This is a repartee to a post published by Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar in the Harvard Business Review blog who initiated the $300 house idea. Their post responded to our Op-Ed in the New York Times on May 31, 2011.

Dear Prof Govindarajan and Prof Sarkar,

We are deeply sympathetic to the efforts of designers, businessmen and academicians throughout the  world who feel concerned by the living conditions of the millions of people who live in substandard housing in India and elsewhere. We too believe that there is a lot creative thinking and co-creation can do to improve living conditions in many parts of the world, including richer countries.

As the ongoing financial crisis reminds us, we are all connected in hitherto inconceivable ways. When the real estate market plunges in New York and Dubai, it surges to the point of becoming surreal in Mumbai and Shanghai. When the demand for high-end housing gets saturated in upscale Mumbai, investment shifts to affordable housing and the pressure for redevelopment increases in neighbourhoods denominated as slums.

In other ways too, parts of the world that we thought belonged to radically different realities, seem astonishingly connected. Many neighbourhoods of Tokyo and Mumbai share a common history of incremental development. The homeless of Los Angeles may not be much better off than the shack dwellers of Kolkata. Notions of poverty have become more layered and intricate. It is necessary to challenge our preconceptions and look at the world we live in a fresh way –one that our earlier neat ‘development’ categories never allowed us. It is equally pressing to understand and engage with contexts that are often diverse, even within the same city, before attempting templates for common solutions.

Creative thinking is never as powerful and constructive as when it is based on first hand experience and interaction with the parties that it seeks to help. Knowledge of the context seems to be a weak spot of the $300 house project. India is not Haiti, Mumbai is not Raipur. The urge to solve the problem of 1 billion slum dwellers is just as misplaced as a proposition that would pretend to address the problems of 1 billion suburbanites.

We do not intend in any way to belittle your work and the great network of people who are advising the $300 house project. We are just trying to understand how it relates with the reality that we know. The so-called slums of Mumbai are a very diverse lot. Dharavi in Sion is different from Utkarsh Nagar in Bhandup, which is a far cry from Shivaji Nagar in Govandi. They all have different histories, economies and levels of development. One thing that they all do share, however, is that none of them have any house that costs less than $3000 to build.

While there are homeless people and people living in cardboard shacks in Mumbai, this is far from being the norm. It is probably just as marginal and widespread as it is in New York or Los Angeles. Most people who live in what the Indian government calls slums live in houses made of brick, stone, concrete and steel. What makes some of these neighbourhoods difficult to live in is the lack of civic amenities such as sewage or toilets, sometimes even water. What they do not lack is an ability to build or invest in their homes. Our question is whether this is the market you are targeting. If this isn’t, then what is the market you are really looking at? Even in small towns and villages people have better living standards.

Even if no poor needs the $300 house in India, a market may certainly be found in other parts of the world. Maybe that the $300 house makes sense in devastated parts of Haiti or Japan. Maybe there is even a market in the urban fringes of North American cities, where people have lost everything, including sometimes – and this is the most debilitating thing – the ability of helping themselves. In India, the market for housing is nowhere as dynamic and competitive as in so-called slums. There are networks of contractors, masons, artisans, carpenters and plumbers who are busy everyday making and improving homes. We all have much to learn from this market. This is why one must study it carefully before attempting to enter it.

We are no experts in business strategy, but it seems to us that market research should come before the conceptualization and design of a new product. This is not how you have built your model. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we can only assume that this is because you have taken slums for granted.

We are not averse to market solutions. If you had taken the time to browse through our websites or read some of our publications,  it would be evident we have faith in local markets engaged in construction. We believe that these should be recognized and infused with government support and better quality materials. The problem with most conventional market interventions is that they treat the poor exactly the way the socialist state often does – as passive consumers. A real market-based solution will understand the dynamism within the economy of poorer neighbourhoods and work with the actors there. We believe that the local construction industry in Dharavi or Shivaji Nagar and neighbourhoods throughout the country has proven to be the most efficient and quality-conscious provider of affordable housing.

Residents don’t need cheaper, lesser quality houses. The best thing to do would be to bring in new technologies, construction materials and design ideas to improve the houses people are already building for themselves. And in order to do this, the benchmark should be existing building practices and materials. Not some fantasy dollar figure.

That being said, we believe in the sincerity of your effort and find value in it. The fact that you have mobilized so many people and brought so much media attention to one of the most pressing issues of our times is commendable. We are also convinced that among the scores of design proposals generated in response to the $300 house challenge, some will break out of the box and have real impact. We only wish that you had made end-users and their contexts your starting point. This is the paradigm shift we are all yearning for.

***

For more on this theme see our study of a 2.5 lakh rupee house in Bhandup.

Chez Nous bungalow in Bandra West (Mumbai): A freshly repainted 1950 art-deco building. Three of the builder’s children live in the building with their children.

The biggest casualty of the new wave of urbanization in India is not architecture or design, even though these have suffered a lot from the rapid and mindless pace of construction in and around cities. The biggest casualty is quality. So many new residential and corporate high-rises in Mumbai have been built so poorly that they would not qualify as high-end in any other context but the hyper speculative bubble in which we find ourselves today. In Mumbai, we can’t speak of real estate anymore. What we are witnessing is “surreal estate.”

Mumbai has a good stock 100 to 60 years old art deco buildings. It is known as the second art-deco city in the world after Miami. Marine Drive is famous for its elegant raw of mid-rise buildings facing the sea. Bandra has many 2 to 4 story-high building from that period as well. Many of which where built by East Indian owners for their children. The art-deco period in Mumbai was part of a new wave of urban development in the first part of the nineteen century.

