SLUM - EXTERIOR

With Alleys, Streets, Plazas, and Edges defined, let's dive deeper into them, explore their subcategories and their impact on slum fabric

Alley

In formal urban fabric, an alley is used strictly for circulation or utilities. In slum fabric, they fulfill multiple additional functions that bring them closer to the program of the urban fabric's street.

• Wide. At their widest, alleys are around ten feet. Traffic access (and therefore its transition to a street) is prevented by obstruction from other functions: wet corners, porches, stand-alone shrines, etc. In the air, the alley is further obstructed by extensive balconies, which also host wet-corner and porch programs for the units above. Laundry lines cross the alley from balcony to balcony. Some balconies extend far enough to touch their counterparts across the alley, although it is generally avoided. There is enough space for the stairs to be perpendicular to the street and outside the balcony footprint, giving the unit above more balcony space and the units below more façade. A water/sewer line runs through the middle of the alley, preventing any items or structures from being placed on top of it. The free space above the water/sewer line becomes a natural choice for pedestrian circulation. Water/sewer line thus serves two functions - an impressive level of utilization. Together, all elements create a vibrant, enjoyable environment, especially for kids playing active mobility games throughout.

• Medium. As the alley shrinks, the stairs turn parallel to the street and enter the balcony footprint. The only way for the stair to remain perpendicular to the street is to enter the building footprint, with some residents electing to do so. Wet corner and porch programs remain on and below the balconies, on both sides of the alley. Clothing lines also turn parallel to the street, as there is not enough space to stretch them across. Balconies enclosing the alley happen more often. However, some residents recess the second floor (or lack the means to maximize the footprint) and claim sunlight, allowing programs such as potted plants or commercial and manufacturing activity. The neighbor quickly adds a side window and shares the sunlight without compromising the floor plan. As before, a water/sewer line anchors the circulation. Kids make do with decreased room to play, reducing the mobility of their games and setting up a board game on the steps of the exterior stair, standing both in front of and under it.

• Narrow. As the squeeze continues, more program elements enter interior spaces. The buildings absorb the stairs, as there is no longer space for them on the exterior. The wet corner becomes internalized, leaving only occasional water containers on the porch. Porch functions flatten themselves against the walls and become shelves. Balconies fall out of favor, i.e., turn into jettyings and interiors. With balconies and exterior spaces gone, play areas are reduced to just circulation over the water/sewer line. However, the children take advantage by playing cricket, since there is little space for a ball to get lost.

• Ultra-narrow. The second floor on both sides meet in the middle, creating an enclosed corridor roughly the width of the water/sewer line. Any nook and cranny the water/sewer line leaves unclaimed is used for storage. Sometimes the sewer opens up to gain more space, even allowing a daring, squished exterior stair. Other ways to gain space include creating a small cubby by stepping a wall, which comes at the cost of reduced interior space. Thus, a tense stand-off exists between interior and exterior spaces. The light enters the alley through the sideways corridors on the first and second floors. Occasional light wells are claimed by commercial activity and used as natural advertisements. Clothing hangs over the doors, as there is nowhere else to put it. Enclosed alleys are dramatic, yet not very enjoyable spaces to inhabit. The kids disperse to play in less constricted alleys.

• *Commercial. Alleys dominated by businesses are uncommon, as businesses generally require robust transportation access. Commercial alleys prioritize revenue over all other programs. Access to light is limited as the alley is framed by structures up to six stories tall. Most businesses are B to B and not customer-facing, manufacturing a variety of goods, such as clothing and bags. All these factors combined create an unwelcoming, dirty, neglected environment. Windows facing a commercial alley are tiny. Leftover bay windows are filled with trash and discarded items. Few people choose to live or do customer-facing business here, and if they do, they create a small island of cleanliness directly adjacent to their door.

