Mumbai

URBZ + ENSAMBLE STUDIO/MIT-POPLAB

Mumbai is a city of disparate habitats that emerged through various historical encounters to form a global, but non-standardized, metropolis. Often represented in bipolar terms as a city of slums and high-rises, contemporary Mumbai’s diversity of built-forms represents the creative ways inhabitants occupy urban space. Within the complex city fabric, informal settlements have grown incrementally, and now absorb over half of the metropolis’s 12 million residents, most typically in thousands of tiny “tool-houses” squeezed into a disproportionately small share of the city’s land.

Serving as both a residence and workspace, Mumbai’s tool-house echoes a housing type common across Asia, from Singapore’s shop-house to Tokyo’s home-factory, and generates its value through use rather than from land speculation. It represents a lifeline that keeps millions of people afloat and allows them to productively occupy the city. In the name of redevelopment, however, these neighborhoods are being replaced by single-function high-rises, revealing the arrested imagination of the authorities.

Instead of a planet of slums in need of clearance, we see neighborhoods in different stages of evolution. The in-situ work of URBZ and Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab's innovative research respond to this vision with a collage of tactics, technologies, and imaginations. The air is proposed as new territory where live-work conditions and public infrastructures recover their rightful place, liberating the excessive pressure on the land. Rather than a tabula rasa, homegrown neighborhoods are seen as a “tabula pronta,” with real value to drive development strategies. This is not a speculative future, but an expanded present where inhabitants can reclaim growth for themselves.

Credits

URBZ: user-generated cities, Mumbai

Founding Partners: Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava, Geeta Mehta Uneven Growth Team: Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava, Yehuda Safran, Ishan Tankha, Sameep Padora, Diane Athaide, Ismini Christakopoulou, Jai Bhadgaonkar, Bharat Gangurde, Shyam Kanle, Aki Lee, Itai Margula, Shardul Patil, Aditi Nair

Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab, Madrid and Cambridge

Ensamble Studio Principals and Founders of POPlab at MIT: Antón García-Abril, Débora Mesa

Ensamble Studio/POPlab Team: Antón García-Abril, Débora Mesa, Javier Cuesta, Ricardo Sanz, Marie Benaboud, Simone Cavallo, José María Lavena, Massimo Loia, Borja Soriano, Erin Soygenis