Why building smart cities is not a smart idea

Why building smart cities is not a smart idea
Instead of trying to build 100 new cities with doubtful futures, the government should attend to the many places in India that are on the verge of becoming important urban centres.


In the 2014 Union budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley allocated Rs 7,060 crore to the development of 100 new cities in India. This was in keeping with the BJP manifesto for the Lok Sabha election this year.

“We will initiate building 100 new cities,” it promised, “enabled with the latest in technology and infrastructure – adhering to concepts like sustainability, walk to work etc, and focused on specialized domains.”

If the budget allocation is divided equally, each potential new city will get around Rs 70 crore. This amount does not build a city, but can presumably allow a feasibility study.

The refrain of “one hundred” had to be a rhetorical device. In the budget speech, this number became a mantra, with a number of projects given Rs 100 crore of funding. Then came the announcement that 100 new cities would be built.

What background data or realities of our country is this based on? There are eight metropolises in India, 26 Tier-II cities, 33 Tier-III cities and more than 5,000 Tier-IV towns. Current villages with the potential for future urbanisation number more than 638,000. All these are already in existence. These are not the new cities being referred to.

Those fresh, dynamic, extremely smart cities are greenfield developments, laid on land previously untouched. Development would, therefore, be swift, smooth and unhindered by the pesky and cantankerous citizenry that resides in every existing urban set-up.

The potential new cities are to be “based on integrated habitat development – building on concepts like twin cities and satellite towns”. Custom-built cities, emerging in the shadow of older towns, can be sterling examples of progress and best practice, undertaken, no doubt through the currently favored mode of public-private partnerships.

Will this simultaneously breathe new life into the older city, while helping the new one reach its stated potential? As one possible answer, consider Mumbai’s favorite means of redevelopment – hire a developer, erect a shining tower, sell it at market rates. Accommodate in afterthought the original users in a runt, a lesser endowed cousin to the skyscraper built in one corner. Now imagine this at the level of a city.

Urban Renewal
Does urban renewal have to be imagined only in terms of new cities? Such an approach gives up on any possible transformation of existing cities from within as too difficult and unlikely to yield the lucrative returns envisaged in any outsourced enterprise.

The reverse does not stand: if existing cities are to be developed well, then given the number of present urban settlements in India, new cities are not needed at all. All that land that is now rolling nature can remain just that. The new city can only be at the expense of the old.

New cities are designed swathes of infrastructure, imaginary spaces awaiting occupation. What attractors do they offer as potential? In our liberalized, liquidity-based, aspiration-fuelled present, their primary potential would be as investment, not occupation.

I overheard a commuter describing his acquisitions in the upmarket node in Navi Mumbai. “We have three flats in Kharghar”, he said, “but we've never once been there”. Spaces with market rather than social potential are built for instant gentrification, displaying all the hallmarks of new Edens and Elysian Fields, but keeping out Babel. They lack for nothing except life.

Mutant Impositions
New towns are fundamentally unnatural entities. They are vast, mutant super-impositions on landscapes devoid of habitation. Historically, cities grow organically, through accumulation and accommodation, where people come first, not infrastructure. Over time, through largely iterative processes, common law practices coalesce into traditions of urban behavior, remaining inclusive, and then through osmosis with other cities turning cosmopolitan. First settlement, then design. Every great metropolis is testament to this, located next to bodies of water, along caravan trails, next to natural resources. They grow by attracting migrants who see the value in those who have come before them, and learn from it.

Even new cities need a reason for their existence. Jamshedpur and Bokaro Steel had heavy industry to attract workers in the socialist 1950s. Chandigarh, Gandhinagar and Bhubaneshwar were new capitals. Navi Mumbai, on the other hand, envisioned as a twin city to the grand metropolis, took more than three decades to become viable. Lavasa and Amby Valley, exclusive by their very mandate, and despite their large publicity budgets, hardly appear to be urban transformers.

Smart City, Sim City
Planned cities take as much time to come into their own as unplanned towns. In the same manner of towns that grow organically, the individual potential of a planned urban settlement will be reliant on regional transformations, socio-economic and political processes and sheer blind luck.

You might remember Sim City, a vastly popular video game in the 1990s, where you played the mayor of a city. A large part of your time was spent laying out the city – its roads, networks and infrastructure, its public buildings and amenities. You then allowed users to move in, who came like ants chasing honey. Soon you would receive either praise and accolades from your citizens, or – if they did not like your layout – you would face strikes, rioting and arson. Good intentions are never enough.

Why not focus on the urban centers that already are? If only the government could overcome the fear of resistance and inertia from existing populations, overcome the desperation to show instant results, be patient, work for the long-haul well beyond their terms in office, then existing towns, from Tier IV to Tier I can be transformed – first through public participation, then through inclusive policies and the provision of social infrastructure, and finally through “enabling technology and infrastructure, and specialized domains”.

No one can deny that our big cities are overburdened. But for every one of those, there are already a dozen more on the cusp of becoming future cities with potential. If attention is lavished on these instead of the chimeras of a hundred new cities with doubtful futures, new India, with its changing demographics, may still benefit.

As Rahul Mehrotra, architect, academic and urban conservationist recently remarked in a discussion on urban change: “We do not need 100 new cities. What we need are 100 great cities.”