Street

• B to B (recycling). 13th compound, a recycling community, has the widest streets and the largest structures in Dharavi, empowering it to process 80% of Mumbai's plastic and dry waste. The facades are rag-tag and featureless, as most buildings are warehouses with small processing areas. Infrequent residential structures tend to be deeper in the alleys. Retail is limited. Dealing with recycling waste every day, the street creates an oxymoronic impression: spacious and bright, yet dirty and unwelcoming.

• B to C. Circulation of the commercial street is wide to supply businesses. Additionally, the width creates a welcoming environment for potential customers and allows prominent ad display. Driven by a steady stream of money, the structures here are of higher quality and have flashy finishes, competing for customers’ attention. Streets are crammed with transport and people, all in one stream. Commercial activity happens on the ground floor, with other floors reserved for residential spaces. The businesses take over the sidewalk, creating waiting areas or displaying merchandise. If they don't, traveling merchants will claim the sidewalk directly in front of them instead (no space in the slums can be functionless). Traveling merchants are there illegally, don't pay taxes to the government, and are therefore a target of police raids. However, they are there with permission from a local business (some benefit from the foot traffic traveling merchants generate) and pay "taxes" to a local community organization that guarantees their spot. Therefore, one can't just park their papaya cart anywhere they are pleased.

• Residential. A luxury in the slum, residential streets are rare. Residents of such streets were among the community's founders and were lucky to claim as much livable space as they wanted. Later waves of settlers were crammed into increasingly small alleys. Having lived here the longest, many residents found jobs in the formal economy. Transportation access focuses not on bringing goods in, but on getting people to their jobs across Mumbai. The resident'’ transport, ranging from bicycles to e-bikes, mopeds, to full-sized cars, is parked directly in front of their dwellings. The scale of Full-sized cars makes for an intimidating presence in the slum fabric, taking a footprint larger than some dwellings. Properties here are robust, tidy, sometimes fully formalized, and command a steep price, reaching $150,000 or more. This price repels all but the wealthiest developers, who must build residential skyscrapers to recoup their losses on land acquisition. Most of such communities are therefore left alone.

Plaza

An open space of any kind is under constant programmatic pressure to be better utilized - filled by structures. As a result, many plazas became significantly smaller or vanished due to infills. The only way a plaza can survive is to have a well-defined function that the community creates and maintains.

POTTERY PLAZA

Pottery production is a powerful plaza-forming program. Even so, pottery plazas shrunk over the years due to infills and manufacturing adjustments.

• Kiln. A multi-functional kiln is the defining feature of a pottery plaza and the main feature that preserves it. Kilns are used to fire a variety of clay pots, store them, and air-dry them before firing. Any available waste and recycling material is used for firing, causing noxious smoke to fill the plaza, leaving soot deposits on the surrounding buildings and disrupting their program. Some kilns are now pushed onto the rooftops (more on that later), which further puts pottery plazas in danger of going extinct. Temporary structures and roofs are erected above the kilns to maximize the space for air drying and to protect the firing kiln from rain. Kilns can be fully disassembled as needed for an event (such as a wedding) and reassembled after.

• Manufacturing areas. Plazas are utilized for mixing clay, wheel throwing, painting, and decorating the final product. However, many of these functions have moved indoors while maintaining a direct connection to the plaza.

• Storage. Copious storage is necessary in any production line. Plazas store products in all production phases, from raw clay and materials for temporary structures to the final product ready to be moved to the stores.

• Residences. Some residences face the plaza and often double as workshops (more on that in the next chapters).

• Buildings. Buildings facing the kiln reduced their windows to the minimum to protect themselves from smoke and soot. Clothing lines appear only when the kiln is not in use. Roofs are actively utilized for air-drying pottery; some even build patios with additional drying racks on the roofs. One building I visited stacked the plaza program into a skyscraper, from mixing clay on the bottom to firing kilns on the top. Others enclose isolated functions, such as wheel-throwing, in a tiny, booth-like container.

• Economy. Primarily local, as most pots are bought by Dharavi residents.

LAUNDRY PLAZA

Like the pottery plaza, laundry plazas are under pressure from infills and the modernization of laundry facilities.

