City portraits: Mumbai9 aprile 2013Venezia, Palazzo Badoer

City portraits: MumbaiInternational conference9 aprile 2013Università Iuav di VeneziaBadoer, aula Tafuri

curatorManuela Schirra

infodottorati@iuav.itwww.iuav.it

@iuav 2013a cura delServizio Comunicazione Iuav – Venezia

Università Iuav di Venezia

S CUO LA D I DOT TORATO

“In the heterogeneity and in the openness is our pride, not our shame: [...] and this lesson has a profound importance for India. And for Asia and the world.”

Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian

City portraits: Mumbai

april 09th, 2013

9.30 Welcome alberto ferlenga, director of Iuav School of Doctorate Studies manuela schirra, curator 10.00 first session charles correa, architect, planner, activist and theoretician, Mumbai City on the Water (1975) Screening: Video 1 (16’) darryl d’monte, former resident editor of “The Times of India” and the “Indian Express” in Mumbai, Mumbai The Only Thing Real about Mumbai is Estate sandeep gandhi (and geetam tiwari), Civil Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Matching Mobility Needs luisa pellegrino, University of Turin, Turin You Can Find Me in the Garden manuela schirra, Università Iuav di Venezia Kanchanjunga. A possible living model for Mumbai 13.00 lunch break

14.00 second session fabrizio giraldi, freelance photographer Go Mumbai william hunter (and camillo boano, caroline newton), The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, London Contested urbanism in Dharavi enrico michelutti, Technical University of Catalonia - UPC, Barcelona Lessons learnt at the community scale subhash mukerjee (and michele bonino, matias echanove, rahul srivastava) , Marc Hood, Turin - Mumbai Homegrown architecture bijon jain, Studio Mumbai, Mumbai Immediate Landscapes 17.30 final andrea iannetta, Film & Television Institute of India, Pune Allah is Great (2012) Screening: Video 2 (25’)

city portraits

Mumbai, the eighth stage of the international conference series City Portraits. Promoted by the Iuav Doctorate School, and organized by its PhD students and doctors, the series, covering cities all over the world, will address the subject of urban complexity from a variety of viewpoints, which is the only way to understand the subject. The co-existence within the Doctorate School of dif-ferent approaches to research relating to the questions of architecture, urban planning or design, united by a scholarly tradition that has made the Iuav an international point of reference in the sphere of historical and urban studies, makes the theme of the city particularly suitable for making the best use of the skills, from both the past and the present, developed at our university.The aim of the conferences is not so much to summarise processes that are too complex to be the object of a small number of considerations, but rather to provide keys to the interpretation of important aspects of our contemporary nature, and to the understanding of how this nature is presented within those urban phenomena that, more than anything else, characterize it.The conference will focus on cities that are particularly relevant for their histori-cal importance and their present-day condition, capital cities or metropolises in every continent. For each city will be analyzed the reasons and the components of their diversity in a globalized world.Historians, urban planners, architects, experts in design or economics, photo-graphers, etc. will participate in the conferences. Each conference will be ac-companied by an independently produced series of images (films, photographs, documentaries) by which means a specific city been represented and made know to its inhabitants and to those beyond its boundaries. The City Portraits are now the start for a series of guides published by Editrice Compositori, dedicated to the greatest city in the world and seen through the eyes of the architect. The first release in November, Sao Paulo and Istanbul. Thus, in addition to the traditional tour guide you will be able to pack also the guide City Portraits to explore the modern urban changes taking place.

Alberto FerlengaDirector of the Iuav School of Doctorate Studies

Mumbai09.04.2013curator Manuela Schirra

Madrid19.03.2013curator Sergio Martín Blas, Claudia Pirina

Mexico City28.11.2012curator Caterina Pregazzi

Jerusalem15>16.05.2012curator Ruba Saleh

Istanbul29.02>01.03.2012curator Teresita Scalco, Moira Valeri, Marco Vani

São Paulo29.11.2011curator Daniele Pisani

St Petersburg19>20.04.2011curator Cristiano Guarnericollaborator Lora Rudko

Beijing15>16.12.2010curator Anna Laura Govoni

Abstract

Charles Correa, architect, planner, activist and theoretician, Mumbai Darryl D’Monte, former resident editor of “The Times of India” and “Indian Express” in MumbaiSandeep Gandhi (and Geetam Tiwari), Civil Engineering Dep., Indian Institute of Technology, DelhiLuisa Pellegrino, University of TurinManuela Schirra, Università Iuav di Venezia Fabrizio Giraldi, freelance photographer Willian Hunter (and Camillo Boano, Caroline Newton), The Bartlett Develop. Planning Unit, London Enrico Michelutti, Technical University of Catalonia - UPC, BarcelonaSubhash Mukerjee (and Michele Bonino, Matias Echanove, Rahul Srivastava), Marc Hood, Turin-MumbaiBijoy Jain, Studio Mumbai Andrea Iannetta, Film & Television Institute of India, Pune

