Presentation at the JSTOR conference on Sustainable Digital Initiatives in India, Bangalore, December 9, 2010. The presentation is titled: “Hyping Up Neighbourhoods: Hyper-topographies of user-generated cities.”

1. The Culture of Friendship.

According to anthropologist Marilyn Strathern one of the biggest achievements of the web has been to break through kinship based hierarchical barriers to communication. Along with distance, proximity itself poses enough barriers to communication when class, age, gender and other markers come in the way. The web has promoted a mode and style of communication that works through the tone and conventions of informality which has far-reaching effects on social life than we imagine. Not just through collapsing huge distances but also breaking through  non-physical barriers in our backyards.

The web promotes a culture of friendship that we have still to fully understand beyond the quick moves made by social network sites. Social network sites themselves are based on a language that emerged in the early days of the web, when community users were exchanging information through bulletin boards and web-based communities. The culture of informality, sharing and collaborative sourcing is encoded in the DNA of the internet .

The fast absorption rate of new technology protocols by the youth that we observe in India is also thanks to dense off line social networks. The existence of those social networks is one of the strongest assets of India today and operates as much online as it already in offline spaces in familiar ways. Our work in Dharavi in Mumbai builds intensely on these social networks, which are cemented as much by friendship networks as by kinship and community bonds.  Dharavi is a so-called slum that we prefer to call a neighbourhood in formation, and it exemplifies the idea and practice of the user generated city. It was generated out of nothing by settlors, who transformed it from  marshlands and mangroves into what it is today without fully erasing both these elements that continue to exist.

http://www.airoots.org/2008/09/connecting

2. Airoots

The name of our blog is inspired by mangroves, which grow through a biological interdependence of each other as well as of land, sea, air, fresh and salt water sources. They occupy a space that is in between worlds, acting as a perfect metaphor for virtual and actual realities that help us connect with the web in the same way. As an environment that is full of elements found in each other. The actual has elements of the virtual and vice versa. When we met and started our collaborations and exchanges we were building on these elements all the time. Inspired by the dense networks of Dharavi in Mumbai and Shimokitazawa in Tokyo, our virtual exchanges made us see connections between the two and then we physically rooted ourselves in each others environments – Tokyo and Mumbai to develop our understanding of urban spaces in different avatars – virtual, actual and others. Through our web based collaborations we began growing roots into each others mind spaces, and this is really the power of the net – not only to expand but to promote interdependence and cross connections.

By focusing more on what is common than what is different, we could rethink in deeper ways about both cities, we realised that Dharavi was a version of Tokyo’s past and Tokyo is a version of Dharavi’s future. They both have a history of incremental development  and they both share a low-rise high density typology which we feel embodies these interdependent community and friendship based networks which make up their social and physical environments. The mashup collages we produced were themselves the best communication devices to present these interconnections.

http://www.airoots.org/2009/02/dharavi-tales/

http://www.airoots.org/2008/10/dharavikitazawa/

3. Urban Typhoon

The Urban Typhoon workshops built on the ideas of local action, participation and social networks. In 2008, we organized the Urban Typhoon Koliwada-Dharavi, in which about 130 people from Koliwada and the rest of the world joined voluntarily. Together we brainstormed on the future of Koliwada, a fishing village tucked in Mumbai and wrongly referred to as a slum.

In the process, we broke many barriers, including communication barriers since we could work together in teams with people speaking different languages and coming from completely different cultural and social backgrounds. We also broke some barriers in the way “activism” is usually conceived of in India, where mass mobilizations through rallies and slogans dominates the scene along with a tendency of speaking on behalf of the ‘oppressed’ people. Our mode of connection was through the same spontaneous frienship networks that allow people today to connect through vast distances via Facebook.

The virtual existence of the workshop as a project, months before its actualization in Dharavi is the way it came to life. The interdependence of the virtual and actual is what made the workshop possible. It is this connection that helps us locate our action and documentation processes best. At one level, digitizing, documenting or archiving the past is coming to terms with the virtual element of all that is seen to be worthy of archiving. But if we see elements of the two in each other, which is the way we define our activism as well, then the act of documenting what we are doing is almost coterminous with our action. Technologies available to all of us today make this possible in an unprecedented way. For us this defines the nature of our activism itself.

