Pre-research outline

• I started by reviewing the available Google Maps and Google Street View of Mumbai slums, taking screenshots of the points of interest for later sketching.

• I watched fourteen travel blogs and documentaries on the topic, taking time-stamped notes and screenshots along the way.

• The documentaries pointed me towards a number of written sources, research, and news articles. They were not numerous, as the slums remain largely unexplored from the architect’s point of view.

• Pre-research culminated in 35 sketches that informed a narrative, preliminary conclusions, and a travel thesis.

Slum Etymology and travel thesis

• Slum - current definition. Slum: a dirty, unpleasant, and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people. I find this definition surface-level and biased.

• Slum - pre-visit definition. After my pre-research, I developed a more neutral definition.

  Slum - an informal self-built settlement.

  Informal means architects and urban planners weren't involved. Self-built means shaped by need and instinct, without much prior planning. The resulting urban pattern has consistently emerged since cities became a thing eleven millennia ago. You can see similarities between ancient cities across the globe and today's slums. Left to its own devices, the human species builds those patterns and is most at home in them. As such, we wouldn't be too quick to dismiss modern slums as something unworthy of our exploration. Slum fabric is raw function and raw program, a mix of ancient human instinct and modern needs, coming straight from the user and therefore more in tune with the user than anything architects and urban planners design. Slum communities are engaging, enterprising, vibrant, and resilient, unlike designed low-income communities that are predominantly over-constrained, segregating, and apathetic.

• Dismissive pursuit of aesthetics. Architects and town planners throughout history were quick to condemn ancient urban fabric and slums as unsightly, re-shaping the cities with ideologies and beauty standards that were quickly becoming obsolete. This is a classic form-over-function drive, and in low-income communities, function is paramount, as there is no disposable income to put form over function. Yet we persist in replacing unsightly slums with handsome towers, without giving adequate thought to what it takes to live on low income and what drives low-income individuals. Residents are reckoning with us exchanging ugly, technologically inferior, but supremely functional slum fabric for sanitized, technologically superior, but programmatically broken urban fabric. Urban fabric can and should learn program from slum fabric.

• Learn before you school. Before re-developing the slums, we must go in and learn what the community is all about. We must visit their businesses, visit their homes, and learn their way of life in great detail, especially if we come from a higher economic status, as architects and urban planners often do. Something we take for granted without even thinking about it might be inaccessible to low-income residents, and if our design is based on such preconceptions, it will inevitably fail despite meeting code and looking good. For example, in Mumbai, slum redevelopment projects often ignore the wild entrepreneurial spirit of low-income communities. "We can create anything, except parents and love." - in the residents' own words. Not tapping into that is not only arrogant, but negligent.

• Slums are not the solution, only a teacher. I'm not offering a slum as a solution, nor do I suggest resigning ourselves to the idea that slum programs will always beat us and therefore stopping design for low-income communities altogether. My proposal is simple - design informed by slums, not substituted by slums, not blindly substituting slums. Whatever the new urban fabric will look like, I strongly believe architects and urban planners should relax their grip on it. There is precious little room for spontaneous communal expression left in the current urban fabric, and even when the modes of such expressions are provided, they remain over-constrained. We don't know what we don't know; we can't predict everything; some use cases will emerge that we couldn't anticipate, and we should consciously leave plenty of room for that. Just as we shouldn't arrange posters in teenagers’ rooms lest we draw their resentment (this chaotic mode of self-expression should be left entirely to them), we shouldn’t obsess over controlling every edge and datum line in the urban fabric if we don’t want to cultivate apathy among the inhabitants.

Research outline

With preliminary conclusions outlined, I developed my travel plans.

• Location. Mumbai, India.

• Time. 7 days.

• Goal. Documenting the program of informal low-income communities and the formal projects substituting them.

• Scope. Urban fabric and interiors of both residential and commercial properties.

• Budget. $5,000, including plane tickets and stay. However, my sister, a hamster, who's been inserting herself into my business since her DOB in 2002, invited herself over and bloated my budget to $11,000.

