ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the housing discourse of the Indian architect Charles Correa in the mid nineteen seventies, in the aftermath of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) crisis. Contrary to how people conventionally understood Gandhian architecture as a building morphology suited to villages, Correa arrived at his idea of such an architecture from the vantages of his own present of urban low-cost, low-rise, “self-help” construction. This chapter explores the extent to which Correa’s present in the mid nineteen seventies was consonant with Gandhi’s own low-cost architectural present of finitude. The chapter examines Correa’s conception of self-evident resolutions to urban housing problems in the global south in a climatological sense and also ties in his discourse related to squatter settlements with that of the British architect John F.C. Turner. The chapter engages with a critical, Marxist interpretation of Turner’s formulations and subsequently speculates about the manner in which Correa may have arrived at his conception of a low-rise, medium-density pattern of habitation in his Belapur Housing Scheme in Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra. Moreover, the chapter explores how Correa promoted Gandhian presentism in marked opposition to futural thinking. While futural thinking involves understanding the necessity of events in the present from the vantages of an imagined space that lies beyond their limits, in the future, Correa took an entirely different approach by presenting the future itself as an indefinite extension of his own present of low-rise Gandhian urbanism or a present of squatter settlements. Correa could not think beyond the limits of his own “Gandhian” present.
