About 60 fourth year architecture students from Sir J.J. College of Architecture participated in the Affordable Housing workshop.

The 3-day long affordable housing workshop was conducted at the J.J. College of Architecture, Mumbai, on January 23^rd, 24^th and 25^th, 2012. It was a follow- up from 6 weeks of 9 groups of students documenting the work and processes of a contractor’s building methodology and construction techniques. This included a timeline tracking the life of the structures studied and activities that revolve around them. The sites they frequented were sprinkled all over the city – Shivaji Nagar, Nerul, Vashi, Bhandup, Charkop and Dharavi. The 4^th year students participating in the workshop, along with being guided by their teachers Profs. Mustansir Dalvi and Yashwant Pitkar and Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, had an array of resource people, each with their specific set of specializations, to help them out with different aspects of the design. This design was basically an insertion or mutation within the existing typology which was to emerge/evolve during the course of the workshop, through exchange of information with the resource people. These were Sameep Padora, Founder of  sP+a, Mumbai; Marco Ferrario, co-founder of MicroHome Solutions, New Delhi; Poonam Mulchandani, independent architect, Auroville; Alexis de Dulca, head of Affordable Housing at Lafarge, Chennai; Rajeev Kathpalia from the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, Ahmedabad; Thomas Demschner, senior structural engineer at Lafarge, Lyon and Ritu Mohanty, urban designer at Edifice, Mumbai.

Day 1 was a day of orientation and introduction. Prof. Dalvi brought the freshly arrived resource people  up to date with the events of the weeks gone by. He spoke about the seminar and workshop having which covered issues of housing in the city in a counter-intuitive manner unusual for the design curriculum in place. It stood beyond the realm of real estate and affordable housing envisioned by the state. Since most of this was built directly or indirectly by the users themselves, it was worth recognizing as an alternative explored in this studio. He proceeded with explaining the methodology adopted for the studio and its objective so far. This included re-looking at the houses documented and proposing changes to the contractors, who would be invited on the final day. These could be functional, aesthetic, procedural and much more and would be produced on the basis of the information and knowledge absorbed from the interactions with the contractor and the subsequent lessons inferred from the site visits added to the inputs from the resource people. (Photo: Sameep Padora of sP+a with students during the workshop).

Rahul and Matias spoke about the kind of approach they had tried to inculcate right through the workshop. According to them, practice and the production of knowledge is connected. But there exists a hierarchy in knowledge production. The point is to subvert this hierarchy and invert the notions regarding who really is the expert. Therefore, the students would absorb  knowledge from the contractors, in turn passing on this new acquisition to the resource people who would reflect ideas from these existing circumstances. They spoke about how the sites in question could not so easily be described as’ slums’. Urban practitioners and planners cannot work with certain terms and this was one of them. Thus, new terminology needs to be generated to define this phenomenon. Just like hundreds of different typologies cannot merely be grouped into being ‘suburban’. This understanding led to their insistence that students reconstruct existing narratives of these sites and look at them in a dynamic way-not just as they currently exist, not just purely as structures, but also the process through which they are built, on the basis of a timeline. The ‘field’ in fact, becomes the centre of the whole pedagogical process. To engage, instead of to observe is necessary. The space informs and the student listens and in the future, shares. This entire study would most importantly, involve forging a deep sense of connection with the place and the contractor. This relationship would be strengthened through mutual sharing where one would constantly learn from the other. Also, the student would try and address where the entry point for an architect would be in this situation. The role of the student would also be to take a lead in interactions with the resource people and sustain a dialogue. This would be an important subversion which would eventually dissolve the expert-non expert dynamics. Then the output will not remain purely academic and will be one that can be executed successfully on site..

The resource persons then took turns to introduce themselves and their work so the students could get an idea of what kind of questions they could bombard each one with.  The students then proceeded to explain, a group at a time, the sites, the documentation, introduce the contractors they had collaborated with, elaborate on the timeline, investigate into structure, materiality and costs with diagrams, technical drawings and physical models. The discussions were punctuated with small question and answer sessions till everyone was familiar with each site, the houses, the families, the contractors and the workers involved. Here are a few panels on display.

