Cities and graphic narratives have a special connection. So much so that landscapes from an artist’s imagination can infect urban practitioners who may want to translate them into concrete entities. 

What if traditional rural settlements were historic urban nuclei?

All you need to bring along are your hands, a desire to produce something useful and beautiful which you feel the residents would love to use and loads of enthusiasm.

While residents may live here and work elsewhere, this neighbourhood also shows a high level of its own economic activities.

Touring Dharavi, it becomes obvious to many visitors that people in Dharavi might be poor in relative terms, but they are not very ashamed.

In Rio “pacification” is a code word to describe the invasion of neighborhoods by squads of policemen walking around their guns pulled out, ready to shoot. 

It is commonplace in Brazil that ‘favelas’ are a pervasive part of the urban landscape. Recently however, alternative, bottom-up models have emerged that slowly change this scenario.

Does Dharavi reveal a contemporary urban model that defies functional urbanism?

The competition for land, rather than the traditional competition for tenants, was especially exacerbated in sites of growing industrialization and development like Bombay. 

In collaboration with local pedreiro Ataide, the urbz team helps build a house in Paraisoplis right from digging the foundations.