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urbz was founded in 2008 in Mumbai by Rahul Srivastava, Geeta Mehta and Matias Echanove. We are now a collective of urban researchers and practitioners based in various parts of the world.

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Architect

Andrés Sánchez

Architect, Anthropologist

Melissa Martinez Cañadulce

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As we continue our long-durée participatory methodology, we are also proud to acknowledge the long-term collaborators who have played a key role in supporting and enriching this approach.

One of the most enduring and meaningful collaborations has been with the Engineers for Social Impact @nyuad_efsi program at New York University, Abu Dhabi Campus.

For the past decade, professor Matt Karau has led engineering students from this program to urbz, Mumbai, where the urbz team integrates the students into the ongoing community-led projects, allowing them to test and apply their learnings outside of a classroom setting.

This year marks a decade of this partnership, built on mutual learning, shared values, and a commitment to co-creating with local communities.

We’ve just concluded yet another dynamic week of the Handstorm workshop with the latest cohort of @nyuad_efsi students.

As we celebrate this milestone, here are a few glimpses from past years that reflect the spirit and impact of this ongoing collaboration.

Stay tuned for more updates about this year’s workshop with NYUAD!

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Image 1: 2025 cohort along with urbz team and the community members of Dharavi Koli Jamat

Image 2: 2025, NYUAD students at the Customs House Study Space

Image 3: 2024 cohort, at the Dharavi Koliwada Fish Market

Image 4,5: 2023, Exhibition with the NYUAD students at the urbz office

Image 6: 2019, site visit with the NYUAD students

Image 7,8: 2018, site visits and discussions at the old urbz office

Image 9: 2017, Matt, Rahul and Matias (initiators of the collaboration)

Image 10: 2016, NYUAD students hard at work on the cool roof

Image 11: 2015, students experimenting on an illuminated apparel

With the support of the @rearc.institute, urbz has been co-designing an intervention within a shared habitat in a mangrove forest surviving in a dense and concretised city. ‘The Garden of Festivities’ is a project that attempts to unite livelihood concerns with an ecological imagination that grows from the Kolis collective, ancestral knowledge and expertise.

The first step of the project is a participatory landscape intervention on the last remaining commons within a habitat they are struggling to preserve.

Read the full article on urbz.net, link in the bio!

#CommunityLedDesign #KoliHeritage #EcologicalUrbanism #ParticipatoryDesign #MumbaiCoastline #MangroveConservation

Continuamos aprendiendo de los procesos diversos en la ciudad de Cali. Junto con @lomeritos.siloe y @camino_albarrio hemos podido comprender sus proceso e iniciar el apoyo a un proyecto de Espacio Experimental de Música y una Cocina Comunitaria. Estas organizaciones a través de sus procesos consolidan experiencias de participacion colectivas valiosas en el marco del ejercicio realizado por urbz y @somoscali500. #cali #participation #community #homegrownneighbourhood

Thank you Azure magazine for featuring urbz!

The urbz, Mumbai team along with the Dharavi Koli Jamat and many members from the community have been working on the ABCD of Koliwada project, made possible by the @rearc.institute.

Samidha Patil and Kareena Kochery, spoke to @novakovicto from @azuremagazine about the embeddedness of the practice, reductionist conceptions of places as 'slums' or 'informal', and the participatory methodology of urbz.

Check out azuremagazine.com to read the full article. Or if you can, get yourself a copy! The issue features five conversations with creatives from around the globe. Can't wait to get our copies!

Dharavi has creativity and diversity deeply embedded into its landscape. It houses schools, hospitals, mosques, temples, pottery studios, craftsmen, leather industries, textile workshops, food production units, markets, people from all over India and much more. This mix creates a unique urban settlement, facilitating interactions and arrangements that are just as unique. Dharavi combines spatial density with temporal intensity - if no one quite understands how so many people can be accommodated over the 590 acres of Dharavi, it is even harder to figure out how people manage their time. Days seem long enough to juggle jobs, businesses, industries, social work, friendships, festivals, carnivals, commerce, community, families, children, and drawn-out chai breaks.

Our project, 1000 Voices, aims to understand this grand terrain through the perspective of people, through their presence and activities, and keep on reproducing it day after day.

Click on the link in the bio to read the collection!

Everywhere
Bogotá
Geneva
Mumbai
Paris