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charles correaCity on the Water (16’, 8 mm, Films Division - Government of India, 1975)

In a few minutes the documentary focus on the birth and the evolution of Mumbai, and finally offers a simple solution to the most critical issues. Navi Mumbai and Waterways are respectively the solutions for the informal settlements highly populated and the daily people moving. “Incredible. Half million people arriving every morning, nobody living.” The issues in question are the same as the plan for Navi Mumbai, presented on Marg in 1966 and signed by Charles M. Correa, Pravina Mehta and Shirish B. Patel.keywords: mega city; people moving; open to the sky; water

darryl d’monteThe Only Thing Real about Mumbai is Estate

Political parties and some NGOs have raised the spectre of “hordes” of migrants “pouring into” Mumbai, but the truth has always been somewhat different. Pe-ople do not stream into Mumbai because of its bright lights; they come for jobs, not for homes because they live in far worse conditions here. According to the International Institute of Population Studies in Mumbai, only 480 people – not families, as is commonly mistaken – come into the city every day. In the 2001 census, Greater Mumbai was just under 12 million A decade later, it has only grown to 12.4 million – an increase of just 5 lacs. Thus migration as a proportion of the total population is declining. In the 1970s, the proportion of migrants was some 70% and natural increase 30% but the proportions have now been reversed. This is no surprise, considering that formal employment in the city is declining, with the closure of mills, chemical factories and even industries owned by multinationals.A second problem is the astronomical price of real estate. According to a study by the UK-based property consultants Knight Frank, rentals per sq ft in the two central business districts of Nariman Point and the Bandra-Kurla Complex are 1.5 times higher than in Manhattan. It ought to know, because it leased a huge property in plush Park Lane for $55 per sq ft per year, as against $90 in Mumbai. And this at a time when there have been reports about Nariman Point losing out to its competitors to the north and the impending boom in real estate on mill land in mid-town Mumbai. Combined with the fact that the state – the Maharashtra Housing & Area Development Authority (mhada) – no longer maintaining a pretence of building for the poor. In upmarket areas, a single-bedroom flat is virtually impossible to find these days. All these developments are bound to leave a deep impress on the cultural

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life of the city. With spiraling joblessness (more than 80 per cent of jobs are ‘informal’), the authorities are demonizing the “other” – Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants in particular and Muslims in general. The regional chauvinist par-ties – The Shiv Sena and its splinter, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena – have then turned their unwelcome attention on to North Indians, and particularly Biharis who run autorickshaws and taxis. Mumbai suffers from a terribly schizophrenia: with a wafer-thin crust consisting of a globalised elite and vast majority of discomfited, jobless and homeless people.keywords: Mumbai, mega city, real estate, social disruption

sandeep gandhi (and geetam tiwari)Matching Mobility Needs. Infrastructure investments driven by Industry or User Requirements?

Mumbai, the capital of State of Maharashtra, along with Mumbai Metropolitan Region (mmr) is a large metropolitan city spread over 438 Sq.km area with a po-pulation of 21 million. Mumbai is the financial and economic hub of India and continues to generate significant revenues, much of which is contributed by workforce in the informal sector, generating 75% of all jobs. This low paid work-force mainly resides in dense informal slum settlements which houses nearly 60% of cities population. The average monthly household income in Mumbai is less than usd 100 which means less than 50% of households cannot afford to spend Rs. 25 (usd 0.5) on travel a day. As this makes even subsidized public transport inaccessible, it should not be a surprise that 56% of population walks or cycles to work. 36% of trips are on public transport and intermediate public transport (ipt), only 8% use private motorized modes while the average trip length in the city remains low at 8km. Even with the reality of these figures staring in its face, the Maharashtra government through Mumbai Metropolitan Development Authority (mmrda), in its endeavor to transform Mumbai to a ‘world class city’ has embarked on multibillion dollar projects which subsidize the wealthy few. Big ticket transportation projects such as Bandra Worli Sea Link, Metro Rail, Monorail, grade separated roads, multi-level parking, etc. are routinely approved on the justification of financial viability based on highly in-flated demand and ‘cost benefit’ estimates. Yet others have been cleared on the garb of socio-economic gains such as reduction in pedestrian deaths by grade separating them in to skywalks and subways. Though in reality they only serve to benefit car users through the removal of signals while pedestrian fatalities continue at close to 4 per day. While Mumbai seeks funds for implementing airports, express roads, metro and monorail projects worth over usd 10 Billion over the next few years its poor remain outside the planning process and con-tinue to suffer the consequences of a city makeover. Simple, low cost measures

