This is the original version of our piece that appeared in The New York Times on February 21st 2009.

It does not take much to galvanize protest against a movie in India, but few thought the word Slumdog would cause so much anger. Especially as hundreds of Bollywood titles translate into much worse. We had to pay attention though, when friends from Dharavi joined hands with the protestors. The Indian media widely reported popular outrage at the word ‘dog’. But what we heard from Manju Keny, a 19 year – old college student living in Dharavi – was something else. She was upset at the word ‘slum’.

We could not agree more.

Dharavi is the celebrated Mumbai neighborhood in which some the most spectacular scenes of Danny Boyle’s movie were shot, including the anti-Muslim riots of 1992. The opening sequence, however was actually filmed near the airport, with kids playing on the plane field, being chased by policemen and landing up – in a moment of pure Hollywood magic – a few kilometers away in Dharavi. Rather than name an actual location, the movie constructs a cinematic slum out of many pockets around Mumbai.

This imagery represents what most middle-class residents in Mumbai (and now all over the world) imagine Dharavi to be. The urban legend has taken root only because few of them have ever been there. It is the same reason why most Manhattanites still avoid stepping anywhere near Bed-Stuy, that beautiful and vibrant neighborhood in Brooklyn. Times might have changed since Barry Stein described it as the “largest ghetto in the US” but old prejudices die hard.

Likewise, the slum imagery does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Don’t expect to see the familiar clichés about urban poverty here. Well over a million “eyes on the street”, to use Jane Jacobs’ phrase, keep Dharavi safer than most US cities. Yet, Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into an oppressive feeling. The crowd is efficiently absorbed in the thousands of tiny streets branching into bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see depressed people loitering. Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an already incredibly industrious city.

What you will see however are piles of garbage uncollected by municipal authorities. These are favored by a certain brand of photo-reporters and slum tourists. But then again, one has to remember images of Naples during the garbage crisis. In comparison, things are nowhere as bad in Dharavi where people have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state – including the setting up of a highly functional waste recycling industry that serves the whole city.

This resourcefulness has aroused the curiosity of people from all over the world. They cannot get their head around this phenomenon, which in sixty years emerged out of marshlands to become a multi-million dollar economic miracle that provides fresh food to Mumbai and exports crafts and manufactured goods to places as far as Sweden.

No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the success of Dharavi. It was entirely built by successive waves of immigrants who moved there in response to rural poverty, political oppression or natural disasters. They managed to produce a place that is far from perfect but has proved to be amazingly resilient and able to upgrade itself. In the words of its resident-activist Bhau Korde – “Dharavi is an economic success story that the world must pay attention to during these times of global depression.” The fact that it developed with internal resources, through the sheer resourcefulness of its inhabitants is something truly special.

Not surprisingly an increasing number of students, researchers, activists and writers are feeding off Dharavi to produce new concepts, participatory methodologies and architectural systems. They come not to help poor people but to learn from Dharavi. The Net Generation in particular recognizes itself in the story of this self-developing city, which is powered by the collective intelligence and individual aspirations of hundreds of thousands of people.

Why can’t government officials, real-estate developers and NGO workers think about Dharavi in any other way than as a slum that needs to be cleared and redeveloped? Maybe it is simply a conceptual and generational gap. Why can’t they see that development is in fact the main driving principle of Dharavi? Its apparently messy organization is not a problem in itself but rather an expression of intensive social and economic processes at work. In an age of complexity, artificial intelligence and wiki-logic, this should be self-evident.

Any attempt to segregate living and working would not make any more sense in there than in an artist’s loft in Brooklyn. In typical post-industrial fashion, in Dharavi homes double up as productive spaces. When the morning comes, mattresses are folded and tens of thousands of units emerge to sustain a decentralized production network rivaling in efficiency with the most ruthless of Chinese sweatshops.

Dharavi is the ultimate user-generated city. Its urban and economic development relies on the intensive use of social networks and communities. Each of Dharavi’s 80 plus neighborhoods has been incrementally developed by generations of residents updating their shelters and businesses according to needs and means. This organizational logic is neither new nor unique to Dharavi, but we have never been in a better time to understand it. Just as the development of open source software requires guidelines and coordination; all Dharavi needs is some support from the government – mostly in the form of giving its functioning some legitimacy by providing the same services as in any other part of the city– and then trusting its inhabitants to continue from there.

For this to happen, urban planning needs to come to terms with some of the fundamental changes that the information age has brought to all fields of knowledge and practice. The role of the expert, for one, must be reinvented. It is no longer possible for planners to work in isolation. Instead we must find ways to plug into local knowledge and respond with new ideas, tools and practices. Besides, the complexity of a neighborhood such as Dharavi should never be blanketed under a generic term such as ‘slum’. One way to deal with it, is to disaggregate and localize planning and design interventions. This should build on existing dynamics and incentives and work through the internal logic of each community.

This is no fantasy wishlist. Sometimes, historical accidents show the way for such spontaneous urban evolution. Look at large parts of Tokyo. Its low-rise high density and mixed-use cityscape, which appears messy and chaotic to western planners, has emerged through a similar Dharaviesque logic. The only difference was that it modernized, legitimized and was supported by economic growth, which its inhabitants themselves contributed towards.

Maybe all that Dharavi needs is a recognition of such spontaenous processes that have always sustained its development. As Ramesh Misra, lawyer and life-long resident puts it, echoing the aspirations of many in Dharavi: ‘We have always improved Dharavi by ourselves. All we want is permission and support to keep doing it. Is that asking for too much?’

David and Charmayne de Souza’s book is a tale about Mumbai and the numerous roads that connect it to the rest of the world. Through the turns and twists of life, the city once seen as a refuge from nomadism, an heir of sedentary agrarian life, becomes the most vibrant stage for itinerants from everywhere. A stage vividly alive with other worldly songs, dances, colors and stories, which invites us to dream of hitting the road, leave all things behind, rely on providence, put on a colorful dress, paint one’s face, tattoo this bodily vehicle of ours, and dance our way through. Like madmen who have finally recovered themselves not by sitting back in an illusory normality but by engaging fully with their fantasies, using imagination, myth and tradition as weapons for survival.