• Method. I gathered about 10 hours of video, trimmed it to 4.5 hours, turned it into 6,000 screenshots, sorted the screenshots, and used them to create over 150 annotated sketches that formed the basis for the narrative. The sketches and the narrative were running concurrently, informing and steering one another. Ironically, sorting the screenshots was the most challenging part, as not one of them firmly fell into a particular category.

  Today, I'll present a select portion of the materials, or we'll be here all day. Also, I will not show any photos or videos, only sketches, except for a few. The residents had some bad experiences with the media and bloggers, so they initially forbade any cameras. They only allowed mine after I told them that I would use the gathered materials for sketching only.

Responsible Tourism

If you plan to explore low-income areas, do it responsibly so you don’t become a "poverty tourist." Poverty Tourism isn't defined by where you go but by why you go.

• Come to learn, not to preach. Accept that you have no idea what it takes to live on $2 a day. Refrain from judgment and offering advice, or you will make a fool of yourself. Examples to follow.

• It is their story, not yours. My guide asked me a pointed question: "Are you here to know us?" Did I show up with a done story looking for soundbites, or am I here to tell their story? I've had my pre-research and pre-conclusions, and, spoiler alert, 85% went into the recycling bin after the trip. That's normal. If your story is unchanged after the site visit, you probably work for a national news channel.

• Avoid self-gratification. A common reason for poverty tourism is to come back home with a heightened appreciation for your elevated way of life. This will happen; you can't avoid it, but don't go to these places with that explicit purpose; that's mean.

• Choose a respected tour operator. I went with Reality Tours because they invest 80% of their profits back to the community where they tour. Also, their charity work keeps them close to the community, and they have access that no other tour operators have. They were more expensive than others, and I was ok with it. Remember that low cost often comes at the expense of human rights. Don't support blatant exploitation trying to save a dollar that you are more than capable of spending.

Relevant Slum History

• Mass urbanization. There was a recent (last half-century) mass migration of rural residents into Mumbai. The scale of migration was so big that the urban fabric couldn't handle it. Slums began to proliferate as newcomers claimed gaps in the urban fabric. The urban fabric is exclusive, meaning it excludes people below a certain economic level, and slums were an ingenious way for low-income residents to subvert this trend and to anchor themselves in the city. They were incredibly successful, as nearly 40% of Mumbai's population lives in the slums as of 2025.

SLUM DESIGN LANGUAGE

The first time I saw Dharavi, the world's largest slum, I experienced sensory overload. The slum's complexity was initially incoherent. It took me a few days to start seeing patterns and learn to read the slum fabric. Since we don't have days for onboarding, we will start by learning the slum's design language. With this baseline, it will be easier to read slum fabric and its program later on.

EXPOSED WELDED STEEL STRUCTURE

• Member types, sizes, and connections. The superstructure in slums is commonly steel columns and beams. Sizing is small, so members could be lifted and put in place manually, without heavy machinery (there is rarely any room for it). Connections are simplified as much as possible to reduce the number of critical welds (welds that ensure structural integrity). For example, in floors, beams are placed on top of girders, instead of in-level, which makes the whole assembly free of critical welds - the welds are there only to fix the beams in place, not provide structural integrity. The only critical welds remaining in the structure are between girders and columns. I've observed no bolted connections at all. Bolted connections, while requiring less skilled labor, require prior planning and tighter tolerances and therefore limit the structure's flexibility and adaptability to the site. Flexibility is of utmost importance in the slums, as, without prior planning, builders must solve design problems during construction.

• Programmatic reasons. Slum fabric must be able to claim available space quickly, before urban fabric has a chance to react, and also retreat quickly and cheaply in case urban fabric puts up a fight. In other words, it must be flexible and fluid, which makes steel structure an obvious programmatic choice. Flexibility during initial construction extends to flexibility during expansions and additions, as well as contractions and subtractions. Visible structure is easy to visually assess and plan alterations on the spot. Steel structure allows the building to grow fairly tall if needed and also to expand sideways to claim air rights around the structure - jettying to maximize spaces on the upper floors is common. A steel structure allows walls (infills) to be easily removed wherever the program calls for it without compromising overall structural integrity. Steel also offers well-known formal benefits: it is more predictable and controllable, requires less space and fewer members (space is gold in the slums), is naturally non-combustible, and is fully reusable and recyclable.

