Slum Rehabilitation Authority
Dharavi Redevelopment Project
FAQ's
All cities in India are loud, but nothing matches the 24/7 decibel level of Mumbai, the former Bombay, where the traffic never stops and the horns always honk. Noise, however, is not a problem in Dharavi, the teeming slum of one million souls, where as many as 18,000 people crowd into a single acre (0.4 hectares). By nightfall, deep inside the maze of lanes too narrow even for the putt-putt of auto rickshaws, the slum is as still as a verdant glade. Once you get accustomed to sharing 300 square feet (28 square meters) of floor with 15 humans and an uncounted number of mice, a strange sense of relaxation sets in—ah, at last a moment to think straight.
Dharavi is routinely called "the largest slum in Asia," a dubious attribution sometimes conflated into "the largest slum in the world." This is not true. Mexico City's Neza-Chalco-Itza barrio has four times as many people. In Asia, Karachi's Orangi Township has surpassed Dharavi. Even in Mumbai, where about half of the city's swelling 12 million population lives in what is euphemistically referred to as "informal" housing, other slum pockets rival Dharavi in size and squalor.
Yet Dharavi remains unique among slums. A neighborhood smack in the heart of Mumbai, it retains the emotional and historical pull of a subcontinental Harlem—a square-mile (three square kilometers) center of all things, geographically, psychologically, spiritually. Its location has also made it hot real estate in Mumbai, a city that epitomizes India's hopes of becoming an economic rival to China. Indeed, on a planet where half of humanity will soon live in cities, the forces at work in Dharavi serve as a window not only on the future of India's burgeoning cities, but on urban space everywhere.
Ask any longtime resident—some families have been here for three or more generations—how Dharavi came to be, and they'll say, "We built it." This is not far off. Until the late 19th century, this area of Mumbai was mangrove swamp inhabited by Koli fishermen. When the swamp filled in (with coconut leaves, rotten fish, and human waste), the Kolis were deprived of their fishing grounds—they would soon shift to bootlegging liquor—but room became available for others. The Kumbhars came from Gujarat to establish a potters' colony. Tamils arrived from the south and opened tanneries. Thousands traveled from Uttar Pradesh to work in the booming textile industry. The result is the most diverse of slums, arguably the most diverse neighborhood in Mumbai, India's most diverse city.
Stay for a while on the three-foot-wide (one meter) lane of Rajendra Prasad Chawl, and you become acquainted with the rhythms of the place. The morning sound of devotional singing is followed by the rush of water. Until recently few people in Dharavi had water hookups. Residents such as Meera Singh, a wry woman who has lived on the lane for 35 years, used to walk a mile (two kilometers) to get water for the day's cleaning and cooking. At the distant spigot she would have to pay the local "goons" to fill her buckets. This is how it works in the bureaucratic twilight zone of informal housing. Deprived of public services because of their illegal status, slum dwellers often find themselves at the mercy of the "land mafia." There are water goons, electricity goons. In this regard, the residents of Rajendra Prasad Chawl are fortunate. These days, by DIY hook or crook, nearly every household on the street has its own water tap. And today, like every day, residents open their hoses to wash down the lane as they stand in the doorways of their homes to brush their teeth.
The Eyes of the Skin - Juhuani Pallasamaa
There is a subtle transference between tactile and taste experiences. Vision becomes transferred to taste as well; certain colours and detail evoke oral sensations. A delicately coloured polished stone surface is subliminally sensed by the tongue. Our sensory experience of the world originates in the interior of the mouth, and the world tends to return to it’s oral origins. The most archaic origin of architectural space is in the cavity of the mouth."
___________________________
Elements of design that provide a feeling of spirituality experienced from the buildings – Phenomenology is closely related to the teachings of Buddhism, everything is about relational design, things must work in harmony respective of universal codes.
Ego removed can create harmony in design, when political aims are channelled through architecture then the what results is an aggressive threatening type of architecture that creates emotional disharmony within the mind of the onlooker.
