November 9-16, 2010

In partnership with Khoj. With the support of Ford Foundation and the Norwegian Embassy. ‘KHOJ International Artists’ Association’ is an artist led alternative space for experimentation and international exchange based in India. Part of the global Triangle Arts Trust, KHOJ sees its role as an incubator for art and ideas, artistic exchange and dialogue in the visual arts.

The Urban Typhoon workshop invites artists, architects, activists and academics from all over the world to ideate with residents, grassroots groups and other users of Khirkee Village, New Delhi. The event aims at reclaiming the locality by collectively generating multiple ideas, visions and plans for its future.

During the week-long workshops all kinds of interventions and interactions will take place, stimulating debate, exchange and awareness. The workshop draws its energy and creativity from the involvement of local users, including business owners, housewives, children, teenagers, loiterers and other hoodies. It focuses on local participation and global engagement.

The workshop is documented throughout the week. The participants also produce all kinds of material, which is then uploaded on a user-generated Website. In addition, the output is translated into various installations, exhibitions, essays, festivals, architectural designs, urban plans and site-specific action, during and after the workshop. Its ultimate aim is to inform decision-makers on the aspirations and potential of Khirkee Village.

URBZ, has been conducting similar workshops in various places around the world including Shimokitazawa (Tokyo), Dharavi (Mumbai) and Galata (Istanbul).

The Urban Typhoon Khirkee (New Delhi) workshop is being organized in partnership with Khoj, a globally renowned artists collective based in that very neighbourhood. Khirkee is an ‘urban village’ in a city in fast forward mode, which may need to creatively reinvent itself if it is to preserve its identity in an increasingly alienating global context.

Khoj has operated from there for more than a decade and has initiated several projects, where artists have become urban practitioners projecting visions and revealing choices that formal actors may have overlooked.  In this partnership between Khoj and URBZ, we hope to organize an event that has a special significance to the world of urban engagement in which artists have a special role to play.

Participant Requirements:

The Urban Typhoon workshop is multicultural, multidisciplinary and a multimedia event. Students, urban planners, architects, designers, artists, sociologists, media artists, political activists, and anyone with a high motivation to work in urban spaces and willing to engage local communities for the week long duration of the workshop is welcome to join.

The objective is to produce creative alternatives for the future of a neighborhood threatened by limited official choices and imagination.

Please fill up the registration form, including a 100-word bio-note of yourself and a face-picture.

We will be in regular touch through e-mail after that.

Travel and boarding expenses are to be borne by the participants (so,don’t wait to make travel bookings! We will also make reservations at reasonable rates in local lodges and hotels to facilitate the process).

A few weeks ago, our Sunday was spent painting clay pots that we purchased from the nearby Dharavi neighbourhood of Khumbarwada, which is only a five minute walk from the Dharavi Shelter and the Transit Camp.

From some of our small donations that we have received up to this date, we managed to buy some pots, paints, brushes and wire. The children from the Shelter organised themselves into groups and painted the clay pots producing some incredible patterns and designs. A local resident then came in to help us hang the pots in the entrance patio of our Shelter and at the same time we began painting the bricks on the entrance wall in the patio.

This activity was one of a series of activities we are want to carry out to transform the Shelter and develop it into an incredible and beautiful space for art, creativity, exchange and learning.

The following images have some more of our plans to convert the remaining space we have surrounding the existing structure. We have included approximate costs for each of these activities.

Your contributions are most welcome!

Our new friend, James Subudhi, came to visit our Shelter a few weeks back and spent the Sunday volunteering with us.  He spent a memorable day with the children and learnt a lot about richness of Dharavi. What James mentioned the most about his visit was about the happiness of the children and the strong sense of community that he saw in this place. He has written an extract which I have posted below which he calls Of Magnets and Development.

All of us—kids, mothers, teenagers, strangers, and volunteers—huddled in a circle looking down into the sewer drain just outside the door to the shelter. “Paul is going to kill us,” Dipti said. The gravity of tiredness pulled on my face as I looked through the metal grate into the stagnant sewer.  I thought about what might be in there to give the liquid a greenish, purple and black grey thin goo consistency: shit, paint, spit, pan, dirt, the piss of everyman in Mumbai, motor oil, rusted scrap metal, water, diphtheria, typhoid, polio, cholera, and more piss.  A Dharavi sewer drain was as far away from the chilled bottled of water and masala dosa I wanted than Christmas is from July.  The wheels in my head quickly turned toward a destructive and money driven solution… breaking the lock and just buying a new one. Simple.

Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a kid running towards us.  He perched, knees bent, butt hovering above the ground, his arms out stretched over the drain. One of shelter participants pulled and held the gate open, the boy on the ground dropped a magnet on a string in, and another guided it around the drain by pulling the string in different directions.  A minute later my jaw dropped.

“Those keys need to be washed. They are very dirty” a little girl said.

