Joseph Manuel Koli is a large man. Dressed in white, he cuts an imposing figure as he strides through the lanes of his neighbourhood in Dharavi, pausing to speak to labourers involved in construction work.
Changing demands
Over the past 20 years, Mr. Koli has been involved in constructing hundreds of houses in the neighbourhood. Loosely termed a contractor, he does far more than repair and maintenance work. “When I was a young man living here,” he says, “my neighbours used to work as labourers and carpenters, and I joined them. The daily wage used to be about Rs. 35 a day and I worked in that profession until it reached about Rs. 65 a day. By then, I had started to get my own ideas about what people here want and what they look for when they are rebuilding their houses.” Today, he is more of an architect and interior designer.
As families grow and the scope of work expands, he explains, many people are demolishing their original single-storey hutments to build bigger structures, big enough to accommodate both a workspace and a comfortable home. And Mr. Koli is one of the many contractors involved with the complex process of rebuilding this large slum.
He, and a group of other contractors like him, are part of a project run by Urbz, the Institute of Urbanology, which is curating a project in Dharavi called the ‘ideal home’. It is part of the Dharavi museum movement that aims to showcase local talent through an exhibition space and to employ design as a tool to promote social change and innovation. After working with artisans involved in pottery and ceramics to come up with innovative designs, the group at Urbz wanted to acknowledge these contractors as artists in their own right.
“The idea is to engage with the locals and provide them a catalyst for coming up with innovative designs,” says Jai Bhadgaonkar, the architect who is overseeing the project. “These are people with no formal training in architecture, and we, as architects, sit with them and help them.”
An important factor here is that the contractors are asked to imagine building a house from scratch, with no restrictions in terms of floor space index (FSI) and floor height. They are just asked to imagine what an ideal house, one that would appeal to residents of their neighbourhood, would look like.
Exchange of ideas
From the second floor of his house in Dharavi, Mr. Koli explains that the process of designing a house involves discussions with the residents. “It depends on several factors, like workspace and the number of people in their family. We go about it based on their needs. For instance, if there are two brothers, and they want run a grocery shop on the ground floor, then it often happens that they will run it by rotation. This means that the house has to be designed in a way that each of their units has equal access to the ground floor.” Another example: for the interiors, he explains, as families grow it’s important to have floors with a good ceiling height, so that an additional slab can be built for sleeping areas.
Based on the ideas of contractors like him, the Urbz team has created three models — in wood, acrylic and steel — corresponding to different ideas of an ideal home. “The beauty of this process is that these contractors don’t work with drawings, they work from intuition,” Mr. Bhadgaonkar explains. “There are times when they explain they want a terrace, for instance, and I draw something with straight lines. They are quick to make corrections like insisting that they want the parapet to have curved line so it doesn’t impose on the neighbour’s space.”
All the designs curated, Mr. Bhadgaoankar says, have some important commonalities in terms of the usage of space. “In all cases, the contractors have opted for the work and living space to be in the same building, and for one or two small units to be rented out to tenants. The other feature is that the staircase is always designed in a way that everyone has access to public spaces while also having their own private spaces.”
Despite being told that there are no restrictions, each of the contractors have acknowledged that going above three stories would not be feasible since the soil in Dharavi is not strong enough to support such structures.
The team at Urbz eventually hopes to create a dialogue with the government through these ‘ideal homes,’ and challenge the model of slum redevelopment that is currently in vogue: erecting high rise buildings in their place.
Pointing to a cluster of Slum Rehabilitation Authority buildings near the area in which he works, Mr. Koli gives The Hindu his version of why the high-rise model doesn’t work. “They are not popular because people are separated from their livelihoods, and on the seventh and eighth floor, they don’t have the same equation with the street that they once did.” There is also the fact in a flat of about 230 square feet there is little opportunity to change the space as the family expands.
The ideal homes project provides a counter narrative to the thought that development, based on increasing FSI, is encouraged as the only option for building affordable housing and moving people away from slums. It wants to encourage the thought that the best idea is to let self-built houses develop around spaces where better amenities and infrastructure can be developed by government.
