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.

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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.

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.