Khushboo chawl, Khotachiwadi

We recently organized a week-long studio on Khotachiwadi, a heritage precinct in Girgaum, Mumbai, with students from the School of Habitat Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). This was part of a course taught by URBZ members Rahul and Matias on the politics of urban space. The studio took place at Studio X near CST, with fieldwork in Khotachiwadi every day. In Khotachiwadi we often met at James Ferreira’s house who generously hosted us.

The studio focused on the chawls of Khotachiwadi. While Khotachiwadi is well known for its Konkan-Portuguese-style bungalows, its chawls and their residents have often been left out of the picture. This is a shame because, as most visitors and residents acknowledge, the diversity of habitats, architectures and cultures is one of the most interesting aspects of this much loved neighbourhood.

TISS-SoHS students brainstorming at Studio X

Throughout the studio, we discussed the history and culture of Khotachiwadi, the meaning of heritage in a rapidly changing city, the importance of having diverse habitats, rent control and how it allowed people across classes to stay in places like Khotachiwadi. We talked about architectural styles and urban typologies and the role of local economic activities in preserving neighbourhood life. We discussed mixed-use patterns in old neighborhoods of Mumbai and how urban plans and zoning codes are typically based on segregating functions. We also talked about urban villages, political identity, East Indians and their origins, the role of the Shiv Sena in local politics and a few other things.

The students visited the chawls, interviewed residents and published their texts and photos on http://khotachiwadi.urbz.net. They asked residents about their personal histories and stories and their current situation; the way they perceive the possibility of edevelopment; their relationship with bungalow residents; their aspirations; the possibility of envisioning a common future with other residents of Khotachiwadi belonging to different castes and histories.

Residents of Khotachiwadi celebrate the Diwali in front of the 150 years old Khanderao chawl. The Diwali Sammelan festival was started over 75 years ago by Mangesh Rane ji who is the oldest resident of Khotachiwadi.

Chawls are a very typical architectural typology in Mumbai, dating from the city’s industrial days, derived from the structure of army barracks, evolving into residential sites for industrial workers and finally being reshaped in use by the in-coming families of migrant workers to eventually become bustling middle-class neighbourhoods The chawls can be anything between 1 to 5 stories high and are typically organized around a large veranda connecting single rooms, with the whole floor sharing a common bathroom. Many of them have been converted or destroyed in the past decade or so. Some of the chawls of Khotachiwadi are more than 150 years old, a few families have roots there going back more than four generations and some have individual toilets in each home.

The neighbourhood of Girgaum, to which Khotachiwadi belongs, is well known for its historical chawls. Thanks to the Maharashtra Rent Act, which has frozen rents in South Mumbai at their 1947 level, many families have been able to stay in this part of the city where rent for a new 50 sq.m flat can easily reach Rs 50,000/month or higher. Often accused to be the root cause of all urban problems in Mumbai because it never allowed owners to maintain their buildings properly, the rent control act has also been instrumental in maintaining people from all socio-economic background in South Mumbai.

These and other themes were explored and discussed by the participants of the studio, the output of which is available on http://khotachiwadi.urbz.net

Water scarcity is a part of daily life in the quasi-desert state of Gujarat, and its largest city, Ahmedabad. With the city experiencing hyper growth, the tremendous pressure on its infrastructure is in-your-face, and groundwater tables have been falling at the rate of 2-3 meters per year because 70-80% of the city’s water supply has come from borewells. Those can be seen all along the road even today that additional water is carried in through canals from the distant Narmada river, some 200 km away. In spite of this, the daily water supply per capita today is a mere 140 litres (as opposed to 180 litres envisioned by the city ’s water plan about ten years ago). From the policy side, the city has adopted some new water regulations after a major drought hit the state of Gujarat in 1999. It now mandates that all new developments above a certain size to either capture rainwater for direct use, or to collect it in a percolation pond for filtration and much-needed recharge of the ground water.

In fact, several interesting layers of sophisticated water management infrastructures from different times in history can be traced underneath the organic urban structure in the dense old city of Ahmedabad.  Its distribution network dates back from colonial times.  Integrated in the old town’s community-based spatial morphology of ‘pols’, different sized neighborhoods organized around semi-public courtyards, is a system of fresh water supply and sewage pipes that cater to each house. It lies beneath the street surface, but is made legible by tall poles, indicating the location of the pipes and direction of the water flow.

