Mumbia's Poor Reject Tower Blocks

Piles of garbage, homes so dense in their proximity to each other they practically block natural light, and open sewer drains is a sight common on the streets of Dharavi in Mumbai, India and makes up Asia's largest slum.

To address these poor living conditions, private sector redevelopment plans have been created for Dharavi. These plans which call for replacing the shanty homes with block towers have met with resistance from the Dharavi Bachao Andolan coalition, formed by leaders within this slum community advocating to have more chawls rather than towers. The "chawl" is more of a traditional style design that sets a few single level units around a central courtyard where residents may interact and work on their stitching, processing or weaving.

These are the benefits that the chawl brings that will now be lost if towers are built in the community argues the coalition but the Indian government counters that the local problem is one of space as a successful chawl community requires sprawl whereas building vertically maximizes space so more of the inhabitants can be housed. Ultimately, the government and private sector developers really just want to reclaim the vast swathe of the city currently taken up by the 60% of Mumbaikars living in slums regardless of the potentially adverse effects on the residents.

Hence, this redevelopment plan for Dharavi has not been thoroughly thought through as they fail to see that packing people into towers does not make for community revitalization. Most of the first ghettos in the United States were towers where people where jammed into squalid conditions and India may be doing nothing more but trading one kind of slum for another. I think it would be smarter if the shortsighted vision of simply reclaiming land is not the one goal to be focused on here but also a way to improve the quality of life of the Mumbai poor.


Image obtained from: www.guardian.co.uk

Out With The Old, In With The New

Usually, most cities look to revitalize their blighted down towns with new development but the city of Las Vegas has chosen a new approach. To build a new downtown right next to the decaying one creating a new "center city" that underscores the extravagance that Las Vegas is known for.

In April, the city formally inaugurated a new urban core on a 61-acre undeveloped parcel of land (a portion of which was formerly occupied by the Boardwalk Hotel and Casino, the Bellagio hotel employee parking lot and other stand alone commercial structures) for the new city center which is to be a 16,797,000 square foot mixed use project currently under construction by MGM Mirage on the Las Vegas strip. Though much of this land was fallow brownfield, its acquisition entailed numerous legal fights over the years and use of eminent domain.

Unlike most other themed resorts along the strip, the city center has been designed to include multiple highrise structures incorporated with contemporary urban design. The master plan designed by Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn Architects, seeks to make this a pretty self sufficient mini city composed of its own fire station, an on-site power plant for reclaiming water, approximately 2, 670 condo and condo-hotel units and almost 5,000 hotel rooms distributed over several highrise and mid rise towers, a 400 room hotel and casino, two 400 room hotel boutiques (whatever those are) a 500,000 square foot retail and entertainment district which will house the first grocery store on the strip and an Alzheimer's research center, designed by Frank Gehry.

With a total cost of approximately $11billion, this is the largest privately funded project in the history of the United States and with its focus on art, center city will be host to some of the world's most renowned sculpture artists including Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Coosje Van Bruggen and many others.

Now I know that Las Vegas likes to do everything on a grand and ridiculous scale but I think some aspects of this project are unnecessary. Does Vegas need More hotels, condo units and casinos? No they don't. With the economy being what it is now, how many of us will be vacationing in any of those planned units in the near future? Many of the other projects for the city center I think will be more beneficial to the city, like Gehry's proposed Alzheimer's center (hopefully this time he tries to design something that looks like it belongs on earth) but all the highrise hotels are not needed in a city that is already saturated with them. I don't think projects should be proposed on a whim but only if they would be significantly beneficial to its surroundings and the city as a whole. So I would say scrap most of those condo and hotel-condo units, the city doesn't need that many and scrap the casinos cause I don't think they need more in Vegas. Everything else can stay.

Image obtained from www.nytimes.com
For more info, check www.vegastodayandtomorrow.com/citycenter.htm