Unfinished home work

The camera pans to a woman in a colourful salwar-kameez seated in a narrow gully somewhere in Mumbai, amid broken paving and open sewers. She is surrounded by children, mostly screaming and running, as she states the obvious: “We see people living in apartments and we too want our children to grow up in proper homes; not playing near gutters.” About 40 minutes long, the film shows images of wadis (neighbourhoods) thriving within inches of railway tracks, even as the residents squat on the edge of the (presumably defunct) track and talk of their aspirations for a ‘ pukka ghar ’ (concrete home).

We see a man seated on a khatiya (string cot) in a tiny room — his home in Kolkata — as he talks in Bengali about the basic right to a life of dignity. A clothesline doubles as a curtain rod, offering a semblance of privacy to the multiple residents of this room-apartment. Other images from Kolkata show men and women living under tin roofs complaining that they are frequently uprooted, as they were born to Bangladeshi parents.

Homelessness takes many forms: refugees, the urban poor, the rural poor, runaways, and so on. The film’s screening is part of the ongoing exhibition ‘State of Housing: Aspirations, Imaginaries and Realities in India’, in Mumbai, which focuses on housing issues across timelines, cities, and types of housing (from mud huts to skyscrapers).

A pamphlet informs us that the country currently faces a shortage of 18 million urban housing units, and 40 million rural units. Organised by the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) and Architecture Foundation (AF), the exhibition has been jointly curated by architect, educator and urban designer Rahul Mehrotra; architect Kaiwan Mehta; and poet, art critic and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote.

It has three segments: History of housing in India — from 1947 till date, spanning the policies, and the socio-economic and political scenario, accompanied by facts and figures; chronotopes — linking a construction with the respective era — of about 80 housing projects countrywide that serve as reference point for architects and planners; a film that captures the ground realities of the many kinds of housing structures. Additionally, there are lectures on related topics.

The timeline harks us back to post-Partition India, as refugees made their way across borders. We see images of the Red Fort and Purana Qila in Delhi transformed into camps for the displaced. It was during the Nehruvian era (1947-65) that new colonies were planned to house refugees in Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. Independent India’s first planned cities — Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Faridabad — were also conceived at this time.

Viewers will observe the changing parameters in the census on housing amenities, partly due to greater availability of data, and partly due to the changing emphasis on our needs. For instance, the early years of the census did not record the availability of independent rooms for married couples. This was added later.

We learn that Darshan Apartments in Malabar Hill was one of Mumbai’s earliest multi-storey buildings raised on stilts. The ground-floor space between the stilts was left vacant earlier; today they’re used to park cars.

On view are the blueprints of Cosmopolis Apartments, designed by Charles Correa, which was not built. But parts of his vision — climate solutions such as double-height terraces that allow residents to enjoy views of the sea but not suffer the heat — were translated into reality in his only residential tower in Mumbai: Kanchenjunga, Cumballa Hill.

Alongside images of sprawling slums in our metros, there is information on the earliest Slum Clearance and Improvement Schemes. We can walk through a prototype of a 30-sq-m apartment, with placards marking the kitchen, bathroom and other areas. The idea is to visualise the units planned under the ‘Housing for all’ (Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana) scheme — 20 million affordable houses for the urban poor by March 31, 2022. Co-curator Mehrotra, however, believes that the “absolute solutions based on statistical architecture may not be realistic”. To illustrate, the photographs showing how different the similar-sized spaces look when occupied by different people, drives home his point of ‘building homes not houses’. As he explains, “We need to work on building communities, not units. For instance, as migration to urban areas rises, we should also concentrate on rental housing versus only the ownership model. These units may work for nuclear families, but not so in parts of the country where joint families are still the norm, or where migrant forces are not always committed to a place.”

Context in terms of social, political and historic events also comes through in the chronotopes. For instance, the knowledge that the Asian Games Village in Delhi was originally built to house athletes for the 1982 Asiad. The case studies bring out the changing practices in housing, the transforming role of architects, along with a broader view of the ecology of housing.

Mehrotra hopes that “the exhibition serves as a provocation to the people in the profession to play a more active role in finding solutions to the housing crisis”. He is quick to admit, though, that ‘there’s no magic bullet’, but initiatives like these go a long way in shaping dialogue, and perhaps even our skylines.

‘The State of Housing’ is on view till March 18 at Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai. Entry is free

Kiran Mehta is a Mumbai-based journalist

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