First published in scroll.in, Jul 19, 2014 • 07:00 am

Time Out Mumbai- Re:claim

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai, December 2013

Re: claim

Dear Mumbai,
re: your claim that the only solution to your congested, imploding self is to reclaim more land from the sea, here are our considered opinions-

We see from our records that your past actions re: reclamations on your good-self are chequered with inconsistencies- whereas your laying the many causeways in the mid 19th century interconnecting the erstwhile islands that constituted your good-self had some intrinsic merit in making you whole, this resulted in a low-lying centre prone to flooding annually and mosquitoes, a space you further exacerbated by raising several textile mills, creating a situation you have not satisfactorily resolved even after a century and a half.

Your next request for plastic surgery admittedly met with some success in 1940 with your self-named appendage- the Queen's Necklace. But you botched this up laying a road along the water edge rather than perpendicular to it, isolating a thin sliver of land only useful for walking dogs and/or resisting expressions of young love. All your subsequent actions, we note with concern, catered to the whims and fancies of automobiles rather than your own citizens, a trait so deeply embedded that you seem to think is normal. It is not.

We can only shake our head at your half-hearted, ultimately abandoned attempts to create a business district out of the sea in the late 1960s, which you ironically named after the same person who opposed you in the first place. We call your attention to the toothless gum that is the Cuffe Parade fishing village. Your desire to iconicize the Mantralaya only resulted in scuppering the very objective of your new city across the harbour. This reluctance to shift your administrative heart to Belapur put back both settlement and progress of New Bombay by three decades, making it a dormitory suburb. We must therefore infer, Mumbai, that you are, in your own words, 'aarambh shoor'; you know how to start things but not finish them.

It is with some relief that we note your fancy late '90s ideas proposed by your starchitect to reclaim a width of one kilometre on your western edge for 'public amenities' stayed on the drafting board. God alone knows how you would have monetized all that land in the millennium. On bended knee, we offer thanks to our city deity daily that your other scheme of enclosing your natural eastern harbour (linking Colaba to Uran, like bringing together a thumb and forefinger) in order to create, a 'giant freshwater lake' remained just an idea. Having seen your track record with sewage,re: the Mithi, we only shudder at what you could have done to the water you sought to sweeten.

Now, in your latest application, you have sought to expand on the aborted Nariman Point reclamation by another hundred hectares. We observe that you have enclosed testimonials from foreign experts to back your claim. Needless to say, you seem unconcerned that in the last decade your business centres have all shifted to BKC and the mill lands. Enterprise and commerce have moved north. Has this not helped change the mono-directional circulation of commuters and laid the base for a polycentric city? Who do you think will benefit from raising land to create high-end residential properties on the southern tip? You already have, at the last count, around 1,40,000 unsold ‘crore-plus’ flats all over the city. We suggest you sell them first.

Also, your current policy allowing the densification of those parts of your good-self that are already some of the densest in the world displays an ambivalence about your own urban future. While you ignore debris-dumping on mangroves and salt-pans without permission, you keep a twenty kilometre stretch of eastern docklands undeveloped, hidden behind tall screens. This, after shifting the bulk of your maritime commerce to JNPT. We suggest, earnestly, you look up the word ‘oxymoron’.

Your new proposal also seeks to create another ‘freshwater lake’, this time at Mahim, which you intend to fill with water from the Mithi. You never learn, do you?

To conclude, your past history does not give us the confidence to endorse your proposal to resume reclaiming land. By allowing redevelopment on almost every plot of land (built or unbuilt), to provide ‘long denied’ benefits to the owners, your developers are reclaiming the entire city anyway, bit by bit. You should be satisfied. And satiated.

Nevertheless, given our long association, we specially commissioned our back office to develop a proposal to reclaim land from Bandra West to Sur-on-sea (Oman East). We are told this is feasible, as the crow flies. The only reason we resist giving it the go ahead is our concern about illegal migrants, and the possible dilution of your city’s culture.




The image at the top of this post is Neibhur's 1764 mapping of Bombay's islands.
This image was one of many made free for use online by the British Library.

The Fifth Estate

Here is a long essay on the conundrum that is Mumbai's housing that was published in The Indian Quarterly; 

Volume I | Issue 4 | July-September 2013

The Fifth Estate

Mumbai’s developers are increasingly holding the city to ransom as its people desperately grapple with the dearth of affordable housing

I pass an hour in the local train listening to a man on his cell phone confess that he has no ready money for investment. What he does have is “property” that he will sell only when he gets the right price. On a second cell phone he is already making deals for the next property to buy. “Give and take” is his oft-invoked mantra. This is bijness. There was a time when one came to Mumbai to do business. Today, Mumbai nagariya is the bijness.

Mumbai has always attracted real estate deals. What is so different today? The change is in the mind-set. In a city where green-field land is virtually gone, all land is now perceived as available for (re)development, even if already built upon. Once you accept this premise, the whole city is a very large pot of gold, which like Kuber’s ghada can constantly be replenished.

The built city, the one we always held as a social contract to be permanent, a city we could take for granted, is now temporal, almost tentative, a commodity. The home is now the new unit of exchange. Once, it was accepted wisdom that occupation of space, whether through outright ownership, long-term rental or even common-law territoriality was the stable base upon which Mumbaikars built a life. Their home was the costliest thing they possessed, but this was the one thing they could never afford to sell. To sell was a downgrade, a displacement to the northern boondocks, away from the downtown soul of south Mumbai. Now there is another option: an upgrade, with the promise of more square footage and some rokda. Now the very house you live in can be monetized, even as you live in it. This has brought a venal sense of entitlement for a homeowner to lust for every last rupee that can be squeezed out of a deal.

