Housing Without Developers

  Last week Studio X Mumbai held a day long workshop provocatively titled “Housing without Developers”. As elaborated on their website, the workshop tried to challenge the seeming inevitability of Continue reading →

Novelizing Journalism

Every so often, a book about poor people captures the attention of large numbers of first-world readers. Journalist Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Continue reading →

Jugaad

Pavement unit for two   Jugaad: A creative idea, a quick, alternate way of solving or fixing problems This is an interesting housing unit I saw on a pavement in my neighborhood. Continue reading →

Vertical City

After two years of writing from the outskirts, I am back in Mumbai, feeling a sense of being embedded and distant at the same time. Being back gives me a Continue reading →

Good Park, Bad Park

I would like pick up from Lubaina’s post on Green Washing Mumbai and discuss particular spatial typologies that are manifestations of Mumbai’s Bourgeois Environmental sensibilities. As Lubaina explains in her Continue reading →

Green-Washing Mumbai: Part 2

As described in my previous post, the Open-Mumbai exhibition demonstrated a plethora of possibilities of greening the city and programming unused or seemingly neglected areas of the city for ‘public Continue reading →

Green-Washing Mumbai: Part 1

Taking a slight segue from the general narrative on our blog, I would like to introduce an extremely interesting phenomenon that is currently taking shape in Mumbai- articulating the need Continue reading →

In retrospect

Adriana’s post reminds me of a project that we built as architecture undergrads in Mumbai. As a part of a short workshop conducted at KRVIA[1], we decided to build a Continue reading →

Are There Many “Informalities”? Reflections from my past work…

As part of a one-year research fellowship, at the Kamla Raheja Vidhyanidhi Institute for Architecture, I studied processes of urban development and land acquisition in Mumbai, through the academic year Continue reading →

Ways to Stay Put

By 2050, 55% of India’s population is expected to live in cities[1]. While it has been noted that the influx of people into cities shall create a high demand for Continue reading →

Mumbai and its Post Liberalization Slum

As cities in the Global North witness a spur of protests that deploy tactics of informal occupation on formal spaces, cities in India are increasingly seeing a push towards formalization Continue reading →

The Project

While it’s true that a large number of slum dwellers are poor, it would be a fallacy to relate slums to abject poverty, definitely not one that which rises out Continue reading →

Mumbai and its Slum Dog Millionaires

Intro Post by Namrata Kapoor I watched Slum Dog Millionaire in New York, 6 months after I had left Mumbai. Scenes from the film invoked a strange nostalgia that I Continue reading →