Extreme Urbanism 10: Mumbai Development Project, Imagining Housing as Urban Form

Over the last three decades housing has become extremely scarce and expensive in Mumbai. A report by Knight Frank, a global realty consultancy, listed Mumbai as the most unaffordable housing market in India with 29 percent of its under-construction dwelling units exceeding the 10-million-rupee ($100,000 USD) mark. Approximately 57 percent of households live in single room tenements and, according to the 2011 Census (the most recent census taken in India), roughly 40 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. Applying that percentage to Mumbai’s estimated current population of close to 18 million suggests a current slum population of over seven million. Even the middle class faces a dire housing market, with hopes for home ownership foundering on the shoals of extreme housing prices.

Current government policy prescriptions favor supply side solutions implemented through the availability of disproportionately high floor area ratios (FSI in Mumbai, FAR elsewhere) that overwhelm carrying capacities of many districts. High FSIs to encourage redevelopment of existing housing stock have doubled the densities on existing plots without any corresponding augmentation of urban infrastructure and services. Without a greater overall plan, such plot-by-plot redevelopment has fragmented the urban grain, disrupted the historic fabric, interfered with existing community formations, and exacerbated socio-economic dichotomies.

In collaboration with GSD 5251 The Development Project and its real estate students, this option studio will focus on creating a fully designed development proposal for a specific multi-acre site within Mumbai’s Elphinstone Estate, a warehouse district situated in the port lands along the eastern waterfront of the city and owned by the Mumbai Port Trust. Currently, the site is primarily composed of warehouses, leased on short tenure, some iron, steel, and transport offices, small scale retail, and slum housing interwoven throughout. The challenge for the studio will be to strategically and advantageously leverage the existing extremes of housing and land values to create housing for slum dwellers and other income groups.

To that end, the studio will explore typologies for affordable housing on high value land. Development patterns promoted by metropolitan and parcel-scaled development government policies will be examined through a series of transects cut through the inner city of Mumbai. Questions of hybridity, mixed use, mixed incomes, and high density will be front and center as the studio grapples with conditions of extreme urbanism. Methods for reinforcing and extending existing urban fabrics to facilitate easier transitions for local communities will be tested.

The studio’s design explorations will be part of a fully realized real estate development proposal, prepared in collaboration with real estate students working in small teams with design students, for the Elphinstone site that meets tests of financial viability and advancement of beneficial spatial, social, and environmental outcomes. The studio emphasizes the need for design to be embedded within the larger development practices of the city where real estate development has emerged as an important instrument of urban development. The studio will also explore implementation partnerships between city and state governments, the private sector, and civil society (housing NGOs, cooperative housing societies etc.). The interdisciplinary nature of real estate, weaving together financial, market, regulatory, political, environmental, and contextual analyses into physical design and planning outcomes that generate positive real estate outcomes for the city will be ever present. The studio asks its students, working with the real estate students, to integrate the skills and knowledge of real estate professionals, designers, and planners to transform how the built environment is produced and consumed.