Parel Village, at the heart of the former mill district, is one of Mumbai's oldest residential enclaves, a medieval-origin settlement that predated the British mills by centuries. The surrounding chawl tenements — dense, multi-story residential buildings built by mill owners to house their workers — still stand in pockets between the new corporate towers, their internal courtyards and shared water taps preserving a way of communal urban life that was standard in Bombay's working-class areas.
The BDD Chawls at Worli and the NM Joshi Marg chawl clusters give the clearest picture of this housing type. The contrast between the old chawl lifestyle — noise, shared space, dense community — and the new luxury towers that have replaced most of the mills tells the story of Mumbai's economic transformation in a single walk through the neighbourhood.