Dear All,
Please find attached a Times of India article (link below) on UDRI’s comments to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai on the revised draft Development Control Regulations for the Mumbai Development Plan 2014-34.

(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Piecemeal-release-of-development-control-regulations-disappoints-UDRI/articleshow/51885798.cms)

The MCGM since March 2016 has been partially releasing chapters of the DCRs in no particular order (coincidentally right before a long weekend or public holiday). The time given for submitting public comments for these chapters has been limited (two weeks at best) and further cut short by the said long weekend/ public holiday. In many cases, the bye-laws are referring to unpublished chapters limiting the competence to evaluate and comment holistically.

So far following chapters have been released in the following...

Mumbai development planning process is one of the largest citizens planning initiative to span over a period of almost 10 years starting from 2007. Began at UDRI as a house project, the exercise has evolved into a pan-city exercise to have encouraged multitudinous agendas to spawn all in the mandate of locating a stake in the future of city development. The development plan archive is a pursuit to capture this movement in time and city planning to present a landscape of aspirations promoted by the various participating people groups. Even though UDRI is credited to have started the proceedings, three other agencies in YUVA URBAN, TISS and KRVIA have, to an extent risen as prominent platforms of discussions on the third edition of the Mumbai Development plan. Archive as objective, is a pursuit to gather as documents/ content generated from various sources along with those from the MCGM...

Late 2014, if schedules are meet, brings about the tentative implementation of the third statutory development plan for the city of Mumbai. Four citizens groups/ academic institutions, Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), YUVA Urban, Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) have taken upon themselves to be the forebears in voicing the demands for the citizens of Mumbai. Project to note is progressive in the agency/ institution conducted area planning exercises for the city. Popular among these area were the Parel Mill Lands and Eastern Waterfront Plan both done in collaboration between UDRI and KRVIA. Case for the need to activate a citizen’s plan for Mumbai in conjunction to the upcoming planning exercise was internally activated at the UDRI in July 2007. Over time as situational urgency was felt...

Look up your maps and you’ll find that middle-class mumbaikars are moving to Sewri! The landboom in Thane can be heard in Colaba! When did this happen? And where’s it taking us?

When you blinked, Mumbai began to sprout up in areas you didn’t even know existed. Wadala (East), Thakur Village, Ciba Geigy Road. They’re among the new neighbourhoods that have emerged seemingly overnight over the remains of shuttered factories, farms and forest land to radically alter the city’s geographical and social landscape.
The mushrooming of new neighbourhoods is just happenstance, of course. Since the new changes in development regulations have opened new areas of the city to builders. Industrial and green areas were rezoned for commercial and residential use. Alongside, TDR scheme allowed the “transfer of development rights” to the suburbs from plots in congested island city that the government had...

The downside of our city’s headlong rush into the future is that we are losing iconic Mumbai charms in the process. From cotton fluffers to flamingos, the jewels in Mumbai’s crown are falling loose. We celebrate our city’s endangered species – and cross our fingers that they will still be around in 50 years.

Chinese shoemakers

Octogenarian Charlie Bhang refuses to take concessions to nostalgia. “It’s all gone. What’s there to talk about?” he says. Behind him 30 – 40 pairs of fine, hand-stitched designer shoes are neatly stacked in leather cases. These are the last shoes manufactured by Bhang in his tiny factory upstairs. Once they’re sold, the century-old trade of Chinese shoemakers will be extinct, much like the Chinese silk sellers who wandered the streets until the 1950’s.
In the 1940s, a dozen Chinese shoe shops operated in Colaba alone (among them, S Bhang and Co), while there...

GET MORE OUT OF MUMBAI
September 10 – 23 2004, Vol 1 Issue 1 | Hello Mumbai: Going out, staying up, winding down

FIRST WORD
It’s an enormous honour for me to welcome you to the first issue of Time Out Mumbai. Some 36 years ago, when we launched TimeOut London, we never dreamed that the magazine would become such an international success. But now that it has, with a network of magazines servicing cities worldwide from New York to St Petersburg to Beijing, it seems only natural that we should turn to Mumbai.

As the vibrant entertainment, business and leisure capital and a home to 12 million people, Mumbai has an influence that’s felt round the world from “Bollywood Dreams” in London’s West End (and on Broadway) to bangra beats in New Jersey rap.

It’s a city ripe for the TimeOut treatment.

TimeOut’s goal around the world is to help a city’s residents and visitors to make intelligent...

… presents a photo documentation of information from an exhibition (6th January — 20th March, 2016) on Indian architecture in NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art), Mumbai. These images are a record of selected surveys from the exercise. For an entire country for a period of approximately 80–90 years, these lists summarise the extent of a professional impact of a field. A bunch of other parameters is definitely displayed along with these but within these mentioned shows the scope of contribution to a currently spare design knowledge landscape. Books and publications are edited but maybe around ½ or ¼th additional to the submitted catalog could complete a bibliography on Contemporary Indian Architecture. Ancient and colonial work is left out of the discussions. Also this is all the information available at a regional scale, work about the field in universities abroad too remains...

varkala by anfal shamsudeen

Inspiration is an imagined construct. It stages as a method to locate an idea. Its purpose is to justify why and how something has come about and its contribution to a larger conversation. There is an addition to the product other than the physical object or a manifested entity.

An otherness is the principal appeal on why inspiration as concept is pursued, at times insisted upon and then stated as a whole reason for a body of work to exist. It’s understood inspiration is all around us. We can and should find inspiration in everything we have access to. Well in theory.

Product of inspiration is causative in nature as it’s assumed to play role in adding to a body of knowledge. Question is what is the product and which aspect of knowledge it’s contributing to? For example, a photograph, what is it an image of, has it been produced before, how is the subject...

The image of a city is a sum total of aspirations of people of a period. As this people group change so does the looming perception of it. Every generation, who stages in an account of the place has its fair share of patterns/ identity tags definitively ascribed to it. Though always narrated linearly, history is understood of having varying overlaps. These overlaps manifest in its numerous forms on the basis of an identified entity which is brought under a specific format of record. Culture to an essence is the contributing factor of this nonlinearity as traces of the past is left behind and those left out of formal narrative make its presence known informally.

The question posed _ what are the key events that have brought regional culture to its present form _ is a quest to layout the varying stages of city record which gives Mumbai its present state we are accustomed to. As several...

Niyogi Books has in a short span of time established itself as a publisher of fine illustrated books.
Started in 2004 it has about 200 books on its active list and is recognized for its high-quality illustrated books on a range of subjects from art and photography to heritage, culture and history of South Asia. These books have won several awards and prizes including those from the Federation of Indian Publishers.

Niyogi Books has, over the years, developed a prestigious author base that spans various fields and professions and includes award-winning photographers and journalists, eminent art historians and curators, artists, scholars, travel writers and translators from all over the world. B.N. Goswamy, Geeta Chandran, Hugh and Colleen Gantzer, Mushirul Hasan, Jaya Jaitly, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Raghu Rai, and Suneet Varma are just some of the names on the list. A range of biographies and...