Marco Ferrario of Micro Homes Solutions (New Delhi) with some of the students.

Rajeev Kathpalia of the Vastu Shipla Foundation in Ahmadabad looking at students’ project.

After a short break the entire assemblage moved to the studio space where one on one interaction ensued and ideas were thrown back and forth. These were discussions about what could now be contributed by students for a better design once the process and structure was analyzed more deeply. To be kept in mind at all times was the context, the practicality and the ability to communicate these ideas to the contractor at the end of the workshop. This was carried over to the next day.

Day 2 had more resource people joining in as the exchange continued and students started generating models and drawings for their insertions while consulting the relevant sources of information. There was a small lecture by Alexis, Thomas and Jean-Michel on the efficient use of ready-mix concrete while Poonam provided an alternative viewpoint involving use of locally available material and appropriate technologies with low environmental impact. The students spent the beginning of the day absorbing from as many people as possible and the rest of it, processing this new-found data and applying to their respective subjects.

JURY: Contractor Chand Bhai responding to the students’ proposals.

Contractor Pankaj Gupta discussing construction techniques with students.

Day 3 was the final day when all the discussions of the previous days culminated into a set of breakthroughs on each group’s desk. This meant last minute consultations to allow for clear articulation because the day was to end at a special moment, when the contractors viewed the work of the students and critiqued their design suggestions. Pankaj Gupta, Chand bhai and Anwar ji arrived right on time and were taken around by the enthusiastic students. They looked slightly amused at the painstakingly detailed documentation of their self built houses and site, as well as that of the other contractors. One by one each project was discussed, though the focus was on the student’s new input. The contractors carefully listened and then countered the arguments with reasons why these would or would not work on site, taking all aspects of the existing situation into consideration. There followed a vibrant exchange with inserts and rebuttals from all the actors- the students, the contractors and the resource persons which continued well into the evening. Design suggestions varied from changes in materials to consistency to light, ventilation and circulation. Some were well received and some debated, eventually leading to everyone in the room having participated, reacted and resolved the issue in some capacity or the other.

Great article by Sonia Faleiro in the New York Times India Ink blog, about the work Pankaj Gupta does in Shivaji Nagar, Deonar, Mumbai.

Like Mumbai, the city where he lives, Pankaj Gupta’s success has been incremental.

Mr. Gupta started working at the age of 13, making paper bags out of old newspapers that he’d sell from house to house in his hometown of Saadpur in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He graduated to running a tea stall before leaving for Mumbai at the age of 14. He wanted to lift himself out of poverty.

Mr. Gupta is now a mustached 30-year-old with a hint of a belly. He dresses modestly considering that he’s a successful building contractor, and owns three houses and two shops.

I heard about him shortly after I arrived in Mumbai from San Francisco for a research project. I‘d wanted to meet migrants who’d found success in the city. I was particularly interested in those who recognized the role the city had played in their success and were, in different ways, repaying the city by changing it.

Rahul Srivastava, a co-founder of URBZ, an organization that researches the development of cities around the world, told me Mr. Gupta is positively changing the lives of families that live in Shivaji Nagar, a vast suburban neighborhood best known for its proximity to a government slaughterhouse.

In less than four years, Mr. Gupta has built more than 200 houses and repaired countless others.

Mumbai is home to an estimated 18 million people. Nearly every vacant piece of land from the pavements to the traffic islands is, at night, occupied by sleeping bodies. Before moving to Shivaji Nagar, many of the people who now live there suffered a similarly precarious life. They had occupied government land that was later claimed for construction projects such as railway tracks. In exchange for moving, each family was given access to a 10-foot by 15-foot plot in Shivaji Nagar.

Some resettlement colonies never become pleasant places. But Shivaji Nagar bustles with life and potential. Small businesses sell everything from shoes to motor parts. Those that cannot own a business, work for others, often at the slaughterhouse. One of Mr. Gupta’s clients belongs to a caste that has traditionally grazed animals for a living. The man offloads hundreds of goats from trucks and herds them toward the slaughterhouse for 150 rupees (about $3) a day. Doing this over many years, he has saved 150,000 rupees. Of the many contractors in Shivaji Nagar, it was Mr. Gupta he entrusted with building what he knows will be his most precious possession: his first home.

