more info, contact us.

The centre itself shows how such cities do not have to be oases in a desert or isolated worlds. Through new kinds of research suggestions it feeds back ideas and technologies that can be integrated into local markets and become part of the regular technologies. This is of course no easy task. It is one thing to evolve ideas and solutions in a controlled condition and quite another to integrate it in an economy and world of practice that work at a different scale. The research process is often long  and expensive and as a result inventors like Tency are interested in collaborations with larger groups that can help them with both research and application. However, in this process the question of integrating these innovative technologies to the contexts in which a majority of the people already live gets defeated. They end up being used only in masterplan type situations where they can be integrated to the project from the outset. Not bad but not enough.

Earth-brick house in Auroville

Fountain/water purifying system

We got into an interesting conversation with Tency and our Alexis of Lafarge’s Affordable Housing unit regarding a local water purifying system that creates a bonsai tornado effect in sewage water and uses the chemical reaction as a basis for exorcising smell and purifying the water to a degree that in can be used successfully for non-potable uses. This experimental system has already been picked up by large housing projects in Bangalore. Our interest was seeing if this technology can help conserve and recycle sewage water in water-scarce neighbourhoods that have been incrementally built. It would be mandatory for the process to be financially viable at a local level in these neighbourhoods. Given the government’s antagonistic stance towards self-built neighbourhoods, the market seems to be the only viable entry point. Tency felt that it would well be worth a try and looks forward to doing a joint project.

Our second stop at CSR was at another founder member of Auroville, Satprem Maini of the Auroville Earth Institute. Satprem is a soft-spoken French architect dedicated to the magic of mud. He too warmed up to the possibilities of making mud-based architectural solutions more commercially viable by working with large companies as long as they promoted this substance-use. Our own concern tends towards mixed-media – to borrow a term from artistic endeavours – but we are genuinely enthusiastic of a range of materials, mud too, which has huge advantages in terms of weather and cost. What we came across was this observation by these stalwarts of mud-use; in India the cultural resistance to mud, reflective of low-status, is extremely strong. At the end of the day, it will be up to residents and contractors in self-built neighbourhoods to decide what works best for them. The answer is likely to be a remix of whatever materials are locally available. Improving the distribution of high-quality and sustainable materials is a way to positively influence local development without disturbing existing dynamics.

URBZ has developed a new website for PUKAR, a Mumbai-based urban research and action collective. Based on Wordpress, an open source content management system, this website has been entirely customized to suit the needs of PUKAR, of which its flagship project – the Youth Fellowship program – comprises about 400 youth researchers across the city. Besides this, PUKAR’s researchers work in various neighbourhoods all across the city through projects such as ‘Healthy City, Wealthy City’ and ‘Mythologies of Mumbai’.

The main purpose of the new website is to allow PUKAR’s researchers and staff to publish their research online and make it publicly available.  The site will also allow visitors to comment on pages and posts. Among various innovative features is a plugin allowing different Flickr photo albums to be displayed on every page. The admin section was also entirely customized and a series of plugins have been produced to suit PUKAR’s needs, including the main menu and the tag cloud. All these plugins will be made freely available to all Worpress users and developers on the URBZ site in the near future.

The site was developed by Wordpress and CSS master Ricardo Garcia Sanchez, who works with URBZ from Geneva, Switzerland. The design was produced by Jose “Cole” Abasolo, based in Santiago, Chile. Cole is also responsible for the design of the URBZ website and posters. The site was conceived by Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava who both have been working for PUKAR (Rahul as its first Director and initiator of the Youth Fellowship Program, and Matias as IT Advisor). The development of the site was coordinated by Matias Echanove.

The architecture of the site as well as its design are the product of a year-long dialogue with PUKAR’s staff and youth fellows, which included many IT training sessions. It was produced in a participatory way and conceived to maximize everyone’s involvement in the production of online knowledge and information.

www.pukar.org.in

On Sunday June 13, URBZ organizes the Dukaan Workshop. Students, Architects, Engineers, Craftsmen, Handymen, will come together to build an evolutionary, flexible and light dukaan or streetshop, which can support an economic activity and be incrementally developed.

The materials used will be those available on the spot: pallet racks, bamboo, recycled, etc….

Bring ideas, skills, material, tools, contribution and motivation. Innovation will be there for sure!

For directions: urbz.net/map