Archive for the 'Community Housing' Category
Housing Typologies in Mumbai
DOWNLOAD “Housing Typologies in Mumbai” (PDF)
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.
Geographies of Resistance
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.