Ahmedabad also has a long history of rainwater harvesting. The oldest example for this are the famous vavs, the monumental step wells that used to provide rainwater, collected during monsoon season, to the community year-round.  These structures are multi-storey underground water tanks shaped such that a series of stairs, on one side, would allow for comfortable access to the water level as it is slowly falling over the course of the dry season, while there is also a direct connection to the lowest point of the well from where water can be pulled up to the surface in a vessel. The step wells are adorned with artfully carved pillars and arches, and the climate inside is cool and pleasant. Examples of step wells that still exist today in Ahmedabad include Dada Hari Vav and Adalaj Vav, both built in the 16th century, as well as Mata Bhavari Vav, which is even older. What is interesting is that places of worship (both Hindu and Muslim) are either integrated in each of the vavs or can be found directly adjacent. Those, today, are still in use while the wells themselves have dried up.

The traditional wooden residential structures as well as many of the places of worship of the Old City incorporate a smaller scale version of rainwater harvesting. Water used to be captured from the second rainfall of the monsoon onwards, from the pitched roofs, then carried down through copper gutters and chains to be stored in limestone-lined deep tubewells (between 30 and 50 ft deep at 2-3 ft in diameter). The relatively small scale (25.000 – 30.000 litres per family and year) of the wells implies that this water was used mainly for drinking and cooking. The use of copper and limestone as materials ensures the high quality of the water to last for months; it is in fact far superior to the quality of water from other sources, including today’s municipal water supply. Maintenance and operation efforts, given the simplicity of the historic structures and durability of materials, are relatively low.

Since the construction of a large scale municipal water supply system, however, most of these rainwater harvesting systems, much like the step wells, have fallen idle. Interestingly, though, Nirav Panchal of the Heritage Project of the Municipal Corporation of Ahmedabad has explained to me that people have been approaching the city in the past five years in search of advice as to rehabilitate their rainwater harvesting structures for daily use .

Why would people want to do that? It improves their quality of life very directly by providing for the safest, healthiest, and best tasting drinking water one may hope for, and it is reliable in the long term (a tubewell fills up with two or three good rains).

The most important thing for the city remains the combined impact of many, many micro scale systems

This highlights the role culture and awareness play not only for rainwater harvesting, but also for water conservation and grey water re-use, and ultimately for the water safety of the city. What shapes the water problems of entire regions, according to Prof. C.N. Ray of CEPT University in Ahmedabad, is the mentality brought towards the matter by people. He argues that this is why coping mechanisms have traditionally been more sophisticated, and per capita demand has been much lower, in areas that have historically experienced water scarcity, such as Gujarat, than in those with more plentiful water supply.  It is incredibly important to harness what remains of the pre-’near-unlimited-water-from-the-tab’ mentality.  Thas means to embrace the idea to restore historical systems, and even to construct new mechanisms for rainwater harvesting at a household or small community scale.  The traditional example shows how simple this is provided some basic design parameters are taken into account.

Now imagine this happening citywide. The simple collection and storage of rainwater from roofs could contribute about 10% to the freshwater supply, while also improving public health. Especially if combined with a similar system of grey water re-use, this could dramatically reduce the per capita use of tap water, and make for a much more sustainable growth.  Not only in Ahmedabad, but also in other cities and even countries.

February 11-14, 2010

Prepared for students of the The Royal University College of Fine Arts (KKH), Stockholm, Sweden

Map of the Visit:

Enlarge the map.

PROGRAM

Thursday Feb 11

11.45: Arrival.

Stay at Grand Hotel in Ballard Estate, South Mumbai.

14:30: Lunch at Britannia Restaurant, near the hotel. Café Britannia is one of Mumbai’s favorite Irani Café.

17:00: Visit of Charles Correa’s Kanchanjunga Apartments. Then Drive through Marine Drive and stop at Chowpatty Beach. Walk to Khotachiwadi, an old Portuguese hamlet in the heart of the “Native City” in the presence of leading fashion designer and resident James Ferreira.

19:00: Talk with Mariam Dossal, Professor of history at Mumbai University and author of  “Mumbai: Theater of Conflict, City of Hope.”

20:00: Dinner at James Ferreira’s house.

Friday Feb 12

9:00: Presentation by Sharada Dwivedi, co-author of Bombay, the Cities Within.

10:00: Visit of Old Bombay starting with a walk to the Gateway of India, followed by quick shopping experience at Colaba Causeway and a visit of the principal architectural icons of British Bombay.

13:00: Lunch at Phoenix Mills, a new super mall popular amongst Mumbai’s middle-class youth.

15:00: Visit of Girangaon, the old Mill land, an iconic landscape of industrial Mumbai in company of Shrutika Shitole, Tejal Shitole and Kiran Sawant of PUKAR staff. See their blog on Girangaon.

18:30: Back to the hotel and free night.

