Over the past century, the “slum” has emerged as Mumbai’s dominant housing type and the foremost object of its policy interventions. With nearly six of every ten inhabitants residing in government-recognised slums, Mumbai is currently home to one of the highest slum populations of any city in the world. However, its built form also reveals it as a test bed for an impressive range of public interventions in the field of affordable housing. Starting in the late nineteenth century, these interventions have ranged from top-down strategies involving slum clearance, resettlement, and redevelopment to more experimental, bottom-up schemes that have encouraged in-situ upgradation, self-help, and the active participation of communities.

Through the deployment of multidisciplinary and overlapping lenses of “Policies,” “Physical Form,” and “Patterns of Inhabitation,” this dissertation traces the formation of these paradigmatic policy shifts from a global perspective while centring its attention on the physical form of these policies and their transformation over time in Mumbai. By positing the city’s policy and physical landscape as a fertile site for understanding the emerging urbanism of the twenty-first century, and by extracting evidence collected through historical surveys and fieldwork, the dissertation aims to create new metrics to assess the physical performance of past policies and programmes and to point directions for the future—a future in which policymakers, architects, and planners operating globally can learn from, and build with, people and communities. ... Read more

Searching for the ideal density of households in residential areas has been a persistent pursuit of planners, designers, and policymakers since the inception of the rapid urbanization process triggered by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. One of the main challenges in this goal has been achieving the optimal trade-off between economic efficiency and quality of life, avoiding urban conditions prone to trigger social unrest and environmental degradation. [...] ... Read more

Soon after India’s independence in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, commissioned Le Corbusier with the plan for the new capital of Punjab, Chandigarh. While Le Corbusier and his team were building Chandigarh largely based on the principles of CIAM’s Athens Charter, the CIAM met in Dubrovnik, in 1956, with the aim to draft a Charte de l’Habitat. But while no such charter was ever formally drawn up, over the next two decades, discourse on ‘habitat’ would come to be dominated by members of Team 10 and their largely Euro-American affiliates. However, this paper argues that the most significant typological innovations in housing design in the second half of the last century are to be found outside the conventional canon of Euro-American circles. In fact, it was the Habitat Bill of Rights, a manifesto commissioned in 1976 by the Iranian government to an ad-hoc group of architects including Josep Luis Sert, George Candilis, Nader Ardalan, Moshe Safdie and Balkrishna Doshi, that proved to play a pivotal role in shaping post-colonial typological innovations in housing design that would take the notions of temporality, community, and patterns of human inhabitation as key factors in the design process. To illustrate the impact of the Habitat Bill of Rights, this paper will unpack the Aranya Township project, a ‘sites-and-services’ scheme prepared by Doshi in the mid-1980s in Indore in India that drew many of its design principles from the influential 1976 document. Using data collected on-site and graphic documentation of the settlement’s transformation through time, from the late 1980s until its current state, this paper will demonstrate how Aranya promotes incremental growth as a determining factor to reconcile some of the key objectives of modern urbanism (improving sanitation and mechanical efficiency) while acknowledging and accommodating vernacular patterns of inhabitation and community. ... Read more

This video will present a very short history of the sites-and-services approach, one of the most popular strategies for the development of incremental housing implemented over the last half-century. We will explore this approach from the perspective of spatial design, and use two case studies (Nefas Silk, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Charkop, Mumbai, India) to unpack some of the key design and managerial considerations one must take into account while planning for sustainable and affordable housing. ... Read more

In 1956, the same year when José Luis Sert organised the land - mark conference on urban design at Harvard, the international organisation CIAM met in Dubrovnik with the aim to draft a ‘Charte de l’Habitat’. But while no such charter was ever formally drawn up, over the next two decades, architecture and planning discourse would come to be dominated by members of Team X and their largely Euro-American affiliates who proposed an ecological notion of ‘Habitat’ with varying “scales of association” as an antithesis to the ‘Functional City’ propagated by the ‘Charte d’Athènes’ of 1933. This paper intends to expand the debate on habitat beyond this limited geography and timeframe by throwing light on its development – and transformation – through two understudied manifestos writ - ten from the context of the Developing World. The first is the 1976 ‘Habitat Bill of Rights’ prepared on behalf of the Iranian government and co-authored by Sert, George Candilis, Nader Ardalan, Moshe Safdie and Balkrishna Doshi that found its most direct translation in the design of a ‘sites and services’ scheme prepared by Doshi in the mid-1980s in Indore. The second case is Charles Correa’s 1985 ‘Bill of Rights for Housing’ that described seven principles and a hierarchical “system of spaces” that he believed to be essential ingredients for building affordable cities best demonstrated in his incremental housing project built in New Bombay. In both cases, it is not architecture – which, in fact, was programmed to be morphed by dwellers over time – but urban design that prevails and generates community. Through a spatial reading of these two cases that draws on both archival and contemporary material, this paper seeks to position housing design – especially in today’s context of the Global South – as primarily an urban design challenge of curating thresholds: from the private courtyard to the public commons. ... Read more