Consider Vallabhbag, Ghatkopar, a suburban neighbourhood largely inhabited by Gujaratis. Built in the late 70s, this is not a gated community but built along lanes ending in cul-de-sacs. Very urbane, with pocket parks, very upper middle class. Each building is uniformly four storeys high, in reasonably good condition. Today, individual building societies are sourcing out developers to hand over their buildings to take them down and re-erect new apartments, with added areas granted through the municipal munificence of Floor Space Index (FSI) and Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). Homeowners negotiate for sops (space and cash) as quid pro quo for excess square footage that the developer can sell for profit. Aspirations are created where once none existed. Charles Correa in a recent interview said: “Sometimes aspirations of people can be quite ugly”. Aspirations here, having reached a tipping point become the norm. All change is justified. 

More housing in Mumbai sounds like a good idea, but in some localities like Altamont Road, Walkeshwar or Malabar Hill the price of real estate has risen exponentially. The most expensive real estate deal in the city, in June 2012, was for a 28th floor flat in Tahnee Heights on NapeanSea Road, which exchanged hands at the rate of Rs. 830/- per square inch! According to a recent survey by Liases Foras Real Estate Rating and Research, more than 60% of new housing units cost over a crore of rupees each. Housing affordable to the middle class now amounts to only 2% of the available stock. What this means is that at today’s rates even areas as far-flung as Jogeshwari West (13,987/sq ft), Powai (17,717/sq ft) or Palm Beach Road in Navi Mumbai (14341/sq ft) can provide, at most, a modest 500 square foot, super built-up apartment for a crore (figures from magicbricks.com, Jan-Mar 2013). No wonder then, no developer wants to construct anything in a size other than for the luxury segment. The rising cost of upper-end estate is unsustainable.  More than 35,000 housing units in the city are left unsold. Despite this, there is no fall in retail prices—proof if any that while the city can no longer provide homes to live in, it is still a haven for speculation.

The developer has become the fifth estate of the city. The grab bag of goodies is growing. This has been made possible by changes in the Development Control Rules of Greater Mumbai (Clauses 33(7) and 33(9), for the most part) that allow for reconstruction of buildings irrespective of their condition. Kamu Iyer, one of Mumbai’s most respected senior architects, always lived in Gold Finch near Five Gardens, designed by his teacher G.B. Mhatre in the late 1930s. Buildings like these in Parel, Matunga, and Wadala defined the domestic fabric of Art Deco Mumbai. Iyer’s own celebrated monograph on Mhatre helped generate awareness for these residential buildings worthy of heritage preservation. Gold Finch is one of the best examples of Mhatre’s mature work. Now, it is up for redevelopment, in amalgamation with an adjacent plot. The new building will loom 16 storeys above the four-storey harmony of the once salubrious R.P. Masani Road, calling attention to its nouveau riche occupants.

“Gated spaces are not new to Bombay,” says Iyer. “Kalbadevi, for example, had many community-based wadis, providing homes for all economic levels. Redevelopment today will lead to both gentrification and stratification of former mixed neighbourhoods, reducing considerably the public realm.” With single plots granted permission to rebuild, planning norms and urban sustainability are impatiently brushed aside for the “greater common good”. It is not unusual to see single buildings springing out of otherwise harmonious localities like mutant incisors. These extrusions affect the relation between building and street, and constrict light and ventilation, especially on the lower floors. New housing, exclusively for the affluent, directly affects available infrastructure like water supply and parking.

In Mumbai today, the builder lobby is all-influential. Since the mid-80s, they have negotiated operational space within the development rules, and these “understandings” have become more and more concretised. No wonder then, a former Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) chief was viewed with so much resentment for tightening the screws on new building projects and reducing concessional FSI on such mythic devices as flower beds. His recent departure was the reason that, according to newspaper reports, most of the afflicted members of the lobby allegedly took off to Dubai to celebrate his leaving.

A survey of Housing Typologies by the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in 2007,2007 identified 21 distinct types, reflecting Mumbai’s diversity. These included chawls, slums, slum resettlements, site and service schemes, slum rehabilitation projects, housing at the urban edges, townships in the suburbs and redeveloped dilapidated structures. Many of these are self-help housing, consolidating older inner city areas and developing newer localities, mostly without state support. One such housing site laid out grid-wise on a garbage dump has become Shivaji Nagar, Deonar. Each grid has narrow alleys with five or six hundred units on a plot of around 120 square feet. Unlike organic slums, Shivaji Nagar was created by re-housing families uprooted from other parts of the city. Today it is a thriving locality, with several communities making their niche in Mumbai’s emerging middle class. Its alleys are paved, and repaved before every election. Electricity is legal, bought from Reliance; water comes to every house through overgroundover ground pipes that run for hundreds of feet. There is no squalor.

Every family in Shivaji Nagar is on the path to a pucca house. This is possible because land costs are not factored in and these are houses built outside the credit economy, in rokda, as it were, as and when the householder accumulates enough to upgrade. The prescient homeowner in Shivaji Nagar looks to the future: in (re)building, he creates an upper floor for giving out on rent. For every home rebuilt, at least two families get housed. Nowhere in the upper city does this 100% model of increasing housing stock exist. The poor renting from the poor seems like a win-win situation. Despite this, as Rakhi Mehra of micro Homes Solution has written, institutions like the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) have policies that block out those who need affordable housing the most by making a 15-year residency proof for families and a monthly household income above `5,000 as qualifying guidelines.

