Presentation at the Politecnico de Torino, December 1st, 2011

1.    Vulnerable Urban Age

Building in construction, Khar West, Mumbai. Photo by Priyanka @ urbz

We live in a vulnerable urban age – where many ambitions of the twentieth century seem to be coming apart. According to David Harvey, the connections between the financial crisis and urban “development” are very real. He connects it to the financial mismanagement of the real estate market, and also projects it on a larger story of urban politics. Today – bursting of real estate bubbles in Dubai, decaying infrastructure in the US, social unrest in London, are all part of the same story. We take as our starting point this vulnerability of the urban world that we accept as the normative.

2.    Post-Planning World

Add-on to Micro-Rayon Housing Projects, Moscow. Photo by Francisca Insulza, Merve Yucel and Evgeniya Nedosekina (Strelka).

One very important political goal that was expressed in urban civic terms in the twentieth century imagination was reducing inequality and providing a decent standard of living for as many sections of society as possible. Social housing projects in Europe and America were one manifestation of this social concern – but its highest point of achievement was in the Soviet Union. Today 70% of the population in the capital city of Moscow live in mass housing projects. However, In contemporary Moscow too we see how such projects have been overgrown by the post-planned city where structures and homes have been extended and personalized.

3.    The Natural City

House in Dharavi, Mumbai. Photo by anonymous KRVIA student.

The emerging economies of today – especially Brazil, India and Africa – are responding to the same impulses and imperatives as the post-planned city in Russia, US or Europe. The form that dominates much of the new urbanscape is what is often misrepresented as slums or the informal city. We refer to this as the natural city. The natural city is a urban cyborg, in a constant process of simultaneous decay and regeneration. It is neither pure nor perfect. Often polluted, corrupted and toxic itself, it is simply a manifestation of certain irrepressible processes of urban growth. It flourishes anywhere planning fails. This failure is itself an expression of the fact that the natural city was denied a legitimate expression. This dominant urban form that Mike Davis evokes as engulfing the planet in the 21st century is our point of inspiration and departure.

4.    Local Expression

Artamis. Former campus of the industrial services of the city of Geneva, it was squatted for many years and had become a nodal point of the city’s cultural life until occupants were evacuated. Photo by airoots.

We see it as energized by what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai refers to as the production of locality – a process that is determined by collective agency and will and which makes people participate wholly in the production of their environments. It is a process which is often negated or even actively repressed by the state, which in the twentieth century even in non-socialist countries, was epitomised by the desire for total urban planning and control. The frustrated impulse to produce locality manifests itself in all kinds of ways: urban counter-cultures in developed societies, underground markets, parallel economies and of course habitats that emerge in the shadow of the planned environments.

5.    Vernacular Absorption

The natural city absorbs all materials and ideologies, becoming a vernacular expression in every locality – feeding off the negentrophic tendency of systems that internally mitigate their imbalances and dysfunctionalities. Much like the hunter-gatherer societies that live outside the boundaries of controlled civilizations and create wealth and culture on their own terms, the natural city creates its own systems of transactions. It is at once deeply connected to the powerful state-level and global forces that try to control it, but also, to some extent, able to mitigate their local reach. Where they are forced to express themselves in large numbers as so-called informal settlements they are constantly threatened by the state-crafted ideology of planning which itself has actually lost steam in many parts of the world. An ideology that does not pay adequate attention to the special form of the natural city based on creative spatial arrangement of space, time, functions and relationships.

6.    City Users – City Makers

Construction site in Shivaji Nagar, Deonar, Mumbai. Photo by urbz team.

Out of the agents that energise and produce the natural city, the post industrial artisan, the local contractor and the hardware dealer, are key characters. The local contractor is at once businessman, community player and a possible political figure. He knows the nuts and bolts of his constantly forming environment like no one else. We see him as part of the larger story of urban based class struggle that David Harvey talks about. According to Harvey, the city is no more the site where the factory exists but is – in lieu of the factory – itself the agency of production and also the product itself. It consists of the alienated worker in the planned discourse and the relatively less alienated figure – a bit like a post-industrial artisan – the contractor, his team of workers and network of collaborators. (We are aware this is a huge departure of the narrative presented but feel that this trajectory of thought is worth following as well.)

7.    Freedom of Expression, Imagination and Action

March against the redevelopment of Shimokitazawa, an unplanned locality in the centre of Tokyo. Photo by Save the Shimokitazawa.

Eventually the Natural City – as a universal expression with its vernacular- local ammunition is a creative moment. It is sad that in the world of urban futures the practice of making cities has not allowed – in fact has actively suppressed – the ability and desire of people to allow themselves a form that is economically and culturally liberating even though at present tends to be civically deprived in many manifestations.

Presentation at the Municipality of Milano, on November 28th, 2011

1.    URBZ: user-generated cities

URBZ is a global network of urban practitioners interested in user-generated cities around the world. These are urban spaces produced or controlled by residents and inhabitants. The URBZ studio is in Dharavi, Mumbai and acts as a space for urban practitioners to work and learn from the context. It also provides services to the residents of Dharavi and other neighbourhoods in Mumbai and India. These services include consultation, research, design and architectural inputs.

