- Matias Echanove is a founding member of urbz.net, a platform for experimental urban research and action, with collabo... moreMatias Echanove is a founding member of urbz.net, a platform for experimental urban research and action, with collaborators in Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Geneva. He is also co-director of the Institute of Urbanology in Mumbai and Goa, together with partner Rahul Srivastava.
He authored or co-authored essays and commentaries published by Oxford University Press, Strelka Press (Moscow), Domus (Milan), New Village Press, Tokyo University Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, The Times of India, Time Out Mumbai, Art India and Indian Architect and Builder. Their work has been exhibited at MoMA in New York, The MAK in Vienna, the Istanbul Design Biennial and the Sao Paulo Cultural Center.
Matias Echanove studied government and economics at the London School of Economics, urban planning at Columbia University, and urban information systems at the University of Tokyo.edit
Au travers de l'analyse d'un projet d'urbanisme - une nouvelle plage publique à Genève - le texte explore l'importance de l'espace public pour la constitution d'une expérience partagée du monde et la constitution d'un commun.
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Conceptualizing Mumbai simply as a “megacity” or, as the United Nations calls it, a “large urban agglomeration,” is inadequate. Rather, it is a hub in a larger urban system. Seeing Mumbai from the point of view of the entire Konkan region... more
Conceptualizing Mumbai simply as a “megacity” or, as the United Nations calls it, a “large urban agglomeration,” is inadequate. Rather, it is a hub in a larger urban system. Seeing Mumbai from the point of view of the entire Konkan region (the Arabian Sea coast along the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Goa, in western India) helps us understand how Mumbai’s realm stretches all the way to small towns and villages, and how important the city’s connections with those places are for Mumbai. Communication and transportation systems are making it easier than ever for people to “belong” to several places at once. A person can be rooted in his or her village of origin without sacrificing the social mobility offered by larger city centers. Nowadays, even those migrants who end up staying in the city usually maintain strong connections with their hometowns.
The connection between rural and urban in India is reflected in the Konkan story. While it cannot be denied that the development of infrastructure such as railways contributed to the urbanization of villages and towns, this urbanization was largely triggered by the impulses of the villagers themselves. As villages and towns urbanized, they also preserved their relevance to local populations, in part because they allow a lifestyle that is out of reach in the city. Circulation between the city and the village gives people access to big-city opportunities while preserving their sense of home, their identity, and their prospects back in the village. This has allowed villages to remain relevant in the age of the “megacity.”
The connection between rural and urban in India is reflected in the Konkan story. While it cannot be denied that the development of infrastructure such as railways contributed to the urbanization of villages and towns, this urbanization was largely triggered by the impulses of the villagers themselves. As villages and towns urbanized, they also preserved their relevance to local populations, in part because they allow a lifestyle that is out of reach in the city. Circulation between the city and the village gives people access to big-city opportunities while preserving their sense of home, their identity, and their prospects back in the village. This has allowed villages to remain relevant in the age of the “megacity.”
Research Interests:
There is something about the sheer size of Tokyo that stimulates imagination. Tokyo has a special place in urban fiction. By far the largest urban agglomeration in the world, it is built “atop the junction of three tectonic plates”... more
There is something about the sheer size of Tokyo that stimulates imagination. Tokyo has a special place in urban fiction. By far the largest urban agglomeration in the world, it is built “atop the junction of three tectonic plates” (Lovgren, 2005) and therefore destined to be destroyed (again) in the future. The Fukushima disaster has reawakened the trauma of devastation and Japan’s ambiguous relationship to technology and progress. Technological advances, particularly in construction and planning, are seen as the only way to secure the city against earthquake and and other natural disasters. Yet, technology has also demonstrated its extreme destructive potential when it gets out of control. Tokyo fictions have often played with the dystopic fantasies of a high-tech future, ultimate disaster and post-apocalyptic anarchy.
A related sci-fi scenario is that of Tokyo as a cybernetic organism, which merges seamlessly nature and technology, tradition and the future, in a ubiquitous mediascape that connects everyone and everything. The cyborg city is a recurrent theme in Japanese architecture and urbanism since perhaps the nineteenth century, when Fukuzawa Yukichi first introduce the idea that information technology was at the “very essence of modern civilization” (Yoshimi: 2006: 273). Academics and architects have embraced the idea of the ‘information society’ since the 1960s. In Japan, it was initially associated with a tremendous enthusiasm for the future and a blind faith in technology.
