foreword

The objective of this assignment was to explore four urban ideas and apply them to a 500 metres radius of a chosen city. These four urban ideas consisted of: The Social City (explored along with the idea of The City Beautiful), The Compact City, The Metabolist City, and The Resilient City. The chosen city for the synthesis was the city of Mumbai, India. The area of Mumbai analyzed and synthesized in this assignment is the Worli area located near the coastline and home to the fishing industry along with well-known landmarks such as the Worli Sea Face, Worli Promenade, and the Worli Sea-Link. The idea of the four urban cities were interesting to test in Worli due to it’s multicultural and mosaic urban fabric. Worli’s urban context consists of highrise development, recently developed infrastructure oriented towards automobile sufficiency, and a diverse commercial industry. However, it also contains patches of slums, unused abandoned land, an untreated coastline, and open drainages. Worli, like the rest of Mumbai, is a patchwork of the urban context, making it an interesting area to apply urbanism ideas that might look small but serve the community and its inhabitants at a larger scale- attempting to upbring the community at large.

The fundamental intention in exploring these ideas was to enhance the city from people up, following Jan Gehl’s theory- enhancing the city for its inhabitants will result it in being more liveable, instead of forcing people into a pre-built mould of large built forms. The idea that was explored successfully in this area, was The Social City- Mumbai due to its high density and tight spaces may seem like a difficult area to explore this idea. However, I believe this is the actual driving factor that makes this idea successful because any design move made is fully adapted and ‘inhabited’ by the residents. Yet, the patchworked urban fabric and almost arbitrary roads does pose its own challenges. Mumbai’s high density along with increasing vehicular traffic in numerous forms: rickshaws, taxis, cars, bicycles, hand carts, buses, motorbikes, and scooters with the addition of a large number of pedestrians can be filtered with the introduction of continuous skywalks. This has been explored through diagrams, collages, and sketches.

Going through the other ideas made me realize that all these ideas can closely be intervened with each other if the underlying concept is followed through. That being said, The Metabolist City was challenging to integrate because of what Mumbai is. Mumbai quite literally is living- a city that never sleeps and a city that never dies.

At the same time, making smaller interventions for the larger community makes the city more liveable.

Currently, Worli has a mixed lower class income demographic, with rich cultural significance. Even though civic and infrastructural developments are beginning to increase the exisitng situation of Worli’s amenities and urban landscape is deteriorating. Current infrastructure is being burdened with improper waste disposal, lack of flood proofing during the monsoon season, open fish market and plenty of opportunities for the spread of disease through the densely populated slums.