CHARLES CORREA

CERTAINLY ARCHITECTURE IS CONSIDERED WITH MUCH

MORE THAN JUST ITS PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES.
It IS A MANY LAYERED THING.BENEATH AND BEYOND THE
STRATA OF FUNCTION AND STRUCTURE AND MATERIALS
LIES THE DEEPEST AND COMPULSIVE LAYERS OF ALL
 PROJECTS
British Council,DELHI Incremental Housing Gandhi Ashram
Belapur

Kanchanganga Gun House, Jawaharlal Nehru Kendra

Housing AMHEDABAD
Concept Of A Smart City
"Making housing is like a bird
building its nest. You start with a
basic house, but you have to let
people change it to their own needs.
- Charles Correa

Correa discussed housing and the importance of

people to be involved in determining its design
and use.
 Mumbai-The Problem

In geographical terms, the city of Mumbai is that rarest of places: a city far out at sea, emerging like a
mirage above the waves. It floats on a narrow tongue of land, surrounded by water not on one or two,
but three sides. The sea defines Mumbai, perhaps like no other city in India or indeed in the world.
Throughout the citys history, the sea has shaped Mumbai, encompassing its economic basis as a port
and centre of maritime trade, its skills and employment, its settlement and mobility patterns, as well as
its relations with the neighbouring mainland and other regional inland locations.
Originally situated on a handful of small islands around fifteen kilometres from the nearest mainland
shore, in the late eighteenth century the city was joined by land reclamation to the larger Salsette
Island in the north by the British. Mumbai, then called Bombay, spread from its colonial centre in the
south towards the north in several developmental waves.
The citys original centre included its port, fort, docks, merchandise warehouses and subsequent
business districts, neighbouring cotton mills, a railway terminus and other public institutions, most of
which were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The practice of simply extending the citys boundaries further north while retaining the high
concentration of jobs on the reclaimed southern promontory was more or less successful for much of
the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. However, by the early 1960s things were reaching a critical
pitch.
Bombays population growth was exploding, driving up prime real estate prices in the south and
threatening to push much of the citys poorer and lower-middle class population the backbone of the
citys workforce and wealth generation out into ever more distant suburbs in the north.
The city was quickly turning into an urban sprawl machine attracting more and more migrants. This
led to the rapid growth of the informal sector and formation of slums in inner-city locations, as many
workers preferred to live in inner-city slums rather than in proper accommodation in far-away suburbs.
At the same time, the two main north-south commuter train lines were becoming dangerously
congested. The city was becoming the most densely inhabited place on the planet with some of the
lowest open spaces per capita.
New Mumbai Insight
Bombays population jumped from 1.5 million in the
years leading up to the Second World War to 4.5 million
in 1964, and was predicted to double by 1984. By 1965,
municipal limits had already reached the northern end
of Salsette Island todays suburb of Mira Bhayandar
meaning that the city sprawled over a continuous 45-
kilometre stretch from the south to the north.
The very advantages that the sea and land reclamation
had offered Bombay were rapidly turning into an
unmanageable burden.
There seemed to be no practical conception of how to
deal with this self-perpetuating one-way street of
urban development, had it not been for the vision of
Charles Correa.
Along with two of his colleagues, Pravina Mehta and
Shirish Patel, Correa submitted a memorandum to the
Bombay Municipality in 1964, suggesting to re-structure
the north-south developmental pattern into an east-
west one centred around Bombay Harbour.
The proposal would also integrate the areas on the
mainland rim, some 20 kilometres east of the old centre
of Bombay, into a new polycentric urban structure.
This was innovative thinking. It opened up entirely new
perspectives on the future development of Bombay and
its hinterland, and represented the first concerted effort
at decentralising the urban functions of Bombay.
Following much public support and extensive
deliberation, the basic proposals were accepted by the
state government in 1970. A new city was to be
planned, called New Bombay, which would eventually
become the largest planned city of the twentieth
century.
 Mumbai-City Needs A Twin
The government did not
finally accept this plan until
1970, when it started to buy
land east of Mumbai old
town. Large bridges then
made it possible to create a
direct link with the old
centre, so that there was
now nothing else in the way
of the actual goal of a new
commercial centre with a
new urban structure.
The City and Industrial
Development Corporation
(CIDCO) was founded, and
Charles Correa headed it as
chief architect from 1970 to
1974. Their aim was to settle
at least four million people in
New Mumbai, thus
containing the spread of
further emergency
accommodation and creating
enough new jobs.
 Mumbai-City Needs A Twin
There were two key aspects to be
dealt with: creating living space
and setting up mass transport
systems.
The southern sub-centre called
Ulwe, for which Correa produced a
development plan, is now part of
New Mumbai.
The intention was to carry out real
town planning here, with the
colonial British planning in Old
Mumbai definitely providing a
model: a development and use
plan was drawn up in co-operation
with CIDCO, rules were fixed, i.e.
the building development
structures, building heights and
street width etc., and a start made
by designing 1000 dwellings for
350,000 inhabitants.
 New Mumbai Insight
Planning for New Mumbai , formerly Bombay, is
the commercial and financial centre of India, with
a population of about twelve million at the time
of writing.
The huge city is growing by many thousand
hopeful immigrants from predominantly rural
areas each day. Mumbais particular topography
it is a long, narrow peninsula meant that the
constantly needed extension of the city limits
was possible in one direction only, northwards.
Britains efforts as a colonial power 200 years
ago were directed at citifying something that
was essentially a withdrawn little town because
of its outstanding location as a harbour and
trading centre.
But Bombay did not start to flourish until 50
years later, when the turmoil of the Civil War cut
off American cotton export.
So the world focused its interest on Indian
cotton, and Bombay became the centre for the
shipment of goods.
 New Mumbai INSIGHT
Ultra-fast growth began, the port became the largest in
India, and rapid urban expansion created the problem of
a housing shortage and a proliferation of emergency
accommodation.
The centre of Mumbai, now and then, is at the southern
end of the peninsula, where commercial life developed
and population density and land prices are highest.
The extreme expansion of the urban area to one side of
a fixed commercial centre created Mumbais major
problems of long transport routes. Journeys lasting
several hours on express trains had to be accepted if
people were to get to work, a state of affairs that
eventually reached its natural limits.
As early as 1964, Charles Correa with his colleagues
Pravina Mehta and Shiresh Patel proposed to the Mumbai
city authorities that they should not expand any further
northwards, but use an eastern site cut off by a sea bay
for urban expansion, with the aim of establishing New
Mumbai.
 New Mumbai-A Smart City
Every income group was to be considered here, and
cost/use factors devised in categories, for example
clay or bamboo buildings for lower income groups,
masonry buildings for middle income groups and
apartments for high earners.
The complexity of a city as an urban organism
meant that flexibility had to be a factor as well, with
room for natural growth.
Urban quality in the sense of an ambience
appropriate to human scale meant considering
factors like varied living space dependent on urban
density, structures like neighbourhoods and
quarters, public buildings and areas, also sufficient
green areas and open spaces, and transport with
adequate stopping points.
Correa developed a complex and flexible urban
structure for Ulwe, but at the same time laid down
strict building guidelines to guard against Indian
urban sprawl: urban blocks as the basic structure,
with fixed building height, numbers of floors and
street and rear faades, and also fixed use
dependent on position within the city.
An urban centre offered administration, public
buildings, green areas and transport links with
buses and trains. This ambitious, fixed structure
and thus inimical to the Indian free spirit has been
under construction for several decades.
New Mumbai
New Mumbai