Many observers then lamented the fact that these new constructions had a terrible aesthetic compared to the buildings they came to replace. Today find these art-deco buildings attractive. But this is not only nostalgia for an older golden age. These buildings were well built and this is why they are still standing today. They have endured Mumbai extremely hot and humid weather and its salty air. Many of these buildings have thick walls and high ceilings. They can last another 200 years without any problem if they are well maintained. It is quality construction.

In parts of the city one can still see the original Portuguese-style bungalows, which art decos buildings often came to replace. They can be found in Bandra, Khotachiwadi and other East Indian enclaves. Those that have not been destroyed by their owners or predatory developers still look beautiful 150, sometimes 200 years, after being built. Quality and care.

A street in Khotachiwadi (Mumbai) with a Portuguese-style bungalow

Roseville Bungalow, St Sebastian Rd, Bandra West, Mumbai: Original style East-Indian bungalow. Probably up to 150 years old.

In contrast, some of the new upper-class high-rises you see in Lower Parel and the Northern suburbs will look like nothing in 10-20 years time. This is because their first function is not actually to provide a long lasting quality experience to their residents. Architecture, design and durability seem to be the last concerns of this generation of developers. These new buildings are first and foremost financial products. They need to be sold quickly to fellow speculators who will not live in them, but instead resell them in a couple of months or a couple of years to another speculator. All this speculation is done with borrowed money, which must quickly return to the lender. This lasts until the bubble bursts.

One sign of surreal-estate bubbledom is the tens of thousands of flats lying vacant in Mumbai, waiting to be bought and sold. Their most important quality is to be easy to sell and for this they must remain empty. What developers want to maximize is the exchange value of their properties. This is done by standardizing construction as much as possible. Everyone wants easy products. That’s why most new buildings in the city and suburbs are monofunctional and offer more or less same layout on every floor. Any variation makes their market value harder to assess. Standardization means that the value of the building can easily be calculated on the basis of square foot price in any given part of the city. Each flat can also be sold individually to smaller investors who often bet with their savings. This speculative pattern trickles down all the way to affordable housing, with blessings of the government, which even incentivizes it through the SRA scheme and other similar market happy initiatives. This has disastrous consequences for the city of an order of magnitude that is still hard to grasp. Heritage is getting lost, a great potential for the city is wasted and people who end up staying in these buildings see them degrading very quickly.

New constructions in Lower Parel, Mumbai

India is home to some of the oldest, deepest and most sophisticated forms of urbanity anywhere in the world. Old cities such as those of Kochin, Ahmedabad, Surat, Delhi, Haridwar, Varanasi and a hundred more encapsulate a sense of urbanity and cosmopolitanism that we have everything to learn from. They are still the liveliest parts of towns after hundreds of years of existence. These are not valorized at all. They are either being redeveloped or decaying. While a few old families actually want to stay in their historical neighbourhoods, most middle-class people left the city for the suburb. And the suburb sprawls into nothingness. One could argue for instance that in Delhi, the Old Town is actually the city and that “New” Delhi is everything else -for the most part being an endlessly suburban sprawl, with enclaves of urbanity here and there.

New India seems to be about urbanization without a city. Did we loose the city somewhere in Old India? The beauty of places like Khotachiwadi in Mumbai and Khirkee Village in Delhi is that they know how to be urbane. They have deep roots, they are connected to the larger context, yet also appear to be slightly detached; not fully buying into the development craze they see around them, as if they had seen it all before.

A 200 years old house in Ahmedabad that has been restored with the help of the Alliance Française. The current owner, who is the third generation in his family to live in the house, welcomes overnight guests.

These neighbourhoods are their own universes. Like the Pols in Ahmedabad, they are self-contained and preserve a very strong sense of identity, without being exclusive or closed to the rest of the city. They stand in sharp contrast to the gated colonies that are the norm in middle-class suburbs. A closed gate marks the end of the city. It is the beginning of another logic, which is not that of the urbane trader or artisan. The gate belongs to the culture of the settler who wants to work the land exploiting it to the maximum. The settler seeks to profit directly from the land rather than from the social and commercial networks that crisscross it.

New Delhi is full of gates, which it seems to have inherited from its farming past. It is not as much a city of villages as a city of fields. As soon as people can put a gate somewhere they do it. In Mumbai the most gated spaces are five star hotels, which by the way all try to look like airline lounges. When you enter their compounds you are really made to feel that you are leaving the city (if not the country).

View of Khirkee (Delhi) from the Masjid

There are no closed gates in Old Delhi, no gates in Khotachiwadi, no gates in Dharavi. The city is a place that anyone can enter freely. Khirkee Village has gates. But it must be by mimetism. Or maybe that these gates are better understood the other way around. They are encircling this enclave of urbanity, leaving it outside New Delhi’s totalizing suburban spread.

When you enter Khotachiwadi you feel safe even though there are no gates. In fact you feel safer because there are no gates. People are walking in the street. Neighbours are talking to each other, sometimes shouting at each other. But when something goes wrong they know how to come together. Our friend James who is a life-long resident of Khotachiwadi leaves the doors of his 150+ years old bungalow open all day. People come in and out all the time. He has sparrow nests in each corners of his house.

Waking up in Dharavi somewhere in a house on a small street –and almost every street is narrow and pedestrian- it is not unusual to hear a birdsong or a rooster cocking. It is only when one looks outside the window that one realizes this is not the countryside, but the heart of the city.