In 2009, I found myself in the fortunate position of working as a young architect in Charles Correa’s office and assisting him on what would be his last book. Closing the circle on a lifetime spent writing and theorizing on architectural and urban issues, A Place in the Shade: The New Landscape & Other Essays is a collection of about thirty short texts that gives one an insight into Correa’s incisive and analytical mind on a wide range of topics: from architecture and art to planning and politics. Sometimes reflective, and almost always provocative, the essays illustrate Correa’s confident command of these diverse topics and his ability to connect them to the agency of the architect – a role that he was convinced comprised not just of designing buildings but one that also needed to engage with urban issues through public writing, teaching and advocacy. [...] ... Read more

The BK faculty will be represented at the 17th Venice International Architecture Exhibition with “Housing the Urban Invisibles”. A show that displays student work and educational material that critically explores alternative approaches for the design of mass housing as a key component of sustainable development.

This show addresses the theme of the Biennale, “How Will We Live Together?”, and invites the visitors to re-think the current systems for the production of affordable housing worldwide, with a particular focus on contexts undergoing a process of rapid urban growth.

“Housing the Urban Invisibles” draws upon the results of the Dhaka studio co-organised by Prof. Marina Tabassum during her Visiting Professorship at the faculty in the Spring of 2019, expanded with photos and student work developed under the auspices of the Global Housing educational programme for Tema (Ghana), Mumbai (India) and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). The students work from the Global Housing studios is complemented with a display of educational material developed for the edX MOOC “Global Housing Design”, developed by the Global Housing research group. ... Read more

Building adequate housing is a pressing issue worldwide. With close to a billion people currently living in slums, accommodating a growing population, and improving dwelling conditions is a critical issue for society. This challenge cannot be solved with a one-size-fits-all approach. Every city, region and country demand their own housing models and prototypes. That’s why housing design needs to negotiate many aspects simultaneously to achieve sustainable urban environments and inclusive dwelling communities. This course uncovers how social, economic and environmental factors are interrelated in the design of housing settlements. For this, the course dives into three key aspects that anyone involved in housing design should take into consideration: time, environment, and community. Each of these aspects will be examined through a specific design approach, respectively Incrementality, Typology Mix, and Clustering. ... Read more

The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization investigates the mutual relationship between the struggle for political inclusion and processes of informal urbanization in different socio-political and cultural settings.

It seeks a middle ground between two opposing perspectives on the political meaning of urban informality. The first, the ‘emancipatory perspective’, frames urban informality as a practice that fosters autonomy, entrepreneurship and social mobility. The other perspective, more critical, sees informality predominantly as a result of political exclusion, inequality, and poverty. Do we see urban informality as a fertile breeding ground for bottom-up democracy and more political participation? Or is urban informality indeed merely the result of a democratic deficit caused by governing autocratic elites and ineffective bureaucracies?

This book displays a wide variety of political practices and narratives around these positions based on narratives conceived upon specific case cities. It investigates how processes of urbanization are politicized in countries in the Global South and in transition economies.

The handbook explores 24 cities in the Global South, as well as examples from Eastern Europe and East Asia, with contributions written by a global group of scholars familiar with the cases (often local scholars working in the cities analyzed) who offer unique insight on how informal urbanization can be interpreted in different contexts. These contributions engage the extreme urban environments under scrutiny which are likely to be the new laboratories of 21st-century democracy. It is vital reading for scholars, practitioners, and activists engaged in informal urbanisation. ... Read more

Public exhibition held between 1st November and 30th November 2018 at Lilavati Lalbhai Library, CEPT University on the housing designs of Charles Correa. ... Read more

Public exhibition held at the Charles Correa Foundation as part of the 'Designing Equitable Cities' conference in Panjim, Goa. ... Read more

