MG Road, Dharavi, Mumbai

The Homegrown Neighbourhoods workshop (Jan 8th-14th, 2013) looked at social and urban development processes in Mumbai. It involved a four day period in Mumbai exploring neighbourhoods and meeting people with whom we are working with  – mainly in Shivaji Nagar (Govandi), Uttkarsh Nagar (Bhandup) and our office in Dharavi. This was followed by a three day reflective and discussion based session at the institute office in Aldona, Goa.

This workshop saw the participation of friends and colleagues from various institutions around the world including the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the Swiss Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne, the Politecnico do Torino, the Max Planck Institute of the Study of Religous and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Columbia University and Harvard. It kicked off a collaborative research project aimed at producing critical concepts that can be used as tools of engagement for a pragmatic yet humane urbanism. By the end of the year we hope to have a series of essays exploring related themes in depth in various contexts and forms. We also hope that this collaboration will result in the organization of more workshops, studios and seminars with students and participants from Mumbai and other parts of the world.

First day session at the URBZ office in New Transit Camp, Dharavi, Mumbai.

Professor Amita Bhide who teaches at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and is an advisor to the Institute of Urbanology.

This was a significant moment for our ongoing work. We could reflect with academics and researchers from all over the world about themes close to our practice and deepen our engagements conceptually and intellectually. As practitioners we are acutely aware of how valuable the discursive space is and we were lucky to share experiences and ideas with a group of people that understands the spirit with which we work.

The Mumbai chapter involved explorations of “homegrown neighbourhoods” (the term which provides the title) in small groups and many discussions on the move. Participants could observe, discuss, critique and respond first hand to the contexts that shaped the themes of the workshop. The themes emerged from our ongoing work and the resource persons in Mumbai were essentially our local partners with whom we interact on an everyday basis.

From the Left: Pierre Frey (author of Learning from Vernacular), Vincent Kaufmann (Director of LASUR), both professors at the Swiss Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne (EPFL). From the right: Bhau Korde (social activist in Dharavi), Himanshu Keny (resident of Koliwada in Dharavi) and Matias Echanove (URBZ/Urbanology).

Centre: Irfan Khan community leader in Baiganwadi (Deonar-Govandi), explaining the mosque project to the workshop participants. Left and Right: Rahul Srivastava and Shardul Patil (URBZ/Urbanology).

Luca Pattaroni (Professor at EPFL) reading palms to children in Bhandup.

The intense sessions of observation, immersion, dialogues, became the fodder for the sessions in Goa. The office of the Institute in Aldona was formally inaugurated through the workshop. Debates about the informal and formal divisions  that shape most  perspectives on urban spaces today were critiqued and argued around threadbare, the concept of the tool-house was given the treatment by fire and the complex realms of economic activities and spatial arrangements – resonating at abstract and concrete levels – occupied much thought.  What was particularly rich was the perspectives that came from  the range of disciplines the participants represented, and the conversations across the Francophone and Anglophone social science realms.

The workshop is a start of a series of collaborations between the participants who will continue to interact and communicate with us to deepen, sharpen and critically evaluate the concepts and ideas that shape our practice. From April onwards, we shall be putting up short blog posts that frame the themes and ideas discussed and  emerge from these ongoing discussions. These broadly center around the idea of the tool-house, which acts as a touch-stone for building bigger theoretical frameworks on cities and urbanism.

Smita Srinivas and Yehuda Safran,  professors of urban planning and architectural design at Columbia University respectively. Both are also advisors to the Institute of Urbanology.

Discussion at the Institute of Urbanology in Aldona, Goa. From left to right: Anush Kapadia (lecturer in social science at Harvard), Michele Bonino (Prof at Politecnico do Torino & principal architect at Studio Marc), Sytse de Maat and Tobias Baitsch (PhD students at EPFL), and Ajay Gandhi (Post-Doc anthropologist at Max Planck Institute).

