http://www.airoots.org A blog by Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove on adventitious roots, urban forests and villages, natural cities, lost tribes, new nomads and everything in between and under... Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:19:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Abstract of paper selected for presentation at a conference on Architecture and Fiction in Lisbon. Cultural theorist Donna Haraway astutely observes: both fiction and fact are rooted in an epistemology that appeals to experience. However, there is an important difference; the word fiction is an active form, referring to a present ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/08/fictions-for-a-user-generated-city/ Economic & Political Weekly EPW June 12, 2010 vol xlv no 24 41 Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria (janjaria@bard.edu) - Bard College, the United States Ulka Anjaria (uanjaria@brandeis.edu) is at Brandeis University, the United States. Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City Much of the critical and popular controversy surrounding the 2009 film Slumdog Millionaire is ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/07/slumdog-debates-continue/ Have you ever looked carefully at the little fruit shop jutting impossibly out of the corner down your street ? Or the paan wala perching precariously on a tiny piece of real estate sandwiched between a bus-stop and a compound wall? Or the condensed universe of a cobbler in a ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/06/diy-dukaan/ For an understanding of Mumbai's original bedroom city, the end-stop for several lakhs of the city's commuters, read this entry on Mira Road on www.urbz.net. http://www.airoots.org/2010/05/miras-musings/ Last week, Mumbai-based urban practitioners Marinha Fernandes, Kapil Chavan and Swati Sanghvi, organized a Jane Jacobs Walk in which at least sixty people participated to re-discover the streets of Kalbadevi, Girgaum and its many tributaries. These walks were part of a global event in which similar gatherings glided down urban ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/05/jane-jacobs-walk-in-mumbai/ New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys Now that many commentators have replaced the word "slum" (the s... word) by the phrase "informal settlement", we are compelled to wonder what do we really mean by the term "informal". Do we mean unconventional? Unofficial? Unplanned? Undesigned? Or do we mean its form is imperfect, ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/04/informal-neighbourhoods-or-neighbouroods-in-formation/ Here are some links to the most fascinating explorations of unusual urban settings...or takes on them... 10 Wierd Eco Systems on Earth - features Dharavi as one of 'em! Read about the Walled City where Sunlight could not Reach. And for a great read on the impact of Science Fiction on Architecture and ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/04/wierd-cities/ While it was not surprising to witness the Bombay Gymkhana authorities behaving disgracefully on the night of the TEDx Mumbai get-together – when they shut down the evening because of transgender intellectual-activist Laxmi Tripathi’s presence – it felt horrible. We saw, first hand, a drama that must have played and ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/04/unfair-play-at-the-bombay-gymkhana/ The insistent and continuous comparing of India and China does not really stop. It may fade away from the media for a few months but continues to trouble and haunt policy makers, academics and all those in the grand race for global supremacy all the time – as is testified ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/03/an-asian-story/ What We See refreshes Jane Jacobs' economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. More than thirty renowned pundits and practitioners combine their personal observations with meditations on Jacobs' insights for the living city. The book models itself after Jacobs' collaborative approach to city and community building, asking citizens ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/03/coming-soon/ Mumbai and Pune are overseeing the birth of two new cities growing in between their long, expressway-connected urban sprawl. These are Amby Valley and Lavasa. Both these urban dreams have been conceived in the mode of planned cities even though they have very different starting points. One is an out ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/03/the-way-the-city-crumbles/ The Portuguese left a few long lasting legacies in Mumbai. Forts are one of them. Along Mumbai's Eastern and Western waterfronts one can rediscover them hidden in the surrounding habitat, whether it is mangroves, fishermen's huts or Dharaviesque microworkshops. Airoots follows Anuradha Mathur (co-author with Dilip Da Cunha of the much ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/02/mumbais-liquid-grounds/ Right from Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra's evocative title (Bombay; The Cities Within) , to the trite images of slums juxtaposed against high-rise buildings - Mumbai's many personalities have been alternatively celebrated and chastised. The diversity of built-forms, the many different urban sensibilities (small town enclaves in South Mumbai, coastal ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/01/parallel-urban-worlds/ Tokyo in 1945 after being flattened by USA Air Force firebombs. The standard approach to residential redevelopment projects is to take ground zero as a starting point — even if it means creating it. This often translates into shifting people from substandard but incrementally developing environments into apartment blocks that ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/01/haiti-viewed-from-asia/ Ferry Wharf, Or the Brother's Push (Bhau-Cha-Dhakka), Mumbai Some years ago, the idea of the Eastern Waterfront was thrown into the public realm by several planning and design centres to show that much more can be done to explore the city’s island status and its vast shoreline on both its sides. ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/01/port-city/