Kali Marnane

Over one billion people live in “intolerable urban housing conditions” across the world (UN-Habitat, 2003). In India, escalating poverty levels, mass rural to urban migration and a lack of affordable housing has led to the growth of slums, informal settlements and squatter settlements, terms that can have overlapping meanings and negative associations. This paper discusses areas that have developed without formal control over land tenure, planning, design and construction that are defined as informal settlements (Davis, 2006; Dovey & Kamalipour, 2018; UN-Habitat, 2003). At the last Indian census, informal settlements housed 1.68 million people in the state of Gujarat (Census Organization of India, 2011). In Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat, informal settlements have grown on low value public, private or agricultural lands and are often seen as “ugly eyesores” needing removal by the government through a process legitimised by their “illegal” status (R. Desai, Sanghvi, & Abhilaasha, 2018). Since 2010, the Gujarati government has led redevelopment plans to replace existing informal settlements on site with western-style apartments of seven to eight stories in a public-private partnership model (Government of Gujarat, 2010, 2013). This model provides essential utilities and greater security of tenure for some, however the socio-cultural and economic outcomes are often worse than in the informal settlements and are generally unsuccessful (Vaid & Evans, 2017, p. 784; Sunikka-Blank, Bardhan, & Haque, 2019; Fried & Gleicher, 1961; M. Rathod, personal communication, September 16, 2016). The failure of these redevelopments, and the informal sector’s continuous growth, indicates that information on the complex and diverse existing conditions of informal settlements is deficient. Analytical studies of existing housing, settlement form and spatial patterns are required for urban planning and new housing to create relevant outcomes for underprivileged residents, yet studies of informal settlement morphologies and housing remain rare (Dovey & King, 2011; Duarte, 2009; Kamalipour & Dovey, 2018; Krishna, Sriram, & Prakash, 2014; McCartney & Krishnamurthy, 2018; Mukhija, 2002).

Viewed from the outside, informal dwellings have appeared spontaneous, arising out of the needs of every-day people and therefore considered a new type of vernacular environment (Goel, 2010; Kellett & Napier, 1995; Lapping, 1973; Peattie, 1992; Farrell, 2013; Franklin, 2016; Rapoport, 1988). Some have proposed that informal settlements might be “reminiscent of a traditional village” (Dovey & King, 2012, p. 285) or that features of informal settlements can be traced to a rural vernacular, but this has not been investigated in detail (Nallari, 2014, p. 340; Turgut & Kellett, 1996). This paper will examine the origins of informal settlement morphology to test these ideas. Morphological analysis typically uses the categories of streets, blocks, plots and buildings to study the development, transformation, spatial patterns and character of urban settlements (Conzen & Conzen, 2004). Morphological analysis requires adaptation to study informal settlements, as it has not developed to account for the ambiguities of spatial ownership found in informal settlements in India (Dovey & Kamalipour, 2018; McCartney & Krishnamurthy, 2018). Adapting morphological analysis to study informal settlements has considerable potential to verify residents’ priorities, determine the motivations for settlement location, understand formalisation processes, quantify settlement form and identify existing community assets. This information can help to create more site- and context-responsive designs and policies to alleviate the negative impacts of living in informal settlements.