In Shivaji Nagar, every family partners with local contractors, who are as busy with work today as developers like the Lodhas or IndiaBulls in the other Mumbai. Pankaj Gupta is one such contractor who has learnt his craft through a decade of experience and apprenticeship. He has the process of house construction down to such a degree of efficiency that project management consultants could take notes from him. He can build a two-storey Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) house from demolition to handing over keys in five weeks flat. Gupta is well respected, for as he says, in Shivaji Nagar trust is the only currency. His work guarantees follow-up repairs and general maintenance even after the family has moved in. He has to; he lives in the neighbourhood too.

Gupta is only one of hundreds of contractors who build solid, lasting homes outside the pale of the mother city. This upgradation is happening in many other wards as well. Mumbai’s slums have a history at least half as long as the city itself. Few slums are new, and their inhabitants, through years of toil, have lifted themselves up in the world. The contractors’ creations are quite unique, for they work in deep collaboration with homeowners, constructing the most blatant displays of aspiration. New homes proudly show off shiny ceramic tile facades, idiosyncratic aesthetics, designed interiors, well-appointed kitchens and toilets. Some homes even have false ceilings with decorative mouldings and small chandeliers, just like in the movies. All this, on plots the size of postage stamps.

And yet, Shivaji Nagar and other similar localities like  Dharavi, Wadala and Bhandup live in the valley of the shadow of demolition. The BMC can be both benign and arbitrary. In Shivaji Nagar, no construction is permitted higher than fourteen feet. Any violation and sledgehammers may swing. Even though many houses routinely flout this restriction, demolition is not a norm. There is a policy to live and let live, which is why an inhabitant can pledge his life-savings for a pucca home. Contactors and officials understand each other. Pankaj Gupta had just completed building his own home and office in March 2012 when the BMC demolished its upper floor. “Bees saal mein pehli baar hua (It’s happened for the first time in 20 years),” he says stoically. It has hurt him, but the reason is politics, not personal.

Mumbai now is vertically cleaved into a binary of high-end luxury housing and hands-on, user-generated housing. Outside of the slums, there is no culture of building for oneself, discounting single-family anomalies such as Antilla. The model for cooperative middle-class housing—the mainstay of the 1970s that allowed families with modest incomes to build apartments—has almost gone. The state that once patronised cooperatives by providing subsidized land has now become a trader and auctioneer of land. The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), the state organisation responsible for generating housing stock, finds it easier to outsource to developers, at terms that benefit them. This sedentary mindset has permeated the rising middle classes: no one wants to do for oneself what they can get done for a price.

While the middle class is inexorably being squeezed out of the reckoning, slums remain the sites of true affordability and self-help. Badmouthed as eyesores and bastions of filth, civic bodies have mandated to make the city slum-free by 2015. The way to these Elysian fields is, naturally, to be forged by builders regulated by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), who are to re-house the so-called unauthorised but “eligible” slum dwellers in free units of 300 or so square feet each on 20-storey skyscrapers clumped together, while freeing a large portion of the occupied site for sale at market rates. Dharavi can now happily be renamed Bandra–Kurla South.

With policies allowing unilateral interventions by lobbies intent only on making capital, the collegial soul of Mumbai is being inexorably ripped out. Mumbaikars are now wilful accomplices to their agenda, bought over by ephemeral but colour-saturated carrots. When the pupils of your eyes can reflect only rupee symbols, you are reduced to a caricature of a citizen. Individual rights become everything, while urban responsibility is NIMBY—someone else’s concern. Mumbai seems headed down a one-way road to transformation for its own sake.

This city has had a history of reclamations—some that defined its urbanity, like those in the 1930s and 40s, and some contentious like those in the 1970s—but Mumbai has never been more a site for reclamation than it is today. Even as you read this, the land that is sought to be reclaimed is the ground beneath your feet.



.

Kala Ghoda Ver. 2.0

Once, just once in a while, does our city give back to its citizens. More through serendipity than through design, but who are we to complain? A new al-fresco space has been made accessible to the public at large, taking them off the streets around Kala Ghoda and elevating them one level above it, and allowing for a new vantage point from which to observe the beating, beating heart of South Bombay.

Through a an act of munificence, veteran photographer Kakubhai Kothari has set up a simple new gallery on the terrace of the Jehangir Art Gallery devoted exclusively to photography. The Gallery is itself small, an asymmetrical room of one straight and one curved wall, enough to hang about 24 midsized frames. This space was, for many years, the former studio of the water colorist who would sign his work as, simply 'Chetan'. Now back in the possession of the Jehangir management, this reconverted space shall, hopefully, be the venue for many exhibitions of photographs. The first one, appropriately enough, is by Kothari himself and he has put up several large unframed images of tigers that he photographed in the Bandhavgad, Sariska and Tadoba reserves.

What supersedes the new gallery, to me, is the terrace itself that I have to first traverse to get to the photographs. Reaching the top, having climbed the refurbished steel staircase next to the Samover, I realize how large the terrace is, and (reflecting the lobby and galleries below) how it is broken up into several footprints. It is currently, perhaps quaintly, carpeted over (see image) but I doubt this will last the monsoon. Nevertheless, (and am I speaking too soon here?) there is a potential for this space to be put to use in a variety of ways, should the management appreciate this.

