Author: Agatha Mary Mohan Ponraj
Site Location: Dharavi, Mumbai
Institute: Avani Institute of Design
Advisor: Ar. Niraj Pillai

Description

The origins of the project lie in observing the everyday as architectural. Drawing from Pauline Gallacher’s question in Everyday Spaces: “Is there still potential in the forming of neighborhoods for little spaces of contradiction, which stand aside from the transience of the here and now and testify to the past of a place and its future possibility?”

I grew up in Dharavi. Not in the map of it, but in the texture of it—the closeness, the choreography, the constant negotiation of space. As I entered architectural education, a dissonance appeared: the city I knew and the city the discipline wanted to draw were not the same. One was fluid, porous, shared. The other was enclosed, programmed, rendered. This thesis comes from the need to reconcile those two visions.

Cities like Dharavi are rarely short of architecture; they are full of it—walls that become blackboards, staircases that double as markets, courtyards that host festivals and funerals alike. What they lack is recognition. Conventional design frameworks call these conditions “informal,” but in reality, they are civic systems—messy, adaptive, and profoundly intelligent.

This thesis begins by taking those overlooked logics critically. It does not read incidental spaces as leftovers, but as urban instruments that shape collective life. Through mapping, observation, and critical inquiry, the project transforms these cues into architectural propositions that resist closure and invite appropriation. The aim is not to solve Dharavi, but to listen to it—and in doing so, to reframe architecture as an act of equity: a structure that acknowledges multiplicity, amplifies everyday practices, and opens itself to use far beyond what is drawn.

Drawings

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