Sangharsh Nagar

Mumbai is both the financial capital of India and its largest city. The city’s planning authorities are faced with the enormous task of accommodating Mumbai’s ever-increasing urban poor population. At present more than half of Mumbai’s 12.5 million inhabitants live in informal settlements or slums. Over the years, several policies have evolved to tackle the proliferation of slums, starting with the Slum Clearance Act of 1956 right up to the current Slum Redevelopment Scheme (SRS) of 1995, which marks a fundamental shift in the role of the state towards mass housing. Rather than investing itself, the supply of affordable housing in the city has since been primarily handed over to the private sector with the state itself acting merely as a facilitator in the process. In this scheme, eligible families living in recognized slums are rehoused on existing plots by the private developer in exchange for a portion of the land and higher construction rights that can be used to build new market housing. However, being a developer-centric scheme, each family is given a fixed 22.5 m2 housing unit in a high-rise tenement often with drastically inadequate light or ventilation. Moreover, by ignoring the existing living patterns of such communities and the social amenities that they so crucially require, a majority of these projects have done little to improve the living conditions of the urban poor in the city.

Sangharsh Nagar, built in the northern suburb of Chandivali by the Mumbai-based architecture firm of PK Das & Associates, is an alternative to this. Measuring a total of 34 ha, Sangharsh Nagar was designed to accommodate more than 18,000 families that were forcibly evicted from their homes in a settlement in Sanjay Gandhi National Park as a part of the city’s slum clearance scheme in 1995. However, being a slum rehabilitation project, the architects had to provide each family with the stipulated 25 m2 of space at an overall density of more than 500 dwellings per hectare. Rather than the typical rubber-stamping that characterises most such rehabilitation schemes, however, Das attempted to develop a neighbourhood where clusters of ground-plusseven- storey buildings are intertwined with much needed social infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds and other community facilities.

Essentially, the scheme revolves around the design of a pada (cluster). Each pada accommodates about 550 houses along with small-scale social amenities such as a society office, crèches, a women’s centre and other common facilities. At the heart of each cluster lies a central court that serves as the common open space for that pada. The buildings (of which there are four basic types) that overlook these open courts are always accessed by a baithak (an informal meeting place), and consist of a central circulation core around which five to seven housing units are placed to optimize costs. All housing units within these are similar in layout and comprise a single room (that serves as both the bedroom and living space), kitchen, balcony and toilet with adequate access to light and ventilation – essential requirements in the hot and humid climate of Mumbai.

At the larger scale, three such clusters form a wadi (sector). These wadis are linked together by internal streets that were intended to be lined with social amenities of a more public nature such as markets, banks, post offices and commercial shops that would help tie together the entire scheme as a whole.

Sadly, the project has not been completed fully according to the architect’s original plans. Built with the help of the Government of Maharashtra and the Nivara Hakk Welfare Centre, Sangharsh Nagar was supposed to house some 18,362 families, 14 schools, two medical centres, 180 balwadis (nursery schools), 180 welfare centres, 800 shops, two community halls and four religious institutions in addition to a number of playgrounds and a large, 1.6-ha maidan (public open space) that would serve as the entire scheme’s central meeting and recreational space. Today, only about half the scheme has been realized and the remaining land has been rubber stamped with the kind of tenements that generally get built under the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme elsewhere in the city.

While this makes it difficult to prove whether the architects intentions would have been truly successful, Sangharsh Nagar is noteworthy because of its size, but also for its unconventional approach towards rehabilitating such communities by planning and building at the scale of an entire neighbourhood.