• Temporary structures. Wood and plastic tubes are sometimes used as structure, but those are reserved for temporary buildings. It is prudent to test a building on site to see whether it is financially and legally viable. If money comes in and bulldozers don't, then you can commit to steel. Wood and plastic tubes are connected with whatever is available at the moment: glue, wire, nails, screws, rope, hose, etc.

DECKING. For temporary structures, it is a mishmash of doors, plywood, particle board - anything flat. This creates a problematic floor, as dozens of elements with mismatched strength make navigation difficult. Occupants are compelled to memorize where the beams and girders are, since those are the sure places to step. For permanent structures, the obvious choice is reinforced concrete. Formwork can be cobbled together from any number and type of available construction waste. On a few occasions, I've seen fiber cement being used as formwork. Formwork is commonly kept in place as cheap reinforcement, which keeps the reinforcement at the surface level. Also, concrete can be mixed with any construction waste readily available in the slums.

INFILLS

• Program. Infills, coupled with a steel structure, make the building very flexible and customizable. Opening a business is as easy as removing an infill. Business didn't quite work out on one side of the building? You can easily patch it up and try an opening on another side. Business doesn't go at all? Convert the front to residential. This makes finding the right program for the place easy and failures less costly.

• Materials. On the low end, we can use corrugated plastic, corrugated fiber cement, and metal, all with little to no insulation value but much easier to remove and reconfigure. Getting passive ventilation right is critical, or the building will quickly turn into a furnace. Luckily, the infill's flexibility lets us quickly add and remove holes and test multiple configurations until one produces a breeze. On the high end, we have brick (with plaster over it) and concrete. This choice suits well-established programs requiring less flexibility and buildings where comfort is a higher priority, such as residential structures. At this point, slum buildings begin to compete directly with formal buildings in comfort and appearance.

FINISHES

• Unfinished infill. Most common, giving the slums their distinct rough appearance of rusty metal, old wood, stained concrete, washed-up plaster, and brick.

• Paint. Paint is truly transformative in the slums, making them more vibrant, cohesive, and inviting. The method works well in the formal sphere too. (Boston hotel artwork, for example). Art groups paint slums as a charitable act. Painted slums are sometimes accented with murals and other artworks throughout. However, painted patterns (imitating stones) make the slums look worse than they were unpainted.

• Plastic stick-on panels. A level up from paint, but a downgrade in aesthetics. The patterns chosen are usually refuse from large manufacturers. Most patterns look like they came from PS2 games and turn building into a magic-eye image. The cheap plastic feel reinforces the off-putting effect.

• Ceramic tiles. A level up from plastic, demanding more skill during installation. Patterns are hit or miss, but the material quality sometimes saves an ugly pattern. On a few occasions, I saw an entire wall covered by tiles from a samples catalog. Because all samples came from the same catalog, it looked surprisingly decent. I can almost imagine a pro move of pretending to be an architecture office and ordering a bunch of free samples, only to use them in construction.

• Pondering: Why don't the slums look holistic? Why do slums look so rickety-dank, but the same thing done in Europe in the Middle Ages looks charming? Availability of materials. In Europe, communities were restricted to the same stone from the same quarry, so even though the building shapes were chaotic and riddled with errors like modern slums, the resulting street was cohesive. Same with ads and signage. Something from the 1900s looks cohesive because most signs were made at the same shop with the same materials, stencils, styles, and types. Today's ads have millions of fonts, colors, and styles to choose from. The aesthetic of Indian slums falls victim to globalization and an unlimited variety of materials and styles, which are then picked at random and doomed to clash aggressively. The mad variety of finishes requires skills to wield properly that are rare in the slums, and, to be fair, in urban fabric, too. That's where design professionals can plug in right now. I've already mentioned art groups painting the slums, and it is the cheapest way to solve the cohesion problem. Are there other design interventions that we can offer?

