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Housing Typologies in Mumbai
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As any other urban area with a dense history, Mumbai has several kinds of house types developed over various stages of its history. However, unlike in the case of many other cities all over the world, each one of its residences is invariably occupied by the city dwellers of this metropolis. Nothing is wasted or abandoned as old, unfitting, or dilapidated in this colossal economy. The housing condition of today’s Mumbai can be discussed through its various kinds of housing types, which form a bulk of the city’s lived spaces.
This study is intended towards making a compilation of house types in (and wherever relevant; around) Mumbai. House Type here means a generic representative form that helps in conceptualising all the houses that such a form represents. It is not a specific design executed by any important architect, which would be a-typical or unique. It is a form that is generated in a specific cultural epoch/condition. This generic ‘type’ can further have several variations and could be interestingly designed /interpreted/transformed by architects.
The focus of this study is on documenting and describing the various house types found in Mumbai with discussions regarding their respective cultural contexts, evolution of form, policies under which they took shape, delivery systems used to generate them, agencies involved, financial mechanisms, uses and occupations, tenure patterns, transformations, etc. It is neither a comprehensive history of housing in the city nor a study of housing conditions, but instead a study of house types. The compilation however would be valuable for undertaking a historical study or describing the present housing condition.
SARAI-CRIT Workshop on Emerging Urbanism in India
Workshop organised by CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust) and SARAI/Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi on 27-29 December 2006 at the All-India Institute of Local Self-Government, Mumbai
In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to understand and grapple with the transformation of contemporary urban spaces and environments across India. It is now widely recognised across spheres as diverse as academic social science, urban planning and architecture, social work and activism, and the arts and cultural industries that there has been a conceptual vacuum in understanding the city in India since Independence. The estrangement of both urban scholars and practitioners from their object of understanding remains acute.
Recently, both inside and outside institutions, new practices grouped as “urban research” or “emerging urbanism” have renewed the call for new methodological inquiries and collaborative frameworks to understand the changing conditions and landscapes of urban India. The primary sites for this emerging urbanism have been both the urban spaces and built environments in which projects, experiments and interventions have been undertaken, as well as the discursive and conceptual spaces in which new ideas and theories are still being discussed and worked out.
Geographies of Resistance
Abstract of presentation by Anirudh Paul and Shekhar Krishnan at the Roundtable on ‘Asian Cities and Cultural Change’ at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, July 2005
The past twenty years have witnessed the decisive end of attempts at state-centred urban planning in Mumbai. The post-Independence Development Plan, which has guided land, housing, and economic growth since the sixties, has been displaced in favour of piecemeal investments in infrastructure and transport, and housing and slum rehabilitation by the state, with increased participation from private builders and agencies. With the retreat of the state from its ambitious agendas of rational land-use, equitable distribution of services and resources, and protection of the environment, the instruments of abstract spatial planning used by the state have withered and mutated into new urban forms marked by severe exclusions and enclosures. Classical urban planning practice was historically premised on the segregation of the functions of modern urban life into residential, commercial/industrial, and public spheres, and their centralised location governed by state directives. However, Asian cities have constantly demonstrate the falsity of this separation of functions — with their vast districts of dense, mixed-use settlements governed by porous legalities, popular politics, and tactical negotiations over space and survival. This vast and complex economy has been inadequately imagined as the Third World ’slum’ or theorised as the ‘informal economy’. With the retreat of the state, centralised planning practice and its technocratic spatial imagination has been appropriated into a new spatial regime in which a predatory class of private builders dominates the production of formal housing for a minority of the rich, amidst rising inequality in access to housing and basic services for the majority of the urban poor in Mumbai [1].
Housing Experiment at Betwala Chawl
The residents of Betwala Chawl are a community of migrants from Allahabad — makers of exquisite cane furniture — who have squatted on a plot off Foras Road (Nimkar Marg) in Central Mumbai for more than 75 years. Betwala Chawl would qualify as a heritage slum, if criteria to ear mark heritage buildings were any different! With the help of housing activist Chandrashekhar Prabhu and the Slum Rehabilitation Society represented by Adolf Tragler, the community has acquired the land under its ownership.
