MUMBAI. URBZ / Urbanology, Mumbai; Ensamble Studio / POPlab, Spain /USA

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1 MUMBAI URBZ / Urbanology, Mumbai; Ensamble Studio / POPlab, Spain /USA Never before have creative collaborations between planners, architects, local groups and end-users been, at once, so conflict ridden and full of potential. Unleashing them requires overcoming narrow interests and miscommunication. What we envision here is not a speculative future, but an expanded present, where inhabitants can at last reclaim growth for themselves! 28 Mumbai

2 Mumbai: Beyond the Slum and the High-Rise Mumbai is a city of disparate and incoherent habitats, loosely tied into a restless, shape-shifting whole. It emerged through various historical encounters; from marshy margins of medieval kingdoms, to expansive Portuguese colonial landscapes, from a constrained English port city to its latest rebranding as a global metropolis - the dense and intense city we know today. Mumbai continues to evade attempts to reshape into a modern, standardized metropolis. At the frontier of this (eroding) resistance are hundreds and thousands of tiny homes squeezed into a disproportionately small share of the city s land. These little homes exist in large interconnected collectives and often serve as both residences and workspaces. The tool-house, which combines and compresses various functions, is a distinctive housing archetype across Asia. Its other avatars include Singapore s shop-house and Tokyo s home-factory. These efficient live-work spaces exist in fact all around the world, independently of geographies and classes. In Mumbai the toolhouse, which generates value through its use rather than land speculation, is the lifeline that keeps millions of people afloat and allows them to grow roots and a future in the city. Many poor artisanal communities, manual workers and small time traders - often from castes historically belonging to the so-called low strata - live a life of economic survival and productivity in these spaces. In the name of redevelopment, the neighborhoods are progressively being replaced by mono-functional high-rise residential blocks, revealing the arrested imagination of the authorities. The complex reality of officially designated slums in Mumbai is quite distant from what the hackneyed term implies. Seeing them for what they are, as homegrown neighborhoods, helps discover their history, their systems of organization and spatial innovations. These reportedly absorb well over half of the metropolis 12 million residents. They are developed locally, incrementally, and against all odds. If instead of feeling threatened by a planet of slums that need to be cleared, we believe in a planet of neighborhoods and habitats, which are in different stages of evolution, we can do greater justice to those living in them. This will help reclaim the idea of growth in ways that escape old-fashioned notions of urban development to pave the way for richer and more diverse environments, shaped by users needs and aspirations. Imagining how growth could happen in such dense and use-intensive environments - and in different directions-, we explore new technologies and grounds. The air appears as new territory to conquer, where live-work conditions and public infrastructures recover their rightful place, thus liberating the excessive pressure on land. Through design, the existing incompatibility between typology and scale gets diluted, the productive hybridization -that is inherent to the spirit of the place- is reinforced and new alternatives to single-minded redevelopment strategies become refreshed. The in-situ work of URBZ and the inventive explorations of Ensamble Studio / MIT-POPlab, - in turns a creative and troubled collaboration- draw a collage of tactics, technologies, visions and imaginations. They prevent an automatic disqualification of homegrown neighborhoods to present them - not as tabula- but as a tabula pronta with real value to drive any development strategy. At the end, it is the users themselves who will make the final difference, by seizing the tools of institutions and experts to continue doing what they have always done control and shape their environments with higher levels of professionalism and sensibility than those who deliberately ignore them-. Cities would be substantially different if their processes of urbanization could match up with that. It is time for radical, incremental strategies that bring together local and global experiences and align them with users of urban space. 29 UrbZ / Urbanology & Ensamble Studio / POPlab