With the rigor of a scientist, David catalogues the itinerant species of Mumbai. He abstracts them from their context and captures them in their most heightened spirits. His photo gallery of characters is reminiscent of our old biology labs, where obsessive professors kept exotic creatures in formalin. Charmayne sets the subjects of David’s photos back into movement through poetic inspiration. Her writing reminds us of the mythical dimension of itinerant life, which is present in every civilization. Sedentary societies have indeed always had an ambivalent relationship to the people of the wind, as Japanese villagers call them. Itinerants have been perceived in turns as indispensable trading partners, threatening agents of change and as objects of desire. David and Charmayne’s images and words bring to life some of the multiple avatars of that nomadic spirit that all of us carry deep inside and which refuses to leave.

This is probably why, turning these pages, even those of us who chose or inherited comfort and security cannot help but sigh at the thought of these untied lives, which seem to be fed by faith and magic more than anything else. Of course nomadic life, as intense and meaningful as it can be, is usually driven by necessity more than choice. But for an instant, it is liberating to believe that most of the people in this book would never trade itinerancy for routine and standardization.

Itinerants have by definition traveled through all kinds of roads and crossed all kinds of bridges. Poverty, subjugation, creativity, freedom and spirituality have proved to be the most difficult and slippery terrains, where one easily slides from one state to the other. And yet, evolving on these edges, itinerants have unsettled feudal political regimes more than any democratic system ever could. All through history, they produced heterodox spiritual kingdoms and challenged caste and tribal identities.

In Mumbai, itinerants are at home. This is after all, a city in which the street is king. It is here that the rules of urbanism seem to bend backwards, where the streets stop being just thoroughfares, where the evolutionary linearity of hamlet, village and town become fuzzy and where the home and the road become, quite literally, one and the same.

The itinerants of Mumbai are of many different kinds. Several of them may well have discovered the thrills and perils of the road only on arriving here. A large number could have moved from the world of subjugation to that of freedom on reaching here.  A fair amount would never consider their lives enviable and would be actually quite willing to trade it for middle-class comforts any day. Most may want to escape the streets altogether. But none would deny the fact that, if there is one place that is paradoxically reminiscent of the freedom that forests provided in the past to all those who wanted to escape, it is this city.

Every morning in Mumbai’s urban jungle, the multitude wakes up before the sun and chases the night away. Bats, rats and cockroaches go hide underground and the magnificent buzz starts. Those who have slept on the streets wake up to the blaring horns of taxis and buses. They find little niches in between buildings and by-lanes to use as washrooms. They open up boxes on pavements and transform them into stalls, enshrine trees with fresh flowers and incense, serve chai to the early crowd. Very soon they are dwarfed by the millions of commuters who march in rhythm to the city’s arcane industrial work ethic. While salaried men and women commute from home to office, from office to the supermarket and back, itinerants go nowhere. In the street only the sedentary kind must move, if possible in an AC car. The nomads are at home, right then and there, and everywhere.

The urbanite is often quite uncomfortable with this city’s most idiosyncratic citizens. That is because they seem to be so at ease in his landscape. Before he sees it coming someone knocks on the car window demanding a few rupees in exchange for a prayer, a flower or a book. Somehow it always feels wrong to refuse the trade, as if it the hawkers were actually asking for nothing but their due. The sedentary car user comes to terms with the nature of reversals, brings the window down and makes a deal. It is encounters like this one, multiplied a million times, that saves this city day after day. For all its shortcomings and in spite of a recent rise in nationalist politics, Mumbai has proved to be an urban oasis for many migrants and travelers ever since the first fishermen settled on its shores. It is the capacity of Mumbaikars to accept a high level of promiscuity with strangers that has made it so safe despite the vertiginous divides existing between castes and classes.

Itinerants become human connectors in an increasingly divided yet interdependent world. As much as the pathways and signals mediate roads and neighbourhoods, itinerants constantly connect the city’s many different dimensions to one another. They are the x-factor that allows this exuberant unpredictable city to function day after day. It is these ever-present encounters that make us realize how full of mad contrasts the city is. Where one brushes shoulders with ipod listening teenagers one moment and the very next, faces a tribal ritual masochist doing a thousand year old dance. Further down the lane, one come across the last of a dying breed of water carriers using ancient goatskin pouches walking past piles of used mineral water bottles.  One can hear a knife sharpener’s wheel screaming, next to a well-stocked shopping mall selling everything under the sun,

David and Charmayne’s ode to Mumbai’s itinerants makes the reader aware of these contrasts through their own distinct approaches. The portraits isolate them in the stark environment of the studio while the poems re-connect them to their contexts like light, near invisible strings.

They wake up the sedated jaded urbanite who turns away from their incongruity but has registered their presence and at the end of the day is actually blessed to be connected to the world wide web of the mystic, astrologer, eunuch or beggar. They provide that touch of fantasy, that glimmer of otherness that saves him from that very urban brand of autism proliferated by global media and consumerist culture. This coalescing of different moments, eras, epochs, and state of minds is what makes the streets of Mumbai so special. David and Charmayne remind us that their exhilarating unpredictability is predicated as much on run-of-the-mill disorder, civic mismanagement and individual idiosyncrasies as it is on the genuine love of unpredictability of the city’s inhabitants.

Itinerants wind up embodying the roads they inhabit. Not just its smell and hues but also its edginess, roughness and straightforwardness. This can been seen most sharply when the context is erased. In a photographer’s studio, which invisiblizes the city, the subjects in sharp focus become just as disconcerting as an empty, silent city on a day of curfew. Paradoxically, this evacuation of context only makes us understand the affectionate relationship of the street and its myriad squatters even better. The street is to Mumbaikars what the sea is to fishermen.

The book builds on several such reversals. It successfully generates the impression that it is not the reader watching these personas but the other way around. The itinerants look back amused at our child-like fascination as we gaze at them. They come with their pride and smiles and snap at our faces, waking us up for an instant from our sedentary somnolence.

They unsettle us for many reasons.

They convince our resistant minds that that the man with a painted face, outrageous dress and clinking necklaces is in fact truer to himself than the suited man driving by on his way to office. Is there anything more discomfiting than a head on confrontation with the self-conscious celebration of nomadic life and its exquisite liberty? Is there anything more transformative than the realization that the beggar and the hooker are actually richer than their patrons? Is there anything more radical than accepting the fact that the greatest perceived victim is actually a fearless master of his life?

