Homegrown cities
This experiment in affordable housing led to the co-designing and construction of a small house in Shivaji Nagar, in Govandi. A neighbourhood in Mumbai that is struggling against all odds to keep growing and improving.
The Handstorm Workshop (March 14-20, 2014) draws on energies that flow from creative manual involvement. It will bring together talent from Shivaji Nagar, surrounding areas and from all over the world to work at 3 levels: furniture/interior, architecture/construction, and infrastructure/streets.
These are all dimensions of everyday life where small improvements can make a huge difference. The workshop will connect the creativity and skills of designers, architects and artists with those of carpenters, masons, plumbers and contractors to produce the kind of innovations that can only happen when knowledge flows both ways.
The workshop will involve a live, studio-cum-exhibition space in which residents will participate, examine, exhibit, give feedback on a range of products and prototypes such as furniture, wall units, street furniture, plants, trees, model houses, construction materials and 3-D planning models.
The aim is to co-create objects, techniques, tools and models that are break-through designs and user-friendly in the context of homegrown habitats.
The Handstorm Workshop invites contributions that will be exhibited to residents of Shivaji Nagar, Govandi on the first day of the sessions (March 14th). These could be innovatively designed objects that you feel are useful for any small home (around 16 x 32 feet ground level and rising one to two stories high), both inside the home and outside, the streets on which they exist, or the neighbourhood as a whole.
These include examples or prototypes of household furniture, embellishments, street furniture, ornamentation, fittings, grills, plumbing, tools, plants, pots, trees that could grow in densely inhabited environments, new kind of materials for construction, anything that you feel residents could use.
To understand more about the context of the neighbourhood and the workshop please read this post.
The Handstorm Workshop involves a set of encounters in which participants will work with local city-makers (artisans, home builders, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc) and residents from the neighbourhood over six days to come out with improved prototypes of exhibited objects, produce something totally new or simply endorse the exhibits by actually using them in and around their homes, through the course of the workshop.
Tools and materials needed will be provided. Our only requirement from all participants; they should be willing to work with their hands in actually creating objects. (This is a computerless workshop!)
Just your hands, a desire to produce something useful and beautiful which you feel the residents would love to use and loads of enthusiasm.