Indian City: Dharavi Free Essay Example

As one of the most visible informal settlements in India, Dharavi – an informal township within the metropolis of Mumbai – is one of the world’s 30 mega-slums and Asia’s largest. Spread over 525 acres, it presents a very vibrant mosaic of tens of thousands of small businesses and hundreds of thousands of residents of different religions, castes, languages, provinces, and ethnicities, dependent on one another and the city socially, culturally and economically. Its enterprising residents manufacture garments, leather goods, foods and pottery, besides running a flourishing – and unique – recycling business.

Dharavi is an icon of urban issues relating to informal settlements in the developing world and the success of the incremental development. While Dharavi obviously poses unanswered questions concerning land tenure, poor building stock, and lack of adequate physical infrastructure, it also has much strength that needs to be recognized as seeds for potential solutions to rapid urbanization, about how informal settlements generate solutions for the demands of small businesses and housing.

These include Dharavi’s hard working entrepreneurs and their social capital, its community-oriented urban fabric, and its post-industrial live-work paradigm.

Dharavi’s economic activity is decentralized, human scale, home-based, low-tech and labour-intensive. Its streets teem with ingenious businesses, repurposed and recycled structures, and innovative overall uses of materials, space and labour.

The organic urban fabric of Dharavi represents an important repository of history. Pedestrian oriented narrow streets are lined with 2-4 storey structures that are commercial at the street level and residential on upper floors. The roof terraces are used for storage, to catch the evening breeze, or for children to fly kites.

The occasional nooks and bends of streets allow for casual meetings or for street vending. Small streets and courtyards that veer away from the main streets have a distinctly residential character, where children play and women work on crafts or food processing enterprises. Public spaces and streets are integral parts of the residential life, with activities spilling out into the open during the cool of the evenings. All aspects of life in Dharavi are lived within close proximity to others. The large open spaces that serve many nagars are well guarded against encroachment, and provide venues for festive celebrations, political speeches and cricket matches.

This has created an organic and incrementally developing urban form that is pedestrianized, community-centric, and network-based, with mixed-use, high-density low-rise streetscapes. This is a model many planners have been trying to recreate in cities across the world.

KINETIC AND STATIC

Indian cities include two components occupying the same physical space: the Static city and the Kinetic City. The static city, built of more permanent materials such as concrete, steel, and brick, is perceived as a monumental two-dimensional entity on conventional city maps. Meanwhile, the Kinetic City is perceived as a city in motion, a three dimensional construct of incremental development. The Kinetic City is temporary in nature and often built with recycled materials: plastic sheets, scrap metal, canvas, and waste wood. It constantly modifies and reinvents itself.

The Kinetic City, with its bazaar-like form, is like the symbolic image of the emerging urban Indian condition. The processions, weddings, festivals, hawkers, street vendors, and slum dwellers all create an ever-transforming streetscape. It is an indigenous urbanism that has its particular “local” logic, a temporal articulation and occupation of space that creates a richer sensibility of spatial occupation.

Meanwhile, the static city dependent on architecture for its representation is no longer the single image by which the city is read. As a result, architecture is not the “spectacle” of the city, nor does it even comprise the single dominant image of the city.

In contrast, festivals such as Diwali, Dussera, Navrathri, have emerged as the spectacles of the Kinetic City, and their presence in the everyday landscape pervades and dominates the popular visual culture of Indian cities.

In this dynamic context, if the production or preservation of architecture or urban form has to be informed by our reading of cultural significance, the understanding that cultural significance evolves will truly clarify the role of the architect as an advocate of change (versus a preservationist who opposes change) namely, one who can engage with both the kinetic and static cities on equal terms. This understanding allows architecture and urban typologies to be transformed through intervention and placed in the service of contemporary life, realities, and emerging aspirations.

Here, the static city embraces the Kinetic City and is informed and remade by its logic. The static and Kinetic Cities clearly go beyond their obvious differences to establish a much richer relationship both spatially and metaphorically than their physical manifestations would suggest.

Dharavi possesses such attributes with its use of local materials, walk able neighbourhoods, and a mixture of employment and housing. It represents a design ‘totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to “warehouse” the poor’.

In 2010, Prince Charles cited Dharavi as a role model for sustainable living, praising its habit of recycling waste. Last year the slum hosted its first art biennale.

Following the success of Slum dog Millionaire, the slum has become a tourist attraction and guides offer tours of its hundreds of workshops.

The aim of the thesis is to know- How can a strategic spatial framework incorporating the existing social-economic production of space in informal settlements linking it to the formal city, lead to long term inclusive and sustainable redevelopment projects?

The main objective of this thesis was to challenge people’s perceptions of slums by highlighting the creative talent that resides in them and also changes the boxed in perception that people have of Dharavi as a slum rather it being an urban village. The process includes studying the living conditions that these urban and suburban developments create and the feasible ways in which their problems can be addressed through the regeneration of the spaces.

The intention is to regenerate the existing conditions rather than demolishing it, but to intervene in a way that it creates spaces that contribute to the social and economic development of the community while protecting the living spaces on the street level by selecting various pockets and, generating a community and breathing space on ground, that is multi-functional in nature and not alien to the users or the context.

The community spaces thus can be used for the following aspects – To host workshops, lectures, exhibitions, and cultural events. The workshops can help people be better at their talent and also inspire more people.

Small-scale learning centres for the locals and children.

These community spaces will showcase not just local talent, but also will present community workshops and help connect creators looking to sell their goods to community members throughout Dharavi.

These spaces host exhibits celebrating the pottery, embroidered garments, wooden carvings, textiles to recycled items and other handicrafts manufactured within Dharavi’s three square kilometres.

Objects a platform to be contemplated and appreciated by makers and locals from Dharavi, the city of Mumbai and the rest of the world.

Developers in Mumbai have eyed Dharavi, which sits on prime land, for ambitious redevelopment undertakings since 2004, when the Dharavi Redevelopment Project was launched. Earlier, the state government re-launched plans to move the much-delayed project forward by announcing that it will accept bids to redevelop multiple sectors of Dharavi.

The intervention could serve as a counterpoint to the argument that Dharavi needs to be completely reinvented: The need for some public support and intervention to improve the infrastructure, but it doesn’t have to be all redevelopment.

Dharavi is an urban settlement in the sense that it’s extremely dense, extremely difficult to have services and toilets and infrastructure. But it is not in the sense of being violent or full of despair, it’s also perhaps a slum in terms of property rights being somewhat being ambivalent, but in many ways, it’s more like an open village.

This urban space won’t be meant for gawking tourists, but for the locals themselves. They live in a crowded space, in tough conditions, yet they are constantly creating, designing, manufacturing and commercialising all kinds of goods.

The holistic development can be streamlined with the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and the Smart Cities vision of Mr. Narendra Modi, Honourable Prime Minister of India, and promotes the adoption of smart solutions for efficient use of available assets that enhance the quality of urban life for all. It encourages citizen participation in the formulation of their city’s future.

The endeavour can change not just global perceptions of Dharavi, but, perhaps even more importantly, local ones.

“The main mission is to challenge our perception of slums, favelas, ghettos and other informal settlements around the world, and to acknowledge the citizenship and creativity of these people.”