Standing on the terrace looking to the West, I can observe life in the Kala Ghoda parking lot. In this, I am not alone. The lot has, for more than a century now, been overseen by a portentous head of Sir David Sassoon,
"...stuck like a schmuck up here
-an ahmaq.
a certified keer-e-khar –
                                (David Sassoon)
I can now see the old man eye to eye, as he sticks his “pilloried head/ out of a medallion/ in the pediment above the archway...” of the building formerly known as the Mechanics Institute. The Army and Navy Building and the Elphinstone College on either side make up the line of neo-Gothic edifices, whose details one can appreciate better from this crow's nest. There is the precarious Watson's Hotel that I fervently pray will not collapse just because I am looking at it. From beyond, I can clearly hear the bongs from the clock tower named after Premchand Roychand's mum calling the faithful to paryushan. To the east looms the other tower, named after another Jeejeebhoy, aka the Bombay Stock Exchange, and I wonder why India's second most photographed building needed to have a monstrous neon sign capping it, just to tell me of its provenance as Babel and Sodom Inc.

But best of all, I can turn my head up and look up into nothingness, unafraid of getting run over, propositioned, or hauled up for loitering.
Arun Kolhatkar had the same idea:
"This is the time of day I like best,
and this is the hour
when I can call this city my own;
when I like nothing better
than to lie down here, at the exact centre
of this traffic island..." 
                                  (Pi-dog)

But I find myself at a point somewhat removed from the centre of the lot both along the x and the z axis, and I am overwhelmed with a desire to lie down on my back on the carpet and stare at the waning, pink rippled dusk. I stop myself, of course, out of a sense of decorousness. There are too many people around. A couple with far too many children are making their way up the stairs after asking whether there is anything to see. There is. The best thing about the Jehangir Art Gallery is its stellar location. The second best thing is that it is a space that has always been free to all. This terrace could be the harbinger of an opportunity to become another welcome public space.

This said, I have some hopes too:
I hope that the terrace space will always remain open.

I hope that the newly created gallery shall always be dedicated to the display of photography.

I hope that the terrace will inspire installations specific to the opportunities the site offers.

I hope that the management of Jehangir will consider some light trelliswork to shelter visitors during the summer months.

I hope that the edges of the terrace shall not be barricaded with safety features that obscure the views of the streets below.

I hope that this space will be made available for lectures and performances in addition to displays of art, and that these shall never be made exclusive.

I hope better sense (and taste) shall prevail, especially during the Kala Ghoda Festival, unlike the ritualistic buggering up that happens once every year of the parking lot below.

I hope that Samovar shall be allowed to set up an al-fresco eating place. There is enough space for this.

I hope the skyline that we grew up with and loved will never be obliterated because of DC Rule 33/7.

I hope the sky may never fall on my head.

“A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig!
You got it! You got it! You got it!
It’s all yours now.
You can take it away 
Anytime you want
But first, examine it.”
(To a Crow)



(All the excerpted lines are from Arun Kolhatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems, 2004, Pras)

This is the way the city ends

This is the way the city ends,
this is the way the city ends,
this is the way the city ends,
not with a bang, but a whimper...






image © Mustansir Dalvi, 2012, all rights reserved.

FirstPost Mumbai: When Dharavi grows up, it wants to be Khotachiwadi.

Here is my new column on FirstPost.Com:

When Dharavi grows up, it does not want to be Shanghai

Dharavi Koliwada

Photo by Smita Dalvi, (c) 2009

When Dharavi grows up, it wants to be Khotachiwadi. Or Fontainhas. Certainly not Shanghai, nor Singapore, god forbid, with all its imposed hygiene and eugenic living. 

The vast slums of Mumbai are blithely derided and dismissed. They suffer from a monomaniacal insistence from the upper city: that they are unwanted and should be removed. This wanton labeling ensures they remain under-appreciated. Even when condescended to as being vital to the city's services — that they provide Mumbai's manpower — an undertone of otherness separates them from the city that matters. 

Slums in Mumbai, such as they are, have to be seen for themselves. Of course, many of them occupy plots whose ownership is contentious. But not all, having grown from earlier settlements that sometimes predate the city. 

Easily ignored in this tarring and feathering is that slums are diverse: they are just being settled or undergoing transformation, young or old, random or well laid out. Despite this, they share one important trait with the city itself — they are in a state of becoming. 

Slums, in their third stage of development, are not free from the threat of demolition. But they have ways to deal with it. What they cannot deal with is the finality of 'rehabilitation'.Reuters From their very rudimentary beginnings, one can notice a sense of order. Settled first as 'tent cities', slums begin their infancy as roofs, as mere shelters and little else. In their chrysalis stage, they get the 'slumdog' image that is so familiar — hutments with rough and ready enclosures of blue tarpaulin or flex movie hoardings, pattra or cement sheets held in place by brickbats. These are the settlements that suffer most in the rains, bear the brunt of frequent demolitions and fires, and have problematic sewerage and drainage. 

In their third stage, however, they aspire to becoming pucca, properly rebuilt with services equivalent to the rest of the 'legitimate' city. Large areas of the so-called slums of Mumbai have already reached this stage. They are rarely noticed. From Dharavi to Deonar, from Cuffe Parade to Bhandup, these erstwhile settlements are now full-fledged urban neighborhoods that create value for themselves and their immediate surroundings. Once again, a sense of order and self-similarity prevails, with most issues of hygiene and public health already resolved. 