VERTICAL CIRCULATION

• Stairs. Traditional stairs take up a lot of space and are avoided. You can find these stairs in established slums or in older slums that arrived first and therefore weren't as concerned about preserving available space.

• Metal ship ladders. Metal ship ladders are the predominant vertical circulation type in the slums. Ship ladders provide the smallest footprint while maintaining the core program of the full stair: the ability to climb it unsupported, which is important for hauling items up and down. If you look carefully, you'll see that only two points of support (two feet) are required to climb it, leaving the hands free to hold items. Nonetheless, the most common way to climb ladders is 3-point support: you throw an item over your shoulder or place it on your head, with one hand supporting it and the other holding the railing as you climb. Ropes are also used ILO railings. You can find them hanging in the stairwell, occupied by a ship ladder. However, most ship ladders commonly have railings welded to them as a standard quality-of-life improvement. Technically, ship ladders can forgo railings entirely, as they are steep enough to serve as railings themselves, but this is considered too much of a comfort compromise even in the slums.

• Wall-mounted ladders. Wall-mounted ladders are rarely used, despite being cheaper and having an even smaller footprint than ship ladders. Wall-mounted ladders are not as functional, as you need four points of support to climb them, which leaves no hands free to haul anything. Hauling is still possible, but it requires at least two people, ropes, and is much fussier and more time-consuming. This is an important lesson in affordability. Affordable isn't jsut the cheapest thing; it's the cheapest thing that preserves core functionality. If your value engineering ends up draining resources long-term - in this case, time - then you failed to design affordable buildings. Low-income communities can't afford to be wasteful, and design choices shouldn’t force them to.

• Rope with knots. I've seen this only once, but I have to mention it. In one unit, the space was so restricted that occupants used a rope to climb to the loft space. Obviously, this requires a high skill level and strength. From a benefits standpoint, it takes practically zero space and can be easily removed. As this was a loft, no item hauling was needed, since you can just toss items there. A similar circulation modification is used in US fire stations: a pole. It is the quickest way to slide from the upper to the lower floor during an emergency call. Luckily, firefighters aren't asked to climb the same pole back up after the call.

• Locations: Interior, exterior, and hybrids. Interior and exterior stairs are not different; they start as one and become the other within the same flight. Stairs are commonly exterior, going up into a jettying. Some are recessed so they can be secured with a door. Stairs are a natural element to eject from the private interior program out onto the public street domain, since they don't need to be inside or private. Overall, if you want to picture vertical circulation in the slums, imagine a NY-style cast iron fire escape stair serving as the only vertical circulation.

ENTRIES

• Doors. A traditional vertical door is common in the residential area. It is often kept open during the day for ventilation. Sometimes, vents are introduced into the door to keep it closed and ventilated. When the door is opened, a curtain is drawn for privacy. An open door lets you use the exterior as an extension of the interior living space, for example, to host a wet corner program.

• Hatch. A horizontal door sometimes used on the second floor to save space. It helps to avoid a stair landing in front of a door. Shoe racks are mounted on the wall at the top of the stairs.

• Sectional Gate. A sure sign of commercial activity within, a sectional door acts as a removable exterior wall. Removing a wall lets commercial activity move in and out of the building every day, like a tide.

Residential and commercial entries could be on opposite sides of the same building, and sometimes belong to the same unit, allowing an apartment program on one end to blend seamlessly into a business program on the other. Let's put a pin in that.

WINDOWS

• Core program. A regular window's core program is to provide ventilation, light, and views. In the slums, only ventilation often remains because of extreme density. Even when light and views are possible, residents block off windows with permanent, self-made shades because Mumbai heat is oppressive year-round. I didn't observe many residents putting stock in views or natural light.

• Add-on program with metal grates. A window in the slums gains additional program through metal grates. The objective of metal grates is to claim the air rights outside of the windows and balconies and saturate the captured space with program. Nearly all windows in the slums have metal grates over them, as not capturing free air space is wasteful; some are shallow, and some are large enough to serve as balconies or bay windows. The program commonly includes storage, a clothing line, and a green zone, each with the added benefit of moderating sunlight. Occasionally, and concerningly, the metal-grate balconies are used as children's play areas, despite having little structural redundancy to support that use.