In the world of urban planning, participation is a buzz word. Anything, from rallies to surveys are seen to be part of the participatory process. For us participation is interaction and expression, spaces that allow more connections and interdependencies. Allowing Dharavi to grow and improve on its own, based on these processes is what epitomizes participation best. We facilitate the process through our own engagements – and most especially, through our skills of documentation of this process.

http://www.urbantyphoon.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbzoo/sets/72157624795749494/show/

4. Dharavi.organic

Archiving research, projects, activist moments and processes is integral to what we do. We used the wiki site for this purpose. The wiki grew way beyond the workshop and we began using it as an archive for every one working in Dharavi. It also allowed many people to connect with each other directly. Film makers, journalists, media people and community members connected with each other through the wiki and initiatives were created or grew from these connections.

Today, dharavi.org is a well-used, growing, archive cum networking space and always comes up on google searches. This has influenced the way journalists, stidents and researchers look at Dharavi now. It is not easy to dismiss Dharavi as a slum anymore.

http://dharavi.org/

http://dharavi.org/index.php?title=C.Communities_%26_Nagars_of_Dharavi/New_Transit_Camp/Jaanibegum_House

http://dharavi.org/index.php?title=G._Surveys,_Projects,_Designs_%26_Plans_for_Dharavi/Projects/Columbia/Healing_Miti_River/Spring_09

5. URBZ: User-generated Cities

Continuing with our belief that the virtual and actual are constantly interdependent, we set up our office space in Dharavi from where we work with the neighbourhood. Working and learning from the context directly has informed our understanding of user generated cities the best. We can see for ourselves how the neighbourhood is constantly being produced and can participate in the process as well. The context of Dharavi is our subject, a living subject. It is a living repository of incremental development which is our main thematic informing our activism. And digitizing this process as it unfolds is one of our main mandates. Its complex layers, its palimpsest quality, its moving maps and constant movement is a challenge for digitizing in a manner familiar to all people involved in the practice of archiving and digitizing. And we know for sure we can learn a lot from each other in this regard.

After opening our office on MG Road, New Transit Camp, we have become involved with the Dharavi Shelter, a community initiative that aims at providing a creative space for the kids living in the neighbourhood. We are managing the space and producing the programme of activities, which include many activities that are producing valuable documentation about Dharavi. The art is also spilling over onto the street, where we are inviting artists to paint walls along with the local youth. Our latest initiative is a stand-up cybercafe, which will be based in the ground floor of the building where our office is located.

http://urbz.net/learning-from-dharavi-one-house-at-the-time/

http://urbz.net/

6. Documentation as Intervention

This interconnection of documentation and engagement is something that we developed in PUKAR when we worked there. The Youth Fellowship project and other action-research project that PUKAR is engaged with allowed us to use information and communication technology directly for this purpose.

Along with advising on research, we trained some of the 400 PUKAR Youth Fellows to use the web to present their research and connect with a larger community of researchers in Mumbai and around the world. We also developed the new PUKAR website, which allows them to keep their blogs and archive their work in multiple languages. The PUKAR site was entirely customized to the needs of PUKAR.

Using the same basic framework, we have developed other websites archiving our work in different parts of Mumbai, including the Eastern Waterfront, where we conducted an urban design studio with graduate students from Columbia University and in Khotachwadi, where we have been involved with the conservation of the architectural heritage.

http://pukar.org.in/

http://pukar.org.in/yf/

http://ewf.urbz.net/

http://ewf.urbz.net/site/sasoon-dock/

http://khotachiwadi.urbz.net/

7. Urbanology

We have recently incorporated the Institute of Urbanology in Goa, which aims at developing methodologies for urban research along with conceptual tools that will allow us to think about cities and urban interventions in a more grounded way. This accompanies  our engagements in consultancy, design and architectural practices and  we like to think of all these spaces as informing each other. The Institute is more focused on research, but defined and practiced in creative ways. One important element of this includes refining the processes of digitization and documentation based on the principles we have described above.

To summarize, we see online tools and techniques of digitization as intrinsic to the process of engagement. We understand our context as being a composite and interdependent whole of virtual and actual realities. We therefore relate to the context as a living subject with which we interact in multiple ways. The culture of the web is a major source of inspiration for our work, in particular its roots in friendly and open protocols, social  networks, peer learning. The web also augments our activism at the ground level.

http://www.urbanology.org/

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 act of fashioning, while fact is a descendant of a past participle, a word form which masks the generative deed or performance. A fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings. (1989: Primate Visions, New York, Routledge).

We place our urban activism firmly in the space of fiction as understood in this epistemological sense. Besides writing, we use other fictional devices as starting and ending points of our theoretical and activist explorations.

In our presentation we focus on:

1. The circulation of a fictitious image about an urban neighbourhood.

2. The presence of a piece of architectural fiction – the ‘Tool-house’ connected to our work in Mumbai and Tokyo.

The purpose is to show how these have played a crucial explanatory and expressive role in our practice.