A back street in Dharavi

The best neighbourhoods we can think of have all in one way or the other preserved village-like qualities. A beautiful neighbourhood is a neighbourhood that has roots and people to keep them alive. Khotachiwadi was once a plantation and the shore used to come to its doorsteps. Somehow this past is still alive there. Sometimes the link with the origins is not as old, direct or as spatial. In Dharavi people have often brought the village along with them, preserving old community ties, along with an ability to use spaces to fulfill many different functions, and a high degree of local autonomy. Most people in Dharavi go back to their village at least once a year. Khirkee Village proudly preserves its identity and a sense of its origins. The beauty of these neighbourhoods is not architectural –although some places like Khotachiwadi have outstanding self-standing houses– it is rather the way people are invested and involved in their habitats. The way they have shaped them over time, and the way the neighbourhood is experienced as a moment, which continues the historical journey of the people who inhabit it.

This is why Guy Debord says that when we destroy such neighbourhoods, we don’t only destroy people’s social networks and livelihood, but also their collective history and sense of identity. The point is not at all that places like Khotachiwadi, Dharavi or Khirkee village should be turned into Archeological Survey of India sites and barricaded, with a ticket booth at the entrance. It is in fact, exactly the contrary. In order to exist and survive, neighbouhoods must continue their journey through time and keep on evolving continuously. It is the dynamic interaction between people and the space they inhabit that must be preserved at all cost.

Presentation @ MAD Salon in Mumbai on Saturday, May 7th, 2011. Hosted by Susmita Monhanty and Sid Das.

1. Tower of Babel

This biblical story conveys many human anxieties and fears. Its monumental architecture encompasses a tale of tyranny – the domination of man over man in an attempt to bring together diverse histories under singular control, of streamlining otherness and reducing all fantasies into one. What is striking to the modern mind is the sheer scale of its ambition, of reaching out to the skies before crumbling under its own weight of over-extension and then fearing the ensuing confusion that comes with multiplicity and pluralism. The ambitions embodied in the myth seem to recur in human history – complete with the repetitive and cyclical fall.

2. Skyscraper Index

A little statistical table that circulates in the media now and then has an unsettling effect on many who encounter it. It shows correlations between ambitious building projects – specifically those that strive to the greatest heights ever – and the mysterious occurrence of economic depressions and the bursting of speculative bubbles that seem to unfailingly follow them. The table is seen to be unscientific but like the power of all great myths – has managed to plant little seeds of doubts and beliefs in the collective consciousness of those involved in realizing such ambitions. Are these grand projects crystallizations of arrogance and power till the sky literally falls on their heads? Often they become like the ruins of the tower of Babel, unfinished or surrounded by the rubble of economic despair.

3. World One

Mumbai’s very own Babel arises from its already pretty ruinous landscape with the same old tired ambition. The World One tower aims to be the highest residential tower in the world and rather like the grand but ill-fated biblical structure, wants to enclose as much as possible within its generous boundaries. It posits to be self-contained, encompassing as many needs as possible within it. It plans to tower over the rest of the city in arrogance and ambition. It turns away from the economic reality of thousands of luxury flats lying unused or unsold in its neighbourhoods and seems to be paving the way for a bubble to burst that, paradoxically people seem to be anticipating.

4. Barad Dur

The prevalence of biblical images and tales in medieval literature, of medievalism being one of the most challenging coming-of-age of moments of modern consciousness and the continued prevalence of medieval imagery and tales in modern fantasies and imaginations is explained by scholar Umberto Eco. He points out how an episodic and evolutionary presentation of history does not really mirror the diverse, complex and unpredictable way in which human lives and cultures actually unfold in space and time. Medieval concerns continue to exist deep in the human consciousness and experience. Popular culture is replete with imagery and fantasy from medieval times because modern life is punctuated by medieval moments, not withstanding the self-image we have of being modern thanks to technological changes and the scientific spirit. The Dark Tower of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings haunts us in movies, games and art, reliving old nightmares and shaping dreams and fantasies.

5. Dark Urban Age

As episodic history and transformative epic moments continue to influence our understanding of life, one powerful myth that has become prevalent is that we are now all firmly entrenched in the great Urban Age. However, it would be more accurate to say that we are in a rather Dark Urban Age. Prophets predict apocalyptic visions about this era with images of dark shadowy habitats replacing the erstwhile fears of the forest that castles and protected urban habitats had in the past. Every new architectural or urban fantasy that gets realized repeats such imagery, presenting itself as a fort surrounded by architectural wilderness full of danger and chaos. If it is not such negative imagery about their surroundings then it is about taming the wilderness and transforming it into acceptable notions of urban life – most of it still shaped by ambitions of the Babel Tower.

6. Out of the Castle

Today, when a young, well-meaning architect steps out of the castle, she is alert and on the lookout for dangers of the wilderness which she has to bravely tackle and eventually tame. The wilderness is epitomized by the category slum, encompassing all that is avoidable, dangerous and worthy of erasure. Like the proverbial adventurer of ancient tales she encounters false monsters and elusive spirits. The slum emerges as a highly unstable category, slipping through fingers the moment she thinks she has found one. In Mumbai particularly, the spectacular spectre of speculation has produced the most naive narrative on slums, where it is used in the grossest of way at one level and full of nuances at another. In Dharavi, each neighbourhood looks the other way when asked where the legendary and largest slum in Asia is supposed to be. It is always on the next street. Eventually when she finds it – it appears as a chimera, a construct and helps her realize that the dangerous forest around her is nothing like what she had been told it was.

7. Final Fantasy

The scary forest was a fantasy in the mind of castle dwellers in a way that played upon all kinds of anxieties and fears. Kings and aristocrats saw them as spaces out of control, unlike the domesticated peasants and taxed agrarian lands that were caught in their web. From the vantage of the subaltern hero, the forest was Sherwoodian, full of Robin Hoodian impulses, a social space and a world of creative freedom and economic independence. Resisting control was its biggest aim. An urbanological understanding of forests reveals a sharp questioning of what is wild, tame, and natural. Urbanology questions what is urban, rural and tribal, what is a slum and what is heroic resistance to monumental ambition. The final fantasy for an urban explorer is questioning the romantic fallacy of Babylonian ambition and revealing falsely frightening wilderness to be something else altogether – a liveable fantasy of human, creative and ecological possibilities

The practice of photojournalism and image making has changed everywhere. Whether it is on websites of mainstream newspapers or on amateur blogs all around the world, images are increasingly taken by sources close to the scene of action. It is about being right here, right now, and having a sharp enough reflex to snap the image at the right time.

The story is more complicated than simply the amateur journalist taking over the job of the professional. What is happening is that the amateur becomes an expert when she talks about what’s near her, what she is familiar with.  This abundance of information from an infinite number of sources doesn’t mean the end of professional journalism at all. Instead it implies a reinvention of the journalist as a selector/editor of the texts and images that she receives. The journalist still has to be at the right time and the right place but this doesn’t necessarily mean the time and place where the action is unfolding. The place to be is at the receiving and transmitting end of deep networks of actors and readers.

Journalism was already global before the advent of decentralized media. It had become an industry that successfully mobilized people in different parts of the world, and through communication technology such as the telegram, the phone or the fax, connected them to control rooms where the information was being processed and then broadcast. The field of journalism was already broad. What new technologies have brought is a new depth. This depth is not an analytical depth (which may well have been reduced by the speed of diffusion of information), but a depth in the story, since the object of the story can also become a storyteller. We can get the insider story. The end-receiver of information is increasingly intimate with the reality reported in the news. The reader can now interact with the actors from the stories she is reading and even become part of the story, by asking a specific question or offer unique insights.

It follows that there is no simple opposition between the so-called “democratization” of the media and the role of the specialist. The amateur is a specialist of her own reality. We recently started a workshop series on the theme of ‘water’ at the Dharavi Shelter. The kids have quickly become familiar with the use of the digital camera. For this project, we are asking them to look at water in their neighbourhood. They shoot pictures and describe what they have photographed in their own words. Then they document the way water is being used at home, how it gets evacuated and where it goes afterward. This material is then shared with water system specialists who ask questions back to the kids. We are only facilitating this communication. In a way we are acting as journalists, getting information from here and transmitting it there, and then the other way around. Our role is not simply that of a mediator however – we are also actors. And a lot of this involves connecting people to each other. The art of connecting is just as creative as any other, be it writing or photography. This connection, going both ways, empowers the children  significantly.  They will be able to speak with authority about something near them and will get to know it better than anyone else.

It seems to us that good photojournalists have always looked at photojournalism as much more than a profession. It is a form of engagement with the context, with the subject. The most moving and insightful work in that field, has always been one which constructs its own story and doesn’t try to elude the presence and subjectivity of the photographer. Carrying a camera automatically changes the response of the people around you. Playing with that effect is what makes great photography. What we love the most about previous the photos taken by the kids at the Shelter is that they could never have been taken by anyone else. People on the photos would simply have responded differently if they had been snapped by unknown adults. Maybe some would have smiled or felt intimidated in front of a photographer. In front of their friends or family people are more spontaneous and natural. Some of the best shots taken by the kids are the ones that let us sense the relationship between the person behind the camera and the person being photographed.

The images that emerge have a distinctive aesthetic and politics. They emerge from the knowledge embedded in familiarity, the taken for granted, the mundane but eventually emerge to have a sacredness of their own. What facilitates this process is the collective energy that is unleashed by the use of digital technology. The plasticity of which is an individual nightmare for the professional photographer surrounded by amateur images and image-makers, but which becomes a powerful tool when it allows for users to come together and enter into an exercise that becomes a shared and collective practice. The process of making images together, of exploring familiar contexts as a collective, of sharing with an immediacy that this technology facilitates like none other, makes the entire exercise in photojournalism enter into a different realm – one that needs to be appreciated for its aesthetics as well.

Historian, philosopher, writer, Umberto Eco points out how new knowledge technologies that use the digital image are connected to a world at least as old as European medievalism in which the word and the image have always been integral to the political imagination. He looks at contemporary society and all its technological paraphernalia as one more episode in this epic story. He insists that digital technology is potentially liberating and – more importantly – irreversible. We need to find the right handles so that our relationship with knowledge continues to be genuinely challenging and satisfying.

Anthropologist Appadurai points out that the contemporary practitioner is part of a shifting, moving and fluid landscape. New technologies help us express these further and connect to the ‘scapes’ that make up our social imagination in more ways than one. This ‘social imagination’ continues to be rooted in a complex, ever-changing context, one that is inevitably local, because locality is always being produced. However, at the same time, it is acutely aware that national boundaries, like many others are being challenged by new constantly mutating technologies. For him, the globalized world is not the same as Marshall Mcluhan’s mediated global village. It is rather about the migration and movements of people from one part of the globe to another. It is about becoming aware that our lives and worlds are deeply interconnected. Most importantly, it is about the way in which media and new technologies help us come to terms with these connections, shifts and movements.