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such as; improving road edges, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure (including safe at grade crossings), lighting, etc.; which would bring down crashes and directly benefit more than 90% of the trips in the city do not find a mention in the usd one Billion, annual mmrda budget. On the contrary hawkers continue being evicted, pedestrian infrastructure dismantled to make way for vehicles on the roads. keywords: Mumbai; mobility needs; mmrda; transport projects

luisa pellegrinoYou Can Find Me in the Garden. Mumbai’s Parks, Maidans and Third Landscapes

Too busy, as we are, in focusing our attention on the new shining, rampant, concrete Mumbai, we often forget that, within the thousands of faces and of layers of this impressive mega city, there is a natural city-body made up of par-ks, garden and green spots. There are some special areas of the city which work as its lungs, that is to say, there are some empathetic places of the city where to breathe, where to rest, places which in many different ways absorb and lighten Mumbai’s tension. Let alone the Arabian sea – the kala pani, the black water which “Hindus weren’t allowed to sail on” (Adiga 2012) – the parks and gardens of the city are these very spaces, they answer a social need and at the same time show a different world within the metropolis, a world made of unexpected wilderness and greenery, as well as urban abandoned ‘third spaces’, as Gilles Clement would define them. Private gardens and parks have always had an important role in the ‘western’ imagery of India: the beauty of Indian flora contributed to the Orientalist cliché about its luxuriousness and wilderness. Once Orientalist stereotypes are overco-me, we discover that green areas are very important for both cultural and envi-ronmental reasons on a private and on a social scale. Not only they are places of historical memories of both a glorious and decadent past – see the Maidan and its peculiar colonial and post-colonial function or Rushdie’s description of Bombay’s gardens full of melancholy, but they also work as shelters for home-less people, or for slum dwellers paradoxically in search for a private corner in a public space, as described by Cyrus Mistry in The Radiance of the Ashes (2005), or they are third spaces, areas abandoned by humans beings, but inhabited by animals and plants, which sometimes take their places back even in the middle of the city, in the chaos of a market, in a corner of a slum, and which are often described by authors, sometimes without even noticing, in marginal ways such as in Anjali Joseph’s Saraswaty Park (2010) or in Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), full of lost dreams, and provisional, forgotten third spaces.keywords: mega city; public space; third landscape; literature

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manuela schirraKanchanjunga. A possible living model for Mumbai

In the nameless skyline of Mumbai watchful eye can recognise a pure form. A monolith of concrete, that was discussed a lot but perhaps little known. The Kanchanjunga tower, built in Mumbai between 1970 and 1983 and signed Charles Correa, is for its spatial concatenations one of the most complex housing projects that have ever been made, as well as a monument to the Indian culture.A dissection of its parts can now suggest important solutions to contemporary architecture. From the point of view of the constructive conception, in terms of typological invention of apartments and for they vertical aggregation system, and more for the specific interpretation in terms of shape of the climate sustainability, obtained here without the use of high-tech technologies, but interpreting and updating traditions and local building techniques.Kanchanjunga is an important architectural model for the issues of community way and wind-way, permeability of the limit and sensory connections, privacy degrees and living-patterns.keywords: hyper-local; living-patterns; sostenibility; housing

fabrizio giraldiGo Mumbai

My camera is like a ‘gateway’, suitable for focus on the space in front of which I am. An abstraction device for landscapes, simple or complex that they are. Mumbai, a place wonderfully harmonic and disharmonic at the same time, taught me this. In a so complex city is very easy to fall into rhetorical images without balance, but the matter is that in Mumbai exists a feel of balance, however metaphysical. For my work it was very important to break away from the first impression, and learn to feel the balance. Go Mumbai is the exercise that I imposed on myself in order to obtain objective images of a so complex and real set-design.keywords: gateway; wonder; balance; set-design