David & Charmayne de Souza’s book “Itinerants, the Nomads of Mumbai” is available in all good bookstores.  In case you cannot find it and would like to purchase it contact us and we will put you in touch with them.

The Jevon Hall on Dharavi Main road usually resounds with Bollywood music playing during marriages and festivals. But last week Bollywood arrived on Dharavi’s door steps. Music composer Bappi Lahiri, the disco king of the eighties walked up the flight of stairs to sing with a bunch of children from Ganesh Vidya Mandir and Ambedkar schools located in Dharavi.

Bappi Lahiri aka Bappi Da came for a press conference about the new album he is producing with children of Dharavi and DJ Paul Devro of the label Mad Decent (Philadelphia). We had invited Paul Devro, a veteran of the Urban Typhoon Workshop, for a week to map the music and sounds of Dharavi. When Paul expressed his unconditional love for the music of Bappi Da, we immediately tried to connect them. It worked and they got along so well that they decided to produce an album together with children from Dharavi, which Bappi Da  called “Slum Stars” as a response to the title of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.”

Bollywood star producer Bappi Lahiri with DJ Paul Devro and young Dharavi singers at a press conference in Dharavi.

Bappi Da recorded some songs with the children in his studio. The media had come that day to check out what his public relations officer had sent out to them. Many admitted they had stepped into Dharavi for the very first time. While Bappi Da, Paul Devro and the children got good attention – there were a host of community leaders and residents who had also come for the event but were given the royal ignore. Except for a couple of press reporters  – who did interview a few – for the most part Dharavi remained in the media’s shadow this evening.

Fortunately, a local hip hop crew, the South Dandy Squad who Paul Devro had recorded and who had helped us find a space for the party in Dharavi managed to get some attention from the media.

South Dandy Squad performing a capella for a local TV network.

Yet – the media bias was clear. Just a couple of weeks earlier we, along with architect Wahid Seraj and students of Srishti School, Bangalore, helped organize an architectural studio. This was to help the faculty and graduate students of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University and the JJ School of Architecture do a project in Dharavi. The studio responded to the need of three Municipal Chawls in Dharavi to evolve plans for their self development.

Omkar Municipal Housing Society (proposed) in Kokiwada, Dharavi.

The issues were complex, but the students and the community did a terrific job in responding to the nuances. They provided alternative scenarios, using different rules and regulations. They connected with the community, who in turn gave them all the cooperation that was needed. It is rare that architects, planners and community members get a chance to collaborate like this. However, when an event was organized to present the work to the community and the public at large, we invited the media. Unfortunately, since there was no celebrity, no big speeches and consequently, very little reportage. The sole journalist who came did not publish the report as promised. It was published later – truncated within another story.

One of the persons who was disappointed, but not surprised was Mr. Ramesh Mishra, a lawyer born and brought up in one of the several Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) chawls in Dharavi, Koliwada. It was he who had invited us to help evolve plans for his chawls that subsequently lead to the studio. He was working on a case in the Human Right Commisson. It involved the right to self-development for the residents of his and a neighbouring chawl.

Ramesh Mishra (right) with members of the Urban Typhoon team, including architects Geeta Mehta and Kamu Iyer in the back.

The built-form of the ‘chawl’ evolved in colonial Bombay as a working class tenement modified on army barracks with one room per family, a common toilet and usually a long common corridor. They can be single or multi-storied structures and reportedly a good part of Dharavi comprises of chawls. Their existence testifies to some official involvement in their construction. In fact most of the tenants in the chawls in Dharavi built by the BMC (The Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation) pay controlled rent to the administration.

Municipal Chawl in Dharavi

The case by Ramesh Mishra demands that chawls such as his be exempt from the Dharavi redevelopment Plan which would reduce the size of individual homes considerably. His insistence that the BMC chawls be recognized as a distinct historical component of the neighbourhood is important at several levels. It questions the deliberate homogenization of the neighbourhood as one slum. It aligns with similar resistances by residents of Koliwada (in fact Mr. Mishra is on fairly strong ground when he says that his chawl actually comes within the purview of the Gaothan law – a special protection for urban villages).

All these concerns went into the studio but almost nothing was reported. Many residents of Dharavi have been cynical about the way the media reports or does not report stories about their neighbourhood, this is why we created www.dharavi.org which lets anyone publish their research, ideas and opinion in any language.

This is our tip to the mass media: If you want a good story speak to Mr Mishra, the South Dandy Crew and the thousand other people who have unique stories and knowledge about Dharavi. If that happens it will be a paradigm shift in the way the media understands cities and neighborhoods.

JJ School of the Arts and Columbia University students presenting their work to chawls residents. Bellow is one out of three Powerpoint presentations shown by the students to the residents. This was done after only a week of work on site. The students are now working on a more professional plan that Municipal Chawls hope to present to the authorities in June.

In addition to the airoots team, Melissa Nahory and Sytse de Maat contributed photos to this post.

Dharavi Bazaar by Wahid Seraj. What would happen if Dharavi could develop on its own terms?

Why is it that Dharavi exercises so much fascination for architects, urbanists, researchers, students and journalists from all over the world? Is it because it is the “largest slum in Asia”? Is it because it is under imminent threat of being redeveloped? Is it because it is worth billions? Is it because the global media loves to recycle stereotypes of victimhood and third world poverty? These tired clichés and false alarms have filled the news for some time. But it is time to reload our browsers.

Let’s start by dissipating some of the most prevalent myths about Dharavi. It is not the largest slum in Mumbai, let alone Asia. There are more huts and structures around the airport. There are massive, sprawling informal settlements in the industrial suburbs of Kandivili and Vikhroli.

The infamous Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) has been decried as a land grab of the highest order by many residents, professionals and advocates in India and abroad. For better or worse it seems to have hit a wall after the financial meltdown. All that hot speculative money, which investment bankers were eager to cool off by injecting into real estate, has evaporated. Who can the government sell the land to now? Who wants to colonize that urban jungle full of political parties, slum dweller federations, NGOs, religious factions and angry residents?

The global media loves to work with the simplistic and highly problematic label of “slum”. City reporters, activists and non-governmental organizations also find the short-cut concept useful. Dharavi has often been pictured by the city’s media as a wasteland with barely standing temporary structures; an immense junkyard crowded with undernourished people hopelessly disconnected from the rest of the world, surviving on charity and pulling the whole city’s economy backward.

