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FROM UTOPIAS TO HETEROTOPIAS: Migrant Housing - Values of Time, Density & Culture

WEEK - 06
September 4, 2020

Mitali Vadher
(UG190862)

Title of the Topic: Supports - An Alternative to Mass Housing

Understanding:

After discussing possible solutions for a housing problem in this case, we end up stopping
to the point where we realise none of these solutions can be put into action so easily
because implementation is out of our hands. It's the government who would see to that,
whose certainty is highly questionable. This is very well summed up when the author says
that the housing problem is not just one problem, it is a sum of a lot of problems and it can
be worked out only when all the forces such as architects, planners, government, involved
in the process would work hand in hand.

Mass housing is not a synonym of housing, it is essentially a method to provide that. It is

necessary to understand that this method has its own implications. Mass housing tends to
remove the individual user out of the picture, but while this is done, it is essential to look at
the broader picture in the terms of looking at a similar kind of people who are predicted to
occupy it later. Here we are redesigning a settlement and that is why it becomes essential to
study the aspirations and living patterns of the users as a group, but even when designing
from scratch we should not negate the vision of how the space would function when
different people with different needs would inhabitat there. I do not understand how mass
housing can be done with knowing what kind of people are going to use it. I can say that if I
wouldn’t have studied about the users, I would have ended up creating bland boxes for
them to live in absence of any other affordable option available to them. This is the problem
with housings today, it tends to ignore basic human needs such as a good semi-open or
open space of their own, a house which would let them grow and which would grow with
them, and of course proper light and ventilation when looking at mass housing.

Forever human civilizations have lived and thrived in dwellings made by them, using local
materials and responding to the basic human tasks and needs. Even today, when we look
at slums like in Surat, it is evident how the users built and modified their houses as per their
own needs in the most logical and economic way available to them. Meaning out of housing
is created only when these things are turned into tangible forms.

It talks about human behaviour towards its possessions. We tend to like things which can
make our own, modify, rather than having to settle with something which is our own but
doesn’t allow us to actually do something with it other than just have the possession. In
Surat We have seen how the migrant workers paint their house, extend their built territory,
extend their otlas as per their need, while the ones in the government housing were denied
this liberty. They were denied the ability to modify their houses, there was hardly something
they could do with their possessions. This leaves the question of what is the use of
developing a housing which will not respond to basic tendencies as humans. It is also
peculiar how all the basic human tendencies are so nakedly seen in such squatter

Monsoon 2020 | Studio Unit Level-2 | Bachelor of Urban Design | Faculty of Planning | CEPT University, Ahmedabad
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FROM UTOPIAS TO HETEROTOPIAS: Migrant Housing - Values of Time, Density & Culture

settlements. It provides a great learning about the human responses to their houses and
how everything is connected to their living patterns.

Mass housing also questions what is a dwelling truly. It is easier to explain what a dwelling
is rather than what it is, because it is all the things which provide for an individual to sustain
and respond to it with the most basic of his emotions. It is everything but a machine for
living. It allows us to thrive, and it also thrives with us. By calling it a machine it removes the
human form the picture, he no longer responds with the house. Then we are just creating
products for consumers and not dwellings for humans. We do not consider dwellings as
organisms when they are so alive as they constantly grow with the dwellers and go through
the entire process of birth, growth and disintegration. It so much as responds to its
environment just as living beings do. The response of dwelling to its context and the
humans should go hand in hand, absence of which not only creates imbalance in the life of
the dweller and everything related to him. This natural relationship is so basic yet so difficult
to apply in reality that it’s scarcity is creating housings which do not respond to human scale
and living patterns.

Monsoon 2020 | Studio Unit Level-2 | Bachelor of Urban Design | Faculty of Planning | CEPT University, Ahmedabad