Reinventing Dharavi: an Ideas Compendium

FOREWORD

Dharavi is well-established as one of the world’s most significant informal communities, requiring a critical reimagination for a better future.

Reinventing Dharavi: An International Ideas Competition was conceptualised to generate new ideas, concepts and interventions for a sustainable integration of urban uses – affordable housing, livelihoods, health and sanitation, recreation, education, urban design and urban planning, social and cultural activities, environment, governance and economics, amongst others.

The competition generated an exchange of approaches, both national and international, as well as novel ideas, to enhance the existing characteristics and future potential of this area, especially taking into account the needs of the residents.

The ideas are meant to articulate an array of multi-disciplinary strategies, considered through a range of time structures, from short term to long term, transitory to permanent and staged development cycles. It is essential that a larger group of people be involved in this process of reinvention including government, civil societies, NGOs and most importantly, the people of Dharavi.

The competition received proposals from 20 teams comprising a total of 140 participants, across 21 nationalities. Urban Design Research Institute has collated all the submitted entries into this book.

The publication ‘Reinventing Dharavi: An Ideas Compendium’ is an abridged compilation of all the proposals received for the competition. The proposals are organised in the order in which they were received, as twenty separate chapters, with the name of the teams and team members, which were only revealed after the competition process was completed.

A brief context on Dharavi and a gist of the competition process have been outlined in the Introduction, followed by the twenty chapters with the proposals in which the ideas extrapolated from the teams have been organised under specific categories namely, governance, planning, finance, housing, transportation, social amenities, phasing, services infrastructure and environment.

An ideas matrix has been produced to summarise the central theme of each team under the five prime categories of planning, governance, finance, housing and infrastructure. A brief Foreword suggests how the ideas generated from the competition could be taken forward for furthering development in Dharavi and also provide pointers for slum rehabilitation projects in Greater Mumbai.

Finally, the Appendices comprise the brief for the competition, brief bios of the jury, the Steering Committee and the Technical Committee, the resources and a glossary of terms.

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