One story that encapsulates the entire experience of the photography workshops that we do at the Shelter, where images keep being produced and then tell their own stories, where the location is supreme, where time is tamed by sheer presence and immediacy, is told by Ray Bradbury in ‘The Illustrated Man’, first published in 1951. This is a collection of narratives about a dystopic future in which the media literally comes alive. The stories are embodied on a man and are alive with moving images, tattooed by some enchanted artist from a local fair. The man himself could be from any point from the past or future. The stories his body ‘reveals’ ultimately end with one that starts to reflect the life of the person presently ‘watching’ them. They are futuristic stories about a world where a giant screen absorbs human beings into its digital folds, and about human impulses emerging through the ruins of a nuclear devastated world and the intricacies of faith.

But what is striking is that that it places the storyteller at its centre, weaving images and worlds about the past, present and the future. It is ultimately about the triumph of her imagination that cuts through the varied contexts in which one finds her telling her story – always part of a collective universe of story tellers – performing around a fire, thundering in an auditorium, whispering through cyber-space, crackling through television or hitting back at the player in a video game. When the kids at the Dharavi Shelter take pictures of their own streets and homes, they also tattoo them with their imaginations, report it, narrate it and emboss it with their own lives.  The story that emerges has a life of its own.

The photos have been by children living near MG Road, New Transit Camp, Dharavi, during a workshop conducted at the Dharavi Shelter by photographer Lasse Bak Mejlvang from Denmark and Himanshu S. Jan 23, 2011. The workshop participants are: Simon, Anand, Vishal, Neha, Reshma, Karishma, Muskan, Umesh, Gautam, Punam, Amar.

More photos here.

Click here to read an article on photojournalism by Neha Thirani that inspired this post (pdf document).

This introductory note on Goa has been written for graduate students of the landscape architecture program of the Royal University College of Arts in Stockholm. We are organizing a year-long programme on Goa’s urban systems with them.

The Studio aims at understanding the way habitats and settlements in Goa function, how they are organized and in what way do they resemble or differ from habitats and settlements in the rest of the country. Goa is the smallest state in  India with a distinctive history shaped by Konkan coastal experiences and Portuguese colonialism. The Konkan coast all along Maharshtra and Karnataka shows comparatively lower population levels than the hinterland of those states. The population levels of the coast are also comparable with the sparse demographics of the hilly tracts of the regions. Goa includes a coastal belt as well as hilly ghats that shape its landscape, making it a bio-diversity hotspot with  a demographic profile that is very distinctive.

Due to the long presence of Portuguese rule, four major urban settlements emerged, connected to trade, commerce and political rule. These are the port town of Vasco, the commercial center of Margao, the market city of Mapusa and the political capital of Panjim. The sea facing economies of these urban centers were also connected to the agrarian landscape of the rest of the state, which were dotted with villages and hamlets, mostly on the coastal belt. The four urban centers are intricately connected to the other settlements through economic exchanges and population movement giving the entire populated region of Goa a sense of being a connected network.

Through the landscape one sees paddy fields, private forests and water bodies that are enmeshed into the network by being constantly shaped by human presence and activity. Along the western hilly tracts the forests too are involved in an economy of use through the large mining industry and commercial exploitation of timber.

Most of the coastal belt is shaped by the tourist economy with its distinct civic infrastructure. The presence of Industrial estates – large zones of economic industrial activity – also dot its landscape making them destinations of everyday commuters.  The visual grammar of Goa gives you a sense of low population density and vacant spots, but in reality it is a highly dense, even urbanized system in which many habitats and settlements co-exist with forested and agrarian areas.

To the national imagination, the land use patterns of Goa seem difficult to understand, shaped as the hinterland is by a very different history and colonial experience, with a heavy concentration of large mega cities and extremely denuded and infrastructure deprived rural regions.  In relative comparison, many of Goa’s villages have infrastructure comparable to small Indian towns and in some coastal regions, even reproduce a condensed and highly urbanized consumer lifestyle thanks to tourism.

Goa is beset by a variety of pressures; the ongoing juggernaut of real estate development in the rest of the country looks at Goa as a prime destination for luxury and upper-middle class second homes for India’s rich, the mining lobby looks at its bio-diversity rich forests as spaces that can be exploited for more wealth, the idea that agricultural activity is no more the economy of future makes a lot of traditional land use vulnerable, and a combination of real-estate interests and tourist activities plays havoc with its coastal belt.

Along with all this, administrative policies in Goa are pressurized by the national framework, which forces categories and policies that work with larger population levels and different urban typologies. For example electoral constituencies in Goa are considered too low making for an inclusion of more territory per unit, even though these territories are internally very distinct. The idea that a network of villages and towns can potentially work as a system is totally disregarded and a larger urban discourse prefers looking at Goa as a city-state or a big urban center with a potential of becoming a bigger city.

All these factors play havoc with everyday life in Goa, which is consequently becoming a hotspot of restlessness and frustration to Goans of all kinds. Activism in Goa and its political consciousness is on high alert but intensely pressured by forces beyond their control. The rhetoric  of urban real estate, planning and urban design discourses typically undermine Goa’s unique urban trajectory and organization.

We aim to understand Goa’s spatial and historical configuration through the idea of the network of its towns and villages and help translate its distinction (or similarities) to policy makers, so that its future is more in control by the people who reside in it, by people who are part of its history.

It is also a strong contention that Goa’s spatial configuration can act as a reference point for several of India’s thousands of districts that are presently being denuded by the idea that dominant big-city centric urbanization of today is the only kind for everyone and all regions.  In this day and age when environmental concerns are becoming more and more real, when the practices of the construction industry attached to hyper-urbanization is being understood as being ecologically, socially and economically problematic, the story of Goa can contribute hugely as a counter-point.

The fact that there are different ways of being urbane, that are not necessarily connected to building construction and certain types of industrial development, which allow for the co-existence of natural density and social demographic density and where villages and towns, forests and fields can be accepted as functioning networks can open the way for a better policy that looks after the interests of most of India today.