1. Fictitious Images:

Sometimes it makes sense for us to see concepts in the Weberian sense of being ‘useful fictions’. The word ‘slum’, which is the most common description of Dharavi in Mumbai (the main site of our engagement for the last four years), is more often than not a manipulated concept. It is evoked strategically to become a tool in the story of urbanism expressed in a particular way. It has been understood as such by a wide variety of commentators, groups and agencies. One such voice is that of urban historian Mike Davis.

We have been huge admirers of Mike Davis as a commentator in his analysis of the political economy of built form in LA from so many unusual angels. His intimacy with the city, his passion for its past and its present, allowed him to seamlessly connect a deeper imaginative engagement with a sharp political and economic eye. It allowed him to blur or delineate the boundaries of fiction and fact in ways that are concretely experienced.

Eventually LA comes across as a place with history, complexity and cultural depth that is an active backdrop to its volatile political economy.

We also owe him a debt in his attempt at providing a global perspective on the issue of habitats in terms of poverty and the false security of liberal economics connected to it. Few scholars have been able to pull out the issue of the political economy of housing from pure audit based analysis and locate it so strongly in the space of contemporary economic and political practices.

However, we also have a few points of disagreements with his analysis. The world of slums is homogenized by him as a discrete category, and the sense of history and depth he attributes to urban spaces such as LA are simply missing. It is an overwritten category and we believe it is possible to get out of this framework and still stick to a critical analysis of economic processes.

In fact we see ourselves as inspired by his gaze on Los Angeles, which we project on own urban experiences. Our fieldwork in places like Dharavi, Mumbai, reveals a complicated story, one in which history, imagination and fiction interact in special ways. Where the memory of a village is intertwined with that of caste and physical spaces, economic aspirations and mobility. We believe that Davis does not adequately critique the category ‘slum’ as a pre-fabricated, fixed, idea. When the slum is evoked at a global level – it follows a kind of apocalyptic moment, which ends with scenarios of wars and rioting converging effortlessly with cinematic representations of such habitats – evoking movies like City of God, Slum Dog Millionaire and District 9.

We see a complex variety of habitats subsumed under the label ’slum’  – all of them anchored in economic systems that cannot be framed in a narrow framework of choices. However, for us as activists, we do not choose to contest the label by suggesting it is fictitious but by rewriting its story altogether.

We therefore start our work in Dharavi by literally creating a fictitious image – in which a street of Dharavi is merged into one of Tokyo to reveal how the stories of these two mega cities – Mumbai and Tokyo get connected in a way that can only be brought to surface when one enters a terrain that perceives the relationship of fiction and fact in the way Haraway conceives of them.

We produce a narrative that connects Tokyo and Mumbai to each other. Both cities have neighbourhoods that are seen as “messy”, non-functional, irrationally laid out, hard to navigate, even harder to map out, nearly impossible to access by car, not neatly zoned, and happen to be mixed-use, full of narrow pedestrian streets with crowded storefronts, mobile vendors and groups of people hanging out.

In Tokyo, such a pattern of development emerged during the post-war period, when the government concentrated on transport and infrastructure and left housing to the people and private sector. Since land-holdings were small and resources scarce, many urban neighbourhoods in Tokyo mutated into urbanized versions of the villages they emerged from. They did not delete the earlier form. Add to this, you had a massive pressure of population and a growing economy that allowed informal production practices, mixed-use urban areas, and artisanal production to complement the countries growing global economy. What you got at the end were urban landscapes that looked astonishingly like the dense, economically dynamic neighbourhood of Dharavi. We became audacious and suggested that there was something more to the similarity seen in the landscapes of some neighbourhoods in Tokyo and those in Dharavi.

And that these are fairly deep and connected to the way in which urban economies, land-use and urban forms emerged historically. This made us re-look at the so called slummy world of Dharavi and asked the question; what was the main factor that brought these two cities closer on these counts?

2. The Tool-House.

The possible answer emerged over a period of time. Our research revealed that the slummy quality largely attributed to Dharavi’s messy, chaotic look emerged from the preponderance of the work-living combined function that each spatial unit of Dharavi represents. Its artisanal, village-like foundations made it possible for the typology of what we refer to as the ‘Tool- house’ to dominate its landscape. Seen by itself there is little to defend it from accusatory labels such as being a slum. And yet – when you juxtapose its architecture to a similar structure in Tokyo, you start seeing how limited the term is. What actually differentiates one from the other is simply they way they are both perceived. In Mumbai the structure and habitat is undervalued and in Tokyo it is simply accepted and retrofitted with inventive technology.

