Here are some links to the most fascinating explorations of unusual urban settings…or takes on them…
10 Wierd Eco Systems on Earth – features Dharavi as one of ‘em!
Read about the Walled City where Sunlight could not Reach.
And for a great read on the impact of Science Fiction on Architecture and Urban Design.
While it was not surprising to witness the Bombay Gymkhana authorities behaving disgracefully on the night of the TEDx Mumbai get-together – when they shut down the evening because of transgender intellectual-activist Laxmi Tripathi’s presence – it felt horrible. We saw, first hand, a drama that must have played and re-played itself through the corridors of this century-old elite club since the days of its inception.
In its colonial avatar, it never allowed Indians to walk through its sacred corridors with dignity. It shamelessly took a donation from a Parsee philanthropist even though he himself could never be a member. It did not take a stand when it saw Hindu upper caste cricket players make its star bowler sit outside their dining hall to have dinner in clay utensils while all of them enjoyed eating in their glistening crockery. It did not flinch in its resistance to women voters on its committees until it was virtually forced to do so hardly a decade ago.
In the late nineteenth century, when it came into being, many of the Gymkhana’s members must have worked at the (then) Bombay Municipal Corporation. It must have suited the British officers perfectly well to have a swanking sports club within walking distance from their offices. They made several allowances to all such establishments – including absurdly low land leases.
In a city where good quality sports facilities are scarce, the club, in free India, may justify its exclusive institutional existence (and occupation of prime land), by providing some decent infrastructure to its members and acting as a trustee to sports property in a city eaten by real estate sharks.
And yet that is not the way some of its arrogant members see this equation. They have inherited the same superficial, insecure, and fragile sense of self-esteem that their ancestors had. It would have done them and the club no harm when Laxmi Tripathi, representative of the country at UN meetings around the world, passed through its corridors and got lost in a private party hosted by one of its (surely many) enlightened members. But of course that was not to be.
While she was sure of who she was – the club members seemed to be confused (Euro-Indians? Indian Europeans? Narrow minded elites? Who knows? Some kind of trans-cultural group for sure with no hint of self-reflection at all).
Eventually they threatened to forcefully shut down the party if she did not leave. In a great moment of solidarity everybody chose to leave with her.
These are the moments when you want to examine the history of such establishments more carefully. We know how several such clubs have grossly violated their land lease contracts by making money through illegal constructions on what is virtually public land. Many gymkhanas – Bombay included – found their 99 year old leases expired in the 2000s. And miraculously they arose again – subsidized heavily by the city and its public – whom they choose to treat in this atrocious way.
This brazen land use happens in the face of so many demolitions of simple constructions made by workers and residents in the city – especially in the so-called slum neighbourhoods. Just last week BMC authorities demolished a tiny building recently erected by a resident in Dharavi for local children to play in. How will those children feel as they walk along Azad maidan one day and see the grand facilities of the gymkhana and their lush lawns?
Mumbai has always prided itself on being a city with relatively fewer gates than that of divided and gate-enmeshed Johannesburg. That’s such a false sense of feeling good. Our gates are invisible and equally powerful – all in the mind and implemented through ideology. Far worse.
The insistent and continuous comparing of India and China does not really stop. It may fade away from the media for a few months but continues to trouble and haunt policy makers, academics and all those in the grand race for global supremacy all the time – as is testified by the continuous evoking of these two countries in conferences. Actually, nations and histories frequently play themselves against each other . From the cold-war US/USSR domination to the rise of the Middle-East, to the surprising success of countries like Malaysia and Indonesia – nations have their moment of glory and then fade away in the space of global attention. Japan was a hot favourite in the 70’s and got inevitably discussed as a model of sorts and then it found its way out.
