The whole MHS blog
As Delhi confronts enormous urban challenges-- resource scarcity, poor infrastructure, traffic, and the proliferation of slums -- shortcuts and quick fixes may appeal to the Delhi Development Authority and other governing institutions. But the dearth of meaningful community consultation and public involvement in decisions that will affect quality of life for all the city's residents jeopardizes the health, inclusivity and sustainability of Delhi's urban future.
In the two following pieces, Greg Randolph and Mukta Naik call for...
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As Delhi confronts enormous urban challenges-- resource scarcity, poor infrastructure, traffic, and the proliferation of slums -- shortcuts and quick fixes may appeal to the Delhi Development Authority and other governing institutions. But the dearth of meaningful community consultation and public involvement in decisions that will affect quality of life for all the city's residents jeopardizes the health, inclusivity and sustainability of Delhi's urban future.
In the two following pieces, Greg Randolph and Mukta Naik call for...
Yes
In the last month we have been witness to two building collapses. Or at least two have been widely covered by the media. The first one happened in Thane (Mumbai), with a toll of 74 lives. The second one happened last week in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Over 400 people lost their lives, and the death count is still rising.
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The challenges of megacities in the global South are notorious. Images of sprawling slums adjacent to soaring, glitzy high-rises have become simple shorthand for the complex problems of inequality, corruption, and poor governance in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Jakarta, Rio, and Nairobi. But despite the sensational stories from the mega-cities of emerging economies, most urbanization in the global South (and North) is happening in smaller urban centres. In India, even though just $12 per capita is spent on infrastructure for basic...
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At the Unbox design festival held in Delhi from 8th- 10th February, micro Home Solutions conducted a workshop on 'Transient Living Spaces'. Apart from designing a prototype for a single-person temporary night shelter, we also looked at improving the design of the temporary shelters of the construction workers in the city. Swati Janu recounts her visit to these shelters and the consequent learning process.
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By Swati Janu
In light of the failure of the civic authorities of Delhi to provide night shelters for the homeless this winter (like every other year) and the consequent number of deaths (reported and unreported), we at micro Home Solutions decided to come up with designs for affordable single-person night shelters at the Unbox design festival in Delhi from 8th- 10th February.
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Mumbai: Photo courtesy of Ricky Burdett’s presentation at Urban Age Mumbai....
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Last week mHS participated in the Yale School of Management’s Global Social Enterprise Conference. An annual interactive discussion between social sector workers and Yale SOM students, the conference concludes a semester of the MBA students advising and learning from young social enterprises in India. mHS hosted Yale students two years ago, and this year we returned to learn more about the state of the sector and how experts in the field see a path forward for social enterprises. This year's panel--which featured notable social...
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Over the weekend, micro Home Solutions hosted a workshop for students from the University of Minnesota, who are visiting Delhi for three weeks in order to understand broadly the challenges, opportunities, and crucial questions facing India’s cities. mHS was tasked with helping this group of students—almost all of which had never been to India—come to a rich understanding of life in an informal settlement (or, as the UN would call it, a “slum”).
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Of the 40-odd people who attended the Searchlight South Asia workshop on urban poverty (11th of December in Mumbai), most came in not knowing what to expect. Urban poverty is a term that confuses and confounds many, even among those of us who work in the development sector. Lina Sonne from Intellecap, which brings out the Searchlight South Asia newsletter for the Rockefeller Foundation and had organized the event, pointed out that there is still an overwhelming focus on rural poverty and a need to move away from thinking of urban poverty as...
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The longer I work in the low-income housing sector, the more appalled I am by government apathy towards providing shelter, one of the most basic human rights upheld by the Constitution of India as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which India not only signed but played an active role in drafting!
Our current era is one in which governments have distanced themselves from the role of housing provider, citing the need for private investment. The bald truth is that private developers have no reason to build homes...
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In India, where over 60% of the urban buildings are erected without municipality approval and without formal architectural or engineering advice, even construction in formal colonies can be a problem.
When more then one year ago we thought of constructing our office on the terrace roof, we immediately realized that the it may be not so easy. A couple of years ago the new Delhi master plan sanctioned residential buildings in colonies like Greater Kailash to go as high as four storeys above the ground level. The immediate...
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Shahjahanabad: The narrow historic galis of Shahjahanabad heighten the intimacy of urban...
