THE FISHNET

KOALITION
or
THE FISHNET

50% international architects, 50% Koli non-architects.

Our group took advantage of its special composition for establishing an immediate connection with the inhabitants of Dharavi Koliwada. We could meet the extended families of our local team members, enter their homes, take teas together, talk to them in a frank and informal way. We could meet people belonging to different generations, the kids and the old men, in a reasonable cross section of the population. We spoke extensively, had lots of surprises.

Place vs. amenities

To be able to use the informations we were invested by for visualizing a negotiation process, we “forced” people's rich and articulated opinions into a finished number of relevant issues, asking people to choose one which they could sacrifice in case of redevelopment, and one they would never negotiate. “Translating” the discussions into these issues led to unpredicted discoveries: PLACE (sense of community, local culture, proximity of relatives and friends) was the one most people would never give up. Surprisingly enough, most people considered AMENITIES to be negotiable, in a neighborhood were there is hardly any public space.

How could we use these not obvious informations help to preserve Koliwada's unique characters?
The Kolis are the original inhabitants of Bombay's original seven islands, their history is the one of the city: the project proposes to strenghten the connections among Bombay's different Koliwadas, in an actual network aimed to emphasize both their common cultural characters, but also their sometimes spectacular differences, in an almost paradoxical attempt to suggest to the inhabitants' new perceptions of their own places (“Guess which one is Venice?”).

The Koalition is also aimed to reach a negotiational scale able to avoid the big-fish-eat-small-fish process of a single Koliwada having to challenge the actors of redevelopment alone. Sooner or later other Koliwadas might be involved in top-to-bottom development processes.

The uniqueness of the results of our talks with the inhabitants also stated very clear needs for a specific kind of development. International standards don't really seem to fit a reality like Dharavi Koliwada: the complex and delicate relationships among landlords, tenants, local economy and informal construction call for a very specific understanding of urban density.

Without actually going into a design project, our proposal thinks that Dharavi Koliwada's urban fabric and lifestyle could tolerate additional density if properly designed to read the fragmentation of the neighborhood and the quality of very small and creative public spaces which are already there.