What we call the ‘tool-house’ emerged in Tokyo and Mumbai unselfconsciously – from their artisanal urban-village roots and became an anachronistic architectural presence. Seen without the label, the structure can be seen as either primitive or futuristic, with the label it represents a significant architectural rupture in the hi/story of urbanization.

The modern city emerged through an atomic division of functions, which had for long cohabitated in space and time. As working and living became spatially segregated, they also started being regimented along temporal lines. When the self-employed artisan became a factory worker s/he splintered the workshop-home and days of work. S/he would have to commute to a separate place and compartmentalize time in strict schedules demarcating work and leisure time. Ever since, the practice of separating residences from places of manufacture has shaped much of the way we think of cities, work, and time. In particular, the organizing of space according to these principles became the main purpose of urban planning.

For us, the tool-house is a piece of architectural creation that brings to surface the contradictions embodied within the history of urbanization. It has a cyborgic quality if juxtaposed against the exaggerated zoning logic between places of residence and places of work that are the norm in urban arrangements today.

It is true of course that the logic of the tool-house is intimately linked to the larger economic context of what is often referred to as ‘informality’, basically referring to decentralized production and the subsidizing of costs by using space in complex and layered ways. However if we get rid of the reductive label of informality and see it for what it is: as a valid economy in its own right with a corresponding architectural form (almost like global finance and glass buildings!) we see the tool house as having a dignified space in a valid urban landscape.

It would be useful to go back to the coinage of the term ‘informal economy’ by the anthropologist Keith Hart. It was meant to qualify the transactions of the shadowy world of gambling in Ghana in the 1970s – as an economy. We should remind ourselves of the need to put an emphasis on the word ‘economy’, instead of ‘informal’. From this perspective, the term ‘informal economy’ attempts to dignify all transactions outside the space of a regulated and controlled economy by acknowledging that these are also economic transactions. They follow certain rules and are rooted in some form of rationality. By focussing on the word ‘informal’ we get an impression that this is not a real economy at all, just something shadowy, or imperfect.

Today, the usage of ‘informal settlements’ places such habitats in some kind of a limbo, as it represents them as candidates for their formalization through some form of redevelopment or the other.? And its euphemistic use for the other fiction – ‘slum’ does not help us understand most of the world’s habitats.

Places like Dharavi are ultimately organically connected to the unit of the family, the community and the persistence of the village form in the modern metropolis. By ignoring these complexities, by oversimplifying their location and meaning, contemporary urban planning and architectural practices or analysis, do not mean much to many parts of the urban world.

3. User Generated Cities:

Both these examples – the Slum and the Tool-House, converge into our urban practices. At present, while we evoke and engage with Tokyo, our main site of activism is primarily in Dharavi, Mumbai. A site that has been fictionalized in unsatisfactory ways by cinema – both locally as well as globally. Where, reality often becomes a special effect that then contributes to more hyper- real narratives of political emancipation or change.

Documentaries on news channels ultimately frame their stories exactly like their fictional counterparts. These then find their own way into the space of policymaking – covering a huge bandwidth of useful or abusive fictions of their own  – from literally building on speculation, to manufacturing urban utopias through planned redevelopment projects or straightforward real-estate takeovers.

However, as mentioned above our response is simply to produce more narratives of all kinds. The process of doing so is a collective one. The modus operandi is the interactive workshop. (The Urban Typhoon and the MASHUP). We have a portal – part online – part on the ground called URBZ – User Generated Cities, which provides a set of tools for residents and users to start the process of taking charge of their neighbourhoods. The online side is an interactive website that allows users to work with a global community of supporters. It provides a way for them to showcase and upload their city/habitat/neighbourhood onto the virtual world in a manner that connects to a hyper-local scale where the smallest of information, the most unexpected image, the unlikeliest of stories becomes a source of local control. We use all existing online technologies and make them accessible to the residents through on-the ground activities. The goal is to eventually facilitate the emergence of a user generated space, a collectively authored piece of urban fiction, that is really, as Haraway put it..’ an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning’, making afresh, being inventive and opening up new possibilities for the world of cities at large.

