Course description
What new and relevant formal and spatial imaginations could be articulated for mass inhabitations in the emerging contexts of urbanization in India's metro cities? At stake lies the opportunity to advance spatial explorations which interrogate a historical narrative that has framed India’s mass housing question around the tropes of tenure security, affordability and efficiency. These tropes manifest into a standardized housing built form of a 1-2 or more BHK imagined for the inhabitation of a nuclear family, and on the basis of the separation of living, work and other cultural conditions. Such architectural manifestations have remained limited in accommodating the varied spatial practices of making home for diverse socioeconomic groups. The promise of their provision has also proved to be elusive as the number of actual tenements that have been built in India’s metro cities since independence fall way too short of the calculated housing shortage.
This framing, accentuated by drawing metro cities into a discourse of urban renewal via redevelopment during the millennial turn, has also led to seven widespread housing tendencies amongst contemporary architectural practices. First, a tendency of resignation to the current models of housing legislation, delivery and finance to facilitate either harsh, inhospitable, and economically, socially and ecologically unsustainable conditions of mass inhabitation or attempt to soften them with design moves that largely prove to be inconsequential. Second, a tendency of co-optation through community participation that ends up manufacturing consent for implementing insitu developments and urban renewal programmes of large-scale physical infrastructure modernization while leading to eventual dislocation and resettlement of low-income households on city peripheries. Third, a tendency to promote redevelopment of mass housing stock to maximize spatial opportunities for existing residents within the current legislative frameworks leading to excessive importance given to size of interior spaces, a complete dearth of outdoor open spaces, inhospitable building layouts that focus on privacy, a financial burden of increased maintenance charges on older residents, and burden city infrastructure. Fourth, a rights-based tendency whose activist efforts, situated in narrow narratives of “lack” and “inadequacy” of “informal” mass inhabitations, have started translating into mapping the previously unrecognized opportunities of state-owned land for their assembly under town planning schemes and where new standardized houses could be built. Practices situated in this tendency claim that such efforts will make cities more equitable. They, however, have been unable to make any real dent in implementing these objectives not only due to complexity of land tenures but also because of the lack of clarity of the political and social ramifications of the large scale erasures proposed in such projects. Fifth, a tendency to promote self-redevelopment of mass housing stock to maximize spatial opportunities for existing residents within the current legislative frameworks, which has shown a negligible purchase by residents due to the limitations of the enabling environments to access bank loans that have only begun to show nascent change. Sixth, a tendency to retrofit physical infrastructures to improve living conditions in existing low-income settlements whose opportunities are created by lower level municipal staff and local politicians but which do not have much import with architects. And finally, an emerging tendency to create housing literacy amongst citizens to better understand current models of housing regulation, delivery and finance so that they could demand for better mass housing. Contemporary architectural practices, however, have remained limited in interrogating the discourses that have come to set the terms for producing spatial imaginations of housing in the first place.
This studio, therefore, operationalises a different tack by asking ‘what spatial affordances can lend to making home?’ in mass inhabitations. We define home as the set of relations, associations and meanings that individuals and households attach not only to the dwelling unit but also to their surrounding environment. These include emerging household configurations such as spatial relationships between individuals sharing a kitchen; spatial imaginations of domesticities produced by differences of class, caste, religion, gender and age; socioeconomic and cultural practices such as routines, rituals, events, gatherings, workspaces etc. and their resultant spatialities; and, spatial experiences such as those of pleasure, fear, desire, memories etc. Practices of making and inhabiting home are located in the interplay between an ecology of such associational spaces, for their immediacies and for future provisioning. Spatial affordances are the transactional possibilities made possible for life and living by the formal, configurational and experiential organization of built form. In thus exploring mass inhabitations, this studio explores the possibilities of articulating new discourses of housing, their spatial imaginations, and ideas of the regulatory, delivery and financial models that could shape them. It takes on the nascent model of self development to ask what could a spatially, socially, economically and ecologically sustainable model for housing be, where its existing residents are at the helm of the redevelopment.