However – for those interested in the history and growth of cities the connections of India, China and Japan remain fascinating for many unexpected reasons. At one time ancient cities in the north of India – Magadh and Pataliputra – had significant connections with China and Japan – thanks to the presence of Buddhism and the independent trade networks that connected these territories for several centuries now. Though Japan can claim greater historical distance from the other two, the insidious way in which Buddhism negotiated its political turmoil and its older religious systems ultimately connected the three historical territories in ways that are difficult to ignore. An architect scholar such as Kisho Kurokawa has represented the relationship of these historical linkages through an interesting metaphor. He points out that Buddhisms roots are in India – nicely muddied and enriched by the historical manure of centuries of prior spiritual discoveries, but it found its stabilizing structures in China’s robust and ancient socio-economic institutions and beliefs and grew tremendously in its environment. However it eventually bloomed into its most sophisticated version in Japan – highly refined and taken to unexpected levels. Interestingly – some would argue that in its move towards refinement, Japan came back closer to the point of muddied origins. After all refinement is achieved by an even more intimate contact with purity and impurity – things that are familiar in a special way to India.
Such a trajectory is mirrored in several surprising ways in worlds not disconnected to Buddhism either. Take for example the way in which cities themselves in these varied environments grew. In India – after the mysterious and puzzling success of the Harrappan / Indus Valley Civilization – urban spaces were more or less messy affairs and far from being models of civic worlds. This has been documented time and again by travelers – however polite – in their writings. They frequently lament about the presence of dirt, lack of order and overt messiness everywhere on the subcontinent. A history that persists till today. India’s urbanism – like the story of Buddhism – appears to be stuck at the point of origin – organic and enriched by historical manure more than anything else. China – in comparision delves into strong institutional histories – rooted in centralized imperial administration (way before communism) and manufactures cities at the drop of a hat. Japan on the other hand – continues to confound categories. Its cities are at once refined, sophisticated, technologically advanced, as they are rooted in a messy aesthetic. Its official voices even say that so many Japanese cities are slummy – for the simple reason that those cities never really gave up their older forms. Interestingly – the magical quality of Japanese cities – like with Buddhism – reconnects to the point of origin that brings it back to India. Some scholars have pointed out that older Japanese urban neighbourhoods remind you, in a twisted way, of Indian slums.
What is the spiritual-urban lesson here for us? Should India imitate China’s history – without any of its supporting institutional structures – or should it risk a more sophisticated – Japanese inspired trajectory for its cities and come closer to where it already is – with just a few shifts in policy? Shifts that recognize that more than anything else Slums need a movement of attitude more than anything else – as we have pointed out several times in this blog…
What We See refreshes Jane Jacobs’ economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. More than thirty renowned pundits and practitioners combine their personal observations with meditations on Jacobs’ insights for the living city.
The book models itself after Jacobs’ collaborative approach to city and community building, asking citizens and niche specialists to share their knowledge with each other. What We See asks us all to join the conversation about next steps for shaping socially just, environmentally friendly, and economically prosperous communities.
Edited by Stephen Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth. Foreword by Michael Sorkin.
In bookstores May, 2010.
(http://www.whatwesee.org/home)
Contributors:
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Mumbai and Pune are overseeing the birth of two new cities growing in between their long, expressway-connected urban sprawl. These are Amby Valley and Lavasa. Both these urban dreams have been conceived in the mode of planned cities even though they have very different starting points. One is an out and out imitation of American suburbia while the other uses very sophisticated rhetoric about new urbanism. The interesting thing is that they began with the idea of containing their membership, of controlling the process through which they would get users to come to the city, but may well land up eventually opening their doors. After all, no city in the world can afford to have gateways, no matter how exclusive the original intention. The problem with cities that like to think of themselves in utopian terms ultimately find their unrealistic vision coming undone for one basic reason – money, investment and sustainability.
