Playgrounds of Mumbai
Data Visualization
Playgrounds of Mumbai - A look into who gets to play
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The city of Mumbai is home to more than 18 million people. In such a populous city it’s fairly common to find people playing on the streets. Like many others, growing up in Mumbai, my friends and I would play in the compound of our apartment buildings whenever vehicles weren’t parked there, but most times we would end up playing on the streets right outside our buildings. Wanting to understand why this phenomena occurs led me to come up with the research question, How do kids in Mumbai access spaces to play?
People playing on the streets
Mumbai is made up of 24 municipal wards. The plan was to map out all the parks and playground spaces in the city of Mumbai, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a consolidated dataset that captured this information. This meant having to arduously collect all the data myself using Google Maps. Hence in the interest of time, I focused my attention on just 1 ward, the ‘M-Ward [West]’. Through my research, I came across a project called ‘Open Mumbai’ undertaken by the Architectural firm P K Das and associates, where they had mapped out open spaces across Mumbai. This came in handy while trying to create the map.
They estimated in the year 2012, that Mumbai has just 1.58 sq m of open space per person. By comparison, London has 31.68 sq m and New York City 26.4 sq m per person.
M-Ward [West] within map of Mumbai
Open spaces in M-Ward [West]
At a glance the ward seems to have a lot of open spaces. However, ‘open spaces’ are an architectural terminology that includes a few different categories of spaces like playgrounds, parks, recreational grounds, mangroves, beaches, etc.
Recreational grounds are private spaces like golf courses, gymkhanas, club grounds and grounds within corporate residential housing areas,etc. Only a very small portion of the population has access to these spaces and hence, these spaces need to be discounted.
M-Ward [West] Recreational Grounds
Spaces that are classified as Parks and Gardens, more often than not, are designed for their aesthetic value. These spaces usually have jogging tracks, flower beds, benches, fountains and other such things that make these spaces a nice place to go for a picnic or a place within the city to get close to nature. While many parks and gardens have swing sets and monkey bars, most don’t have the space for people to run around and play sports.
M-Ward [West] Parks and Gardens
This leaves us with only the spaces classified as playgrounds. These spaces have plenty of open space for kids to run around and play sports. But the lack of too many of these spaces translates into over-crowding of the available ones.
Therefore it’s quite clear that access to playgrounds is extremely limited for the population of the city.
M-Ward [West] Playgrounds
In the past 7-10 years however there has been an exponential rise in a new kind of space that has become an avenue for people to play. ’Pay and Play’ spaces or turfs as they are colloquially called, function by charging a fixed hourly rate. They provide people with a safe and clean environment to play in, without the hassle of worrying about oncoming traffic (like when playing on the streets), or worrying about space crunch and having to share an over-crowded playground.
Turfs have become so popular in fact, that there are aggregator websites and mobile apps that one can use to make reservations days in advance to avail the space.
Many turfs also provide coaching services to their clients, along with this, most turfs also advertise the availability of parking slots at their premises, which paints a clear picture of the people who frequent turfs.
To collect this data, I went through all the turfs listed on an aggregator website called bookmyturf.com and then cross-referenced that data with Google maps to get the coordinates to map them out.
When mapping the costs of the different turfs across the city, moving away from town towards the suburbs of the city, one can notice a pattern emerge.
Expensive neighborhoods like Bandra attract the highest cost while the far flung parts of the city like Malad offer the cheapest options. This pattern repeats itself even inside the same suburb.
Focusing specifically in M-Ward [West], one can observe different price points in the suburb of Chembur, with 3 different turfs at 3 distinct price points.
Play at K-star being located at the prime real estate area near Central Avenue Road is the most expensive turf, whereas Urban Sports located at PL Lokhande Marg, an area with a lot of low income and informal housing in the vicinity offering a cheaper alternative.
There is a direct correlation between where the turf is situated and the price of entry. Looking at all this data, one can clearly notice that there are severe barriers for kids to access safe play spaces in the city of Mumbai, leaving most of the kids in the city growing up with no space to play.
