The industrial revolution decisively cut-off homes and workspaces from each other. The impact of this incision was most strongly felt in the house of the artisan. If there was any space that used itself most creatively and productively it was the artisan’s workshop-cum-home that produced most of the goods that circulated in the pre-industrial economy.

The gigantic scale of the modern city was unleashed through many forces – mainly energy-based revolutions – but its architectural character owes a lot to the atomic split that happened when the workshop-home of the artisan was splintered. Since then, the logic of separating residences from places of manufacture has shaped much of the way we think of cities.

Yet – many cities in India are littered by sprawling collections of built-forms that do not reflect this neat divide. In its new-avataar – in what we term the tool-house – the artisanal home continues to exist in many different lives. This could be mistaken for an expression of backwardness, if we didn’t see the same arrangement was not happening at accelerating rates in our classic first wold global cities: London, New York and Tokyo. What is the artist’s loft if not a tool-house? Our creative cities are indeed reorganizing their industrial structures into polyvalent spaces.

A tool-house emerges when every wall, nook and corner becomes an extension of the tools of the trade of its inhabitant. When the furnace and the cooking hearth exchange roles and when sleeping competes with warehouse space. A cluster of tool-houses makes for a thriving workshop-neighbourhood and its public spaces emerge as a dynamic by-product of such an auto-organized habitat.

This explains why a walk through any so-called Indian slum – is also an imaginative walk through a moment in the dawn of the industrial revolution. When it had still not drawn the rules of how we should live, work and sleep. When it had still not marked itself off as the moment of taking humanity into the great urban age and when it still produced fantastic and flexible narratives about the future of humanity. The industrial revolution and urban transformation have always been discontinuous and fragmentary. The echoes of the moments of its transition repeatedly re-appear everywhere. Just look out for the presence of the tool-house – more real and ubiquitous than the much-hyped robot.

The reason why urban landscapes formed by tool-houses are so crucial for urbanists is that it makes explicit the relationship between production, livelihood and spaces that expresses the lives of more than half of humanity. Not to be able to see this dimension in slums reveals a terrible lack of imagination and aborts the complex and organic evolution of urban forms. To see them for what they are – maybe through the lens of a sci-fi possibility – is to do real justice to the multiplicty of urban forms.

In reality – tool-house landscapes indicate a need for a sharp re-structuring of the way in which labour, work, and capital unfold in the post-industrial city. It can help us to concretely visualize a future in which the dated dichotomy of the formal and the informal organization of production and services, the new spatial order that internet-based and mobile communication technologies have introduced in our lives, and complex dialectic between the artisanal/organic and industrial mass-based product in the contemporary economy.

Cities of the future can keep being formed by the empty development and one-dimensional growth (literally) of real-estate development or they can rearrange themselves in less predicable ways following our aspirations localized needs. Where urban development is left to local actors we observe the (re)emergence of live-work spaces that are in fact less dehumanizing than the housing block and its twin office tower that are being systematically promoted by urban developers from all across the ideological spectrum from real estate investors to NGOs passing by the government as the only way on to modernity.

It might be time to acknowledge that for all its lack of infrastructure and overcrowding, Dharavi is not as much a pre-industrial settlement as it is a post-industrial one. Not as much as slum in dire need for redevelopment as a highly successful model of bottom-up development, with at the core of its system the tool-house.

Just when Dharavi vanishes from Mumbai…architects will want to re-examine its complex structure for referencing the future…mad prophecy… but just you wait… talk to the international researchers flocking into the labyrinthine streets of Dharavi, you will soon find out that they come less to propose their own models than to learn from Dharavi. Get over it, Dharavi is not backwards, but forward.