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/

Bijal Vachharajani writes about the URBZ MASHUP Mumbai in this week’s edition of Time Out Mumbai

Politicians and the media have been debating the plan to build a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji off Marine Drive. The municipality has been busy considering proposals for towering hotels across the city. Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava and Geeta Mehta, on the other hand, have a different vision for Mumbai. They believe that the city should develop more organically, as a user-generated city. “When you are developing an urban design, you should incorporate systems that allow people to intervene in the planning,” said Echanove , who has started the research outfit urbanology.com with Srivastava. “Residents are the city experts. They are the ones who have the most pertinent and accurate data about their city.”

This fortnight, Echanove, Srivastava and Mehta, who is an associate professor of architecture and urban studies at Temple University, Japan, are organising a workshop that will help city residents put some of their visions down on paper. Urbz Mashup will give artists, designers, architects, activists, writers, photographers and just about anyone interested in cities and urban planning the opportunity to present their ideas about Mumbai in any form they want – music, videos, photo-collages, even short stories. “They can speculate about the future architecture, create a dream scenario or a nightmarish one,” said Echanove. “It could be a vision inspired by any place – a neighbourhood, another city or country.” The work will be exhibited online on the Urbz website, while selected plans will be displayed at an exhibition at the Sir JJ School of Art.

Over four days, the group will cover some of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, including Crawford Market, Bhuleshwar and Chor Bazaar, documenting their history, archiving the changes taking place and using their imagination and skills to re-interpret the area. “The workshop is an opportunity for urban practitioners to collectively explore localities, streets and neighbourhood,” said Srivastava. “They can bring in their own experiences to produce new ways of looking at, visualising and imagining the city.”

The Mashup idea emerged from the Urban Typhoon workshop that had been organised in Dharavi in 2008. “We felt this time we should focus on the creative element of urban practice,” said Srivastava. “Development laws are going to change the landscape of Mumbai. So we thought we’d have a small exercise that will find new ways of looking at a street.” He explained that the Mashup aims to transform the city in a creative manner “that does not destroy the spirit of the neighbourhood, its residents, their thoughts and feelings” .

Echanove added that the workshop would also concentrate on specific pockets such as the nineteenth-century Khotachiwadi village in Girgaum. “This historic site is threatened by real estate developers,” said Echanove. “There’s a lot of pressure to sell and once these bungalows are sold, they will be destroyed. However, we can use design strategies to preserve the neighbourhood.” He cites fashion designer James Ferreira’s house in Khotachiwadi as an example. Ferreira has restored his family home in a way that the ground floor functions as a living space and the first floor as an office. Another bungalow has rented out the ground floor to a gym. “It’s almost like a village economy operating in an urban space,” Echanove said. “This way, at least the income generated goes towards conserving the locality. At the Mashup we will work with the residents and try to find similar solutions.”