This is an excerpt from our lead essay published in Art India magazine, January 2011.

A Street in Khirkee, by Jose “Cole” Abasolo. Produced during the Urban Typhoon Khirkee, New Delhi, November 2010.

At the simplest level, there is one thing that connects the world of urban practitioners – architects, planners, activists and designers – to that of contemporary artists involved in the messiness of everyday life. It’s the burning desire and audacity to interfere with the arrangements of their own contexts on all fronts. This interference is spiked by an unusual combination of aesthetics and politics, whereby both parties fiercely harness the forces of creativity to push forth their specific agendas. These agendas express themselves in any number of ways – from producing globalisation-fired, speculation-enriched glistening cities to fighting violent battles against apocalyptic injustices; from pushing inter-disciplinary public art projects in a world of faded funding to encouraging the gentrification of dysfunctional streets by promoting fresh art projects.

Often, artists and urban practitioners share common agendas and oppose their own brethren on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Freshly globalised cities thrive on symbolic capital and have more money for art projects, uniting the aesthetics of urbanism across a range of practices, from architecture to design. You also have the rebels, who align over issues of justice and inequality and work together in marginal urban spaces. Political engagement of this more direct kind definitely connects artists and urban practitioners of a certain sensibility, and we see ourselves closest to them, though with significant qualifications.

From neighbourhoods that are ignored by civic authorities to those that face social and economic prejudice: such spaces attract a certain kind of political investment that hopes to transform situations. For us, however, these urban contexts are more than sites of resistance. They represent a powerful counterpoint to those initiatives that today dominate contemporary urban environments, infecting building practices, cultural lives and notions of urban futures all over the world with their sinister capacities. The counterpoint has to be political in the truest sense of the term, where one moves beyond notions of victimhood, the politics of marginalisation and the desire to ‘help poor people’ and ‘save neighbourhoods’, and enters into a realm where contexts are understood and negotiated in finer ways.

The deeper we go, the closer we come to aligning with artists who share the same starting points – an attraction and empathy for worlds that fall outside dominant and mainstream urban ideologies. We can confidently say that the so-called slums, favelas, suburban ghettoes, street corners, urban villages and inner cities are breeding grounds for artists not simply because they are marginal or exotic spaces, but because they embody critiques and counterpoints through their very existence. One has to only look at the musical productions coming out of the ghettos of Baltimore, the favelas of Rio or the suburbs of Paris. Some of the most powerful forms of expression are emerging far from the centre. As architectural theorist and philosopher Yehuda Safran says, “The future is in the periphery.” Of course, artistic and cultural productions coming from the periphery are rarely treated with the respect they deserve. But when they are, what emerges is something we find truly significant as urban practitioners.

Urban spaces inspire artists to use them as subjects or themes. Artistic production that takes the context as a departure point are typically based on collaborations, which challenge the notion of the heroic and solitary artist, driven by a unitary coherence and a deeply personal aesthetic. Co-authored projects often derived their meaning and force from a shared understanding of the context and common sense of purpose. As a result, complex meanings get attached to processes rather than finished products. The making of the object, installation or performance, rather than the object itself, is taking the centre-stage. The process has its own aesthetic and it is something we experience in the world of urbanism too.

Plans and designs as finished products is a limited and limiting idea. Development projects that do not involve the people who will inhabit them often end up alienating them in one way or another. Super-developed urban infrastructure that provides for everything – art galleries, performance spaces, parks – can still produce, within a short span of time, bored and alienated youngsters. Similarly, habitats that are pre-fabricated ultimately come to life only when their inhabitants start to work on them by living in and transforming spaces through their needs. Our engagement with urban worlds has convinced us that at no point of time can one design a finished city – a promise that has been proven unrealistic and false, a countless number of times. What we can do is ensure processes of engagement and participation that are constantly active.

Ignoring this, the world of architecture and urban design finds itself in a creative impasse, banging against a wall of its own making, caught up in a political economy which limits its creativity and hopes to destroy only to rebuild in the same old way. The notion of a neighbourhood – or a building for that matter – as an ‘object’ that must be designed by an omniscient maestro has outlived its time. The modernist impulse, which drove urban planners and designers to produce grand solutions for ‘the poor’, or even for the city as a whole, is still driving ambitious souls powered by an endless supply of capital. In practical terms as well as intellectually, this has been exposed as fraudulent and dangerous. Who can still confidently argue that mass housing will solve the problem of the poor (and the middle classes, for that matter) in, say, Mumbai or Shanghai? We have seen this model fail throughout the world, with the richest countries suffering the most. Today, thousands of buildings less than ten years old are standing decrepit and unmaintained, waiting to be slowly washed away by the forces of nature.

Our generation of urban practitioners sees the city as an animate subject. Not as a dead corpse or mechanical ensemble, nor as a monstrosity in various stages of organic decay – visions that have, for long, populated the imaginations of urban thinkers and artists. The city we see emerging and are working towards is high-tech and rooted at the same time. What moves it are the millions of people, who day after day, make it their own by walking on the roads, running shops, standing and chatting at street corners, painting walls, making and repairing houses and getting involved in local affairs.

Many activists, politicians and urbanists, who have grown up in a world divided into discrete ideological blocks, are still unable to see local businessmen and concerned homeowners as agents of change. This wouldn’t have been the case if self-righteous establishments hadn’t taken supercilious stands or made grand gestures about cities that are ineffective, corrupt and unconvincingly imagined. This is as true of London and Chicago as it is of Delhi and Bangkok.

