Kareena Kochery and Samidah Patil have been embedded here for 16 years, working as part of urbz, an architecture and urbanism studio. On any given day, the two can be found walking the village streets and catching up with neighbors who have intercepted them on the way to work. This is where all their urban design projects in the neighborhood start, not with blueprints and briefs, but at hello. And recently, these casual conversations began to surface one repeated concern in particular: that one of Dharavi Koliwada's main thoroughfares was just too dark.
“I was pulled aside one day on Dutta Mandir by a woman in the neighborhood who had a question for me,” said Kareena."‘Is it okay if I tell you something? I just wanted to say that it will be really helpful if we could put a light near the community toilets.’"
More conversations in the streets and in public community meetings confirmed that the lighting concern was shared by others who either lived on or passed through Dutta Mandir on a daily basis, from students to tenants, commuters, and the fisherwomen who worked the market at the end of the road. Some public lighting was installed more than 50 years ago, but the village has long since outgrown it. For the most part, public streets and open spaces are lit only by moonlight or whatever illumination might spill out of shops and private homes.
Walking Dutta Mandir helped surface the need for more lighting and break down hierarchies that community group meetings, often dominated by men, can unintentionally reinforce.
“Normally, you might make a plan first and mark out all the points that are calling for light,” said Kareena. “But we quickly realized that the social dynamics won't really allow it here.”
Dutta Mandir is a narrow street. Buildings' upper floors extend and hang over the lane below, as residents have built upward and outward over the years. New streetlights would not be attached to existing lampposts or structures otherwise in the public domain, but drilled into private property—homes and shop facades, stairwells, and under balconies or protruding upper floors. The collision of private property and public space ignited negotiation amongst landlords, tenants, merchants, and residents. How much light was actually necessary? Would lights prevent residents from getting sleep? Would the drilling and wiring compromise wall integrity? What kind of lights would be used?
Made from stainless steel or cast aluminum, bulkhead lights found on commercial ships are built to withstand violent storms at sea.
First, the community coalition purchased lights from a local store and installed them that spring, as a prototype to test placement and gather feedback. But when June arrived in Mumbai, it brought the monsoon with it. Strong winds swept through the Koliwada for months, ripping the new lights from their fixtures and plunging Dutta Mandir back into the dark. "The monsoon has its own agency, it's a force you really have to reckon with,” said Samidah. “It’s safe to say we underestimated the monsoon the first time around.”
Weather-beaten and broken, the temporary fixtures were nonetheless a generative pilot. Neighbors saw the potential and bought into the project, even suggesting additional locations that should be lit. But the message from the monsoon was quite clear: ordinary lights would not do here.
So they looked where the Kolis always have: to the sea.
Made from stainless steel or cast aluminum, bulkhead lights found on commercial ships are built to withstand violent storms at sea. Kareena and Samidah traveled to Alang, the shipbreaking yard on India's northwest coast and one of the largest in the world. In one trip, the sea provided all the lights Dharavi Koliwada would need to cover the street.
“The question of identity is a theme that emerges very strongly here,” said Samidah. “People in Dharavi Koliwada felt like no one knew about Dharavi Koliwada. The young people here especially wanted to work on something that makes them feel that their village is a part of India and Mumbai’s heritage, that it is not a slum.”
Residents wanted that seafaring identity built into the lights themselves. So before the lights were wired and switched on, local fabricator Dutta Koli designed a set of symbolic brackets featuring familiar sea creatures and the neighborhood's name written in Devanagari. Now crabs, shrimp, and oysters light up Dutta Mandir street.
Before the prototypes and the monsoons and the ship lights of Alang, the urbz office briefly lost power. At this point, the Dutta Mandir lighting project was just an idea on Kareena and Samidah’s desk. It was a collection of notes, desires, concerns, and thoughts on paper. Two local electricians who knew the Dharavi power grid better than anyone, Vicky Koli and Ankush Gite, came to the office to restore the power; a blown fuse was probably the culprit. Making small talk with their neighbors as they do, Kareena and Samidah polled them: “do you think there is enough light in Dharavi Koliwada at night?” That conversation spiraled into a collaboration that eventually brought the street lighting project from whispered wishes on the streets of Dharavi to something real. Vicky and Ankush know every inch of Dutta Mandir, and every person who lives or works on it.
“It was just a dream working with them,” said Kareena. “They knew the lay of the land, they knew exactly where to draw a wire from or where to direct a cable to. The people of the community are indispensable to the technology.”
If the lights that guide the way to the fish market are infrastructure, Samidah and Kareena believe, then the human connections and relationships that paved the way for that lighting are too. There was no wiring without Vicky and Ankush, no negotiations with tenants and landlords without friends like Onal and Chandrakant Koli, and no ideas or knowledge without the women and community partners who spoke up.
The lighting of Dutta Mandir is a pilot project to understand how expanded lighting infrastructure could work throughout the entire village. At residents’ request, certain stretches of the street are also testing solar panel installation to power the lights and their own homes. The first set of pilot panels was installed on one neighbor’s terrace, with special care to make sure it did not block the sunny area where they dried their fish from the market. Weighing up to 30 kg each, the solar panels were too large and heavy to go up the stairwell. With ropes and harnesses the panels were hoisted up like a piano, crawling past each floor of the building until they reached the top.
The project is part of the more expansive Action-Based Comprehensive Development Plan (or ABCD) of koliwada, a resident-driven planning strategy that offers an alternative to more conventional top-down master plans that might enter a locality with predetermined ideas about what it needs. Local knowledge, daily interactions, and networks of trust inspire community solutions instead of presumptive planning. The Dharavi Koli Jamat,The traditional governing body of the Koli community in Dharavi Koliwada fisherfolk, women, youth, and non-Kolis who all call the neighborhood home have shaped all four of the ABCD priorities, including the transformation of a colonial-era customs house into study space for students, a regenerative public park by the Mithi River uniting livelihoods with an ecological imagination, and the redesign and planning of water supply and sanitation infrastructure.
The way Kareena and Samidah tell it, this isn’t as much a story about lighting as it is about the compounding effect of care in a neighborhood. “It is through daily practices of care that effective civic infrastructure comes into existence,” they say. “It is never provided for in one sweep.”