What is green mobility?
Lincoln Paiva: Green Mobility, from a "means of transportation" point of view, maybe understood as cleaner and more efficient vehicles. From a broader point of view, green mobility is a set of indicators involving planning, energy grid, technology, traffic control, infrastructure, and transportation systems providing a better quality of life for people and causing less economic, social, and environmental impact. Green mobility is not a goal in itself. The modern urban way of thinking conceives mobility as a means to provide urban and social development to the population in an ecological way or, in other words, with as little environmental impact as possible. We cannot think of sustainable urban mobility only as the transportation systems (transporting people) and energy. The purpose of sustainable urban mobility is to provide local development.

Your company, Green Mobility, is meant to play a key role in promoting strategies and projects for sustainable urban mobility that combine both private and public initiatives. How does this work in Brazil? In particular, how does Green Mobility operate? 

Paiva: We have been advising Brazilian cities to develop a more sustainable transportation policy and culture. The major challenge has been breaking paradigms about the low, medium, and high capacity transport systems, emphasizing the importance of creating a high-capacity network and not only systems. The cities have been implementing the wrong options, by taking only under consideration the data concerning passenger demand and neglecting socioeconomic issues, therefore leaving thousands of low-income people out of the transport system because of the tariff fees. 



Lincoln Paiva is founder and president of Green Mobility.

Courtesy of Lincoln Paiva

You did research on workers' modes of dislocation in part of São Paulo's service industries. Please describe your research and the specific actions that are being taken by the companies and their workers.
Paiva: The companies are still not willing to invest their money before they have a positive signal from the cities. Regarding projects involving the private sector, it will be important for cities to develop public policies that favor private investments. For instance, for a company to encourage people to go to work by bicycle, the city has to invest in infrastructure such as bicycle parking areas, bicycle paths, and security and also offer benefits so that the workers feel comfortable with the idea of pedaling a bike, exercising, and having a more positive attitude toward using the car less often.

In São Paulo, what types of operational and structural measures, in terms of sustainable urban mobility, are possible in the short and long term?
Paiva: The first thing to do would be to develop a municipal urban mobility plan, based on a more sustainable transport policy with short-, medium-, and long-term visions. Without it, it's virtually impossible to determine an emergency action plan. If you don't know where you are going to, all paths are alike.

Another of São Paulo's current challenges is the disarticulation between the pattern of land use and mobility, as for example the fast-paced construction of high-rise buildings and other large-scale developments. What are the socioterritorial and environmental consequences for the city and its inhabitants?
Paiva: I recently took part in a debate with [staff members of] São Paulo's municipal urban planning company. According to them, São Paulo is not among the most vertically dense cities in the world. I don't agree with the high-density proposals by urban planners, or in other words, the concept of Compact City, which is widely discussed in cities. In developing countries, this has caused islands of poverty and underdevelopment, because urban transport and work aren't dealt with as part of urban and social development, [which] will have to be [done as] part of a project involving several state-level departments. And that kind of cooperation is nonexistent in Brazil.

The World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 could be remarkable opportunities to set up new paradigms for sustainable cities in Brazil. How are mobility issues being handled in the cities involved? Are there areas for innovation? 

Paiva: There's no innovation as far as I know. Unfortunately, the Brazilian cities will miss out on those excellent opportunities. What we nowadays foresee in terms of transport projects has to do with the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit. But, I insist, that one transport system is not going to solve the problems of Brazilian cities. Public officials do not understand that these two events can attract tourists, resources, companies, investment, and development. Their vision is focused on transporting people. I liked the idea of building the soccer stadium in the eastern zone [of São Paulo], but I haven't seen any project for local development or for the city's transport system. The subway is already there, with capacity for sixty thousand people per hour each way. Aside from the money to build the stadium, there will be no other investment in the transport system.

How can Brazilians improve their quality of life and make healthier cities?
Paiva: São Paulo has got a minority of upper-middle-class and better-educated people, especially youngsters between nineteen and twenty-five years of age, who understand that, in order to improve quality of life, it will be necessary to change the lifestyle that is deeply influenced by North-American consumerism, especially the car as a status symbol. With the improvement of the economy and encouragement from the federal government, a considerable part of the population can afford to buy a car. It's not fair that people have to give up on an asset that was widely promised as a symbol of achievement and status and go back to riding a bus or walking. So, as I see it, the wealthiest population in the city will have to give up driving their cars, because 80 percent of the drivers live less than ten kilometers away from work. However, the city must rethink its mobility strategy, by providing different means of transportation for short distances that can be used instead of the car. Alternative types of transportation are practically nonexistent in São Paulo.