Artists engaged in seeing neighbourhoods as sources of inspiration and collective expression are leading the way out of ideological trenches towards a world where ‘community’ doesn’t necessarily imply communitarian politics and community art doesn’t have to be about the art of a community, but becomes the art of creating communities across cultural and social divisions. To the Net-generation, a ‘community’ refers to a collection of users with a common set of protocols aimed at facilitating boundless communication. The invention of these protocols is where we feel some of the most potent artistic and urban practices are converging, giving both a new charge.

In the world of art, co-production has been in effect for ages. Certain protocols have been devised explicitly to allow individual expression within a collective. You can see this in art practices in vogue before the age of autonomy of art. The institution of apprenticeship and the mastery of certain skills and methods had allowed generations of artisans to produce artifacts and architectures that bore no signature, yet expressed the highest levels of aesthetic coherence and taste. The object could live a life longer than that of the individual artist, as long as the skills and know-how that went into its making were transmitted to a future generation. This is also the way cities were built in pre-modern days with artisans reproducing age-old construction techniques and priding themselves on perfecting their masters’ styles. Some of these traditions have survived till date. The Compagnons’ associations, born at the time of the cathedrals in 12^th century France, are still alive and teaching traditional carpentry techniques to new generations. Japan too has kept artisanal construction techniques alive to build temples and traditional houses even within the most futuristic urban environments.

These practices, however, are largely marginalised in a world that has still not recovered from the modernist revolution. Art forms that emerged most strongly in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, driven by a heroic sense of exploration and self-affirmation, had reservations about well-developed art practices from an earlier time, many of which were perceived as negating the figure of the artist-as-producer. Stylistic imperatives and technical restrictions were believed to repress the personal sensibility of the artisan. Breaking out of this labyrinth and existing in a world of infinite possibilities was at the same time terrifying and tremendously energising. New paths could be uncovered and explored, making full use of the availability of new materials and technologies, as emerging political ideologies saw tradition as the biggest impediment to social emancipation. Individual signature and innovation became more important than the reproduction of inherited practices and respect for cultural and spatial contexts. New aesthetic orthodoxies emerged to critique traditional styles. Art saw itself at the threshold of several new futures and possibilities, and the urban realm was the inevitable site and location for all of them.

With the emergence of industrial modernity, the notion of the urban took on a new connotation. As a site of cosmopolitanism, growth, democratisation and emancipatory economic transformation, the city was marked out as a unique space in the evolution of mankind. The 21^st century has sealed this dimension of our collective future. The future, according to everybody, from social scientists to political economists to environmentalists, is irrevocably urban. However, this realisation is not a continuation of the last two hundred years of faith in the city as a site of all that is desirable, which was based on a clear understanding that the default world was not urban. This shift, from being aware of the urban as a site of progressive, democratising and modernising impulses in a largely non-urban world, to the realisation that the future (and even the present) is, in fact, nothing but urban, is a powerful one. It is definitely connected to the specific technological transformations that 20^th century globalisation made possible. It is connected to an increasing awareness that huge tectonic shifts have taken place in our understanding of geography and the inter-connectedness of the world.

This vision, once ironically called the Global Village, convinces us more than ever that the choices for us in terms of habitats are not as unbounded as we once thought. Cities, for better or worse, are really the contexts in which we live and where humanity will probably perish, whenever that happens. For all those anguished souls, us included, who remain dissatisfied with the state of the world – this realisation forces us to look at the city afresh. If only because it is not simply that dazzling confluence of modernity and emancipation but simply, all that there is for us to work with, whether we like it or not. The questions, therefore, change from “Do we want to live in cities?” or even “What kind of cities do we want?” to “How do we cope with this urban reality?” and “How do we improve it?” The context rather than the ideology becomes the starting point for all creative processes.

Shopping Mall in Santa Fe, Mexico City

We  just spent a week at a seminar organized by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, where a group of 60 students, professionals and academics debated the theme of the “World Class City” and its possible re-imagination.

The phrase “World Class City” has become ubiquitous in discussions on urban and economic development in India and other developing countries. One sees it daily in newspapers and hears it on TV and at the dining table. It is also omnipresent in policy circles and academia. Although critical minds get instinctively suspicious of such as term, it is hard to dismiss altogether, and even more so to “re-imagine” its meaning. For a start, the “World Class City” needs to be placed in its urban and ideological context.

The emergence of the “World Class City” in discourses on urban development is linked to the disappearance of the equally problematic notion of “Third World”. When the Soviet block (the “Second World”) disappeared as a distinct political regime, “First World” capitalism spread all over the world as it seemed to represent the only possible model of governance and development. Socialism was relegated to the museum of failed utopias and the world’s political imagination was suddenly reduced to whatever could be done within the frame of capitalism.

Since (almost) every country could now be measured on the scale of its economic production and accumulation (GDP), the political nomenclature of first, second and third worlds was replaced by terms referring to stages of economic development: underdeveloped, less developed, developing, developed, most developed…

In a way, one could say that at that time the world became more politically integrated and economically “global”. Without the Second World, there could not be a Third one. The world had become global again, with international trade networks expanding to new horizons, financial flows circulating freely from country to country, industrial processes realigning themselves along command and control centres and sites of production, and so on. With this relative erosion of political-economic borders, cities were propelled at the centre stage of the world economy. In an integrated global economy, their significance was no longer simply national –they became international entities, with high levels of specialization.

Cities came to be seen as the “hubs” of the global economy and a new nomenclature emerged to replace that of the Cold War era: first tier, second tier and third tier cities. This meant that potentially a developing country could have a second or first tier city. Shanghai and Sao Paulo are perfect examples of that. At this point, the aspiration of many political and industry leaders shifted from a national agenda to an urban agenda. Since cities were engines of growth, it made sense to invest heavily in their development, even if it meant leaving the country behind.

