Deona Gaothan Road runs from Govandi station up to the village for about a kilometre. In that short stretch, you will see row house societies, a sprinkling of office buildings and newer high-rise residential developments. Typical, in its variety, of many of the eastern suburbs. And though the gaothan , or village, after which it is named still exists — and the residents are descendants of the original inhabitants — it is tucked away in a corner and you could easily miss it if you strolled down the road. The erstwhile village has been almost engulfed in Mumbai’s urban sprawl.
The road, and the gaothan , are in the city’s M-ward, Mumbai’s least developed, as per ward level statistics. Neglect could easily see it become just one more of the slums that fill large parts of the ward, or have its inhabitants pressured out by redevelopment.
In February last year, the urban design team at a Edifice Consultants (which has an office in the road) started a pro bono project for the neighbourhood. Part of the idea was to improve the locality, but also on the agenda was to explore the concept of a user-driven space, where residents contributed to a vision of what they wanted their neighbourhood to be.
“We had heard of community driven projects that were done in places like Dharavi for instance,” says Mishkat Ahmed, who leads the project. “But nothing in this area, where the issues are quite different.” Having conceived of the idea, Ms. Ahmed had no idea of where to start. So, she says, “We looked at the governance structure of the city and found that the concept of ALMs (Advanced Locality Management) was an already existing medium through which communities could come together to find solutions to the cities problems.”
- Rain-water harvesting
- Connection of the area’s sewage lines to the main MCGM line (not yet done in the area)
- Improving the streetscape: fixing streetlights and breaks in the footpaths
- Preserving and developing open spaces: there are two wells and a pond in the area which the ALM is trying to get cleaned and preserved as a public recreation space
- Recreational facilities in the area, like developing a vacant plot as a public reading room
In some parts of the city, ALMs had fizzled out after promising starts, but the team looked to the ones that had flourished and even gone beyond the usual briefs ALMs set themselves, like the Kala Ghoda ALM, which organises the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, and Vision Juhu, a project run by the Juhu ALM to revive water bodies and open spaces in the area.
They needed to understand the area better. “We couldn’t do a study for the whole M ward,” Ms. Ahmed says, “so we decided to mark out just a one-kilometre stretch from our office to the Sion-Panvel highway. Sure enough, even in this space there was already an ALM that had been set up years ago to work on waste management. But they had not managed to reach out to the entire community.” What was needed, then, the team decided, was to give that citizen’s organisation a little push.
Starting with a tour of the area with members of the ALM, Edifice began a nine-month research project, including a door-to-door survey, including workers in the offices and commercial establishments as well as residents of the housing societies and the gaothan . Their first major finding was that when it came to a ‘street experience’ the area lacked an overall sense of place. For example, despite there being a large BMC-owned and well maintained public garden near the village, as many as 64 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they did not know of its existence or, if they did, had never visited the garden, and over 70 per cent said they were dissatisfied with the recreational spaces in the area. Ms Ahmed says this is perhaps because “the approach to the garden is obscured by an auto stand and the junction is at an odd space.” Other concerns that came up included the lack of streetlights and broken footpaths.
In April, once they had mapped the area and compiled their research findings, the team invited residents and people working in the area to a public gathering to discuss a way forward. It quickly became evident that one of the main things that most residents wanted was to convert the neighbourhood into a zero-waste zone and show it as an example to the rest of the city. The reasons were simple: “When fires break out in the Deonar dumping ground, we are the first people to get affected,” says S. Ganesan, a former scientist at BARC, who is one of the residents of the area. Several other residents were among the first to participate in the protests against local authorities when the Deonar dump fires earlier this year blanketed that part of the city with murky smog. Clearly there was awareness of waste management principles, but the neighbourhood had not come together yet.
In October Edifice, in consultation with residents, put out a tender for environmental consultants and NGOs who could install a modern waste management system — recycling dry waste and converting wet waste into compost —and train and educate residents in its use. The tender was supported by CSR funds that Edifice managed to get for the project. The team is now conducting a waste audit of over 700 families in the vicinity including 250 families in the village.
The group also helped register a new ALM called BYN@88 (short Better Your Neighbourhood and 88, Deonar’s postal code). “The registration was important because it allows us to attend meetings with the ward officers twice a month and creates an interface with the BMC,” Ms. Ahmed explains. “For instance, we needed the BMCs help in creating space in the adjacent public park for the residents of the gaothan, which is densely packed, to put up the machinery that would turn the wet waste into compost.” Once that project is done, the newly created ALM is looking at addressing a host of other infrastructure issues. (see box).
Since they began work on this project, Ms. Ahmed says, citizen groups from two other localities in Kanjurmarg and Ghansoli have contacted them for help in using the same model of bringing citizens together and then connecting them to CSR funds to kick off neighbourhood development.
It’s not how the ALM ide was originally conceived, but if this one stretch of road is an indicator, it’s a model that could work.