The impact of Mr Gupta’s life experience is clear in his work.

After moving to Mumbai, he started working for his uncle, a shopkeeper. A couple of years later, he was forced to leave following a trivial argument. He was 16, and the only job he could find was carrying bricks at a construction site. “There’s nothing my workmen do that I haven’t done,” he says. “So I know the limitations, but also the possibilities of human labor.”

Those experiences lead him to become a contractor – of a particular sort.

Pankaj with workers at one of his sites in Shivaji Nagar.

In Shivaji Nagar, neither lot size nor budget merits an architect. Design is left largely to the ingenuity of the contractor.

Unusually for Mumbai, Mr. Gupta favors uniformity. He’s currently building three adjoining houses and has managed to persuade their owners to make them aesthetically similar. He buys locally produced material, and hires local workers. He says, “They understand the client’s needs, because their needs are the same.” Since he was keen to use new material in his work, URBZ introduced him to a provider of ready-mix concrete. Mr. Gupta is now one of a handful of contractors in Shivaji Nagar to use it.

Most importantly, because his clients cannot afford to live elsewhere for too long, he has to work swiftly. On average, Mr. Gupta builds a house in just two months.

He says falling out with his uncle influenced how he works. “If you want to work,” he says, “Build, don’t break relationships.” When a mosque was built locally and the contract went to someone else, Mr. Gupta still asked to provide some of the material. He did this at no profit. “I’m a Hindu,” he says, “but I wanted my hand in that mosque, because it is place of God.” After a pause he adds: “And consider how many people enter a mosque every day. If 10 people every day see my work, at least one will think of me when he needs something made.”

But the most important way Mr. Gupta is changing Shivaji Nagar is by working ethically.

Shivaji Nagar is constantly being improved upon. As incomes rise, “kachcha” houses, which are made of mud, are converted into “pucca” houses, those made of stone or brick, and “pucca” houses upgraded with fresh paintwork and tiled floors. Demand for construction is huge. Although competition is brisk and the contractors many, Mr. Gupta is never short of work because his clients recommend him to their friends and family.

In Mumbai, many contractors have been known to leave work unfinished or, as hidden expenses emerge, to raise prices as they go along. Not so Mr. Gupta.

Matias Sendoa Echanove, another co-founder of URBZ, describes Mr. Gupta’s work as “exemplary.” He is a man who, when he’s paid to build a house, does just that.

That may not seem like much — to do the job one is paid for — but for the residents of Shivaji Nagar it means the world.

And this is how the boy who was built by the city of Mumbai, is now a man helping to build it.

Sonia Faleiro’s “Beautiful Thing” is a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer and Economist Book of the Year. She’ll be speaking at the Goa Arts and Literary Festival on Dec. 19 and 21.

The centre itself shows how such cities do not have to be oases in a desert or isolated worlds. Through new kinds of research suggestions it feeds back ideas and technologies that can be integrated into local markets and become part of the regular technologies. This is of course no easy task. It is one thing to evolve ideas and solutions in a controlled condition and quite another to integrate it in an economy and world of practice that work at a different scale. The research process is often long  and expensive and as a result inventors like Tency are interested in collaborations with larger groups that can help them with both research and application. However, in this process the question of integrating these innovative technologies to the contexts in which a majority of the people already live gets defeated. They end up being used only in masterplan type situations where they can be integrated to the project from the outset. Not bad but not enough.

Earth-brick house in Auroville

Fountain/water purifying system

We got into an interesting conversation with Tency and our Alexis of Lafarge’s Affordable Housing unit regarding a local water purifying system that creates a bonsai tornado effect in sewage water and uses the chemical reaction as a basis for exorcising smell and purifying the water to a degree that in can be used successfully for non-potable uses. This experimental system has already been picked up by large housing projects in Bangalore. Our interest was seeing if this technology can help conserve and recycle sewage water in water-scarce neighbourhoods that have been incrementally built. It would be mandatory for the process to be financially viable at a local level in these neighbourhoods. Given the government’s antagonistic stance towards self-built neighbourhoods, the market seems to be the only viable entry point. Tency felt that it would well be worth a try and looks forward to doing a joint project.