This is the broad context within which the imagination of the World Class City emerges. The World Class City is not simply your “Global City”, since, in a global world, most cities are global whether they want to be or not. World Class echoes the Cold War era notion of First World, since in a world dominated by the First World, World Class really means First Class. First Class as a status is relative by nature. On the one hand, it is based on a certain imagination of what our first tier global cities (New York, London, Tokyo) ought to look like, and on the other hand, it is a statement of superiority vis-à-vis the rest of the country.

The problem is that the cities that really stimulate our imagination when we think of World Class are not as classy when you view them from the ground. London is experiencing a rise in urban violence and unemployment and many neighbourhood shops are closing down. New York is enduring one of the most dramatic bed bug epidemic (of all things!) of its history and Tokyo has an increasing number of homeless people setting up tents and shacks in parks and squares.

The “World Class City” is a slogan that seems to be coming directly from a marketing agency and seems to be devised to sell the latest fashion in cosmetic urbanism. It is a visual narrative made of bits and pieces taken from distant places, which exist primarily as urban spectacles in our imaginations. One never encounters the World Class City in reality. The only places where this vision seems to have materialized are cities like Singapore and Shanghai, where authoritarian regimes can sustain its artificial existence. These are closer to the model of the theme park or the “special economic zones”, which achieve perfect order at the cost of forcefully containing the mess outside their boundaries.

In India the dream of transforming Mumbai into a World Class City has given way to the more realistic ambition of developing world-class buildings and infrastructures in some parts of the city. This version of the World Class City takes the form of firewalled islands of high-security and a world-’classiness’ connected to similar islands around the world. Outside, the Third World  continues to strive.

The World Class City as it is being envisioned and developed nowadays uses speculative projections that would humble the most spectacular of science fiction imagery and is a shortcut for the political glory of corrupt leaders or those without much imagination. The latest in that brand of development is Mumbai’s aptly named World One complex, which is planned to become the highest residential tower in the world, entirely self-contained and unabashedly exclusive. From the twentieth century ideal of “One World”, we have come to the vision “World One”. Real estate speculators and developers have resolutely decided to keep the rest of the city at the door.

Without its second class citizens and third world periphery, the World Class City would have no backdrop to pitch itself against. It uses the label ostensibly to carry the entire city on its merit, but in reality only exists, especially in new urban avatars, as a medieval fortress, an enclave that leaves behind the citizens that do not belong to its globally networked connections. The idea has currency in the business and politics of construction, often tied up with a more respectable sounding infrastructural dimension. These infrastructures function as corridors that connect the periphery to the centre, making the World Class City look like a walled kingdom reigning over a city-region that it is simultaneously exploiting and protecting itself against.

The World Class City is not as much a vision of the future, as it is a reproduction of a model that belongs to the Dark Age with added high-tech features. Our hopes  for the future do not rest in the World-Class enclaves of this world, nor in the regions they dominate, but rather in the spaces that are not yet fully ruled by them, where alternatives to the World Class City vision are waiting to be recognized by architects, planners, developers and policy-makers.

Presentation at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements,
Bangalore January 7th, 2011.

1. The Culture of Activism in Mumbai

The traditional culture of activism in Mumbai was broadly nationalist socialist, rooted in the freedom struggle against colonialism. The activism around housing and urban inequality, that blossomed during post-Independence, inherited a similar vocabulary and rhetoric. At best it was proactive and effective, and at worst it became a victim of regional chauvinism or got stuck in narratives of victimhood, charity and the voiceless poor. Across the ideological spectrum it evoked communities and the participation of ‘the people’ through mass rallies, demonstrations  and centralized leadership. The activist often became the voice and representative of the poor and the poor itself became, like the community, a highly rhetorical figure of speech.

2. Knowledge Practices and forms of Engagement

The relationship between the intellectual and the activist has an old precedent in the city while the activist as intellectual and academic opened newer challenges to both, action and ideas. In many cases the activist as academic or intellectual followed a route of bringing attention to her constituency and speaking even more strongly on their behalf. What attracted us, and many like us to the interplay of activism and intellectual work is based on the recognition that knowledge practices are embedded in the world at large and these are the starting points of our political engagement.

3. Contexts, Knowledge and Agency

As we produce knowledge about our immediate urban contexts, this knowledge transforms us into activists. Self-reflexivity about our roles as researchers of urban contexts gets heightened as soon as we raise questions. It is the  moment of articulating these questions that transforms us into political beings and it is this moment that remains the point of inspiration for our activism.  However the relationship between knowledge and politics is linked directly to its accessibility: more people who access it, participate in it and produce it,  the more political it becomes.

4. The User Generated City

Neighbourhoods that have been directly produced by their inhabitants embody knowledge about buildings, construction and urbanism. Incidentally the majority of human settlements around the world are of this nature. And if we believe Mike Davis’ apocalyptic predictions they are growing at ‘alarming’ rates, becoming ever more complex and impenetrable. We would rather see such neighbourhoods, which have grown outside of the formal planning and development paradigm as  knowledge systems, with their own modes interaction and engagements.

5. Community and Participation

Community is about both creating and being created by local modes of communication and knowledge sharing. “It is clearly no linguistic accident that “community” and “communication” share the Latin root communis, “in common.” Communities comprise people with common interests who communicate with each other.” (Melvin Webber, 1964). Participation is essentially about immersing oneself in the process, which in the urban context, means getting involved in its production. There can be no participation without communities and communication systems.

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/