You have to understand the workings of urban economies very carefully to appreciate that. A city is not just about beautiful buildings, clean streets and idyllic landscapes. They need to be economic generators primarily. If you isolate these features and make them the focus, people will get bored. At best you will produce a suburban landscape, at worst a bedroom city. Mumbaikars – who one presumes are a big market for these two projects – maybe fed up with traffic jams, garbage and badly managed civic services for sure. But just take them away from their city for a long period and they start missing it terribly. They are certainly not missing the jams and garbage but definitely primarily its energy that comes from the special way in which people, lives, work, fun, entertainment and commerce enmesh into each other. They like the easy access that the city’s layered economy allows them to cheap basic services – no matter how rich or moneyed they are. Everyone wants things delivered to their door steps, safety in numbers and car shopping even if they do complain against hawkers too. Giving them clean utopias will work up to a point. The unbearable pain of dealing with the city’s basic pressures may make them fantasize about the promised new urban land – but eventually when they are confronted with the reality of a cardboard cut, picture perfect city, they will back off.
What may eventually happen is that both Lavasa and Amby valley may loosen up a bit and allow the spirit of Mumbai – dirt and all – to flow through their haloed gateways and share that magic. New Mumbai too tried hard to preserve a sense of planned idealism but what remains of that today is a grid over which the standard layer of Indian working class – service oriented urban economy has settled down nicely and thickly. Informal settlements have become firmly entrenched in the landscape.
Such experiments convince us that you cannot really plan or manufacture a city. You have to be sensitive to the way in which markets, bazaars, jobs and needs organize themselves and facilitate the process through which these translate into decent settlements. The expressway connecting Mumbai and Pune could itself have been a stimulus with the potential of being harnessed effectively to create many organic urban spaces. Instead – what we have is one unholy sprawl which multiples the civic, environmental and problems of both Mumbai and Pune.
To create two islands of urban idealism inside this is a hopeless effort when the proper way to go about would have been to pay greater attention to the possibilities of the entire stretch and create ideal living conditions for everybody – not just the moneyed classes. But one presumes that everybody in the business of making these two cities knew that. No wonder they thought of having helipads and airports first thing…
The Portuguese left a few long lasting legacies in Mumbai. Forts are one of them. Along Mumbai’s Eastern and Western waterfronts one can rediscover them hidden in the surrounding habitat, whether it is mangroves, fishermen’s huts or Dharaviesque microworkshops.
Airoots follows Anuradha Mathur (co-author with Dilip Da Cunha of the much acclaimed book and exhibition SOAK) down the adventurous path in Sewri, Mahim and Worli.
Down the adventurous path: Anuradha Mathur in front of Rahul Srivastava
Abyssinian Mangroves. Unlike Red Mangroves their branches go straight up in the air and don’t become roots. Both photos are taken in the vicinity of the Sewri Fort.
What if the city acknowledged the incompressible dimensions of its existence and redefined itself around its fault-lines : rivers and tides, vegetation and wildlife, migration flows and vernacular habitats… These are the living forces shaping Mumbai day after day, yet they are all, in one way or the other, misunderstood and endangered.
Supereal Mahim Beach and its hidden villages.
Following a methodology based on sectional analysis of a territorial segment, Anuradha’s students observe the integration or the disappearance of one habitat into another. For instance, a river flowing into a creek and sustaining a mangrove forest, which is slowly reclaimed by garbage and turns into a solid ground upon which a settlement grows. This grounded approach serves to produce design interventions that acknowledge and potentially influence the forces in presence.