These neighborhoods are hives of building activity. The houses here have long passed the hutment stage and are now as pucca as your own homes, albeit in constrained conditions. Unlike most flat owners (this means you), these homes occupy a plot on the ground and rise to a height that will not get them in trouble with the BMC. They are built in RCC and brick masonry, finished with ceramic tiles, both inside and outside, are clean and largely maintenance-free. They have electricity and piped water running to their kitchens and toilets. This is clearly seen by the miles of running pipes over ground, on both sides of the streets. The roads outside their homes are paved with interlocking tiles, just like any other part of the city. 

Despite this, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) chooses to name these localities as 'difficult' areas, and damn them to the eternal hell of rehabilitation. 

The first impression one gets while walking through these localities is the humane scale of building, the coziness of homes, shops and production units nestling close to each other. You know the fortune of each dweller is dependent on their neighbor. This social network is a vast support system, fueled by proximity and circumstance. One is reminded of the Barrio das Fontainhas in Goa, with its similar architecture of narrow, sheltered alleys, quaint, colorful facades and outdoor living. Or of Khotachiwadi, an urban village in Mumbai, a well-knit community, so popular with tourists who love just to walk through its narrow streets and pocket plazas. 

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of URBZ, located in Dharavi, study user-generated cities. They have interacted with various contractors and mistrys who build the houses in these 'slums' and have documented their work. They demonstrate that the construction is efficient and locally derived, based on such optimization of men, materials, processes and time as could give a few good lessons to professionals in building and management. Although untrained, these contractors develop on a bank of building lore, learning from precedent and experience, adjusting to the vagaries of budgets, climate and the ever looming threat of demolition. For example, their way of introducing toilets in places where underground infrastructure is absent is remarkable for its ingenuity. They are also true masters of recycling, nothing goes waste. Each house is built on the debris of its older avatar, which when demolished is compacted into a high plinth. Those organisations rating 'green' buildings for low carbon footprints and zero-energy construction would have a field day here.

These slums, in their third stage of development, are not free from the threat of demolition. But they have ways to deal with it. What they cannot deal with is the finality of 'rehabilitation'. Entire neighborhoods could be razed and reconstructed in a faux Singaporean image, with the inhabitants being 'rehoused' in zoo-cages of 300 square feet several feet above the ground. This is a strong possibility. This new model goes against the grain of every neighborhood as has developed organically over a period of several decades. The architect Richard Rogers has critiqued such models of rehabilitation: "If you can repair, it is so much more sustainable than starting again. We should reuse land and materials. Even slums can be renovated." 

The short, sharp shock proposed by the SRA will result not only in gentrification, but in displacement. The social integration of currently thriving neighborhoods and the value, both material and intangible, that they have infused into the plots they currently occupy will be unraveled in no time. Connections, associations, inter-dependency, a strong shoulder to rest on in times of need will all get subsumed in a miasma of legitimacy. It is sad to contemplate that the only network that these communities would now have easy access would be Facebook.

Dharavi Koliwada

Photo by Smita Dalvi (c) 2009

Street in Fontainhas, Goa

Photo by MalenaN; posted in virtualtourist.com

Khotachiwadi

FirstPost Mumbai.The Blue Tarpaulin

Here is my new column on FirstPost.Com.

The Blue Tarpaulin: What it bares about Mumbai's high-rises

In my opinion, La Familia Ambani did not not shift into their two billion dollar abode because of a Vaastu dysfunction. I think the problem was much more mundane. Antilla leaks. This is why Mumbai was subjected to the rather unedifying sight last monsoon of large parts of the world’s costliest urban home covered with blue tarpaulin.

Antilla apart, the blue tarpaulin is a sight that has become ubiquitous all over the city. Normally associated with slums in mid-growth or buildings under construction, Antilla caught our eye mainly because it was a skyscraper, a state of the art uberhaus, and one designed by a vaunted, outsourced architectural firm.

Let us begin with the moral of the story first: Mumbai’s climate will bite you on the bum if you do not respect it in the first place. The tarpaulin is indexical of the essential disjunction between our aspirations and the sensitivity we have to fulfill them.

As buildings in our city rise higher than ever — 100 storeys and more are now being commonly contemplated — the appreciation that they are being erected in a tropical climate seem to be bypassed by the day. Sleek, blister-packed, glass edifices routinely puncture our skies forming beacons shanghaied by visions of an uncharted future.

How considerate are these imaginings to the inhabitants within? The fully air-conditioned environments are all very well, but all it needs is a leaking building to undo such technologies. As every householder knows, cracks, fissures and leaks are often invisible and go undetected until the problem becomes malignant.

Mumbai has lost its horizontality. This is a metaphor at many levels. For Mumbai’s high rises, the vertical semantic itself, the need for each building to be tower-like, an icon splashed on front page advertisements of national newspapers, can be the problem.

In the tropics, any architecture, whose predominant feature is a wall, exists in denial of the hot summer, the wet monsoon and the yearlong humidity. Its 4mm glass exterior is the only protection against these insistent forces, and the pane is a very meagre insulation indeed. Whereas this knowledge is self-evident, your grandmum would tell you so, exigencies to ignore it are too strong to resist.

Technology and real-estate prices beguile both designers and their patrons to create potentially problematic buildings. There are locations in Mumbai that now go for up to Rs 700 per square inch, so the need to maximise saleable area commonly overrides common sense.

