This scheme was used in the lecture 'The Kinetic City, Designing for Informality in Mumbai' by Rahul Mehrota, when he was professor in urbanism at MIT. In the lecture he uses the term 'the kinetic city', referring to the constant dynamic processes shaping the urban space of Mumbai, the making and remaking of the city, as opposed to the 'static city', the city of concrete and bricks that architects usually work with. Recently Mehrotra was appointed Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard.
The scheme shows 'The Five Stages of Squatting', as he calls it; the five stages that a Mumbai street vender has to go through to become a more or less established part of the urban domain.
In the first stage the new street vender stalls out the products he is selling on some cardboard sheets on the sidewalk. He barely has any products on stock, so that he can never loose much if he were to be attacked by his competiting neighbors. A small number of people get interested in buying the goods he is selling. After a while he obtains a handful of costumers who regularly come back, making it possible for him to move into stage two. The street vender has teamed up with his competitors and does no longer have to fear being pushed away at any time. He can invest the money he earned to have more products on stock. But he also drew attention from the police. He now has a carpet to sell his goods, so that he can easily pick up the carpet with all his stuff inside, and run away if the police is signalled by someone on the lookout, and would raid the location where the street vender is selling his goods. To move into stage three, he needs to spend some of his earnings in bribing the police, so that they allow him to stay in place and put a bigger table to stall out his goods on a better display for his costumers. Now the street vender is less flexible, but he is able to bribe the police when necessary and has less to fear from competiting street venders. In stage four he expands his business and by offering more products and appeal to a wider range of costumers. By now he is a well-known street vender, but he needs prepare himself for the rain as monsoon is approaching. Therefore, in the final stage the street vender builds a small shed and is now an established part of the urban fabric.
It's a very interesting way of addressing this process and demonstrating that there is actually a pattern behind this process of informality.
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MEHROTRA, Rahul, 'Working in Mumbai' (lecture at Harvard GSD) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFmjA252s1E
Picture used under common users licence from Flickr