The Worli-Bandra Sealink viewed from Worli’s Koliwada (Fisher folks village)
Right from Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra’s evocative title (Bombay; The Cities Within) , to the trite images of slums juxtaposed against high-rise buildings – Mumbai’s many personalities have been alternatively celebrated and chastised. The diversity of built-forms, the many different urban sensibilities (small town enclaves in South Mumbai, coastal villages in the suburbs) and the contrasting economic and cultural lifestyles are still very pronounced experiences in Mumbai – making any first time visitor feel disconcerted beyond the normal lag of time, space and culture. It does take a special level of composure to walk from a street, crowded with makeshift homes with children playing around dizzily speeding cars or being accosted by a demanding beggar for your sandwich and then walking into a mega-mall lined by the latest branded items even if you do see the shocked face of the girl behind the counter marveling at your ability to buy goods worth her entire years salary. You don’t have to be a card-carrying socialist to know that these are- at the very minimum – moments demanding some element of erasure, forgetfulness and glossing over if you want to continue living with a semblance of normalcy. Visitors still wonder at how easy it is for such worlds to co-exist without erupting into easy violence. That’s when you realise that there are many ways in which people live around and through contradictions. Its not that you need Johannesburg style gated communities with electric walls to keep people apart. There are all kinds of gates – many a times invisible and even more effective. Older feudal structures in the mind are pretty strong, easily making a rebellious soul stop short of pushing the envelope. Combined by good old brute police force – this helps in creating a perfectly gate-less secure society. At least for the moment.
When we came across the theme of China Mievelle’s wonderfully wierd fiction story ‘The City and The City’ (introduced to us by Carol Breckenridge) it lent itself easily to a comprehension of Mumbai’s extreme contrasts. In his novel two cities are enmeshed in each other, but citizens of one are conditioned to ignore the evidences (sometimes staring at them in their face) of the other. The office of the ‘Breach’ ensures that the urban worlds remain parallel (even though enmeshed intricately) and disconnected. When a body from one city is found in the other – the narrative starts to flow and the reader discovers the rules through which people can co-exist and remain disconnected.
For anyone in Mumbai who has rolled up a window in an air-conditioned car – in the face of a highly professionalized beggar economy, or walked over a sleeping homeless body, or appreciated the new arty graffiti on a wall once housing streams of homeless families, the novel touches a raw nerve. Reminds you, with the same moral force of your conscientious school teacher – that there is a world out there, which you see and need to respond to in a manner beyond glazed eyes. And yet that would be a ridiculously simple allegorical connection to make with the book. Thankfully our comparison is not moralistic nor intended to create victim – based hysteria. There always are deeper reasons behind the resignation to accept contrasts, particularly when they are so obvious.
But what Mievelle’s world conjures is the ability to see how deeply etched are the invisible worlds that exist around us in many scenarios. It is an ideologically divided Europe that is the inspiring context of his novel. It can work in several ways. Reminding us that there are schisms in several cities – energetically cosmopolitan New York, aggressively regenerating Moscow, ethnically complexed Paris, or migrant enriched London. Its possible for the office of the Breach to operate in all kinds of ways. Its possible for us to be oblivious of the obvious in more ways than simply not seeing the faultlines that are all too evident. Its about finding out where the faultlines actually are. And they may not at all be where you look for them.
Tokyo in 1945 after being flattened by USA Air Force firebombs.
The standard approach to residential redevelopment projects is to take ground zero as a starting point — even if it means creating it. This often translates into shifting people from substandard but incrementally developing environments into apartment blocks that cut them off from their social networks and livelihoods. These projects often become housing-centric and blind to the relationship between neighborhoods and economic development. They end up benefiting the construction industry much more than the population they are supposed to serve.
Haiti’s shattered urban landscapes were about communities, street life, resourcefulness, aspirations and dynamic local exchanges. As we have seen in the Dharavi area of Mumbai (the setting of “Slumdog Millionaireâ€), poverty often generates creative responses and initiatives. Local actors tend to produce piecemeal development that directly supports neighborhood-level activity.
As we consider how to rebuild Port-au-Prince, we can find an alternative to the usual top-down redevelopment model in postwar Tokyo. The Japanese government didn’t have the money to rebuild housing and so focused instead on roads, sewage and rail transportation. It also encouraged lenders to give families money to build homes. A decentralized and highly participatory urban redevelopment process produced areas of low-rise, high-density structures built with local skills and material. This not only strengthened communities but also stimulated the local economies. Tokyo today has a landscape that is futuristic and yet retains many traditional Asian urban features including street markets, small-scale businesses and family enterprises. The incremental redevelopment of Tokyo was thus intricately connected to the rise of its middle class.