Main References:

1. Davis Mike: Planet of Slums. Verso, (2006).

2. Brigman Jeb: Welcome to the Urban Revolution. How Cities are Changing the World, Harper Collins India, (2009).

3. Echanove Matias and Srivastava Rahul: ‘The Village Inside’ in Lynne Elizabeth, Stephen Goldsmith (eds), What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, New Village Press, CA, (2010)

websites:

www.dharavi.org
www.urbz.net
www.airoots.org
www.urbanology.org

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 tiny crevice in an invisible part of the city seemingly impossible to inhabit? What unifies them all are the most astonishing design elements that have evolved over practice by the concerned artisans or street traders, who have managed to sculpt space for from thin air. As often happens we take these things for granted – unless you are part of the design and architecture world in which learning from these practices makes you watch carefully. However few allow themselves to learn from these moments – because prejudices come in the way. Instead of appreciating the creative modes of survival we dismiss them in a larger story of encroachment. Even though everyone knows that the real culprit are often the extortionists who collect hafta and keep the hawkers on a tight leash of uncertainty.

Once when you are driving down the empty roads (relatively speaking) late at night to the airport or railway station, pay some attention to these spaces – tiny cupboards hanging from walls and trees, tool-boxes tucked away between street corners and buildings and plastic bags containing entire worlds.

When Llorenc Boyer and George Carothers – urban practitioners working in the city – decided to follow up on suggestions about these amazing spaces and learn more from them, one was not quite sure where this would lead. But weeks of conversing with street vendors of all kinds, documenting and networking with them translated into a most unusual workshop series inaugurated last week in Dharavi. Christened the DIY Dukaan –( Do It Yourself) the series saw residents like Shaukat Ali and other traders from the neighbourhood to improvise existing design needs responding to new ideas and suggestions. What followed was a most intriguing day in which steel pallet racks, bamboos, pieces of plywood, wire meshes, nuts and bolts were brought together to morph into the most unexpected models for street vendors to use. What seemed to be in great demand were portable structures that could fold up so they could escape the municipal vans harassing their perfectly legal activity. Or ones they could store their stuff and take home in. Participants got to know that there are legally permitted structures measuring 2 by 3 feet which the BMC allows anyone to use to trade goods, provided the space is proportionate to public use of pavements.

Eventually the very act of taking that little structure seriously opened up many questions about trading on the street, balancing needs of public spaces and the creation of legitimate networks free from state extortion so that the city’s millions of entrepreneurs can do their thing in a way that helps the city at large.

At the end of that hot, humid but exhilarating day two neat little models emerged – one that was a simple foldable table that could be hung on shoulder straps and the other a box that could store material, open up into a structure to sell goods and which could grow into taller spaces allowing for protection from rain and sun.

The sheer explosion of ideas and energy that preceded and followed the creation of these little artisanal wonders convinced all observers that this could well be the start of a new journey to make the city and its special needs the basis for practical and effective interventions. There are certainly many waiting for the next session in the workshop series!

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, not fully formed, maybe even formless? All at once or a mix of the above?

Is it simply everything outside the formal, in which case we start asking what exactly is the formal? Is it really possible to conceive a pure formal settlement at work, like a machine or a perfectly orchestrated system? With no traces of what we call informal processes intrinsic to them?

Modernism pushed this vision to the extreme and some even tried to engineer urban systems in the same way as Henry Ford had organized his assembly line. A human scale of relating to space was the main casualty of such thinking, with some cities becoming as alienating as factories. Think of generic central business districts, master planned suburbia stretching along miles of roads, and satellite towns with rows of mass-produced buildings meant for the economically marginalized. This is the urban history of many cities and the future of so many more. The forces that produce hyperformal habitats dominate the urban development (i.e.: real estate market) of emerging megacities throughout Asia and so many other parts of the world.

But however much we organize, masterplan, regulate, institutionalize, and police our cities they remain a mix of systemic order and spontaneous, improvised, “informal” responses and actions, rooted in human emotions, needs and imagination. And this holds true on both sides of the imaginary line between the formal and the informal city.

Almost every commentary on formal processes, spaces and activities acknowledge that an ideal-typical formal equation does not exist in real life. Similarly, all those who have studied informal processes point out to the presence of structures and power equations, which approximate what happens in formal contexts. There is an inbuilt element of circular reasoning which is unavoidable when entering this discursive space. This becomes even more complex when understanding urban worlds especially in dealing with the huge variety of spaces most cities are made of. A variation punctuated by economic disparity, aspiration, hierarchy, equalities and inequalities and specific histories. These structuring forces are present in all forms of habitats, yet there is an enduring tendency to refer to some neighbourhoods as informal settlements.

The word “informal” may be more politically correct than the “s… word”, but at the end of the day it is equally dismissive and misleading, especially when it is meant to describe an extremely diverse range of habitats and living arrangements across the world. “Tales of two cities” have for too long dominated narratives of urban development in emerging countries. There isn’t some “other”, “informal” space. Instead, there are multiple urban histories and trajectories that must be recognized and respected.