It is only recently, and in conjunction with informed local and global opinions that an alternative picture of Dharavi has begun to circulate. Where it appears as a developed urban area composed of distinct neighbourhoods, as a space where artisanship thrives, where commerce and business are the main defining moments of its landscape. Far from being depressed and isolated, the economy of Dharavi appears to be deep-rooted in the city and networked globally, with local goods being exported as far as Italy and Sweden.

If we deduct pity and voyeurism as the only reasons for the wide interest in Dharavi, what is left? Maybe there is something truly energizing and inspiring to be found there. Something so big that Mumbaikars don’t perceive it until they realize that the whole world is looking at it over their shoulders. Indeed, a certain detachment is necessary to get out of the general myopia. What fascinates so many people is no longer the misery of Dharavi, but its incredible capacity to develop and evolve in spite of all odds. Dharavi has emerged through the collective intelligence, skills and efforts of its residents. To use the language of the net generation, it is the ultimate user-generated city.

Dharavi Beach by Jose “Cole” Abasolo. Today the Mithi river is terribly polluted. Maybe that instead of throwing its untreated waste water into it, the five stars offices of the Bandra Kurla Complex could help cleaning it.

The fishing village in the neighbourhood, the potter’s community that settled there and the waves of rural artisanal migrants from different parts of the country came with their multiple skills and shaped this enclave in the most creative way one can imagine. In fact artisanal skills are primarily what has made Dharavi what it is. No wonder it is often talked about as the ultimate workshop-factory-residential space. The post-industrial, decentralized production processes through which most goods are produced in Dharavi stands in sharp contrast to the Chinese sweatshop model. Every wall, nook and corner is an extension of the tools of the trade of its inhabitants. Over here, the furnace and the cooking hearth regularly exchange roles and sleeping competes with warehouse space all the time. Space is the most precious resource in Dharavi, this is why it is used around the clock in the most efficient way possible.

The inhabitants of Dharavi have a fantastic capacity to solve their own problems. For many, Dharavi has been a platform for social mobility to middle-classdoom. However, one problem the inhabitants cannot get their head around is the threat of a top down redevelopment plan backed by the state. This burdens the residents of Dharavi more than anything else. Not only does the state not help, it even comes in the way of self-development. Why would anyone invest in their homes or business if it risks being bulldozed in a few months or years?

What seems to separate Dharavi from the DRP more than anything else is a generational gap. In the age of user-generated content, open-source and P2P, the net generation connects intuitively with the archetype of the squatter, who, just like the hacker in another realm, delves in and strives to overcome loopholes leftover by the system, and uses community and social networking as its modus operandi. In fact, it makes total sense to understand Dharavi as a self-generating post-industrial city.

While many are still chewing the blue pill, the world has experienced a paradigm shift, which most spectacularly manifests itself through the rise of information and communication technologies to affect all fields of knowledge. One of the principal characteristics of this shift is the collapse of distance between the expert and the layperson. The success story of Wikipedia, which lets anyone be a contributor to the most comprehensive encyclopaedia ever produced, is nothing but a reflection of the power of the Web, which was designed, in the words of Web pioneer Tim Berners Lee, “to be used for anything, constraining its users as little as possible … [and] built to enable, not to control.”

The user-generated approach to knowledge production is also injecting new concepts and viewpoints in the practice of urban planning. Top down plans such as the Dharavi Redevelopment Project have become objects of much criticism on the grounds that they completely ignore the knowledge and concerns of the residents themselves. Surely, they should be included in discussions and projects that will radically impact their sheltering and livelihood. How can one pretend to do any plan for Dharavi without drawing on the experience and skills of its inhabitants? After all, they are the ones who developed Dharavi generation after generation.

Slow, generational growth and incremental development is what created several European towns and villages that today are considered to be fine specimens of urban heritage. Close set streets, low-rise and high-density structures create vibrant neighbourhoods that have become major tourist attractions.

Tokyo Dharavi Remix by Matias Echanove. A chunk of Dharavi is inserted in a Tokyo landscape. The suburbs of Tokyo have the same urban typology as the informal settlements of Mumbai. This is because both share a history of incremental development.

In Japan, villages got absorbed seamlessly into new urban precincts and crop-fields converted effortlessly to residential or industrial spaces. A futuristic city like Tokyo emerged through such a process and reveals vast swathes of urban space that are dense with small, compact structures and labyrinthine streets, looking, from a distance, astonishingly like Dharavi.

More than a master plan, Dharavi needs a liberation of the imagination. Lets drop the heavy CAD maps and GIS surveys and zoom in to the street level. All Dharavi needs is some creative photoshoping and less of a patronising colonial gaze. If allowed to develop through their own internal skills, if provided for with basic infrastructural and amenities, the hundreds of enclaves, will keep improving their conditions, as they have always done. While no one can imagine what the neighbourhood may look in a couple of decades, it is certain to represent the city’s spirit like nothing else.

Published in Time Out Mumbai, Jan 20, 2009

Ranchhod Savdas Tank from Kumbharwada, the potters neighbourhood in Dharavi, has very clear dreams and ambitions. He wants Kumbharwada to be known as the best pottery production center in the world. He wants the new generation of youngsters in Kumbharwada to find this traditional occupation so lucrative that they would take to it spontaneously. He wants to modernize production techniques, respond to the latest demands in terms of designs and choices and generally build on the hundred year old dynamic history of this neighbourhood that was founded by his ancestors and their families.

He is also very annoyed at the inability of the city, its media and civic authorities to see the value of his dreams and the fact that they are inextricably linked to those of the city at large. After all the city has been built on similar ambitions; it has seen enterprises emerge from nothingness, it has been nourished by the sweat of its hard-working resident-workers and it continues to evolve and modernize in many sectors.

Smoke coming out of the ovens where the Kumbhars bake their pottery.

He finds it difficult to believe that the authorities cannot see a simple thing. That his neighbourhood is primarily an artisanal space around which the resident artisans have woven an intricate and interdependent structure of residential and work spaces that are so enmeshed, that it is impossible for one to be conceived off without the other even for a minute.

Tank, like other members of Kumbharwada in Dharavi, believes that for the city to do justice to its history of enterprise, it must rise to the occasion and recognize this simple fact. The best way of recognizing this is by letting this neighboruhood continue to evolve through its own inner logic. Not impose a development plan on it and learn to give importance to the voices of its residents and their choices.