The moral of the story? The kid’s local solution was more efficient than mine. We didn’t have to break the lock. We didn’t have to spend money on a new lock. We didn’t have to wait in line at shop to purchase a new lock.  We didn’t have to feel Paul’s wrath. And I probably got my lunch quicker this way than through my solution.

Contrast this event with how development occurs and how land-use decisions are made in Mumbai. The government and market solution to the locked door with a lost key down the drain would have been to demolish the building for a use that would squeeze the most profit from the property, like finding the right size hand to squeeze all the water out of a sponge.  In the process they definitely would not have listened to anyone in Dharavi, especially youth.

Yet this event is exactly how decisions about development, land-use, and community problems can be made in Dharavi, with youth and residents generating and implementing solutions to problems and a vision for the future they see with some guidance and resources from ngos, government, labor, and business. 

Whatever it is that Dharavi needs or wants, and how those needs/want can be met,  what it’s future can and should be,  what it is, what its problems are, and how they can be solved, should decided by and led by its residents, yet within at least one limit. That limit is of allowing no one, not the government, ngos, businesses, land owners, a resident, or community to have a monopoly on the truth, morality, and what is right and wrong, because we can all be right and wrong.

 On the one hand ngos believe the community and its residents have knowledge that is superior to their own and that of the government, to create an argument that the community deserves a seat at the table when decisions are made or least have those making decisions listen to their voices. While community residents often know things about their neighborhoods better than someone who doesn’t live there, they can be wrong. I’ll mention now that some of the kids from the shelter wanted fish the keys out of the sewer with their hands. Yet it is hard for ngos and activists to accept the fallibility of the community’s knowledge when the government and businesses are so much more powerful than they are, through their monopoly of the truth, law, and implementation of the law. Yet without recognizing their fallibility and that government, business, and other stakeholders besides community residents can be right, the community will be unable to form alliances with stakeholders besides ngos to get the resources and policies they need and want to create the changes they want and expect.

On the other hand, government and business are so corrupt that they believe they and they alone hold the truth and morality in their minds and hands that they refuse to engage community residents in the land-use and development decisions that impact them. This believe is based on using cost benefit and analysis and the logic that what makes the most profit and costs the least within their standards is right.

Government, business, labor, and ngos often go as far as to think that they are so right that they are objective because they use mathematics to support their arguments. While mathematics is an objective tool (a squared plus b squared equals c squared wherever you are on Earth), its use as a tool in deciding what to measure, how, when, and why is subjective because they are based on the desires, wants, and beliefs of the people making decisions. The government could believe that drinking water with ecoli in it is healthy, and contract out the distribution of water to a company with the requirement that ecoli be in it. This would save money because the company would not have to treat the water for ecoli. And it might even be profitable if people assume the water is safe to drink. But it’s not in the interest of health.

What I believe Dharavi needs to create a healthy and sustainable future are methods of participatory development and land-use decisions that involve a variety of stakeholders, a commitment from NGOS to secure resources to implement the ideas that come out of those processes, and residents who are trained to organize and advocate for resources and policies to implement their shared vision and solutions to problems.   

James is raising money for our Shelter by playing a show on February 19^th  in New York. Do drop by if you are around. I am sure it will be a great show!

The URBZ Team in Mumbai has embarked on a new project in Dharavi’s New Transit Camp nagar, where its office is located. Our landlord Paul Raphael has inherited a 200 m2 plot just down Dharavi’s MG Road. He built a simple structure to host activities for street children and elderly residents and asked us to help organizing activities there. URBZ is not a charity organization, but we believe in connecting deeply with people and neighbourhoods. We also see ourselves as natural connectors between local needs and global capacities.

URBZ teamsters Himanshu and Dipti started giving drawing classes to the kids every Sunday and we would like to expand our activities there. We have started meeting elderly residents and talking with them about the history of the neighbourhood. We want to archive these stories on our www.dharavi.org site. Our current projects for the Shelter include: getting drawing material, tables and chairs; providing lunch for 60 children every days; building a space to host a library and a tea shop on the site; and turning the empty space around the shelter into a clean patio for the children to play.

We have created a new section on the URBZ site dedicated to the activities of the Dharavi Shelter, where we explain what we are doing in more detail and request donations from anyone willing to support the Shelter and New Transit Camp’s residents. We are sending the link to this new page to all our friends and colleagues in the hope to raise enough to sustain the activities of the Shelter. It is amazing how much we can do with very little money. We calculate that with less than $1000 a month we could provide a simple lunch to up to 60 children every day!

Please visit our Dharavi Shelter page and if you are in Mumbai, come to visit the Shelter in person!

Dates: Oct 29 – Nov 1, 2009

Workshop Starts: Thursday Oct 29 at 10AM at JJ-School of Architecture

Exhibition & Party: Sunday Nov 1, 6-10PM at the Girgaum Catholic Club in Khotachiwadi

Sites: Girgaum (Khotachiwadi, Chowpatty Beach, Wilson College neighbourhood), Crawford Market and Chor Bazaar.

