Rahul completed his MPhil in Anthropology from Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He has co-authored an upcoming book titled ‘The Homegrown City: Reclaiming the Metropolis for its Users’,  which is about how cities develop and evolve through the actions of those who use it.

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How did your interest in anthropology lead to a focus on urban spaces?

Anthropology continues to stimulate curiosity about all aspects of human life and provides ways of understanding that avoid being trapped in categories. Anthropologist Anthony Leeds specifically questioned the classification of habitat as rural and urban in simplistic ways and I have found much merit in such questioning. Over the last three decades I have worked in so-called tribal villages, rural contexts and neighbourhoods such as Dharavi in Mumbai, which defy classification. I have seen more points of connections between all of them rather than differences.

Tell us a bit about urbz. What are its goals?

Urbz was founded in 2008 in Dharavi Mumbai by Matias Echanove, Geeta Mehta and myself. It is a collective that focuses on practice and engagement. Dharavi in Mumbai is a unique neighbourhood that tells stories about India, encompassing themes of caste, enterprise, collective ownership, state responsibility, and much more. It inspires all of urbz projects, including participatory planning, design, architecture, anthropology, urban policy and much more. Today, urbz has offices in Mumbai, Geneva, Paris and Bogota.

Congratulations on the upcoming book. Could you tell us about the inspiration and the idea behind it?

Thank you! The book, co-authored by Matias Echanove, covers 16 years of our activities in urbz. The book is energised more by our practice and conviction rather than scholarship and rhetoric. It believes that dominant urban policy and practice are shaped by a vision that overlooks the vast majority of urban life that falls outside planning strategies. A substantial part of the world’s urban population lives off local, collective  capital, based on internal resources. These experiences offer a glimpse of possibilities that exist beyond the dominant economic logic, which may seem invincible, but may not actually be so.   

What do you find interesting about urban development in general, and how does it differ in India from what you see abroad?

Urban development is interconnected organically with all kinds of human experiences. I don’t see it in isolation. More than ever before, our world is faced with issues that make us confront the fundamentals of living, including the production and consumption of quality food or the materiality of the construction of homes. These take us away from the realm of the purely urban space. Today, what we refer to as urban development has become quite standardized all over the world. It has become synonymous with real estate value and investment in a certain type of infrastructure.

What ideas would you like to work on in the near future?

Urbz takes me quite organically to thinking about the economy. Anthropology has a great deal to say about the human scale as the most appropriate one for thinking about the economy. For me, working out the nitty-gritty of local interconnected systems, even when addressing a global network, is something to think about for our next project. We also need to reevaluate the role of institutions in modern life. Today, institutions have become synonymous with bureaucracies, and these need to be sharply distinguished. Institutions today need to be more decentralised, responsive and flexible than ever before, and that is not the case.

What are your other interests, and how have you nurtured them alongside your work in urban planning?

I am a screenwriter for films and have been collaborating with filmmakers from India and Europe over the last five years on various projects, including short and feature-length fiction films and documentaries.  I also co-own a small artisanal business that produces an Indian alcoholic beverage called Mahua in France, where the company was established in 2019.  My Urbz team encourages me to keep innovating and experimenting with all my passions, and they are the ones who help me nurture these other interests!