Khushboo chawl, Khotachiwadi

We recently organized a week-long studio on Khotachiwadi, a heritage precinct in Girgaum, Mumbai, with students from the School of Habitat Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). This was part of a course taught by URBZ members Rahul and Matias on the politics of urban space. The studio took place at Studio X near CST, with fieldwork in Khotachiwadi every day. In Khotachiwadi we often met at James Ferreira’s house who generously hosted us.

The studio focused on the chawls of Khotachiwadi. While Khotachiwadi is well known for its Konkan-Portuguese-style bungalows, its chawls and their residents have often been left out of the picture. This is a shame because, as most visitors and residents acknowledge, the diversity of habitats, architectures and cultures is one of the most interesting aspects of this much loved neighbourhood.

TISS-SoHS students brainstorming at Studio X

Throughout the studio, we discussed the history and culture of Khotachiwadi, the meaning of heritage in a rapidly changing city, the importance of having diverse habitats, rent control and how it allowed people across classes to stay in places like Khotachiwadi. We talked about architectural styles and urban typologies and the role of local economic activities in preserving neighbourhood life. We discussed mixed-use patterns in old neighborhoods of Mumbai and how urban plans and zoning codes are typically based on segregating functions. We also talked about urban villages, political identity, East Indians and their origins, the role of the Shiv Sena in local politics and a few other things.

The students visited the chawls, interviewed residents and published their texts and photos on http://khotachiwadi.urbz.net. They asked residents about their personal histories and stories and their current situation; the way they perceive the possibility of edevelopment; their relationship with bungalow residents; their aspirations; the possibility of envisioning a common future with other residents of Khotachiwadi belonging to different castes and histories.

Residents of Khotachiwadi celebrate the Diwali in front of the 150 years old Khanderao chawl. The Diwali Sammelan festival was started over 75 years ago by Mangesh Rane ji who is the oldest resident of Khotachiwadi.

Chawls are a very typical architectural typology in Mumbai, dating from the city’s industrial days, derived from the structure of army barracks, evolving into residential sites for industrial workers and finally being reshaped in use by the in-coming families of migrant workers to eventually become bustling middle-class neighbourhoods The chawls can be anything between 1 to 5 stories high and are typically organized around a large veranda connecting single rooms, with the whole floor sharing a common bathroom. Many of them have been converted or destroyed in the past decade or so. Some of the chawls of Khotachiwadi are more than 150 years old, a few families have roots there going back more than four generations and some have individual toilets in each home.

The neighbourhood of Girgaum, to which Khotachiwadi belongs, is well known for its historical chawls. Thanks to the Maharashtra Rent Act, which has frozen rents in South Mumbai at their 1947 level, many families have been able to stay in this part of the city where rent for a new 50 sq.m flat can easily reach Rs 50,000/month or higher. Often accused to be the root cause of all urban problems in Mumbai because it never allowed owners to maintain their buildings properly, the rent control act has also been instrumental in maintaining people from all socio-economic background in South Mumbai.

These and other themes were explored and discussed by the participants of the studio, the output of which is available on http://khotachiwadi.urbz.net

Image: Fusionopolis, one of the newest indoor entertainment mall of Singapore.

Public spaces are sacrosanct in urban planning rhetoric and embody a range of virtues—from the community to the commons, from equality to inclusive citizenship. What constitutes a public space, however, is often a point of contention

Shopping malls, plazas, sidewalks, parks, museums, pedestrian pathways, flea markets, bazaars, and even transport systems like the metro in Delhi—are all contenders for the label of “public space.”

As cities aspire to “world-class” status—an idea which carries its own set of notions of what public space should be all about—grand urban designs begin to dominate the imagination of planners and developers and reconfigure our cities.

The notion of the word-class city emerged after political and developmental discourse gave up on the first, second and third world distinctions from the Cold War era. The global city, with its high urban standards, linked to other such cities through gleaming new airports, became the capital of the new world order.

In such a city, the coming together of speculation-driven real estate development and the idea of “public space” has produced weird urban species. In New York, for instance, developers are encouraged to create open spaces in front or below their buildings in exchange for additional floor area. More often than not, these “privately owned public spaces” are designed to discourage genuine public use.

