Artist Natalia Rodriguez along with URBZ’s Shyam Kanle and the kids of the Dharavi Shelter have produced this photo novel, which is the first of a series. The story was entirely invented by the kids. This fiction says as much about their reality as about their creativity .

In this series, the kids speak about their neighbourhood and lives. They tell us how Dharavi is an ancient place that is surprisingly able to rethink and transform itself again and again

Giving a voice to the kids is urgent and inevitable. Whether it is to talk about communal tension, the arbitrariness of the state or the daily struggles of Mumbaikars. They are not only our future, but also our bright present!

Toronto born band LAL Forest will be playing at the Ambedkar Hall, on MG Road, Dharavi, Mumbai this evening at 7PM. All welcome! For directions see the map.

Chapel Street, Bandra

Walking through the streets of Mumbai is an intense experience with every excursion being an adventure of its own.

For most people in the city, walking is a banal activity, something they hardly think twice about. However, during the last one month with URBZ, taking a walk through various neighbourhoods in the city has made me aware of its many unexpected dimensions.

In the city where I come from – that is Delhi – I’ve hardly ever walked. A pedestrian is considered to be a trifling being. Moreover, public space in general is highly gendered and often a long sojourn from your house to the neighbourhood deli would make you understand the power hierarchies much faster than a two hour class discussing radical feminism.

Thus, often I could not help but feel like a stranger in my own city. What kind of cities are we making? Are big cities killing the pedestrians? How public is “public” space really?

When I read Michel de Certeau’s “The practice of Everyday Life”; I could not help but be riveted by his idea of the city and what makes a city, or what I would like to call the city-fabric. According to him, the practice of walking is one of the most elementary forms of experiencing the city and something, which resonates in my mind every day.

Veronica Street, Bandra

In Mumbai, I walk daily from Sion Circle to the URBZ office in the Transit Camp. I walk in the quiet streets of Bandra where I live, I walk in the parallel universe of Dharavi with narrow streets but warm people, I walk in rush hour at the Dadar station and I also walk along the dimly lit Marine Drive at night.

Once in Bandra, wandering through the narrow lanes which melted into each other, I found myself in Chapel Street. It was a special visual experience to absorb that space in its entirety and at once I heard the city speaking to me and also to many others simultaneously.

This street- the most basic element in urban sociology- was at once static and full of life. It represented the everyday and the spectacular at the same time. I was with my colleague Francesco, and, our search for old Portuguese bungalows in Bandra led us to discover many other interesting aspects about the city. It was like having a conversation with the city-spaces and the age-old heritage- which ultimately lead me to read the “real city”; accessible only to the pedestrian and one which cannot be found in concrete apartments or high rises. It exists in all its ethnographic beauty on the street.

And, that’s when I also realised how spaces are an affect. Reading spaces, streets, neighbourhoods-be it by walking or any other such fundamental impulse – makes you re-discover the larger relationship that exists between the social and the purely geographical.

On another assignment with Shyam, who also works at URBZ, I walked into the labyrinth called Dharavi; knowing little what was to come. We started from our office in the Transit Camp and within the next two hours wehad reached Mahim and crossed almost every street that lay between. The rich texture of the neighbourhoods that we saw, the people we met and the houses we were invited in, created an immediate relationship with the physical spaces we explored that day.

Mary from Dharavi

Amongst the twenty odd people we interviewed that day, we met Mary. She makes chai just around the corner from the URBZ office. I did not even know of her existence during the last two months of my working. Mary makes chai all day long in her little shop which she shares with another lady, Devi. For both of them, the street is their office, home and playground all at once.

The small streets in the big city are one of the most important features of Mumbai’s fabric. And, somewhere down the line- the everyday practice of walking and this raw city-fabric lead you to each other. On both the above mentioned occasions, in some odd way; it seemed like I strengthened my relationship with the city.

I wonder what Michel de Certeau would have said had he walked the streets of Dharavi! More on that in a subsequent post….

We have for long opposed the reality of the city to that of the village. However, my observations in Dharavi, a large unplanned neighbourhood in the centre of Mumbai, which is the most populated city in the world, tell me that they have more in common than is commonly acknowledged. This article describes the curious similarities between the small Italian village I come from and Dharavi.

The village in question is Buscoldo, in the north of Italy close to Mantova. The population is roughly 2500, while the population of Dharavi is estimated at 700,000. In spite of these stark differences in number, the two places share common trajectories of incremental development and organizational patterns.

Moreover, Dharavi is itself a collection of smaller neighbourhoods, which typically fiercely resist being amalgamated into each other.

The oldest part of Dharavi, Koliwada, was founded by a tribal fishing community, the Kolis. They settled there before the Portuguese and British arrived in Mumbai. My village is traditionally connected with agriculture. Historically, it was also a strategic military base.

In Dharavi, people notoriously created their habitat without any specific help or planning from the government. They used their know how to develop the place in response to their needs. This appears clearly when you walk through the neighborhood. Houses are really close to each other, the street is a market place and space for social interactions. Houses typically have a shop or workshop at the ground floor and the neighbourhood feels extremely dense in terms of structures and population.

In my village, we can also observe unplanned areas with the same features where the same kind of dynamics take place every day, or at least on specific days of the week. Unfortunately this reality is dying because of globalization forces (big AC supermarkets) that cuts-off local activities. So the risk, we are going to face, is that any village will become just a dormitory, where the work space and the living space will be totally split and the community and social relations will be cancelled.

But if we stop our sight on one of these houses which forms the oldest part of my village, we can notice that some of them are still “tool-houses”, even if they do not hold the same importance as before. According to URBZ (Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava), the“tool-house” is a place where the actions of living and working are not neatly divided, where every single nook and corner becomes an extension of the trade of its inhabitants.

Tool-house in Buscoldo, with the shop in front and living space in the back.

This kind of bottom-up development has been the core of the economic Italian system from 50 years ago, but now is going to disappear in this post-industrial-crisis era. In Dharavi this is not happening, so should we imagine that this kind of vernacular model will take place again and will be able to generate a new development in European society?

POPULATION DENSITY

Unfortunately the population density in my village is not reflected anymore in the density of homes, because the economic system and the needs of society needs have changed. Also if we consider what happened in Dharavi, we can notice that the local economy is still strong.  Besides, the community still remains important. This is unlike what is happening in my village, where this kind of local and “self-supported” economy is losing is strength and in some ways this impacts the sense of community as well.

MILL IN-FORMATION

In my village there was a big mill (photo on the right), which produced flour from grain and maize. It was a big structure, which stopped production during the 80s. The building remained empty for almost 20 years. It was in the beginning of 2000 that it was transformed into an apartment building block. Instead of demolishing this old structure the local contractor decided to keep it safe and re-use it in a different way. This was a small gesture of generating a new shape by an incremental-improvement process. Something that characterizes Dharavi a lot, since it is a neighborhood constantly in-formation, where every family creates and evolves their own house, bit by bit.

Finally it is important to think about the process of urbanization itself that connects Dharavi to my village. In both cases there were not too many regulations and laws and rules, historically that interfered with the ability of Buscoldo or other Italian towns to reinvent and reproduce themselves. In fact, I think this is the main feature which combines these two apparently very different realities. Though of course today this ability to reinvent our town or villages is strictly constrained by urban planning rules.

Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove speak at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy on December 1st at 3PM. Followed by presentations by URBZ fellows and Politecnico graduates Alberto Bottero, Francesco Strocchio, Serena Alcamo, Daniela Bosco, Valeria Federighi, Miriam Bodino, Fabio Colucci.

Click here to enlarge the poster.

(Art by Alberto Bottero and Francesco Strocchio)