In Mumbai, urbz Charts a Participatory Future for “Homegrown Urbanism”

The Koliwada was the seed around which Dharavi grew. It’s existed for centuries, and in a way, both the village and the larger community predate Mumbai as we know it. At the same time, it’s a place deeply shaped by its colonial past, when industries and activities that were considered polluting or “unclean” were pushed out of the fortified city, which forced a lot of artisanal communities — like Chamar leather-workers — to relocate here. Dharavi has a long history as a refuge for historically marginalized communities.

The area was primarily marshlands, and much of Dharavi was built out organically on reclaimed land, with the community’s discarded waste and refuse eventually anchored by the mangrove roots growing around it, creating a solid base for construction — and building techniques still used to this day emerged from this landscape. Yet it’s still thought of as a “slum,” and one famously described as the largest in the world.

The government and the urban planning regulations formally categorized it as a slum until 2014. After years of community protest and activism, they finally removed the tag. But changing the perception is a different challenge.

It’s a challenge. Kareena and I both trained as architects, and we were both disillusioned by it — which I think is ultimately how both of us ended up at urbz. My background was actually working for the companies engaged in so-called “slum redevelopment.” It quickly became apparent to me that what we were building didn’t reflect community needs. For starters, the small apartments weren’t livable for the average Indian family of five. It falls under the umbrella of real estate development, rather than thinking of housing as a community need that exists as part of a social entity.

I was also let down with the limitations of architectural practice. When I did my master’s, I decided to focus on landscape architecture instead, which opened me up to the field of cultural geography and a broader way of understanding our built environments. We don’t use the word “slum”; we call it a homegrown neighbourhood. But Samidha’s perspective is really distinct. Her family is Koli, although from a different village — and her parents and grandparents experienced eviction. They were displaced from their home.

Well, it happened before I was born, when my mother was in her teens. But what I know is that it was a huge shift. We were a fishing community highly dependent on water, and it was a way of life that also necessitated access to boat storage and fishing equipment. In the off-season, the same spaces were then used for drying fish, as well as boat repair and maintenance. And these liminal spaces — the semi-public “verandas” between houses — were cultural spaces as well: They were sites of festivities and celebrations.

That all disappeared. When my family was moved into an apartment, there was an immediate space crunch, and a loss of cultural and economic livelihood. And you can trace that loss to the change of typology from a small hut to an apartment building. This happened to a lot of people. For example, some fishing communities moved into the distillation of alcohol — at the time considered a major taboo — which pushed them further into stigma and poverty, while networks of vernacular artisanal education also disappeared. But the Dharavi Koliwada is still here, and even though most people are no longer employed as fishermen (many now work in construction and building trades), the community connections remain.

To this day, that type of distinction between public and private space doesn’t really exist in Dharavi, and particularly in the Koliwada. People are getting haircuts in the street, cleaning rice, all sorts of activities that might otherwise be deemed to belong to the “private” realm. In many planned neighbourhoods, however, public life is largely limited to leisure — to recreation and maybe shopping.

It feels quite natural at this point, because we’ve been here for 15 years. The community is organized by a self-governing local body, the Koli Jamat Trust, and they’ve already come up with ideas for projects to improve local life. We’ve been working closely with the Koli Jamat to co-design and build small-scale individual building projects, like the redevelopment of the Koli Jamat Hall [a four-storey community hub combining offices for local leaders with a dedicated space for events, meetings and celebration, as well as ground-floor restaurants and shops]. Right now, one of the biggest priorities is to rethink the water sanitation network for the whole of the Koliwada — a long-standing initiative that started before we received support from Re:arc.

The government never provided public water infrastructure for the village, so people ended up doing it for themselves in an ad hoc way. Basically, they’d build their own pipelines and connect them to the public water main that runs closest to the village. It more or less worked for a while. Now, as the village grows in population and gets busier and demand for water increases, there are too many pipelines — some get barely a trickle. And wherever there’s a leakage, it increases the risk for contamination and threatens public health. So there’s a need to rethink the whole system. At the same time, installing a conventional public sanitation project would more or less entail demolishing the entire village.

