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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.

Housing has been a function of Mumbai’s changing landscapes. For the purposes of this study, seven types of landscapes are identified:

1. Agrarian Landscapes with Strategic Points for Trade and Control. Mumbai was a set of seven islands dotted with fishing villages, paddy fields and agricultural villages. Mumbai also had some small ancient ports around which mercantile villages developed. These villages were typically made up of small single family houses densely packed together. The economy was primarily agrarian with fishing and agriculture being the two predominant occupations. Mumbai also was strategically important along the western coast due to its ports. Hence various Indian and foreign rulers tried to have control over it. These rulers built forts and other military infrastructure in the agrarian landscapes. People lived in free standing single or double storied houses.

2. Landscapes of Trade Routes and  Market Places. Parts of Mumbai were established as strategic trading nodes since the 15th century. The colonial rulers strengthened Mumbai as a trading node by using the natural harbour at the south of the city. Large amounts of goods passed through the Mumbai harbour. Subsequently, the adjoining lands were developed into markets. Farmlands were used for real-estate development. The geographical limitation of the seven islands was overcome by integrating lands with large scale reclamations. Planning was done for encouraging Trade and Revenue collection and cartographic maps were prepared during this time to aid the collection. The Colonial Fort was developed at the south to house the rulers. Outside this fort a large town grew with densely packed housing stock and shops. The wadis of Mumbai developed here as set of buildings with shops in the front and houses behind and on higher floors. Land owners became land lords and rented houses in these wadis.

3. An Industrial City. The end of textile supply from America after the American Civil War forced the British to look for other places to manufacture textile. Textile industry was encouraged in India. A number of textile mills were set up in Mumbai during the second half of the 19th Century. At the same time train tracks were laid to move goods and military very quickly. By the turn of the century, Mumbai had already become one of the most important textile producing centres in the world. The focus was on developing the infrastructure for industries. Economy was now driven by the Mills of Mumbai. The landscape was characterised by mills, bridges, railway stations. It was here that one of the most famous housing types - the chawl came into existence. These were multi-tenanted buildings with shared utilities built by mill owners and other landowners for the working class in the city.

4. A Colonial Presidency Capital. With the national freedom movement gaining strength during the end of the 19th century, the colonial government was forced to get actively involved in governance issues. The Colonial government started planning the city as an imperial outpost. Organisations and Institutions like Municipal Corporations, Improvement Trusts, Public Transport Companies, Courts and Universities were set up. These institutions became responsible for planning and managing the city. The landscapes during the time were characterised by planned plotted developments with wide roads and public transport facilities. The apartment type was introduced in the city and started gaining prominence as a mass housing type. While the state became the most important agent in the delivery of land and housing, the landlord group proliferated by building rented apartments in the newly planned plots. While as a capital of a colonial presidency Mumbai received money from outside for its expenditure, the predominant economy of the city was based on Industries.

5. State Capital. After independence Bombay remained the regional capital. Industrial production still dominated the economy of the city. Its capital status also continued after the formation of states in the mid 60s. It became the capital of the Maharashtra State. Planning focused on Planning for equity and efficiency of the Socialist State where regulations of Urban Land Ceiling and Rent Control and instruments of Floor Space Index, Development Plan, Land use Zoning were framed. Also large service institutions like the Housing Board, Repair Board, Housing Authority, Industrial Corporation were created. The landscape was characterised by new industrial districts, town planning schemes, large mass housing colonies, Bungalows and apartments in suburban areas and some commercial districts. While Apartment became the predominant housing type, slums started growing. With the landlord community discouraged after the rent control act, the housing delivery was managed by state agencies and cooperative housing societies. The builder group was born during this time.

6. Overgrowing Metropolis. Discussions on slums became intense since the 70s. The high rate of migration into the city was blamed for this. High Population in the city became the central conceptual point to discuss urban issues. Institutions like the Metropolitan Authority were set up to discuss and organise growth outside the city boundaries. The Regional Plan was born in this context that created a plan for a new Central Business Districts and a satellite city. Slums, suburban developments, urban fringe sprawl started proliferating on account of immense demand for real estate. Site and services schemes, apartments and slum housing became the predominant type. State Agencies remained active in providing housing, but the builder and developer group became the most important agents in the housing delivery system.

