HornOkPlease

Today was a wake up bell. It marked a shift in our conception of our work here.

This was brought on by a meeting that Kelvin, Melissa, Camillo and I had with Gautam Chatterjee at MHADA's offices. As the Officer on Special Duty for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, he is in essence guiding the bidding from the 14 developers and deciding what outside advice to accept and what to refuse.

As he explained the current adopted proposal for Dharavi's Redelopment, I was visualizing the image of Dharavi, 20 years from now, during monsoon season, being about as close to Blade Runner as you can get. The unfortunate thing is that people would be living there - not replicants! The idea of creating a stratification of uses and blanketing the ground with three levels of industry and parking was frightening, and I left the MHADA office feeling like I had been living in the two-dimensional world depicted in Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and was just shown the three-dimensional world for the first time.

This whole experience just became a bit too real.


- Andrew 16.05.09