REGENERATION THROUGH SUSTENANCE SECURITY: THE CASE OF KUMBHARWADA, MUMBAI

Abstract

Slums and squatters are the by-products of rapid urbanization in developing countries. Mumbai, transforming from a fishing village to now the economic capital of India, best represents the territorial conflict between centralized developments and autonomous settlements. Although the stem of urban informal settlement is a manifestation of inadequate provision of affordable housing, solution to emphasize the “efficiency” of direct housing provision should not overpower the importance of such “effectiveness”.

The slum redevelopment program carried out by Mumbai failed due to the excessive dependence on public funding and processes full of managerial pitfalls and corruptions. On the other hand, rehabilitative schemes led by real estate investors are equally challenged as the interest of the slum dwellers are always neglected by that of the profit-oriented investors. While more than half of the population in Mumbai is living in such unsatisfactory condition, fully reliance on either government or private investors to achieve a replicable model of rehabilitation is unrealistic

Under an assumed cooperative framework among government, private investors and slum dwellers, and architects/architecture, this thesis uses Kumbharwada, a pottery village in Dharavi as a proposal for concept change and shift in practice to balance the redevelopment. Instead of providing a “complete but useless house”, a “functional module” is proposed to facilitate and catalyse an autonomous redevelopment that has been observed. In contrast to the convention one-size-fit-all solution, the design strategy developed several devices which react to specific conditions in micro scale and aims to reconcile the diverse needs from within.