Archinect - News

Urban India: Informal Housing, Inadequate Property Rights

2017-03-03T09:56:00-05:00

The rapid pace of urbanization in developing countries places increasing levels of stress on cities. As thousands of people move into urban areas each year, the availability of affordable housing emerges as a key challenge. In India, 412 million people live in urban areas. Depending on the source, anywhere between 33 and 47 percent of those (equivalent to 26-37 million households) live in informal housing, which often lacks access to basic services like roads, water, and sanitation. To make matters worse, most of those households do not have any formal property rights, thus jeopardizing their ability to live and invest in the land they currently occupy.

As architects, we often use “informality” to describe everything outside of the formal city. Informality is the gray area occupied by the slum, the favela, or the barrio. Our failure to segment informality into distinct categories results in design solutions that barely scratch the surface of urban complexity. Designing for informalit...

Poverty, corruption and crime: how India's 'gully rap' tells story of real life

2016-05-16T12:38:00-04:00

beneath the surface of the city, a new sound has begun to emerge, one which refuses to airbrush poverty, illiteracy and police brutality. Driven by a similar sense of disenfranchisement that characterised the development of hip-hop in 1970s New York, a new generation of musicians is creating India’s own homegrown rap scene – labelled by some as “gully rap”, slang for gutter or from the streets.

“The popular rappers in Bollywood just talk about girls and booze and parties, they are only talking about glamour and trying to sell a fake dream. I wanted to make music that spoke about fighting, and the murders and the violence that were a part of my life growing up – and is the same for millions of others living in ghettoes across India.”

The roots of his music may lie in American hip-hop, but Shaikh and others in India’s burgeoning scene have made gully rap their own. Shaikh’s lyrics, a mix of Hindi and Urdu, speak in the street slang of India’s slum areas and address everything from police corruption and brutality to his song Bombay, which is about “the everyday struggle to survive”, directly challenging the government for making fake promises.

Of Dirt and Cleanliness – (Clean India Campaign)

2014-10-07T12:00:00-04:00

"In all modern cultures, cleaning up merely involves moving “dirt” from one place to another. Five decades ago, cleaning up may have been easier. It would have meant restoring the predominantly organic and compostable discards in the waste stream to its rightful place – namely, the soil – and facilitating its transformation into manure. Over the past two decades, India has transformed from a sleepy nation living in its villages to an economic powerhouse with an urban population bursting at its seams. We can, as Modi did in the UN General Assembly, invoke our ancient culture to claim that Indians have a special relationship with and reverence for nature. But that does not take away from the fact that Indians or Americans, Hindus or Muslims, we are all worshippers of the same homogenising religion of consumerism. We are what our garbage is. Our garbage which once bore no resemblance to American garbage is increasingly peppered with the same brand names, the same indestructible materi...