This piece was published in an edited version in
Time Out Mumbai, March 14-27 2014, Volume 10, Issue 15
Travel Lite
Those in academic circles probably know this already, but Mumbai has
been the international flavor of for quite a few years now. This is especially
true for students of architecture and urban design. Each time the monsoon bids
Mumbai farewell and her sodden soul slowly dries, cohorts from universities,
unknown and ivy-league, travel to her shores for field visits, just like flamingos
at Sewri.
After parking
themselves in one of the many establishments on or off Colaba Causeway,
high-seating Volvo buses are procured and from such rarefied and elevated
environments the city is absorbed. Driving down from the Gateway of India
(referred to by some as India Gate) to the boondocks of Navi Mumbai, depending
on the theme of the semester, the colonial SoBo, the dense inner-city areas of
Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, the ‘panjra-pol’, the Dhobhi Ghat, the City Improvement
Trust precincts of Dadar-Matunga, the former mill and current mall lands, the
eastern docklands, the fast-disappearing mangroves and salt pans and ‘slums’ of
every stripe are mandatorily observed. Local trains (in non-rush hours) are
given custom, the monorail admired, and various skywalks crossed. Getting
serious, development plans are procured, Google Maps pored over, terrabytes of
jpegs clicked, local colleges of architecture visited and a few brains picked-
all this in about three days or so. Oh, of course, Dharavi-darshan happens and
'Kumbharwada' becomes part of international vocabulary. It joins words like
'jugaad', which have already been learnt in advance.
There is quite an
abyss between the literature available and the city's reality. In the spirit of
academia, much previous reading is prescribed. Suketu Mehta, David Gregory
Roberts, Katherine Boo, Dwivedi and Mehrotra, among others form the canon. ‘Slumdog
Millionaire’ becomes the visual point of reference. This is pretty obvious when
you encounter un-nuanced positions about slums or the role of real estate;
cluster housing is fait accompli- a shining pointer to end all woes, after all
it is community driven, no? Speculative theories coalesce into New Urbanism
projects, learnings from weekend immersions and catch-as-catch-can ethnography
informs the iterations of computer extrusions, where high rise developments
(the only answer) are clothed with a garb of Bollywood culture.
What does our city
offer that attracts so many to it? To be charitable, Mumbai does provide the
foreign observer with several contradictions, to paraphrase Whitman, being
large and containing multitudes. It is some surprise that trains run on time,
but garbage remains uncollected. One family lives in a 2 billion dollar, 20
storied skyscraper residence, while more than half of the city lives in
self-built postage stamp housing. The rule of law is indexical of our
democracy, but common law applies everywhere. Everyone here walks and talks
English, but as a phunny Indian language. However, despite these polarities,
true to our common ethos, what you cannot see is vital to understanding and
appreciation, but intangibles are often subsumed in the morass of visual
documentation. This can lead to some ‘face-palm’ results. Some American
students of architecture found the sights and smells of one corner of one
street in the city so overwhelming that it became a metonymy for the city as a
whole, and resulted in the design of skyscrapers made out of ‘kachra’.
Nothing interests
student practitioners of architecture and urban design and their mentor
institutes more than change. The objective is always to make a city ‘more
livable’. This is predicated on the understanding of a city as it is as ‘less
livable’. Sociology rather than technology is currently the driving force
behind change, and alternatives derived to conceptualize ‘better cities’ are
the results of surveys and sampling, even if the sample set is a few persons
doing muttergashti at street corners, or a paanwallah, say, or a local SIM
shop. There is an urgent need to put it all down on paper and soon conceptual
charts, three dimensional street views, stitched photo-collages and before/after
layouts are all put together and displayed.
By now, there is
entire machinery in place here in the city to receive these visitors and cater
to their needs, spaces for work and presentations, large panels for pinning up
their work and seminar spaces for discussion, even for the conduct of
international conferences. The usual suspects of invited city experts are
rounded up from time to time to take on these fights of urban regeneration
fantasies, and to give anecdotal and insightful comments and ‘crits’ about the
nature of change in Mumbai, which are eagerly lapped up by these wide eyed,
travel-lite acolytes. I should know, on occasion I have been one of them.