2.    City Makers

The City-makers, or the users, inhabitants of these urban spaces are a critical presence in all that URBZ does. They are people who energize the local economies and built-environments of these neighbourhoods – as producers and providers of goods and services, retailers and vendors, innovators and designers.

3.    The Contractor

Among this vast and dense networks of city-makers, the contractor has become a very special partner to us. The contractor is a person who takes on construction assignments for local residents – usually of his own neighbourhood. He connects with material providers, labour, local financers and other actors in the production of a structure that works closely with the needs of each client. Here is a video clip of Amar, whom we met in Bhandup.

This is a video rendering of the process of building a typical structure, usually on a 10 by 10 feet foot-print.

4. Neighbourhoods…

These new, improved structures are unfolding all over the neighbourhood and play a crucial role in the incremental improvement and transformation of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods have evolved over a period of time and continue to evolve. Their typology and ability to absorb a range of different economic backgrounds, along with providing community and local support to people at different stages of economic status has contributed tremendously in creating a practical, financially sound affordable housing template for cities such as Mumbai.

5. … in-formation

The contractor is constantly looking for ways to introduce new material and technologies so as to make competitive structures and get more clients. In this process we came across Pankaj Gupta, a dynamic contractor from Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, who was keen on using high-quality ready mix concrete. URBZ facilitated a connection with a high-end provider from the city and helped forge a strong partnership between two very unlikely collaborators.

6. Affordable Housing

This equation is slowly becoming part of a larger conversation between high-end material providers, architects and urban planners and contractors and clients from Mumbai’s user-generated cities. Our practice focus on the exchange between architects and other professionals and city-makers in various neighbourhood. Francesco, our intern from Milan, is presently working directly on physically constructing houses with a contractor from Dharavi. Such collaborations have become the basis of our new learning programs in architecture schools as well.

This poster announces a four month long pedagogic program to be done in partnership with the JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai in partnership with Lafarge and URBZ. Students will work closely with contractors, clients from local neighbourhoods in Mumbai as well as technical consultants from around the world and evolve ways of working together.

7. Tool-House

In this initiative, the question of urban typology becomes a very crucial factor in discussions with policy makers and other actors in the city. This is one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome because it becomes a point of contention with developers and builders who work on a more high-end scale of the building market. We focus on the tool-house – the basic structure that shapes the landscape of the user-generated city and show how it is an economic, social and housing asset. In all consultations and conversations described above we look at the tool-house as the basic architectural concept that is integral to local initiatives.

The tool-house is at one and the same time integral to the production of the urban typology and the unit of production of goods and commodities. It helps in making the landscape dense and productive at the same time, by economising the spatial arrangements of the city. In Mumbai, more than half of the population of the city lives in such neighbourhoods but occupies less than 20% of the land and contributes hugely to the economy of the city. This is not a fixed statistic. As the economy improves and grows, this typology changes and absorbs newer forms and shapes. The Tool-house is at the heart of the user-generated city and brings in people, actors and resources together.

Old Goa

Any engagement with Goa and Mumbai inevitably stumbles across its Portuguese history. In Goa its in your face and omniscient, in Mumbai its hidden and unexpected. Either way this past reinvents itself and sustains its influence in the places it once touched, embraced and dominated. In its persistence lies a tale that is worth hearing.

One of the most striking aspects of post-colonial societies that have had relations with Portugal, is that their habitats and architecture have continued to be an inspiring part of contemporary building practices. Not as monumental backdrops, but as practical models and templates of distinctive and desirable ways of living. A lot of this is reflected in the human scale of old villages and urban precincts, walking friendly neighbourhoods and the enmeshing of cultural and economic histories with building practices.

The family House of the Sardesai, a upper caste Hindu family, in the village of Savoi Verem, North Goa.

Historically, all of the following factors contributed to the dynamic presence of the colonial imprint in these spaces; the older time-period at which Portugal touched lives, mostly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the way in which traditional, European style building and architectural practices fused with local traditions and carried on being practiced and the contrasting templates of their habitats when compared to non-Portuguese neighbouring regions, which made them distinctive.

For example, in predominantly British colonial Mumbai, where Victorian architecture dominates imperial memory, the older Portuguese inflected neighbourhoods stand proud as counter-points, becoming the most treasured and desirable neighbourhoods in this hyper dense megalopolis. The trendiness of Bandra is directly connected to the East-Indian (old Portuguese converted local Christians) villages that miraculously survive modern day aggressive urban practices. Under threat, but bravely putting up a fight is Khotachiwadi, that Portuguese – Coastal – Konkan architectural fusion, comprising of several homes and bungalows belonging to the East-Indian community.

The East Indian village of Gorai, North Mumbai

These Portuguese inflected neighbourhoods open up a new vocabulary of evaluating contemporary urban practices, that built upon traditional European and local artisanal practices and allowed for a very innovative way of dealing with contemporary challenges. At best, when Mumbai’s villages evolved through a conscious understanding of this legacy, they produced beautiful, livable and modern neighbourhoods. When these practices were not recognized or validated, they became perceived as slums.