• Wash Pens. Dhobi Ghat, a laundry community, existed for over a century and initially started as a laundry facility for the British. Concrete wash pens were built then and are still used today to manually wash clothing by beating it against a flogging stone. The wash-pen basins are lined up in double rows and occupy most of the plaza. Wash pens have been altered and modernized over the years. The central basin now hosts plumbing encased in concrete and doubles as an extra circulation core and a landing for ship ladders of the upper floors. The smaller basins often have water pumps. Industrial laundry machines, spin driers, folding and ironing tables, and occasional ship ladders and structural columns for the spaces above intrude on the wash pens.

• Clothing lines. Spin driers remove most of the moisture, but they aren’t a substitute for clothing lines. Clothing lines dominate the roofs and patios and also stretch across the wash pens. If the lines are too long, the residents prop them up with temporary, unsecured bamboo poles. The clothing lines are two ropes intertwined in a helix pattern, which lets them hold the clothing without clothespins. Residents sort clothing lines by type and color, creating an impromptu, vibrant art installation.

• Residences. The units are paired with wash pens and have the same width, which makes them among the smallest in all Mumbai slums. Over the years, residents built up the upper floor, creating more residential space, with some upper floors cantilevering over the basins and partially or fully shading them. Nearly all units have corrugated metal roofs, which allow them to host clothing lines. Today, most units are rental, so the decorations are limited.

• Machinery. Industrial laundry machinery is gaining popularity in the community and taking more and more space over the years. Most of the machinery is positioned between the residences and the wash pens, if space permits. If it doesn't, the machines can encroach onto wash pens, sometimes taking them out of use. The higher efficiency of industrial laundry machines could be the main driver of the community's vertical growth.

• Structure. In addition to the typical steel structure with infills found elsewhere in slums, Dhobi Ghat employs a lightweight metal tube structure to build a trellis for clothing lines. Large tarps shield the whole plaza or individual clothing lines from the elements, as needed. 

• Economy. Mostly export. Nearby formal hotels, hospitals, and other businesses use the laundry services provided by Dhobi Ghat.

COMMUNITY PLAZA

Community plazas are reserved as communal spaces for the adjacent units and exist by consensus among the residents of these units. Canopies often protect these plazas from the elements. The program of community plazas includes shrines, spaces for community organizations, retail, storage, moped parking (you'd have to walk the moped here), etc. Open spaces for community plazas often form when various slum clusters meet in awkward, suboptimal ways, making the space not worth developing. Community plazas come in a wide variety of scales, from tiny ones that serve as meeting spaces for only two units to large ones that act as a community nexus.

Edge

Edges form every time a slum comes into contact with urban fabric. Edges present opportunities, but also dangers to the community. Opportunities come from integrating into the urban fabric by providing services or products and establishing a solid revenue source. The danger comes from the urban fabric's natural hostility to informality. The nature of edges, the nature of interaction between the slum and urban fabric, is the key factor in the community's survival.

Factors influencing the edges are:

• Commerce. Commerce is mutually beneficial for slums and the urban fabric alike. It allows the slum to show its utility to the urban fabric, creating a symbiotic relationship with it and soothing its aggression. Being customer-facing, commerce has the nicest finishes and the best buildings in the slums, with facades and structures evolving into full-on urban fabric controlled by the slums - the perfect insulating layer. This allows a slum to hide in plain sight. Formal businesses even end up crossing over and setting up shop in the slums: after all, these are cheap and fairly built commercial spaces.

• Hard vs. soft. A hard edge is a fence, a shore, something a slum can't cross, so it hits the edge and stops abruptly. A soft edge occurs near underutilized pockets of urban fabric, such as parking spaces along the highways. Slums expand into soft edges, test the boundaries, and temporarily retreat if necessary. The trick is not to challenge the soft edge too aggressively, or it will quickly harden.

• Hostility. Urban fabric is always hostile to slums to some degree. If the particular type of urban fabric is slow or reluctant to react to incursions, slums exploit it, claim space, and saturate it with activities, often commerce. If the reaction time is quick, the slum learns not to encroach, but this in turn creates a hostile, resented edge that predominantly functions as a waste disposal area.

