Led by Vinayak Koli, our team walked through the lanes of Dharavi Koliwada to reach an L-shaped clearing in the low-rise high-density fabric. He pointed to a ruin of a building, a pile of yellow-grey basalt stone. Once surrounded by marshy waters and mangroves, we were looking at the last and probably only vestige of colonialism in Dharavi Koliwada - the site of a one-room customs outpost - now surrounded by brightly coloured Koli houses. This was not our first acquaintance with the site, we had been here numerous times before for a housing project adjacent to the clearing. Back then we didn’t know much about the history of the non-decrepit pile of stone. Vinayak filled us in, telling us how the British built the Customs house. Its purpose was to tax goods coming into the village by boat through the Mithi River estuary whose waters connected Dharavi to villages in Mahim, Bandra and beyond. 

Post-independence, it was handed over to the Income Tax and Revenue Department of India, which then handed it over to the Dharavi Koli Jamat. Soon after, the Jamat leased the room to Koli tenants who made a few additions to the structure. In the 1970’s the structure was vacated and fell into disrepair. He added that for a few years in its long history, it was also used as a police station. The earliest recorded presence of the structure was in the Laughton Survey of 1865. 

This silent pile of stones concealed a long history, they suddenly transformed into an important relic of Koliwada, a testament to the significance of Koli seafaring culture to British colonisers who controlled all lucrative trade routes. Most importantly it acts as a historical marker of an amphibious landscape, where the edge of land and water is always shifting - a perennial negotiation between local and global phenomena.  

We were there to understand if and how it could be rebuilt to function as a study space for college students in the neighbourhood. In one of the Koli Jamat meetings, a young chartered accountant spoke of how he used to find it difficult to find a peaceful space to study. He expressed a collective need for the neighbourhood - an accessible, dedicated space to dive into your books and study hard. A college degree is an aspiration for almost all the Koli youth who are now far removed from their indigenous occupation. This request triggered the imagination of the Dharavi Koli Jamat who thought of the customs house site as one with great potential. 

urbz is working on the ABCD project, here was the opportunity for a meaningful intervention that combines a current need with the site’s potential and contributes to the comprehensive development of the neighbourhood. In this spirit, we began work on the Customs House project in April 2024. We wanted to know as much about the structure as it used to stand. Students from NYU, Abu Dhabi, helped us with this. They were in Dharavi for the annual Handstorm workshop where they immersed themselves in our ongoing projects. 

In an attempt to reconstruct the collective memory of the site, we spoke with residents of Dharavi Koliwada and dug through city archives. We wanted to hear from students about their experiences, so we visited the different types of public study spaces in the city. To understand the primary material, basalt, we hunted down old stone structures in other Koliwadas and stumbled upon stone masons doing repair work when we visited the study space at Sion Fort. 

We presented our findings to the Dharavi Koli Jamat, which included young professionals and some youth. Together we formulated parameters that would help guide the first design iteration. In addition to a study space, we proposed that the space could double up as a small museum to highlight the significance of Dharavi Koliwada. This was well received and became part of the program. As we continued to discuss with the community, it became clear that the structure would have two storeys and need to be secured when not in use, especially at night. It was also decided to preserve the material memory of the site by sticking to the materials that the elderly residents remembered the structure to be made of - stone and wood with terracotta roof tiles. The pile of stone could live on, reabsorbed into the walls of the new structure. 

The site is all of 290 sq.ft. - not enough to provide study space for the entire neighbourhood, but enough to get started. It was important to utilise every inch of space - this is the design grammar of Dharavi at large. After exploring a few options with the Jamat, the design of the building began to emerge. The building took the natural shape of the site, it would be made of basalt and have a wooden roof with terracotta tiles. 

The Mangalore roof tile - a tiling system made by optimising the traditional Portuguese tile is commonly used across India. The shape of the customs site is curved at one end, consequently, both the plan and the roof have a curved profile. While the Mangalore tile is good for straight profiles, it doesn’t lend itself easily to curves. This pushed us to explore alternate tiling systems like the traditional Indian pot tile - a handmade pot thrown on a wheel and cut into two halves. Each half is one tiling unit and is laid by overlapping one into the other. Similar tiling systems are seen in Asia and northern Africa.

It has always been our practice to highlight the resources and skills of the contractors and artisans of Dharavi. The Kolis of Dharavi have adapted to alternate sources of livelihood and building construction is one of them. It was fitting that a local Koli contractor took care of the RCC and stone construction. He procured more salvaged stone from other sites around the city and found skilled stone masons, a tough task in Mumbai city. A young electrician duo from Koliwada did all the electrical work. The roof is being built by our friends from Design Jatra, who are specialists in vernacular architecture. The wood for the roof was sourced from a site 134 km away from Mumbai, the wood craftsmen come from villages in the same vicinity as the wood. Design Jatra also helped optimise the design of the pot tiles. The optimisation was needed to overcome certain drawbacks, which contributed to the decline of the Indian pot tile. But, weighing hugely in its favour is its superior performance over Mangalore tiles in reducing thermal heat gain.

The diversity of hands-on skills available in Dharavi has always inspired and impressed us. As architects experimenting with pot tiles, we couldn’t be more lucky to have Kumbharwada - a potters' village - within a walking radius of our site. Our long-time collaborator, Abbas Galwani, is a potter with a thriving practice in the heart of Kumbharwada. It was a no-brainer to approach him for the task at hand. After several attempts at optimisation, we collectively designed a pot tile that we hope could revive its use. As we write this, 15000 pot tiles are being meticulously handmade and fired in the kilns of Kumbharwada, Dharavi. 

There is a buzz in the neighbourhood as the project nears completion. The construction has been in full swing for the past couple of months, with the site even hosting 8 Australian builders who worked alongside Dharavi’s local building experts to complete the plinth. In addition to the ongoing design and construction, we are talking to the community about the life of the building post-completion of the structure. A few weeks ago we conducted a workshop with students from the neighbourhood. We discussed memberships and other organisational strategies that could serve the community best. A few college students living in the vicinity offered to take charge of the daily operations of the Customs House study space. Within months a collective need has been collectively responded to. 

urbz has been embedded in Dharavi Koliwada since 2008, starting with the Urban Typhoon workshop. Since then, we have been a part of several community-led projects from conception to construction. This project has been especially rewarding because it allowed us to co-design and revive a part of Koliwada’s history. We hope the Customs House enjoys a long new life as a study space. We are grateful to the Dharavi Koli Jamat for their trust in us, the young professionals for bringing in big energy, the elderly who shared their precious memories, Lalya the neighbourhood dog who guards the site at night, the hands that built the project, and the re:arc institute for their unconditional support.