The dynamism of the favelas of Brazilian cities, the streets of Macau, the villages of Mumbai, the diffused urbanism of Goa, the cosmopolitan legacy of Maputo in Mozambique and parts of Angola, all of these together make for a story that has much to teach the world about architectural and urban practice today. A practice that is facing many challenges – from the pressure of dealing with rising populations, questions of sustainability, and financial manipulation and mismanagement of architectural practices.

Khotachiwadi, South Mumbai

The Institute of Urbanology, located in Aldona, Goa is engaged in exploring the relationship of this history to contemporary urban practice. If this story stimulates  your imagination, do get in touch…

At most times the urbanologist and the anthropologist are one and the same. For us walking the streets of old neighbourhoods in ancient or futuristic cities and the forgotten paths of history in far away places happen together. An assignment to Indore in central India, for the Aranya project saw us make a detour to mythic Mandu (Madhya Pradesh). Basically ruins of an old kingdom, the splendour of the place was accentuated by the lush monsoon greenery which gives the region that fantastic hue of green. It is deceptive, since it does not indicate the dryness it is also capable of declining into, just a few months later.

Mandu of course, on a weekend was overrun by tourists. This pushed us to look beyond and we had our customary airoots adventure that took us on a journey into the primeveal past of most cities. A journey through time that connects forests, collective memory and cities into one holistic moment. In four hours of driving time we could span habitats that nestled next to each other but lived in different centuries.

The Mahua Tree

Mahua, that magical tree which epitomizes the core of the colonial-tribal encounter yielded the most delicious intoxicant we had ever tasted. A nutritious drink made from the flower of the Mahua tree – also known by that name – came to us in a leaf cup. The making of the drink was banned by the colonial authorities in the late 19th century because it made the independent minded Bhil communities  that lived in the region even less dependent on a monetary labour economy that the authorities were intent on pulling them into. They licensed the making of distilled liquor only so that the communities could be addicted to it and had to pay and thus work for cash. Devious.

The colonial legacy lives on. Mahua making is not banned, but it is trapped in a moralistic, anti-drinking rhetoric that is the very opposite of the spirit of the tribal communities that love it. So it goes a bit underground.

We are sometimes blamed for being idealists. We spoke to the Bhil girls and boys, shepharding goats on the hills, and told them that our belief that there is something valuable here is often called delusional. They laughed. They told us they are really quite happy to be here on the hills, as long as their connections to the forests are not tampered with. No one likes going to the city and being pulled into doing physical work for the construction industry, something they have to do for survival, especially during the summers.Their presence in the forests around is discouraged by the authorities on the grounds that they will denude them.

The forest policies in India remain anti-people and to our minds are at the heart of a faulty policy that creates forest-less cities and people-less forests.

Generous Hosts

Bhil Pride

This experience will definitely inform our next paper that we are working – on to be presented at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, in November 2011 about the connections between the jungle that is Dharavi and the jungle that is the Borivili forest sanctuary in the metropolitan limits of Mumbai.

Our collective ancestral home

This is a repartee to a post published by Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar in the Harvard Business Review blog who initiated the $300 house idea. Their post responded to our Op-Ed in the New York Times on May 31, 2011.

Dear Prof Govindarajan and Prof Sarkar,

We are deeply sympathetic to the efforts of designers, businessmen and academicians throughout the  world who feel concerned by the living conditions of the millions of people who live in substandard housing in India and elsewhere. We too believe that there is a lot creative thinking and co-creation can do to improve living conditions in many parts of the world, including richer countries.

As the ongoing financial crisis reminds us, we are all connected in hitherto inconceivable ways. When the real estate market plunges in New York and Dubai, it surges to the point of becoming surreal in Mumbai and Shanghai. When the demand for high-end housing gets saturated in upscale Mumbai, investment shifts to affordable housing and the pressure for redevelopment increases in neighbourhoods denominated as slums.

In other ways too, parts of the world that we thought belonged to radically different realities, seem astonishingly connected. Many neighbourhoods of Tokyo and Mumbai share a common history of incremental development. The homeless of Los Angeles may not be much better off than the shack dwellers of Kolkata. Notions of poverty have become more layered and intricate. It is necessary to challenge our preconceptions and look at the world we live in a fresh way –one that our earlier neat ‘development’ categories never allowed us. It is equally pressing to understand and engage with contexts that are often diverse, even within the same city, before attempting templates for common solutions.

Creative thinking is never as powerful and constructive as when it is based on first hand experience and interaction with the parties that it seeks to help. Knowledge of the context seems to be a weak spot of the $300 house project. India is not Haiti, Mumbai is not Raipur. The urge to solve the problem of 1 billion slum dwellers is just as misplaced as a proposition that would pretend to address the problems of 1 billion suburbanites.

We do not intend in any way to belittle your work and the great network of people who are advising the $300 house project. We are just trying to understand how it relates with the reality that we know. The so-called slums of Mumbai are a very diverse lot. Dharavi in Sion is different from Utkarsh Nagar in Bhandup, which is a far cry from Shivaji Nagar in Govandi. They all have different histories, economies and levels of development. One thing that they all do share, however, is that none of them have any house that costs less than $3000 to build.

