My neighborhood in covid time

My neighborhood in covid times

After almost 10 months of lockdown yesterday when I walked through my neighborhood it was surprising to see a city so happy again.I like my neighborhood since it has this typical character of "niche dukan upar makan".This stretch of 1km  has housing apartments, kindergarten, Reliance mart,small nursery at the edge of street.The unique quality of the street is that it connects the seawoods station and palm beach road and the corporation building at the end of the walking street. Inspite of covid lockdown our milkman and vegetable vendor were always working serving people by giving milk and vegetables at there doorstep.Even the reliance mart was working only difference was that there was coupon system wherein only 5 people were allowed at one time to maintain social distance and avoid over crowding.

Today while I was walking the pani puriwala at the corner of neighborhood was with his mask on and had 3-4 customers around him.Children playing badminton by cleaning grounds.Few children playing football on streets during lockdown whereas the others were on online classes.

To my surprise people were with yoga Matt onstreet exercising and few other with children in pramps.The nursery vendor says," There is nothing like corona."He is happy in his world of plants.My boutique friend has been working hard to keep her tailors working and multitasking. I think its herd immunity which saved Indians and good that our country has vaccine now so people are relieved and relaxed.Also all the homemakers have been cooking and cleaning and taking care of there loved ones.Most working men/women working online and running offices efficiently from home ,saving on travel time.All in all the new normal is going to be a wonderful family module.

Also there are few details in city which makes city life interesting 

For eg. Going down picking up milk, vegetables, laundry, nursery which one can easily  go and pick up.

That's the reason why townships work.

We as urban designers and common man should be sensitive to cities to enjoy city life.If there was no noise and chaos in city,city life would be so boring and mundane.

 Having people of all age groups is necessary to make life interesting

Niche dukan upar makan is the ideal mixed use typology

 In a city people feel safe with people around u even if u dont know each other.

As Jane Jacob ideally stated" A street is safe where there are eyes on street ,that's what makes city safe "

And that's exactly the feeling I felt when i walked today through my neighborhood.

Introducting the Team at UERO

Urban and Environmental Research Organization (UERO) was realized after several cups of coffee and constant discussions about urban issues in the city and across the globe. It has idealized with the vision to attain a deep rooted understanding of our cities and the process of continuous transformation which needs immediate attention. UERO believes that transformation is inevitable while innovative and sensitive urban insertions can prove to be very effective. At UERO, every research project has a strong theoretical understanding that leads to practical, sensitive and innovative design solutions. 

Sameera Rao, Ashlesha Kale, Samruddhi Raje, Saadiya Rawoot  ( From Left to Right)

Ashlesha kale is a Mumbai based Architect, has keen interest in writing on grass root  Urban Issues. She also loves to teach basic design and experiment with students on various techniques of design. She has been a jury in various Architecture schools in Mumbai and Pune. She also loves travelling and believes in the fact that a good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. She has travelled in various parts of India such as Jaipur, Delhi, Pondicherry, Auroville, Jodhpur, Udaipur ,villages of  Maharashtra,Mumbai,Pune, Karnataka,etc and world such as spain, Europe, USA, China, Hongkong, Seoul, Dubai. She has been a speaker on urban morphology conference in china. She also loves reading theories on urban issues and is in the process of finding a new theory on urban issues for the present time. She is a urban design post graduate from CEPT and is presently heading the Masters Program in Urban Design at D.Y.Patil College of Architecture, Mumbai. She is also the Principle of Research and Publications, UERO. 

Sameera Rao  a graduate in Landscape Architecture from Ball State University, Indiana and an urban designer by heart is an associate at UERO. She teaches at D.Y.Patil College of Architecture with a socialistic and humanistic approach to design.  She believes in challenging the existing systems and creating new alternative approaches to design to create habitable living environments. She strongly believes that design is everybody's business and the city dweller has a crucial role in the evolution of his environment. Some of her research interests are Public Spaces in the City, Informality as an Urban Form, Design Thinking and the Role of Research in Education. 

Saadiya Rawoot and Samruddhi Raje are the young and dynamic urban researchers of UERO with a passion to discover the secret behind the evolution and the constant growth of cities. They are curious and anxious to learn the existing theories and understand the metamorphosis through observation, analysis and design.

What's going on UERO?

Here are the projects that we are currently working on:

Great streets in Mumbai

We identified four popular streets in Mumbai and had our students on the streets to critically map them early May. Colaba Causeway, Crawford Market, Marine Drive and Flora Fountain have been our four sites of study and have been analysed in depth to understand the publicness of these spaces. We are now working on the final boards and a documentary film that will unveil the complexity of the fabric of the city of Mumbai!