• Buffers. Sometimes, there is a buffer near the edge, such as a harshly enforced 40ft buffer around a military base fence - any encroachment would be met with immediate violence. Other times, urban fabric is more docile and pacifistic, and the slum eliminates a buffer entirely, putting structures right on the edge, or even using urban fabric structures for support. It depends entirely on the nature of the edge and how it is enforced.

Types of Edges

1) TRANSPORTATION ARTERIES AND UTILITY LINES

Road Edge. A slum facing a road has a huge opportunity for commerce.

• A formal road provides easy supply lines.

• A formal road brings massive through-traffic of customers from outside slums with deeper pockets, encouraging a high-margin export economy (from slums to urban fabric).

• Roads are wide (even a double-lane road is wider than a residential block in the slums), allowing plenty of natural light, improving customer experience, and making ads larger and more visible. Natural light also permits extensive vegetation, such as full-size trees.

• Roads are naturally soft edges. Parking lanes and sidewalks, if there are any, will be taken over by nomad merchants, some selling items straight from the back of their parked vehicles. Low-traffic periods could be exploited to claim portions of lanes (or even full lanes) and set up shops there. It is a balancing act, as you don't want to halt traffic, which would halt commerce, or become too much of a nuisance to drivers, which would draw the ire of authorities. With sidewalks occupied, pedestrian traffic is pushed into the already narrowed lanes, slowing car traffic and putting drivers on high alert. Drivers, instead of relaxing and scrolling TikTok while driving, sweat bullets trying not to hit anything. Thus, Road Edge spontaneously evolved a European walkable-neighborhood doctrine and made the road safer for everyone involved, pedestrians mixed with cars notwithstanding. Also, slow traffic lets passing drivers spot businesses better: they could go from complaining about traffic one minute to buying cheap papayas the next.

Pedestrian Bridge Edge. Pedestrian traffic from Dharavi train station cuts across two highways and is so thick that it used to halt both highways for ninety minutes twice a day during rush hours. To solve this, a long pedestrian bridge was built to lift pedestrian traffic above the highways, with the road below forming a unique edge.

• Pedestrian bridge traffic is of no consequence as it is entirely detached from the street.

• The road below is a slum street, dominated by pedestrian and mixed moped traffic. The width, enforced by the pedestrian bridge above, is abnormally generous for a slum street, almost double the norm. The massive columns of the pedestrian bridge are used as ad spaces. Occasional planters with spiked fences - traffic dividers with unclear purpose - are dully ignored and navigated around. The structures grow tall enough to stop inches from the pedestrian bridge underbelly, but they dare not use it for structural support.

• With little non-slum traffic coming through, most businesses are a part of the domestic slum economy: barbers, diners, smoke shops, etc. It makes you wonder whether the street had a booming economy before the bridge and entered decline after it was finished.

Train Track Edge. The edge of train tracks is precarious, as it is harshly and quickly enforced. Trains do not tolerate disruptions, and authorities are not shy about security structures and bulldozers. This creates a cautious, tense, conflict-ridden edge. Like any hostile edge in the slum, it becomes a dumping ground for the slum's programmatic issues. In the early days, people used train tracks as bathrooms, to the great displeasure of authorities and train riders. With the deployment of public bathrooms in the slums, the situation greatly improved. Today, train tracks often serve as landfills, which also advertise waste-removal issues for authorities.

• Passive train track edge. The most common arrangement. Some put shanties up against the edge, minimize windows, dump trash there, and pretend the edge doesn't exist. Some engage it more, utilizing ample sunlight to grow potted plants. Some go as far as putting a half-alley up against the edge and cautiously using it for views and activities such as laundry and recreation. In this arrangement, residents stay away from the exclusion zone and don't use it as a landfill. They even clean the tracks from the trash thrown out of the trains. This arrangement should be formalized as it appears to be the most mutually beneficial for both parties. However, if activity becomes disruptive, authorities will quickly put up a fence, bringing back the resented edge and all its issues. It is a balancing act that requires patience on both sides. The lesson of the edge: don't expect all people to behave the same way in the same space.