Coming across someone like him is indeed an important reminder to all of us so invested in transforming the city. It is an important lesson for all urbanists, urban planners and urban historians. What the story of Kumbharwada represents is a vital moment in the history of cities that has the potential of making Mumbai a trendsetter.

A history, which acknowledges that homes and workspaces were decisively cut-off from each other only as recently as the industrial revolution and the impact of this incision was most strongly felt in the house of the artisan. Historically, if there was any space that used itself most creatively and productively it was the artisan’s workshop-cum-home that produced 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 most 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.

However, cities like Mumbai are living examples of built-forms that do not reflect this neat divide. The artisanal home continues to exist in many different forms. Consider the fact that this form exists functionally, in some way or the other (as studio-homes, artists lofts and so many other examples) in the contemporary global economy.

All it needs is a little bit of imagination to transform neighbourhoods like Kumbharwada and use it to showcase Mumbai’s amazing spirit of enterprise. The pottery industry represents one of the few lucrative artisanal occupations that has survived mechanical competition thanks to the tastes of its consumers.

It would be nothing short of foolishness to over look this precious history.

Photo credits: All but last by airoots team. The last taken by KRVIA

Published in the Mumbai Mirror, December 31st 2008

Amar Farooqui’s slim but potent, ‘Opium City: The making of Early Victorian Bombay’ (Three Essays Collective, 2006) takes you on a journey of Mumbai darker than the city’s industrial waste.

Farooqui, makes absolutely no compromises. He leads us out of the sepia-tinted memories we fancy so much and forces us into the squalid eighteenth and nineteenth century streets of Bombay in a manner that would make most heritage conservationists squirm.

You get to see the city in pretty much the way we know it today – a city of crowds and pathetic facilities for those unlucky to live outside its privileged, inner circle. A city dominated by administrative uncertainty, yoked to the larger imperial project headquartered in Calcutta much in the manner that it is today to Delhi. A city energized by small business communities from across the region, but who are always kept subservient to its suspicious rulers. A city economically addicted to forbidden trade – opium – an addiction that shaped the rules of the trading game and one, which remains a shadowy presence in the city’s underbelly, where the lines between business and crime are still seen as blurred.

Such an account of the city’s past means that those who lived through the city’s effervescent post-independence optimism – the celebrated decades of the fifties and sixties – have to re-cast their nostalgia and see them as freak moments. As soon as the dust settled, the city reverted to its wicked old ways.

But then, Farooqui’s story is still half-told. Historians often get so carried away by the austere fact that lies in the archive that they forget there’s more.

And one is not talking about the spirit of the city at all. That has been done to death, by novelists and writers – and with good reason. One is talking about the fuel that keeps the city going – the act of exchanging goods and services.

We detect in Farooqui’s rendering a lot of prejudice about conducting business itself. And the familiar disdain that many misguided historians in India have towards this act. A disdain that is a mirror image of the equally pathetic attitude that the city’s economic elites show towards the traders that rule its streets – the feriwalas or the hawkers – treating them like criminals.

Such extreme attitudes yield two contrary but complementary stories; of the city’s heroic working class past that focuses exclusively on its industrial, trade union-lead history and the false hagiographies of its corporate heroes.

In reality, the complete story of Mumbai lies in its very humble origins as a trading city, which incidentally, Farooqui draws quite accurately. The problem is the way he tells his story.

He does not do adequate justice to these real characters – the petty traders, small shopkeepers and street-hawkers – who were crushed in the past by a colonial regime that treated them suspiciously. But they were all over the place, building the foundations of the city and making it what it remains – an economically successful and cosmopolitan city.

The tragedy is that even such well-researched historical accounts condemn these characters into insignificance because they do not fit into a larger story of working class history.

And that’s the reason the city keeps stumbling.

Instead of making the symbol of the feriwala or the street trader, its mascot, the city criminalizes them while the prejudiced scribe ignores them altogether.

No wonder the city’s thwarted identity spews out weird mythologies where the underworld refers to itself as a business company!

Published in The Hindu on Sunday December 7, 2008

In the last week of November, all of us living in Mumbai went through a succession of mental states. Ranging from incredulity, rage, cynicism, disbelief, shock and nervousness, to fear, sadness, numbness, hate, and and the most disturbing of all, fascination. A morbid fascination for the ability of a handful of young guys to create mayhem in the city, shake Indian politics, and hypnotise the global media.

Surely these were no ordinary kids. They were well trained, fully equipped and possibly driven by faith. Thanks to GPS technology they could navigate an ancient sea route that connects two colonial cities partitioned by history. Thanks to their urbane appearance they could sit down at Leopold café and enter the city’s best hotels without raising any suspicion.

They checked in at the Taj next to the general manager and transformed their quarters into a five-star control room. After brutally killing scores of tourists they cool-headedly recharged their AK-47 and rampaged the city. They killed Mumbai’s top cops and hijacked police cars, twice. Till the end they defied India’s best commandos. For a moment it seemed that the country’s entire army could not stop them.

Before last week, a movie script based on this sequence of events would surely have been deemed far-fetched. The audacity of this attack is indeed incredible.

The accomplishment of extraordinarily audacious objectives has precedents throughout history. Not too long ago, the word audacity was being brandied in a completely different context and with a completely different meaning. In fact, at the other end of the spectrum altogether. A group of determined men and women succeeded in carrying their candidate all the way to the highest office, beating the most powerful political apparatuses in the US: The Hillary campaign and the Republicans. The Obama campaign provided magical inspiration to people all over the world and revived some hope for the world’s most powerful (and dangerous) democracy. Such a comparison is itself audacious, but there is a reason for making it.

If anything could be learnt from last week’s event, it is the lesson about the power of audacity. Audacity is precisely what Mumbai has been lacking, especially since the 1991 communal riots. Instead of defending its multicultural identity, forged by a history of trading and migration, it allowed goons turned politicians to rule and tear apart its unique brand of cosmopolitanism. Innocent scapegoats were killed and cowardly mobs were rewarded, setting in motion a cycle of violence that just took a new spin last week.

