Mass Inhabitation

Studio Co-ordinators : Rohit Mujumdar, Prasad Kanolkar

Rishika Waghmare & Sujal Kothawade

The Mass Inhabitation course began with a question of how climate is experienced not only as an infrastructural problem, but through everyday life. It asked us to look at how people inhabit uncertain conditions and how they develop their own spatial and material ways of adapting to them.

Our study took us to Ganpat Patil Nagar, where we tried to understand the settlement through the lives of the people who inhabit it. We began by studying six different clusters, each shaped by different conditions of livelihood, migration, family structures, gender, religion and housing. Through conversations, photographs, measured drawings, plans, sections and mapping, we documented not only what the houses looked like, but how they were actually being used.

As we spent more time in the settlement, we started noticing that many of the adaptations were not necessarily planned. A shop became part of a house, a street became an extension of the living room, a mezzanine became a bedroom or a storage space, and a small room could change between work and domestic use throughout the day. People extended, divided and modified their homes as their families, occupations and incomes changed. These small decisions, repeated across the settlement, were constantly shaping the larger built environment.

A light ingress analysis from a cluster in the back side of the settlement

A section through the ‘makkan + dukaan’ cluster showing how life and economy are interwoven

This also made us look at climate differently. Adaptation was not always about large infrastructure or formal solutions. It could be as simple as raising a plinth, moving an activity outdoors, changing the use of a space depending on the weather, creating temporary structures, or using the street because the house was too small or too hot. The way people dealt with water, heat, rain, ventilation and limited space was closely tied to their everyday routines and economic conditions.

Resident responses to problems of light, heat, water and ventilation

From these observations, we developed six arguments around livelihood, religious and gendered spaces, streets as extensions of the home, enterprise and domestic life, rental systems, and the incremental adaptation of housing. These arguments helped us move from studying individual houses to understanding the larger systems and relationships that hold the settlement together.

The course also made us question the idea of a house as a fixed object. In Ganpat Patil Nagar, a house is constantly changing. It can be a home, a workplace, a shop, a rental property, a storage space or all of these at once. Its form changes as the needs of its inhabitants change. In this sense, inhabitation is not something that happens after a building is made; it is what continuously produces and transforms the building.

What we took away from the study was an understanding that mass inhabitation is made up of countless small negotiations between people, space, climate and resources. Rather than looking at the settlement only through what is missing or what needs to be provided, the study allowed us to recognise the knowledge and agency already present in the way people inhabit and adapt their surroundings. It made us look more closely at ordinary spaces and understand that these everyday adaptations are also a form of architecture.