Charles Correa is one of the most influential Indian architects around. He has been building extensively in India and abroad, but along with his designs it is his thought process that made an impact. He was a strong advocate for the development of New Bombay (Navi Mumbai) as a twin city to Mumbai, that would decongest the city (or at least absorb some of the inflow of immigrants pouring in from rural areas to the financial capital of India). He actually acted as Chief Architect for the planning of the new city.  However, he himself would agree that, eventually, the city’s growth didn’t quite go as planned. An educated guess is: big money and unscrupulous/corrupted public officials messed up what was originally a good plan.

We know Charles Correa cannot be held responsible because in one part of the new city, he showed what he was really up to. This is the ‘Artist Village’, a 55 hectare mixed-income housing project in Belapur, New Bombay. The neighbourhood immediately transported us to a Goan atmosphere, indicating his roots on the Konkan. It was almost as if he saw the twin city as a gateway to the coast, all the way down to his native state.

The village has a high concentration of artists. The first residents had to be artists of some sort to move in. Naturally things have changed a lot since it was built, about 20 years ago.

It is really worth a visit. Go to see what a genius urban designer can do when he thinks beyond design. It is very fashionable amongst architects to despise each others’ works. Charles Correa’s ‘Artist Village’ in New Bombay has not been spared by criticism from fellow architects.

True, not much remains of the houses he designed. Most have been remodeled or destroyed and rebuilt. Some inhabitants said they were impractical (”What was the architect thinking when he put toilets outside the house?”). Some clusters of houses became “model” mini-gated-communities while others became mini-slums.

But this is precisely the genius of the project. It was produced with the idea that the residents were going to alter it in many ways, making it truly their own.

One resident we talked to complained that no provisions were made for the common spaces in the center of each cluster of houses. No one was in charge of maintaining them. These spaces do not fall under any jurisdiction; not private nor public.

This resident had to take it in his own hands and talked to his neighbors and they worked out a solution. They each contributed to a common fund that started being used for maintenance. There is even extra money left to pay a retired army man to spend his days sitting on a chair in front of the gate they built, to prevent strangers from entering the cluster (we got through though!)

In other clusters we saw residents wiping out the ground in front of their house. This was part of the plan. The architect even foresaw the dispute between neighbors which is part of the pluralistic and messy process of creating a community.

What really struck us as we walked through the Artist Village, was how organic it really looked. It was designed, yes – but it managed to be a natural city. Before we saw the project we had almost lost faith in urban design altogether, thinking that it was irremediably oppressive, determining in advance how people are to go about their lives, enclosing them into a limiting format.

The first reason why the Artist Village looks organic is that it allowed people to modify their houses freely, whether with a paintbrush or a mortar. Something that is NEVER allowed in the type of mass housing devastating the urban and psychological landscape of cities around the world.

The second reason, we have to say, is Correa’s deep understanding of the nature of cities. His cluster modules are very simple, yet they are related to each other in a complex way.

This housing project offers the quality of life of a village with the sophistication of a city. Each cluster permits the emergence of a hyperlocal community feeling, while integrating each house to the whole settlement at different levels. The hierarchy itself is very organic, as the diagrams below show (from Charles Correa 1989, The New Landscape).

Cluster of 7 houses

Cluster of 3 x 7 houses

Clusters of 3 x 3 x 7 houses

Mapping of the village

It is great to see that the best is possible. There is a middle-way between Dharavi and Brasilia and Charles Correa points clearly to it. Thank you Charles!  A deep bow from the airoots team.