Our second stop at CSR was at another founder member of Auroville, Satprem Maini of the Auroville Earth Institute. Satprem is a soft-spoken French architect dedicated to the magic of mud. He too warmed up to the possibilities of making mud-based architectural solutions more commercially viable by working with large companies as long as they promoted this substance-use. Our own concern tends towards mixed-media – to borrow a term from artistic endeavours – but we are genuinely enthusiastic of a range of materials, mud too, which has huge advantages in terms of weather and cost. What we came across was this observation by these stalwarts of mud-use; in India the cultural resistance to mud, reflective of low-status, is extremely strong. At the end of the day, it will be up to residents and contractors in self-built neighbourhoods to decide what works best for them. The answer is likely to be a remix of whatever materials are locally available. Improving the distribution of high-quality and sustainable materials is a way to positively influence local development without disturbing existing dynamics.

“Radical Incremental”: From Perugia to Dharavi

Red-Eye Workshop, Saturday June 4^th, 2010, 9PM to 9AM
@ Festarch, Perugia, Italy

Objectives: The workshop invites artists, architects and designers for a creative exploration of incremental urban development in radically different contexts. It aims at altering the discourse on places. By encouraging a play of the familiar and the fantastic, it is simultaneously sensitive and irreverent to contexts. It promotes incremental building practices, while allowing genuinely creative and free interventions, unburdened by limited speculative notions of the future and modern planning ideology.

Workshop participants will mashup images of Perugia and other cities together with images of Dharavi using their own laptops and image editing software. Images of Dharavi will be provided. Participants are required to bring images of their own cities and neighbourhoods. The focus is on streetscapes and architecture but people and objects can also be included.

Rational: The Mashup workshop uncovers the common hidden dynamics at work in radically different urban contexts. By merging together streetscapes and architectures from Mumbai, Perugia and beyond, the workshop rehabilitates neighbourhoods whose urban forms are typically misunderstood and mistreated by urban practitioners, such as Dharavi, a large unplanned and self-developed settlement in the heart of Mumbai.

The history of incremental development connects urban contexts that everything else seems to set apart. Who would imagine that neighbourhoods in Japan or Italy could be compared to those in Mumbai? The incremental growth of cities is the default form of urban development all over the world, especially when there is no grand master plan imposed. Some of the most glorified cities and neighbourhoods have emerged from this process. Yet, it is dismissed in cities like Mumbai where the urban development is dominated by speculative interests and narratives of a world-class and master-planned city.

Exhibition: A selection of the mashed-up images will be exhibited at the festival on Sunday 5th and then uploaded on the Abitare and urbz.net websites.

Registration: Participants should apply before June 1st. To register send a short bio and a brief explanation of why you are interested in participating in the workshop via the contact page. Participants should bring their own laptops. Attendance is limited to 25 participants.

We spent most of last week in Ahmedabad, the dynamic capital of Gujarat, which is developing just as fast as any other major Indian city today. In spite of the wide availability of land, real estate prices are shooting up in most parts due to the speculative bubble that is currently affecting India and boosting its economy.

Alexis de Ducla, a 28 year old affordable housing enthusiast who currently heads a special research project at Lafarge, a large cement company invited us to meet Bijal Bhatt, who heads the Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) –the housing and planning wing of SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association). MHT wants to start producing affordable housing for its members. This is a first for the organization, which has been focusing mostly on slum upgrading and advocacy till now. They have asked us offer recommendations that could help them achieve their objectives.

We visited a few social entrepreneurs and developers in Ahmedabad, including the up and coming DBS (Affordable Housing Strategy), a start up that is currently developing a 1400 flat housing project in south-east Ahmedabad. Flats are 22 sq.m to 62 sq.m and sell from INR 3.29 lakhs to 8.25 lakhs ($7,400 to $18,400), which is well below the market rate. For this project they have collaborated with SAATH an non-profit organization who’s goal is to create inclusive cities.

