Navi Mumbai is a city designed to diffuse the overpopulation problem of Mumbai. However, there were villages in the area that developed informally alongside the formal city. These villages present several problems such as inadequate housing, identity loss, lack of infrastructure, lack of public space, overcrowding and crammed streets. There are two possible outcomes for these villages, their eradication to make way for the formal city or their existence in limbo as leftover space. The project aims to break through this dichotomy and an urbanisation strategy is developed for the remaining villages in the city that anticipate informal development. The project focuses on Moha Koliwada, a fishing village that is inhabited by members of the Koli people. An urban plan is developed first to provide the community with the necessary infrastructure to urbanise in a healthy manner. Three housing typologies are designed to serve different purposes: to ensure the important access to the sea, to maintain village life and to increase the density of the village. The housing typologies are inspired from Indian modernism and more specifically low rise - high density projects. The aim is to allow these villages to connect with and contribute to the formal planned city while maintaining their distinct village character. The project attempts to show how these villages can provide housing for the urban poor in a better and more humane manner than the mass housing schemes developed by the authorities and more specifically CIDCO (City and Industrial Development Corporation). The mass housing schemes are problematic as we are historically aware in the West, they don’t reach the poorest inhabitants in India and they unfortunately become an aspiration for many residents of informal settlements. Finally, guidelines regarding urban planning, stakeholders and housing typologies are developed for the urbanisation of other villages in Navi Mumbai. ... Read more

In India, informal waste management (IWM) within slums stands at the intersection of informal economy and circular economy. Collecting and processing hundreds of tonnes of municipal solid waste per day, this industry supports the millions of people engaged in this business and provides ecological and economic contributions to Indian cities. However, IWM is currently faced with the problems of internal vulnerability from slums and external threats from cities. The current situation of Indian slums does not correspond to the aspirations of dwellers and workers for a better living and working environment, nor the expectations of cities for a better urban image and development prospects. Over the last few decades, many slum redevelopment schemes have attempted to change this situation, yet their entire focus on resettlement strategies has left no space for IWM as well as other informal businesses. As ecosystems buzzing with activities, slums cannot simply be replaced by neat low-income housing estates unless they allow for the flourishing of many dynamic economic and social activities and new trajectories of resource use that contribute to sustainable livelihoods. The aim of the research is to explore a new direction for future slum development, which entails a synthesis of economic, environmental and social sustainability. The design result will allow informal waste management to operate in synergy with other economic sectors in a spontaneous socio-economic cluster to promote sustainable livelihoods for slum dwellers and sustainable development for Navi Mumbai. ... Read more

India's rapid urbanization results in a horizontal urban expansion to the periphery, shaping them into a dynamic rural-urban interface termed the 'peri-urban'. On the one hand, urbanization has profoundly impacted villages within the urban boundaries and resulted in a massive breakdown of local space through gradual changes in land use, economy, and social linkage. On the other hand, infrastructure works in the city have provided many job opportunities, attracting poor migrants from surrounding rural areas to move to the city. In 2010, about 35% of the population in Navi Mumbai were rural migrants. They were mainly working in labour-intensive sectors, such as quarrying.

Unprecedented urbanization in India increased existing inequalities and exacerbated urban exclusion in the context of disability to access social services and formal houses. Government interventions have been unable to respond to the exclusion appropriately, especially in the housing sector. Under the existing social housing allocation system, most quarry workers are excluded from applying for formal social housing without legal citizenship and stable incomes in the city. They have to live in self-built informal shelters which have difficulty accessing basic amenities and are exposed to high levels of risk, including pollution, dynamite blasting, and heavy industrial road traffic. In general, the dynamic socio-spatial spaces in the peri-urban area are full of multidimensional conflicts between villagers, migrants, and government officials. Fortunately, housing is a combination of domestic activities, income generation, and social linkage in the Global South. It is significant for urban development and facilitates social integration.

From an urban aspect, long-term socio-ecological urban resilience will be achieved through urban upgrading in Navi Mumbai's quarry belt. The upgrading will be divided into three phases: resettlement, urban upgrading, and ecological restoration. Focus on the resettlement phase, the proposal of the residential cluster is based on quarry workers' collective and mutual-help lifestyle. The temporality in the quarry area has also been taken into account, which may help the project adapt to the post-quarry period. Finally, a conclusion of urban-scale design principles will serve for upscaling and replicability of this project. It will guide the resettlement and upgrading of many informal settlements located in the quarry belt.


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Housing project located in Navi Mumbai, India, with a goal of social integration, and a gender-sensitive design approach. The main goal is to create places of loitering for fun and leisure for women of all income groups. ... Read more

Navi Mumbai is the largest planned city in the world, situated on the west coast of India, in Maharashtra state. Despite there being roughly an equal divide between the sexes, pubic space Navi Mumbai remains a male domain similar to many other cities around the world. Women’s access to public space is highly conditional and therefore their movement within these spaces is limited. Social restrictions on women’s spatial mobility reduce their job opportunities especially those from the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) and the Low Income Group (LIG) since their livelihoods depend on public space. These women are faced with issues regarding their own safety, their sense of belonging and the lack of access to basic needs such as sanitation. The opportunities for women in the informal sector are extremely limited and the restricted access to public space only exacerbates this issue.

The City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) of Maharashtra was formed by the government in 1970 with the aim to address the urban housing shortage among the lower and middle income groups, including slum dwellers. Their mission is to house these people in pucca, meaning permanent, houses by the year 2022. However, in recent years, the Mass Housing Scheme has become standardized, failing to deliver what it promises, offering no planned amenities and only providing 2 very similar dwelling types. The scheme’s incapability to provide for different people’s inhabitation patterns and needs, demands a new approach. The same is true for the environmental impact on the area, specifically in regards to the mangroves. Ever since CIDCO started to develop the satellite city there has not been any serious action taken to preserve and expand the natural environment.

In response to the research, the proposed project targets areas in Navi Mumbai where the CIDCO Mass Housing Scheme has already been built in order to activate the existing schemes by means of a gender sensitive approach. A set of gender sensitive principles have been derived from the book Why Loiter? by Shilpa Phadke, writing on women and the risk on Mumbai streets. These principles have been applied at every scale from the urban strategy to the individual dwelling unit. The scheme consists of four components including separate building types for each income group with public space acting as a social connector. The project aims to show that by increasing the density and taking up more ground space, an unwelcome dead zone can be converted to a lively, safe and inclusive neighbourhood for all.
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The world is increasingly urbanised. Especially in those countries that are in rapid development, the migration to the city is extreme. This is the case for Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Its population growth exceeds the number of newly built housing, and the housing that exists is unfit for a majority of the urban population. People create their own solution and move to informal neighbourhoods: neighbourhoods where they build their own houses and earn their money on the streets.

While the conditions in the informal settlements are far from optimal, people can live their life and create their own opportunities. Somehow, they make a living that they cannot make in formal housing units: either due to the rent they cannot afford to pay, or due to the inability to earn an income in the way they do in the informal neighbourhood. In this way of living the life in the informal neighbourhoods, temporality plays an important role. People are versitale, can adapt to different situations, different circumstances. They can build up a process, starting something from scratch with the resilience to improve it, one step at the time. The streets are vital: pedestrian flows are economic opportunities. Converting any moment, any place into an opportunity that fits the situation the best: from a kitchen to a shop through the window, from a outdoor stall to an outdoor cooking spot, from a place of moving and travelling, to a place for gathering and meeting. Spaces can transform, dwellings can transform, adapt to circumstances, adapt to serve the opportunity that seems most succesful. It is this temporal element that makes them resilient.

But these people are also vulnerable. With the current neighbourhood conditions, a lack of good quality housing, a lack of a well patterned street-network, a lack of services and hygiene, a lack of legal ownership, the dangers are clearly visible: fire, flooding, eviction and disease are potential enemies, created by their living situation. These people, of which there are so many in a city like Addis Ababa, deserve a home that caters their needs, actively engages them to use their abilities to improve their neighbourhood with the right acces to services, streets, economic opportunties. How can we use the theme of temporality to create such dwellings?

In this project, a built environment is envisioned that combines the informal way of living (earning an income, having social relations), with a good quality of dwelling. It provides a framework in which people can built their dwellings tehmselves, keeping them affodable, and being able to constantly adapt the home to what they need most. It generates outside space as well as people flows on lower as well as higher levels to increase the economic opportunities for all of the people living in the area. ... Read more

This graduation booklet shows the work that is done during the ‘Global Housing Graduation Studio: Addis Ababa Living Lab’. The goal of this project was to research and design housing solutions to improve the livelihood of Addis Ababa’s urban dwellers. Currently, Addis Ababa is facing the problems which are caused by the ongoing rapid urbanization. One of these problems, and the focus of my graduation project, is the degradation of the rivers and riverbanks. This project proposes a rehabilitation of the riverbank informal settlements of Addis Ababa, as well as implements a strategy to increase the density of the city which also takes into account the existing inhabitants of these riverbanks and offers them a dwelling type that fits their traditional way of life. ... Read more

The world is urbanising rapidly, with the Global South as the part of the world with the most rapid urbanisation. The urban population of Ethiopia is predicted to nearly triple in 25 years. The swiftness of urbanisation is resulting in extreme challenges. It causes, reinforced by climate change, that Addis Ababa is increasingly affected by flooding. The urban poor are forced to settle in the least desirable areas, such as areas around rivers which are most vulnerable to flooding. The rivers of Addis Ababa are polluted with all kinds of waste because of inadequate services. Around half the population has no water supply, forcing people to purchase water in shops. The urban poor cannot afford this and use the unsafe water from the rivers as a consequent. The Ethiopian government launched in 2019 the Addis Ababa Riverside project, or the Sheger beautifying project. It follows a series of ongoing beautification projects in the Global South. The project aims to clean the rivers and create public spaces, bicycle paths and walkways along the rivers. The project is criticised because it is no certainty that the rivers will not continue flooding and there is no proposition for all the waste that is currently discharged into the rivers. Rapid urbanisation in combination with poverty and the inability of the state and the market to provide affordable housing, cause that over 1 billion people reside in informal settlements. Addis Ababa can be seen as an example of this inability. Historical grown, informal neighbourhoods called sefers are located in the city centre. Over the last decade, sefers are challenged by the swift urbanisation of Addis Ababa with a resettlement program aiming to replace these low-income neighbourhoods into denser urban schemes affecting the social, economic and political tissue. This program, the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP), was introduced by the government in 2005. The inhabitants of former kebele houses claim their houses get demolished without any compensation or alternative accommodation. Piassa is chosen as a project site, being currently challenged by demolition of the existing kebele housing. Having researched the location and its inhabitants, a housing system is designed with a combination of tenure systems for different income groups. These groups will live together in an inclusive, mixed-income environment in the inner-city of Addis Ababa. ... Read more

An Architecture of Enablement documents the design of a participatory housing system in the context of Addis Ababa. It represents the first application of the principles put forward in Patterns of Participation. It focuses on formulating a new standard of housing applicable city-wide, perhaps even nation-wide rather than a particular, site-specific piece of architecture. It confronts real-life issues head on, offering an alternative to the existing mode of mass housing in Addis Ababa. ... Read more

With almost 110 million inhabitants, Ethiopia is the largest and most populous
country in the Horn of Africa. In the current trend of global urbanization, Ethiopia’s cities are rapidly growing. A tripling of the urban population is to be expected in 2050, putting a big pressure on the housing stock and employment opportunities. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital is growing at 3.8% per year, as more and more people from smaller villages or rural areas search for a better life standard. Statistics show that among the relatively young migrants, 6 out of 10 is female, coming from different social and cultural backgrounds. Women in Ethiopia, and to a larger extent those living in rural areas, suffer from a lower social status in the patriarchal society. They struggle more to find appropriate housing and supporting networks. This thesis invests the opportunities to create gender sensitive housing to pave the way for these new urban women. Furthermore, it proposes an alternative to the current mass housing strategy. ... Read more