This is the core of our mission at urbz. We see ourselves as bridging the gap between architecture and planning and community agency. And we try to be cognizant of that in everything we do. Fortunately, there are alternatives to a top-down way of doing things.

With the water sanitation project, for example, we’ve looked at case studies around the world — including in Brazil, Pakistan and Japan — implementing shallow water infrastructure in dense urban settings. There are particularly good precedents across Latin America, where infrastructure has been designed and engineered to fit into tight spaces — and where digging deep underground isn’t possible.

Across the Koliwada, we undertook a study of all the lanes to understand where the narrowest points are so we can plan out a new water system. We’re also working closely with the Koli Jamat to figure out phasing, implementation, and how we can bring the entire community on board. Of course, it’s a massive project, and one that we can’t undertake by ourselves. With the funding we’ve received from Re:arc, however, we’re committed to building a prototype and then looking at how it can be developed — and we’re supporting the Koli Jamat, who are in conversation with municipal authorities to get funding for the project.

Oftentimes, we are building on community priorities that already exist, so we listen and learn and work from there. We’re consciously not thinking about — or talking about — our work in a traditional planning context. There’s no “master plan,” because that imposes a top-down way of thinking. We work with the community to identify current needs and future needs. It’s development without a formal plan.

Our visual communication style is also very deliberate. The drawings that we produce of our projects don’t come from an architectural language of communication — we’re trying to remove those layers of abstraction and the sense of distance as a viewer. And our own team is very multidisciplinary. Our co-founders, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, didn’t study architecture, so we try not to operate within that kind of vocabulary. [The urbz team in Mumbai also includes Bharat Gangurde and Jai Bhadgaonkar.]

Sometimes, when we initiate a project, we find that we haven’t earned full trust. For example, when we proposed an improved fish market for the Koliwada — which responds to a need that exists in the community — we hadn’t yet done enough work with the Fisher Women’s Association to gain their trust. But then a need to create a dedicated study and co-working space for students emerged out of those conversations, so we’ve started working on that. There’s a dilapidated British colonial customs house that was in ruin, and they transferred ownership to the Koli Jamat. So we’re working on creating the new study space there.

Thanks to our Re:arc funding, we’re collaborating with local artisans to reintroduce vernacular architecture to the building. We’re working with Abbas Galwani, an artisan from the Dharavi Kumbharwada [which was traditionally a Gujarati potters’ village] to optimize traditional pot tiles — which are made as pots on a wheel and then cut in half — to fit the building. He’s hand-making about 15,000 new tiles.

The roof tiles on the building now were designed by the Portuguese when they colonized this part of the world, and then they were optimized by the British. They even call them Mangalore tiles, so people think they are local. But the pot tiles that we’re exploring now are a true local vernacular — and one that supports local artisans.

Absolutely. And in that sense, a lot of the best projects tend to “emerge” in response to how people live. Re:arc has been really good to work with in this respect, offering a lot of flexibility with their grant funding. In our conversations with community members, lighting for the Koliwada has emerged as another priority, and even though it wasn’t part of our initial pitch to Re:arc, it’s a project we’re fortunate to have support for now.

It’s something that community members have been suggesting to us. The lanes are so narrow and tightly packed, so the Koliwada is very dark. You end up with some alleys that are so overbuilt that it feels like an arcade. At the same time, there’s a lack of a distinct architectural identity for the neighbourhood, and a real desire to express a sense of place. Lighting is a way to do that.

We recently finished a pilot where we installed some solar-powered lights. And now, with the help of local electricians from the Koliwada and a group of NYU Abu Dhabi engineering students, we’re studying ways to place solar panels around the neighbourhood, which is a challenge because space is quite limited.

A remarkable thing about the project is how it was all installed and managed — and ultimately led — by community members. We just facilitated the technology, and people went around figuring out locations that need lights and working with us on how to install them. Things just need a spark. We did a lighting installation, and someone came up to us and said, “This is great. Can you do it in my lane?” And then they take us to their home and tell us about the problem.