The 1976 Societies Act decrees that if a group of tenants (more than 70%) come together and register as a society, this society could take up the development of its premises on its own, without involving a builder as an agent of development. Such a self-development model can save the tenants’ society lakhs of rupees, an amount which could in turn form a corpus fund. This community corpus can be used to support the tenants’ monthly outgoings, which for new developments in Mumbai can be prohibitive for urban poor communities. Moreover, the surplus space from redevelopment could help tenants gain additional floor space for the use of the communities or for sale by them, thereby challenging the builder-touted myth that as per SRA (Slum Rehabilitation Authority) or Cess Rules, rehabilitated tenants and slum-dwellers areonly entitled to 225 sqare feet of floor space in ‘free housing’.
Betwala Chawl is our first experiment with this model of self-developed, community-oriented housing practice. Architecturally, our attempts here are to modulate the built structure to achieve a comprehensible urban form — carving out as large an open space as possible, with a perimeter building typology that defies the rubber stamped tower type popularised by city builders. Our attempt is to tweak the building bye-laws and existing policies in order to maximise programmatic space for our low income user group. Spaces given free of FSI (Floor Space Index) by the Development Control Rules specific to the Slum Rehabilitation Act can work as flexible production/work-spaces by the community. A stilt is given free of FSI for parking by the SRA laws, so is a balwadi, society office and welfare or community centre. These form void spaces in the rehabilitation building, distributed as double height punctures in the building mass, such that they could alternatively be used as work spaces.
Urban housing policies, while addressing the issue of shelter, fail to connect it to the fundamental right to work. The paradigmatic shift from an organised smoke-stack economy into an informal, often home-based economy has not yet been reflected in mainstream planning practices and housing policies. This design and community intervention, will institutionalise a cooperative society with its own corpus financed from the sale and commercial components of their self-development project — empowering the community with new housing on its existing tenured land.
Community Geographic Information System (GIS)
Mumbai is one of Asia’s largest cities, in which urban spaces are the central arenas of political imagination and intervention. The past decade has seen the articulation of a new politics of space in Mumbai — through the contesting claims of the urban poor majority in slums and squatter settlements, assertive residents’ associations and civic reform movements, the prosperous construction industry and builder-politician nexus, and concerned practitioners in the design, architecture and research professions.
In spite of this increased awareness and concern with urban spaces, basic information on housing, land, infrastructure and environment — the right of citizens — remains largely inaccessible, because of bureaucratic obstacles and vested interests. This asymetry of information has given rise to predatory classes of builders and speculators, whose privileged access to information is transformed into “development rights” for construction, eroding accountability to local communities and urban stake-holders, and the planning policies meant to uphold their rights.
Existing applications of new spatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) for commercial services or scientific research remain distant from the needs of these grass-roots communities and local decision-makers. With the increasing demands of citizens for their rights to information on urban space — and recent legislative enactments and public interest litigation on freedom of information — we feel that communities can harness the power of new geo-spatial imaging and mapping technologies to strengthen their demands for secure tenure and housing rights, open and vibrant public spaces, and ecological conservation and sustainable development in the mega-city.
This proposal outlines a project to develop an open-access spatial data infrastructure, and a set of simple tools and applications in localised in Indian languages, for knowledge transfer and participatory urban planning by communities and citizens in the Mumbai Metrpolitan Region. Read the Community GIS Project Proposal and the Community GIS Project Addendum
Mumbai Port Trust and Dock Lands
The objective of this study has been to formulate development strategies, policy instruments, and a public imagination for the regeneration of the Port and Dock Lands of the Island City of Mumbai. Published in 2005 as a limited edition “Study of Mumbai’s Eastern Waterfront” by the Kamala Raheja Foundation and the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), copies are still available from CRIT upon request.
