URBZ continues its experimentation with local knowledge production, collective creativity, individual expression and radical pedagogy in Istanbul with the Mashup Workshop, which will bring together local residents, travellers, thinkers, creators, doers and other enthusiasts in the neighbourhood of Sishane-Galata.

Just as many other parts of Istanbul, Sishane-Galata needs to redefine itself in a context that keeps on expanding. Well known for its bazaar-like atmosphere and tight social networks, Sishane-Galata is a not-so-global neighbourhood in a city that seems to constantly grow and stretch itself. Just as Istanbul is being celebrated as a global city at the centre of a vast sphere of economic and cultural influence, the same global, regional and metropolitan powers are forcing so many localities to redefine their functions and identities.

Fortunately, not all forces brought about by globalization are synonymous with cultural and economic homogenization. Sometimes the flows can be reversed and villages, small streets and local communities can send a feedback to the world. Like the bright light of a shining star, such feedback signals a singular existence, one among millions. Millions of neighbourhoods affirming themselves in the world, and all of them in their own way, providing a sense of their trajectories, which can serve as an inspiration to others.

The Mashup Workshop will serve as an eccentric instrument pitching and magnifying the voices of Sishane-Galata and bringing them to the world –or at least to the World-Wide Web. Rather than pledging to accurately reproduce local beats, workshop participants will mix them, mash them and tune them up to their own realities. The workshop aims at establishing a connection with the neighbourhood and its residents in the form of a creative dialog. In the process, local skills and knowledge will be used and investigated, along with those of participants from other parts of the world.

The workshop’s output will be a multimedia portrait of the neighbourhood and its broader context, using all forms of expression available, including video, photo, sound, design, drawing, fiction, performance, and painting. The material produced will be published on urbz.net and madeinsishane.com. The workshop will raise awareness locally and globally, promote the neighbourhood and its residents, assist them in their advocacy, and hopefully influence planning and policy-making.

Stay tuned! for more updates urbz.net/istanbul

A few weeks ago, our Sunday was spent painting clay pots that we purchased from the nearby Dharavi neighbourhood of Khumbarwada, which is only a five minute walk from the Dharavi Shelter and the Transit Camp.

From some of our small donations that we have received up to this date, we managed to buy some pots, paints, brushes and wire. The children from the Shelter organised themselves into groups and painted the clay pots producing some incredible patterns and designs. A local resident then came in to help us hang the pots in the entrance patio of our Shelter and at the same time we began painting the bricks on the entrance wall in the patio.

This activity was one of a series of activities we are want to carry out to transform the Shelter and develop it into an incredible and beautiful space for art, creativity, exchange and learning.

The following images have some more of our plans to convert the remaining space we have surrounding the existing structure. We have included approximate costs for each of these activities.

Your contributions are most welcome!

Great news… URBZ just acquired an office space in Dharavi! We will be running most of our operations from this space, including developing this website, planning our workshops, our architectural and design work. The office will also house the Dharavi School of Urbanology. This will be a space of urban research of the most grounded kind.

The Dharavi School of Urbanology uses its base here to understand and comment on urban processes everywhere. It invites researchers to understand Dharavi’s intricate history and functioning so as to gain insights on how urban space emerges to create multiple possibilities city life in other parts of the world. You can see a compressed history of urban processes here that unfolds into a multi-dimensional explanation of the inner workings of several global cities. Workings that go beyond the landscape of favelas and informal settlements and into the streets of glitzy new townships in Shanghai, along the gridded avenues of Manhattan, through the labyrinthine streets of Tokyo and the deceptively sparse urban energies of small townships every where.

We invite scholars from all over the world to come to Dharavi and compare the knowledge embedded in its intricate networks with their own experiences from other cities. This alchemy of ideas and insights will fuel it’s grounded intellectual agendas.  The Dharavi School of Urbanology makes a tentative start through our tool-house office in in this locality – as small as the tiny post industrial tenements  that  neighbour it  – and as bristling with potential and energy!

Our team includes residents who possess an intimate understanding of the place, besides being passionately involved in its issues. We also have international urban experts who provide advice on research projects as and when needed.

Do look up our section on pedagogy for related activities.

We have always felt that Dharavi is a living laboratory of urban practices that we should learn from rather than “redevelop”. This neighbourhood, wrongly known as the largest slum in Asia, is in fact a user-generated city of the most elaborate kind. What really turned it into a slum is the attitude of the authorities, who have refused to provide it with the same infrastructure and public services as any regular neighbourhood in Mumbai (water, sewage, electricity, garbage collection). Despite all this, or in spite of it, Dharavi has come up with its own solutions and processes. It is by no means a perfect place, but we feel that it has a lot of potential -if allowed to develop on its own terms. In any case, we are not here to develop Dharavi, but merely to learn from it and work in its spirit. In plus of being one of the most interesting parts of Mumbai, it is also one of the few places where we could afford to rent an office space. The real-estate market in Mumbai shows no sign of getting anywhere close to affordability, even in these times of a global financial meltdown.

It will take us about a month to get the space ready. We want to create a security exit and somehow replace the asbestos roof. We also need to paint it and add a toilet. Once this is all done, we will be welcoming visitors, artists, interns and Urbanology fellows. We are planning on organizing monthly events in the community space in front of the office, which has a stage and is used regularly by the community for public functions and weddings. These will include movie screenings and parties.

To send us postcards and visit us, use this address:

URBZ / Urbanology
Block No. 4/6/12
New Transit Camp, Dharavi
Mumbai 400-017, INDIA

Here are more images of the office and the street: