(Curator exhibits own projects to culminate exhibit)

Mumbai's unending search for affordable residences could find clues in a project in Navi Mumbai, which has drawn from the architecture of city chawls

Amidst the steel-and-glass clutter of Lower Parel, the four towers of the Ambedkar Nagar Slum Rehabilitation Authority housing project are still an imposing sight. Built in 2010 by a private developer to replace dilapidated tenements, their spartan geometry suggests a no-frills attempt to maximise space. Inside, though, small flats are separated by dark corridors. Affordable it may be, but it’s not exactly very liveable.

Affordable housing is now an official buzzword: during the recent Make in India week, state chief minister Devendra Fadnavis suggested a ‘built in Mumbai’ to create more affordable housing projects. Is there a way however, to make these projects more liveable? Has enough thought gone into their design?

An exhibition on affordable housing (on till March 21st at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture) organised by the architecture firm Sameep Padora and Associates seeks to look at the question of affordable housing in this light, to create discussion around design. On display is a documentation of the various housing typologies in Mumbai, and a study of the architecture of types of chawls across the city. Mumbai has a rich history of affordable housing, and the chawls, built originally as units for workers, are a testament to this. In the narrative around Mumbai's chawls there is always a portrayal of the socio-cultural fabric and the feeling of community that they created; think of the 1983 movie Katha, directed by Sai Paranjpye, or Kiran Nagarkar’s cult 1995 novel Ravan & Eddie.

But the firm found that there was very little documentation of the kind of architecture that enabled that socio-cultural fabric to exist. “This study began after a developer approached us to build an affordable housing project on the outskirts of Navi Mumbai,” Sameep Padora explains. “Before we started building, we decided to study different models of earlier affordable housing projects in the city. What we found is that the much-eulogised social life was a product of a specific architectural framework as much as it was the other way around.” In the 14 projects they studied, Mr Padora and his team found several innovative design concepts that ensured shared community spaces existed even in projects meant to house a lot of people.

Some of the more interesting projects are higlighted in this story. Mr Padora plans to use some of these concepts for Udaan, his Navi Mumbai project, which he wants to make different from the likes of Ambedkar Nagar. The central focus: making sure that life for the people who will eventually live in this building will not be confined to the four walls of the interior. He also hopes that his findings from the study will find their way into policy discussion about the design of affordable housing.

According to architect Kamu Iyer, whose book Boombay: From Precincts to Sprawl, is one of the major works detailing the history of chawls in Mumbai, the discussion around affordable housing in Mumbai is complicated by a shortage of land but there are still ways to develop better designs. He says, “Mr Padora's project is in Navi Mumbai, where land is still not so expensive, so innovation is possible. But for the rest of the city, it can be complicated. Still, the study is a step in the right direction and there should be new thinking about how to build affordable housing projects.”

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