Saturday Feb 13

9:30: Departure for Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s largest unplanned settlement. Visit of the URBZ office and discussion with Bhau Korde life-long resident and social worker in Dharavi.

13:00: Lunch at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA) followed by a presentation on Dharavi by KRVIA Director Anirudh Paul and Rupali Gupte author of a studies on the housing typologies of Mumbai,

15:30: Road trip to Gorai and visit of a 1985 Site and Services scheme by the World Bank.

20.00: Dinner on the beach.

Sunday Feb 14

9:00: Departure to Navi Mumbai and visit of Charles Correa’s Artists’ Village project built in 1988 and incrementally developed since then. Walk through and discussion with residents. Followed by a visit to the CIDCO Housing project of Raj Rewal Associates at Navi Mumbai.

13:00 Lunch and departure to Pune.

A Brief Architectural History of Mumbai

Mumbai’s history of land-use, architecture, built-forms and infrastructure is chaotic, and contrary – something that is visually expressed quite obviously from the moment you arrive. An afternoon landing at the international airport provides you with a birds-eye view of this narrow stretch of land which seems to have large swathes of low-rise, impossibly high-density settlements at its center. They spread for several kilometers, rising up hillocks, squeezing between towering buildings and spreading over marshy land. These house a significant portion – some statistics say nearly 60% – of the city’s population. Old villages lie at the heart of several of these habitats – villages that leased out lands to poor migrants and slowly got absorbed by the overwhelming growth of the city.

In the sixteenth century, the city grew around the old trading centers in the north (Vasai, Thane) with the Portuguese empire controlling sea-trade and a coastal agrarian economy. That’s when the Koli fishing community and their several villages came into contact with Christianity and a Hindu-Catholic cultural sensibility was formed. One that is still evident in several parts of the urban region. Khotachiwadi (photo)- a small hamlet with an Indo-Portuguese flavour that is going to be the first evening stop is part of this legacy. It actually emerged in the late nineteenth century, when middle-class educated landed families from the northern  villages of Gorai, Vasai and Bandra decided to move closer to the source of modern jobs – the port. They built homes in distinct styles combining their earlier forms and individual architectural idiosyncracies. The village reflected all the socio-economic and cultural diversity of the emerging city, with homes for all kinds of people – poor, middle-class and elites all jostling for space within the fabric of this quaint urban-village.

Around the early eighteenth century, the center of urban gravity shifted south wards with the British settling down and creating a massive port to rival local ports such as Surat in Gujarat. The coming of local merchants from Gujarat to the city – especially the Parsees (erstwhile migrants from Persia practicising Zorastrianism) shaped the ethos of the native city. A city that still demonstrates so many vernacular architectural flourishes evoking other parts of India – mainly coastal Gujarat and Maharashtra – regions that were the main sources of migrant populations in the nineteenth century.  These neighbourhoods begin from the docklands and move all the way westwards marking the boundaries of colonial Mumbai. They are dotted by Fire-temples – holy structures meant for the Parsees – who define this moment of the city’s history. The community played a stellar role in the infrastructural, economic and cultural growth of the city. Big business families – which  had made money in the opium trade channelized funds into bridges, schools and colleges and businesses.

The port activities provided a lot of money to the city and was responsible for the physical development of colonial south Mumbai – right from the Ballard Estate – where the Grand Hotel is – to the Gate way of India. Gothic, Indo-Sarcenic and several other mish-mash styles emerged with architects from all over the world trying out their fantasies for this city that at one time was as prosperous – as major urban global centers like Shanghai and even some European cities.

One sub-set of the Parsees are the Iranis – a group of Muslim and Zorastrian families who arrived from Iran in the late 19th and 20th centuries – and made a name for themselves specially in the restaurant business – with the Irani cafe as the most visible expression of this. Irani cafes – according to historian Frank Conlon – were the first public sites of inter-community interaction in Mumbai where common citizens found a place of interacting beyond caste and community ties. The Café Britannia restaurant near the Grand Hotel, is one example of this important cultural institution of the city.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of the textile industry and pushed for a second wave of economic dynamism that was rooted in the industrial mills (photo) that dotted the landscape all the way down to the late twentieth century. For several decades, the mills (mostly situated in the central suburbs, considered at one time to be on the outskirts of the colonial city) dominated the city’s economy. It attracted hundreds of thousands of workers all the way from coastal Maharashtra and south India and shaped a middle-class ethos that was architecturally expressed in the famous chawls that lined the mill neighbourhoods. The chawls were barrack like structures ostensibly built for male migrants without families but were soon transformed into community and familial enclaves that became the backbone of the city’s modern sensibilities. A combination of  trade-union based politics, `corporate gangsterism and sheer greed for quick money eventually killed the mills as economic centers. After the failure of several years of civic activism on behalf of the leftist groups to stop the process – the ample lands of the mills were eventually sold off to real-estate developers for the creation of malls, offices, boutique shops and nightclubs.