Seeing this requires zooming down to the small picture –that always helps with the big picture as well. Rather than labeling entire neighborhoods “informal”, we should pay attention to what we see at the street level (and sensing what we can’t see). To illustrate our argument, we would like to take you to Dharavi’s Mahatma Gandhi Road, where we spend lots of time, working on and thinking about the potential futures of this iconic post-industrial Mumbai neighborhood.

Dharavi MG Road

Dharavi keeps on escaping simple definitions. First it was marked as a slum (the “largest in Asia”, if you recall the headlines from the 1980s onwards). Slowly researchers, the media and parts of the public started to question if Dharavi could really be called a slum. After all, it was composed of a diverse fabric including villages, municipal chawls, high-rises, self-standing houses built by rich merchants, transit camps as well as self-helped and incrementally developed structures. It was an economic miracle full of traders and producers, so far from any clichéd image of how an impoverished neighbourhood is supposed to look like. Moreover, the residents of Dharavi, an older settlement compared to other similar neighbourhoods in Mumbai – managed to lift themselves out of poverty in spite of the lack of infrastructure and public services. Today many of them have reached middle classdom and gone beyond.

On MG Road, we see bustling commercial activities with shops expanding onto the street, people buying, selling and chatting, tool-houses along the road where all kinds of goods are being manufactured and assembled, wholesale retailers, repair shops, restaurants and tea stalls, butchers and fish markets, temples, churches and mosques, crowded gyms and function halls, services ranging from hairdressers to fortune tellers, and so much more.

There is a lot happening in that stretch. The density of activities and the flow of people is so large that it may be easy think of it as a big mess where things get done and undone in an improvised and haphazardly manner. In reality, just like any other street bazaar in the world, MG Road has its own developmental dynamics, organizational principles, constraining factors, control mechanisms, evasion tactics, and collective memory. As soon as you start looking at these processes, the word informal looses all meaning.

In fact, one could interpret the work of anthropologist Keith Hart, who coined the term ‘informal economy’ to qualify gambling in Ghana in the 1970s, as a demonstration of the fact that the shadowy world of gambling based transactions are also an ‘economy’. The emphasis can as easily be placed on the word ‘economy’, instead of ‘informal’. From this perspective, the term ‘informal economy’ attempts to dignify all transactions outside the space of a regulated and controlled economy by acknowledging that these are also economic transactions, which follow certain rules and are rooted in some form of rationality.

After its conception, the term followed all kinds of journeys. It got loosely converged with the use of the term informal as used in organizational studies or management and then became the basis of creating an abstract set of terms for economic activities as a whole, dividing that world into informal and formal sectors (though with an acknowledgment that they are always full of internal contradictions). Such a conceptual path leads you to the term informal settlement – which simply does not do justice to the world of urban habitats as we argued above.

The term puts so-called ‘informal settlements’ on the brink as it represents them as candidates for formalization through redevelopment. How many times has the lack of infrastructure in some neighbourhoods (usually due to prejudice or civic mismanagement) become an excuse to label entire neighbourhoods as ‘informal’ and therefore in need of redevelopment, when often all they needed was investment in certain amenities, a legitimacy of status and a deeper understanding of existing land uses?

We feel that the word ‘informal’ has now become another catchword that can be affixed to all kinds of terms to give them a superficial edge: informal settlements, informal networks, informal cities, informal design. The term has not been adequately thought through and glosses over many dimensions of lived reality.

If we want to describe the cities of today, especially the parts that fall out of the grid or creep through it, we need to invent new terms that express not so much their form but rather the way they evolve. That is why we would rather describe MG Road as being constantly ‘in-formation’ rather than informal.

Saying that a habitat is ‘in-formation’ doesn’t necessarily mean that it is incomplete. Instead, the term echoes Kevin Lynch’s description of cities as “evolving learning ecologies” (1981 p.115) and seeks to capture the capacity of certain urban spaces to evolve continuously and adapt to the context. The hyphen between ‘in and ‘formation’ is there to emphasize the dynamic production of urban forms and its perpetual incremental improvement and conservation.

The terms in-formation also invokes the word ‘information’ in its system-theory sense as “any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns” (Wikipedia). If urbanists, architects, policy-makers, self-helpers, users and commentators, can stop describing some neighbourhood as ‘informal’ (and therefore in need of formalization) and understand how economic, social and cultural patterns influence the formation of physical habitats in planned as well as unplanned neighbourhoods, we will be that much closer to solving some of the most important challenges of our urban world.

Examining and learning from the way fellow humans use space across geographies and histories is without any doubt the most exciting trigger for creative intervention and architectural innovation.