Kenneth Frampton Studies in Tectonic Culture
_________________________
Bernard Tschumi – Questions of Space pg 34
1.0 Is space a material thing in which all material things are to be located?
2.2 If space consciousness is based on one's respective experience, then does the perception of space involve a gradual construction rather than a ready made schema?
2.81 Are objective social space and subjective inner space then inextricably bound together?
"Fragment 1 – A double pleasure"
"Typical statements on architecture often read like the one in the first edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1773: ‘architecture being governed by proportion, requires to be guided by rule and compass.’ That is Architecture is a ‘thing of the mind’, a geometrical rather than a pictorial or experimental art; so the problem of architecture becomes a problem of ordinance – Doric or Corinthian order axes or hierarchies, grids or regulating lines, types or models, walls or slabs – and of course the grammar of syntax of the architectural sign become pretext for sophisticated and pleasurable manipulation. Taken to its extreme, such manipulation leans towards a poetics of frozen signs, detached from reality, into a subtle and frozen pleasure of the mind.
Neither the pleasure of space or the pleasure of geometry is (on it’s own) a pleasure of architecture."
________________________
"Finally, in this last chapter of part I, we shall see what happens geometrically, when a building or a town is made entirely of patterns which are living, we can always recognise its life-not only in the obvious happiness which happens there, not only in it’s freedom and relaxedness-but in its purely physical appearance too. It always has a certain geometric character.
The most important thing that happens is that every part of it, at every level, becomes unique. The patterns which control a portion of the world, are themselves fairly simple. But when they interact, they create slightly different overall configurations at every place. This happens because no two places on earth are perfectly alike in their conditions which the other patterns face.
To make this character of nature clear, let me contrast it with the character of buildings being built today. One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can-and ought-to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth century architecture.
Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass)-but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.
On the other hand all oak trees have the same overall shape, the same thickened twisted trunk, the same crinkled bark, the same shaped leaves, the same proportion of limbs to branches to twigs. On the other hand, no two trees are quite the same. The exact combination of height and width and curvature never repeats itself; we cannot even find two leaves which are the same.
___________________________
Christian Norberg-Shulz - Genus Loci iii Place pg116
Alienation in our opinion is first of all due to man’s loss of identification with the natural and man-made things which constitute his environment. This loss also hinders the process of gathering, and is therefore at the root of our actual “loss of place”. Things have become mere objects of consumption which are thrown away after use, and nature in general is treated as a “resource”. Only if man regains his ability of identification and gathering, we may stop this destructive development. The first step to take is to arrive at a full understanding of the objects of identification and gathering, that is an understanding of the concept of thing. Thereby we shall also be able to define the nature of man-made meanings and their relation to natural meanings. Again we have to ask Heidegger for help in his essay The Thing, he uses a jug as an example, and asks for the “jugness” of the jug. “The jug’s jug-character consists of the poured gift of the pouring out… The giving of the outpouring can be a drink. The spring stays on in the water of the gift. In the spring the rock dwells, and in the rock dwells the dark slumbers of the earth, which receives the rain and the dew of the sky. In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of the water and the earth… In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell…” “The jug’s essential nature, its presencing… is what we call a thing.” Heidegger takes the function of the jug, the pouring as, his point of departure. He defines the pouring as a gift and asks what is here “given”. Water and wine are given and with them the earth and the sky. The jug is understood as an artifact which serves a purpose. Its function, however, forms a part of life which takes place between earth and sky. The jug participates in this taking place; yes, it is part of the place in which life is concretised. The function of real things is therefore to concretise or “reveal” life in it’s various aspects. If a thing does not do that, it is not a thing but a mere commodity. We dwell poetically when we are able to “read” the revealing things which make up our environment. Things are made with the purpose of revealing; they gather world. And may themselves be gathered to form a microcosmos…
________________________
An essay by Matthew Watts Gaston Bachelard and the poetic imagination
