urbz

Congratulations to urbz co-founder Geeta Mehta, who is included in the Forbes Women's 50 over 50 Impact Makers list!

When Gustav Magnusson asked me to be part of his project "Keynote Conversations: 100 interviews for reinventing the city", I must admit that it sounded like an overly ambitious project. I took months to send my contribution, and I finally did it after much polite insistance from Gustav. Now the book actually exists and I must say it is a great read. Full of interesting practitioners and thinkers with perspectives I either endorse already or which are new to me and totally inspiring. My text is a very condensed description of three ideas that are guiding much of urbz's work: 'Mess is More', 'Form Follows Process' and 'Conflict is Creative'. Urban projects must build upon local dynamics, not repress them. Relationships, uses, affects and meaning which are embedded in localities are the starting point for any urban intervention. Let use reclaim common sense, intuition and empathy. Let us connect with people and species who inhabit the spaces we seek to plan and design. But what if our subjectivities fail to converge? What if inhabitants can't reach a consensus? The aim of participatory urbanism isn't to find a compromise between diverging preferences. Our purpose should be to make sure that all parties, the loud ones as well as the marginalised ones, can express themselves. Points of disagreement are full of creative potential. If anything, conflicting viewpoints is the only thing missing from the book! Perhaps it is because it focuses on the interviewees' vision, rather than their methods. Could this be an idea for the next volume? Thank you Gustav Magnusson for your kind invitation. It is an honour to be featured alongside such accomplished urbanists as Ethan Kent, Rahul Mehrotra, Jack Self, Meriem Chabani, Philipp Rode, Camilla Richter-Friis van Deurs, Aseem Inam and many others ! I take this opportunity to thank also my friends and partners in crime at urbz: Rahul Srivastava and of course Samidha Patil, Bharat Gangurde, Kareena Kochery, Amin Khosravi, Andrés Sánchez Arias, Geeta Mehta and many others who keep on inspiring me and giving me joy. It's all team work and that's what makes it real. https://lnkd.in/dphR8qRb

We open this space for a critical discussion around architecture and its dynamics. Faced with an activity that responds to the dynamics of the market and that reproduces Western, colonial and patriarchal logics, what alternatives can we rethink to counteract these dynamics from communal design and mutual support? The first session presents an alternative ontological theoretical framework consolidated from the periphery of knowledge for a communal practice of architecture. The second session presents the experiences of community organizations, social struggles, and collectives that seek to transgress the delocalized and hegemonic dynamics in the production of space through their practices. ......... Desde el colectivo urbz abrimos este espacio para una discusion critica en torno a la arquitectura y sus dinamicas. Ante una actividad que responde a las dinámicas del mercado y que reproduce las lógicas occidentales, coloniales y patriarcales, que alternativas podemos re-pensar para contrarrestar estas dinámicas desde el diseño comunal y el apoyo mutuo?. La primera sesión presenta un marco teórico ontológico alternativo consolidado desde la periferia del conocimiento para una practica comunal de la arquitectura. La segunda sesión presenta las experiencias de organizaciones comunales, luchas sociales y colectivos que buscan transgredir con sus prácticas las dinámicas deslocalizas y hegemónicas en la producción del espacio.

🎙️ Listen to our workshop, “No Place like Here”! on Spotify! Urbanologist Rahul Srivastava and filmmaker Alvina Joshi discuss the importance of locality in crafting impactful climate stories. How can we represent the realities and histories of our environment through place-based narratives? The full session is now available on Spotify! https://lnkd.in/djZ6wjfb This workshop was done in collaboration with urbz #ImpactFilmmaking #LocalNarratives #Earthbound #SpotifyPodcast Mathivanan Rajendran Anil Arjun Alina Gufran Sarabhi Ravichandran Storiculture

A new publication by Andrés Sánchez Arias in the latest issue of DARQ 38 Magazine - Urbanismos Bottom-Up de la Universidad de los Andes.

Co-founders of urbz, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, will be giving a talk about "The Natural City - Urban design in practice". This is an open, online event as part of the HSLU & NID - PhD Programme Eco-Social Innovation by Design - an exciting collaboration between Lucerne School of Art and Design (Switzerland) and the National Institute of Design (India). When: 2nd of May, 2024 - 12:00-13:15 pm (CET)/ 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm (IST) Please register at the link below!

“It’s pretty easy to look at art, regalia and aesthetic motifs — and geography — and then aestheticize an architectural response. But that’s just cosmetic. There aren’t synergies between the design and the way of life — it’s alienated from the epistemology it’s supposed to represent.” The quote is an excerpt from an inspiring dialogue between David Fortin, an Indigenous architecture practitioner from Canada, and Stefan Novakovic of Azure Magazine. It resonates so much with our collaborative work with the Indigenous community and building contractors of Mumbai - the Koli’s. Over the years we have worked alongside the Koli community, facilitating a participatory approach to the design of various buildings in Dharavi Koliwada, including the building that houses our current office.

Dharavi’s story is one of always pushing back further the boundaries of the slum. Go to Koliwada, its oldest settlement, and ask. Residents will say this is a 400-year-old village and not a slum; the slum, they will inform you, is on the other side of Dharavi Main Road. On the other side of that road you will find a scattering of overgrown municipal chawls. Those tenants, who have been renting their apartments from the government for decades, will point to their neighbours who live in structures that look exactly like theirs and insist that those are the slums, not their homes. Their neighbours in turn will say that their houses are better than many middle-class houses in other parts of the city, and will point to their flat-screen TV and internet-wired computers to support their argument. They will direct you to the 13th Compound, where the recycling industry is located. That’s probably where the slum is – at least it looks and feels more like one. Yet in 13th Compound people will say that this is an industrial area, not quite a slum, and perhaps those huts over there – gesturing to the edge of the settlement – are what you’re looking for. You may finally see lines of recognisable shack-like structures. That is the place where you might spot a little girl walking on a huge waterpipe next to what seems to be her home. The girl may inform you that the redevelopment project is a threat, not an opportunity, if she can’t prove she has been living here long enough. In all probability, her family moved there relatively recently, a few years short of the cut-off date that makes her eligible for a free flat after redevelopment. In that case, she and her family would either move to a settlement far away, or simply return to their ancestral village. When asked what life is like, living in a slum, she would probably say it is tough – with open drains and very little civic infrastructure – but she would also invite you inside the house, introduce you to her family, shut the door and insist that the slum is now firmly outside.  This is her home –complete with an altar to a popular saint, cooking utensils hanging on the wall, a TV in a corner, and schoolbooks on the floor – and to call it anything else would embarrass you. Especially when you accept a cup of sweet tea and are told that, for all its ills, this place is still better than the one left behind.  These lines were published 10 years back in a book called Dharavi: The Slum Outside. They seem just as relevant now, at a time when a new redevelopment project is in the works. Full text and photos here: https://lnkd.in/dm7XRcPn

urbz animated a session with filmmakers that foregrounded the idea of locality in storytelling, specifically in the making of fiction films. Read the following article to know more about it. https://lnkd.in/dnEK8Mfx