Gabriela Santana (architecture student at Escola da Cidade, Sao Paulo and member of URBZ Brazil)

We are particularly thankful to Vincent Kauffman and Luca Pattaroni, from Lasur, EPFL who provided the basic infrastructure and also bought in a big group from their institution. To Peter van der Veer of the Max Planck Institute for supporting the attendance of their members, to Mark Wigley Dean at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, for supporting the participation of Yehuda Safran and Smita Srinivas, and to all our friends who came on their own.

We are grateful to our advisor, the writer Amitav Ghosh who so generously opened his house to welcome the guests in Goa and whose intellectual contributions that evening remained with us all through the sessions the next two days.

Photos by Julien Gregorio. More photos of the workshop here.

The author of this article, Marcella Aruda, is a student of architecture at Escola da Cidade, Sao Paulo, Brazil. She participated in a three days workshop organized by URBZ in Paraisopolis. The students are seen interacting with local builder Ataide in the picture above.

What are the most productive and socially relevant roles that the architect and architecture student can play today? I ask this question because as a student of the discipline in Brazil, I feel that the architect’s social function has lost direction a bit. What I want to explore in this short essay is: How can Brazilian architecture colleges best prepare the student to practice his social function?

In the end of the 20th century, Brazil could be considered an urban country: in 2000, the population living in cities exceeded 2/3s of the whole country’s population, reaching 138 million people. This process of urbanization was lead by the cities in the southeast, principally São Paulo, and then started to expand to other regions.

While the medium annual rate of urban growth in 2010 was 1.9%, the São Paulo periphery’s growth rate was above 6% (Whitaker). In 2011 a government report (IBGE) states that 11.4 million people in Brazil live in unstable settlements, or as we refer to them here, in favelas. Also, the same report declared, that 3.2 million of low-income houses are mainly concentrated in the southeast region. That covers 49.8% of all such residences in the country with almost 23.2% of the lot being only in São Paulo.

Reflecting on these numbers it must be reiterated that most of these houses were constructed by people themselves or local pedreiros, (contractors, skilled masons, small builders) without any technical or scientific help of any other professional – just with their know-how, and skills gained through what they learned by doing.

Sketches of local constructions in Paraisopolis by students of Escola da Cidade. More here.

Considering that architects study, project and construct spaces where social relations take place – and that they have the scientific and technical knowledge to do it, it would be very helpful on all counts if they should be part of the process of building in these irregular settlements.

What happens today is that, in Brazil, the majority of architects only work for 10% of the population. That is, most architects’ produce a wide of range of output only for the ones who can pay a significant price for having this ‘privilege’. In such a scenario, as a student of architecture who is also supposed to be socially conscious, how exactly do I see my role?

The need of bringing back the importance of the architect’s role in society is imperative. Along with this it is also important to change the way we see architecture: “not anymore as some individual aesthetic expression, but as an ethical and aesthetic one” (Tomaz Lotufo). The question is: how?

Maybe if we should try and understand why the process of letting go the ‘social concern’ happened in the first place we may get some clues. In the university, the architecture student learns about his role in society, however, it mainly narrows to a theoretical understanding. There is no practical learning.

The acknowledgement of a social role only emerges when awareness grows; and this consciousness only comes alive when we empathize with others in a different context, know how it is to be in another’s place, wh know other realities besides our own. And one can only know another reality if one cohabits and lives with it and establishes a relationship with ‘other’ people, who are part of it.

Paraisopolis viewed from a rooftop

Supermarket built by pedreiro Ataide in Paraisopolis (previous shot taken from this roof). Escola da Cidade students studied this construction in detail and presented their finding to the pedreiro, the community and the municipality.

Inside the supermarket. Ground floor starts functioning while construction is ongoing on the upper floors.

Pedreiro Ataide with market owner in front of the store. Trust and reputation is everything for a local builder.

A good address in Paraisopolis.

Being in touch with social reality is extremely substantial, in that it develops an understanding of a culture – of ways of doing, building, exchanging and also relating to the people themselves as well as to the urban space as a whole. Besides, it generates the practice of collective values, which collaborates to create collective life and social organization.