How do you see the relationship between the automobile industry and urban planning and architecture?
Paiva: The automobile industry's vision of the city's future is a false promise in terms of urban planning. It's technological cities like in The Jetsons cartoon: The car talks to the driver, appears to be people's best friend, solves all the daily problems, moving around among glass-enclosed buildings and empty streets. We aren't searching only for more security, technology, or better energy efficiency. The industry will have to accept that its purpose is not only transporting people in a more efficient and environmentally sustainable way, but to offer solutions for the accumulation of cars in the streets, which makes driving itself difficult, slows cities' development capacity, and impairs quality of life. No one wants to slow down car sales, but, in the future, not everybody will own a car and not everybody will be able to drive their car at the same time. The industry needs to understand its responsibility to introduce private transportation as one of the solutions for the implementation of a network of transportation systems in a city. Automobile manufacturers are wasting their time and sources thinking in terms of imaginary cities that will never become real. It is necessary to rethink the current model of individual transportation.

How is climate change influencing public policies and private-sector initiatives in Brazil in terms of urban mobility? What are the main differences compared to other countries? 

Paiva: Brazil could be a leader in this area due to its low rank in the list of countries with the highest motorization rates. In order to reach for that [goal], it is necessary to foster the development of new technologies that would enable a more comprehensive understanding of the public transportation systems and to create new systems oriented toward our own reality.

In the battlefield that is the contemporary city, every cartographic technique—from Street View to municipal charts, and from GIS (geographic information system) to OpenStreetMap—possesses a politics of its own, whether deliberate or inadvertent. Enter the word Dharavi into the search box of Google Maps, and you'll find yourself abruptly catapulted into what appears to be a large patch of light yellow nothingness wedged between two suburban railway lines in central Mumbai. In this yellow-tinted cartographic void, the surrounding tangle of roads melts away and detail is conspicuously absent. As large patches of nothingness go, one quickly notes that this one is strategically positioned—a stone's throw from the Bandra-Kurla Complex, an area which after decades of northward expansion has become the city's financial and commercial epicenter, and just as close to many of the city's most important commuter hubs. Switch over to satellite view, however, and the scene unexpectedly transforms—the bland void is replaced by a speckled, irregular carpet of urbanity teeming with life.

The street bazaar on Mahatma Gandhi Road in Dharavi is always a hive of activity.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

Dharavi is revealed for what it is: one of Mumbai's districts, home to several hundred thousand residents and nearly as many small but vibrant businesses, tightly-packed workshops, crowded basement factories, ceaselessly industrious enterprises, liminal ateliers suspended in a spatial limbo between inside and outside, hi-tech print labs juxtaposed with low-tech tool shops and countless miniscule grocers—not to mention over one hundred places of worship. This throbbing, pulsating urban landscape is often characterised as Asia's largest slum, hemmed in on all sides by some of the most valuable real estate in India's financial capital. But it is unique only in its strategic position. Otherwise, it is emblematic of how half the city's population lives.

High-rise housing projects built under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority are slowly replacing locally developed low-rise settlements.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

Zoom in towards block No. 4/6/12, past the railway lines, and the headquarters of what is probably Dharavi's only resident design practice spring into focus. Not that it is in any way discernable from its surroundings, since urbz resides on the top floor of a typical three-storey structure, the uneven product—like its neighbours—of several decades of incremental growth and unabated adaptation. Accessing the office involves scaling several narrow, uneven flights of stairs, then clambering up a near-vertical metal ladder.

Work proceeding on the construction project in Shivaji Nagar with contractor Babu Bhai. Highquality rmc was delivered in small quantities to unplanned low-rise, high-density neighbourhoods such as Rafiq Nagar (Deonar).

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

Dharavi is home to between half a million and one million people—no one is really sure of the exact figure since no recent and reliable demographic statistics exist. A 1986 survey conducted by the National Slum Dwellers Federation counted 530,225 people grouped into 106,045 households, and a total of 80,518 structures, but the numbers have certainly grown since then. If the estimate of half a million to one million inhabitants is correct, its density is somewhere between four and eight times Manhattan's—a reality that is almost unimaginable, to a Western observer at least, if one considers that its buildings are on average three stories high. That Dharavi is a slum, however, is a notion that Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, the founders of urbz, resist. Terminology, they point out, like cartography, carries baggage, and defining the district as a slum designates it as a terminally diseased district where demolition and redevelopment is inescapable—a condition that amounts to something of a wet dream for the administration and the city's developers, who are only too aware of the multibillion-euro value of the land it stands on.

urbz members Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava in Savda Ghevra, a resettlement colony on the outskirts of Delhi, studying local construction processes.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

Reconsidering it as an infrastructurally underserved urban district, as urbz does, is an attempt to linguistically dodge preconceptions and focus instead on the remarkable potentialities latent in Dharavi's extraordinary socio-urbanistic make-up. As the epicenter of Mumbai's light industry and artisans, it is a phenomenally productive reality in modern Mumbai. One conservative estimate places the annual value of goods produced in Dharavi at 500 million dollars (400 million euros), which, if one considers the infrastructural investments (or lack thereof) that went into making it, probably qualifies it as the most efficient and productive district in the city.

