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!

Flickr Video	Flickr Video
Before and after drawing workshop: It is all about self-expression!

Image: URBZ team members and interns with the South Dandy Squad and DJ Paul Devro (Mad Decent) at the dharavi.organic party organized in January 2009 in Dharavi.

URBZ Internships are integral to all our activities. At present we have two streams of activities around which the internship programmes take place. One is based in Mumbai and the other in Goa, six hundred kilometers south of Mumbai citty.  Our internships have a strong pedagogical component to them in the sense that we encourage interns to develop their own projects in partnership with us. At the same time they have an option of working directly on our ongoing projects as well.  Interns  can thus bring in their own research, action, project-based, creative agendas and use the expertise of the URBZ team and the facilities of URBZ to develop them.  Or they can learn through our own projects and subsequently develop their agendas from here. Our own projects include the following:

A. Mumbai – based.

1) Understanding and Documenting the Diversity of Mumbai’s Built-forms.

2) Engaging with Dharavi, Mumbai’s context in terms of architectural, planning and socio-economic projects.

3) Working with Shelter – a charitable trust in Dharavi which works with children and elderly residents from the neighbourhood .

4) Mapping resources and materials for auto-construction of structures and civic amenities in Mumbai.

5) Creativity and Art projects in Mumbai’s informal neighbourhoods.

B. Goa – based.

1)  Looking at urban policy in India.

2) Exploring the idea of urban systems and networks outside the metropolitan map.

3) Local involvement in environmentally sound coastal tourism.

4) Comparing the impact of colonial histories on urban formations.

5) Exploring the relationship of fiction with architecture and urban spaces.

Since the internships form an integral part of our activities they also contribute to URBZ’ sustainability and are therefore paid programmes.

The internship fee  covers residential rent (in Dharavi/ Panjim), cost of internet, use of office space and the support provided by the URBZ team in community involvement as well as research and intellectual mentorship.

Fee Structure:

a. With residence in Dharavi / Panjim

International interns: US $ 500 a month

Local interns: Rs. 5000 a month

b. Without residence

International interns: US$ 250 a month

Local interns: Rs. 2,500 a month

Exceptions can be made for highly motivated individuals who cannot afford the internship. For further information please contact us.

Present Interns:

Dipti Hingorani (Spain/ UK)

Julia Siedle (Germany/ US)

Sytse De Maat (Netherlands / Switzerland)

Former Interns

Francesco Strocchio and Alberto Bottero, Torino, Italy

They are architecture students at Politecnico Di Torino.

Internship period: October 2009

Guillaume Folliot, Caen, France

Is a student at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie. He graduated in History, studying the production of Memory and the political use of history in media. He is now finishing a second graduation in Social Geography and Urban Issues. During his internship with URBZ he has mainly worked on two historical precincts linked with the Portuguese colonisation, Khotachiwadi in Mumbai and Fontainhas in Panaji – Goa. The aim of his work is to create databases with historical, cultural, urban and architectural information.

Interned with URBZ from April 1 to August 1, 2009

Swathi Shivanand,Bangalore, India

Student of Masters of Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Worked previously with The Hindu, Bangalore as a city reporter for two years. Post graduate diploma from Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Interned with URBZ from April 6- April 30 and June 1 – June 23, 2009.

Tilak Pattnaik, Mumbai, India

Tilak is a fifth year undergraduate from Metallurgical Engineering& Material Sciences at IIT Bombay. His interests include reading, playing, watching movies & anime and meeting & interacting with new people. He was a core group member of Techfest, IIT Bombay’s annual science & technology festival and Asia’s largest of its kind. He is also the chief editor of Pulse, IIT Bombay’s science & technology magazine.

Interning from June 1 2009 onwards

Namrata Mehta, Bangalore, India

Is a post-graduate student at CEMA, Centre for Experimental Media Art, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, interned with URBZ during the months of January and February 2009, for a two month project in Mumbai and Bangalore. The internship explored and sought to bring together the areas of participatory planning, community informatics, community media and web development.

Internship period: January 2009 – March 2009