The fading genre of science-fiction has served the twentieth century imagination well. For many exhilarating decades, different planets have been surrogate social and political possibilities and journeys into outer space have been as much about travels through alternative historical trajectories as anything else.
Loyalists won’t allow the genre to vanish as yet. In the twenty-first century, it has moved through even more adventurous worlds, with the Internet and digital technology becoming an integral part of every-day reality.
An Airoots story – ‘The Unknown Firewalls’ – appears next month in a collection: ‘Shock-wave and other Cyber stories’ (Puffin - Penguin India). It simultaneously takes you on a journey through the streets of Shimokatzawa and Dharavi - a creative response to the digitally compressed world we live in.
Since the Airoots methodology is constantly evolving, this act of creative writing helped re-think arguments about homes, cities, urban spaces and (of course) Dharavi.
The notion of the ‘Tool-House’ – a landscape version of the ‘cyborg’ - appeared in an argument about urban landscapes.
It was a response to a simple question - when is a house not just a house?
When every wall, nook and corner becomes an extension of the tools of the trade of its inhabitant. When the furnace and the cooking hearth exchange roles and when sleeping competes with warehouse space. A cluster of tool-houses makes for a thriving workshop-neighbourhood and its public spaces emerge as a dynamic by-product of such an auto-organized habitat.
This explains why a walk through Dharavi - the most concentrated nest of tool-houses possible - is also an imaginative walk through a moment in the industrial revolution when it was still an infant. When it had still not drawn the rules of how we should live, work and sleep. When it had still not marked itself off as the moment of taking humanity into the great urban age and when it still produced fantastic and flexible narratives about the future of humanity.
The industrial revolution and urban transformation have always been discontinuous and fragmentary. The echoes of the moments of its transition repeatedly re-appear everywhere. Just look out for the presence of the tool-house - more real and ubiquitous than the much-hyped robot.
The reason why urban landscapes formed by tool-houses are so crucial for urbanists is that it makes explicit the relationship between production, livelihood and spaces that expresses the lives of more than half of humanity. To reduce these spaces to slums reveals a terrible lack of imagination and aborts the evolution of urban forms in complex ways. To see them for what they are – maybe through the lens of a sci-fi possibility - is to do real justice to the multiplicty of urban forms.
Dharavi and Tokyo from this perspective may well exchange their personas in unexpected ways. As we have argued elsewhere in the blog – Tokyo could well become the grand future of slum worlds and Dharavi – if allowed to flourish in a manner true to its history – could well become the first ‘Tool-House City’ – as otherworldly and real as a sci-fi fantasy.
We explore this theme – among many others - in our forthcoming talks this week.
Other questions:
What does a grid do to a city?
How does it constrain and liberate?
Does it always have to be explicit?
What are the fictional grids that organize Dharavi and Tokyo? Are they very different from the explicit grid of Manhattan?
What is density?
When do solutions to density become purely fictive devices?
Is the low-rise high-density, high –rise, low density equation a useful
way of exposing the fictions that lie behind the idea of contemporary
urban issues?
via airoots