Crawford Market -Sketch by Pranay

                                           

Colaba Causeway - Map by Gaurav

The final boards will be presented in a public space and will be open for discussion and critiques to initiate public participation in the design of our cities.

How to incorporate bylaws for vegetable farming in urban areas?

With Mumbai having the highest population density and very low per capita open space, creating alternative solutions for open spaces is an important concern. Vegetables today are grown in distant villages and transported to the cities and several agents are involved in the process thus creating a vast difference in the cost at which the vegetables were bought by the farmer and is being sold to the consumer. And also, for mass production of vegetables several chemicals are used and we don't really know what is in our food. Today, there is an awareness towards organic food and a parallel system for growing vegetables in urban areas like terraces and roof tops can be explored. This will also help in reducing the heat island created in cities and create open spaces that are immediately accessible.


Market square in a new town

The organic development of a market square in a planned new town of Navi Mumbai has been documented through a participatory approach. This formation of the urban plaza will be analyzed through different theoretical frameworks to understand in detail the humanizing factor of an urban space.

Art Installation on the site ( Sector 6 Plaza, C.B.D. Belapur)

Public Participation about the Proposed Design for C.B.D Belapur

Interactive Art on the Site

Understanding the real density of Mumbai

Four 1 sq km fabrics in the city of Mumbai have been identified to understand the densities and the diversity in building typologies. This approach has been adopted to explore the varieties of typologies, their respective densities and fabrics that make the city of Mumbai. Dadar and Abdul Rehman street are being considered as the first few cases for the study of density.

What should be the edge like along the Mangroves?

While Navi Mumbai is the largest planned city in the country, today it is constantly reclaiming mangroves and busy violating the public policies. So the Landscape Elective studio is currently researching on the threatened mangroves and others under threat. It will propose alternative approaches Policy level decisions and guidelines for for Mangrove Landscapes.

The Housing Studio - 4th Year Architectural Design Studio ( Ashlesha Kale and Team)

With rapid urbanization and constant migration from rural to peri urban and urban areas, the Gaothan in Karave is an example of the naturally existing blur between completely urbanized and areas under threat for urbanization. This case was taken up in the 4th Year Housing Studio of D.Y.Patil College of Architecture. The process of study and design solutions produced in the studio will be developed into a book to document the findings, research methodology and pedagogy in the studio.

Studio Work - Porus

Student Work - Porus

Chandivali lake edge at Bandra

                                     

Mumbai - a transforming gaothan!

Urban Landscapes is an elective offered by Ashlesha Kale and Sameera Rao at D.Y. Patil College of Architecture to 4th year students. The elective class in Urban Landscapes took off with the study of Bandra Station Precinct. Although as the study got deeper the whole of Bandra is being studied to understand its evolution, transformation and shift from being the queen of suburbs to that of chocked roads, taller buildings and soaring real estate prices.

Discussion in the class

Bandra has evolved from a collection of several small villages to a residential adress of glamour, entertainment and stardom. Bandra has the unique distinction of having 5 churches and the Basillica of the our lady of the Mount. With Bandra Kurla Complex becoming the new business hub of the city, the older generation cannot quite visualize this ever changing image of Bandra.

Mapping Land use

Understanding Bandra Through evolution and several other layers

Mumbai is a walkable city, a city of intermodal transport systems and a city where only 5 % people use private automobiles. With all stations demonstrating intermodal transportation, this image of where the train stops, the bus starts and when the bus stops, there is a cab or an auto waiting is very obvious at Bandra Station. Standing in the foreground of the splendid colonial Bandra station, one can notice the trains, the buses and the autos all moving at the same level which is a model that several countries are striving for today. On the contrary, in the background of the station is the unending skywalk that takes off at the kalanagar station and lands at the Bandra talao. This skywalk runs mostly empty yet has been repeated in several parts of the city.

Bandra Station ( West Side)

Colonial Bandra!

The legendary skywalk!

The built and the unbuilt!

Empty skywalks unmanageable streets

Waiting for the interchange!