A response to last week’s events driven by fear and paranoia against our immediate or distant neighbours –which seems more than likely– will only feed into a further destructive spiral. If we don’t want to stand mute witnesses in the face of history, we will have to reclaim audacity for ourselves, and prove against all odds that yes-indeed all things are possible; including transforming our city’s mindset and reclaiming diversity and openness as Mumbai’s main strengths.

To do that we will have to rise above our prejudices against certain communities, neighbourhoods, slums, even ordinary people. These prejudices put us at threat more than anything else. Here is a concrete example: Of all the failures that paved the way for last week’s disaster, the biggest was that the police didn’t follow up on an alert given by members of Mumbai’s oldest communities, its fishermen. They were the first to report abnormal activity on their shore. Unfortunately they were not heard.

Read another airoots article on this topic published in the Mumbai Mirror, December 3, 2008

We are looking for funding for a project in Dharavi. We need your help! Please contact us if you can contribute or if you have any suggestions!!!

The Context:

Dharavi is usually described as the “largest slum” in Asia. Home to at least half a million people, it is one of the most diverse and culturally vibrant parts of Mumbai. About 95% of the residents of Dharavi belong to what are officially called dalits and ‘other backward castes’. This partly explains why the authorities have largely ignored their needs. Political parties and NGOs have been present in Dharavi for many years, providing support to many residents and speaking on their behalf. However, to this day, it is nearly impossible for individuals and grassroots groups of Dharavi to get heard. Mass media is generally sympathetic to the hardships endured by the residents, but again usually misrepresents Dharavi as an homogeneous community, when in fact it is composed of about 88 communities, each with their languages, practices and cultures.

One of the highest stresses faced by the residents of Dharavi today is uncertainty regarding their housing and workspaces. The Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), which is the government agency in overseeing slum redevelopment efforts in Mumbai, has divided Dharavi into 5 sectors and requested proposals from real estate investors from all over the world for each of these sectors. This project, known as the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), requires developers to provide a 300 sqf flat to each family that can prove that it settled in Dharavi before the year 2000. In exchange for rehousing residents in new buildings, the builders get construction rights in Dharavi.

The DRP has been highly criticized by NGOs and independent experts, notably for leaving out of the plan hundreds of thousands of residents who cannot prove that they settled in Dharavi previous to 2000. Some experts have also pointed out that any plan that might increase the current population density of Dharavi was irresponsible, since the density levels are already unsustainable. In any case, the DRP is severly compromised by the current financial crisis, which has caused many of the bidders to withdraw or simply disappear.

Dharavi residents may be temporarily off the hook but that also means that Dharavi will also certainly fade away from the media and government’s limelight and go back to being what it always was, a shadow city. One of the reasons for the media frenzy that surrounded Dharavi is that it epitomizes the urban crisis that Mumbai, India and the world are facing as more and more people move to cities. Global economic recession will not stop rural immigrants from coming in mass to urban areas. In fact, as the crisis hits rural areas, it might well accelerate the influx and therefore the informal development of shelters on the city’s pavements, along the railways, and in the periphery.

The recent attacks in Mumbai will almost certainly translate into a renewed attention on security and a greater insularity of middle-class and upper class enclaves in a city where about 60% of the population is said to be living in slums. This deepening of the class divide will only isolate the poor majority further and exclude them from a process of development and globalization that has benefited many middle-class Indians.

The residents of Dharavi are not only aspiring to better living standards, they have also demonstrated extraordinary resilience and creativity in the face of social exclusion and economic hardship. Many commentators, including The Economist, have been impressed with the dynamism and entrepreneurialism displayed by Dharavites. Local industries, such as leather and embroidery, are even attracting the attention of shoppers and investors. Moreover, researchers, including Nokia’s R&D team and Microsoft Research India, who have performed market studies in Dharavi have noted the extremely high absorption of new technologies by the population. Every lane in Dharavi has a cell phone retailer, and cybercafes are flourishing.

The Urban Typhoon workshop, which took place in Dharavi in March 2008, and was supported by Asia Initiatives in Japan and PUKAR in Mumbai, clearly confirmed that residents are willing to be involved in the development process and have more than physical manpower to contribute. Foreign participants were utterly impressed with the positive attitude and great motivation displayed by local residents, as well as by  their genuine willingness to be part of the solution.

The Concept:

DOT stands for Dharavi.organic Technology Centre. It combines several initiatives taking place in Dharavi, including the PUKAR Youth Fellowship, the Urban Typhoon Workshop, and the dharavi.org platform. These initiatives are described in the last section of the proposal.

DOT is a space of self-expression for all residents of Dharavi. It aims at helping those who are willing to voice their opinions, ideas, visions, and plans out to the rest of the city and the rest of the world.

Objectives:

The DOT center will provide a space, tools and training in English, Marathi and Hindi for all those who want to use dharavi.org and access other websites.

Dharavi.org already serves as a link between people interested in researching Dharavi and local residents. DOT will now allow residents to reach out to people, community groups and organizations from around the world who are dealing with the same set of issues.

The Urban Typhoon workshop sparked the interest of Dharavi residents from various parts of the neighbourhoods. DOT will provide an infrastructure that will allow the multiplication of such initiatives. DOT will help connect Dharavi with students and schools of architecture, engineering, planning, and economics as well as social workers and generally with people from all walks of life who want to spend some time to help local projects in Dharavi. It will constitute a physical connection point for the outside world into Dharavi.

DOT will not only allow Dharavi residents to access the Web free of charge, it will also help them to use it to fulfil their needs and aspirations. It will for instance support local business initiatives and the pursuit of educational goals.

In addition, DOT will provide vocational training in hardware repair and software development to young people in Dharavi. It will then connect trainees to potential employers.

The space itself will have versatile usage and will be usable for different functions, such as parties, youth, women’s groups and various workshops and classes.

Partners:

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research) is a NPO (Not-for-profit-organization) in Mumbai. It is a Research Collective that has an ongoing three-year-old research project with 40 groups all over the Mumbai Metropolitan Region involving 300 youth from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, as barefoot researchers.

Dharavi.organic is a multimedia open source Wiki website dedicated to Dharavi, one of the largest informal settlements in the world located in the heart of Mumbai. This is an URBZ project.

Urban Typhoon is a participatory design and planning workshop organized by a global network of urban researchers and practitioners. The first Urban Typhoon workshop was held in Tokyo, 2006, the second in Mumbai, 2008 and the next one will take place in Istanbul, 2009.