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william hunter (and camnillo boano, caroline newton)Contested urbanism in Dharavi

This paper draws from first-hand experience, research, and critical practices that have sought to investigate a 175 hectares swatch of land in the middle of Mum-bai that is home to over 1 million inhabitants. For the last 3 years, investigation and reflection on Dharavi has been the core of design-based studio Practice Module: Urban Design in Practice at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit.If on one side Dharavi was what some would call a ‘live’ case study, on the other it was more than that. Dharavi was a place where our different episte-mic words of what we called urban design started falling apart. It was also a complex microcosm of practices where our methodological and architectural artillery, grounded in a specific aesthetic regime, became somewhat ineffective and sterile. It was a symbol of a multiplicity of urbanisms at play that failed all our philosophical apparatus. Dharavi for us was essentially a space in which we started our process of recalibration of Urban Design - an intellectual, pedago-gical and political process.The engagement of this endeavour with the city is explicit. During the process participants develop a socio-spatial cognition; a knowledge and understanding of the socio-spatial intertwinement, not only through learning, but also throu-gh exploration, experience and critical thinking. This understanding is then translated into strategies and actions that allow people to take ownership of their right to the city.Central to this reasoning is the idea of critical design as a “mediation of theory and practice in social transformation” - Friedmann, J. (1987) Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action. In this recalibrated role we, as the practitioner/architect critically immerse ourselves with the broader community in which we engage in. This means we are curious about the urban reality we encounter, we allow ourselves to be amazed. And in trying to meet the chal-lenges posed, we refuse to be seduced by straightforward looking answers and conventional thought.This way of working calls for an innovative attitude in which design is reconfi-gured. Urban design practice becomes something more - it becomes an activa-tor for change.The paper discusses the work that has been done over the last 3 years and uses material from short and long essays, drawings and diagrams, pictures and photo-montages, video stills and visualisations on what is known as Dharavi. This collection of thoughts, reflections and design work, gives us some glimpses into the shape that a recalibrated profession could take.keywords: Dharavi; contested urbanism; critical design; urban design

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enrico micheluttiLessons learnt at community scale. Right to the city shaping relational geographies in Mumbai’s un-recognized settlements

Mumbai’s informal fabric, which constitutes more than the 50% of the city, is increasingly characterized by settlements formed after the 1st of January 1995, where slum dwellers live in a condition of deep socio-economic vulnerability, suffering evictions and demolitions. These so-called ‘not notified’ settlements, being not declared “slums” by the authorities, are actually deprived of basic rights to the city. This lack of recognition implies insecurity in land tenure and in access to housing and services, which are to a certain extent guaranteed in ‘notified’ slums. The 1995 rule plays an important role also in the planning of the city, being the key condition in defining areas for possible slum redevelopment: besides a very limited number of programmes, which use the year 2000 as a deadline for application, only communities formed before 1995 can be part of a SRA (Slum Redevelopment Authority) project.The paper presents three case studies exploring the “illegal” fabric of the city: Rafi Nagar 2, a Muslim community in Mumbai’s North-Eastern suburbs; Sai Leela, a small Hindu pavement dweller community located near a key infrastructural node of the city; and Chikkalwadi, a huge settlement characterized by the presence of both Hindu and Muslim communities. Case studies allow questioning of the diverse relational geographies in place between ‘illegal’ settlements and the rest of the urban fabric (both formal and informal). At the community scale, the complexity of these relations, characterized by different socio-economic and cultural-ethnic conditions, is increased by the legal-political factors embedded in the 1995 rule.The analysis shows how relations and interactions between social groups and individual slum dwellers in informal-formal areas take shape according to the specific socio-political conditions and underlying negotiations, bypassing conventional public authority-citizen arrangements. The absence of rights obliges community institutions to find alternative solutions to cope. Lessons learnt from the case study settlements show the importance of recognizing ‘not notified’ settlements for the improvement of slum dwellers’ living condition and for the efficiency of public planning strategies in Mumbai’s recently urbanized fabric.keywords: right to the city; “not notified” settlements; relational geographies; inclusive city

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subhash mukerjee (and mochele bonino, matias echanove, rahul srivstava)Homegrown architecture. The possibilities of architecture in Mumbai’s informal neighbourhoods