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Last week Greg and I had the opportunity to visit Vinoba Bhave Nagar, one of the communities where we will be piloting our new Technical Assistance Kiosks (TeAK). TeAK aims to deliver architectural and engineering assistance where such services have never been available before—in low-income communities, where affordable housing is constructed through informal means that rely on neither government permits nor private developers. The architects at mHS are currently finishing the backend research in order to deliver our technical and design...
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At the end of September, when world leaders, community leaders and thought leaders gathered in New York for the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, mHS co-founder Marco Ferrario arrived with a new vision for how to expand India’s affordable housing stock. Captured in our CGI commitment, the mHS pledge is to bring architectural and engineering services to low-income neighborhoods through a network of community-run kiosks.
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This is part one of a two-part post on the self-construction housing opportunity in India's slum areas. This first part highlights the need to acknowledge and facilitate the self-construction market and shares experiences from the mHS pilot; the second part will examine innovations needed to address issues of safety and quality in self-constructed housing, and what we can do to make innovations and information more accessible to communities. It originally appeared on urb.im, where co-founder Rakhi...
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A key principle of the central government's "Slum Free India" policy is to redevelop slums in situ (upgrading their current situation rather than dislocating slum dwellers) and offering them basic tenure security. Still in its pilot phase, the policy, Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), emphasizes a process for community engagement and has laid down detailed guidelines for the interaction process.
Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT), an established national social sector organization, was one of four NGOs tasked by the local municipality in Delhi to...
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Rakhi Mehra, Co-founder mHS, writes about the need for a multidiscplinary policy perspective to resolve homelessness and other urban housing issues. This piece was featured at urb.im.
The situation of the ‘homeless’ in India is dire. Roughly one percent of the urban population in India is believed to be homeless, amounting to an estimated 3 million people. The official Census of India (2001), however, tells a different story: the figures report only 778,599 homeless, a...
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Rakhi Mehra, Founder, micro Home Solutions contributed this article to the urb.im blog. The urb.im network is a global community working for just and sustainable cities. Read the original post here.
About 80 percent of low-income rental units in India exist in the informal market. These affordable units house Mumbai’s working poor and are rented out by makeshift landlords, who are often poor themselves but who capitalize on any extra space they have at home...
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Vyas Yengkhom writes about the human tendency to accept and the challenge of questioning what has become the norm. Vyas is an architect and has been with mHS since its inception.
“The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics”. – Honore de Balzac
“With no common...
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Nipesh P Narayanan, architect and urban designer with mHS argues that it is the poor conditions of slums that make them affordable. To find solutions for housing the urban poor, we need to stop seeing land as a commodity and view it as a resource for the betterment of citizens, he argues.
More than half the...
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Miguel Angel de la Fuente's account of his internship at mHS
This is an account of my experiences at mHS over the last two months. Before the end of 2011, I was a student of Civil Engineering in Spain, trying to finalize my Thesis in my modest city of 300,000 people. In this brief period, my life has been the complete opposite. I have come to Delhi, with a population of 16 millions, with its crazy traffic and never ending honking. I have had to get used to a new culture (sometimes completely opposite to mine) in a short time, make new...
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It is intriguing and surprising how well non-architects can design, analyze. I came across a group of creative minds building a miniature structure made out of straws, some French Fries and Burger boxes in McDonald's at Saket, New Delhi. The structure resembled one of the study models that a novice architecture student would build, trying to define the possibilities and defy the usual course of built form. Their explanation was philosophical indeed: the built form is an artifact, which will identify the arch; an underpass, but at the same...
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As an architect and planner living in India, working in urban settlements with varies degrees of formality- or rather informality, I feel a sense of urgency to evolve ideas and possible solutions to house the poor. Too many people in urban India live in absolutely critical conditions. Looking at the urbanization trends for the future, the urgency assumes dramatic proportions and the scale of the problem is so large that one is almost devoid of hope.
In the last century, architects and planners responded to several urban and...
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On February 12th, Lorenz and Nipesh from mHS visited the Yamuna Pushta Green Zone where it had built a temporary homeless shelter three winters ago. They were joined by IGSSS' Indu Prakash Singh, Dr. Amod and DUSIB representative Vijay Kumar Sharma. With the objective of evaluating current design practices for temporary homeless shelters, the team reviewed each one of the three existing helter by entering the premises, looking for technical flaws and discussing possible improvements, maintenance solutions and improved design keeping the...