Mumbai’s history reflects two distinct phases. One is the south-oriented story that starts with the development of the docks by the British in the seventeenth century. The other is an older, northern-bound story that starts with the Portuguese conquest and domination of the regions around Vasai village in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The essay argues that the point of intersection of these histories is one that can potentially explain the overwhelming presence of poor, infrastructure deprived habitats – often referred to as slums – that dominate the landscape of the city.

Worli-Koliwada, one of seven century old fishermen settlement in Mumbai

Mumbai’s slums occupy an unusually large scale – even when compared to other Indian metropolises, with similar economic and political constraints. The essay proposes that the scale and depth of the phenomenon requires a special inquiry into its history. The essay does this by focusing on the story of a small habitat – called Khotachiwadi – that encapsulates many of the issues being debated. Khotachiwadi eventually however, becomes a springboard to discuss other issues to do with the political economy of built-forms in the city – especially with regard to the dialectic of the slum and the village.

Khotachiwadi, Girgaum, South Mumbai

It also asserts that a critical examination of the category ‘slum’ – and its relationship with the ‘village’ – can challenge take-for-granted notions of urbanism and urban futures for labour-surplus countries like India that have old agrarian histories.

These notions usually render village-like habitats as being inappropriate for modern urban spaces. These spaces are viewed as having a certain kind of density that can only be absorbed by the high-rise form, which, in turn, is presented as antithetical to the village. While critiques of these notions have the potential of moving into radical ideas of the urban – especially in the realm beyond built-forms – this paper restricts its discussions to the physical dimension of urbanism.

When the Portuguese empire handed over islands in the southern end of the region to the East India Company they did not see this cluster of islands as valuable. They were more interested in the rich fertile lands of the north that supported their trading activities connecting Daman, Vasai, Goa and Calicut. These lands were dotted with villages that went all the way to Mahim and Bandra, perceived to be the southern borders of the Portuguese sphere of influence. The social structure of this space was dominated by a combination of feudal and mercantile practices subsidized by low-caste labour. Large parts of the population were converted to Christianity, a process that preserved the caste divisions by allowing for the emergence of upper caste land-lords and low-caste labour and artisanal groups.

When the East India Company took charge of the southern islands, they forcefully integrated Bandra and Mahim, which they saw as the northern borders of their territory. As the influence of the company increased through the development of the docks, many groups migrated from the Gujarat and Maharashtra regions all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Parsee, Hindu and Muslim Gujarathi merchants, shop-keepers and businessmen moved in and around the Fort areas and brought in their urban traditions of built-forms from their city of origin – Surat – an architectural legacy that is still evident in some neighbourhoods of south Mumbai – especially Kalbadevi. On the other hand, the low-caste predominantly labour communities found themselves being absorbed by the villages that existed, in what was then perceived to be, the peripheral regions of the north. The lands were mostly owned by Christian landlords or occasionally by a member of the Pathare Prabhu community – an old courtly caste that linked its existence to a thirteenth century kingdom nearby.

All through the nineteenth century, poorer migrant groups would pay rents to landlords to set up hamlets that became their homes. Interestingly, richer rural communities, mostly upper caste Catholics, who happened to be educated and got skilled jobs in the docks also reproduced similar hamlets – referred to as wadis. These expressed themselves in newer villages like Khotachiwadi – a hamlet of cottages in Girgaum or a similar one in Matharpakadi at Mazagaon. They looked like the older upper-caste landed villages of Bandra, Mahim, Gorai and Vasai but had actually been built afresh in the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, swampy land around Mahim, particularly in a village called Dharavi (that was occupied primarily by Koli fisherfolk) became the site for the settling down of untouchable communities from different parts of the country. Those regions were seen to be unlivable and peripheral, from the vantage points of both – the fisher community that lived by the sea, as well as the city civic-authorities in the south.

Dharavi-Koliwada, a fishermen village that has for long been called a slum

As it turned out, as more low-caste groups arrived from the countryside, attracted by the mills and the docks, the southern city could provide only limited accommodation. Most of the surplus labour lived in the villages, outside the perceived city limits.

As the southern city kept expanding and as dependence on agriculture declined in importance, it became easier for landlords to make more money by renting or selling out land than through agriculture. However, when their lands got integrated into the city they had to give up their control either to the civic authorities or to slumlords. This process got even more complicated in the post-independence period with the development of a local electoral process and the growth of new neighbourhood leaders.

The landscape that thus formed by the middle of the twentieth century in the northern parts of Mumbai was really a cluster of villages that had become outsize settlements. Even today, the largest slums of Mumbai in that region -  Dharavi and Jari-Mari – reflect this village like legacy with their land ownership patterns revealing this quite clearly.

However – villages do not simply become slums because of an awkward growth in population. It helps a certain political economy to view them as slums and this is the main argument being made in the essay. The attempt is to understand the deeper historical basis of slum formation in Mumbai and see it as much as a story of habitats and perceptions about habitats, as about the political economy of scarcity of infrastructure.

To explicate this point – we focus on a small village – called Khotachiwadi in Girgaum.

Khotachiwadi is a cluster of about twenty-eight small cottages and bungalows built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the heart of the city. Today it is referred to as an urban heritage precinct mainly because of its distinct architectural flourishes linked to an Indo-Portuguese past.

Right from the start, the homes represented a diverse set of architectural influences – Portuguese villas, Maharastrian coastal cottages, Goan homes and regular cottages and bungalows found in the region. In its hey-day – the early twentieth century – the village boasted of about eighty-eight such individually owned or leased homes.

Engendered architectural heritage in Khotachiwadi

During the course of interactions with the villagers, we came across frequent statements by elderly residents mentioning that the wadi used to be referred to as a slum in the early twentieth century. It was called as such by British surveyors who were developing a larger urban plan for the city. Intrigued by the fact that a village now celebrated for its architectural legacy was once referred to as a slum, we continued to explore this observation.  In spite of frequent attempts though, we were unable to actually verify this through archival material. The records only mentioned the real name of the village, never the underlying assumed category. However, on inquiring with contemporary architects, urban planners and government officials, we found most of them agreeing with the residents. Their certainty was based on the awareness that many habitats even today tend to be loosely referred to as slums, though they are historically distinct villages. Some historical accounts of the city even referred to its native towns (immediately outside the Fort precinct), as slums. Referring to Khotachiwadi as such was, thus, quite understandable.

