How can social and digital empowerment fuel positive growth for Dharavi's SMEs?

Dharavi is a prime real estate location due to its closeness to public transport systems, business districts, as well as ecological hotspots. The proximity of living quarters to where individuals work, often from within households, brings both benefits and challenges to households and businesses.

Dharavi is a frenetic engine of entrepreneurship characterized by variety, innovation, recycling, and reuse. While the Indian economy is in a historic slump that is predicted to take years to recover, residents and workers in Dharavi are starting to return to the city as industries and their allied supply chains are beginning to open up.

Dharavi embodies an efficient pre-industrial live-work paradigm. This is now desired and interpreted in post-industrial societies, and more so in the Covid-19 era, as a sustainable lifestyle.

Local contractors design their ideal Dharavi homes which are exhibited at Zaha Hadid's Maxxi in Rome. 

The competition for land, rather than the traditional competition for tenants, was especially exacerbated in sites of growing industrialization and development like Bombay. 

What does the mutation of colonial Bombay into global Mumbai mean for architectural forms and public life?

From a small Italian village, to a city like Milan, to a metroplis like Chile and finally to Dharavi, Francesco finds similarities and differences among the different scales.of habitats. 

Similarities between urban villages in Mumbai and Italy. 

Micro homes which integrate spaces of work and are well connected to the street economy seem to be far more viable on the longer run at all levels.