Vaissnavi Shukl
In our previous episode, we spoke to the team from Better Shelter about their kit of parts approach to providing emergency shelters in crisis situations. Today, we continue that line of inquiry and look at the work that pop up housing has been doing in India by deploying an industrial and modular construction system. With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we speak to Sampath altar, the founder of pop up housing, on how they are improving the housing conditions in low income communities through their innovation.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

So before we talk about pop-up housing per se, I thought we should dig a little more deeper into what the idea of pop-up means? I mean, you hear about pop-up stores and you hear about pop-up structures, and almost in a very fancy way, you’ll have these luxury brands come in with pop-ups in the middle of New York City and London, all of those things. The inherent idea, of course, is that these pop-up structures are often temporary, but that’s what they’re supposed to do, remain there for a very short period of time. Now, how do you approach the idea of permanence in communities facing constant displacement, while talking about these pop-up structures?

Sampat Althur
Yes. Thanks, Vaissnavi. So if you look at it, pop-ups also have another connotation to it. You look at a lot of our displays, at times we have these pop-up ads that come up and, you know, pop ups are something that people sometimes don’t really like them to come up with, right? Or even if you look at a neighborhood, a lot of times when there’s a pop up store, there is a little bit of tension in the neighborhood, like, you know who’s gaining, you know what’s happening and why is this happening? It’s disturbing the neighborhood. So there is some tension that’s always there when there’s something that pops up out of nowhere. And I think the idea actually started for me when we were looking at pop up events like the Kumbh Mela in Nasik. It’s once every 12 years. First time I heard somebody called Kumbilla, pop-up event, really, no, it is. It actually is. But, I mean, the scale of it wouldn’t make you think about it as, like a pop up event. You know, it does pop-up, though. So, yeah, so it’s like, I think, NASA (a platform for architecture students in India), like in 2015 when I was invited to participate in a challenge to kind of look at solutions for the Kumbh Mela. So I was fascinated by the idea, because I was exploring alternate architecture and innovative housing solutions. And I said that would be a great sandbox for me to go and explore. And prior to that, actually, if you look at the US, there’s an event called Burning Man festival, Burning Man, and one of my mentors, Freeman Murray from Burning Man. He’s a building manager there, and it’s like a three month festival in a desert that happens once every two years or so. And it’s a very hippie kind of an event, but it’s very, very futuristic. So we have people from tech, from arts, and it’s like the intersection of what the future looks like. And so one of my mentors, Freeman Murray, was actually a building manager there, and he himself was a very innovative and very creative person. And he was looking at industrial structures for habitable spaces in events like the Burning Man. And he created art spaces with these pallet track structures, which were just interlocking, and you could go three, four stories high. Didn’t need much of a foundation, free standing. And he started tinkering with that and making art spaces, and, you know, cultural spaces. And then he came to Bangalore, India in 2008 and set up and took up an empty lot. And he actually set up a coworking space, an art space in Bangalore. I actually bumped into him in one of the events, and I told him that I run some student hostels. We have a family business. We’re doing rental housing. And he was like, “why didn’t, you should come and check out my space?” And we went and had a look at the space. And I was fascinated to see something come up in the center of a city on an empty lot, which was actually kind of gathering a lot of garbage and waste and public nuisance and creating this functional space out of really nothing, and just overnight, like within a few days, it was set up. So that really got me interested, and I started spending a lot of time with him. We did a lot of structures in the peri urban, Bangalore and and when Kumbh Mela, the opportunity of Kumbh Mela, came up in 2015 I was like, let’s go and try this out for the Kumbh you know, because there are 30 million people coming, it’s a city which has around 2 million people, and the infrastructure was a big bottleneck. Can we look at really addressing some infrastructure challenges in the Kumbh? Mela and I wrote to the Kum Foundation, and our idea was shortlisted as one of the top 10 innovations. And MIT Media Lab was there, and we were selected. We got a small grant, and we actually built the first multi level portable structure in the Kumbh Mela in the history of Kumbh Mela. And it was really fascinating. And we were always prodded by the MIT scientists and the local mentors there. “Can we think beyond the Kumbh. So can we also think beyond the pop up events? Can we look at solving more urbanizing issues? Can we look at cities? Can we look at urbanization? Can we look at migration and look at the Kumbh Mela as a sandbox and see what can really solve real world problems?” That got me really excited. And you know, one of the learnings I really had there was I started looking at cities as a year round. Kumbh, Mela, I started looking at cities year round. Pop-Up Event, millions of people migrating to cities and coming in, going out. If you look at it, you know, people are acting, but the place is a constant, right? So though people are migrating, space is a constant. So that is permanent, though, the people are moving in and out temporarily, the space remains. So, you know, there’s a different set of people coming in. So, you know, it kind of blurs them, what’s temporary, what’s permanent. And that really got me thinking. And started looking at cities as a year round Kumbh Mela pop0up event. And also started looking at cities as a year round disaster. Infrastructure is failing. It’s not catching up to the kind of needs that are demanded in urban cities that the way India is growing. So I started thinking like, instead of waiting for a Kumbh Mela to happen once in 12 years, to innovate, instead of waiting for a disaster to innovate, can we start innovating and intervening right now in urbanizing cities, that’s