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Lorenz Noe, AIF- Clinton Fellow with mHS
Coming to mHS fresh from my undergraduate studies in Political Science and Political Economy at Berkeley, my mind had never wandered over to architecture in any serious manner. Sure, I appreciated the engineering marvels of the cathedrals and ancient buildings in my native Germany, but this interest never ventured beyond a mere appreciation of the aesthetic nature of buildings and one art history course. On the other end of the spectrum, studying economic development had, of course, introduced...
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When you are in our line of work, reading a news item titled "Spend Rs 32 a day? Govt says you can't be poor" (http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-21/india/30183983_1_...) makes us see red!
New poverty lines suggested by the Planning Commission to the Supreme Court earlier this week suggest that...
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When the government starts talking about measures to avoid creation of slums rather than merely making cities ‘slum-free’, there should be reason to cheer for those of us who have been watching with frustration the increasingly haphazard and inequitable way Indian cities are growing.
Union Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Kumari Selja and Delhi’s Chief Minister went into a huddle a few days ago, along with a number of key officials, to decide on measures to implement in Delhi the ambitious Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY)...
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While the Malegam Committee (MC) recommendations gave the much-needed jolt to the micro finance sector, they have incorrectly stereotyped micro finance institutions (MFIs) and the roles they can play ensuring financial inclusion. The highly conservative and backward looking recommendations fail to understand the complexity around poor households, their livelihoods, cash flows and lifecycle needs. My gut is that the MG report recommendations are designed for MFIs to be a delivery channel for government financial programs & priority...
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In this train system, impeccably clean trains pull into the station every 2.5 minutes. They carry 1.5 million daily commuters over 100 miles of track to 132 stations around the city. No trash lies on the ground of the station, no rats scurry between the tracks, no one eats or drinks inside the cars, and a clear voice makes announcements over the loud speaker. Despite appearances, we are not in Singapore, or Japan, or the United States. We are in Delhi, India.
India is notorious for its red tape and corruption, especially when it...
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When it rained mangoes
I never saw it coming when I had joined my internship… that I will fall in love with this field (of architecture) all over again…. Sometimes I feel living in a city gives us exposure but somehow also pulls us away from the zest or to say the sheer joy of designing.
Everyone has a different...
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On both sides, vast green fields stretched to the horizon. Suddenly, Vyas pointed towards the left, and I saw a massive cloud of dust approaching us. Soon, we took a left turn and were in the middle of the storm. As we moved into Holambi-kala, fierce winds and flying tin sheets greeted us. We rushed out of the cars and towards the village centre of the Baliga Trust. I couldn't look ahead, because everytime I would raise my head, specks of dust would fly into my eyes. By the time I reached the centre, I could feel the dust in my mouth.
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RAKHI MEHRA Co-founder, micro Home Solutions
IN A BRAVE AND COMMENDABLE MOVE, The government catapulted low-income housing to the top of national agenda with a call for a slum-free India by 2015. Subsequent policy drafts, however, have fallen woefully short of the vision.
Adequate shelter is a basic necessity for...
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It works in Rome, Barcelona, and in Dharavi….why not in the slums of the world-class city, Delhi? While for many Indian families a personal bathroom and toilet is considered a step-up in social status, Europeans families have been sharing bathrooms and toilets for generations.
Even
today in many hotels...
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The comic strip is to explain the need of technical assistance during a construction/upgradation of a house.
We projected and presented this work during a workshop in Mangolpuri with a great success!
Vyas:...
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Its 1 pm on a Sunday at the ‘Centre’ and we have a packed room with over 50 women, few husbands, and some kids all colourfully dressed in their Sunday’s best. See the pictures, you’ll also recognize some member of BASIX, Baliga Trust, our partners.
This is the first formal workshop with the community on ‘need for
safe building standards and role of professional design expertise’.
We’re also here to hear the voice of our potential clients.
We have a great set of comic strips thanks to Vyas, Robi and Marco. This is truly...
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We're just back from visiting a 'JJ' - Jughi Jhopari settlement where resettlement plans have been in discussion for last 4- 5 years. I was
surprised (still figuring out if pleasantly or not) – to learn that most municipalities have a JJ department.
conflict of interest- If India achieves...
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