We interacted with people involved in various parts of the affordable housing production chain, including end users. The buyers we met were all looking forward to moving to a new house and neighbourhood, which would give them with better social status. A few of them mentioned that they were doing it for the children who were growing up and needed a better environment.

Affordable housing construction site in south-east Ahmedabad.

Many said that trust in the developer was an important factor in their choice. They started paying for the apartment years before the completion of the project and based their choice on the plans and brochures they were shown. Most wanted a ground floor apartment so they could park their vehicle in front and also open a small shop.

The developers we talked to said that the demand is so strong that it was hard for them to keep a cap on profits. To reserve a flat, buyers first have to deposit money on a bank account and apply for a loan. Rather than the total price of the flat, many affordable housing buyers are looking for loans with smaller EMI (Equated Monthly Installments), of less than INR 10,000 a month, which they feel they can repay, even if that means paying for the flat a few times over.

While some affordable housing developers have a clear social agenda, it is not so easy to help the poorest entirely through market mechanisms. The cap on profits, even at 20% or 10% doesn’t guarantee the fulfillment of the social objective. In some cases it simply amounts to sharing the profit with the buyer. That’s seems like a good thing for the buyer, but it could also drag the market price down artificially, forcing other builders to lower construction cost (and compromise even more on quality) to retain their existing profit margins.

Moreover, buyers of affordable housing are not always those for whom the product is intended. A builder reported that Gujarati friends from Canada and the US wanted to buy 100 affordable flats as an investment. Even with a strict screening of the buyers and provisions forbidding them from selling for 5 to 10 years, many flats end up being sold anyways. A lot of the housing market in India is underground and unaudited. It is the biggest money making and money laundering system in the country.

If affordable housing is so fashionable these days, it is not so much because it serves the needs of millions of poor people. It is rather because the market for middle-class and upper-middle housing is quickly saturating and overheating. Tens of thousands of upper-end flats are going unsold in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands more are empty, owned by distant investors who have no intention of renting it to anybody. Many investors prefer to buy (or better build) and sell fast, before their property deteriorates. Unused flats have a higher exchange value because they are more fluid on the market. Affordable housing is indeed often turning into affordable real estate investment.

The saddest part of the story is the construction of countless cheap buildings all over the country that are not built to last. They quickly deteriorate and become costly to maintain. The developer is out of the building as soon as all the flats are sold and the responsibility for maintenance and repairs falls on all flat owners.

Affordable housing builders are betting on two things: fast turnover and the scaling up of their operation. This is why they are ready to lower their profit margin. But even then we heard buyers complain that the price of the same flat was always changing in response to the demand. This produces a highly unstable and risky market that is disproportionately based on the exchange value of housing, rather than on its use value. The result is a housing stock of extremely poor quality, which cannot really be said to contribute to the betterment of society.

A possible way out of this dangerous dynamic is to re-conceptualize the house as a process, rather than as a product. We have observed in Dharavi and many other habitats that were not planned nor developed by professional real estate developers, that a house is never just a house. It is also a tool for revenue generation, whether it is through renting, production or commercial activity. Moreover a house is never quite finished. It is always improving and being adapted to new needs. This cannot happen in mass housing. A large building can never improve over time.

The economy of construction itself is important. When a resident of Dharavi needs to fix his water pipes, he goes to a local contractor who has knowledge of the water system. If he needs a new roof, he asks a mason from his community, whom he trusts. The money invested stays in the neighbourhood. The proximity with contractors allows the incremental development of entire neighbourhoods. Building an affordable house is a process that combines economic development and finance with construction in such a way that they cannot be dealt with in isolation of each other.

The pot of gold at the bottom of the pyramid certainly lies in a new understanding of how finance and architecture can be combined. This however, will not solve the real problem of so many social entrepreneurs. There will always be a hard line below which the market cannot reach, these are the most needy (and perhaps numerous) people all around the world. Rather than trying to push the market down to impossible levels to try and reach to the poorest while satisfying the social imperative of social entrepreneurship, it may be time to think about value generation from a totally different perspective. And this thinking can only emerge from the ground-up.

More photos of Ahmedabad here.