While almost every aspect of our life is regulated and governed by laws, we probably don’t think about how or why these rules came into being. For architect Sameep Padora and his team at sPare, a research initiative that looks at issues of urbanisation in India, it was a particular housing project that took them down a rabbit hole to delve into the history and creation of the city’s codes and byelaws for building homes. Today, this research has been documented and displayed at Ballard Estate’s new multidisciplinary hub, IF:BE, showcasing a range of images, diagrams and 3D models of buildings that have stood for over a century in the city. “It’s almost like an archaeological project. When we put each model together, we also tried to find out what was particularly specific to that project, and the unique details we could learn from it,” he tells this writer.

The idea for the project came about in 2015, when a developer approached Padora and his team for an affordable housing project in Karjat. “That’s when we began our research to see how we could design these types of houses. We knew Mumbai is home to residents living in smaller homes for many generations. We were interested in finding out how they lived—what were the adaptations they made to their spaces and how [those have] fared over time. While we heard lots of narratives and stories from each home, we uncovered very little about the architectural quality or the tectonics of what comprises affordable housing.”