Over the last three decades, housing has become extremely scarce and expensive in Mumbai. A report by Knight Frank, a global real estate consultancy, listed Mumbai as the most unaffordable housing market in India, with 29 percent of its under-construction dwelling units exceeding 10 million rupee ($100,000 USD), despite half of households residing in single-room tenements and roughly 40 percent of Mumbai’s population living in slums. The issue is exacerbated by current government policy that favors disproportionately high floor area ratios and the redevelopment of existing housing stock without augmentation of urban infrastructure and services. This plot-by-plot redevelopment has fragmented the urban grain, disrupted the historic fabric, interfered with existing community formations, and worsened socio-economic dichotomies.

Such dire housing market conditions and inconsistent plans persist within an extended investment boom in urban India, clearly visible across the Mumbai city region. Indian development firms with access to global capital markets execute ambitious projects with rapidly expanding infrastructure across the city and suburbs. Housing and commercial spaces rise in new multi-use complexes, but large populations are left behind and further squeezed. This problem stems from a misalignment of capital investment and sustainable, equitable city building.

The studio’s design explorations will be part of a fully realized real estate development proposal, prepared in collaboration with GSD Master in Real Estate students who will work in small teams with design students. The site is located within Mumbai’s Elphinstone Estate, a multi-acre waterfront district owned by the Mumbai Port Authority, and composed primarily of short-term lease warehouses, transport offices, and small-scale retail, with slum housing interwoven throughout. The studio’s challenge is to strategically and advantageously leverage the existing extremes of housing and land values to create housing for slum dwellers and other income groups.

The studio emphasizes the need for design to be embedded within the larger development practices of the city. To that end, students will explore typologies for affordable housing on high-value land and examine transects cut through the inner city of Mumbai that expose parcel-scale development patterns promoted by government policies. Simultaneously, real estate students will study the market and policy incentives shaping development proposals in Mumbai. Students will collaboratively focus on feasibility across multiple dimensions and phases of a development project, including assembling political support, securing site control and approvals, and creating and refining an investible proposal that addresses the concerns of many stakeholders in tension. The studio will also explore partnerships between city and state governments, the private sector, and civil society (housing NGOs, cooperative housing societies, etc.).

The studio requires students to integrate the skills and knowledge of designers and real estate professionals to transform how the built environment is produced and consumed. Students will collaboratively address conditions of extreme urbanism and test methods for reinforcing and extending existing urban fabrics to facilitate easier transitions for local communities.