The very first idea for my work came to my mind while I was coming back home from my second travel in India. I was in a cab in Mumbai, going to the airport, and from my window I was looking at the very poor houses along the road, wandering about some little and cheap changes that could improve their conditions.

I didn’t know yet, but I was crossing Dharavi, the biggest slum of Asia, the second one in the world (as somebody says, but it’s difficult to give numbers in these cases). Dharavi is an incredible working reality, always moving and growing. More than 1 million people lives there, in a slum too near to the centre of Mumbai to be ignored by economical interests.

I came back to Dharavi after 2 years - in 2008 - and I lived in Mumbai for 3 weeks studying the reality of Indian slums, the bamboo scaffoldings system and trying to do my best for my thesis to be as real as possible (I studied Building Engineering and Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano).

“SHANTITOWN” is a play on the words “shantytown” (meaning slum) and “shanti” (sanskrit word for peace).

The idea is to create a multifunction building system for emergency applied to the case of shantytowns. The frame is made with bamboo simply tied, as the techniques of Asian scaffoldings. The claddings are made with different recycled materials, as typical in cases of necessity.

All the material and the techniques are local, nothing needs to be imported, and local Indian workers can teach people to create their home and to maintain it.

I followed the principles of slum (recycled and cheap material, simple systems, teaching of techniques, multifunctional buildings..) trying to obtain the best comfort possible.

Saturday 30 October, 2010

Slums around the world

Almost 200.000 people every day, almost 1 million and half a week, 70 millions a year, choose to move next to the city to search for better conditions of life, for a place to live near to their working place. 
That means about 1 billion people in the world living as squatters, 1 every 6. The expectations for 2030 talk about 2 billions, that is 1 every 4. 
They escape from the countrysides where the governments aren't able to give them a work, and they arrive in the cities where the governments aren't able to give them a home.

Squatter reality has always been in our history, from Rome to USA to London, Paris..Different places and ages, same meterials, locations, reasons, reactions of the governments.
The same reality is called johpadpatti (India), favela (Brasil), kijiji (Kenia), gecekondu (Turkey), aashiwa'i (El Cairo), barriadas (Lima), kampung (Kuala Lumpur), mudukku (Colombo), penghu (Shanghai)...


How a slum borns:
A group of people, usually at night time, ivades a ground that can't be use for anything for different reasons (maybe it is a swamp, maybe it's too near to the railways..), they come and make up very quickly the poor skeleton of their future house with bamboo, wood, metal sheets, anything they can find. Then police arrives and they must leave the place. Then they invade again, the police comes, and so on until the police stops coming and the slum begins growing.
A new community is born. In the years, these communities drain the ground and build services for better living conditions, and then many times happens that the government turns the people away and gets back the new ground. 
The slums all around the world are ruled by strong communities that manage the law, the money, the services, anything. 
I strongly recommend the book "Shadow cities" by Robert Neuwirth to better understand the dynamics of the growing of a shantytown.

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