Previous studies on informal settlement morphology have taken different approaches. A narrative approach (for example: Arputham, 2012; Guinness, 2009; Jellinek, 1991; Nallari, 2014; Neuwirth, 2006; Nijman, 2008; Perlman, 2004; Pyati & Kamal, 2012; Sullivan, 1980) describes the environment as the setting of human activities but does not explicitly analyse informal settlement morphology (Raharjo, 2010, p. 40). These studies demonstrate the interconnectedness of social, cultural and spatial systems, however the lack of accurate drawings of the built environment can result in research that overlooks or assumes the physical conditions of informal settlements, and may fail to analyse the effect of the built environment on other factors (Mukhija, 2002). A graphic approach intentionally analyses informal settlement morphology using mapping and imaging (Raharjo, 2010, p. 37). Research globally (for example: Dovey & Kamalipour, 2018; Dovey & Raharjo, 2010; Funo, Ferianto, & Yamada, 2005; Funo, Yamamoto, & Silas, 2002; Huchzermeyer, 2011; Jones, Maryati, & Suhartini, 2018; Kamalipour & Dovey, 2018; Ramirez-Lovering, 2008) and in India (for example: Barquin, Brook, Puri, & Rybczynski, 1984; V. Bhatt et al., 1990; Livengood & Kunte, 2012; Rybczynski et al., 1984) reveal much about settlement form but ignore factors that have spatial impact such as the historical, social and cultural context. A combined graphic and narrative approach (for example: Dovey & Tomlinson, 2012; Gopal & Nagendra, 2014; Krishna et al., 2014; Parekh, 2015; SPARC, 2011-13) provides a better context for understanding the relationships and complex dynamics of informal settlements (Raharjo, 2010, p. 42). An approach that connects and analyses the social, cultural and physical environment of informal settlements can reveal their morphological origins and development.

This paper explores the origins of housing design and neighbourhood organization in an informal settlement in Ahmedabad. In Ahmedabad, most informal settlers have migrated from a rural village in Gujarat or Rajasthan to self-build houses on vacant land while looking for better work and education opportunities (M. R. Bhatt, 2003; Manav Sadhna, 2016). This paper compares a self-built family dwelling in the informal settlement in Ahmedabad with the family home in their place of origin, a rural village in northern Gujarat. The informal settlement, Ramapir No Tekro, is the largest in Ahmedabad and houses over 150,000 people. Data were collected from six months of fieldwork over two years in informal settlements in Ahmedabad from 2017-2018. As a videshi (foreigner) to Gujarat and India, an invitation was required to study informal environments and people’s homes. This research was conducted after being invited to the urban and rural home of a Gujarati family living in an informal settlement. Full ethical clearance was attained prior to fieldwork commencing. Fieldwork methods included participant observation, architectural documentation and oral histories collected from two family members: Ramilaben and Rakeshbhai.¹ Rakeshbhai, age 23, was living with his mother and younger brother in a rural village. Ramilaben, age 39, lived in the family house in Ramapir No Tekro with her husband, father-in-law, teenage daughter and son and visited the family village every two or three months.

Vernacular architecture of Rural Gujarat

There are four vernacular regional settlement morphologies in Gujarat. These are: the Saurashtra, North Gujarati, South Gujarati and tribal (M. Desai & Desai, 2011, p. 26; Pramar, 1989, p. 51). The vernacular architecture of north Gujarat is the dominant settlement type across Gujarat and in the location of the village I visited in 2017 and 2018.

Figure 1 Location and Map of Gujarat outlining the geographic regions

A simple north-Gujarati rural dwelling is typically comprised of three spaces arranged in a rectilinear manner starting with a porch facing a shared open space (otla), a semi-open hall (osri) and an enclosed room (ordo) (Figure 2). These rooms are arranged from the most public facing the open space to most private at the rear (M. Desai & Desai, 2011; Kaza, 2010; Pramar, 1987). These spaces have different names in some texts, such as parsal rather than osri (Maretto & Scardigno, 2016) or pankh rather than otla (Barenstein, 2015), however I will use the terminology provided by my research participants. An otla is one of the most distinctive features of Gujarati houses at every scale and class and functions as a transition between the public street or yard and private dwelling (Kaza, 2010, p. 31; Maretto & Scardigno, 2016). The otla acts as a surveillance position from which much work is done and an important social space for neighbourly interaction. Gujarati houses are characterized by their lack of fixed furniture, as spaces are rarely given over to specific functions other than the kitchen and water source. The floor is the setting for all activities including work such as carpentry or pottery, which was done from home in the osri, otla or yard, making the spaces of the house extremely flexible and not determined by permanent furniture placement (Pramar, 1987, p. 333).