In a city like New Delhi, well-protected and spacious historical sites, public parks, plazas and malls stand as a contrast to the action-packed and crowded streets of the anti-thesis of the world class in the very local, Chandni Chowk. In neighborhoods that decidedly don’t fit with the world class vision, such as Dharavi in Mumbai, where any space is currency, designated public space is virtually non-existent but the spirit of the public infuses every nook and corner. Crowded streets become collective spaces during festivals; temples and shrines become either thoroughfares or meeting points; they remain oases of calm or contribute to the general din.

A layer of public-ness settles onto traffic-infested streets when collective prayer has to happen and for that one moment waves of urban chaos freeze, and allow for that incredible flash of community to manifest itself before crashing back into their usual stormy selves a few minutes later. More often than not, leisure, commercial and communication uses share the same space and time: streets are typically used simultaneously as a playground by kids, sales points by a street vendor, pedestrian links to the train station, as well as meeting places for residents, drying spaces for clothes and advertising spaces for movies and recruitment agencies.

These two extreme examples, of designed but underused monumental spaces and the squeezing out of public moments in space-starved neighborhoods indicates that there is much more to urban public space and life than merely how much space is formally accounted for it in physical terms.

However, the idea of a world-class city short-circuits these discussions before we can discuss whether Indian cities should be more like Old or New Delhi—or debate if Dharavi has its own peculiar notion of public space, or if New York’s designed public spaces are passé.

It is a slogan, as if devised by a marketing agency, to sell the latest fashions in cosmetic urbanism—an alluring ready-to-wear one-size vision that promises to fit all. It is a visual narrative made up of bits and pieces taken from distant places that exist primarily as urban fantasies in our imaginations. Now Dubai, now Singapore, sometimes with a hint of the Manhattan skyline, all spiked by grand architectural flourishes, the idea of the world class city pushes us towards the model of the theme park or “special economic zones,” which achieve perfect order by forcefully containing the mess outside their boundaries.

High speed escalator to nowhere: Fusionopolis, Singapore.

This is unfortunately the vision within which the elusive “public space” is, quite literally, trapped today. In the face of the jumble of street life in India, we have now begun to respond, as urban designers did in Shanghai and Singapore (our model cities) by elevating private spaces away from the street and joining them through internal connections. These privately built spaces, whether residential or corporate, are firewalled and sterilized versions of the open commons of the street.

High-tech surveillance and codes of conduct insure a strict filtering of “the public” and tight control of its movements. These spaces are then gradually connected to one another by skywalks, subways, highways, and airways, leaving the “street” and its unruly “public” further behind and below. Interconnected shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur and airport-to-city connections in Dubai are full-fledged examples of these. The tentative plans for the “smart cities” to be built along the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor already show the same tendencies at work, which will favor a certain metropolitan “public” over a regional and local one. Eventually we find ourselves starved of the touch of human interaction that always characterized our streets.

Aspirations to world-class status have sealed the fate of many fast-growing cities today. They have become exclusive zones in which most citizens, unless they have a great deal of economic power, are made invisible. And the veneer of still being a city, all air-conditioned and antiseptic, is maintained through privatized and inside-out architectural gestures made in the name of public space.

At the end of the day, all that remains behind is physical space designed to accommodate an idea of the public that has been stripped of its fundamental property: inclusiveness. No matter how much time, money or skills that go into the design of such a public space, nothing can replace the millions of contributions made by each and every user who carves it out over time.

Article by Matias & Rahul published in the Wall Street Journal blog today.

This is the video of the TEDxMumbai Presentation made at Blue Frog by Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava of URBZ on 3rd April 2010.

Click Here to read the complete description of the presentation.

Rahul & Matias are proud to present the work of the URBZ collective at TEDxMumbai on Saturday April 3rd, 2010 (between 4:30 and 5:50 PM) at the Blue Frog. They will be speaking about how user-generated cities are not only possible but essential if we want to build a future that is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. They will show how the fear of slums and the rush to redevelop them into high-rise buildings is responsible for one of the worst man-made disaster in the history of urban development and propose alternative approaches based on their work and projects in Dharavi and elsewhere.

Live stream: http://www.ustream.tv/tedxmumbai

Schedule: http://tedxmumbai.com/schedule/

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