where the whole idea of pop up housing really came up, and stretching the limitations in looking at more permanent, portable solutions. You know, I have this other mentor of mine in the US, Tim McCormick, and we were having this conversation of what’s temporary and what’s permanent. He said, “You can look at it as permanently portable. You know, you don’t really have to call it a temporary, but permanent portable.” Yeah, and I think that’s where I started looking at modular framing systems, industrial materials, and seeing how we can really look at solving problems for people. So now that you’ve kind of dipped your toe into it, please tell us what pop up housing is, yes, so pop up housing is really looking at it. If you look at it, the problems of the world cannot be solved in the same level of thinking in which they were created. So the housing industry has really not innovated that much over hundreds of years. But if you look at the apparel industry, the industrial sector, the warehousing and the industrial sector, there’s a lot of innovation that’s happened in warehousing and industrial structures. So they have been looking at, how do you optimize space, how do you optimize cost, how do you look at optimizing resources and building efficiently? And I think that’s the journey. So pop up housing is really looking at leveraging industrial construction for solving low cost, modular housing solutions for mostly the base of the pyramid, you know, low income housing in urbanizing cities. So but we have often seen the idea of finding shelter or the idea of housing as a basic human right, and yet it remains a privilege for for many, because if you look at broadly the the population that is homeless or unhoused, it’s a striking number, when you consider that it’s such a basic living necessity, if you were to think of housing as a service, or if you were to think of yourself as a service provider, evolving and knowing the future, what role do you think housing as a service could play in addressing housing shortages, especially in urban areas? So of course, usually when you look at housing, you look at housing as a physical space, as a building, right as a commodity that is sold, that is traded or that is gifted to the lower part of the pyramid as a part of a government scheme. So for us, of course, we are used to different PM yojanas, and you have different hours yojana And you have LIGS and MIGs and all of those things. So beyond providing shelter, how do, how do, especially your projects, empower the communities to shape their future and also challenge, kind of for these systemic inequities that exist in the housing world. Yes, so if you look at it, if you look at the government is really doing its best to look at addressing, I think it’s not an easy job to really solve this problem, because I think it’s more than the housing. It’s the land that’s a bigger challenge when it comes to housing. And if you look at the low income communities, you know, the urban villages, the slums, most of them are self built. They’re very organic. And if you look at the kind of built environment they have, they use locally available materials, and they kind of just make do, because they know that they want to be in the cities for seven, eight months. They want to go back to their hometowns, their villages, for two, three months, which is their permanent home. So they are okay with living in infrastructure that’s not up to the mark. And it’s a pity that you know, they really have to settle for low that’s where I feel innovations can really play a big role, where, if they know that this is something that has a resale value, this is something that can be reclaimed, that can be reused, or even, I think support. Think about them as assets in a lot of way, definitely, you know, and if you look at it as as designed for disassembly, then I feel that they will have this incentive to invest in it and not look at it as a expense or a liability, but as an asset that you’ve said, you know, this is something that is an asset to them. And very interestingly, the PMA, why the government of India, earlier, when they came up with PMAY the initial version, they were looking at housing, just as these two categories of Pakka versus Kacha, anything that was not concrete, was put in under the packet of Kacha and Pakka was only concrete buildings, right? And they were looking at making all the housing for all sections of society into Pakka buildings, and they wanted to just concretize everything, which was not a great way to look at it, especially when you’re talking about climate change and carbon emissions. Very interestingly, in PMAY 2.0 they have given a slash to concrete to permanent buildings, or they’re also calling it as all weather housing. So they have opened up to the notion of what could be permanent housing as all weather housing. And if you look at the Building Materials Technology Promotion Council, there’s a lot of housing innovations which are pre fragile, industrial and which are, you know, factory made. So I think this whole concept that it has to be concrete to be a Bucha house is kind of changing, and that’s really good for the industry, that now we are open to solutions that are modular, that’s prefab, that’s industrial. It has to be basically all weather housing. That’s what they’re looking at. And I think it’s a great trend, and a lot of hope for the future for innovative housing solutions to come up.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Now when you also talk about housing, and especially low income housing or temporary shelter when it comes to housing, so it just in the previous episode, we were speaking to a company based out of speed called Better Shelter, which does you could look at it as pop of housing of sorts, but where they’re doing shelters for refugee camps around the world. Now, when you talk about building for crisis situations or even pop up housing, there’s a certain connotation attached to it, that it is, of course, temporary. It’s cost effective. And somehow, when you club these two ideas together, by default, you start thinking about its longevity. And you know, it’s not meant to be around for too long in terms of your work, and in terms of pop-up housing that you do, how do you really negotiate the idea of the finance, part of it that goes into the production of product of pop-up housing, versus the longevity and sustainability, part of it where you know that It comes with a certain lifespan. All buildings do, but relative to your pakka houses that you otherwise talk about, where does it stand on the scale?