The post-bubble area, from the 1990s to our days, is characterised by economic and ecological insecurity, mistrust of political authorities and the bureaucracy, and the advent of decentralized technologies of communication. The Internet in particular became a source of inspiration for those who saw it as both a tool and a model of more participatory and inclusive society – where communities of interest could come together and produce their own plans and visions for the future. Architect Toyo Ito once imagined a city where information flows were merged to the built environment, blurring the line between the virtual/simulation and the real, but also between people and their habitats: “A great barrier exists between the administrator of a building and its users … electronic media may invalidate these barriers.” (Toyo Ito: 2000)
Imagine a city that is shaped and transformed by its users? Where the distance between urban aspiration and actualization is so short that virtually everyone can participate in planning and developing the city? That city would be, so to say, ‘open source’, ‘peer to peer’ and ‘user-generated’.
This essay looks firstly describes Tokyo as city that was produced spontaneously and incrementally by its users. It suggests that there is a Tokyo Model of urban development, which is a model ‘by default’ and not ‘by design’. That model is based on the active participation of users in the production of urban space. It then describes how political and economic interests have taken over the user-generated city. The rise of a participatory society is indeed contingent not only on the penetration of new technology, forms of socialization and urban praxis, but also on the vested interests and ideologies of dominant groups. The chapter then explores the contradiction in the so-called information society between claims for more participation at the grassroots level and the increased control over planning and over development exercised by governments and corporate actors. The case of Shimokitazawa is briefly presented. The last section provides a conceptual framework based on the concept of ‘information’ that could be used to recognize and legitimize user’s participation in urban development.
A related sci-fi scenario is that of Tokyo as a cybernetic organism, which merges seamlessly nature and technology, tradition and the future, in a ubiquitous mediascape that connects everyone and everything. The cyborg city is a recurrent theme in Japanese architecture and urbanism since perhaps the nineteenth century, when Fukuzawa Yukichi first introduce the idea that information technology was at the “very essence of modern civilization” (Yoshimi: 2006: 273). Academics and architects have embraced the idea of the ‘information society’ since the 1960s. In Japan, it was initially associated with a tremendous enthusiasm for the future and a blind faith in technology.
The post-bubble area, from the 1990s to our days, is characterised by economic and ecological insecurity, mistrust of political authorities and the bureaucracy, and the advent of decentralized technologies of communication. The Internet in particular became a source of inspiration for those who saw it as both a tool and a model of more participatory and inclusive society – where communities of interest could come together and produce their own plans and visions for the future. Architect Toyo Ito once imagined a city where information flows were merged to the built environment, blurring the line between the virtual/simulation and the real, but also between people and their habitats: “A great barrier exists between the administrator of a building and its users … electronic media may invalidate these barriers.” (Toyo Ito: 2000)
Imagine a city that is shaped and transformed by its users? Where the distance between urban aspiration and actualization is so short that virtually everyone can participate in planning and developing the city? That city would be, so to say, ‘open source’, ‘peer to peer’ and ‘user-generated’.
This essay looks firstly describes Tokyo as city that was produced spontaneously and incrementally by its users. It suggests that there is a Tokyo Model of urban development, which is a model ‘by default’ and not ‘by design’. That model is based on the active participation of users in the production of urban space. It then describes how political and economic interests have taken over the user-generated city. The rise of a participatory society is indeed contingent not only on the penetration of new technology, forms of socialization and urban praxis, but also on the vested interests and ideologies of dominant groups. The chapter then explores the contradiction in the so-called information society between claims for more participation at the grassroots level and the increased control over planning and over development exercised by governments and corporate actors. The case of Shimokitazawa is briefly presented. The last section provides a conceptual framework based on the concept of ‘information’ that could be used to recognize and legitimize user’s participation in urban development.