• Active train track edge. On a rare occasion, a slum can take over a train track. It can happen on a slow-moving portion of the train track, such as near train stations. Trains still pass through the tracks, but at minimal speed and with more caution than residents walking across it. Such an edge has commercial activity, although tepid, since there is no way to engage the train traffic and few from the train station will run across the tracks to buy something. Commercial areas are always dirtier than residential, so the track can become littered with waste. This arrangement negatively impacts both parties.

Planned Grid. One approach to slums in India is to give them a grid and forget about them. This harnesses programmatic power and freedom of the slums while making them safer, more efficient, and more uniform. Slum fabric grown within the grid can evolve into urban fabric over time. Formal infills are easier, so architects can introduce good architectural practices and ideas into these communities. Supplying construction materials within the grid is easier, which speeds construction. Slum fabric within the grid is more aesthetically pleasing both at ground level and from above, making the surrounding urban fabric less hostile. The grid ensures a medium neighborhood scale, which supports long-term affordability. Overall, providing a designated space and a grid for a slum is the most cost-effective way to create new affordable housing while eliminating many of the negatives of slums. Unfortunately, the grid can't be deployed in the existing clustered slum without tearing it down first.

Stair. The urban fabric needed pedestrian access to the top of the hill, where a water treatment plant was located. The resulting stair is amazingly friendly to the slums.

• It lets residents access their dwellings straight from the stair by building makeshift access stairs right on the steps.

• It extends side stairs to access slum streets and alleys, and it also allows streets and alleys to connect to it via their own informal stairs.

• Landings seamlessly transition to streets and alleys.

• Urban fabric uses the stairs to extend its influence by branching out with formal assets, such as public bathrooms.

• Formal retaining walls stabilize the hill and make the slum on it safer.

• The ways the stairs connect to the slum fabric allow them to serve as community recreation and gathering spaces, and provide easy access to the urban fabric at the ends of the stairs.

Water utilities.

• Water main. The water main is entombed in concrete and goes underground. The area above and next to it is a large, strictly enforced exclusion zone, cleared through slum demolition and secured with a concrete fence topped with barbed wire. As any hostile edge, it is used for dumping trash and human waste. The fence prevents residents from using the area as a bathroom, so they run sewer lines over it and yeet their garbage over like Olympic hammer throwers. They don't do it out of spite; it's just the best use for the area in the present circumstances. The nearby recycling community somewhat mitigates the situation by using the area as staging grounds for their recycling operations. Some folks from the recycling community also traverse the exclusion zone collecting valuable recycling materials. With human neglect and fertilizer, wild vegetation is actively reclaiming the area. The facades facing the exclusion zone are mostly blank corrugated metal manufacturing facilities with little to no windows. Some residences face the area, but the facades are stripped of all aesthetics.

• Water distribution. It is impractical to have an exclusion zone above and near water distribution lines, so the residents are permitted to occupy it, but not build anything on top of it. This creates a slum plaza maintained by the water system. The area buzzes with quiet residential activity: kids playing, adults lounging, and chores being done. The area is impeccably clean, as in any other residential area in the slums. There is also plenty of space for seasonal festivals and weddings, so the area is lushly decorated on occasion. The area also becomes a natural choice for urban fabric agents such as public bathrooms, community organizations, temples, shrines, etc.

• Lesson learned. The slum will use the area one way or another. If you forbid all positive engagements, such as recreation, you will promote negative engagements, such as a landfill.

2) NATURE

Slums naturally gravitate toward brownfields, forgotten and underused areas, landfills, swamps, wetlands, and other zones passed over by the formal urban fabric. Therefore, slums often run into and reckon with natural barriers such as hills and river banks, engaging them in a variety of ways.

