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... Sat, 24 Dec 2016 05:11:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en All through the world, from Japan to China, the African continent to Europe, economic specialization and attempts to organize crafts, manufacturing and trading processes, have been integral to urban life. In Europe, medieval guilds that interacted, resisted or cooperated with the State and the Church have impacted political and social ... http://www.airoots.org/2016/12/cities-that-smell-of-leather-and-earth/ This is the summary of a talk given at Oris - House of architecture, Zagreb, Croatia on June 16th 2016, which was part of the the Future Architecture Platform. Illustrations by Ismini Christakopoulou, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava. The modern notion of the future is based on a Biblical timeline, which ... http://www.airoots.org/2016/07/utopian-futures-vs-the-fictional-present/ (image source: http://fpif.org/piketty-elysium/) Future as a resource Urban practice has become increasingly speculative about the future. If there is a world where utopias are literally a commodity, bought and sold as little pieces of dreams, it is here. Full of futuristic and visionary images about the way the world should look, buildings, ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/09/speculative-urbanism-and-concrete-fictions/ Organic metaphors for cities have been in fashion at least since Patrick Geddes (1854 - 1932). A biologist by training, Geddes turned to city planning when his eyesight became too defective to use a microscope. He imagined a city as not fundamentally different from any other living organism. A city seems ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/07/natural-city/ Our office in Shivaji Nagar is treated to streams of chai through out the day – most days of the year. However – there are sudden droughts that punctuate this experience. This piece explains such momentary lapses and what they actually mean… The academic field of mobility (with a ‘b’) ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/07/motility/ Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai Global anxieties about population growth have been around at least since Malthus, with a peak in the 1960s when American academics started talking about a "population bomb" that would throw the rich world right back into poverty -and annihilate India once and for all. The particular shape ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/06/slumexplosion/ For the last four years, Urbanology, through its research institute based in Goa and Mumbai, has been working on a project that connects these two seemingly disparate places on India’s west coast. At one level, ‘Tracking the Indian Rail Trail’ looks at the significance of the Konkan railway in the ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/06/people-are-places/ [caption id="attachment_1488" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Inside Bhandup, Mumbai, in a settlement dominated by residents from the Konkan"][/caption] Classifying habitats as distinctly rural and urban is not as straightforward as it seems. What a city has come to mean today – a discrete unit cut off from rural ways of living – has ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/06/beyond-the-boundary/ Khotachiwadi, Mumbai The homegrown city is a global reality. Mumbai is predominantly homegrown. So is contemporary Berlin. Even seemingly well-planned and controlled cities such as New York and LA are internally shaped by their users. Tokyo too, of course, has a long history of unregulated local urban development. The homegrown city cannot ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/05/ineffablecity/ Final touches for a flower bed on the first floor of a home in Shivaji Nagar, Govandi, Mumbai, challenging the norm - of a deliberately shabby look that most prefer, to avoid municipal attention. There are some lanes in Govandi's Shivaji Nagar, a neighbourhood in northeast Mumbai, where residents deliberately avoid ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/02/a-homegrown-slum-improvement-initiative/ [caption id="attachment_1456" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="From the Future of Cities Exhibition"][/caption] The 2010 Saturation City project imagined Melbourne in 40 years’ time, when sea levels have forced the city to concentrate into ‘superblocks’ rising above the water. Photograph: Bild Architecture/A Visual History of the Future The future is a resource - it ... http://www.airoots.org/2015/02/urban-futures-a-series-of-possibilities/ Airoots was pretty inactive on the web this year but hyper-active off line. If this blog is our usual space for reflection, pontificating and processing, then all of it was happening - but somewhere else. We did a crazy amount of new things  that made our learning curve so steep ... http://www.airoots.org/2014/12/random-fragments-from-2014/ Homegrown Settlements and New Metaphors for Urban Practitioners Rebecca Houze in her essay ‘The Textile as Structural Framework: Gottfried Semper’s Bekleidungsprinzip and the case of Vienna 1900” (2006) analyses how significantly Europe’s rich traditions of textile design interwove itself into architectural practices. Semper was one of the few architects who engaged with ... http://www.airoots.org/2014/03/weaving-an-urban-fabric-homegrown-settlements-and-new-metaphors-for-urban-practitioners/ Aditya Vipparti of URBZ showing different options to Sunni Chishtiya mosque committee members in Shivaji Nagar, Govandi (Mumbai). (More photos here). Professional practices change and adapt to the times. Some take longer to respond to new challenges while others are adept at being dynamic. A few, like architectural practice and urban ... http://www.airoots.org/2014/02/architectural-practice-for-the-living-present/ The village of Paspoli, behind the Renaissance Hotel in Powai, Mumbai's North-Western suburbs. Urbanists and architects love to produce archetypes, physically as well as conceptually. These often reduce messy, complex realities into one simple image. For instance, Cedric Price has playfully described the medieval city as a boiled egg with a ... http://www.airoots.org/2014/01/elusive-periphery/