Research Interests:
Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, is supposed to represent the quintessential Asian slum. Crowded streets and busy markets; domestic workshops cheek by jowl with sweatshops producing both real and fake Pepe jeans; brick houses rising as... more
Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, is supposed to represent the quintessential Asian slum. Crowded streets and busy markets; domestic workshops cheek by jowl with sweatshops producing both real and fake Pepe jeans; brick houses rising as high as their microscopic footprints allow; high-rises mushrooming here and there like gigantic shacks; schools in Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, English, Marathi, Urdu and other languages, usually with more than 50 pupils per class; temples of every Buddhist and Hindu denomination; flamboyant mosques so crowded that people have to pray on the streets during namaz; old churches with full congregations – remnants of the region’s seventeenth-century Portuguese history – and new evangelical missions converting low-caste Hindus by the dozen; community toilets that double up as marriage halls; piles of garbage waiting to be picked over by scavengers; open drains running along narrow back streets; thousands of water pipes branching off in every direction.
Dharavi invariably confuses those eager to capture its reality in shorthand. Visitors looking for an essence of the place often land on its edges and corners, in spots that most Dharavi residents themselves have seen only on TV. They may be rewarded for their intrepidness by the sight of barefoot children walking on water pipes against the obligatory backdrop of garbage – a cliché that resonates so powerfully with familiar discourses on poverty and inequality that it obliterates the depth and complexity of the place. Dharavi is diverse and rapidly transforming, and it deceives as much as it overwhelms. It is an enigma that cannot be resolved by simply labelling it one thing or the other.
From the rooftop of Mohan Kanle’s two-storey house, the neighbourhood seems part of the immutable story of urbanism, recalling medieval Italian towns, Istanbul’s bazaars, the by-lanes of Benares, old Delhi, Guangzhou’s urban villages and even Tokyo’s dense residential suburbs. From this vantage point, it seems embedded in the shadow history of human settlements anywhere in the world where planning and control give way to incremental and small-scale development. In some parts, one sees hundreds of low-rise structures so tightly packed that they appear to share one single cement-sheet roof. No wonder urban designers and architecture students love to imagine bridges connecting all of these houses, with new roofs acting as public spaces and gardens.
Mohan’s house was built by his father in the early 1990s. Mumbai’s extreme weather, with monsoon rain for four months and hot, saline air most of the year, has tested the limits of this humble structure. The roof has been leaking for a few years, forcing Mohan to install a shed as protection from the violent rains. About 18 people share seven rooms, which can be accessed from multiple entrances. The structure consists of a maze of connecting doorways and passages, and its uneven proportions are a legacy of its incremental growth. While not abnormally big for Dharavi, the house is larger than most others. There is no rule when it comes to the housing typology of Dharavi. Diversity is the only norm.
Dharavi invariably confuses those eager to capture its reality in shorthand. Visitors looking for an essence of the place often land on its edges and corners, in spots that most Dharavi residents themselves have seen only on TV. They may be rewarded for their intrepidness by the sight of barefoot children walking on water pipes against the obligatory backdrop of garbage – a cliché that resonates so powerfully with familiar discourses on poverty and inequality that it obliterates the depth and complexity of the place. Dharavi is diverse and rapidly transforming, and it deceives as much as it overwhelms. It is an enigma that cannot be resolved by simply labelling it one thing or the other.
From the rooftop of Mohan Kanle’s two-storey house, the neighbourhood seems part of the immutable story of urbanism, recalling medieval Italian towns, Istanbul’s bazaars, the by-lanes of Benares, old Delhi, Guangzhou’s urban villages and even Tokyo’s dense residential suburbs. From this vantage point, it seems embedded in the shadow history of human settlements anywhere in the world where planning and control give way to incremental and small-scale development. In some parts, one sees hundreds of low-rise structures so tightly packed that they appear to share one single cement-sheet roof. No wonder urban designers and architecture students love to imagine bridges connecting all of these houses, with new roofs acting as public spaces and gardens.
Mohan’s house was built by his father in the early 1990s. Mumbai’s extreme weather, with monsoon rain for four months and hot, saline air most of the year, has tested the limits of this humble structure. The roof has been leaking for a few years, forcing Mohan to install a shed as protection from the violent rains. About 18 people share seven rooms, which can be accessed from multiple entrances. The structure consists of a maze of connecting doorways and passages, and its uneven proportions are a legacy of its incremental growth. While not abnormally big for Dharavi, the house is larger than most others. There is no rule when it comes to the housing typology of Dharavi. Diversity is the only norm.