While there are homeless people and people living in cardboard shacks in Mumbai, this is far from being the norm. It is probably just as marginal and widespread as it is in New York or Los Angeles. Most people who live in what the Indian government calls slums live in houses made of brick, stone, concrete and steel. What makes some of these neighbourhoods difficult to live in is the lack of civic amenities such as sewage or toilets, sometimes even water. What they do not lack is an ability to build or invest in their homes. Our question is whether this is the market you are targeting. If this isn’t, then what is the market you are really looking at? Even in small towns and villages people have better living standards.

Even if no poor needs the $300 house in India, a market may certainly be found in other parts of the world. Maybe that the $300 house makes sense in devastated parts of Haiti or Japan. Maybe there is even a market in the urban fringes of North American cities, where people have lost everything, including sometimes – and this is the most debilitating thing – the ability of helping themselves. In India, the market for housing is nowhere as dynamic and competitive as in so-called slums. There are networks of contractors, masons, artisans, carpenters and plumbers who are busy everyday making and improving homes. We all have much to learn from this market. This is why one must study it carefully before attempting to enter it.

We are no experts in business strategy, but it seems to us that market research should come before the conceptualization and design of a new product. This is not how you have built your model. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we can only assume that this is because you have taken slums for granted.

We are not averse to market solutions. If you had taken the time to browse through our websites or read some of our publications,  it would be evident we have faith in local markets engaged in construction. We believe that these should be recognized and infused with government support and better quality materials. The problem with most conventional market interventions is that they treat the poor exactly the way the socialist state often does – as passive consumers. A real market-based solution will understand the dynamism within the economy of poorer neighbourhoods and work with the actors there. We believe that the local construction industry in Dharavi or Shivaji Nagar and neighbourhoods throughout the country has proven to be the most efficient and quality-conscious provider of affordable housing.

Residents don’t need cheaper, lesser quality houses. The best thing to do would be to bring in new technologies, construction materials and design ideas to improve the houses people are already building for themselves. And in order to do this, the benchmark should be existing building practices and materials. Not some fantasy dollar figure.

That being said, we believe in the sincerity of your effort and find value in it. The fact that you have mobilized so many people and brought so much media attention to one of the most pressing issues of our times is commendable. We are also convinced that among the scores of design proposals generated in response to the $300 house challenge, some will break out of the box and have real impact. We only wish that you had made end-users and their contexts your starting point. This is the paradigm shift we are all yearning for.

***

For more on this theme see our study of a 2.5 lakh rupee house in Bhandup.

Chez Nous bungalow in Bandra West (Mumbai): A freshly repainted 1950 art-deco building. Three of the builder’s children live in the building with their children.

The biggest casualty of the new wave of urbanization in India is not architecture or design, even though these have suffered a lot from the rapid and mindless pace of construction in and around cities. The biggest casualty is quality. So many new residential and corporate high-rises in Mumbai have been built so poorly that they would not qualify as high-end in any other context but the hyper speculative bubble in which we find ourselves today. In Mumbai, we can’t speak of real estate anymore. What we are witnessing is “surreal estate.”

Mumbai has a good stock 100 to 60 years old art deco buildings. It is known as the second art-deco city in the world after Miami. Marine Drive is famous for its elegant raw of mid-rise buildings facing the sea. Bandra has many 2 to 4 story-high building from that period as well. Many of which where built by East Indian owners for their children. The art-deco period in Mumbai was part of a new wave of urban development in the first part of the nineteen century.

Many observers then lamented the fact that these new constructions had a terrible aesthetic compared to the buildings they came to replace. Today find these art-deco buildings attractive. But this is not only nostalgia for an older golden age. These buildings were well built and this is why they are still standing today. They have endured Mumbai extremely hot and humid weather and its salty air. Many of these buildings have thick walls and high ceilings. They can last another 200 years without any problem if they are well maintained. It is quality construction.

In parts of the city one can still see the original Portuguese-style bungalows, which art decos buildings often came to replace. They can be found in Bandra, Khotachiwadi and other East Indian enclaves. Those that have not been destroyed by their owners or predatory developers still look beautiful 150, sometimes 200 years, after being built. Quality and care.

A street in Khotachiwadi (Mumbai) with a Portuguese-style bungalow

Roseville Bungalow, St Sebastian Rd, Bandra West, Mumbai: Original style East-Indian bungalow. Probably up to 150 years old.

In contrast, some of the new upper-class high-rises you see in Lower Parel and the Northern suburbs will look like nothing in 10-20 years time. This is because their first function is not actually to provide a long lasting quality experience to their residents. Architecture, design and durability seem to be the last concerns of this generation of developers. These new buildings are first and foremost financial products. They need to be sold quickly to fellow speculators who will not live in them, but instead resell them in a couple of months or a couple of years to another speculator. All this speculation is done with borrowed money, which must quickly return to the lender. This lasts until the bubble bursts.