Khotachiwadi, 2010—currently. urbz’s engagement with Khotachiwadi builds on more than three years of work aimed at saving the distinct personality of this habitat.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

As if to acknowledge that cities are complex entities that don't lend themselves to generalizations, Echanove, an urbanist of Swiss-Spanish origin, and Srivastava, who studied social and urban anthropology, chose not to lump all their activities under the umbrella of the urbz office. In parallel to urbz they run several activities, among which the Institute of Urbanology, a research center based in Goa devoted to understanding the incremental developmental processes and daily practices that define the identity of cities such as Bogotá, Tokyo, Istanbul, New York, New Delhi, Goa and Mumbai, yet elude representation through statistics and cartography alone. In contrast to the data-driven approach that has defined efforts to understand cities in recent decades, the practice of "urbanology" relies on understanding and documenting urban ecosystems through direct engagement with people and places—charting homegrown practices in the fields of housing, artisanship and trade, and the physical and theoretical spaces where these fields converge. To make this possible, the "urbanologist" must borrow from the social sciences: "At most times," they write in a text on their blog airoots/eirut, "the urbanologist and the anthropologist are one and the same."

City Makers, Dharavi, 2009. Survey of the district’s workers. Ramchandra with his son Lakhan repairing domestic appliances.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

This quasi-anthropological approach towards the observation of urbanity derives largely from the belief that designing for a context such as Dharavi—or any urban condition, for that matter—must necessarily occur with the involvement of its inhabitants, the end users. For urbz, Dharavi is a kind of laboratory where a new bottom-up, self-organizational approach to urban design can be bred. Taking a leaf from Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's "Learning from Las Vegas," they claim that learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary. urbz highlights, for example, the contrast between the government's response to the housing crisis, i.e. large-scale production of low-cost housing blocks that quickly turn into vertical slums, and the far more numerous housing units of far better quality being built by contractors and end users at lower prices in Mumbai's many unplanned settlements.

Deepak Kunchikor’s Shaolin Kung Fu Class at the Shelter, a community initiative supported by urbz in Dharavi.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

A specific example offered in support of this thesis, and later the subject of an urbz workshop at Sir JJ College of Architecture, is a house built by contractor Amar Madhukar Nirjankar in the Utkarsh Nagar neighbourhood for 2.5 lakh rupees, or approximately 4,860 dollars (3,850 euros). In the narrative of urbanology, the contractor is a key character: He condenses into a single persona all those qualities of pragmatism, ingenuity, business savvy and political astuteness that make the machine that is Dharavi tick, despite the absence of any formal planning or infrastructural investment. Echoing David Harvey, Echanove and Srivastava perceive the city in general, and Dharavi in particular, not as the place where the factory exists but rather a factory in itself, in which producer and product are one and the same, and in which the contractor—together with the postindustrial artisan and the hardware dealer—is a vital node in the social structure.

Mumbai Contra-CT, 2011-2012. Affordable housing seminar and workshop at Sir JJ College of Architecture, where students learn from local contractors while working with them in various neighbourhoods. In the pictures, contractor Pankaj Gupta talking to JJ students. 

Photo by Priyanka Chharia

Echanove and Srivastava are acutely aware that the continued existence of Dharavi, let alone any improvement of its infrastructure and living conditions, depends on how the debate around its future is framed. For its part, despite the well documented productivity of its workshops, the government has squarely defined it an "informal settlement" and placed it in the hands of the Slum Redevelopment Authority, which unsurprisingly announced its intention to raze the district to make way for the development of new real estate. "Dharavi," the municipality asserts, clearly unconcerned about concealing its voracity for developable real estate, "is the opportunity of the millennium." Current inhabitants would be offered some kind of tenure—in most cases tiny apartments, potentially elsewhere—but the vast majority of the enormous profits generated would unquestionably end up in the pockets of the developers. urbz and the Institute of Urbanology counters this with a sort of artistic guerrilla action, disseminating through its blogs perfectly credibly images of Dharavi streetscapes merged with urban vistas of Turin, Tokyo and other cities. The message is clear: since the incremental growth of cities is the default form of urban development all over the world, Dharavi is everywhere, and the problem of integration between new and old cannot be simply swept under the carpet.

Urban System Studio, Goa, 2011. The workshop was developed with the Royal University College of Art, Stockholm. Pauli and Solano talk about the local development of Pilerne village.

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi

Dharavi + The World, Perugia, 2011. The Mashup workshop revealed the common hidden dynamics in radically different urban contexts. These collages were produced during an all night workshop at Festarch. 

© Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi, Collage by Chiara Proietti

Amar’s house, Utkarsh Nagar, Bhandup, 2011. Part of a diagram showing the construction process for a two-storey house, including details of the materials used, labour time spent and total cost in rupees. Amar Madhukar Nirjankar is the contractor and architect who oversaw the project.

This article was first published in Domus, issue 955.