Objective: URBZ MASHUP Mumbai explores, challenges, subverts, questions and celebrates Mumbai’s ideas and practices of heritage enshrined in its colonial (pre and post included) architecture, arts, culture and politics.

The MASHUP activities cover the oldest neighbourhoods of the city. Girgaum, where Khotachiwadi – the much threatened and celebrated trophy heritage habitat – exists  just a stone’s throw away from Chowpatty beach, one of  the city’s most popular for social dissent and free expression. A fifteen minute walk from there takes you to Crawford Market – Mumbai’s oldest and favourite shopping destination. In between lies a maze of dense streets and bazaars that testify to the city’s numerous communities who made the city what it is, a city of shops, markets, dreams and collective aspirations.

In this maze lie stories, images and ideas of a city that provide newer definitions of what it means to be a Mumbaikar, through the many languages the city speaks in, the many cultural practices it invents, its changing and evolving built forms, its bazaars and markets that are as vital and dense as the air the city breathes – making the question of its identity richer than anything the city officially celebrates. Way richer than the imagination of its political leaders and much deeper than the possibilities framed by its most conscientious citizens.

The URBZ MASHUP welcomes participants from Mumbai, India and the rest of the world to use their skills and imaginations and dive into streets, walk into homes, converse, make images, play, then reinterpret, examine, and recreate newer imaginative frameworks that do justice to the city’s layered, dense and complex life.

Anyone is welcome to register. High motivation, initiative and creative mindset are essential qualities for all participants. The registration fee are Rs 300 for Indian students, Rs 500 for other Indian participants. $150 for international students, $300 for other international participants. Fees can be reduced or waved under special circumstances. Please do let us know if you would like to participate but cannot afford the fee.

Invited Team Advisers and Proposed Topics:

Art India Magazine (Abhay Sardesai & crew)
Topic: The art and craft of everyday life: JSS Road to the world

Stephanie Carlisle,  graduate student in Architecture and Urban Ecology at Yale University
Topic: Under the Flyover: a sectional exploration of contested spaces hidden beneath the map

Mustansir Dalvi, Poet, Architect, Teacher at the JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai
Topic: Taking the Inner-City Out of the Box – Girgaum, Nana Chowk and other areas.

James Ferreira, Fashion Designer, Khotachiwadi activist and life-long resident.
Topic: Preservation through change: Design strategies for an ever-young Khotachiwadi

Ranjit Kandangoankar: Visual Artist & Research Fellow-Urban Design Research Institute, Studying buildings owned by Charitable Trusts
Topic: Re-imagining collages through inner-city perspectives: Null Bazaar and other sites.

Geeta Mehta: Urban designer and faculty at Columbia University
Topic: Bazaarchitecture & historical preservation in Crawford Market & Chor Bazaar. How do you preserve a bazaar?

Kaiwan Mehta: Architect and writer (author of the book “Alice in Bhuleshwar“)
Topic: Real-time history of Bhuleshwar

Amit S. Rai: Professor of English Literature at Florida State University
Topic: Contemporary Movie going in an ancient Movie Theatre: Edward Cinema, Dhobhi Talao

Alison Reeves: Artist, Fullbright Scholar
Topic: Street-vendors of Girgaum: Portraits and stories of Mumbai’s most perennial population: the itinerants

Himanshu S.: Artist & crew
Topic: Dreamality and playful interventions: Girgaum seen from kids eyes

Yehuda Safran: Professor of philosophy of architecture at Columbia University & Harvard
Topic: Poetics of street life & moving habitats. 12 Scenarios for the mashed-up city

Sachin Yardi: Screenplay Writer and Film Director. (Wrote the screenplay of the movie “Traffic Signal“)
Topic: Street-life as fiction. Collective screen-play writing

Schedule:

Thursday 29: Workshop starts at 10AM at JJ-School of Architecture, close to Crawford Market (Entrance in front of JJ flyover). All the participants meet and form small teams of 2 to 5 people max. They decide on a location and an approach they want to pursue, with the help of the organizers if needed. After lunch the teams go to their chosen location(s) and start gathering data in the form of photos, videos, interviews, sketches, etc.

Friday 30: Data hunting-gathering in different locations.

Saturday 31: Participants gather at the workshop site and decide what they want to produce with their data and how it should be presented. Final output could be anything ranging from in situ interventions to design proposals and manifestos to video clips and art works. This day work until the output is ready (may mean an all-nighter). From Saturday 12-noon to Sunday 12-noon all the material produced is uploaded on the URBZ website (with the help of URBZ staff).

Sunday 1: The MASHUP Exhibition starts at 6PM. From 12-noon to 6PM, Participants prepare stalls with print-outs, models, performances, videos to showcase their creative production. Locally cooked food will be available. Party follows. This will take place at the Girgaum Catholic Club in Khotachiwadi. All are welcome.

Locations:

MUMBAI MASHUP View in a larger map