The choice of steel frame technology as a structural system is increasingly replacing RCC (Reinforced Cement Concrete) as the norm, for two reasons: the first is that building erection is prefabricated, dry and speedy. Secondly, the structure itself occupies the least space in the building footprint, and encloses many more square feet that can, of course, be monetised. So like a tetrapack of milk left out in the sun too long, the building bulges from the inside out, straining at its seams, appearing at first glance that all is well on the inside.

Mumbai has lost its horizontality. This is a metaphor at many levels. We are increasingly out of touch with the ground beneath our feet, preferring, ever so easily to elevate ourselves out of the mulch of our city’s reality. The horizontal lines that were once its hallmarks, expressed in deep eaved roofs, wraparound verandahs, sheltered walls, and the triple-shuttered floor length windows, are sparingly visible in its inner city areas even today. These are features of low-rise buildings in the tropics. Ironically, it is the slum dweller who has adopted these vernaculars to create habitable space with a small amount of comfort conditions. The blue tarpaulin is now the waterproof, sheltering deep roof under which all the activities of life are possible. What is home for the slumwallah is the seasonal, ‘tempervary’ solace for the Ambanis.

Horizontality will have to become imperative in Mumbai’s high-rises if they are to remain hospitable to their occupants. This is a part of the world where sunlight abounds. What is needed is the creation of shade, and the provision of cross-ventilation. This is possible only when the outer layer of a building (whether shanty or skyscraper) is imagined as an overcoat and not a lycra bikini.

Only by investing in a layer outside of the habitable space will any building handle both insolation and precipitation. Several countries in South East Asia (Malaysia in particular) have begun to adapt their high-rises to these principles, creating what is now in architectural circles referred to as ‘the bio-climatic skyscraper’. Here, the design choices themselves determine the building’s outer form and inner spaces, shaped to create defences against the elements and to maximise on the comfort of its inhabitants. Any reliance on mitigation in the form of energy-consuming mechanical means is minimised through this simple realisation: good design comes free.

Urban Bawl 2

Here is the second in the series of Urban Bawl columns in Time Out Mumbai for their 'Back of the Book' page. This piece is on city, memory and a set of installations by Jitish Kallat.

Bombay, or what’s left of it

This was an occasional piece written for the Mumbai Reader 10 (2010, UDRI, compiled by Pankaj Joshi and Isaac Matthew) published last year. Given the speed and unpredictability of change in Bombay's urban space currently, I am posting it on this blog to see whether it still holds good.

Bombay, or what’s left of it

It all depends on the way you look at it. Our city is too diverse and too variegated for one single future. It is the sum of its parts and each part, in turn, is the sum of its parts, and so on, ad infinitum. Nowhere is this expressed better than in Mumbai’s inner city- Bombay.

Limits

What are the limits to the inner city? Everything south of the mill lands? Everything south of the Mithi? Neighbourhoods and precincts in our city are undefined, subtle, constructed out of mutual agreements rather than constructed of discreet boundaries. For definition instead, we have generic Wards. ‘C’ and ‘D’ Wards in Mumbai are the archetype of the Inner City, of the Bombay of public memory, identified not by colours on a map, but by paths, places and domains, resonating with neighbourhood names –Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, Tardeo, and landmarks- Panjrapol, Gaiwadi, the Cotton Exchange. The urban character, its fabric, its people and its apparent chaos and filth all make it what it is. With the current penchant of making-over all that is old in the city, one wonders what of this will sustain, even a decade from now. For far too long decisions about change are made by foregrounding visual blight as a tool of damnation- garbage, decrepitude, rundown areas, leaking house-gullies, open wiring; all these and more are reason enough for wholesale change. Eyes, of course, are the easiest to fool.

Preserve

Current models of redevelopment assume the helplessness of the residents of the Inner City to better themselves; that these hapless denizens require the benevolence of their ‘betters’-developers and legislators alike. It is assumed that tenants and landlords coexist in an extended no man’s land, thanks to the vagaries of the Bombay Rents, Hotel, and Lodging House Rates Control Act, 1947. Interestingly, it is the Rent Act itself that, over the last sixty years has helped preserve and sustain the egalitarian character of the Inner City. Owners, landlords, tenants, sub-tenants, leave and licensees, common-law occupants, parasites, saprophytes, the homeless and their relatives, friends and pets all make the broad spectrum of life that fill these streets and enrich our city. The enforced clampdown of rents and sales for decades prevented sudden gentrification of these valuable areas, preventing the polychromy of shared existence to be faded down to the monotone ‘Owner’.

Over the rest of Mumbai, as its peripheries ballooned northwards and general affluence rose steadily since the early eighties, the idea of owning a piece of the property pie eclipsed the idea of rented property in the minds of its inhabitants as the only ‘safe’ model for living. Today, home and material estate have got mixed up in a bind, severely strained by the limited space of a city bounded on three sides by water. This has led to a siege mindset, where the real survivors are Owners, and people who need to rent ‘transients’. Little wonder then, that speculators have had an open field over the last thirty years.

Commodity

Today, when even the possibilities of northward expansion seem to be exhausted, the city is turning on itself, trying to survive by devouring its own children. Every area in the city, salt pan or mangrove, green field or brown, lived in or decrepit, outer or inner is fair game. In the hyperdense inner city of the C and D wards, land is the key commodity for speculation, of forcing a value on paper, of commodifying a human need for profit. This paper value multiplies without restraint simply by assigning a perceived agency to it, either by speculation or even legislation. The recent modifications to the Town Planning Act, the eponymous clauses 33/7and 33/9 legislate the densification the already dense.