One sign of surreal-estate bubbledom is the tens of thousands of flats lying vacant in Mumbai, waiting to be bought and sold. Their most important quality is to be easy to sell and for this they must remain empty. What developers want to maximize is the exchange value of their properties. This is done by standardizing construction as much as possible. Everyone wants easy products. That’s why most new buildings in the city and suburbs are monofunctional and offer more or less same layout on every floor. Any variation makes their market value harder to assess. Standardization means that the value of the building can easily be calculated on the basis of square foot price in any given part of the city. Each flat can also be sold individually to smaller investors who often bet with their savings. This speculative pattern trickles down all the way to affordable housing, with blessings of the government, which even incentivizes it through the SRA scheme and other similar market happy initiatives. This has disastrous consequences for the city of an order of magnitude that is still hard to grasp. Heritage is getting lost, a great potential for the city is wasted and people who end up staying in these buildings see them degrading very quickly.

New constructions in Lower Parel, Mumbai

India is home to some of the oldest, deepest and most sophisticated forms of urbanity anywhere in the world. Old cities such as those of Kochin, Ahmedabad, Surat, Delhi, Haridwar, Varanasi and a hundred more encapsulate a sense of urbanity and cosmopolitanism that we have everything to learn from. They are still the liveliest parts of towns after hundreds of years of existence. These are not valorized at all. They are either being redeveloped or decaying. While a few old families actually want to stay in their historical neighbourhoods, most middle-class people left the city for the suburb. And the suburb sprawls into nothingness. One could argue for instance that in Delhi, the Old Town is actually the city and that “New” Delhi is everything else -for the most part being an endlessly suburban sprawl, with enclaves of urbanity here and there.

New India seems to be about urbanization without a city. Did we loose the city somewhere in Old India? The beauty of places like Khotachiwadi in Mumbai and Khirkee Village in Delhi is that they know how to be urbane. They have deep roots, they are connected to the larger context, yet also appear to be slightly detached; not fully buying into the development craze they see around them, as if they had seen it all before.

A 200 years old house in Ahmedabad that has been restored with the help of the Alliance Française. The current owner, who is the third generation in his family to live in the house, welcomes overnight guests.

These neighbourhoods are their own universes. Like the Pols in Ahmedabad, they are self-contained and preserve a very strong sense of identity, without being exclusive or closed to the rest of the city. They stand in sharp contrast to the gated colonies that are the norm in middle-class suburbs. A closed gate marks the end of the city. It is the beginning of another logic, which is not that of the urbane trader or artisan. The gate belongs to the culture of the settler who wants to work the land exploiting it to the maximum. The settler seeks to profit directly from the land rather than from the social and commercial networks that crisscross it.

New Delhi is full of gates, which it seems to have inherited from its farming past. It is not as much a city of villages as a city of fields. As soon as people can put a gate somewhere they do it. In Mumbai the most gated spaces are five star hotels, which by the way all try to look like airline lounges. When you enter their compounds you are really made to feel that you are leaving the city (if not the country).

View of Khirkee (Delhi) from the Masjid

There are no closed gates in Old Delhi, no gates in Khotachiwadi, no gates in Dharavi. The city is a place that anyone can enter freely. Khirkee Village has gates. But it must be by mimetism. Or maybe that these gates are better understood the other way around. They are encircling this enclave of urbanity, leaving it outside New Delhi’s totalizing suburban spread.

When you enter Khotachiwadi you feel safe even though there are no gates. In fact you feel safer because there are no gates. People are walking in the street. Neighbours are talking to each other, sometimes shouting at each other. But when something goes wrong they know how to come together. Our friend James who is a life-long resident of Khotachiwadi leaves the doors of his 150+ years old bungalow open all day. People come in and out all the time. He has sparrow nests in each corners of his house.

Waking up in Dharavi somewhere in a house on a small street –and almost every street is narrow and pedestrian- it is not unusual to hear a birdsong or a rooster cocking. It is only when one looks outside the window that one realizes this is not the countryside, but the heart of the city.

A back street in Dharavi

The best neighbourhoods we can think of have all in one way or the other preserved village-like qualities. A beautiful neighbourhood is a neighbourhood that has roots and people to keep them alive. Khotachiwadi was once a plantation and the shore used to come to its doorsteps. Somehow this past is still alive there. Sometimes the link with the origins is not as old, direct or as spatial. In Dharavi people have often brought the village along with them, preserving old community ties, along with an ability to use spaces to fulfill many different functions, and a high degree of local autonomy. Most people in Dharavi go back to their village at least once a year. Khirkee Village proudly preserves its identity and a sense of its origins. The beauty of these neighbourhoods is not architectural –although some places like Khotachiwadi have outstanding self-standing houses– it is rather the way people are invested and involved in their habitats. The way they have shaped them over time, and the way the neighbourhood is experienced as a moment, which continues the historical journey of the people who inhabit it.

This is why Guy Debord says that when we destroy such neighbourhoods, we don’t only destroy people’s social networks and livelihood, but also their collective history and sense of identity. The point is not at all that places like Khotachiwadi, Dharavi or Khirkee village should be turned into Archeological Survey of India sites and barricaded, with a ticket booth at the entrance. It is in fact, exactly the contrary. In order to exist and survive, neighbouhoods must continue their journey through time and keep on evolving continuously. It is the dynamic interaction between people and the space they inhabit that must be preserved at all cost.

Presentation @ MAD Salon in Mumbai on Saturday, May 7th, 2011. Hosted by Susmita Monhanty and Sid Das.