The Port and Dock Lands of Mumbai — occupying the entire harbour-side shore of the Island City — contains docks, warehouses, ship-breaking yards, formal and informal industries and economic activities which have been a vital part of the city’s economy and history. Across the harbour, in Nhava-Sheva on the mainland, containerised shipping has eclipsed the functions of the old Mumbai Port Trust, the sole custodian of the Port and Dock Lands, and the largest land-holder in Mumbai. Containerisation and regional competition by new ports has dramatically changed the historic relationships between the old port and the city, and the harbour and surrounding region. These transformations make it necessary for all those concerned with the city’s future to focus on a public strategy and planning brief for the regeneration of Port and Dock Lands within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
Earlier phases of the project (2000–2001) had mapped the built environment of the EWF according to criteria of land-use, ownership patterns, conservation and heritage values, and population and infrastructure. In the process of documentation of the precinct, we also identified the different actors and agencies which have a claim on the limited resources of the area, and whose different and often conflicting interests and agendas will affect any future development scenarios. This study stimulated dialogue between policy-makers, planners and scholars to develop a new planning brief and vision for the regeneration of this historically significant industrial waterfront. In the present phase of the project, UDRI and CRIT have been working with Task Force on the Eastern Waterfront, established by the Govermment of Maharashtra from 2002-2004, and have published the full study in 2005.
A public planning strategy for the Port and Dock Lands can play two vital roles — decongesting the city and improving its environment and opening new spaces for the mobility of goods and people; as well using the nodal location of the waterfront to connect the Island City of Mumbai with its twin city across the harbour, Navi Mumbai, through re-alignment the regional axes of economy, transport and communication. The present phase of the project is working out possible scenarios at the level of the city and region, and developing policy mechanisms and modes of intervention in the Port and Dock Lands. This will establish a basis for negotiation between the conflicting actors, agencies and interests in the area, and ensure sustainability for the local working-class communities by providing them with work opportunities in any new policy regime. The project is also focused on the development of institutional and financial strategies for regeneration of the industrial waterfront into a vibrant public space for locals and citizens.
Mumbai Bus Map Proposal
Making Everyday Objects
While local histories, neighbourhood relations and tactical negotiations create intimate webs of information exchange in the city, urban collective memory is also structured by publicly available representations of the city’s space. The concepts and practices of mapping connect the “soft” information of everyday spaces with the “hard” information of the city’s grids and corridors. Both literally — as a plan of a physical space — and figuratively — as a constructed image of a society or culture — mapping is one of the most direct representations and interventions possible in urban space.
What one maps, where one locates, how one names, are significant and subversive of existing images, ideas and representations. Maps both tell us where we are, where we can go, and how we can get there — linking the realities of space to the possiblities of movement, and offering new ways of understanding and widening our imagination of the city and region.
Mumbai can be clearly imagined through its railway corridors, but information on the bus system is largely elusive. This generates a perceptive amnesia of entire sections of the city which are not directly connected to the railway system. Whereas the north-south geographies of home and workplace dominate our imagination of movement in the city, the east-west geographies of inter and intra-neigbourhood exchange are marginalized. This lack of information on local and lateral transport allows the creation of distinct and separate enclaves not connected to the mass rapid transport system and left out of the public imagination of residents, commuters, visitors and tourists.
Our idea is to make a comprehensive transport map for Greater Mumbai, designed as an everyday object that can be inexpensively reproduced and widely circulated on a copyleft basis. This map can become the basis for future community information systems for neighbourhoods and regions in the city, particularly those not recognized by or connected to the suburban railway network, and subject to different spatial and developmental pressures.
The process of making the map will include:
I. Mapping the transport network — rail corridors, railway stations, bus routes, bus stops, rickshaw/ taxi stands
II. Mapping major public spaces on a city and neighbourhood scale
III. Delineating local precincts with distinctive histories. This will involve consultation with local historians, urban geographers and sociologists.
IV. Mapping major landmarks in the city. The choice of these will also involve dialogue with other actors and communities in the city.
Industrial Museum Collaboration
The Industrial Museum Collaboration seeks to address the crisis of civic imagination driven by two dramatic transformations in our contemporary urban landscapes — the deindustrialisation of manufacturing and production, and the dematerialisation of culture and information. These parallel transformations have replaced large-scale factories and organised urban working classes with dispersed networks of subcontracted and informal production in slums and hinterlands on the one hand; and on the other hand, they have replaced the space of the traditional museum, library and archive with virtual networks of communications, entertainment and commerce.
