View from the URBZ office. Photo taken by Stefano Boeri.

Suspect activity has been observed in Dharavi in the last days, particularly around New Transit Camp and the URBZ office. An unusual number of Italians have been seen walking around the neighbourhood, some of them taking pictures and even measuring a vacant plot on Mahatma Gandhi Road. Is the Italian mafia spreading its tentacles all the way to the most contested piece of real estate in the world?

It turns out that the visiting Italians comprised of many different groups, all related in one way or the other to URBZ’s activities. First came Francesco Strocchio and Alberto Bottero, two graduating architecture students from the Politecnico di Torino, who were sent by double-agent Subhash Mukerjee of Studio Marc, who, it turns out had participated in the Urban Typhoon workshop in Koliwada (2008). Francesco and Alberto have been working on the design of a Social Club for street children and elderly residents in New Transit Camp. This is a project for which URBZ is looking for funding at the moment (just in case you know someone willing to give for a good cause!)

Then came Marco Ferrario and Rakhi Mehra of Micro Home Solutions, a social housing initiative based in Delhi. Their approach is truly interesting in that they try to combine micro-finance with architectural solutions. We talked about a housing project for rickshawalas in Delhi. They also gave us some tips about how to make our own ideas fundable through micro-credit style investments.

Marco Ferrario, Francesco Strocchio, Rakhi Mehra, Matias Echanove, Alberto Bottero, Rahul Srivastava in URBZ office.

The same day we also had the magical visit of Neva Pedrazzini, a scholar of historical preservation who has worked in Milan, Lisbon, Barcelona, La Havana and Venice. She immediately recognized Dharavi as being part of the cultural heritage of Mumbai and India. Her notion of heritage involves change as a principle of conservation. Historical urban spaces and landscapes, she says, should be lived in a sustainable way. Preservation is about preserving life and culture, not just the physical structures.

Just when we thought that the Italian wave of Dharavi was over, the Don of architectural Dons knocked on the door ofour office. We had the honor to receive Stefano Boeri with his wife Maddalena Bregani in our humble office. Before we could even think of interviewing him, he had turned the camera on us and asked us to tell him all about URBZ and Urbanology. Fascinating discussions followed in which we agreed to collaborate on a theoretical platform for the 21st makeshift city.

Stefano declared the office as occupying a mythical space in the world of urban theory and practice. Myth is that special location in the world of imagination and practice that, more than anything else, opens new gateways. He left us with our minds bowling with new ideas and projects, which will soon fill these electronic pages.

“Mitico!”: Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava, Alberto Bottero, Maddalena Bregani, Stefano Boeri, Francesco Strocchio. Stefano was a co-author of the ground-breaking book Mutations, with Rem Koolhaas.

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

Detailed Instructions for using the URBZ site.

One of the most important thing for the website to properly is to make sure that you have the latest browser on your system. We request you to download the latest copy of either ONE of the following browsers.

Mozilla Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.net (Recommended)
Opera: http://www.opera.com/
Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/
Apple Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Internet Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/

1. The user must first register to be able to create and modify pages. You must have received your logging and password by email already. If that’s not the case, please let us know.

2. Once logged in to the account, you can create pages by clicking “Add new” under “Pages” To write blog posts, select “Add new” under “Posts”

3. You are then presented with a “Rich Text Editable Environment” to compose a post or a page. Adding media (images, videos, audio) is simple: Just use the “add media” menu and upload the image / video from the next screen that pops up.

4. Insert the image / video in the post. Click on “insert into post” to add the image in the page. Using the rich text editor one can modify the text, layout and the image (size of the image / its alignment) etc. As you start working more with the system you will find it that it is almost as similar as using a word processor such as Microsoft Word.

5. Another option is to upload all the images to the URBZ flickr account and then insert them directly into the post. Click on the Flick button and then browse for the image among the photosets created that you want to insert into the post. . Click on “insert into post” to add the image in the page. Using the rich text editor one can modify the text, layout and the image (size of the image / its alignment) etc.

6. To add a flickr slideshow, click on the Flickr Slideshow icon as shown above, and enter the required details to add a slideshow. Make sure you keep the width less than 580px for ideal slideshow.

7. You can either upload your video at Vimeo or at YouTube and directly embed the same on the site. Click on the corresponding icon to get a pop-up window to upload a video. Check the above images for the same. After uploading the video enter the URL at the corresponding places to embed it.

8. As shown in the above image, just below the rich text editor, there is an option to geo-tag the post (i.e.: adding a geographical pointer on a google map). Just search the location of the place on the map and select click on the map to save that location. The most important thing then is to insert this exact line in your post/page: “wp_geo_map” This should be in bracket “[ ]“. This code automatically inserts the map in the desired location on the page.

9. Note that each and every page/posts should be “tagged”. Tags are nothing but keywords from the article written that distinguish it. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. The item’s creator chooses tags informally and personally. Don’t think too much about it and just put the keywords that come to your mind when you think about the post/page you just created.

10. When you create a new “Page” it is important to put it at the right place. To place a page, click on the parent attribute on the right hand side.

The system is highly involving. We keep adding more features based on user recommendation and our own experience. Feel free to comment below for any doubts / queries or feature requests or alternatively contact us directly.

The URBZ website takes off into cyberspace this week. With no loud explosions, no fire and lightning. Just a quiet floating off from its web-lab and field-sites where it was being built, evolved, brainstormed and experimented along with a series of activities and initiatives we conducted in cities, studios, streets and beaches all over the world.

The massive global virtual network that is the world wide web has been visualized as a version of galactic expanse. Its virtuality gives in to easy interpretations as being somehow above human life. However, a closer look reveals it to be a connection of minds, thoughts and experiences – a connection of people and their lives through an intricate, interactive communication network.

No wonder some prefer to think of the virtual world as an underground channel, rooted as much as possible in the tasks and travails of human engagement. Still others see it as mirroring our lives in all capacities. Sometimes it emerges in our dreams as one huge gigantic city, with billions of labyrinthine streets, alleyways, roads, bazaars, and homes, full of teeming human energy, producing, interacting, exchanging, copulating, living lives. Either way, the most important thing about it is that it is a system that simultaneously feeds and is fed by the energy of its users. That is what makes it so potent. That’s what makes it possible to think of it in a variety of ways, makes it possible to be used so diversely, in a myriad of  styles, for so many things. There are few systems which actually invite people to contribute to the collective process of growth.

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Visit Us:

URBZ / Urbanology
Block No. 4/6/12
New Transit Camp, Dharavi
Mumbai 400-017, INDIA

See an access map to the

URBZ / Urbanology office