1. Tower of Babel

This biblical story conveys many human anxieties and fears. Its monumental architecture encompasses a tale of tyranny – the domination of man over man in an attempt to bring together diverse histories under singular control, of streamlining otherness and reducing all fantasies into one. What is striking to the modern mind is the sheer scale of its ambition, of reaching out to the skies before crumbling under its own weight of over-extension and then fearing the ensuing confusion that comes with multiplicity and pluralism. The ambitions embodied in the myth seem to recur in human history – complete with the repetitive and cyclical fall.

2. Skyscraper Index

A little statistical table that circulates in the media now and then has an unsettling effect on many who encounter it. It shows correlations between ambitious building projects – specifically those that strive to the greatest heights ever – and the mysterious occurrence of economic depressions and the bursting of speculative bubbles that seem to unfailingly follow them. The table is seen to be unscientific but like the power of all great myths – has managed to plant little seeds of doubts and beliefs in the collective consciousness of those involved in realizing such ambitions. Are these grand projects crystallizations of arrogance and power till the sky literally falls on their heads? Often they become like the ruins of the tower of Babel, unfinished or surrounded by the rubble of economic despair.

3. World One

Mumbai’s very own Babel arises from its already pretty ruinous landscape with the same old tired ambition. The World One tower aims to be the highest residential tower in the world and rather like the grand but ill-fated biblical structure, wants to enclose as much as possible within its generous boundaries. It posits to be self-contained, encompassing as many needs as possible within it. It plans to tower over the rest of the city in arrogance and ambition. It turns away from the economic reality of thousands of luxury flats lying unused or unsold in its neighbourhoods and seems to be paving the way for a bubble to burst that, paradoxically people seem to be anticipating.

4. Barad Dur

The prevalence of biblical images and tales in medieval literature, of medievalism being one of the most challenging coming-of-age of moments of modern consciousness and the continued prevalence of medieval imagery and tales in modern fantasies and imaginations is explained by scholar Umberto Eco. He points out how an episodic and evolutionary presentation of history does not really mirror the diverse, complex and unpredictable way in which human lives and cultures actually unfold in space and time. Medieval concerns continue to exist deep in the human consciousness and experience. Popular culture is replete with imagery and fantasy from medieval times because modern life is punctuated by medieval moments, not withstanding the self-image we have of being modern thanks to technological changes and the scientific spirit. The Dark Tower of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings haunts us in movies, games and art, reliving old nightmares and shaping dreams and fantasies.

5. Dark Urban Age

As episodic history and transformative epic moments continue to influence our understanding of life, one powerful myth that has become prevalent is that we are now all firmly entrenched in the great Urban Age. However, it would be more accurate to say that we are in a rather Dark Urban Age. Prophets predict apocalyptic visions about this era with images of dark shadowy habitats replacing the erstwhile fears of the forest that castles and protected urban habitats had in the past. Every new architectural or urban fantasy that gets realized repeats such imagery, presenting itself as a fort surrounded by architectural wilderness full of danger and chaos. If it is not such negative imagery about their surroundings then it is about taming the wilderness and transforming it into acceptable notions of urban life – most of it still shaped by ambitions of the Babel Tower.

6. Out of the Castle

Today, when a young, well-meaning architect steps out of the castle, she is alert and on the lookout for dangers of the wilderness which she has to bravely tackle and eventually tame. The wilderness is epitomized by the category slum, encompassing all that is avoidable, dangerous and worthy of erasure. Like the proverbial adventurer of ancient tales she encounters false monsters and elusive spirits. The slum emerges as a highly unstable category, slipping through fingers the moment she thinks she has found one. In Mumbai particularly, the spectacular spectre of speculation has produced the most naive narrative on slums, where it is used in the grossest of way at one level and full of nuances at another. In Dharavi, each neighbourhood looks the other way when asked where the legendary and largest slum in Asia is supposed to be. It is always on the next street. Eventually when she finds it – it appears as a chimera, a construct and helps her realize that the dangerous forest around her is nothing like what she had been told it was.

7. Final Fantasy

The scary forest was a fantasy in the mind of castle dwellers in a way that played upon all kinds of anxieties and fears. Kings and aristocrats saw them as spaces out of control, unlike the domesticated peasants and taxed agrarian lands that were caught in their web. From the vantage of the subaltern hero, the forest was Sherwoodian, full of Robin Hoodian impulses, a social space and a world of creative freedom and economic independence. Resisting control was its biggest aim. An urbanological understanding of forests reveals a sharp questioning of what is wild, tame, and natural. Urbanology questions what is urban, rural and tribal, what is a slum and what is heroic resistance to monumental ambition. The final fantasy for an urban explorer is questioning the romantic fallacy of Babylonian ambition and revealing falsely frightening wilderness to be something else altogether – a liveable fantasy of human, creative and ecological possibilities

The practice of photojournalism and image making has changed everywhere. Whether it is on websites of mainstream newspapers or on amateur blogs all around the world, images are increasingly taken by sources close to the scene of action. It is about being right here, right now, and having a sharp enough reflex to snap the image at the right time.

