Buena Vista Tower seen from the Dharavi URBZ office. Click to enlarge.

When we moved to Dharavi, we hoped that some projects would come to us from its residents. There is nothing more exciting than the idea of doing architectural and planning projects in Dharavi and other improvised settlements in Mumbai (and the rest of the world). After all, if Mike Davis is right, this is the new urban condition for an increasing number of people everywhere. We never believed that wholesale clearing and redeveloping was the way ahead for improving the life of people living in so-called slums. Instead incremental development, informed by the way people live and relate to space seemed to be more sensible, less costly, sustainable and respectful of the neighborhoods and their history.

We didn’t have to wait for long before an architectural project came to us from within Dharavi. Paul Zacharia, our landlord and a local leader in New Transit Camp, where the office is located, was given management of a charitable trust which has a plot in need of development. The plot is 30 meters away from our office. He asked us to help with design, construction and financing and added that everything needs to be done really fast because if the land remained empty for too long, some sharks would just take it over. Paul wants to build a social club for street children and elderly residents that will be run by the trust.

The plot with the structure built by Paul in gray.

This happened just as Francesco Strocchio and Alberto Bottero, came to work with us for a month. They are final year architecture students at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy who started a research group called Hindustry. We immediately put them on the project. All construction you see here happened within the space of a week, but a week is a lot of time in Dharavi. Paul had already cleaned up the ground (sort of) and built a sturdy brick structure on it. He told us that if we find money to do better we can destroy it and do whatever we wanted. We thought it would be more practical to incorporate what is there into our design. We are still looking for financing, while the design is going on.

The structure was built by Paul in less than a week.

The building will be a symbol of how Dharavi could be redeveloped in a different way: no high-rise building, no masterplans coming from above our heads, but projects that can improve the quality of life in Dharavi. To us, developing Dharavi means taking into consideration what is already there. This must be done in a way that is economically sustainable. So the basic concept of the project is: 1) Develop don’t destroy, 2) make a small architectural landmark that will act as a statement showing that an alternative model of development in possible, 3) make it work within the economic dynamic of Dharavi.

Base map of the plot. Click here to download a large PDF version.

Dharavi is not a junkyard that can be bulldozed.  The tabula rasa approach is not an option. As we know people live here, they work and play like everywhere in Mumbai. This is a normal neighborhood confronted with special challenges. Several parts of Dharavi don’t look different from so many other areas of Mumbai, which are not referred as slums. Any (re)development project should start by evaluating the strength and the potential of Dharavi and consider the people living there as the main users and stakeholders.

Francesco and Alberto want to call the tower “Buena Vista.” The idea is to let people go up to see the view of Dharavi from above. The tower could also broadcast free wireless Internet for Dharavi residents.

The building we designed should be a new facility for the community. In the initial phase we are considering the use of  pallet racks system, which is a relatively cheap, fast, adaptable and modern way of building inside Dharavi.

The preliminary project proposes two different spaces: a large space on the ground floor for elderly residents (using the structure that has just been built) and  a space for street children on the first floor. A tower provides vertical circulation. It also functions as a landmark for the area.  The top of the tower is used to broadcast free internet wireless to New Transit Camp Nagar (and may be to the whole Dharavi), and diffuse Dharavi’s very own dharavi.organic wiki website.  Two open spaces are planned: a patio on the backside of the plot and an open terrace on the roof.

The pallet racks system allows us to build the tower and the first floor in a flexible and adaptable way. A second floor can be easily added in the future. For the ground floor we are simply keeping the existing brick structure.

The project moves quickly and many things keep changing. These are just preliminary ideas for the buildings. We will continue working on them. We also aim at using inputs from other architects and builders coming to the URBZ office. If you are interested in helping this project in any way, please contact URBZ. What we need the most at the moment is funding. Anything would help. We can already go a long way with $20,000 to 30,000.

Images of the site:

Images of the design:

Project: Jaaga a flexible, incremental, and portable office and living space for up to 100 people. This project was mandated by Freeman Murray, a Web guru who moved to India after making a killing in Silicon Valley as a dotcom programmer and entrepreneur. He now runs the iAccelerator initiative at IIM Ahmedabad. He now wants to move iAccelerator to where the talent is, i.e.: everywhere. For this purpose he asked URBZ to design a structure based on pallet racks. He has experimented with pallet racks structure in California and most recently in Bangalore. URBZ is proposing possible extensions to the Jaaga space. This is the first phase of this study. In the spirit of open source/open access, Freeman has asked URBZ to publish this work in progress online. Suggestions and contributions are welcome.