After all, even today, there exist village lands – called ‘gaothans’ – that are specifically recognized as distinct non-urban habitats, with separate development laws. They are treated by developers – and commonly perceived by neighbouring settlements – as slums.

According to urban historian Rahul Mehrotra, it was in the fifties that one saw the emergence of the simplistic binary – the slum and the multi-storied building dominating rhetoric of built-form in the city. It came to represent a discourse that over-wrote the diversity that existed in the earlier experience of Mumbai’s built-forms and transformed the perceptions of the future of the city through the aspiration of being a high-rise oriented city. This aspiration eventually started a process that aimed at erasing all ambiguous habitats, especially those that embodied the ethnic elements of built-forms found in the erstwhile “native city” – but more so those structures that seemed rural and therefore inappropriate . Thus till the heritage movement in the city really firmed itself up as some kind of a force to reckon with in the 1980’s – much of the old city (that was not protected by the old Rent Act) was destroyed on the grounds that it was part of a back-ward looking colonial experience .

House of famous fashion designer and Khotachiwadi life-long resident, James Ferreira

Places like Khotachiwadi were seen to be anachronistic, since they were villages. While most “native” spaces were distinctly urban buildings, this particular habitat’s resonances of being “rural” created further trouble for it. The colonial “native” city had quite comfortably absorbed the rural memories that its migrants had brought in. These memories had provided the quaint architectural flourishes of habitats like Khotachiwadi. However, in the long run these very flourishes and characteristics made these hamlets seem inconsistent with the ideals of a modern “urban” present – one, that wanted to distance it self as much as possible from any rural memory.

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Celebration of the Holy Festival, last day of the Urban Typhoon Workshop in Koliwada-Dharavi

Sorry Manuel Castells and David Harvey and all those great theorists who have taught us how capital and technology produce the city and constrain also its future development. Apologies to Paulo Freire too who’s tried his best to wake us up from our delirious “magical consciousness” to teach us that we are “subjects in and with an objective world”.

You really are great and we are trying, but we just cannot (and don’t really want to) get liberated from our imagination. We love the world of possibilities more than the world “as it is”. We know that “in theory” the two are not incompatible, but in practice, they don’t fare that well together. So while you go ahead to keep describing it, we’ll imagine it the best we can.

Language and imagination are the best tools we have. And now the mighty Web allows us to drop ideas right in the reader’s heads, enhanced with special graphics, sound and moving images. After having tried both, we are convinced that unrestrained imagination has much more transformative potential than analysis. Don’t get us wrong. We love theories, they are beautiful narratives.

But as Yehuday Safran said, the world is shaped “above all through language, and its sublime, monstruous imagination.”  We support all the truth seekers. Seeking truth is a beautiful project to undertake, so beautiful in fact that it really doesn’t matter if it ever gets realized. But sometimes another path is equally fruitful. What we like is trying out our imagination on reality to see what works. And imagination is at its best when it is naive, magical and wild.

Look at cities. They are first and foremost the products of collective imaginations. Dreams of grandeur and power produce avenues, churches and skyscrapers. Immigrants create heavens for themselves in far away lands, which they dreamt about on their way. When they cannot actually create heavens, they dream of going back with some money to recreate them there.

These heavens are simple really – homes that are the realization of life-long dreams. At the very least, people use imagination and decoration to make their shacks feel special. As Hiroshi Hara said, “There are as many worlds as there are rooms.”

It is also clearer today that communities are imaginary. More than ever before, we live in a deterritorialized world, where the outside and inside have supposedly lost their meaning. Resorting to the imagination is therefore a matter of survival. It is especially when localities get produced by an exterior context that inhabitants dont control, that they need to use their imagination to generate a context from within. A context that can be based on historical narratives, cultural affinities or fantasies – whatever one chooses.

It is worth fighting for an imagined space, especially if it is a stage for human relations and interactions. But it is not worth fighting for a space that restrains or limits imagination in any way. There is no point defending a place that cannot be transformed; unless it is a place worth preserving for the story it embodies, such as a ruin (especially if it is haunted with good spirits). Places must inspire or they must be rethought completely!

The Web is the greatest creation since the letters of the alphabet. In fact the Web is a product of the wild imagination of Tim Berner Lee who dreamed of hypertextuality to communicate the ideas of his time – just like Gutenberg shaped the printing press to communicate the ideas of his. The power of the Web is that it provides the most advanced space possible for the textual/visual expression of imaginaries. Moreover it connects ideas to each other on an infinite plane. What’s more, it acts as a mirror between the virtual world of imagination and the physical world. And it works both ways!

Much more than simple text alone, it allows others to contribute and evolve one’s own imaginary. Just like you could add a comment under that post or copy-paste it onto your blog. These simple moves enhance the potential for materialization of ideas into the physical world.

Here is a concrete example.

There was always a point in time during the organization of the Urban Typhoon workshop when the whole event was nothing more than a Web page. It was no more than wishful thinking by a small group of people. At that point we didn’t have any money to get the guests over, commitment from the local community was at best uncertain, and we had almost no registered participants.

Nonetheless this vision, expressed in the form of a decent Website, made people believe that it was real – and they registered. Contacts were done via email, but it was only on the day of the workshop that people actually materialized. Participants never doubted that the event was really happening, but we only knew that it was real when we saw them actually apparating, one by one – notwithstanding the fact that we were the ones to have invited them in the first place!

It was always harder to convince local people that the workshop was really going to happen. It was even harder to convince them to participate, even though that was the whole idea to start with. We had been invited but community members in the first place but most local people had no interest in participating until the the outsiders popped out of the World Wide Web with their eyes full of great expectations and a pre-emptive love for the neighborhood.

The outsiders had no problem imagining that a fantastic event was going to happen in a fantastic place. They connected the place to the event, while the locals could not connect the fantastic event to their everyday, banal place. At first they simply could not imagine and refused to believe, but that was only until they became overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and faith of the numerous believers.

The materialization of this event comforted us. We felt kicked and gleeful, in our back-of-the-classroom-dreaming pupil approach; our favourite kind!

Next thing in line is the Koliwada Design Cell, which will be the fantastic vehicle that will take us on a journey towards the realization of a participatory development project for Koliwada. All the walls on our way will disintegrate! Lets try out some magical planning.