• River. Rivers and creeks near the slums have no chance to be anything nice. With overpopulation and resulting persistent issues of directing and processing waste, it ends up in the water one way or another. The slum resigns to this fact and often directs the sewer lines into the river directly, turning it into an open-air sewer. The facades are brought as close to the river as possible (since a boardwalk is not happening), stripped to essentials and the cheapest materials, dotted with sewer pipes and tiny windows for ventilation only. We can also see small jettying that are bathrooms hovering directly over the river. Together, the facades form a unified wall that protects the community from foul smells and unpleasant views.  The river bank is reinforced with concrete to prevent the slum from sliding into the river. Occasionally, you can find a person sailing the river on a raft and cleaning up floating trash (the person is paid many times the average wage, but is socially ostracized).   

• Topo. Slums are forced to reckon with topo (the bottom edge), as they have little means to modify it, with only manual labor available. This results in a granular, highly irregular management of topography, creating extreme conditions both good and bad.

  • Compression. I encountered the narrowest alley on my trip on the topo edge. It was an alley that made me bend over, turn sideways, and remove my backpack in order to traverse. Four units faced this narrow portion, with the tops of the door openings cut off by the structure above. The extreme alley nonetheless culminated in a cathartic, spontaneous small observation deck overlooking the slum and the city backdrop. My tour guide had fond childhood memories of this observation deck, where he lounged with his friends.

  • Alleys. Alleys often transition into stairs, following the most optimal path along the topo lines. The steps will be irregular in shape and height, morphing into porches and platforms for a variety of uses, such as water storage, creating irregular pockets of dead ends that residents use to add more entries, taking advantage of any opportunity the topo provides. The alley façade shifts from entry group one moment to full-height retaining wall the next. The alley frequents T-intersections as it hits a portion of topo too steep to handle and navigates around the obstacle. Alleys also do switchback maneuvers, borrowed from stairs, to hop over obstacles.

  • Rapids. Water is supplied to slums for 3 hours per day, so for 3 hours every day every faucet in the slums is opened to fill as many containers with water as possible. Managing water manually causes spills, and in an environment as dense as this, the spills gather in the alleys and run down the stairs, turning them into rapids. Navigating them is very fun, if a bit precarious.

  • Daylight. Access to daylight and views is irregular. Fully enclosed alleys one moment become platforms overlooking the whole slum in another. Sometimes, the alleys become luxurious communal balconies. That said, the topo edge, on average, provides more dramatic opportunities for views and daylight than a slum on flat ground.

  • To be continued after sketches are completed.

• Ocean. Some communities approach the rocky shores. Strangely, ocean shores are not viewed as an asset. Fishing communities set up docks on some portions of the shore, but others treat it as a hostile edge, perhaps due to harsh weather conditions. The facades are not painted (or the paint was stripped by the weather), the windows are small and utilitarian, no decoration aside from kid art. The structures are robust, mostly concrete or brick, to resist the winds. The rocky shore is treated as a landfill in some areas, or used to situate clothing racks in others. Since nature, not humans, enforces the hostile edge, kids frequent the area to play when the weather is nice. Some residents are brave enough to set up a spice-drying tarp, even though the spice will be gone after just one good gust of wind.

3) SLUMS INTRUSION INTO URBAN

• Sidewalk Communities. Sidewalk communities are something the US population is well familiar with - the homeless tent cities that are violently displaced from one street only to re-appear on the neighboring street. Violence is less effective in India, as the sidewalk residents are numerous, well-organized, and dug in with permanent structures. Because of the linear configuration of the occupied site, sidewalk communities cannot sell their properties to developers or develop into urban fabric themselves. In a way, they are stuck where they are in a tense standoff with urban fabric. Unit prices go up to $100,000 or more, but the value is locked in and can never be turned into cash (a lot like homeowners in the US who insist their house is $1m).

  • Residential one-story. The first surprising thing is electricity: initially hijacked from the grid, but eventually formalized. Unlike other slums, there is no water line. Water is brought externally. Sidewalk communities are always under pressure, so they rush to create an insulating commercial layer. Residents hang makeshift signs on their dwellings, advertising their trade, trying to create a foothold in the city and provide services to the residents of the urban fabric. Getting out of your apartment complex and coming face-to-face with a slum is a trivial condition in India, so nobody pays it any mind. Sidewalk communities treat their residences as permanent, decorating and renovating them.