Figure 2: Plan and Section of a Typical North Gujarati house (drawn from: Maretto & Scardigno, 2016; Pramar, 1987)

Village houses are tightly packed together in a cluster called mahelo using a row-housing typology that encloses a central, shared open space (Figure 3). Valuable land was reserved for farming and cultivation and unstable politics required defensive housing mechanisms (Pocock, 1972, p. 6). Residents of each housing cluster are usually descendants of a common ancestor and linked by caste, sub-caste (jāti), religion and profession. The following description of north Gujarati housing clusters defines, almost exactly, the layout that is still used today:

“…each dwelling is joined to the next by a common party-wall and many such units form a row. Each row faces a similar row opposite it and the two rows thus enclose a space in front, which resembles a ‘street’ but which is, in fact, a common yard. No dwelling has an enclosed courtyard of its own. In order to ensure privacy and security, the ends of the common yard are closed off by a wall on one side and by a gateway on the other. The rear walls of all the houses which are exceptionally thick and have no windows, form a continuous line. The whole arrangement thus resembles a fort whose enclosing wall is simultaneously the rear wall of a house. With the ends closed off, the settlement forms a cul-de-sac guarded by a single gateway used by a large number of families.” (Pramar, 1989, p. 52)

Figure 3 Diagram of a typical village housing cluster arrangement, “a settlement of a kinship group forming a defensive enclave” (Pramar, 1987, p. 334)

The central yard of the housing cluster functions as a circulation space, play area, social space, work area, sleeping area on hot evenings and place for religious and cultural celebrations and rituals to take place. People tend to spend much of their time in shady spaces open to the sky. For festivals and other celebrations, colourful patterned fabric is strung up between houses as an overhead canopy to shade the festivities beneath. Bathing was typically performed in the open at a well or river with clothes on, however individual washrooms and toilets are now being added to villages and informal settlements alike as part of the Swachh Bharat toilet scheme, in which the government supported low-income families to build shared and individual household latrines. The “Clean India Mission” was an India-wide campaign in 2014-2019 run by the federal government aiming to clean streets, roads and infrastructure.

A north Gujarati village is composed of numerous housing clusters, in which the hierarchical social order of caste is reflected in the settlement organisation (M. Desai & Desai, 2011, pp. 31-35; Pocock, 1972) (Figure 4). Generally, the dominant caste of the village occupies the most area while the service castes are located on the periphery (Pramar, 1989, p. 52). Each caste has its own area for building homes and its own approach from the fields, creating clear social boundaries that are often invisible to outsiders (Pocock, 1972, p. 7). Circulation patterns move from public to private linking a series of shared open spaces of different levels of privacy, from the individual home (and otla), housing cluster (and yard) to the settlement (and chowk,² or square). Visual connection is maintained among neighbourhoods for collective surveillance (M. Desai & Desai, 2011, p. 36).

Figure 4 Plan of a north Gujarati village (M. Desai & Desai, 2011, p. 36)

To summarise, vernacular settlements in Gujarat are organized by groupings of houses in nested social units, with each unit featuring a shared open space (Figure 5). The most private and smallest unit is the individual house (opening onto the shared space), the next level is the house cluster (opening onto the semi-public street), followed by a neighbourhood or caste zone (opening onto the public street) and finally the village or settlement (featuring a main public square or chowk). The physical organisation of settlements reinforces the social. Urban informal settlements have less rigidity than villages in the population of housing clusters and neighbourhoods made up by caste or extended family.

Figure 5 Diagram of organisational layers of a rural and urban settlement (drawn from analysis)

A North Gujarati Rural Village

Ramilaben’s village house follows the north Gujarati vernacular housing typology and standard dimensions, with the omission of an otla. The omission of this space in both her village and city homes appeared to be atypical. Asked about not having an otla, Ramilaben explained that nobody in her family had one, and so they do not either. She said that their city house did not have enough space for an otla, but if they were to build a new house they would include an otla in the design. The osri in her home is completely open to the front and so performs the function of an otla in this case, meaning her home only has two of the three spaces of a typical village house and represents the “first phase” of the rural house typology (Maretto & Scardigno, 2016, p. 31) (Figure 6).