3 URBZ/ Urbanology URBZ/ Urbanology learns from its environment while contributing to its improvement. Its research, designs and projects are intended to be directly relevant to the neighborhoods where it works. After 5 years in Dharavi, the URBZ office is now operational from Shivaji Nagar in the northern suburbs of Mumbai. URBZ has projects and collaborators in Mumbai, Goa, Sao Paulo, and Cairo. URBZ values incremental development and everyday life practices and engages directly with residents and local actors. It aims to contribute to the debate on urban development by collaborating with end-users and local actors, creating new concepts, implementing projects and recommending strategies and policies. URBZ/ Urbanology sharpened its methodology through years of engagement in New York, Bogota, Tokyo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Goa and Mumbai. It was founded by Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava and Geeta Mehta. / Acknowledgements URBZ/ Urbanology team: Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava, Yehuda Safran, Jai Bhadgaonkar, Shardul Patil, Aditi Nair, Bharat Gangurde, Shyam Kanle; Mumbai Photographs: Ishan Tankha; Architectural and art work by Sameep Padora, Diane Athaide, Aki Lee, Itai Margula, Ismini Christakopoulou. Ensamble Studio / POPlab Ensamble Studio is a multidisciplinary team founded in 2000 on the lookout for new approaches to the design and construction of architectural & urban environments. Among the studio s most relevant completed works are Hemeroscopium House and Reader s House (Madrid, Spain), The Truffle (Costa da Morte, Spain) or Telcel Theater (Mexico City); all of them exposed structures that explore the essence of materials and technologies to build space. Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa, principals of Ensamble Studio, are founders of POPlab (Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where practice and research agendas meet, with the mission of bridging the gaps between architecture and science, architecture and urban design, architecture and infrastructure, architecture and people; thus producing spaces thought for their users, functional and economic, efficient and innovative, poetic and real. POPlab develops projects at different scales, from the building to the urban system it is inserted in, balancing imagination with reality. In this hands-on laboratory knowledge is achieved through action and ideas aim at being tested in our physical world. / poplab.mit.edu Acknowledgements Ensamble Studio/ POPlab team: Antón García-Abril, Débora Mesa, Marie Benaboud, Simone Cavallo, José María Lavena, Massimo Loia, Borja Soriano, Erin Soygenis. 30 Mumbai

4 Homegrown Neighborhoods or Arrested Development? Communities have demonstrated in-house building skills for a very long time. It is this propensity that is relied upon when contemporary cities cannot provide homes for poorer residents. Instead of acknowledging the ability of people to construct, modernize and improve habitats, and help align them with a growing city, authorities and professional builders prefer razing them to build low quality mass housing instead - responding to a speculation fuelled real estate market. (facing page). The persistence of Homegrown neighbourhoods is a sign of initiative and agency against heavy odds. With granting them security of tenure and by recognizing that proportionate urban space in a city can be legally used by those who cannot afford market rates, such neighbourhoods can change into quality habitats. (This page) 31 UrbZ / Urbanology & Ensamble Studio / POPlab

5 Planet of Slums? One way of appreciating the full potential of homegrown neighbourhoods is by acknowledging it as a universal reality. One can see its expression in places as diverse as Mumbai, Italy and Tokyo. The collages on this page serve as a useful provocation. They express the propensity of users to improve and shape their habitats over time to produce vibrant and functional neighbourhoods. From top to bottom, these mashups show Dharavi mixed up with streets in Perugia (Italy), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Shenzhen (China) and Tokyo (Japan). 32 Mumbai

6 33 UrbZ / Urbanology & Ensamble Studio / POPlab Growing Homes The Tool-House, is a residential cum workspace that is the defining typology of many homegrown neighbourhoods in Mumbai and other Asian cities. Derived historically from the artisans or traders home, it is the basic unit of an urban fabric that seems anachronistic for today s excessively zoned, planned urban norms. If rebooted and validated, it can help re-vitalize urban spaces even in rich cities. It has the potential to garner resources more evenly and significantly improve neighbourhood infrastructure and quality of urban life.

7 Reclaim Growth! The office of URBZ in Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, one of the most marginalized localities in Mumbai, has lived the life of a typical homegrown structure. Municipal authorities once destroyed it because -like virtually every house in the area- it grew above the authorized 14 feet height, beyond which only impermanent structures are permitted. It was then rebuilt with lightweight material. Next page: URBZ continues to co-design and participate in the growth of its neighbourhood. The builder of the URBZ office is a partner in a project that seeks to optimize existing practices with the help of architects sp+a and engineering firm ARUP. The whole team is keen on evolving pragmatic responses to affordable housing needs within the homegrown template. The accompanying drawings are the basis of an actual project in construction. Homegrown landscapes can expand urban horizons for everyone. In the image at the bottom of the page, an artist responds to the project and conjures up her version of its many possibilities. 34 Mumbai

8 35 UrbZ / Urbanology & Ensamble Studio / POPlab