Sampat Althur
Yeah, so I think it’s an interesting question. So if you look at pop up housing, like, I’m also a big fan of Better Shelter, and it’s a core structural solution, if you look at it, you know you have a basic shell. It’s a modern structural framework. And the beauty of having a modular framework, like a skeletal system, is that you can really play around with the kind of finishes that can go on for the walling and the roofing. And, you know, we’ve had projects where, you know, we use these, you know, heavy duty slotted angle frames, which are L angle perforated sections, which can be bolted together. So we avoid welding, which is again a constraint in low income communities where there’s not enough power, there’s not enough skills. So we use a very simple challenge with just the bolting mechanism to assemble these frames. And once you have a structural framework, then it’s like a canvas. You really can look at it as an emergency shelter, if you want to use something really very basic, like it could be fabric, it could be a top, it could be any of this kind of, you know, very light, very, very quick, simple materials. Or you could even make it something more semi permanent with something more like a panel or a sheet that can go on to the frame structure. Or the same structure can be reinforced to make it more permanent using local materials. Again, I think that’s the beauty of having a solution that’s more of a framework based, kind of a solution which pop-up housing is and I feel that’s the beauty. So some of our projects, we’ve used right from semi permanent, we’ve also tinkered with making it more permanent. So it’s given us those opportunities based on the needs, based on the communities, and based on what people want. And the best part, previous question that you asked about housing as a service, especially in the low income communities where they don’t own the land, there is a local landlord. You know, there’s a lot of dynamics around collecting rent, even on the land, right? They just collect rent for the land, for the water service or electricity. So I’ve seen a lot of times that people who have access to space, not necessarily owners, but even people who have access and control of that land, even if it’s litigated, see this as an incentive to increase the value of that space by adding some kind of infrastructure so that they can get slightly higher returns in terms of rentals. And why not? You know, people love it when there is some kind of a better speed of infrastructure there, which, you know, they can have a door that’s lockable, they have a private room, they have a toilet, they have a kitchen. So all these things add value, and I feel the migrants definitely don’t mind paying for these services. So housing as a service, I see a huge demand, you know, and there’s a huge opportunity for us to really look at pop up housing solutions for addressing the affordable rental housing segment and creating functional spaces for people, whether ownership or rent.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Now, because you mentioned that this is actually a framework, and people are able to, I don’t know. Would you say customize is the right word to kind of adapt to it and use it the way they want. From an personalization or identity perspective, how do you think this framework, like the literal physical framework, allows for people to, you know, bring in the little bit of their own identity into the space that this framework provides, or this building frame provides, or how are they able to adapt their lifestyle to what would be a rather simple, modular steel structure? How do you think that that personalization happens where the structure then becomes a home, right?

Sampat Althur
So I think in most of our projects, we get the beneficiaries to be involved in the building process as well. So they are also volunteers. They’re also part of the building process as helpers, and they are involved in not just building their house, but having a say about how they want their interiors to be? Like say, where do they want the kitchen to come in? Where do they want the toilet to come in? How big they want the bedroom to be. So since we make these modules in standard sizes of, say, 10 feet by 10 feet, or, you know, eight feet by 10 feet, 12 feet by 15 feet, so we have these standard modules, and it gives a lot of freedom and flexibility for people to choose their space. And even before we go with the structure, we go there to have community meetings. We actually go to the site. We use chalk. We just do a layout with the chalk on the ground, and we tell them, where do you want to have your kitchen? Where do you want to have it all, a lot of cases. We also take care of natural lighting. We take care of weather proofing. We take care of the weather conditions. We also take care of some people in India, also very particular about vast tools. You know, they want to have the kitchen in a particular location. They want to have the toilet in a particular location. They want to have the entry. Want to have the entrance in a particular location. They want to have windows here. So we respect all of that, and we customize our spaces according to their needs. And more than that, you know, once you once, they are involved with the building, and then they also choose the kind of walling that can go on to it. And a lot of times, we’ve allowed them to paint their own homes with the colors that they like and they want, and they’ve allowed the children to do artwork, and once it’s done, then we’ve seen people coming and doing a small puja and getting into their homes and really making it personalized, you know, as if it’s a home, that it’s a permanent home for them, though they’re just maybe there For a few years and moving on. But I see that’s the kind of spirit that India has. People just look at spaces as very personal, and they make it a home in all the ways they can. And small things like storage and shelving built in spaces, they see a lot of value, and they acknowledge that, in fact, one interesting, you know, it really changes their whole lifestyle. Like, you know, there was this one community near Udupi where, you know, this community is a migrant community, who are into construction, and they were living in shanties for over 15 years, and they had families, had kids going to government schools. And when we went there, and we built five homes, though there were 50 shanties, we started with our first project of five homes with the SELCO foundation. Once we built it, the lady of the house came to me and said, Thank you so much. I can now get my daughter married to a better you know? So these are things that you don’t expect, you know, the moment they have a door that they can lock. They have a foundation. They have plenty. They have a structure which is solid. You know? They just feel so uplifted, and they feel that they’re really their status is enhanced, right? And a lot of such stories really are very, very moving to kind of intervene in these small communities to make a difference.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, it almost seems like with a small change, well, not a small change, quite a big change in the living environment, or, you know, introduction of this particular building system, you’re able to provide a certain social mobility to people who’ve other novice not been able to to afford it by themselves. So from that perspective, at least, it seems like a very noble cause.

Sampat Althur
And one thing is, you know, a lot of NGOs play a big part. You know, I work correctly. That’s what I was getting at there. So what the best part is, you know, a lot of times nonprofits are already working in these communities, maybe in education or in health or, you know, power solar. They want to improve the housing conditions. And that’s where, you know, pop up. Housing has been called so many times even now, we have two projects going on for waste pickers in Bangalore, for building an Anganwadi and flood relief shelter. So, you know, we keep getting a lot of requests from the nonprofits who are actively working in these communities. So it’s not, we don’t really go directly into these communities. We always go through somebody who’s already working, who’s embedded in these companies, it becomes so much easier to kind of, to build that trust and to really talk about solutions which are little alternatives. And we’ve seen that the NGOs play a big part here. Many times they help with fundraising. We also help with fundraising, and sometimes beneficiaries also pitch in a bit. So it’s, I feel, a collected, collective effort. And we really need to see, how do we make it a more sustainable model? Because at the end of the day, I feel housing can also be a livelihood. You know, we’ve seen people who are using housing as a livelihood. We can even do like a mezzanine floor, like a cheap, less one. So we are having people living on the ground floor and renting out the room on top and earning extra income in these small households, and a lot of small households who have an empty rooftop are allowing us to build small units as rental room trains. So it’s also becoming affordable rental housing for these small households. So we are actually seeing a lot of things that are opening up in these communities. Because, anyways, people do self built housing, mental housing, and if they have a smart solution, which is modular, which is prefab, which is like, in fact, we are also looking at a housing solution which is like, like a flat pack, right? We want to use the assembly time. We want to reduce workmanship issues on site, so we’re developing a lot of solutions and making it easy for people to assign their own so it’s very interesting to see how this goes.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So the last question, what’s next in the pipeline for pop-up housing, and how do you see it growing from here?

Sampat Althur
Yeah, so I’m really excited about looking at how the sector has been pushing the limits of the built environment, right? You have a lot of rack supported buildings. You have modular mezzanine floor supported buildings. So there’s a lot of innovation happening in the industrial sector. You know, earlier, people used to build this huge concrete warehouses, and they used to do shelving inside it as storage, but now they figured out that the shelving frames can act as a load bearing element of the building itself, the quarter of the entire concrete building is cladding panels onto the shelving and making it tracks about the buildings. That’s the innovation that’s happening in housing. So I’m really looking at how to consult housing problems using these industrial innovations. And can we push the like a mezzanine floor, like I said, a G plus one, even a G plus two, or even multi floors, which are because, I think now industrial materials are being manufactured globally. It’s standard load bearing specifications and products, right? You know, I always had this conflict, because I was also a very avid natural builder. I did a lot of workshops with natural building, and I was, I’d been to Thailand for this one, and we built an Adobe home, and I was talking to my mentor there, John joined. I’m also fascinated with industrial housing, but I’m also really connected, and I love so, you know, stone, soil, water, with local materials, but now, in a post industrial world, even industrial materials are local materials. So look at industrial materials as local materials, right? There’s a huge resale value. There’s a huge second hand market. And if you can build something out of that for people in need and make it really accessible to create shelter, why not? You know, and I feel pop up housing is looking at pop up rooms, rental housing units, migrants. We are looking at doing projects for low income communities, and really looking at sizing the designs, and really training a lot of people to see how they can use these innovative technologies out there to create something very beautiful and something very low cost, and can support communities in their own area.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, so much for the work to do and for sharing your big bright idea with us.

Sampat Althur
Thank you so much. Vaissnavi, thank you so much for having me and looking forward to getting inspired by the kind of people that you’re getting onto your show and doing good work together. Thank you.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.