The story is more complicated than simply the amateur journalist taking over the job of the professional. What is happening is that the amateur becomes an expert when she talks about what’s near her, what she is familiar with.  This abundance of information from an infinite number of sources doesn’t mean the end of professional journalism at all. Instead it implies a reinvention of the journalist as a selector/editor of the texts and images that she receives. The journalist still has to be at the right time and the right place but this doesn’t necessarily mean the time and place where the action is unfolding. The place to be is at the receiving and transmitting end of deep networks of actors and readers.

Journalism was already global before the advent of decentralized media. It had become an industry that successfully mobilized people in different parts of the world, and through communication technology such as the telegram, the phone or the fax, connected them to control rooms where the information was being processed and then broadcast. The field of journalism was already broad. What new technologies have brought is a new depth. This depth is not an analytical depth (which may well have been reduced by the speed of diffusion of information), but a depth in the story, since the object of the story can also become a storyteller. We can get the insider story. The end-receiver of information is increasingly intimate with the reality reported in the news. The reader can now interact with the actors from the stories she is reading and even become part of the story, by asking a specific question or offer unique insights.

It follows that there is no simple opposition between the so-called “democratization” of the media and the role of the specialist. The amateur is a specialist of her own reality. We recently started a workshop series on the theme of ‘water’ at the Dharavi Shelter. The kids have quickly become familiar with the use of the digital camera. For this project, we are asking them to look at water in their neighbourhood. They shoot pictures and describe what they have photographed in their own words. Then they document the way water is being used at home, how it gets evacuated and where it goes afterward. This material is then shared with water system specialists who ask questions back to the kids. We are only facilitating this communication. In a way we are acting as journalists, getting information from here and transmitting it there, and then the other way around. Our role is not simply that of a mediator however – we are also actors. And a lot of this involves connecting people to each other. The art of connecting is just as creative as any other, be it writing or photography. This connection, going both ways, empowers the children  significantly.  They will be able to speak with authority about something near them and will get to know it better than anyone else.

It seems to us that good photojournalists have always looked at photojournalism as much more than a profession. It is a form of engagement with the context, with the subject. The most moving and insightful work in that field, has always been one which constructs its own story and doesn’t try to elude the presence and subjectivity of the photographer. Carrying a camera automatically changes the response of the people around you. Playing with that effect is what makes great photography. What we love the most about previous the photos taken by the kids at the Shelter is that they could never have been taken by anyone else. People on the photos would simply have responded differently if they had been snapped by unknown adults. Maybe some would have smiled or felt intimidated in front of a photographer. In front of their friends or family people are more spontaneous and natural. Some of the best shots taken by the kids are the ones that let us sense the relationship between the person behind the camera and the person being photographed.

The images that emerge have a distinctive aesthetic and politics. They emerge from the knowledge embedded in familiarity, the taken for granted, the mundane but eventually emerge to have a sacredness of their own. What facilitates this process is the collective energy that is unleashed by the use of digital technology. The plasticity of which is an individual nightmare for the professional photographer surrounded by amateur images and image-makers, but which becomes a powerful tool when it allows for users to come together and enter into an exercise that becomes a shared and collective practice. The process of making images together, of exploring familiar contexts as a collective, of sharing with an immediacy that this technology facilitates like none other, makes the entire exercise in photojournalism enter into a different realm – one that needs to be appreciated for its aesthetics as well.

Historian, philosopher, writer, Umberto Eco points out how new knowledge technologies that use the digital image are connected to a world at least as old as European medievalism in which the word and the image have always been integral to the political imagination. He looks at contemporary society and all its technological paraphernalia as one more episode in this epic story. He insists that digital technology is potentially liberating and – more importantly – irreversible. We need to find the right handles so that our relationship with knowledge continues to be genuinely challenging and satisfying.

Anthropologist Appadurai points out that the contemporary practitioner is part of a shifting, moving and fluid landscape. New technologies help us express these further and connect to the ‘scapes’ that make up our social imagination in more ways than one. This ‘social imagination’ continues to be rooted in a complex, ever-changing context, one that is inevitably local, because locality is always being produced. However, at the same time, it is acutely aware that national boundaries, like many others are being challenged by new constantly mutating technologies. For him, the globalized world is not the same as Marshall Mcluhan’s mediated global village. It is rather about the migration and movements of people from one part of the globe to another. It is about becoming aware that our lives and worlds are deeply interconnected. Most importantly, it is about the way in which media and new technologies help us come to terms with these connections, shifts and movements.

One story that encapsulates the entire experience of the photography workshops that we do at the Shelter, where images keep being produced and then tell their own stories, where the location is supreme, where time is tamed by sheer presence and immediacy, is told by Ray Bradbury in ‘The Illustrated Man’, first published in 1951. This is a collection of narratives about a dystopic future in which the media literally comes alive. The stories are embodied on a man and are alive with moving images, tattooed by some enchanted artist from a local fair. The man himself could be from any point from the past or future. The stories his body ‘reveals’ ultimately end with one that starts to reflect the life of the person presently ‘watching’ them. They are futuristic stories about a world where a giant screen absorbs human beings into its digital folds, and about human impulses emerging through the ruins of a nuclear devastated world and the intricacies of faith.