Figure 6 Plan and section of Ramilaben’s village house (drawn from observation, photographs and Zebedee 3D laser scan data 17 October 2018)

Ramilaben’s housing cluster follows the vernacular typology described in the previous section, although does not have need of a gateway. It is possible that this is because her home was built in the 1960s or 1970s and a defensive pattern was no longer required as there were no longer continuous confrontations and battles for power or as much need for protection from thieves outside of the mahelo group of trusted relations (Pramar, 1987, p. 336). The yard’s ground material has been constructed of concrete, decorated in the same radiating pattern as traditional cow dung floors. Five houses in the north-east corner of the mahelo have been renovated into larger, two storey rendered brick and concrete houses painted and tiled in bright colours. Ramilaben’s house has not been renovated since being built. The whole family return to their village every year for wedding season in May and the Navratri festival in September/October, one of the largest Hindu festivals celebrated in Gujarat over nine nights.

Figure 7 Plan of Ramilaben’s housing cluster (drawn from Zebedee 3D laser scan data 17 October 2018)

Each housing cluster in the village joins onto the next and family members maintain the roads to their homes with fixed routes of access. As roads are not publically maintained, public areas can become easily unclean with water and other waste thrown into the streets that run out of the village:

Whether the villagers live in mansions or in mud huts the village streets are for the greater part dark, narrow gullies where filth and refuse contrast oddly with the cleanliness, and sometimes the wealthy appearance of the dwellings themselves. (Pocock, 1972, p. 6)

Figure 8 Plan of case study village (drawn from satellite imagery, observation and Zebedee 3D laser scan data from 17 October 2018)

Informal Settlement in Ahmedabad

In approximately the late 1960s, Ramilaben’s husband’s grandfather moved to the city in search of better employment opportunities but retained the village house to visit regularly. He built a temporary house on an empty field in the outskirts of Ahmedabad with other family members. Incremental improvements have made the house more permanent over time. As more people moved to the area the community grew and merged with other, similar communities that had been built on this field to become one of the largest informal settlements in Ahmedabad, Ramapir No Tekro.

In 2018, Ramilaben’s Wadaj house replicated the spatial dimensions of her village house. It had the same orientation, room layout and neighbours, which were the same extended family members that she lived with in the village. The physical differences were mostly in the materials (relating to when the house was built and renovated) and bathrooms (a toilet and washroom were added to the Wadaj house osri, whereas the toilets and washrooms in the village mahelo are shared). When discussing the differences between her village and city houses, it became clear that Ramilaben felt a strong attachment to both homes but the village was important because it was the house she moved to when she was first married and surrounded by her husband’s family. The village is close to where she grew up, so she can visit her parents easily when she is there and she feels less alone. It is a house her family legally and securely owns, but there is no work or adequate income. Because of this she finds the village peaceful, as she can rest and only has to carry out rituals, rather than daily chores and work, and she would prefer to live there permanently. However, the lack of work and education opportunities mean that living in the village is not a viable option.

Figure 9 Plan of Ramilaben’s Wadaj House (drawn from scan data taken on 05 November 2018)

Ramilaben has made a few renovations since moving into the home, including building the kitchen bench and shelving, replacing the floor tiles and adding the toilet and washroom approximately 6 years ago. To do this she saved up money from her job and received a loan from the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) cooperative. Ideally she would like to continue to improve her home, but is concerned about potential future redevelopment schemes that may require the demolition of her house. Ramilaben’s definition of a “proper” house is one with working infrastructure such as water, light and electricity that is accessible at all times. Currently her Wadaj house only has access to water for one hour per day, and if she misses that hour to fill up her vessels she won’t have water for drinking, cooking, bathing or washing clothes for the rest of the day. More importantly though, a “proper” house has a positive social environment. Living in such close quarters without much privacy, the behaviour and relationships with neighbours are critical to how content and safe a home feels. Ramilaben says, “you want good neighbours around you that are supportive… and then you as a person, you have to be a good person in that home. That makes a good home.” (Interview with Ramilaben on 20 November 2018).