The city’s architectural history is diverse in all possible ways. You have an art-deco legacy thanks to the twenties and thirties modernist ambitions of some patrons. Their work can be seen in some movie theaters, in the residential buildings along Marine Drive and in the more plastic moments of average middle-class structures all along the city, in the form of art-deco flourishes that got incorporated into balconies, facades and the like.

A lot of the colonial architecture survived thanks to old rent act laws which created a divided sense of ownership between tenants and landlords. This made the spaces economically unviable except for providing basic shelter – a move which contributed to the decrepit look of the city but also kept these structures from being pre-maturely demolished.

However – today large swathes of the old city are being rendered ‘unsafe’ by an official gaze – even though they did survive for more than a century in many cases! They are being parceled off to builders in cluster development schemes. Instead of utilizing this for the improvement and strengthening of these buildings, such schemes basically erase them for reconstruction following a model that dominates much of the land use of the city – the SRA or slum Redevelopment Authority model. In which older settlements – designated as slums – make way for real-estate projects after being provided some security of tenure – in most cases tiny blocks of apartments – thus releasing land for the market and allowing the builder to make a killing.

A sophisticated version of this approach overlays the future of Dharavi – a celebrity neighbourhood (thanks to Slumdog Millionaire) in north central Mumbai. It emerged in the thirties and forties – in the shadow of the industrial city – providing space for migrants to create wealth out of very little. Except from a small fisherman village (photo) on what use to be the share of the Mahim Creek, much of Dharavi emerged in a no-land zone – it was literally mud and marsh  - and was made layer by layer by waves of migration – mostly economically and culturally marginalized communities from the southern state of Tamil nadu, western state of Gujarat and a few others. Artisanal energy was the main fuel of this dense settlement and it grew like a challenge to the massive mills providing a counterpoint to the economic dynamism of the city. When the mills eventually folded up and when several activities were dispersed all over the city – Dharavi became a catchment for informal production as well – including it into its diverse repertoire that ranged from leather goods, pottery, waste re-cycling and several others. Its mixed -use, home-cum-workshops – what we call the ‘Tool-House‘ – define its architectural landscape.

We end the study through a visit to the Artists village (photo below), Belapur, in New Mumbai – the planned city which was visualized as an alter ego to old Bombay. Where one was chaotic and incremental, the other was drafted on a drawing board to the last detail.  The artists village was designed by Charles Correa as an example of organized incrementally growing habitats – a distilled version of the process that shapes the dominant infomal settlements of Mumbai.

Khotachiwadi is one of the most charismatic and charming neighborhoods of Mumbai. Situated in Girgaum, South Mumbai; it is a historical hamlet where some of the oldest cottage houses of Mumbai can be seen. Less than 30 of these houses, designed in typical Indo-Portuguese style, still remain. The small streets of Khotachiwadi have preserved its communal and village-like atmosphere up to these days, in spite of the construction of many buildings of varied architectural taste in the wadi since the 1930s. Who better than James Feirerra, a celebrated fashion designer and 5th generation Khotachiwadi resident, to present his neighborhood? This video was produced by URBZ intern Guillaume Folliot:

http://www.vimeo.com/5619049

For more on Khotachiwadi, visit this page.

Khotachiwadi is a small village in south Mumbai that has won the attention of urban heritage conservation initiatives. Architecture students are attracted to its distinctive low-rise, high-density landscape showcasing a variety of individual homes, chawls and apartment buildings that reveal Indo-Portuguese flourishes, port-town styles off the western coast and modernist, deco touches.

For the inhabitants it is a village that is stretched between communitarian nostalgia and the aspirations of its younger residents. The community is passionately involved in its present and future.

khotachiwadi.urbz.net is a space for residents and those interested in Khotachiwadi to interact, communicate and express themselves. The is used as a tool by the residents to build on the existing momentum with regard to saving the distinct personality of this habitat. Archiving activities and documentation projects are punctuated by the organization of events that bring the diverse issues and perspectives on an interactive platform. The site uses existing qualitative data produced or archived by residents as a starting point.

URBZ’s engagement with Khotachiwadi builds on more than three years of work. We see Khotachiwadi beyond its heritage narrative, as part of a larger system of urban villages, hamlets and habitats that characterize Mumbai’s landscape.

Story of Khotachiwadi:

http://www.airoots.org/why-mumbai-slums-are-villages/