I particularly liked this video produced at the workshop made by the TISS team. The first part shows Koli women working at the fish market and the second shows some boys playing cricket. The effects in the video are great.
Ottawa's own Michael Parker (who plays a mean harmonica and is a participant to the Urban Typhoon workshop) created a blog for participants to meet before next week and maybe also keep in touch afterwards. Not much on it yet, but feel free to inject some life to it.
http://www.goingtodharavi.blogspot.com
Holi is a festival of colour celebrating the new harvest. The city celebrates with a vengeance from 6:00 am onwards. People throw colour and water on each other (beware of water balloons landing on unsuspecting heads) and generally have a wild time. Please wear old clothes which can be dumped that day, if you are planning to venture out. Dharavi is known to be particularly noisy and enthusiastic and a bunch of international guests will invite loads of attention. Might be wise to catch up on sleep the whole morning and afternoon in preparation for the party that evening.
From 9:30pm: Mad Decent Urban Typhoon Party
Special guest: Dj Paul Devro [Mad Decent, Philadelphia]
@ Blue Frog Club
D/2 Mathuradas Mills Compound
N.M. Joshi Marg
Mumbai 400 013
http://bluefrog.co.in
7:00 pm Monday March 17 in Koliwada Dharavi
Charles Correa is an architect, planner, activist, theoretician and a fundamental figure in the world-wide panorama of contemporary
Over the last four decades, Correa has done pioneering work in urban issues and low cost shelter in the Third World. From 1970-75, he was Chief Architect for New Bombay an urban growth center of 2 million people, across the harbor from the existing city. In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi appointed him Chairman of the National Commission on Urbanization.
He was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for the year 1984. His acclaimed design for McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT was dedicated recently. He is a recipient of the civilian awards in India, Padma Vibhushan (2006) and Padma Shri.
(Charles Correa will attend the workshop and give a lecture, but he will not lead a team, so please don't register for him.)
Financial Express Reports on Dharavi, Mumbai, Feb 4
Finally, the bidding process for the redevelopment of Asia ’s largest slum Dharavi is likely to take place within the next two weeks. According to government sources, government is issuing a tender document is imminent. Mukesh Mehta, chairman, MM Project Consultants private Ltd told FE, “As per the norms required for the project, 19 consortiums have been shortlisted out of the 27 applied earlier including international and national developers to bid for the Dharavi redevelopment."
Urban Typhoon organizers accompanied some fishermen from Dharavi's Koliwada on a harrowing canoe trip through Mahim Creek - just across the road from the settlement - to see how the tradition survives today. Once the customary occupation and caste identity of Kolis, fishing is no longer the main activity of the community because of environmental and economic changes. Himanchu, a college-aged resident of Koliwada who accompanied us on the expedition, had never been fishing. Still, about 50 fishermen continue the tradition.
The whole Urban Typhoon organizers' team is meeting in Koliwada this week to prepare the workshop. We will post some images as the week goes on. Above is the sidewalk close to Sion station. Below our friend Himanshu who will be helping throughout and of course participating to the workshop.
Himanshu's family owns a Dattatraya temple in the center of Koliwada.
More soon!
From The Economist print edition
Light in the darkness
FLYING into Mumbai airport, many visitors' first view of India is of a mass of corrugated-roofed slums clustered on hillsides around the end of the main runway. That is scarcely a viable image for a country's commercial capital that has set Shanghai as its role model, and it is a problem that has defied government action for over 30 years. But hidden in these and Mumbai's other sprawling slums is a thriving entrepreneurial spirit that has spawned small businesses ranging from pottery to leather goods, and that is also now beginning to support formal property development.
http://www.economist.comLabels: Inside the slums
House in a Slum? You Can't Afford It.
Madhukar Gurav welcomed me to his apartment, airy and bright. Its 225 square feet house a family of four. Yet this modest home is several levels up from where he lived before, and not just because it is on the top floor of the building. Until Gurav scraped together the half-million rupees, or $12,500, to buy this flat two years ago, he lived in a Mumbai slum in a shack made of plywood and tarp.laBase Collective (New York, Switzerland, Chile)
- Architects
Zexe (Barcelona)
- Mediactivists
Which means that registration is open
Thanks to Tomo-chan our web designer who's working hard from Barcelona.
MUMBAI, Dharavi-Koliwada
March 16 – 23, 2008
Dharavi's Koliwada is a traditional fisher folk community in one of Asia's largest slum. Koliwada's village like character has been preserved even in the midst of the dramatic urban and demographic changes that Mumbai has experienced in the last century.
The workshop will produce creative urban designs for Koliwada as well as a multimedia testimony to the unique spirit of the community. This workshop will also be an experiment in participatory planning and global collaborative work. Architects, urban planners, artists, activists and legal experts from India and many other parts of the world will be joining the workshop, working in teams consisting primarily of local residents. Faculty and students from University of Tokyo, Harvard, Yale and Columbia will be participating.
All material produced will be uploaded on a wikimedia website
We hope that the workshop will empower the community to think about the design aspects of redevelopment and build capacity by providing methodologies and infrastructures with which the community can generate and communicate its own urban data.
Urban Typhoon is an experiment in global team-work and participatory design. The first workshop in this series took place in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo (Japan) in June 2006 when 130 local residents and international participants brainstormed with world-class practitioners on the future of this alternative neighborhood located in the heart of Tokyo.