But what is striking is that that it places the storyteller at its centre, weaving images and worlds about the past, present and the future. It is ultimately about the triumph of her imagination that cuts through the varied contexts in which one finds her telling her story – always part of a collective universe of story tellers – performing around a fire, thundering in an auditorium, whispering through cyber-space, crackling through television or hitting back at the player in a video game. When the kids at the Dharavi Shelter take pictures of their own streets and homes, they also tattoo them with their imaginations, report it, narrate it and emboss it with their own lives.  The story that emerges has a life of its own.

The photos have been by children living near MG Road, New Transit Camp, Dharavi, during a workshop conducted at the Dharavi Shelter by photographer Lasse Bak Mejlvang from Denmark and Himanshu S. Jan 23, 2011. The workshop participants are: Simon, Anand, Vishal, Neha, Reshma, Karishma, Muskan, Umesh, Gautam, Punam, Amar.

More photos here.

Click here to read an article on photojournalism by Neha Thirani that inspired this post (pdf document).

This introductory note on Goa has been written for graduate students of the landscape architecture program of the Royal University College of Arts in Stockholm. We are organizing a year-long programme on Goa’s urban systems with them.

The Studio aims at understanding the way habitats and settlements in Goa function, how they are organized and in what way do they resemble or differ from habitats and settlements in the rest of the country. Goa is the smallest state in  India with a distinctive history shaped by Konkan coastal experiences and Portuguese colonialism. The Konkan coast all along Maharshtra and Karnataka shows comparatively lower population levels than the hinterland of those states. The population levels of the coast are also comparable with the sparse demographics of the hilly tracts of the regions. Goa includes a coastal belt as well as hilly ghats that shape its landscape, making it a bio-diversity hotspot with  a demographic profile that is very distinctive.

Due to the long presence of Portuguese rule, four major urban settlements emerged, connected to trade, commerce and political rule. These are the port town of Vasco, the commercial center of Margao, the market city of Mapusa and the political capital of Panjim. The sea facing economies of these urban centers were also connected to the agrarian landscape of the rest of the state, which were dotted with villages and hamlets, mostly on the coastal belt. The four urban centers are intricately connected to the other settlements through economic exchanges and population movement giving the entire populated region of Goa a sense of being a connected network.

Through the landscape one sees paddy fields, private forests and water bodies that are enmeshed into the network by being constantly shaped by human presence and activity. Along the western hilly tracts the forests too are involved in an economy of use through the large mining industry and commercial exploitation of timber.

Most of the coastal belt is shaped by the tourist economy with its distinct civic infrastructure. The presence of Industrial estates – large zones of economic industrial activity – also dot its landscape making them destinations of everyday commuters.  The visual grammar of Goa gives you a sense of low population density and vacant spots, but in reality it is a highly dense, even urbanized system in which many habitats and settlements co-exist with forested and agrarian areas.

To the national imagination, the land use patterns of Goa seem difficult to understand, shaped as the hinterland is by a very different history and colonial experience, with a heavy concentration of large mega cities and extremely denuded and infrastructure deprived rural regions.  In relative comparison, many of Goa’s villages have infrastructure comparable to small Indian towns and in some coastal regions, even reproduce a condensed and highly urbanized consumer lifestyle thanks to tourism.

Goa is beset by a variety of pressures; the ongoing juggernaut of real estate development in the rest of the country looks at Goa as a prime destination for luxury and upper-middle class second homes for India’s rich, the mining lobby looks at its bio-diversity rich forests as spaces that can be exploited for more wealth, the idea that agricultural activity is no more the economy of future makes a lot of traditional land use vulnerable, and a combination of real-estate interests and tourist activities plays havoc with its coastal belt.

Along with all this, administrative policies in Goa are pressurized by the national framework, which forces categories and policies that work with larger population levels and different urban typologies. For example electoral constituencies in Goa are considered too low making for an inclusion of more territory per unit, even though these territories are internally very distinct. The idea that a network of villages and towns can potentially work as a system is totally disregarded and a larger urban discourse prefers looking at Goa as a city-state or a big urban center with a potential of becoming a bigger city.

All these factors play havoc with everyday life in Goa, which is consequently becoming a hotspot of restlessness and frustration to Goans of all kinds. Activism in Goa and its political consciousness is on high alert but intensely pressured by forces beyond their control. The rhetoric  of urban real estate, planning and urban design discourses typically undermine Goa’s unique urban trajectory and organization.

We aim to understand Goa’s spatial and historical configuration through the idea of the network of its towns and villages and help translate its distinction (or similarities) to policy makers, so that its future is more in control by the people who reside in it, by people who are part of its history.

It is also a strong contention that Goa’s spatial configuration can act as a reference point for several of India’s thousands of districts that are presently being denuded by the idea that dominant big-city centric urbanization of today is the only kind for everyone and all regions.  In this day and age when environmental concerns are becoming more and more real, when the practices of the construction industry attached to hyper-urbanization is being understood as being ecologically, socially and economically problematic, the story of Goa can contribute hugely as a counter-point.

The fact that there are different ways of being urbane, that are not necessarily connected to building construction and certain types of industrial development, which allow for the co-existence of natural density and social demographic density and where villages and towns, forests and fields can be accepted as functioning networks can open the way for a better policy that looks after the interests of most of India today.