Dry Feet

The growing population in urban areas around the world puts tremendous stress on natural resources. In India, the urban population has increased form 18 percent to 34 percent of the total population between 1960 and 2017 and is expected to exceed the rural population at the end of 2040. The growing urban population will putt stress on the...

Organizing the Unorganized: Towards empowerment of the informal sector

Nalasopara East, a representative case of chaotic urban fabric in Mumbai, India, is comprised of densely packed mid-rise chawl developments which neglect the complex and unorganized network of informal economic activities of the low-income residents for the benefit of the private developers. This affordable housing project aims to embrace the...

Bridging Realities: A Response to Spatial Inequality in Mumbai & Nalasopara

In Mumbai, “two-thirds of the city’s (Bombay) residents are crowded<br/>into just 5 percent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolize the remaining 95 percent.” The Development Plans for Mumbai, criticized as “a form of ‘planned’ exclusion of the poor and the middle class”, have failed to address issues of...

Towards a Sustainable Density

This graduation project has the name 'Towards a Sustainable Density', and is part of the Global Housing Studio, which aims to rethink the current systems of affordable housing in the Global South. Today, nearly fifteen percent of the world's population lives in poverty in urban areas, of which the majority can be found in the Global South. This...

A Framework for Resilient Communities: An alternative strategy to the current affordable housing developments for the urban poor in suburban Mumbai.

Housing projects being developed in the future, must challenge the previous problematic development trends built on efficiency in the past. In order to do so, Jan Bredenoord, Paul Van Lindert and Peer Smets state, within their book ‘Affordable Housing in the Global Urban South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions’, that new communities being developed...

A Place to Breathe: An alternative for in-situ redevelopment of Baithi Chawls in Nala Sopara

The chosen site for the graduation project demonstrates how the shortage of affordable housing becomes a problem in the Mumbai, how this issue has been responded, and how these actions affect the living quality. The challenge is how to generate an alternative for the provision of affordable housing by taking into account not only the issue of...

Blurred boundaries: The Reintroduction Of Hierarchical Spaces In The Baithi Chawls Of Mumbai

India is the second most populated country in the world, counting for over 1,3 billion people, a number that is rapidly increasing. In line with the rest of the world, India is, next to its increase in population, seeing a rapid urbanization, with Mumbai in the centre of it all. Considering the increase of population and the urbanization of...

Transit City

One of the cities where the rapid urbanisation of the global south is most eminent is Mumbai, the economic capital of India. Due to a rising economy over the last century millions of people migrated to the city. This urbanisation led to an enormous density and therefore prices of land exploded in the inner city. Due to its physical constrains –...

Leaving space: an alternative for the chawl redevelopment in Nala Sopara

In Nala Sopara, In the Mumbai metropolitan region, we can find many one-story dwelling blocks called ‘baithi chawls’. Due to the increasing demand for housing in this area, the developers have shifted their focus to the build of four to five-story chawls. We can distinguish two forms of chawl development; the redevelopment and the new...