Participants at Work

Art has been a favoured tool in the hands of sensitive pedagogues. Our small initiative in Dharavi takes art seriously – for its own sake. We are sure that our little moves will ferret out tremendous talent from the rich locality in which it is situated. Many children coming to the Shelter also go to regular schools but love its special focus – which allows them to channelize the rich experience of living life in the city into new creative expressions. We want all kinds of artists to walk this street, visit the Shelter and inspire them to relate to artistic practices in passionate ways.

At the same time one part of us wants to extend this space into other terrains as well. After all, there are those who also value the learning dimension inbuilt into artistic expression. We have special sessions where the acts of drawing and expression specifically help reflect on the streets, homes, lives and communities of all those who belong there, by using creative landmarks and creating new uses of space. We would like to blur the boundaries between art and craft, science and maths and let the imagination translate into learning new skills – whether it be plumbing, water management, construction and roofing. Skills that are best learned in this special part of the city, which can sprout a building with so little resources within a week. We would like to take the Shelter into a space where elders and children converse across community, class, gender and ethnic divides and learn about the intricacies that made the locality of Dharavi so rich, so that the aspirations of the newer generation get energized in fresher ways.

We would love more visitors – from around the world – to come and interact and learn and inspire. We are pretty sure that much learning will take place in the Shelter, a learning that combines expression, knowledge, creativity and science about living in cities.

Pay us a visit soon!

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: