Celebrating the Formal-Informal Interface: Three Nodes Stitching Kurla's Mall Edge to Its Settlements

Most cities draw a line where the shopping mall ends and the settlement begins, then pretend the line is permanent. Celebrating the Formal-Informal Interface refuses that pretence. It treats the boundary as negotiable ground rather than a wall, and it proposes that the most productive place to build is exactly where two incompatible urban systems meet.

The project is by Yashasvi, and it sits on one of Mumbai's sharpest thresholds: the edge between Phoenix Marketcity in Kurla and the informal settlements of Sanjay Nagar and Qureshi Nagar. On one side is highly organised commercial infrastructure; on the other, dense, self-organised housing. Yashasvi frames the work as Urban Interface Architecture, a strategy aimed at spatial inequality, social fragmentation and programmatic disconnect. It begins with mapping economic activity, amenities, circulation and community structures, and that mapping produces a precise brief. The goal is to curate the interface, not erase it.

A Public Toilet Recast as Social Infrastructure

The exploded isometric of the public toilet and creche shows the Neighborhood Node at work. Roof frames lift away from pink-floored volumes along the street, which reveals a semi-open system of modular blocks rather than a sealed utility building. The key move is programmatic. The public toilet, usually a stigmatised object pushed to the margins, becomes a social space. Shops and laundry areas sit alongside it, so the building stays in use throughout the day and that activity sustains its maintenance.

This is the smartest decision in the scheme. Infrastructure in informal settlements often fails because nobody owns its upkeep. Pairing sanitation with childcare and commerce means people use the place for many reasons and keep coming back. The modular enclosures follow the existing urban grain, so the intervention reads as an extension of the neighbourhood and does not land on it as a foreign object.

Floating Roofs Over a Shared Plaza

The second isometric moves toward more collective programmes: an event space and a restaurant, with roof layers suspended over a plaza and hemmed in by dense surrounding blocks. The drawing shows the logic behind the Community Node, described as a hinge between the two sides of the edge. Ramps and level changes keep the ground accessible, and flexible partitions allow rooms to be reconfigured as needs change.

The separation of roof from ground deserves attention. Shelter becomes a light canopy, and the floor stays open to whoever arrives from either direction. The project states that this node should invite participation from both the formal and informal city. The architecture backs that up by avoiding a single front door and a single owner.

Steel Portals and Brick Volumes: A Lightweight Kit of Parts

The renders bring the material language closer. On the rooftop restaurant terrace, steel columns carry a sloping roof over timber tables, with a solid brick volume anchoring the space. Inside the brick hall, repeating steel portal frames set a steady rhythm above rows of folding chairs. Folding chairs are a small but telling detail: the hall is meant to be cleared, rearranged and used for something else tomorrow.

Yashasvi describes the architecture as lightweight and modular, a set of adaptable systems rather than fixed objects. The pairing of steel frame and brick infill makes that legible. The frame can extend, repeat and adjust. The brick gives weight, thermal mass and a familiar texture that ties the structures to the material vocabulary of the surrounding city. The project also uses varied sectional profiles to handle level differences across the site without breaking continuity, and the sloping roofs in these images hint at that sectional play.

Where the Mall Edge Becomes a Plaza

The plaza render is the clearest image of the Urban Node, the part of the scheme that faces the formal city directly. Vendors and families gather under a large tree and around a red sculpture, in front of a steel-framed glass pavilion. Open ground floors allow activity to spill outward, and the space becomes a transitional plaza where users from both sides of the edge cross paths.

The vendors matter here. Informal trade is usually what formal development tries to remove from its forecourts. In this scheme, informal trade is part of the public image of the place. The glass pavilion offers visibility and openness to the commercial city, while the life in front of it comes from the settlement. That overlap is exactly what the project sets out to celebrate.

Testing the Frame in Timber and Foam

Three physical model views round out the presentation. One is a timber-framed section cut, one a rounded site model populated with trees, and one a stilted roof frame set beside foam blocks. The stilted frame next to massing blocks sums up the whole strategy: a raised, open structure placed among existing density, offering cover without claiming the ground beneath it.

Model-making suits a project like this. Frames, levels and enclosures are easier to judge in three dimensions than in plan, and the section model makes the relationship between ramps, platforms and roofs tangible. It also shows a designer testing the kit-of-parts idea physically rather than relying only on renders.

Why This Project Matters

The project addresses a recurring failure of urban development: informal communities are marginalised when large-scale infrastructure expands next to them. Phoenix Marketcity is a clear example of formal investment arriving beside settlements that gain little from it. By placing inclusive programmes such as sanitation, childcare, shared halls and public plazas directly on the interface, Yashasvi argues that development benefits can be spread more fairly, and that the edge itself is the place to do it.

Its strength is restraint. The scheme does not try to make the two conditions the same, and it does not propose clearance. It works through negotiation: three nodes scaled from the everyday to the civic, built in a lightweight language of steel frames and brick that can adapt over time. Some details of phasing and operation are still open, but the core proposition holds. In cities like Mumbai, the line between formal and informal is not something to hide. It can become the most generous public ground in the city.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Yashasvi

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Project credits: CELEBRATING THE formal - informal INTERFACE by Yashasvi.