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... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:47:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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/ At the moment we are reading this inspiring text. Tagore is a legendary figure within the Indian intellectual, literary and public realms - as legendary as Gandhi and therefore almost as taken-for-granted and relegated into picture frames. As a poet, he was India's earliest Noble laureate and invested substantially in ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/01/contact/ The First Issue of Pedro Gadanho We ended 2009 with an imaginative blurring of District 9 and Dharavi with the help of some extra-terrestrial help and found ourselves stimulated by the power of fiction to visualize context, space and location in the most unexpected ways. The relationship of aesthetics to design ... http://www.airoots.org/2010/01/architecture-and-fiction/ Softer landing for District 9's Prawns in Dharavi If the aliens hadn’t found their way to District 9 in Johannesburg but turned a few latitudes east, across the Indian ocean, over a tiny sliver of land jutting out obscenely and defiantly off the v-shaped south-Asian sub-continent, their fate in cinematic history ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/12/prawn-district-dharavi/ Kolhapur is a small town in the south-west region of the state of Maharashtra, not more than four hours drive from Goa. It is part of a district with the same name, on the prosperous sugar-cane growing belt which makes the rural areas relatively more prosperous than the town itself. ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/12/kolhapur-photo-diary/ One of the most influential practices in the modern world is that of the ‘conference’. It is an easily funded event that helps bring together themes, ideas, practices, resources, and political will into a consolidated moment. A conference can circulate themes across vast territories through its participants attending it ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/12/the-urban-conference/ The Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission is a well-meaning programme that has put in some deeply thought out incentives for hundreds of towns and cities in India, including Mumbai, ostensibly to improve their civic life. Within Mumbai city its impact has not always been so visible - barring a few ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/12/rethinking-urban-policy-in-india/ Any spectacularly violent event lays down the rules for both, a collective response, as well as any attempt at analysis. The meta-structure for these rules typically includes polarization, taking sides, and extreme reactions. Violent acts (glorious, perverted, desperate, passionate, defensive or aggressive), separate, crystallize, draw lines and reinforce boundaries in ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/12/26-11/ Cities and diseases have an old relationship. The plague did more to improve basic sanitation in European and Asian cities than any other factor. We saw that after the Surat plague. Overnight, one of the most badly managed cities in garbage disposal transformed into a responsible urban settlement, thanks to ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/11/pests-politics-and-the-city/ 1. Can’t Picture it: Demographic surveys and enumerations lie. They cannot possibly tell the truth about the number of people coming, going, living, working, renting, subletting and encroaching. Dharavi can only be effectively grasped on the ground and in real-time. 2. Many Dharavis: Dharavi is a collection neighbourhoods, each with their ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/10/learning-from-dharavi/ James Ferreira's House in Khotachiwadi: Preserving through change. The word ‘mashup’ has become a frequently used web based concept – referring to a web page or application that combines data or functional uses from two or more sources to create a new service. Interestingly the word was used earlier in ... http://www.airoots.org/2009/10/mashup/