ROOF

Non-occupiable:

• Colonial clay tile roof. Clay roofs are found in colonial-era structures. Great thermal performer, but very expensive in material, and it requires much more structure to support than alternatives. Today, few places keep the original roof; many are being disassembled, and the tiles are reused on other roof types. Oddly, the traditional clay roof has a bad rep: the supporting wood structure keeps rotting as it ages. Little can be done to fix it, especially on a budget, aside from replacing the whole roof with another type.

• Fiber Cement Board. Most common; over 95% of structures use it. Consists of corrugated fiber cement board over structure, no insulation at all. Fiber cement board is 85% cement, 15% asbestos fiber. Asbestos just won't go away, will it? Fiber cement roof is the cheapest type of roof; it is self-supporting, easy to maintain, fireproof, performs well thermally, and sometimes gives you cancer.

  • Health comments. As far as asbestos goes, this one is so coated in cement that it is fairly inert even if you mess with it, and I messed with it a fair bit as a child in Russia by breaking it apart, throwing pieces into fire, and watching them blow up. There are far more common and tangible health risks in the slums that you can address with the money you save on fiber cement. The sad reality is, when your income is low, the materials select themselves, and risks of cancer are simply dismissed as too unlikely compared to other risks, such as malnutrition. Efforts are underway to phase out asbestos in favor of other fibers; time will show how successful they are.

  • Properties. Fiber cement itself is brittle. People walking on it must be careful to step only on structurally reinforced places. As a child climbing those roofs, I knew the safe places where indicated with fasteners. Navigating a fiber cement roof requires greater caution; therefore, a fiber cement roof is utilized for infrequent uses only - drying pots, placing satellite antennas, etc.

• Fiber cement + mods. Residents are well aware of fiber cement roof disadvantages and are working to improve performance.

  • Tarp. Fasteners are rarely installed correctly and leak all over. Also, you can easily introduce a micro-fracture into fiber cement board by walking on it or putting a fastener through it, even if it was installed correctly. The micro-fracture will leak. The leaky roof problem is solved by throwing a waterproof tarp over the roof and anchoring it down with some weights. It works well enough, until high winds come in and maul the tarp, giving the slums their signature aerial look of a landfill.

  • Clay tiles. The pro move is to use a fiber cement roof, with a tarp over it for waterproofing, and another layer of clay tiles on top to anchor the tarp and add some thermal performance. That way, we achieve a high-performance roof assembly for little money. It also looks good from above, allowing slum fabric to blend better with formal urban fabric and keep the bulldozers away.

 Occupiable:

• Metal. Corrugated metal is a roof of choice at Dhobi Ghat, the laundry community. It lets people walk on the roof often with little care (just mind the edge), enabling them to dry large quantities of clothing on lines daily.

• Deck. Architects love a roof deck, and given a chance, we'll put one into any building. Slum dwellers treat the roof deck as a lost opportunity, so it falls victim to a natural programmatic pressure. If you have a solid floor, you might as well build a room on top of it, which has more utility. Also, decks are brutally hot in Mumbai. I climbed up to check one out and experienced the worst heat island effect of my life: I spent only 2 minutes on the deck, then 30 minutes off it drinking half a gallon of water. Nonetheless, the stove-like property of the space allows multiple uses: drying clothing, drying spices, drying clay pots (you might notice a pattern here). More exotic uses include passive water heaters (a black water tank just sitting there does a good job), hosting a cluster of 5G antennas and providing wireless internet for the neighborhood, and serving as a religious dominant. The last use is recreation, which happens only if the deck sits in a large tree's shadow.

UTILITIES

Despite preconceptions, utilities are widespread in the slums, but are inconsistent from building to building. Some more established buildings have everything a Western house would have. Newly built shacks have nothing at all and have to wait for utilities to catch up. Utilities always appear after the slum already exists, not before like in the formal urban fabric, which makes retrofitting difficult and awkward.

WATER

In the density of Indian slums, extracting water from an on-site well would be a bad idea, as ground sources are polluted with excessive waste from overpopulation. Water has to be delivered from elsewhere, using massive water mains that branch out into communities. The pipes are laid in the streets and alleys on the surface and are rarely buried. Pipes entering households are uncommon.