These Santa Clauses for the speculators posit redevelopment of inner city areas as if they are tabula rasa. The recent proposal for the area we now know as Bhendi Bazaar is a case in point where several hundred structures are proposed to be consumed into thirty or forty high rises. The inevitable result of this would mean the erstwhile tenants would be under severe pressure to move away, those who can afford the many zeros per square foot would move in leading to wholesale  and instant gentrification and demographic change. Modifications in the existing fabric, creating filth-free gated communities, with gated mindsets will lead to a substantial reduction of communal wealth that is the street, the plaza, the playground. What politically correct, un-cosmopolitan, pristine and monolith will replace the grungy surprises, the get-your-hands-dirty delights of the much loved and much visited Chor Bazaar?

Property/ Value

Physical land in our inner city is acutely finite, so how can it be sub-divided, ad infinitum? Historically, landed property defined feudalism. Owning land or real estate generated income for the owner without the owner having to do the actual work of the estate. Landed property was a key element of the feudal pecking order, and freed the owner for other tasks such as living the high life.

In the early years after America shucked off the British yoke, its economy was largely agrarian. Land ownership led to social divide, exploitation and slave ownership. Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice (1795) defined two kinds of property- one, Natural property, ‘which comes from the creator, such as earth, air, water’ and the other ‘artificial or acquired property, the invention of men.’ Paine felt that equality in the latter was impossible; but equality in the former was necessary. ‘Every individual in the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of property or its equivalent. …the condition of persons born after civilization should not be worse than that of those born before. The earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.’ Thomas Paine stressed that individual property should be manifest only in the value of improvement, and not in the actual ownership of land. ‘Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land, owes to the community a ground rent (I know no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds.’ In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat, in his book Economic Harmonies, defined property not as a physical object, but rather as a relationship between people with respect to an object. What one owned was not the object in itself but the value of the object. As such, Bastiat believed that the increasing proportion of communal wealth to private property would result in grater and agreeable egalitarianism.

These lessons from the past are still relevant and can be put to effect in seeking solutions to redevelop of the inner city of Bombay. Some of these prescriptions may appear counter intuitive, but thinking outside the box is the only option available in recent times. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative (from the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals) must therefore be invoked: ‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.’ To paraphrase Kant crudely- ‘Do unto others as you would have everybody do unto everybody’. Using his sage advice, here are a few, perhaps counter-intuitive ways of seeing a possible future for Community living in the Inner City.

Define the Limits of the inner city        

Our city has to overcome the ‘one size fits all’ approach of the Development Control Rules. Colaba and Virar cannot be developed by the same standards. It is the wholesale application of the DC rules that wreaks the maximum damage on the well defined fabric of many of the older areas in the city. Controls need to be stated, most certainly, but from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, making local conditions a priority rather than monetising every thing into units of FSI. Define neighbourhoods, even streets, as units for development. The inner city is a sum of parts, a mosaic of subcultures, and palimpsest of historical accretion. To achieve this, an institutional setup needs to be envisaged where residents and administrators combine into a unified, democratically run association of inner city management.

Create a model for Participation, not Ownership

Every permanent resident should be considered a part-owner or shareholder in a neighbourhood. Individual ownership, tenancy and occupation should be limited to ‘built property’, not the land on which the property is built. The inner city is old, and worn down. A massive restructuring of infrastructure is necessary. In order to achieve this, developers will need to be called in to technically and financially assist reconstruction. Each developer should therefore be compensated by a right to avail an equivalent area of Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) outside the inner city for proposals of buildings with unit areas not less than 1000 sft. This would imply that the developer can build and profit from housing for middle and upper middle income holders, adding to housing supply, while not further congesting the inner city.

Free the Ground Plane for Public Use

The Ground Plane shall be excluded from individual holdings completely and be administered and developed by an association of inner city management. Amenities for the benefit of local users shall be created, and accessed by pedestrian movement alone. Vehicular accesses could edge neighbourhoods and enter them only at specific points, and as cul-de-sacs. The areas under buildings can be used as they are used now-for social interaction, community activity, rituals, even production with mutual understanding between neighbours. Vertical living, currently being much touted as the only solution to the congested city, can therefore be re-examined critically. Residential and office spaces can then be taken off the ground, increasing individual safety and privacy.

Preserve Urban Memory- the fabric of the inner city

We live in a city of history, of onion layers of memory. These layers allow us to take the city for granted. That is as it should be, for knowledge leads to ‘ownership’ that ensures a sense of well being in the city. Any rebuilding must preserve erstwhile (names and) footprints, and the street character layout, complementing the essentially pedestrian nature of inner city streets. Any sensitive reconstruction must display an appreciation of heritage and its effective conservation; most importantly preserve egalitarian nature of the inner city. There is a city beyond that the eyes can see. It is intangible and it is vast. It is as Whitman describes himself, full of contradictions: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’.

World over, inner cities age and ripen with the respect and care of its inhabitants. Our inner cities are older than most, yet most alike in form and character. They define Bombay, or what’s left of it. Let us leave some parts of the city free from the jackboot stomp of the speculator and accept that its residents are capable of determining its place in the new order. Unrealistic individual aspiration leads to a clamour for perceived rights, without accounting for responsibilities that come with it. If each one does not return to the city rather than merely take, we all stand diminished. We are, in a sense our own worst enemy.