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 Urban Design.

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 re-played itself through the corridors of this century-old elite club since the days of its inception.

In its colonial avatar, it never allowed Indians to walk through its sacred corridors with dignity. It shamelessly took a donation from a Parsee philanthropist even though he himself could never be a member. It did not take a stand when it saw Hindu upper caste cricket players make its star bowler sit outside their dining hall to have dinner in clay utensils while all of them enjoyed eating in their glistening crockery. It did not flinch in its resistance to women voters on its committees until it was virtually forced to do so hardly a decade ago.

In the late nineteenth century, when it came into being, many of the Gymkhana’s members must have worked at the (then) Bombay Municipal Corporation. It must have suited the British officers perfectly well to have a swanking sports club within walking distance from their offices. They made several allowances to all such establishments – including absurdly low land leases.

In a city where good quality sports facilities are scarce, the club, in free India, may justify its exclusive institutional existence (and occupation of prime land), by providing some decent infrastructure to its members and acting as a trustee to sports property in a city eaten by real estate sharks.

And yet that is not the way some of its arrogant members see this equation. They have inherited the same superficial, insecure, and fragile sense of self-esteem that their ancestors had. It would have done them and the club no harm when Laxmi Tripathi, representative of the country at UN meetings around the world, passed through its corridors and got lost in a private party hosted by one of its (surely many) enlightened members. But of course that was not to be.

While she was sure of who she was – the club members seemed to be confused (Euro-Indians? Indian Europeans? Narrow minded elites? Who knows? Some kind of trans-cultural group for sure with no hint of self-reflection at all).

Eventually they threatened to forcefully shut down the party if she did not leave. In a great moment of solidarity everybody chose to leave with her.

These are the moments when you want to examine the history of such establishments more carefully. We know how several such clubs have grossly violated their land lease contracts by making money through illegal constructions on what is virtually public land.  Many gymkhanas – Bombay included – found their 99 year old leases expired in the 2000s. And miraculously they arose again – subsidized heavily by the city and its public – whom they choose to treat in this atrocious way.

This brazen land use happens in the face of so many demolitions of simple constructions made by workers and residents in the city – especially in the so-called slum neighbourhoods. Just last week BMC authorities demolished a tiny building recently erected by a resident in Dharavi for local children to play in. How will those children feel as they walk along Azad maidan one day and see the grand facilities of the gymkhana and their lush lawns?

Mumbai has always prided itself on being a city with relatively fewer gates than that of divided and gate-enmeshed Johannesburg. That’s such a false sense of feeling good. Our gates are invisible and equally powerful – all in the mind and implemented through ideology. Far worse.

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 acclaimed book and exhibition SOAK) down the adventurous path in Sewri, Mahim and Worli.

Down the adventurous path: Anuradha Mathur in front of Rahul Srivastava

Abyssinian Mangroves. Unlike Red Mangroves their branches go straight up in the air and don’t become roots. Both photos are taken in the vicinity of the Sewri Fort.

What if the city acknowledged the incompressible dimensions of its existence and redefined itself around its fault-lines : rivers and tides, vegetation and wildlife, migration flows and vernacular habitats… These are the living forces shaping Mumbai day after day, yet they are all, in one way or the other, misunderstood and endangered.

Supereal Mahim Beach and its hidden villages.

Following a methodology based on sectional analysis of a territorial segment, Anuradha’s students observe the integration or the disappearance of one habitat into another. For instance, a river flowing into a creek and sustaining a mangrove forest, which is slowly reclaimed by garbage and turns into a solid ground upon which a settlement grows. This grounded approach serves to produce design interventions that acknowledge and potentially influence the forces in presence.

The Worli-Bandra Sealink viewed from Worli’s Koliwada (Fisher folks village)

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 cut them off from their social networks and livelihoods. These projects often become housing-centric and blind to the relationship between neighborhoods and economic development. They end up benefiting the construction industry much more than the population they are supposed to serve.

Haiti’s shattered urban landscapes were about communities, street life, resourcefulness, aspirations and dynamic local exchanges. As we have seen in the Dharavi area of Mumbai (the setting of “Slumdog Millionaire”), poverty often generates creative responses and initiatives. Local actors tend to produce piecemeal development that directly supports neighborhood-level activity.

As we consider how to rebuild Port-au-Prince, we can find an alternative to the usual top-down redevelopment model in postwar Tokyo. The Japanese government didn’t have the money to rebuild housing and so focused instead on roads, sewage and rail transportation. It also encouraged lenders to give families money to build homes. A decentralized and highly participatory urban redevelopment process produced areas of low-rise, high-density structures built with local skills and material. This not only strengthened communities but also stimulated the local economies. Tokyo today has a landscape that is futuristic and yet retains many traditional Asian urban features including street markets, small-scale businesses and family enterprises. The incremental redevelopment of Tokyo was thus intricately connected to the rise of its middle class.

