The Khotachiwadi Neighbourhood Project /Mumbai
March 2004
This project engaged with the concerns of the city’s Heritage Conservation Society. It focused on Khotachiwadi, a cluster of cottages and bungalows in the crowded (fast on its way to becoming a high-rise) neighbourhood of Girgaum in south Mumbai. Khotachiwadi is declared a “Heritage Precinct” in architectural terms. The project sought to complicate the discussion.
The project invited its residents to collectively narrate and reflect on Khotachiwadi’s history and express it in varied forms. The idea the project sold to the Heritage Conservation society was that this exercise would yield a more subjective engagement with the idea of heritage by paying attention to the presence of individuals and families who have an intimate relationship with its built form. The idea was to critique a static and architecture oriented approach to heritage and bring it within a more dynamic understanding of urban questions. The project yielded a report that made a strong argument in favour of low-rise high density structures for cities like Mumbai and also brought to light the immense diversity of built-forms that it represents, hidden below the dominant, media-hyped image of slums and skyscrapers. This study later on connected with other Urbanology projects on Dharavi and Tokyo to reveal deeper narratives about incremental development in Asian cities.