Mumbai’s so-called informal neighbourhoods are a subject of great interest not only for specialists, but thanks to popular movies and books, also for the general public. From the point of view of architecture, though, many themes are still unexplored and open: in spite of the common perception, slums are busy and vital, small building sites are popping out continuously. Nonetheless, in a city with very high land values, also in those areas the dominant model of development it the one of the tabula rasa and of the big speculative interventions, that often force the residents to move.Relying on URBZ’s presence on the field –it is based in Dharavi- and on MARC’s experience in architecture and re-use, Marc Hood established as a design group with the goal to intercept the forces working on the transformation of the neighbourhoods from within. These are mainly represented by the figure of the local contractor. With their little building sites –often for re-use or remodelling- each day local contractors reshape these parts of the city causing, incrementally, their growth without designers. Marc Hood believes that architecture can give a relevant contribution in these contexts, and at the same time it believes a market to exist for architecture. Working for contractors, Marc Hood works to stimulate the conscience of the utility of design, and of the optimisations that it allows. It seems a way to activate a market which is already active in nuce, a way that can move economical micro-forces which might one day be able to compete with the forces – presently more powerful- of the real estate.Most of the projects on which Marc Hood has worked in its first year are about tool-houses, small buildings in which dwelling and working coexist in the horizontal high density of the informal city. They can be related to Singapore’s shop-houses or to the Japanese home-factories. A bigger-scale project is the one for a mosque for a Muslim community in Shivaji Nagar, a now-settled transit camp where Marc Hood tied its strongest connections with the local contractors. We believe that new forms of involvement are necessary in order to exchange languages and expertise with the informal neighbourhoods. Marc Hood tries to experiment two of them: in this phase of our collaboration with small builders we propose a design of global level, at the same time trying to learn from local practices and aspirations.keywords: informal neighbourhoods; homegrown; architecture; re-use

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bijoi jainImmediate Landscapes

“Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied or realized. It may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing or practicing ideas.”All encompassing, the practice of the architect, whether tangible, ambiguous or theoretical, is primarily concerned with the nature of being. This ontological understanding in ‘Praxis’ may begin to express how the work at Studio Mumbai is created from an iterative process, where ideas are explored through the production of large-scale mock-ups, material studies, sketches and drawings to form an intrinsic part of our thought and body.Projects are developed through careful consideration of place and a practice that engages intently in an environment and culture, the physical and emotional engagement of the people involved; where building techniques and materials draw from an ingenuity arising from limited resources. keywords: immediate; landscapes; praxis; Mumbai

andrea iannettaAllah is Great (25’, 35 mm, Film & Television Institute of India, 2012)

Frank Asmas, a Danish Engineer, is leaving a Wind Farm located in a remote Indian village. He has to reach Nairobi, where he must attend an important conference. When he is ready to leave, he learns that the official car designated to take him to the airport, has not come due to political protests in the region. In its place the project-head of the wind farm has found Salim, a local taxi driver. Their journey together will reveal itself to be full of mishap and inconvenience. Frank and Salim belong to completely different worlds, and this leads first to mutual incomprehension, frustration, anger and ultimately to an unexpected revelation for Frank. A short Road Movie, a simple story, with which I have tried to portray the essence of my experience in the subcontinent. I lived in India for six years and was overwhelmed by the generosity of the Indian people and their joyous approach towards life. I was deeply touched by the fact that in spite of all the political and religious problems spreading in the country, Indians always seem to preserve a big sense of faith in the human world and maintain a very positive attitude towards life. Western writers and Intellectuals have often described this approach, typical of Oriental culture, as “Fatalism” or “a blind faith in God” but for me it is something else. I see an ancestral wisdom in it. A message of peace and harmony of humanity in nature. keywords: politics and religion; philosophy; orient; interculturality

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biographies

charles correaCharles M. Correa was born in Hyderabad, India in 1930. He studied at the University of Michigan and Massachusetts Institute of Technology after which he established a private practice in Bombay in 1958. Architect, planner, activist and theoretician. His work covers a wide range. He was Chief architect for ‘Navi Mumbai’, the new city of 2 million people across the harbour from Bombay, and was appointed by Primer Minister Rajiv Gandhi as the first Chairman of the National Commission on Urbanisation. Correa has been awarded the highest honours of his profession, including the Aga Khan Award for architecture, the Praemium Imperiale of Japan, and the Gold Medals of the uia and the riba.