If aid in Haiti aims specifically at regenerating local economies, if it promotes existing skills and collective initiatives, if it consults with grassroots groups and residents directly, it may well bring about a real transformation.

Published in the New York Times on January 16, 2010.

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 related practices is obvious, the fact that imagination is the fountainhead for architectural practices is even more so – but the capacity of fiction to infuse that relationship with a full-blooded, wholesome stream of subjective connections is something that tends to get overlooked. We pay light-hearted tributes all the time to the power of speculative fiction to influence the architectural imagination but dont always acknowledge how deeply cross-influential those forces really are in the way we think of urban futures. That is why we were so happy to come across the work of Lisbon based writer, curator and architect, Pedro Gadanho who has started a bookazine called Beyond – Short Stories on the Post-Contemporary (through Sun Architecture) which is dedicated to the relationship of fiction and architecture, where architectural projects are conjured through writing, where builtforms can be seen as fiction and much more.

Look for more Airoots writing celebrating this relationship in 2010… A Happy New Year!

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 would have been something else.

Imagine the spaceship hanging over the hot and humid city of Mumbai, specifically over its most mythified neighbourhood – Dharavi.

Its enterprising residents would have absorbed the presence of the craft and its seafood resembling occupants with relative ease. The metallic tentacles of Dharavi’s legendary recycling industry, would have eventually penetrated the most sophisticated barriers and shields to slowly and steadily dismantle the alien structure for absorption into a million-dollar industry that does not allow even the most ordinary piece of scrap to go unsold. How could tons of exotic metal be left to hang in mid-air? Notwithstanding any degree of technological superiority…Bits and pieces of the metal would have found their way into spare body-parts of second-hand cars, ships, toys and assorted machinery. The unusable celestial leftovers may be left to hang in space with no one caring much for aesthetics. Instead somebody would start a little sight-seeing tour by making an improvised crane-bridge to take curious onlookers and tourists for a closer look.

And what of the aliens themselves?

They would have managed to build a tiny little habitat between the crevices of the impossibly dense habitat. Maybe on the toxic watery edge of the mangroves. Not having access to tinned cat-food in Dharavi, could well have found the fish in the sewage water a worthy substitute, considering that a few older residents still fish there even now. And they would have found something worthwhile to do for sure. Their presence would have inevitably fired several wild allegations.

Prawns are said to be hiding in the Mahim Creek near Dharavi

Economically they could make leather goods in Dharavi even more globally competitive with a dash of their own technology. Of course, this could mean a legal crackdown – since scientific tests about the safety quotient of alien substance aren’t possible. But Dharavi’s grey zone economy would take care of that and eventually the aliens would become integral to the neighbourhood’s oldest and most prosperous economic activity, getting swallowed into its several residential, community based enclaves, taking the disputed figure of eighty –eight nagars to eighty nine.

It would have been difficult for any curious journalist to actually discover Prawn-nagar as the boundaries between enclaves are not easy to discern. The only way she would know she’s arrived would be on seeing a bunch of young prawns playing cricket with local Dharavi boys. They would point her out to a set of structures around a small clearing where a few adults would be having a heated argument with neighbours over the right to build a shrine in memory of their lost home – in the form of a replica of their ship.
The shrine would be the only way to connect to their past. No chance of returning home now – given the remains of their emaciated, skeletal, once proud extra-terrestrial space vessel. The other reason nobody would want to return is because the cost of homes in Dharavi would have increased four-fold by now.

Typically, the temptation of making more money eternally overrides any possibility of return.

The journalist would most likely be reporting the possibility of a riot because a prawn-girl and a local – earthling boy had fallen in love and were nearly lynched by both communities, only to be contained by an elderly local activist trying to broker peace.

The prawns would soon be part of political demonstrations trying to save Dharavi and a politician would eventually have got them voting rights. Against the will of a local right-wing party which tried hard to fight their presence tooth and nail – equating the aliens with worse – those from the states of UP and Bihar.

Sooner or later though, a clever prawn leader would have won over the local right wing forces by declaring Marathi as their earth-tongue. He would then have proceeded to pledge support to their drive against the real aliens – the hapless migrants of U.P. and Bihar.

That would pretty much have been the story.

Look out for regular updates from Prawn-nagar, Dharavi, Mumbai on airoots…