Projects

What do young Mumbaikars have to say about their family's rootedness to villages on the Konkan?

In the urbanisation race, India seems desperate to catch up with China. Yet this highly networked country can build a future where cities do not rule supreme.

Many families live in between two households: one in the village and another in the city. 

The biggest growth in urbanisation is not taking place in the metropolis but in small towns that are networked with villages.

An urban village trying to safeguard its heritage value in the sprawling metropolis.

After a handstorm workshop to make a variety of user-oriented objects and with a pilot house on its way, a report about the updates of the Homegrown Cities Initiative

The Handstorm workshop brought together various actors from all around the world to build things that could improve the neighbourhood based on discussions with residents and with the help of local artisans

All you need to bring along are your hands, a desire to produce something useful and beautiful which you feel the residents would love to use and loads of enthusiasm.

The Handstorm Workshop will draw on energies that flow from creative manual involvement, acknowledging that it is always wired to the brain, to form a collective of power that attracts attention from the rest of the city.

How local, community owned and managed housing co-operatives, can be a vital step towards improving the neighbourhoods, bringing good quality civic infrastructure and making the city genuinely ’slum-free’.

The Konkan connection to Mumbai is only part of a larger universe in which the city’s force of gravity pulls together many other such regions.

Chiplun’s residents today speak of their connections with Mumbai against this history – which reveals a relationship that is really deep. Chiplun became a gateway for us not just into the Konkan region and its tryst with the railways – but a paradoxical gateway into Mumbai’s heart – back again.

The so-called slums of the city are in many ways attempts at increasing affordable housing units through a different construction and financial system.

For reasons more than one, Khotachiwadi is across various Bombay newspapers. 

The unique protest, titled ‘Requim for  Khotachiwadi’, was initiated by the village residents to protest against the breaking down of the 150-year-old structure, which had been sold to builders.

“While we don’t want to commercialise the locality, we want to create a cultural space for Mumbaikars, who don’t have many neighborhoods such as this”

Mr. Lodha and members of the Khotachiwadi Welfare and Heritage Trust delivered a letter to the municipal commissioner calling for a heritage law to be enacted.