While these historic industrial and technological changes are common to cities across the world, in Mumbai their articulation in the public sphere remains deeply contested and polarised. In the twenty years since the Bombay Textile Strike inaugurated a post-industrial era of social and spatial restructuring — in which nearly a million factory workers lost their jobs in various industries — political and cultural responses to urban change are divided. They range from the celebratory rhetoric of the utopia of finance and services, styled on Singapore or Hong Kong, to the passionate protests of activists and community groups against the destruction of livelihoods and homes, in factory closures and slum demolitions. The new politics of space and work in post-industrial Mumbai has yet to be comprehensively documented, much less re-imagined, and the importance of a collaborative urbanism to this task is obvious.
In the Industrial Museum Collaboration, we propose a project to develop an Archive and Network, and organise an Exhibition, which can bring together various individual practitioners and groups into dialogue and action on these questions, in relation to the textile mill districts of the inner-city, also known as the Mumbai Mill Lands or Girangaon.
Suburban Caves Proposal
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region, despite its modernity, has been the location of important settlements going back to the Buddhist period. Some o these earlier settlement patterns have integrated seamlessly with the city over a period of time — while others have remained secluded and forgotten within the metropolitan environment. Many archaeological sites in the city, including ancient caves and medieval and colonial forts, have no physical strategies for their integration with the urban environments. Many of these sites, while physically cordoned off, have been encroached, while others are in a state of dire physical and environmental degradation. This project is conceived to investigate the possibilities of integrating these sites back within the urban fabric and the public imagination at large. Though some of these sites have been appropriated by nearby communities — such as Worli Fort, which is used as a gymnasium, or the Jogeshwari Caves, which is used as a temple — there has been no conscious attempt to integrate these sites within the community or the city at large, leading to their decay.
The project proposal takes up the case of three historical caves located within the city of Mumbai, which while being located in similar topographical conditions along sloped or heavily contoured sites, exhibit starkly different relationships with their surrounding urban environment and communities.
Mahakali Caves, Andheri
These Buddhist caves are located off the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli link Road and are surrounded by the city on one side and the Aarey Milk Colony which is a part of the Borivali National Park, on the other side. Though there is a bus depot in its vicinity, accessing the site becomes inconvenient due to an undefined entry, making these caves more secluded from the immediate context and the City. The extent of the caves and its fairground are clearly demarcated by a fence that circumscribes the entire site. On one edge the site is surrounded by slums and on the other edge the only access road is undefined with construction debris scattered along it. Presently, there is evidence of sparse usage of the caves by the local community for informal recreation, and the fairground has actively assumed a playground condition for the neighbouring slum children. Periodically the caves are visited by tourists and outsiders.
Jogeshwari Caves
This site has been recorded as the earliest Hindu cave temple in India (dating back to 520-550 AD. and in terms of total length the largest) . The caves are located off the Western Express Highway at Jogeshwari. In its present state it been it is surrounded by settlements on all sides located at 2 metres from the periphery. It is actively used as a temple precinct by the local community. They also use it as a part of their daily activity as a play space for children and a reading and resting space for the locals. The environmental state of these caves is precarious as the surrounding storm water and sewage find their way to the caves. Also there is a lot of garbage and construction debris in and around the caves.
Mandapeshwar Caves, Borivali
These caves are recorded as built around the same time as the jogeshwari caves and contained the largest Mandapa and a prominent Garbagriha. These caves were witness to a series of invasions by different rulers. They were converted into a church by the Portuguese. The church and its graveyard form one of the edges of the cave precincts. There are ruins of an old structure over the caves.The caves also have in their proximity other educational institutions such as St. Francis D’Assisi High School and Junior College, Technical Institute, Engineering College, School of Interior Design and Decoration. There are encroachments on the other side of the Borivali-Dahisar road. They have an open space towards the road which is actively used as a playground and a congregation space by the surrounding community. The project would thus document the historical evolution of the caves as well as the present condition of the caves with emphasis towards their structural and environmental conditions. The study will also focus towards understanding the nature of relationship, physical and social, of these precincts located within the city and the surrounding communities and their impact on these historic/archeological sites. The study would then propose ways of integrating these caves back within the city.