  • Residential two-story. Sidewalk communities occasionally grow to two stories, but no further. While urban fabric can't get rid of the community, it won't let it get out of control either. The boundary is often enforced with a fence, barbed wire, spikes, and other hostile architecture. That said, the urban fabric made a concession in the form of a public bathroom, likely to manage waste and make slum / urban fabric co-habitation more tolerable. The residential program gets displaced to the second floor, while the first floor is almost exclusively businesses. Sidewalk means a road is near, and a road means customers. As such, the sidewalk community behaves a lot like a road edge, with many businesses such as moped repair shops, cafes, retail, etc. The parking lane next to the sidewalk becomes a porch for business displays, although some elect to avoid the curb and keep their porch on the sidewalk and off the road. I also observed metal trellises built over the façade to hold the tarp, presumably to deal with harsh breezes or prevent moisture infiltration. The one important difference from a road edge is the absence of formal businesses. Because sidewalk communities can't evolve into urban fabric and lack water/sewer utility, formal businesses avoid them and never cross over.

  • Commercial. Other sidewalk communities evolve into markets (or start as a market from the beginning). The structures are still permanent, but smaller, basic, utilitarian, and less well cared for, since decorations and expensive repairs eat into profit margins. They function more as storage units than anything else. Some businesses simply open the sectional gate and start trading, but such arrangements are rare. Most businesses extend out of their enclosure onto the sidewalk and road. It begins with moving your main display case out a little bit so that there is more space behind it to sit. From there, the ideas start flowing. Mobile partitions covered in merchandise are pushed even farther out as advertising. Merchandise (travel bags) is stacked in towers outside and hung on the roof; it is visible from further away. The most proactive merchants put their chairs in front of displays so they can engage passers-by directly and make a sales pitch in person. All permanent structures respect the curb line, but temporary installations don't care at all, spilling over it and even creating a new curb line with makeshift platforms. This creates a tidal cycle: commerce is neatly contained inside the permanent structures at night, then spills onto the road during the day. Residences are rare and are likely a result of a failed business, with the owner staying put for the time being (let's take note of that). Urban fabric is less hostile and pretends it deals with a market. Nonetheless, the edges are harshly enforced with hostile architecture to keep the community contained. Many cabs also park in front of businesses, shuttling clients to and from the train station.

• Slums growing on buildings. Sometimes slums begin to climb the façades of formal buildings. The formal structure must permit such intrusion by being strong enough to handle it, so such conditions mostly happen on well-built colonial buildings. Residents who inherited such buildings deemed the interior/exterior ratio inefficient and tilted it toward the interior by creating a layer of slums on the façade. I observed everything from a modest balcony to a full-on room that nearly doubled the apartment's size. Some balconies are small enough to be suspended from the façade, while others must drop columns two or even three floors down. The residents typically ignore each other's efforts, so you end up with two or even three columns coming down to the ground from different floor levels. Residents on the first floor have it best as they can build on the ground and claim as much space as they want, not worrying about structural support.

  • Boston. One might think that this is crazy business and that it will never happen in the US. See Boston. While Urban Fabric will be very unking to any funny business on the street side, in the alleys it is a free-for-all limited only by your finances and imagination. Unlike in India, US residents are forced to collaborate due to regulatory pressure, so the addition is more or less cohesive from top to bottom. But beyond that, anything goes, and no two additions are alike. I call it a mullet model - business upfront, party in the back (while India likes party everywhere, front, back, and center). I believe it is a great model for urbanism - architects get to obsess over street facades, datum lines, and curbs while residents can go nuts in the alleys and do whatever fits their fancy. It will become an important incubator of ideas we can borrow from and a bellwether showing changing trends and preferences.

4) URBAN INTRUSION INTO SLUMS