In her contemplation on subjectivity and aesthetics in the public realm of architecture and living spaces, Pauline von Bonsdorff, author of The Human Habitat: Aesthetic and Axiological Perspectives asks some thought-provoking questions: ‘What is the relation between everyday – tacit, uninformed, confident – environmental experience and the significance of the built environment? What are buildings and how do they become what they are, on the street?’ (p. 10) ? Is there stability in the roles of the elements of the built environment and in their capacity to be valued?’ (p. 13).

Her attempts at answering these questions provide powerful conceptual tools to understand contemporary urban realities – and of course, much more than that.

In the reflections that follow, we use, interpret, and maybe even distort some of her insights (due to our own limitations) to come closer to answering our questions as urban practitioners working in Mumbai city.

Individual architectural subjects have been a perennial feature of practice and criticism. In the medieval past, the biggest and most glorious practices of architecture were shaped by an economy of sacred power and imperial strength. These influenced themes, sizes and costs of each structure. The aesthetic could spill over cultural boundaries and reflect all kinds of fantasies, providing for a pastiche that only in retrospect became respectable with dignified and definite narratives. Thus Islamic influences on Christian styles and vice versa, themselves amalgamations of a myriad local influences got naturalized gradually, with a play of remembering and forgetting. However, strong pronouncements of what is beautiful and truly glorious were integral to the process of construction, even though the particular constituents of aesthetics were debatable.

Today, in mainstream practice, it seems as if technological advancements in the fields of spacecraft technology have become new frames of reference, based on contemporary notions of the sacred – with faith in modern technology and its accompanying aesthetics. Futuristic universal structures punctuate cities all around the world, and create comfortingly familiar environments, becoming naturalized as smoothly as before. Glass and steel structures in Bangalore sooner or later become part of the local scape like colonial structures once did. There is a reaction to this as well – with grunge, organic aesthetics inspired by environmental discourses doing their own thing. Artistic and creative counter or sub cultures play their role in shaping such forms and expressions.

However, it is doubtful  if either of these templates go deep enough in satisfactorily addressing the full range of expressions of built environments and the needs of users, dwellers, inhabitants.

According to historian and novelist scholar Umberto Eco, our contemporary responses never really transcend medieval impulses. Whether in terms of the glories of grand structures or the sacralizing of nature. It is not transcended in popular culture, nor (in more insidious ways) in high culture, where aesthetics, with all its post-modern twists, continues to have its say. It continues to pass judgment about what is good and bad about buildings, cities, neighbourhoods and all kinds of cultural artefacts. Here past and present, medieval and modern get mixed and re-mixed to create their own anxieties about what is appropriate and beautiful and what is not.

There are other things that remain the same as well. In the medieval past, it was rare that the habitats and dwellings, bazaars and streets surrounding sacred structures got the same investments in terms of attention, expense or investment. In our appreciation of historical architectural grandeur, we sanitize memory all the time. It is only in realist works of fiction and detailed historiographies that we become aware of the everyday contexts as they existed in the past. It is difficult to remember those realities since they have now been sterilized for tourism or to appeal to contemporary tastes. In the past, peasant quarters outside feudal estates, bazaar streets or artisan quarters at the fringes of religious and royal grounds, were not perceived differently from primitive habitats that existed at the edge of or in forests. They were rarely bought into any frame of aesthetic appreciation.

Similarly, in contemporary urban worlds, habitats and dwellings within cities often become invisible or obscure in the public imagination. In visual culture they get subsumed within gated colonies, and high security buildings on one hand or shanties and dark, dangerous alleyways on the other. The aesthetics of the habitat itself, where people live and work have become about interiors or  – at the most – about inner protected worlds within open cities – like gentrified streets, heritage enclaves, tourist friendly villages and art neighbourhoods.

When the economy and polity cannot accommodate people who are unable to afford any of these spaces – their habitats and dwellings are only seen in the most extreme of anti-aesthetic terms. In which words such as slums, shanties, run-down neighbourhoods become both, the embodiment of all that is not beautiful and something more absolute – those which can never become beautiful. Unless they completely undergo a metamorphoses.  Any attempts at seeing an aesthetic within those spaces becomes immediately immoral – as if one is validating the context as a whole – including its apparent brutality.

More than anything else – it is this burden that our work carries when we engage with small parts of the 6 million people strong so-called slum-world of Mumbai. We see in the consistent efforts of the inhabitants living in them, a desire to improve their dwellings, their neighbourhoods, using their own benchmarks of beauty and desire. Which often overlaps with what the practice of building and construction in the rest of the city also wants. We see smooth tiles, steel and glass and much else that is all too familiar, even futuristic.

Along with this, there is a deeper structure that pulls the habitat into coherence. You can still see the genus of older dwellings underlying those spaces. The spirit of the place is evoked from the act of people coming together and building their own environments, using local networks, and all kinds of affordable technologies, relying on community and family networks and using living sacred sites to organize the neighbourhoods. Shadows of the pasts, or from elsewhere, persist. They reproduce structures from villages far away, even accommodating primordial markers of habitats like wells and orchards, within a contemporary urban fabric of immense density.

However, to say this aloud makes us vulnerable to the worst of modern political slurs. We get accused of being romantics and supporters of poverty. Accusations come even when we demonstrate the resilient and robust economy that underlies the making of these spaces. Arguments like ours may have been made several times before. They represent a small part of a vast archive of similar commentaries made by a host of observers and practitioners. Yet they are all dismissed or ignored.

It is for this reason that we found Bonsdorff’s work giving us some new openings. Maybe it is important for us to go back with more fierceness into understanding what exactly is the aesthetic of a habitat. Why has it been subsumed within a larger discourse of architectural practice? Or a sub-set of planning in which it is rarely expressed with the same sophistication as architectural or planning practices are? Is it possible to understand it with more useful tools than what Avatar – style eco-fantasies provide us? Which after all are part of the same neo-medieval worlds that Eco suggests we are trapped in? As absolute as the world of spacecraft technologies and equally ineffective.

Mumbai’s thousands of so-called slums, are composed of habitats that include a wide variety of forms linked to distinct histories. Traditional villages, artisanal colonies, working class tenements, temporary structures, modern dwellings, – all of them are subsumed within a generic category that has little basis in reality. To tell the stories and distinct histories of each of these neighbourhoods is a very important exercise. And an effective way of doing that is by understanding their form, their specific story.

The gaze from the outside and the inner experience of living in those spaces must converge at some point. Such a convergence will make it possible to appreciate what these neighbourhoods really mean to the story of urbanism as we experience it today. And the question of aesthetics as it applies to habitats and dwellings is crucial to this story.