Water is given to the slums only for 2-3 hours per day, so all households must gather enough water to last them through the day for laundry, showers, dishwashing, and drinking. As a result, households store water in everything from ubiquitous blue barrels to reused plastic bottles. More established households centralized water storage - a large plastic water tank placed above the toilet.

Locals have evolved a tolerance for local water quality, but it will definitely give a tourist raging diarrhea. I used exclusively bottled water. You have been warned. It’s a somewhat common issue when traveling. For example, I can’t tolerate Indian water, but can tolerate Russian water, while my wife can’t tolerate Russian water, as I found out the hard way.

SEWER

As expected in a place of such high density, waste disposal is a massive problem. Sewers are commonly surface-level or sparsely covered, running in the streets and alleys along the water pipes, and routed to the nearest body of water, turning it into an open-air sewer, too.

ELECTRICIY

Access to electricity is almost universal. A spiderweb of wires is everywhere, hiding under jettying, climbing the facades, diving into windows and openings in the walls. As with all utilities in the slums, electricity was retrofitted haphazardly. I'm not sure anyone in the slums fully understands the electrical layout at this point. Near electric cabinets, the wires gather in large messy bundles resembling bird nests.

ACs, FANS, PASSIVE VENTILATION

ACs are split-units and are somewhat of a luxury item. Even households that have it don't run it all the time. During my travel, the residents only turned on the AC for me, as a guest. ACs are becoming common in commercial areas, as more and more business owners figure out that an AC workshop generates more profit than a sweatshop. Ceiling fans are dotted throughout, inside and outside, providing some relief from oppressive heat where ACs are not present or insufficient. Finally, passive ventilation comes through windows, doorways, and strategically placed holes in walls.

TELECOM

You will see satellite antennas on many roofs. TVs are widespread, although lately they are getting phased out in favor of phones. 4G reception is present throughout, provided by 4G antenna clusters on some roofs. Nearly everyone has a phone of some kind, which acts as the main source of entertainment, from music and videos to doom-scrolling social media. Contactless payments via QR codes are also widely adopted in the slums, turning a phone into a wallet.

APPLIANCES

Fridges are a must. In Mumbai heat, nothing will last more than a few hours without it. Therefore, many households have fridges, although small, the size of a hotel fridge or a beer fridge. Laundry machines and dishwashers appear here and there; they all look like they are from the early 2000s.

TOILETS AND WASTE DISPOSAL

Many have access only to public toilets, although private bathrooms are spreading steadily. Garbage disposal remains a big problem not only in slums but in Mumbai at large, with lapses in trash removal and processing. Residents collect trash in slums and move it to the edges, where it may sit for days or even weeks before collection.

DECODING STREET ACTIVITY

TRANSPORT

Successful transport at this density and income level should be small, robust, easy to maintain, maneuverable, and versatile.

• Carts. Two- and four-wheel; the four-wheel allowing you to use it as a mobile selling platform. Traditional, cheap, versatile, easy to maintain.

• Bicycle. Not common, perhaps too fragile for such conditions. Used as transport and for delivery. E-bikes are making their way into the slums. Also, sometimes bikes are adapted to pedal-powered knife sharpeners.

• Moped. The king of transportation, an obvious choice in the slums. Best MPG of any gasoline vehicle (80mpg). Small, easy to maintain. Crucially, it has a flat seat and flat floor, providing almost 5sf of mobile real estate that can carry ridiculous loads and up to 7 people. Not OSHA compliant by any means, but it helps you a lot in a pinch, and at a low income level, you are pinched a lot. Remember, the possibility of a horrible accident is always weighed against the certainty of eating plain rice for a month because you blew your money on a safe U-Haul equivalent or UberXL.

• Motorcycle. On the surface, a better moped. More powerful, prettier, cooler. However, it's larger, and it doesn't have 5sf of flat space. It can only be used for its design intent - transporting two people. No other uses are permitted. In a pinch, it won't let you take a calculated risk and use it outside its design parameters, which is exactly why it is an unpopular mode of transportation in the slums. There is a lesson for architects here.