If aid in Haiti aims specifically at regenerating local economies, if it promotes existing skills and collective initiatives, if it consults with grassroots groups and residents directly, it may well bring about a real transformation.
Ferry Wharf, Or the Brother’s Push (Bhau-Cha-Dhakka), Mumbai
Some years ago, the idea of the Eastern Waterfront was thrown into the public realm by several planning and design centres to show that much more can be done to explore the city’s island status and its vast shoreline on both its sides. Right now, the Marine Drive, Priyadarshini Park, small stretches up to Bandra, Andheri and beyond legitimately demonstrate what the western waterfront has offer to the public of Mumbai.
On the east you have Colaba, Mazagaon, parts of Sewri and then the vast saltpans that are relatively open. Most of the eastern waterfront is controlled by the Mumbai Port Trust – an entity that officially handles a huge amount of cargo – most of which is consumed by the city itself. It offers employment to several thousand people with many more being dependent on it directly and indirectly.
According to the port authority representatives it is difficult to evaluate the eastern and western waterfronts’ contribution to the city only in terms of open spaces. The fact that it is an economic engine cannot be discounted. It points out that many spaces which are restricted to the public are done so by the defence authorities. In many cases it has opened up public gardens and provided access to people to visit historical structures even though large parts of the front is in poor condition in terms of infrastructural facilities.
However many of them feel that in the name of opening the waterfront to the city at large – the real estate lobby can simply take over pockets of the land and still keep the place inaccessible to the not so privileged public. Citing the case of the mill lands and the way the state government ultimately gave in to the building lobby they feel there is no guarantee the same may not happen here.
The opponents are not fully convinced. They feel a lot more can be done in terms of rationalizing the use of surplus land that the port authorities have control over, now that many lease terms are coming to an end. Many feel that there is no place for a port in a modern cities and give examples from all around the world. This is countered by the fact that the Mumbai port trust is actually in a state of expansion and a phase of economic growth. There are also newer streams of thinking in which city ports have adapted to their urban status and turn their location to an advantage.
All in all we have a situation in which the city seems to be very divided and in which debates tend to get heated and passionate. Personally we have witnessed several situations in which good intentions have been overridden by commercial interests and so one has to be doubly cautious of tall claims. At the same time to have an economically dynamic functioning port is vital for the economy of a city – especially if it can also develop a powerful relationship with the city by helping through transport issues and opening up parts of its waterfront for the public at large.
These issues are currently being explored by a joint Eastern Waterfront studio by the Urban Design Program and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, together with the JJ School of Architecture and the School of Habitat Studies at TISS. Mumbai’s historical relationship with the sea and its trading networks, the question of land availability, as well as environmental concerns about rising sea levels and mangrove preservation are likely to spark much more passionate debate and ideas in the years to come.
At the moment we are reading this inspiring text. Tagore is a legendary figure within the Indian intellectual, literary and public realms – as legendary as Gandhi and therefore almost as taken-for-granted and relegated into picture frames. As a poet, he was India’s earliest Noble laureate and invested substantially in the vision of Shanti Niketan, a special space of learning, about a hundred and fifty odd kilometers from Calcutta, which combined the magic of forests with intense urbane, cultural and learning experiences. Patrick Geddes is a more than special name in the world of urban practice – providing inspiring ideas on cities, regions and connections between the environment and habitats. He lived for several years in Mumbai and established the department of Sociology and Civics at the Bombay University in the late nineteenth century, besides doing planning surveys in several Indian cities. The fact that the two met a few times and had a great correspondence on issues linked to cities, forests, rural lives, and cultural practices, around the early twentieth century, fires our imagination. A detailed review to be posted very soon here…
Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes, the Correspondence
Visva-Bharati Press (India) and Edinburgh University Press (Scotland)
ISBN – 1-85933-203-X