2009-01-20T01:05:00.001-08:00

Buffalo, Oshiwara, Mumbai.

The same way like Alang and the whole province of Bhavnagar lives out of something that is considered waste somewhere else in the world, the ships, the same way the slums in Mumbai live out from the waste produced by the surrounding city. Buffaloes play a big part in this story.

The buffaloes have always been. The Hindu Indians don’t eat meat and need a lot of buffalo milk, yogurt and cheese to eat. Mumbai has 17 million people and a lot of buffaloes. The urban buffalo sheds and the urban buffalo herds form an own culture inside the city. Men and buffalo live together. This is a first generation urban condition.

The buffaloes need to be washed all the time, therefore the buffalo sheds are situated along the rivers.

Besides milk the other vital product that the buffaloes are producing is dung. Buffalo dung is the main fuel for cooking. Women of the buffalo people harvest the dung from the rivers in where it is mixed with straw.

The buffalo dung is formed into dung cakes and dried along the walls.

Dung cake fuels cooking.

Buffaloes live downstairs and people live upstairs.

Buffalo people are very clean, as are the animals. Having a shave in a buffalo shed.

Maintaining a neat appearance.

Preparing food.

Buffaloes, people and pigeons. In the first generation condition the city mainly produces only organic waste. Animals are needed to process the waste. Buffaloes will eat remnants of vegetables, goat eats even paper. Dog will deal with occasional bones and what is left is for the pig. The first generation Mumbai got used to bring waste to the river side, where it was processed by animals and also didn’t really harm the river either.

When the city got industrialized not all the waste was organic anymore. But because the people had been accustomed to bring the waste to the river it is still continuing the same way today. The non organic waste is suffocating the river systems, destroying the environment.

This is waste that can not be easily processed, not by animals nor by men.

Oil wet-land.

Dead landscape, polluted river.

S.L.U.M., urban ecological restoration planning for Oshiwara River chain of slums in Mumbai. Marco Casagrande, Wei-Chen Weng 2006.

To treat the enormous amount of waste that the industrial city was producing another kinds of buffalo sheds were needed. Slums were formed to treat the waste and following the old waste circulation culture the slums grew along the rivers. Waste goes to river, people know. These slums are along the Oshiwara river valley treating the surrounding city.

Because of large amounts of illegal working power the slums are safe havens for illegal industry that dumps all the waste to the rivers.

Acid for removing colour in recycled plastics.

Plastics point.

Separating aluminium from glass.

High Tech Engineers number 1.

Some chemical work.

Harvesting fire-wood from the surrounding city.

Scrap metal.

Skillful people.

Crossing the pink river.

Very fine manual recycling.

Urban nomad structures.

7-ELEVEN.

This pretty much tells the attitude towards urban waste. It provides life. Waste is a good thing and a happy place.

People in Oshiwara live from the waste of the surrounding city like Alang lives from the waste of the "developed world".

Slum-dog millionaire.

Temporary homes on a bridge. All these will be washed away during the monsoon. Slum is ruin and it is a construction site, urban ruin as a human nature's life providing platform. Slum is open form, as nature is. The dynamics and energies of a slum are much more powerful than those of a fixed, closed form settlement, industrial architecture.

Happy new year 2005.

Legal housing in a nagar, legal slum. Slums can be upgraded into a nagar, if they for example vote for a lucky politician.

A corner shop for dung-cake burners.

Barber shop. A decent shave is respected.

Connecting people.

Weight and the chief.

Chicken.

Super quality Oshiwara chicken, fresh.

Selling color.

Colorful women.

Muslim folks.

This family invited us to their home in a nagar.

The founder of the slum. A respected person the followers of whom now enjoy gifts and comforts of urban life.

Modern times.

This is a poster of one of the Bollywood movies advertised in the slum. Lagan – The Dedication, tale of immortal love…and science. A handicapped guy is sitting in wheel chare that is equipped with a strange laptop. In the background is a space shuttle taking of to the orbit and a pale, white skinned female beauty. This must be how the slum is seeing the surrounding city. It is like a ferry tale or a paradise maybe. Just like in the movies, you can maybe see a glimpse of it, but never really enter. That’s where the immortals live cruising around with laptop wheelchairs. They are somehow crippled and sophisticated. The white skin of the lady has not seen one day of physical work.

A hot goat.

A beetle nut “ban”.

Public art.

A ritual bath place of the Hindus. Bathing takes place maybe a couple of times a year, the rest of the time the holy bath serves as a garbage dump.

Construction workers. These guys are nomads moving from one construction site to another. They will build up their own village from the left over construction material of the houses that they are building.

The organic scaffolding work on the façade of the building is like nature on top of a ruin.

Or a creeper on top of a tree.

Leveled and straight lines created by irregular sticks.

I took a mirror to the most polluted place in the Oshiwara chain of slums, where they are washing colour off from plastic trash with acid that later on runs into the river.

A glimpse of blue sky in the polluted river.

You can literally paint with the river. The water is like ink.

People watching the mirror from a bridge.

This gentleman said he likes what the mirror means. He said the river could be like the blue skies. His method for growing up a respect towards the polluted river was farming. The gentleman said, that he has found a crop that survives in the polluted soil and that the plant is so high, that all the pollution stays in the roots, while the product on the top is clean and eatable.

The gentleman suggested the riversides of the Oshiwarea chain of slums to be transformed in to urban farms that would both produce food for the slum population and clean the river.

When I asked my Indian students to assist the gentleman in the farming work they gave the tools to their personal car drivers.

In the end also the students joined the work.

Watering the plantation.

Setting the seeds to the ground.

2008-12-31T02:25:00.000-08:00

S.L.U.M.

Urban ecological rehabilitation plan for Mumbai City. Oshiwara river valley chain of slums as a case study for urban waste treatment based on the existing fact of the slums as garbage recycling platforms. Modern environmental technology units introduced to the slum communities to control environmental pollution and encouraging towards ecologically sustainable urban living including community farms and bio energy production.

Today the illegal slums treat the urban waste flow from the surrounding city. This may sound ecological but is in fact killing people in the slums due to the forced use of chemicals and inhuman working conditions in general . The slums are situated around river beds. Hazardous means of recycling, illegal factories and overdeveloping results damagingly to the river ecosystems and the rivers can no longer act a the monsoon flood water relief channels causing to annual floods in Mumbai with high death ratios.

The results of the Oshiwara case study are aimed to be multiplied to the other urban slum areas in Mumbai and other Indian cities. Today the slums are the end of the line of urban human exploitation.

S.L.U.M.
Sustainable Living Urbanism Mumbai
Urban Flashes, Mumbai India 2006
Casagrande Laboratory in co-operation with Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, Human Environment Group and Tamkang University Department of Architecture