Often dubbed “Asia’s largest slum,” Dharavi is in fact a heart-shaped agglomeration of primarily informal settlements that bustle with economic activities. It is located literally in the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital. Dharavi was once a remote settlement on the outskirts of the city, bordered by swampy land and marshes and one end and a Koli fishing village at the other. Today, due to Mumbai’s rapid northward expansion, it finds itself strategically located between the city’s two main suburban railway lines and a stone’s throw away from the Bandra-Kurla Complex, the new financial and commercial center.

These geographic advantages and Mumbai’s relative shortage of land available for development combine to make Dharavi a prime piece of real estate potentially worth billions of dollars, creating pressure for redevelopment. Read more about Dharavi.

The URBZ team has been active in Dharavi for about three years, organizing workshops, studio, parties and musical events, writing papers, fictions and articles, maintaining a network of friends and soon opening an office there. One of proudest creation is the wiki site dharavi.org (meaning dharavi.organic), which is the most comprehensive source of information about Dharavi anywhere.

dharavi.org is a multimedia wiki website designed to gather information, images, and ideas on Dharavi in Mumbai. Dharavi is one of the largest informal settlement in the world. dharavi.org offers a space to discuss the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, its potential consequences and its alternatives. Many researchers and concerned parties have contributed content to this open access Website.

Contributions are welcome regardless of political views, background, language or place of residence. Anyone can log in and create pages. Is is open source and open to all. Contributions can be in English, Hindi and Marathi. Translations are also welcome. We are in the process of developing a Hindi interface for dharavi.org.

dharavi.org runs on deki, a system powered by Mind Touch, a San Diego based startup. All the data uploaded on dharavi.org is backed-up and safe. Please go ahead and contribute!

www.dharavi.org

Art is crucial to what we do. Artists are an integral part of all our workshops, forge the most intimate links with communities and stimulate new ways of thinking about and imagining places. URBZ curates art exhibitions, organizes art events and works closely with artists in several of its activities.

The Urban Typhoon workshops in Tokyo and Mumbai had intense contributions by artists – visual, musical and other kinds. People let their guards down, connected to their lives through the space of the imagination and eventually contributed to the whole process most wholeheartedly because of their presence. In Dharavi, Mumbai based artist Himanshu S worked with children in developing a visual archive of homes and habitats through the images produced by them.The whole village was covered with images strung on every available space. He also invited the children to accompany him to paint over homes and walls in the village with their own ideas of what Koliwada was all about.

In the same vein, The MASHUP workshops are visualized as events that are energized by artists and those with a creative bent of mind. The idea that the world of urban engagement is as much about the imagination, about the ability to visualize, about dreams and aspirations is what convinced us that such exercises are intrinsic to what we do.

Essentially, the freedom of thought processes that is essential to art and creativity is the main ingredient of cities in which inhabitants lead the way ahead. This is testified repeatedly by the experinces that we have had in which individuals and communities responded wholesomely to the presence of art related events and activities in our workshops.

Besides, the exhibitions that we organize showcase the outputs of our own initiatives. The spirit of the Urban Typhoon, MASHUP and other workshops is relived through these exhibitions. They communicate the memory, ideas and images of those events at new venues.

Between March 16 to 22, 2008, nearly 100 people from Koliwada, Dharavi, Mumbai, India and other countries participated in a multidisciplinary workshop held in Koliwada. It documented the unique character of the village and produced alternative visions for its future at a time when the Government is planning a massive redevelopment of Dharavi, a large informal settlement where anything between 500,000 and 1 million people live. The land value of the 2.2 km sq. area, defined as Dharavi, is estimated at several billion dollars.

Koliwada is approximately 40,000 m sq. with an adult population of around 15,000 people. The population is mostly Hindu, but with a large Catholic presence, as well. This former fishing village is one of the oldest parts of Dharavi, with historical records pre-dating the existence of Mumbai. Many original residents are property owners and claim their right to develop the land themselves, refusing to be included in the redevelopment project of the Government.

This draft report includes many of the maps, drawings, photos, texts, and documents produced during the workshop. This material represents a work in progress that will lead to the production of a design plan for Koliwada. In the process of producing the material presented here, people from Koliwada and the rest of the world bonded together in a very unique way. Above all, it is this immaterial, intangible moment that this report reflects.

More material, including videos and updated reports are available on these websites:

http://www.dharavi.org

http://www.urbantyphoon.com

URBAN TYPHOONS are events during which local communities from particular neighbourhoods get together with urban practitioners from around the world to produce visions and ideas for a collectively authored effort at urban planning and transformation. The workshops are based on the premise that communities and neighbourhoods have the basic skills and talent to participate more effectively in the processes of urban planning or in simply making appropriate choices that affect their future and the future of their cities. During a ten day interactive event, resource-persons work in teams comprising of local residents and practitioners from everywhere to develop specific themes.

The first Urban Typhoon workshop was held in Shimokatazawa, Tokyo, Japan,in 2006. The second one took place in Koliwada, Dharavi, Mumbai, India in 2008.

Behind the specific contexts of the Urban Typhoon workshops lies a theme of great relevance for urban communities around the world: the participation of the residents in the planning of their urban environment. Over the past decade, participatory planning has gradually gained recognition in the fields of planning and development. Developing cities, such as Curitiba in Brazil, Bogota in Colombia, and Mumbai in India, have experimented with participatory schemes, inspiring other cities, as well as international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Residents’ participation has become an essential element of urban policy in the developing world, as well as in highly developed cities such as Tokyo.

URBAN TYPHOON Koliwada, Dharavi, Mumbai 2008

URBAN TYPHOON, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, 2006