• Tuktuk. 3-wheel car, effectively a covered moped with a wider base and a roof. Rain is no longer an issue. The primary limitation of a tuktuk is that it's not allowed on a highway because it is too slow.

• Shared Cab. A minibus (smaller than a compact car) that would bring you to the nearest train station. Doesn't go until it's completely full. The ride is very cheap - ten cents.

• 3-wheel truck. Same as a tuktuk, but better suited for hauling. It's much smaller than a regular truck, so it fits nicely in the narrow commercial streets of the slums.

• Train. Pretty much everyone in the slum rides it for trips across town and between slums. Very cheap. Famously, the doors are often open for ventilation, which lets you lean out and passively cool. It is strictly forbidden, so everyone does it. Newer trains are now closed and run AC.

• Traditional cars and trucks. They are not represented. You can encounter them, but they are guests, not residents. They are just too bulky to thrive here. An American-sized SUV is as large as some houses and will act like real estate, immobilized by traffic around it.

TRAFFIC

• Density. Density of traffic is extreme. This line is an actual representation of the density - everything bumper to bumper.

• Crossing the road. Those two figures are my sister and me trying to find a gap. The guide next to us says, "Use the power of the hand" to slow down a portion of the traffic and cross, kinda like using force in Star Wars. I didn't think the Force was with me on this one. The guide ended up doing all the Jedi stuff every time we crossed.

• Pedestrian separation. Also, there is no separation of people and traffic. Everyone moves in the same stream. The key for pedestrian survival is to move slowly and not make any sudden moves, i.e., be predictable for motorized traffic all around you.

• Horn. Blinkers are worthless in this environment. Everyone is using a horn to indicate a lane change. The racket is unbelievable and inescapable. As a pedestrian, I got horned at so many times that I became desensitized on day 3.

ANIMALS

You can meet a variety of animals residing in the slums for a variety of purposes. Slums are extremely multicultural, so purposes vary drastically.

• Pigeons. Bred as pets and for racing. Their feathers often died. Fetch a fair price.

• Chickens. Food. They are not free-range.

• Roosters. Fighting. Obviously, highly objectionable.

• Rabbit, turtle, goat, cow. All pets with religious significance across multiple religions.

• Cats and dogs. Traditional pets, all compact and short-haired to survive the climate and lack of nutrition.

• Fish, water turtles. Pets, existing in rather difficult conditions. Water tanks require ongoing maintenance, which is tough in the slums.

GAMES

All games must be adaptable to a high-density, complex environment. In other words, whatever fits in the alley.

Ball games:

• Cricket. The consequence of British rule, cricket is a national obsession. Kids love to play it, provided that they find a spot in the extreme density of the slums. Kids dream of becoming star athletes (at least one Dharavi resident has been confirmed as a star player - Simran Shaikh from the Women's Premier League. Overall, a slum as a place of birth would be hidden as something shameful). There were occasional sport-related brawls. Cricket is played everywhere: corridors, balconies, plazas, anywhere there is a long narrow space.

• Catch. Throwing a small ball to each other until one of you drops it.

Stone Games:

• Marbles. You put a marble on the ground and try to hit it with another marble. Don't need much space or equipment to play it.

• Five Stones. Involves throwing stones in the air and catching them. You start with one; then, holding one, you try to catch another, and so on.

• Hopscotch. Saw it at least once. Requires some space, but doable.

No equipment. Hide-and-seek, Jungle gym, Tag. Slums provide a rich environment for active games.

Toys. Some children were flying kites and had commercial toys. Most played with whatever item they had and used their imagination.

STANDARTISATION

Standardization happens naturally in the slums, usually at a later stage of their evolution.

• Structural standardization. Communities create common superstructures to inhabit together. The building gains the appearance of a formal building.

• Element standardization. Slum residents are observant and borrow design elements from one another. Sometimes one person makes a balcony and all his neighbors copy it. As such, ideas tend to spread naturally, which could be used in the "idea seeding" tactic of slum renovation, which I will cover later.