the uses of impossible solutions

superstudio

was at the sparc office in khetwadi today. the office is on the second floor of an old school building, built in stone with lovely kota floors and jack-arch ceilings. it was a meeting to discuss, what else, dharavi. cept, it seems has done some work on it too and was presenting its proposals along with our nascent strategies to a group of various interested groups. the cept proposal drew upon romantic notions of traditional indian cities to develop an idea for the plan. courtyards, gullies, all very picture book india. i was wondering whether this imagination was not far removed from the hyper urbanity of dharavi where every square inch is throbbing with activity, where work and living are so intertwined it is difficult to tell them apart; where all traditional notions of family, identity, scale, form are thrown into compete disarray. all planning standards seem to find no way to explain the madness on the ground. the rigid frameworks of norms cant even begin to account for grasping the situation, forget understanding and proposing solutions for them. is the solution really somewhere in our ‘wondrous’ heritage of jaipur and the pols of ahmedabad. ownership, densities, work patterns; all in dhravai are something else.

if the fulfillment of the life of an individual is the aspiration of all planning policies, then how do we address them when we don’t even begin to see who the individuals are. i don’t know how this is to be addressed. i have heard it said that since the informal systems of living and working are so resilient- they will survive anyway, so maybe we need not address them. the other option is to skirt the issue by allowing things to stay as they are. are these two poles the only solution? one a complete erasure based on an inability to engage with the complex reality on site , replacing what exists with a somewhat more pretty alternative; or the other to refuse to engage and to romanticize the horrific and degrading living conditions on site.

can a proposal instead also be a rhetorical device? a call to arms for an urgent reappraisal of what we consider to be the right standards for a reasonable ‘quality of life’. this would mean the undertaking of a utopian project. where the complexity of the site is the generator of a new typology for living, and not the blind spot in the new master planning efforts. where existing industry and community is celebrated and enabled rather than denied. already, dharavi has perhaps the highest density on the planet earth. no existing imagination can work. only a project that engages with radical reimagination can perhaps be viable. i am reminded of the utopias of archigram, peter cook, superstudio; even the megastructures of the futurists. have we finally reached the stage of hyper urbanity that these projects imagined? can their mega infrastructure and technocratic imagination open out a possibility for everyday life to celebrate in a new unusual way. I am angered when these proposals seem to care little for what exists but propose without compunction ideas that are ridiculous and unviable. but that does not mean that the responsibility for a new imagination for type does not exist. is there another vision? can we draw it?

antonio sant'elia

archigram

paolo soleri