4.1.2 Land use and urban fabric

Dharavi spread over 239 hectares in the central city area, with an estimated population of more than 18000 individuals per acre. There are several cultural sites such as twenty-seven temples, eleven mosques and six churches (Kalpana Sharma, 2000). Dharavi's land use consists of different types of housing settlements, including informal and formal, and commercial and industrial. The west part of Dharavi is occupied with commercial space, and major industries are along with the major streets and the central roads, so customers and workers can easily access them. Also, hundreds of microfactories of handbags, garments, stationery, clay pots, and many more are incorporated in the houses located in inner clusters. The government built many high-rise buildings alongside the major roads on the area of allotted tanneries before, which moved somewhere else now.

Figure 4 7 Land use of Dharavi (Kumar jain, 2020)

The physical characteristics and urban fabric of Dharavi drastically changed after the Prime Minister Grant Project in 1985. 13 Compound and Kumbharwada (neighbourhoods in Dharavi) are well planned due to their commercial requirements, as shown in Fig(mm). However, the central part of Dharavi is still unplanned, and the majority of informal settlements are visible. It is even complicated for outsiders to navigate most of the time as all the settlements look exactly the same without any known landmarks.

Figure 4 8 Different parts of Dharavi (Thukral, 2021)