PAST EVENTS
Event Date: 18th November 2009
Speaker: Enrique Penalosa
Venue: Coomaraswamy Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai
BOOK LAUNCH: DHARAVI: DOCUMENTING INFORMALITIES
Event Dates: 31st October to 8th November 2009
Venue: Coomaraswamy Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai
Organised by: Swedish Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm and Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mumbai
The art exhibition and symposium sought to investigate urban growth, especially as manifested in the informal “cities” of the poor in growing, global metropoli. The exhibition served as a backdrop for two seminars, the first looking at the ethics, responsibility and communication of professionals working with informal cities, and the second focusing on Dharavi, with participation from the residents of Mumbai’s largest slum. The exhibition also marked the formal release of the book Dharavi: Documenting Informalities.
Event Date: 15th October 2009
Speaker: Stephano Boeri
Venue: Rachna Sansad, Academy of Architecture
The lecture discussed the intricate issues that surround the generation of spaces both for and representative of contemporary politics. Situated within today’s political sphere in which spectacle, leadership, strategy and vision mix freely, a series of on-going architectural and urban projects will be analyzed from the perspective of their public and political use; three contemporary projects triggered by a particular mix of potent visions of the future, world level events and political spaces that once again place the practice of architecture at the crossroads between power and ideal.
Event Date: 9th October 2009
Speaker: Sophie Wolfrum
Venue: Rachna Sansad Academy of Architecture
The Game of Steps form space. They weave the structure of places. They cannot be localised, because they entirely produce the space. “(Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns. Berlin 1988, S.188) We have learned by Michele de Certeau and others in the tradition of the situationist movement to experience city – and understand city as product of this experience. With the concept of psycho-social production of space, psycho-geography, this exerts a great influence on urban theory, and its radicalness makes it a recurrent point of reference in fine arts. Evidently there are various traditional strands behind the current interest in walking and travelling, physical recognition and lived space, cultural production of space, situative or performative urbanism.
Architectural theory likewise takes a line of discourse that underlines the performative aspect of architecture. The performative aspect stresses the component of spatial experience and action that is indispensable in architectural reality.
Event Date: 6th October 2009
Speakers: Cyrus Guzder, D.M. Sukhthankar, V.K.Phatak, Pankaj Joshi
Venue: Urban Design Research Institute
Event Date: 1st September 2009
Venue: Coomaraswamy Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai
Panel Discussion: Issues of the Development Plan (First Workshop)
Speakers: Jairaj Phatak, Cyrus Guzder, V.K.Phatak, Ajit Ranade, Rahul Mehrotra
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UDRI FELLOWSHIP PRESENTATION
Event Date: 1st September 2009Venue: Coomaraswamy Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai
Presenter: Jaideep Gupte
Presentation: Security Provision in Slum Re-settlement Schemes Mumbai – A Case Study of the Lallubhai Compound Settlement, Mankhurd
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Presenter: Vinit Nikumbh
Presentation: Walkability in Mumbai
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BOOK LAUNCH: MUMBAI READER
Event Date: 1st September 2009Venue: Coomaraswamy Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai Book launched by Jamsheed Kanga, Jairaj Phatak
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Since 2006, the UDRI has been publishing the 'Mumbai Reader', a collection of articles on Mumbai. The Reader undertakes a representation of the city that enables innumerable readings through a simultaneous and non-linear compilation of multiple voices. The contents of the reader include some of the most recent perspectives on culture, economy, geography and history of the city. Mumbai Reader has attempted to closely archive changes as well as provide a contemporary understanding of the city in order to be able to reflect both on the present and future of the city.
Event Date: 29th June 2009
Presenter: Jeb Brugmann
Respondents: Shirish Patel, Darryl D’Monte
Venue: Urban Design Research Institute
Through his book, Jeb Brugmann shows how India’s continued rise is inextricably linked to its success in becoming an urban nation and the evidence of an often invisible connection between globalisation and urbanisation.
Event Date: 11th May 2009
Venue: Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai
Within the context of an engorged metropolis, fast approaching a saturation point not only with infrastructure support but also an inundated social and ineffectual political machine, the Mumbai Lounge is conceived as an urban discourse to facilitate theoretical criticism and practical ideas and thus broaden the understanding of our urban environment- both the tangible and abstract and enable greater public participation and generate dialogues with governing and non-governing agencies.
Event Date: 5th May 2009
Venue: Urban Design Research Institute
Discussants: UDRI and Netherlands Architecture Institute
Event Date: May 2009
Collaborators: Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Architecture and Urban Design Research Institute
In May 2009, a group of 50 students and their professors worked with the UDRI as part of a summer internship to conduct ground surveys of integral open spaces, traffic and solid waste in the Fort precinct. The analysis of the surveys led to an identification of issues in the Fort area that needed to be addressed through a local management proposal prepared by UDRI known as the Fort Management Plan.
Event Date: 24th April 2009
Respondents: Darryl D’Monte, Amrit Gangar
Venue: Rachna Sansad, Academy of Architecture, Mumbai
The multilingual Bombay, the Bombay of intolerance, the Bombay of closed mills, of popular culture, sprawling slums and real estate onslaughts, the metropolis of numerous ghettos, the El Dorado. This film is a tale of the cities of Bom Bahia/Bombay/Mumbai, through a tapestry of fiction, cinema vérité, art objects, found footage, sound installation and literary texts. Within the context of an engorged metropolis, fast approaching a saturation point not only with infrastructure support but also an inundated social and ineffectual political machine, the Mumbai Lounge is conceived as an urban discourse to facilitate theoretical criticism and practical ideas and thus broaden the understanding of our urban environment- both the tangible and abstract and enable greater public participation and generate dialogues with governing and non-governing agencies.
