Bombay’s slum makeover

It may just be the world’s most extreme property makeover: 125,000 Bombay slum dwellers are about to have their homes rebuilt by one of the world’s hippest architects.

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) is renowned for building monolithic skyscrapers. Its works in progress include the Freedom Tower, which will occupy the World Trade Centre site in New York, and the £2 billion Burj Dubai, which, at 818 metres (2,684ft), will be the world’s tallest man-made structure when it is completed next year.

By contrast the American firm’s latest venture is the low-rise redesign of 124 acres of squalid shantytown. If that sounds like a comedown from the grandeur of its past projects, it shouldn’t - the slum’s inhabitants are shaping up to be some of SOM’s toughest judges yet.

more from the TIMESONLINE’s Rhys Blakely in Bombay

JJ is the co-founder of 5ft Creatives and he is now a legal alien in the US of A