darryl d’monte Darryl D’Monte was Resident Editor of The Times of India and the Indian Express in Mumbai. He writes for several newspapers and websites and has devoted himself to networking environmental journalists in India and throughout the world for nearly three decades.His book, Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills was published by Ox-ford University Press in Delhi in 2002 and reprinted as a paperback in June 2005. He edi-ted a book titled Mills for Sale: The Way Ahead, Marg Publications, 2007. He published Temples Or Tombs? Industry Versus Environment, Centre for Science & Environment, in 1985, which deals with three case studies in the environment-development debate.He is the Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India (feji) and was the founder President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists (ifej) in Dresden, Germany, in 1993. He was re-elected President in Cairo in November 2000 and now serves on its Administrative Council. IFEJ is part of a global alliance called Complusalliance. He is a Trustee of the Mumbai Waterfronts Centre, which in 2007 shared the first Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award of $100,000 for implementing a project in Mumbai which made a difference to citizens’ well being. In 2009, he was awarded the first Green Globe Media Award at the Delhi Summit on Sustainable Development.

sandeep gandhi, geetam tiwari Sandeep Gandhi, principal of design consultancy firm S G Architects, is an Architect by training and provides consultancy services in non motorized and public transport infra-structure design. He is currently pursuing his post graduate degree in Transportation Engineering through part time M. Tech. program at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, and he is one of the main collaborator of Geetam Tiwari.Geetam Tiwari is MoUD Chair Professor for Transport Planning at the Department of Civil Engineering, and Coordinator Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Pro-gramme at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She obtained B. Arch degree from the University of Roorkee (1980) and Master of Urban Planning and Policy, and Ph.D. in Transport Planning and Policy, from the University of Illinois, Chicago(1987). She has received the degree of Doctor of Technology honoris causa from Chalmers University of

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Technology, Sweden in 2012. She has been Adlerbretska Guest Professor for sustainable urban transport at the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden 2007-2010. She has extensive research experience in dealing with transportation issues of special relevance to low income countries. These include development of bus systems and road designs that would make transportation efficient and safer. She is editor-in-chief of the Interna-tional Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion. She is on the board of Swedish Hybrid Vehicle Centre, Gothenborg Sweden, Urban Mass Transit Company, India, Chai-rperson Board of Innovative Transport Solutions (itrans), Delhi India.

fabrizio giraldi Fabrizio Giraldi is freelance photographer. He has born in Trieste in 1976. In 2002 he joined the GraziaNeri agency and in 2010 he participates in foundation of LUZphoto agency. His works are published on many magazines - D La Repubblica, GQ, IL In-telligence Lyfestyle 24 ore, Internazionale, Io Donna, L’Espresso, National Geographic, Panorama, Stern, Vanity Fair, wired and other. Fabrizio Giraldi takes part in several exhibitions, including Zingst Umweltfotofestival 2012 (Zingst), Italian Geographic 2011 (Rome), Rencontres d’Arles 2010 (Arles), Ivrea Pho-to Festival 2010 (Ivrea).For abitare he followed for one year BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group for the BEING volume, come out in December 2012.

andrea iannettaAndrea Iannetta was born in Rome in 1982. He undertook the degree course in Philoso-phy at the University La Sapienza in Rome with a personal work on “Hegel: early theo-logy and the spirit of Christianity”. During the year 2004/05 he lived in Madrid, where he attended the University of Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid through a scholarship of European Erasmus Project.From October 2006 to January 2012 he studied at the Film & Television Institute of India in Pune f.t.i.i., where he completed the three years Post Graduated Course in Film Direc-tion, shooting the following projects: The funeral (2008), The kingdom of God (2008), “What really happened?” (2009), The light and her shadows (2009), Monsoon Moods (2009), Playback (2011) and Allah is Great (2012).Andrea Iannetta now is working on his first long feature Script, adapted from the Italian Book “Amiche per la pelle” written by the Indian writer Laila Wadia. The project is pro-duced by the Italian Production House tico-Film and sponsored by the European film financing program, media.

marc hood – michele bonino, matias echanove, subhash mukerjee, rahul srivastavaMichele Bonino and Subhash Mukerjee, architects, founded marc in 2006. The office participated to the Venice Biennale in 2010 within the Italian Pavilion. It is presently designing the new Medical School of the University of Turin. Bonino is an assistant professor at the Politecnico di Torino and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Mukerjee teaches at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (naba), Milan. They were both tutors of the winning group of the Special Prize of the Jury at the 10. International Architecture Exhibition of The Venice Biennale, with a project on Mumbai.

