Redeveloping Housing: For the urban poor community at Rahul Nagar, Bairagarh, Bhopal

Abstract

Slums are often viewed as a problem that needed to be fixed or moved away from sight, but one doesn’t realise slums are a space for entrepreneurship and provide accessible affordable housing for the urban migrants. There are multiple reasons for the growth of slums including rapid urban migration, urban governance, and the housing demand- supply gap. This thesis looks at what slums mean to all the stakeholders, including its residents and the reasons for its formation. Slum rehabilitation/redevelopment programmes in India are underperforming. The Government’s multi-storied housing initiatives often have lower acceptability rates and cause much of the urban poor to choose slums over the provided housing. Discontent among dwellers is common due to various reasons- inadequate floor areas for expanding families, lacking provision for domestic economic opportunities like shop keeping and tailoring, deficit community spaces, long commute to workplace, safety issues, poor construction, etc. Such challenges disrupt everyday life of these residents. This, coupled with mounting socioeconomic pressure, causes distress among inhabitants and leads to failure of such wellmeaning projects at multiple levels. Architects, as designers, can be integral in improving the liveability of such projects by involving the community itself. Community assets like individuals, influencers, associations, physical environment, economic and political resources, etc can be recognised to help improve health and increase the socio-economy (McKnight, 1990). A participatory approach is being increasingly adopted to boost the acceptability of these projects. This involves beneficiaries at various levels of decision making to help them shape their environment as per their own basic needs. However, multiple strategies of community participation are context-specific. This requires an intervention that assesses and accommodates the existing socio-cultural fabric of the slums to translate this environment in the rehabilitated housing. This will eventually improve quality of life of residents, preserve their socio-cultural integrity and improve acceptability of the redeveloped housing by employing a user and context-specific design approach. The design concept was derived from the character study of the existing Rahul Nagar slum and identification of requirements of the slum dwellers. The proposal aims at providing residential spaces (which includes 275 dwelling units), flexible extended living spaces and hierarchy of social spaces, primarily to the existing residents of Rahul Nagar slum along with other possible users of the housing. Existing features which provide an imageability to the slum, such as tree clusters, anganwadi and school buildings in the precinct (educational facilities) and primary pathways are preserved in the site planning of housing. The community spaces and residential block configurations are designed so as to improve the probability of interpersonal encounters and eventually increase the level of interaction which reinforces the community bonding and strength. Keywords: Slum, slum redevelopment, consensus design, imageability of slums, participatory approach, socio-cultural integrity.