Thinking it through this way, a socially relevant project can be a way of constructing this relationship and this proximity with this social reality, and starting to signify a way and a means to get to an end. That is: the community, mainly the pedreiros, and architecture students can work together to develop a collaborative achievement, in which the students learn with the local methods of construction, the culture of living and the way of relating in that context while the pedreiro can also get the technical and scientific support he wants. What can be constructed through this is another way of thinking of the irregular settlements such as the favelas: learning what is done in this place, and developing a project that proposes new ways of dealing with this space’s problems and expanding the potential of what works.

Emanating from the pedreiro’s project, the student can give consultancy to the pedreiro, contribute to the project with ideas for an easier way to make the built form, share details of design, exchange ideas of transforming what was meant to be done, harmonize cost and quality, suggest better distribution of rooms, and many other things (but always by remembering that we must not change everything, and strive to keep the language and the essence of what was first provided).

Moreover, this idea of collaboration must involve not only the pedreiro and the student, but also the owner/contractor, the community and, ideally even the authorities. If the project is lead by the pedreiro, who gets the ‘consultancy’ of the student, it can also be constructed by the local labor? This way it would contribute to the local economy and would engage the community, create a sense of belonging necessary to generate the idea of value and also enhance the maintenance of what’s being built.

Marcella showing the group’s output to pedreiro Ataide.

Furthermore, if the city hall, instead of investing in buildings ‘planted’ in the middle of the favela’s space and contracting a company to construct it, could finance the pedreiros (providing capital for the construction) and this would generate jobs in the community and provide tools for their own development.

Of course, this whole idea of involving the neighborhood, the pedreiros and the students is extremely new in all aspects (and also an innovation in academic environment as well as in the social one). How does one introduce a new way of doing and building in an already established culture? How do we set up the participation of the architect in this already established relation chain?

These are questions we will be able to answer only when we start working. Sometimes the process unfolds when the practice starts. However, what we certainly know is that if there is one particular ingredient in place then the process will be smooth. That ingredient is trust. The collaboration between the architecture student and the pedreiro (as a delegate of the community) is only possible by launching a relationship between both: a social contact, a familiarity, basically by instituting trust.

Students show their study to Elisabete França, director of the Secretariat de Habitaçao in Sao Paulo. Left Bhau Korde and Fernando Botton.

Urban Typhoon, Khirkee, New Delhi, was held between November 9 to 16, 2010. This was the 3rd edition of the Urban Typhoon, organized by URBZ in partnership with KHOJ.

The report for the workshop is out! It can be downloaded via these links:

http://urbanlab.org/UrbanTyphoonKhirkee2010.pdf (low resolution – for web)
http://urbanlab.org/UrbanTyphoonKhirkee2010-highres.pdf (high-resolution – for print)

For the URBZ Team, and for all the participants this is a moment to celebrate and reflect.

The focus of each Urban Typhoon is the bringing together of local residents with invited participants – who are interested in the particular neighbourhood – to brainstorm collectively and produce new projections, alternative visions, ideas and solutions for the neighbourhood. The Urban Typhoon can only happen when the practitioners are invited by residents or groups active in a neighbourhood. They are usually connected to a cause or issue that the residents are trying to solve. In Shimokitazawa (Tokyo) and Dharavi’s Koliwada (Mumbai), the residents where opposing a redevelopment project by the authorities which would have reduced the residents autonomy and threatened the identity of the neighbourhood. In Khirkee we were invited by KHOJ, a leading art collective, in the context of their ongoing community arts initiative. Although KHOJ was already dialoguing and working with residents, it was harder than elsewhere to get residents involved before the workshop started. The Urban Typhoon Khirkee thus focused on establishing relationships and starting projects that Khoj could subsequently continue with the help of some of the workshop’s participants. This seems to have happened in different ways.

The fact that KHOJ is an artists collective was particularly significant. Art is central to the workshops. As long as art is defined in a way that includes collective engagements, as long as urban practitioners value the presence of creativity and imagination as fundamentals of living, art is far from incidental. Even in the past, the most successful projects were the one run by artists. We believe that artists often have a very creative way of engaging with the context and people. This is more important than the output. The output will be good if good relationships have been established. Artists and other creative practitioners are essential in an event like Urban Typhoon for these reasons.