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Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, an urbanist and an anthropologist, are co-di-rectors of the Institute of Urbanology and founding members of the urbz.net collective. Mumbai is the focus of many of their researches, which they presented in seminars like TEDx, Urban Age, J-Store; they have been invited by institutions like the Columbia University, the University of Tokyo, the Royal Institute of Arts, Stockholm and the Max Planck Institute.After several years of researches about the Indian city (Urban Typhoon 2008, Urban Visions 2009, Rotterdam Biennale 2009), in 2012 Bonino, Mukerjee, Echanove and Sri-vastava started Marc Hood, a structure working on architecture projects in the informal nieighbourhoods of Mumbai, especially in Shivaji Nagar.

enrico michelutti Enrico Michelutti is an architect and urban planner (Iuav), born in 1978 in Udine. Curren-tly he is a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Catalonia (upc) in the doctorate program on Sustainable Development with the thesis “An Institutional Approach to Ur-ban Fragmentation: Power and Sustainability in Mumbai’s Un-recognized Settlements”. He was visiting scholar at the School of Built Environment at the Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh in 2010 and 2011. From October 2011, he is part of the prospection com-mittee of N-Aerus (Network- Association of European Researchers on the Urbanization in the South).

camillo boano, william hunter, caroline newtonDr. Camillo Boano is Senior Lecturer at Development Planning Unit, ucl, where he di-rects the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development. He is also the Director of Communication in the Unit and Coordinator of the DPUsummerLab initiative. Since 2012 he became one of the Co-Directors of the UCL Urban Lab.William Hunter is a Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit where he leads studios in Design in Development and Critical Urbanism. He is also Co- Coor-dinator of the dpu summerLab series and dpu News editor.Dr. Caroline Newton is an architect, urban planner and political scientist. She comple-ted her PhD in social geography at the K.U. Leuven (Belgium). Her work and research focuses on the socio spatial dimensions of design and critical spatial practices in Europe and the Global South. Caroline teaches in the MSc Building and Urban Design in De-velopment and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

luisa pellegrino Luisa Pellegrino has just concluded a PhD in Postcolonial literatures at the University of Turin, with a dissertation on the literary representation of Mumbai, titled “The Me-tamorphic Body of Mumbai: Representations of the Indian Metropolis in Indian-English fiction”. In 2010 she was visiting student at New York Columbia University and she conducted her research travelling between Bombay, London and New York. At the moment she is doing research on the literary representations of metropolises.

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manuela schirraManuela Schirra was born in Trieste in 1981. She completed her PhD in architectural composition at Iuav University of Venice in 2012 with the thesis “An other housing. For a ‘common view’ of the collective living.” She conducted her research between Japan and India, and spent a period of study in Charles Correa Associates office in Mumbai. She was visiting student at etsav Barcelona School of Architecture, and worked for Barcelona Regional. In 2009 she graduated at the University of Trieste with the thesis “MinAAP: Mixofilia in Autocostruzione Assistita Parziale – Mixofilia in self-help construction”. In 2012 for the exhibition “L’architettura del Mondo. Infrastrutture, mobilità, nuovi pa-esaggi” at the Triennale di Milano, she curated the reports about Mumbai and Delhi.

studio mumbai – bijoy jainFounded by Bijoy Jain, Studio Mumbai is a human infrastructure of skilled craftsmen and architects who design and build the work directly. Gathered through time, this group shares an environment created from an iterative process, where ideas are explored through the production of large-scale mock-ups, models, material studies, sketches and drawings. Projects are developed through careful consideration of place and practice that draws from traditional skills, local building techniques, materials and an ingenuity arising from limited resources.The essence of the work lies in the relationship between land and architecture. The endeavor is to show the genuine possibility in creating buildings that emerge through a process of collective dialogue and face-to-face sharing of knowledge.Bijoy Jain was born in Mumbai in 1965 and received his M. Arch from Washington Uni-versity in St Louis, USA in 1990. He worked in Los Angeles and London between 1989 and 1995 and returned to India in 1995 to found his practice. The work of Studio Mumbai has been presented at the XII Venice Biennale and the Victo-ria & Albert Museum, and received several prizes, including the Global Award in Sustaina-ble Architecture (2009) finalist for the 11th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2010), winner of the seventh Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award: Finland (2012), and most recently the winner of the third BSI Swiss Architecture Award (2012).