7. Base for a Global Capital. The City transformed rapidly since the 90s after the state adopted liberalisation policies. Since the mid 80s, the industries of the city started dismantling.  The Economy of the City now rested on the magnanimous and ambiguous service industry that ranged from large Business Process Outsourcing Units to small entrepreneurs. The new geographies in the city are characterised by large Infrastructure Projects, Rehabilitations, Malls, Multiplexes, Luxury Townships, Redevelopments and Rehabilitations. Planning has diverted its strengths towards managing the Market with regulations for protecting heritage, providing additional FSI for redeveloping dilapidated Buildings and Slums, Transferring development rights, Redeveloping old industrial areas, encouraging private actors, donors and civil society organisations. Housing Types include Large Luxury Townships, High Rise Apartments, Slums, Rehabilitations of Slums and Dilapidated buildings, Apartments in Old Villages and Agrarian Lands and Fringe Townships. The Most important actors in the Housing delivery system include Builders/Developers, NGO-State-Donor-Builder Coalitions, Financial Institutions and Slum Lords.

For the purpose of this study, 21 house types are identified across these historic landscapes identified above.  While, these are more or less chronological categories, the last two (discussing slums and new housing) specifically focus on present experiences. These types include: 1. House in a Fishing village, 2. Single family houses in Agrarian villages, 3. Wadis from the Mercantile Economy, 4. House from a Market in the Mercantile Economy, 5. Chawls built by Private Initiatives, 6. Chawls built by Government agencies, 7. First Apartments in planned parts, 8. Mass Housing by state after Independence, 9. Houses in Plotted developments, 10. Private Apartments of 70s and 80s, 11. Public Sector Employee Housing, 12. Slum, 13. Slum Improvements and Resettlements of the 70s and 80s, 14. Site and Service Housing, 15. Slum Rehabilitations with Private Initiatives, 16. Rehabilitation for Infrastructure projects, 17. Housing in the Urban Fringes, 18. Townships in Suburban areas, 19. Apartments in old agrarian lands, 20. Apartments in old villages, 21. Dilapidated Building Redevelopments.

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.

For the past several years, members of CRIT have been involved in intensive field studies of inner-city neighbourhoods, industrial landscapes, suburban and peripheral communities, informal settlements, and new enterprises and organisations in contemporary Mumbai. Our varied projects have demonstrated, at various levels, the conceptual vacuum in understanding the practices through which the city is inhabited. Most studies of cities in India have either been narrowly empirical, with a bias towards problem-solving, or they have been overly generalised into universal categories of “colonial”, “industrial” or “global” cities (with “pre-” or “post-” affixed as appropriate). Descriptions of Mumbai display astonishing numbers and statistics to represent urban conditions as “crises” requiring urgent intervention — the problem of housing, the crisis of over congestion, the collapse of infrastructure, etc. The sensational use of numbers to describe complex conditions has similarly been reflected in the abstract use of unitary concepts by academics such as “functional urban region”, “mosaic of culture”, “melting pot of communities”, “metaphor of modernity”, “network of interest”, “contested terrain”, “native metropolis”, and “global city”.

While these concepts are inadequate for capturing changed conditions, they become dangerous in formulations such as “world class city”, “Slumbay”, “encroached public spaces”, “deteriorating environment”, “make Mumbai Shanghai”, “mee Mumbaikar” etc. Such concepts guide interventions which respond to generalised conditions, repressing the various ways of understanding and inhabiting the urban environment. Further, these empiricisms and generalisations fall flat in complex conditions of multiple tenancies, interstitial spaces, mixed land uses, informal and illegal commerce, and the tactical negotiations of the street, which characterise the contemporary Indian metropolis. In these urban conditions, Systems, Organisations, and Space are rendered amorphous, and accounts of the global city that assimilate historical difference into a universal narrative, are disrupted. We require a fresh theoretical language to analyse and critique the concepts, practices and formations of the emerging urbanism in India.

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.

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.