We look at knowledge as something that encompasses expression, imagination and experience. Knowledge without these is only an abstraction. Subsequently, knowledge exchange happens at ALL levels in these workshops. Of course, there is also knowledge production. The Urban Typhoon produces new ways of looking at familiar places for residents. A new context puts the previous experience of the invited guests in a new perspective and allows them to get deeply immersed in an environment that they may have otherwise overlooked or ignored. They learn about the place and experiment with their practices. The most interesting knowledge creation happens when local residents and guests find a common ground to discuss local issues and understand how they are related to larger issues affecting everyone. When communication channels of this kind are opened and activated knowledge starts flowing both ways and new knowledge is produced through a creative process.

In each workshop, a local group’s involvement with the locality is extremely important – especially as they continue to engage with each other in real time and presence. Without the involvement of local groups the workshop becomes superficial. Local groups allow Urban Typhoon to connect with an ongoing history of the neighborhood, local activism or local interventions. It also allows activities and relationships that were started during the Urban Typhoon to continue afterward. This gives great meaning to the event. We were particularly happy to do this with Khoj, because we knew the team would make sure the activities continued and the relationships sustained.

The workshops are collaborative. As long as the projects and participants agree on collective authorship, with individuals and groups signing within their acceptable zones of comfort, whatever the arguments, discussions, conflicts and complexities that emerge are never a problem.

URBZ sees itself as a hackivists group who aims at understanding the complexities of the system (at the level of a neighbourhood in the case of Urban Typhoon) and plug-in “devices” (events, interventions, projects) that subvert the system and modify the output. This type of intervention draws its social meaning through inclusiveness and crowd-sourcing. It also confronts conflicts creatively.

Conflicts are part of the workshop at the levels of process and output. But they are never a hassle. They help generate fresh perspectives as we saw in this workshop too. What remains unsolved are not being able to put processes for follow up on certain projects that had high expectations into place. These include the road and sewage project.

In Khirkee it was harder to get local residents involved. And this therefore become the focus of the whole workshop: “how do we engage?” The insider/outsider problematic became larger than necessary mainly because of the doubts and guilt of some of the outsiders who feared that the workshop may become exploitative of the context. Through discussion, we would address this and engage the issues as meaningfully as possible. The larger proportion of artists also helped create a high quality output and presented it in a whole new way. We made it clear that no PowerPoint presentation should be used for the final day presentation and that they would need to take place in the street. This was a great success, which did produce nice connections with passersby and by stimulating many questions and discussions.

The workshop tried its best to be multilingual and inclusive. It valued co-creation between guests and local residents the most. Urban Typhoon’s methodology has always been one of inclusiveness, of other approaches and methods as well. Even if a participating team had a strongly top-down approach. This has happened in the past, especially with architects who often find it the hardest to connect with the community. We try not to be ideological about things. But in the end we can clearly see the type of output that has been produced through different approaches and our experience is that in the context of the Urban Typhoon, the teams which have been able to bring together people from different backgrounds and perspectives into common projects are the most innovative and successful ones.

At Khirkee, people across disciplines worked together in many projects. We only wish that more local residents would have joined the workshop from the beginning. Fortunately, the workshop came to them and integrated them in many different and creative ways.

In terms of follow-up we are very much looking forward to working with Khoj on specific project ideas that the workshop generated. A few participants have continued the work they have started during the workshop with the support of Khoj.

All the photos taken during the workshop are available here.

The report was compiled and designed by Karin Andersson.

The 3rd edition of the Urban Typhoon workshop is about to begin in Khirkee, New Delhi. This workshop follows the Urban Typhoon Shimokitazawa, Tokyo in 2006 and the Urban Typhoon Kholiwada-Dharavi, Mumbai in 2008. This is a good time to reflect on its purpose and methodology. These notes are aimed at all the participants of the Urban Typhoon Khirkee as well as anyone interested in the practice of participatory planning, community art and urban action-research initiatives in any part of the world.

