Dharavi: Where the Urban Design Episteme Is Falling Apart

Abstract

Dharavi is the iconic symbol of a “slum” understood as an inevitable spatial product of global predatory capitalism. Contemporary Mumbai and specifically Dharavi serve as an extreme example of urban design episteme falling apart and putting in place new urban imaginations and practices of resettlements and displacement. Such multiple forms of different urbanisms and heterogeneous forms of urban lives and occupations may be challenged by: fighting non-critical engagement with (re)interrogation of design practice, design thinking and design education, adopting a more nuanced and critical, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary vision of architectural and urban design, as well as dealing with precariousness, scarcity and informality as constituent materials of everyday urban planetary condition.