Event Date: 4th April 2009
Venue: Rachna Sansad, Academy of Architecture, Mumbai
VOLUME ZERO is an hour-long video on the work and the ideas of Charles Correa, one of the world’s most important architects. It deals with his childhood, architectural training, formative years and the paradigm underlying his large and complex oeuvre spanning over five decades – as well as his pivotal role in addressing issues of urbanization in the Developing World. It uses first person narration by the filmmaker, combined with extended excerpts of interviews with Correa, live action, stills, diagrams, animation and archival footage to open up the thought processes that generate architectural space and form.
Event Date: 4th April 2009
Jury: Charles Correa, Sen Kapadia, Narendra Dengle, Kamu Iyer, Ravi Hazra
Venue: Rachna Sansad, Academy of Architecture, Mumbai
In 2000, the Urban Design Research Institute initiated the annual Charles Correa Gold Medal for the best design dissertation from Schools of Architecture in Mumbai and selected schools outside the city. The medal is an appreciation of quality and talent among young students of architecture, and encourages a focus on the urban context.
Schools who want to take part should express interest by writing to UDRI. Schools should offer full time B.Arch. courses for Architecture and must be approved by the Council of Architecture. Each school can nominate only one entry, which is required to be an architectural project set in an urban context.
Event Date: 10th March 2009
Speaker: Jamsheed Kanga, Cyrus Guzder, Devvrat Mehta, Vikas Dilawari
Venue: Horniman Circle Garden
FORT SKYWALKS
The lecture focused on the four proposed elevated pedestrian walkways proposed by the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority in the historic fort precinct. Three points were raised:
Firstly, the mere presence of Grade I Heritage structures and open spaces and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site demand controlled development within a regulatory radius to ensure that vistas and visual perceptions are retained; which this proposal is completely in breach of. Secondly, they unethically obstruct streetscapes and skylines in precincts with distinct styles of period specific international and vernacular architecture. Thirdly, with gross decentralisation of businesses and complimentary corporate districts, pedestrian traffic figures have dwindled. This in addition to the prevalent pedestrian corridors further establishes this project as a solution to a non-existent concern.
CRAWFORD MARKET REDEVELOPMENT
The lecture focused on the proposed redevelopment of Crawford market, a Grade I structure that sits at the springing point of the much celebrated Heritage Mile which terminates at Flora Fountain. The structure which has been listed as a Grade I heritage structure, has come to represent one of the finest architectural and construction innovations for markets within the country. Over the years, a multitude of incongruous developments have gravely affected the structural and architectural integrity of the building.
The projected scheme seeks to recognise only segments of the development as Grade I, rendering the remainder of structures on site exposed to interventions of increased Floor Space Index. This adds an entirely new lens through which development authorities comprehend strategies and interpret regulations with regard to heritage within the city, almost obtuse to the code of ethics and understanding established by conservationists and historians. Prospects of both Crawford Market as well as heritage regulation within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region are pivotal in the urban discourse of the city.
Event Date: 4th March 2009
Speaker: Martina Reiker
Venue: Urban Design Research Institute
The transformation of the modernist city with its celebration of diversity into gated enclaves of the affluent and far away informal communities of the poor is a sine qua non of contemporary critical urban literature. Contemporary practices of visioning the urban are both embedded in and expand beyond the register of an earlier ‘rights to the city’ narrative. Drawing on research in Cairo, the first part of this paper examines ways in which these new urban mobilities re-articulate visions of the urban for the working poor. With modernist urban center no longer providing a productive analytic grid through which to understand practices of the city, the second part of the paper explores forms of connections, communications, exchanges and activisms that are being created within the temporal-spatial register of a very specific neo-liberal urban project.
Event Date: 24th February 2009
Speaker: Nina Moentmann, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrota Sengupta, Dr. Martin Waelde
Venue: Rachna Sansad, Academy of Architecture, Mumbai
The Promised City is a new cultural initiative between the cities of Berlin, Warsaw and Bombay that deals with the promises and visions that cities provide, and orients itself to the universal topos of the search for good fortune. Journalists, artists and creative minds from all disciplines based in these cities explore interactive concepts and platforms of presentation to take a new look at the promises of their own and/or the “other” cultural and social environment. The Promised City is a multi-year project that is intended to document the pursuit of happiness in the form of research work, artistic productions and events.
Event Date: 30th January 2009
Speaker: Sophie Wolfrum
Venue: Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai
Architectural theory takes a line of discourse that underlines the performative aspect of architecture. The performative aspect stresses the component of spatial experience and action that is indispensable in architectural reality. Accordingly, architecture has a repertoire of specifically architectural means and structures, that only develop reality character in a cultural event, in a situation of use, movement and ‘being in it’ during the reception. In the foreground of this understanding of architecture and city are the processual qualities of the spatial experience, the event structure of spatial coherence, the openness of spatial structures. Performative urbanism, however, does not stop at a psycho-geographical reception of city, but acknowledges the urgency of architectural design.
Event Date: 21st January 2009
Speakers: Sudhir Deshpande and David Cardoz
Venue: Horniman Circle Garden
Sandhya Savant was a Conservation Architect and alumni of Sir JJ College of Architecture, who made a tremendous contribution in the realm of conservation practice in the city of Mumbai before passing away suddenly in 2006. Since then, supported by her family, UDRI conducts an annual memorial lecture to deliberate on urban issues.
Event Date: 16th January 2009
Speakers: Brinda and Parth Shah, Rupali Gupte
Venue: Urban Design Research Institute