1. The Urban Typhoon workshop was born in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo in 2006 through discussions with activists and academics who were looking for new forms of advocacy and participation based on local knowledge and cultural practices. The neighbourhood of Shimokitazawa was, and still is, threatened by the construction of a large speedway cutting across its dense urban fabric. Shimokitazawa, Koliwada-Dharavi and Khirkee are what we would refer to as 1) user-generated neighbourhoods, and 2) neighbourhoods in formation.

2. User-generated neighbourhoods are places where participatory development is already alive, even if un-self-consciously. The users are the residents, the shopkeepers, artisans, manufacturers and even visitors and other travelers. They all shape the neighbourhood in small ways, through their “practices of everyday life” and collectively make it alive. User-generated neighbourhoods are not a collection of architectural objects. Over time they develop their own character (or “spirit”) and respond to users in particular ways. They are often complex, contested, and threatened. Their users are typically deeply attached to them for personal reasons and accused of being dysfunctional and backward. We see user-generated neighbourhoods as ancient and futuristic at the same time. They ring a special cord with net-generation architectivists, urbanologists and other hackers and artists who see them as learning grounds for new social practices.

3. Neighbourhoods in formation are neighbourhoods that are being constantly developed and improved by their users. So-called “slums” and “informal settlements” often fall in this category. They stand in sharp contrast with master planned and mass developed settlements which have to be centrally managed and maintained and leave little scope for user’s intervention, outside of formal structures and bureaucratic processes. Neighbourhoods in formation derive their value through the way they are being used, not by the speculative market. Neighbourhoods in formation usually improve over time. When left to develop in their own terms, they often become popular destinations for cultural tourists and youth hunting for “authenticity” or a space outside the grid. Neighbourhoods in formation are typically portrayed as messy and dysfunctional by developers and the planning authorities, who see them as raw material for construction projects.

4. Participation can happen anywhere, when people feel the need to get involved with their social and physical environment. It is never as high as when all residents are simultaneously affected by a disaster that they must address collectively. More often than not, these disasters are man-made. Khirkee seems to be in permanent crisis, with roads being systematically flooded or destroyed and sewage spilling along the streets. Many initiatives have been taken by the residents and local organizations such as KHOJ. Many have failed, few have succeeded. Rather than proposing new participatory methods or “solutions”, we must understand what systems of participation already exist in Khirkee and how they can be used in the most effective ways.

5. Urban Typhoon workshops make sense only when they can be organized in partnership with a local group. In this case, KHOJ, which has been present and active in Khirkee for 12 years invited URBZ to organize a workshop. URBZ and KHOJ have been working together to prepare the workshop. KHOJ is bringing its experience of the neighbourhood, its local network and opens the possibility of continuing some of the projects that will be started during the workshop afterward. URBZ is bringing its experience in organizing participatory workshops, its global network and the enthusiasm of its team.

6. Participants come from Khirkee, other parts of Delhi, other cities and other countries. It is more difficult to get participants from Khirkee than from abroad. Locally, people are typically disillusioned, skeptical or busy. Registered participants on the other hand are often extremely motivated and full of goodwill. One of the main challenge for participants coming from other places will be to find respectful and constructive ways to engage with people in Khirkee. The workshop doesn’t offer a formula for participation. The equation with “the community” has to be invented by all participants individually and collectively. This is where creativity is most needed.

7. The “community” may not exist before we create it in some way and it is often invoked most concretely only in a collective process. Khirkee has many traditional communities, which may themselves be internally divided. The attempt of the  workshop is to bring together people from different parts of the neighbourhood and beyond to help the emergence of a new network of people through the process of working and brainstorming together. Such an event has to be understood as a creative one, which helps transform perspectives and brings shifts in perception and action. Community arts initiatives have often been trivialised by both, activists and artists. We feel that its is only through a process that evokes and works with the idea of the creative and the collective that major strides can be taken in both realms. The first as well as the final challenge is often simply about discovering a shared sense of purpose.