This paper reveals how the second Iran International Congers of Architects (IICA), held in Persepolis- Shiraz in 1974, and the first UN Habitat conference, held in Vancouver, Canada in 1976 played an instrumental role in shaping a discourse on the notion of regionalism in the design for human habitats, especially in developing countries. Building upon a brief analysis of the works of Nader Ardalan, Kamran Diba, Charles Correa, Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Raj Rewal, this paper discussed the incorporation of the ideas published in the Habitat Bill of Rights within their private commissions for large scale housing schemes and master plans in their respective countries, Iran and India. More crucially, this paper argues that both events helped bring together these architects who later, in different capacities, played significant roles as members of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in fostering and promoting an alternative way of adapting modernism to industrializing countries. ... Read more

A public exhibition held between 4 July and 25 July 2018 at the Indian Institute of Architecture, Kolkata, on the housing designs of Charles Correa. ... Read more

On 7 March 2018 came a major announcement in the world of architecture. For the first time in its 39-year long history, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often referred to as ’the Nobel Prize for Architecture’ was conferred to an Indian architect. Born in 1927, in Pune, Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, simply known as Doshi to most people, was awarded the prize for his lifelong commitment to the practice of architecture as well as to education. [...] ... Read more

Mumbai is both the financial capital of India and its largest city. The city’s planning authorities are faced with the enormous task of accommodating Mumbai’s ever-increasing urban poor population. At present more than half of Mumbai’s 12.5 million inhabitants live in informal settlements or slums. Over the years, several policies have evolved to tackle the proliferation of slums, starting with the Slum Clearance Act of 1956 right up to the current Slum Redevelopment Scheme (SRS) of 1995, which marks a fundamental shift in the role of the state towards mass housing. Rather than investing itself, the supply of affordable housing in the city has since been primarily handed over to the private sector with the state itself acting merely as a facilitator in the process. In this scheme, eligible families living in recognized slums are rehoused on existing plots by the private developer in exchange for a portion of the land and higher construction rights that can be used to build new market housing. However, being a developer-centric scheme, each family is given a fixed 22.5 m2 housing unit in a high-rise tenement often with drastically inadequate light or ventilation. Moreover, by ignoring the existing living patterns of such communities and the social amenities that they so crucially require, a majority of these projects have done little to improve the living conditions of the urban poor in the city. ... Read more

Nooit eerder was het zo urgent nieuwe modellen voor betaalbare woningen te ontwikkelen voor de wereldwijd alsmaar uitdijende steden. Goede, betaalbare woningen zijn nodig, zowel om mensen die over weinig tot geen middelen beschikken, in staat te stellen in steden te gaan wonen die voor hen de belofte van een betere toekomst in zich dragen, als om de dreiging van stedelijke segregatie het hoofd te bieden. India houdt zich al sinds het land in 1947 onafhankelijk werd met deze kwestie bezig. Dat heeft geresulteerd in een reeks experi men tele woning¬ontwerpen die nog steeds inspireren, maar ook duidelijk tonen dat het bijna onmogelijk is succesvolle en blijvende oplossingen te vinden. [...] ... Read more

A year ago today, on June 16th 2015, the architectural community lost Charles Correa (b.1930) – a man often referred to as “India’s Greatest Architect” and a person whose impact on the built environment extended far beyond his own native country. Rooted in India, Correa’s work blended Modernity and traditional vernacular styles to form architecture with a universal appeal. Over the course of his career, this work earned him—among many others—awards including the 1984 RIBA Royal Gold Medal (UK), the 1994 Praemium Imperiale (Japan), and the 2006 Padma Vibhushan (India’s second highest civilian honor). [...] ... Read more

In 1964 Charles Correa, Pravina Mehta and Shirish Patel proposed a radical plan to restructure Mumbai (then Bombay) by developing land across the harbour to accommodate the city’s growing population. Now known as Navi Mumbai, this planned city for 2 million people was built to redirect some of the migration away from Mumbai and help shift the axis of growth in the old city from a monocentric north-south one, to a polycentric urban network around the bay. This, they hoped, would help distribute people and jobs more evenly. But apart from its planning ideals, Navi Mumbai is also well known for its experiments in mass housing. Along with Correa’s Incremental Housing in Belapur (a district in Navi Mumbai), the CIDCO Housing built by the Delhi-based architect Raj Rewal was seen as an answer to the enormous challenge of generating a viable habitat for high-density communities at low cost. [...] ... Read more