Course objectives
Learners in this course will develop capacities and skills to:
(1) Analyze existing home making practices in housing builtform conditions, and the specific demographic conditions and speculations for the next 10 and 20 year horizons (Week1), which will include a study of emerging home making practices in mass inhabitations and their spatial affordances. This study will be compiled using methods of spatial diagramming and narrative drawings.
(2) Describe and analyze the site (Week 1), which will include a study of the opportunities and constraints shaped from emerging city contexts and site adjacencies; scale of a tenement, building cluster and site strategy of the existing layout; the legislative, delivery and financial models that shape the existing builtform. This study will be compiled through the use of diagrams, orthographic drawings, physical models and quantitative analysis.
(3) Conduct feasibility studies through a workshop (Week 1), in order to understand how legislative and financial frameworks are employed by developers in order to argue for alternative sustainable models.
(4) Formulate a spatial provocation on home making (Week 2-3), which will include programme building for the current situation and a speculation over 10 and 20 year horizons; sketching the spatial affordances of the imaginations for new and / or relevant home making practices, their diagramming at the scale of a tenement, cluster and site, and the regulatory, delivery and financial models embedded within the proposition. Spatial provocations will be articulated using sketches, spatial diagramming and conceptual models.
(4) Craft the spatial provocation into an architectural intervention (Week 4-6), which will include the translating the experiences of spatial affordances into the resolution of relevant spatial organization including patterns of circulation, and systems of structure, materiality and services. Crafting of the architectural intervention will be explored through scaled orthographic drawings and models.
(5) Articulate argumentative drawings for the proposition of mass inhabitation (1 week), which will draw out the spatial affordances explored in the architecture and its social relationships. Argumentative drawings will be explored through a combination of orthographic and narrative drawings.
Design case
The cooperative, in colonial and post-independence India, emerged as one of the institutional forms for subsidizing the production and distribution of public goods such as agricultural produce, dairy, financial credit, small-scale industries, housing etc. Efforts towards building cooperative housing societies received a filip in the wake of the cooperative societies Act of 1904 with ensuing legislation in 1912, 1919 and 1960. This legislation made it possible for individuals to organize themselves as a collective through the institutional form of a cooperative, and seek land and finance for the construction of housing schemes. Such cooperatives, in Mumbai, were implicitly shaped by caste, religious and linguistic identities of their members, on the one hand, and by their employment in the public sector, on the other hand. These socioeconomic identities have shaped the form of life and living in such cooperative housing societies.
Mumbai’s first cooperative housing societies, initiated during the early 1900s, included societies such as the Saraswat Cooperative Housing Society, Talmakiwadi Cooperative Housing Society, St. Sebastian Homes Cooperative Housing Society etc. The city’s post-independence suburbanization saw the development of cooperative housing societies by entrepreneurs such as Baburao Paranjpe who established Parleshwar Cooperative Housing Society, Vishnu Prasad Cooperative Housing Society etc. in Vile Parle during the 1950s. Following their success, several cooperative housing societies were built by Baburao Paranjape at Ashok Nagar in Borivali during the 1970s such as Karmayog Cooperative Housing Society, Dyanayog Cooperative Housing Society, Rajayog Cooperative Housing Society, Bhaktiyog Cooperative Housing Society, Yoganand Co-op Housing Society etc.
Transforming household configurations, wear and tear of the builtform including its dilapidation in some cases, and even aspirations for increased tenement space made possible by the current legislative framework shape the emerging contexts of redevelopment of such cooperative housing societies. In this studio, we will explore the spatial imaginations of the redevelopment of cooperative housing societies’ in Mumbai through one design case, namely, the Bhaktiyog Cooperative Housing Society in Borivali (https://goo.gl/maps/Vq7vCDAzLXYENhxcA).
Studio mentors: Rohit Mujumdar, Rupali Gupte, Shreyank Khemalapure and Prasad Shetty