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Mumbai's suburban mass housing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

FLORIAN URBAN
FLORIAN URBAN*
Affiliation:
Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, G3 6RQ, UK
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Abstract:

In the 1960s and 1970s, the state-operated Maharashtra Housing Board and its successor organization Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) responded to Mumbai's exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure to fight the housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. In Mumbai's northern suburbs, housing compounds were built for designated income levels, such as Kannamwar Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar for the ‘low-income group’ and DN Nagar or Sahakar Nagar for the ‘middle-income group’. This article argues that Mumbai's state-sponsored tower blocks adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. The designers took up influences from both local Maharashtrian and European housing typologies of the mid-twentieth century, including upper-class art deco apartments, socialist housing compounds and serially built working-class chawls. In contrast to mass housing developments in Chicago, Moscow or Paris, Mumbai's tower blocks were built individually rather than from prefabricated parts, offered rather high standards of living compared to that of the majority and, as a result, became increasingly inhabited by comparably wealthy groups. Since the beginning of economic liberalization in the 1990s, many have been converted into private co-operatives. Once designed to house the masses, they are now visible symbols for a growing minority that constitutes Mumbai's new middle class. At the same time, they are an example for the local evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.

Type
Indian suburbs
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 128 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 In 1995, the local government, which at the time was dominated by the Marathi nationalist Shiv Sena party, changed the colonial name Bombay officially into its Marathi version Mumbai. In contemporary Mumbai, both names are used interchangeably. To avoid confusion, in this article the city will be consistently called Mumbai.

2 For the characteristics of suburbanization in the Western context see for example Jackson, K., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Fishman, R., Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; or Hall, P., Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 Prabhu, C., ‘Housing for all?’, Economic Digest (Mumbai) 32, 5 (May 2003), 19Google Scholar. Of these, approximately 100,000 units were built by the Housing Board and its successor, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Agency (MHADA). Sundaram, P.S.A., Bombay: Can it House its Millions? (New Delhi, 1989), 48–9 and 68Google Scholar.

4 The 2001 census counted 11.9 million inhabitants in the 437 square kilometre city area. See the official city website http://portal.mcgm.gov.in (accessed Dec. 2007).

5 Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) (Prasad Shetty, Rupali Gupte, Ritesh Patil, Aparna Parikh, Neha Sabnis, Benita Menezes), ‘Housing typologies in Mumbai’ (May 2007), 45, online at www.urban-age.net/0_downloads/House_Types_in_Mumbai.pdf (accessed May 2008).

6 N. Bharucha, ‘Dadar Parsi colony to stay “exclusive'”, Times of India, 24 Dec. 2009, available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Dadar-Parsi-Colony-to-stay-exclusive/articleshow/5372052.cms (accessed Dec. 2009).

7 In 1957, the number of slum dwellers was estimated at approximately 415,000 in the Mumbai area, or approximately 10% of the area's 4.1 million inhabitants. By 1976, the percentage had risen to one third of the approximately 8.4 million inhabitants of Greater Mumbai, and at the turn of the millennium estimates ranged around 55% of the 10 million inhabitants within Mumbai's city borders. Next to these approximately 5.5 million there are another 2 million who live in dilapidated formal buildings, and another 1 million pavement dwellers. Thus about 8.5 million of the city's inhabitants live in substandard conditions and are constantly threatened by displacement. Das, P.K., ‘Slums: the continuing struggle for housing’, in Patel, S. and Masselos, J. (eds.), Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition (New Delhi, 2003), 210Google Scholar.

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9 For the development of modern architecture in India see Lang, J., A Concise History of Modern Architecture in India (New Delhi, 2002)Google Scholar, for the role of national agencies especially 32.

10 Achwal, M.B., ‘Low-cost housing’, Architectural Review, 150, 898 (Dec. 1971), 367Google Scholar. To initiate public housing, the Ministry of Housing of the national government in Delhi earmarked funds in its five-year-plans, and allocates them to the state governments. The state government, for example in Maharashtra, then made these funds available to the state housing boards and local municipalities. This meant a lengthy, bureaucratic process.

11 Vidyadhar Phatak, long-time chief of the Town and Country Planning Division of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, interview with the author, Mumbai, 11 Jun. 2008, Sulakshana Mahajan, urban planner with the All-India Institute of Local Self Government, interview with the author, Mumbai, 5 Jun. 2008.

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15 Government of India, National Buildings Organization, A Collection of Designs of Houses for Low Income Groups (New Delhi: National Buildings Organization, 1973). Most likely, the model effect was rather limited, given that the collection of plans was started in 1965 and took eight years to be published.

16 See for example the proposals by architect Jaysukh Mehta, who called for typified, modular housing design. Mehta, J., ‘Typification in HOUSING’, Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects, 38, 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1972), 22–4Google Scholar.

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18 One of these experiments was carried out in Calcutta in the early 1970s, when the Ford Foundation financed the adaptation of the UCOPAN prefab panel system developed by the Polish Canadian engineer Zenon Zielinski. Anon., ‘An experiment in system building’, Architectural Review, 150, 898 (Dec. 1971), 374–5, and Dutta, S.K., ‘New technic [sic] of low-income group housing’, Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects, 38, 2 (Apr.–Jun. 1972), 21–3Google Scholar.

19 Achwal, ‘Low-cost housing’, 367.

20 Ibid., 369.

21 DN Nagar is situated on both sides of Cosmopolitan Education Society Marg (Andheri Link Road), three blocks south of Jai Prakash Road (Versova Road). Only a part of DN Nagar was built in the 1960s; in June of 2008 all but one of these buildings, situated east of Cosmopolitan Education Society Marg and near the southern end of a crescent-shaped nameless road, had disappeared in favour of new developments. The buildings west of Cosmopolitan Education Society Marg, west of the YMCA building, were erected in the late 1970s and show a different plan.

22 Maidan is a park or open plain; the word is used in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and several Indian languages.

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31 For a comprehensive critique of the contemporary modernist city as a tool of exclusion see, for example, the famous urban history of Benevolo, L., Storia della Città (Rome, 1975), particularly 1056–7Google Scholar.

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