Ramilaben’s house in Ramapir No Tekro is, as in the rural village, located within a cluster of houses using a row-housing typology that encloses shared open spaces. In contrast, residents of this cluster are not necessarily linked by jāti, profession, religion or kinship but have moved into the area based on mutual acquaintance and search for work. Ramilaben’s immediate neighbours that face onto the same open space are in fact extended family members, and their clustered housing arrangement is spatially very similar to their village mahelo. The boundary of their social group is actually larger than this, to encompass seven streets of 12-24 row houses each. The name of this larger housing cluster is a chali, which refers an urban row housing typology for low- or middle-income workers where homes are one room wide, usually with one main room and a front porch that is fully open or partially open. In this settlement, housing clusters are named after the oldest person in the village, a significant landmark or temple. Ramilaben’s chali is named after the community temple.

Figure 10 Diagram comparing village and urban informal settlement housing clusters

As in the village, informal settlement streets are maintained by residents. On localised cul-de-sacs streets are kept as neat and clean as the home interior. However, more public streets that accommodate more traffic are less maintained and tend to accumulate refuse. Local animals are fed food waste on these streets which also contributes to their soiling and refuse. This is similar to Pocock’s (1972, p. 6) description of a Gujarati village, noting the significant contrast of clean dwellings to dirty streets.

Ramapir No Tekro is constructed of numerous housing clusters like Ramilaben’s. Without gateways and exterior walls defining their perimeter, it is difficult for outsiders to see the social boundaries of housing clusters that organise the settlement. Although the boundaries are not physically obvious, the housing clusters have a strong influence on local cooperation and communal decision making in Ramapir No Tekro. This sense of collective community and support is the main reason that Ramilaben would like to stay living in this chali.

Figure 11 Plan of Ramapir No Tekro Informal Settlement (drawn from satellite imagery, observation)

Although the informal urban houses are sited on marginal land with much less wealth to build individual dwellings and adequate infrastructure, the organization of spaces contain the same nested relationships as those described in a vernacular village neighbourhood. Residents regularly visit their villages of origin, particularly during important festivals. Additionally, the connection to one’s rural village of origin influences daily interactions between people in informal settlements. A common greeting to someone met for the first time by people living in an informal settlement is “what village are you from?” revealing that identity in informal settlements is bound to rural villages and extended family as well as the housing cluster and related social groups. The comparison between the rural and urban settlements reveals a strong connection to vernacular built environments and the translocation of associated social and cultural practices from rural to urban areas.

Origins of informal morphologies

This paper challenges a common perception that informal settlements in Ahmedabad are a haphazard and unplanned collection of poor-quality shelters. Over the last century, families living in informal settlements in Ahmedabad have migrated to the city from rural areas in search of employment or education opportunities, which influences the type of shelter people are building. The architectural continuity found in the building patterns of the informal settlement in Ahmedabad demonstrates the historical and cultural value of their morphology, commonly overlooked or unseen by government redevelopment policies intent on “modernising” and “cleaning” urban areas to create “slum-free cities” (Ghertner, 2013; News Desk, 2018; Roy, 2014). Self-constructed informal settlements have been documented to have better social outcomes than western-style apartment housing typologies designed with a top-down approach (Cronin, 2011, p. 214; Vaid & Evans, 2017) and are a more cost-effective and culturally appropriate morphology to manage density and crowding in Indian cities (Correa, 1999). This establishes a legitimacy to the informal development observed in Ahmedabad in which buildings are more than a means to manage poverty and shelter. These existing settlement patterns may provide design precedents for informal settlement redevelopments or upgrades that better respond to resident’s needs. Origins of informal settlement morphology should be researched before interventions are made to consider how the built environment impacts people’s way of living as well as how social and cultural practices create the built environment. This knowledge may shape and contribute to the success of urban redevelopment of informal settlements. Further research could explore how these social and cultural patterns link to the built environment and change as migrants adjust to urban lifestyles and adapt over generations. The implications of this morphological analysis also demand that we reflect on preventative measures that address the inadequacy of education and employment in the village, which is connected to issues of climate change, overpopulation, low wages, the shortage of affordable housing in urban areas and the consistent marginalisation of particular social groups through the built environment.

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