Concept: The space is composed of cells that can be incrementally built and connected to each other, following the project’s own logic. The cells are connected to each other on the horizontal plan by walkways and vertically by stairs. Various patterns can emerge over time in response to the needs and means of the project. The conceptual influences of the project include the simply rules and complex outcomes of cellular automata models, the organic poetics of mathematics as represented in the movieπ, the go game and its strategical use of “void” and spatial relationships, and the architectural philosophy of Christopher Alexander, which evolved out of his observations of nature’s pattern language.

In the words of Freeman, Jaaga should be a mashup between “the Solitude farm at Auroville, the dreams of Paolo Soleri and his experiments at Arcosanti, the Silicon Valley and Dharavi.” The Dharavi part is what makes this utopia realizable. Jaaga must work on low budget and produce high quality output.

•   High-density living conditions minimize the footprint of the structure and its cost.

•   Low-height simplifies its construction and allows for an optimal exploitation of the ground space.

•   Total programmatic flexibility means that each part of the Jaaga can in a matter of minutes be converted from a workspace to a living space.

•   Modular structure of Jaaga means that it can be assembled incremental without following a predefined plan.

URBZ, which is based in Dharavi sharing physical and mental space with the Dharavi Institute of Urbanology, believes much can be learned from the innovative architectural solutions and user-generated logic of Dharavi. Injected with some resources, imagination, technology and humanity, the extreme living and working conditions of Indian slums, depicted in Charles Correa’s image below (right) can serve as inspiration for the production of creative and stimulating living and working environments.

Strategy: Pallet racks are never thought of as possible elements for building large structure. Yet they are one of the cheapest and most commonly available material in the market. They are solid enough and easily replaceable. They also offer an infinity of possibilities. URBZ has explored various ways in which they could be assembled to produce different spaces. Here are different examples of simple structural elements that can be made with commercially available pallet racks.

The complete modularity of structures made of pallet rack means that they can be inserted in the most densely built urbanscape such as improvised settlements in Lima or Mumbai (below). They are good architectural solutions for emergency shelters and temporary structures. The shell formed with pallet racks can also easily be converted into permanent structures if consolidated with steel, wood, concrete, or other locally available material.

Modules

For more details on each module, visit our flickr set. http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbzoo/sets/72157622386627766/

Stucture for 100 people

Ground Floor

First Floor

Second Floor

The neighborhood of Shimokitazawa represents Japanese counter-culture more than any other place in Tokyo. Indeed, this is probably one of the first places that young architects, designers, artists, djs, or activists visiting Tokyo are taken to by their Japanese friends.

The narrow and crowded streets of Shimokitazawa have a perfume of freedom and anti-conformism. In Shimokitazawa styled-up youth look alternative and lead alternative lifestyles. Indeed that is one of the rare places in Tokyo where counter-culture meets politics.

The constituencies of Shimokitazawa are diverse. With its unique character, the area attracts many students, artists and other creative types. Meanwhile, affluent homeowners have settled around its center making the development of luxurious department stores a very lucrative prospect for investors.

Thanks to the two train lines stopping through, residents are just minutes away from Shibuya and Shinjuku Stations, which are two of the major centers of Tokyo. Hundreds of thousands of commuters living in South-East Tokyo pass through Shimokitazawa everyday.

Recently, a plan dating from 1946 for a 26-meter wide road throughout the neighborhood was resurrected by Odakyu, a large railway owner and real-estate developer. The government of Setagaya ward, which includes Shimokitazawa, championed the new road plan.

Planning in Tokyo is characterized by strong top-down interventions mainly in the form of infrastructure investment. At the same time, Tokyo is often described as a city of villages, composed of small neighborhoods of 3000 inhabitants or less, known as “chou”. The chou however, serves typically at diffusing information and decisions coming from above to the local level rather than bottom-up communication. In Tokyo, it is very rare that local communities succeed in stopping or even changing the plans of the government.

Some grassroots groups have emerged in Shimokitazawa to oppose the plan and to propose alternatives. Their constituencies extend far beyond local residents. Many people, including musicians, architects, and academics, from Japan and abroad recognize the importance of preserving Shimokitazawa, with its rich urban subcultures and relaxed atmosphere.

Beyond the fate of the neighborhood, the urban policy of the city is in question. Many cities around the world begin to recognize that citizens must be involved in the planning of their communities.