SpRhA – An Age Old Desire

SpRhA, designed by Karan Malkan and Rukaiya Lokhandwala, reimagines a dense urban block at the Gulaalwadi junction in Bhuleshwar, Mumbai, as a mixed use development that balances commercial plazas with residential redevelopment. The project began by collecting the stories and aspirations of the various users at the junction, treating their daily routines as the foundation of the design brief rather than an afterthought.

The proposed site is dense in its urban fabric, comprising dilapidated residential buildings and chawls that have long awaited a redevelopment. It is brimming with the commercial activity of daily wage labourers and hardware shops. By studying both the physical and the metaphysical aspects of the site, the architects derived an overall concept that retains the quality of life found in a chawl while adding the amenities and aspirations of a modern day apartment.

Redeveloping the Mumbai chawl

The chawl is a distinctive form of low rise, high density housing tied to the industrial history of Mumbai, where shared verandahs and common courtyards turned circulation space into a stage for everyday social life. Any sensitive redevelopment of such fabric has to weigh the value of those communal thresholds against the pressure for added floor area and modern services. The design challenge is to rehouse existing residents at higher densities without erasing the neighbourliness that made the original buildings work.

Mixed use buildings of this kind ask the architect to stack incompatible rhythms, the bustle of street level commerce beneath the quieter cycles of domestic life, and to keep each accessible without one overwhelming the other. In a context as layered as Bhuleshwar, that means designing clear vertical separation, generous shared landings, and frontages that keep the hardware trade and informal economy alive at the base. Approaches to mixed-use development increasingly favour this fine grain integration over single function towers.

Schemes rooted in genuine urban renewal succeed when they read a place closely before reshaping it. SpRhA frames redevelopment not as erasure but as a way to carry an age old desire for dignified shared living into a contemporary mixed use form.