In the recent decades, the Government of India has implemented a unique approach to the problem of slum proliferation in Mumbai. By providing an innovative cross-subsidy to private developers, the administration has created a working model for Public-Private-Partnership in Slum Rehabilitation. This report traces the evolution of this model through an extensive literature review of the preceding schemes. It also critiques the models on its impact on public life and provides recommendations for future policy decisions. / text

It is neither mine nor yours, it is both mine and yours. This project is about how a public space is maintained and the intriguing relationship between the contrasts of a private and a public space; the home and a market hall.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

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This thesis explores the challenges of urban sprawl and land scarcity, focusing on Mumbai, a city constrained by geographical boundaries and marked by high population density. With Mumbai encircled by the sea on three sides, opportunities for horizontal expansion are severely limited, prompting the exploration of vertical development as a sustainable and innovative solution. This research proposes a vertical urban model that stacks traditional city sectors—residential, commercial, and recreational—within a compact vertical space. The aim is to house a growing population efficiently, while freeing ground-level areas for vital green spaces such as farms and public parks, especially targeting the eastern coast of Mumbai, the city's last undeveloped frontier. A central element of the thesis is the design approach, which counters the typical social isolation found in high-rise living. Drawing inspiration from the communal dynamics of Mumbai's traditional chawls, the proposed architectural model merges communal living areas with private spaces to foster both community interaction and individual privacy. This hybrid design approach is thoroughly developed through an analysis of chawl lifestyles, adapting their community-enriching aspects to suit the demands of modern urban living in vertical structures. By investigating the feasibility and benefits of vertical integration through detailed architectural designs and urban planning frameworks, this study not only addresses Mumbai's physical constraints but also prioritizes the psychological and social well-being of its inhabitants. The outcome is a holistic urban development model that not only enhances urban life quality but also provides a template for other densely populated cities facing similar challenges. This thesis sets a precedent for future urban planning endeavors, promoting a balanced, sustainable approach to city development that can be adapted globally. / Master of Architecture / This thesis investigates the problems of limited land and the spreading out of cities, particularly looking at Mumbai. Mumbai is a crowded city that can't grow much sideways because it's surrounded by the sea on three sides. To manage this, the study suggests building upwards, stacking different parts of the city—like places where people live, work, and play—on top of each other in tall buildings. This way, more people can live and work in less space, and the ground can be used for parks and farms, especially on the eastern side of Mumbai which hasn't been developed much yet. A significant part of this project is creating building designs that help people feel connected to their community, even in tall buildings where it's easy to feel isolated. It takes inspiration from Mumbai's traditional chawl homes, where everyone shares some spaces and knows their neighbors well. The idea is to mix private spaces where people can have their privacy with shared areas where they can meet and spend time with others. By exploring ways to build up instead of out, the study not only finds solutions for Mumbai's lack of space but also looks after the mental and social health of its residents. The final goal is a new way of building cities that makes life better for people and can be used by other crowded cities around the world. This work aims to show a way forward for city planning that is thoughtful and can be applied globally.

Cities are a way of life. They are an amalgamation of cultural background and urbanism, which determine the quality of life, environmental sustainability, social behavior and economic well-being. Since the ancient times, cities have been the way to define the growth and development. The development of the cities depended upon availability of resources for a better livelihood and the way humans utilize the resources. Even today as cities develop, people hope for better living conditions. Urbanism plays a major role in the development of cities, being a combination of cultural and urban living. Urbanism has brought various downfalls along with progress. Has urbanism made development a monotonous concept? These days, cities are urbanizing at a fast rate not considering their future consequences. Having lived in Mumbai, I have seen it grow into a megacity. The countless problems that urbanism has brought to accommodate the massive amount of people migrating into the city has affected the quality of life of people immensely. However, is it for the better or worse? People all over the country want to have a piece of Mumbai, the city of dreams. This growth in the population has overpowered the city. Mumbai is famous for its railway system. It is the lifeline of the city. However, due to the amount of people using this system, the travel is more of a chaos. Every railway station has a main access road filled with hawkers and commercial storefronts. People in Mumbai are always in a rush, so these hawkers and commercial stores are a necessity to their daily life. People shop for their daily necessities while returning home to save time. However, these streets are extremely chaotic and crowded. My thesis focuses on how this space can be utilized by three consumers - the traveler, the shopper and the one who does both. It aims to decongest this main street and make travelling by local trains convenient. The site I have chosen is located in the heart of Mumbai city and is one of the most important railway station on the Western Suburban railway system. It is known as Dadar railway station. More than 500,000 people use this railway station daily. With the maximum number of incoming pedestrian traffic, my design can be used as an example for other railway stations throughout Mumbai. / Master of Science

One of the chief characteristics of a high-rise building is its verticality. However, it seems that most high-rise buildings do not directly pursue the architecture of verticality. Moreover, verticality is rarely perceived within this building type. This thesis investigates the potential of verticality in a residential high-rise building. Together with the aspect of verticality, the thesis pursues an idea that even in a residential high-rise, the sense of community that typically exists in low-rise settlements on the ground and other connections to the outside can be at least partially preserved. In summary, the proposal aims the architecture to celebrate the verticality of the high-rise as a part of the skyline, expressing the verticality through its facade. For the dwellers, sky gardens offer a sense of verticality with constructed views connecting the outside world. Six two-story-apartments adjoin the sky garden with a double height living room suggesting the apartments in a high rise shouldn't be flats. This double height vertical space extends into the balcony spaces suggesting a local verticality at the apartment level. / Master of Architecture

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In this dissertation I explore social identity, secularism, and Indian Muslims' conceptions and experiences of living in a secular state while debating among themselves the meanings of ethical Muslim selfhood. Through participant observation and interviews based on over 15months of intensive field research, undertaken in a predominantly Muslim area of south-east Mumbai, my research focused on two groups of Muslim men--middle-class entrepreneurs and householders in their early to mid thirties, and senior students, from their late teens to early twenties, from a madrasa (Islamic seminary) attached to a prominent mosque in the city. Owing to its complex and intense dynamism, I also emphasize the city as an important agent in shaping everyday life. The core of my work is to explore secular life and secularism, central to India's liberal conception of itself as a pluralist democracy, that emerge through the lived experiences of Muslim men engaging with various daily pressures and transactions in an intensely dynamic urban context while trying to maintain a self understood to be ethical in terms of an inherited Islamic tradition. In discussing everyday phenomena such as piety and religious authority, gender, childraising, popular culture, personal and professional pursuits and ethical conduct, I demonstrate that the ostensibly `religious' domain of Islam is not necessarily the only, or even primary, basis for achieving selfhood for even those who identify as observant and devout Muslims. Rather, I argue, the religious domain of Islam in this context is defined as such and intersected by discourses and practices of the self as a political and economic agent, that is, a self defined in terms of political modernity. Thus this dissertation also contributes to the current anthropological rethinking of categories like `religion', `secularism', and `politics' in relation to social processes and subjects: a series of projects that are related, in the Indian context, to modernity and liberal conceptions of statehood, sovereignty, and personhood. A major conclusion of this work is that while most Indian Muslims have largely internalized (and accept) the liberal differentiation of politics and religion, the modern secular project in India nevertheless remains incomplete.

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