Bandra talao which was once known as the pink lake is highly polluted and almost unused today.The restoration plans for Bandra lake talk about having musical fountains, improved sidewalks, flashy lights and other features to make this a city level public place for youngsters aspiring the landscapes of the west. Most of the people living in the low rise and mid rise are tenants as the owners have all moved out of their houses eagerly waiting for the redevelopment plans to take shape. Thus the character of Bandra as a suburb that had its ancestral origins in the Portuguese, the Marathas and the British is seen slowing dissolving in the sea of the redevelopment plans. And the vision of all redevelopment plans is undoubtedly to create a world class city with world class amenities.

along the lake

While this story is not unique to Bandra it is really a story of the commons. The wait for redevelopment of houses with a slightly increased FSI and unattended public spaces also desperately awaiting restoration programs to meet the aspirations of our foreign returned youth is the plight of the streets and neighborhoods of the suburbs of Mumbai! Thus, a gaothan under constant threat to redevelopment is a metaphor to the city of Mumbai!

the old and the new!

Along the streets of Dadar

Dadar a centrally located neighborhood in Mumbai is the site for study in the fourth year town planning class at D.Y.Patil College of Architecture. As the team walked through the streets of Dadar, mid rise buildings with G+4 Residential apartments abutted by wide side walks were witnessed. The side walks are very human in scale with hawkers serving varieties of food items and making the street active. Side walks are around 3-4 m wide and the buildings directly abut the side walks. Shivaji Park is a popular neighborhood public space in Dadar and covers an area of approximately 25 acres. This is in great contrast to the Central Park at Kharghar which is built on an area of appx. 119 acres. Simultaneously it also presents a reason why Shivaji Park is more habitable than the other.

This size of the space brings the entire park into the cone of vision of the person sitting at one edge of the park thus fitting into the framework of Christopher Alexander's Pattern language. With the absence of huge gates the edge of Shivaji Park encourages visual permeability and helps the users perceive the edge as fluid and transparent. Low level compound walls and wide side walks makes the edge very inviting and safe for people to sit by and relax.

Location Map of Dadar

Shivaji Park, Mumbai

Along the pathways of Shivaji Park

Low walls along Shivaji Park forming sitting places

                           

Hawkers along the side walks with a special canopy during rains

Through the bazaars of Dadar

While the present mid rise housing typology with wide side walks and a successful public space like Shivaji Park makes Dadar a habitable place, with Mumbai being a victim to constant transformation under the neoliberal framework, it is hard to say what the rise in F.S.I will do to this humanized neighborhood of Dadar.

Glimpse of Changing FSI in Dadar

walling the city!

Why do we like to build huge walls around our spaces? Do we feel protected or rather do we feel in-secured with low walls around our houses. Here is a community open space under renovation and the compound walls are being constructed. As it is a work in progress site, the fencing is yet to happen. These photographs were captured this evening to demonstrate that people do like to sit on the edge. They feel safe and the low height walls do give them a sense of security. It is a rather interesting sitting area.

Community space compound wall under construction

 Why then are we busy constructing huge walls with jalis and other patterns and eventually increasing the heights? Ar. Satya Prakash notes that each independent house in bangalore constructs around 450 sq ft of walls just for compounding the site.

Huge compound walls protecting the buildings

People sitting on the edge of a community garden

Low walls to connect the building to the surroundings

Our perception of protection

Tall walls for protection

Crawford Market

       While providing designs for the Byculla college project in the early1870’s Kipling also worked extensively on sculptural plaques for the publicentrance to the Crawford Market which was named after the then municipalcommissioner of Bombay Arthur Travers Crawford. It was originally designed byarchitect Russell Aitken as a series of sheds for a good’s bazaar but a moreextensive scheme was ultimately considered necessary. Finally William Emersonsubmitted the winning proposal in a competition arranged by Crawford which wasfirst advertised in London. Still known familiarly as Crawford Market; theofficial name has now changed to honor Mahatma Jyotiba Phule.

An old photograph of Crawford Market

       So…. What does one remember while visiting Crawford Market? BritishIndia, old Bombay? Or what can be one’s perception towards looking at placelike this one? Therefore to understand the realm of such a great public spacein Mumbai, we conducted a study on Crawford Market which could give us a clearunderstanding as to why Crawford Market is a notable success till date. It islocated opposite the Mumbai police head-quarters, just north of the ChhatrapatiShivaji Terminus railway station, west of the J.J. fly-over and is at a walk able distance from CST.

       Bazaars, haats are authentic Indianconcepts which become integrated public spaces in the city of Mumbai andCrawford is definitely one of them. We started our study by simply strolling onthe streets of Crawford, understanding the streets, the people, the landscape,the architecture, etc. and the first thing that caught our attention was the128-foot high clock tower which advertised the entire market, adorned thecityscape and made an extremely effective focal point. Clear transformation inthe style of architecture was also observed, right from the 12^thcentury French Gothic style as described by Emerson the mastermind behind Crawford,to the art deco style of architecture.

Transformation

The fabric of the city is finely grained. Thebuilding promotes small blocks in close proximity, each varying in heights. Thestreet has got three major setups starting from the M.J.Phule Market, theCrawford Market and the Mangaldas market making the land use majorlycommercial. We also find mixed use of buildings and comparatively lessbuildings which were entirely residential. Public amenities like a police chowkopposite the Sheikh Memon Street and the Jama Masjid; an excellent example ofIslamic architecture is also found.

Open v/s Built

Building Use

Land Use

Gradually we started understandingcertain important elements which made it a great street one of which was theheights and proportions of the buildings as compared to the street. We noticedthat the (Sheikh Memon) street was in shadow almost the entire day. We understoodthat the buildings, their heights were all planned and constructed keeping inmind the sun path which increased the comfort zone  not only of the pedestrians but also thehawkers sitting, standing, and yelling along the by lanes of the street. Nextthing that was dominating the street was the hawker community hawking loudlythe prices of their products. As a whole they were advertising and invitingpeople to the lane making it noisy and chaotic.

Heights and Proportions

       A Streetis never complete without its people. They are people who make a street what ithas to be. Be it hawkers, be it residents of that area, be it consumers or beit pedestrians. Therefore we started understanding the tiny activities thatpeople were observed doing on the street. The percentage of people standing,sitting, bargaining, arguing, interacting, eating, drinking, etc. A majorpercentage of people visited the street as consumers. Interactions, conversations,bargaining happened amongst people who came to buy. A conversation, adiscussion, generally starts when there are open and public spaces, which arenot restricted for a class or a community of people. When people come together,though strangers they automatically tend to start a conversation or sometimeseven arrive at an inference. While Crawford Market is an integrative publicspace that caters to the needs of diverse class of people and is accessible toall, it did not seem to translate into a place where people could sit anddiscuss issues, be it personal or social and political. This is mainly because,Crawford Market is always busy and it apparently did not have sittable places. 

Street Corner Happenings

Another part of our study broughtus to the conclusion that people tend to sit where there is shade; irrespectiveof the size, kind or the comfort level of the space. All they require is shade.People in Crawford were observed sitting on an empty Mango crate, or on theplinth of a small shop, or even on the plinth of the footpath but all thesespaces were found in shade; of a tree of the roofs of shops, etc. Since it wasa long walk along the street we felt really hungry by noon. But even we urban researcherspreferred hogging on the street rather than cooling ourselves in an airconditioned restaurant. Yes street food works at Crawford. It provides a widevariety of food from spicy amalgamation snacks to cooling and refreshing juicesand friutplates. We observed people eating on the streets, looking at theactivities going around or simply gazing at the landscape of the street. Wealso mapped the density of sound, which was partly dependent on the trafficflow, and partly on the week days. We understood what kind of smell wasdominant in which area and how it affected the pedestrian circulation. Crawfordlacked landscape too. We found out that the trees were not complimenting thestreet and the people.

Trees

Landscape Mapping

Sound Mapping - Monday

Sound Mapping - Sunday

Smell Mapping

Color Mapping

Mapping Vehicular Movement

Mapping Pedestrian Movement

       Another important feature of the market is that there is order in chaos.Though the street hawkers made the lane noisy and chaotic, there was order inplaces like the Mangaldas Market or the Crawford market. The entire pedestriancirculation changes when one enters the Crawford Market or the MangaldasMarket. There are proper pathways that lead you to the shops, even the shopsare arranged on the smell or the king of shops. Everything so disciplinarily sorted out. But one cannot deny with the fact that it is because of the hawkersand the noise that they create that one feels safe and secured walking throughthe by lanes. Generally a by lane becomes dead and dark especially if it is aresidential area but it is a completely different picture at Crawford Market. Becauseof the mixed use of the buildings and again the street hawkers, there is activityfound till late night. These bring in more people on the street making it asafe place to walk on.

Shops and Informalities

Continuous Activity

        Our understanding of Crawford Market isthat it is a great bazaar with diverse people, variety of goods, plurality inactivities and the heart of the city of Mumbai. It has a history and a great storyof transformation and has evolved over a period of time. While we learn fromthis study the proportions that make a street work, the kind of architecturalelements that humanize a city and the blur between the formal and the informalit also forms a case for small urban interventions to deal with the increasing auto mobile traffic which was not quite anticipated several years ago. A conservativesurgery to keep the essence of this space intact with small urban insertions tokeep it from overcrowding by auto mobiles is the challenge that Crawford Market in particular and Mumbai in general presents today!