Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai

by Anne Rademacher

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 11

  the many colleagues who have been a part of our Ecologies of Urbanism in Asia

  projects. 38 This approach builds on formative thinking across several arenas of scholarship to propose studies of urban nature-making that foreground place

  and context. Rather than assuming a singular, universal ecology, and thus a uni-

  fied experience of urban nature, our intention is to identify the multiple forms

  of nature—in biophysical, cultural, and political terms—that have discernable

  impact on power relations and human social action. In Ecologies of Urbanism in India, we wrote:

  Identifying and understanding these multiple forms is central to the analytic. Some hinge on human social processes, and some on non-human and/or biophysical ones.

  Each intersection may involve competing worldviews, aspirations, imaginaries, and

  assessments of the stakes of urban environmental change. Social efforts to ensure, create, or imagine ecological stability that characterize these intersections are often infused with ideas of political, social, or cultural improvement, revival, or restoration. To promote particular urban ecological futures, then, may also involve the reproduction or contestation of cultural ideas of belonging to certain social groups, territories (including the city, the nation-state, the region, and the realm called the

  ‘global’), or, indeed, nature itself. 39

  At the same time, an analytical stance that is exclusively social is only partial, and quite unhelpful for the reasons discussed above. The ecologies of urbanism

  approach therefore demands attention to the underlying biophysical conditions

  and natural histories of a place, and it requires a multi-scalar perspective that

  varies its analytical parameters according to the social and/or biophysical pro-

  cesses under consideration. The result, as we write, may be for example that “the

  appropriate boundaries of ‘the city’ are not automatical y known from municipal

  borders or demographic concentrations. Likewise, nation-state borders (may) not

  determine where and how a study begins and ends. ”40 Our focus is thus on processes, and the imperative of tracing the scales and boundaries that the processes themselves compose. In this sense, the very connections that allowed my own ethnographic work to move from Kathmandu to Mumbai, discussed in the preface,

  extend from the idea of ecologies of urbanism.

  While the analytic has proven generative in our efforts to understand urban

  environmental change in Asia, we recognize the enduring centrality of the bio-

  physical sciences, which usual y lay claim to the term “ecology” in its singular

  form. The biophysical sciences may offer only one in a constel ation of compet-

  ing and meaningful understandings of urban nature, and while each may enjoy a

  privileged or empowered social position at different moments, there is no question that regarding scientific ways of knowing biogeochemical processes and systems

  as unimportant leaves us with little capacity to understand socioenvironmental

  change. In this study, then, I pay particular attention to the specific concepts,

  methods and imperatives from ecosystem ecology that the architects assembled in

  12 City Ascending, City Imploding

  order to compose a scientific basis for “good design.” I ask what kind of ecological science the environmental architects learned. How did they employ that knowledge in their environmental design approaches?

  This question is motivated, in part, by the many ways that environmental schol-

  ars across disciplines have sought to more ful y integrate ecosystem science and

  social studies of the environment. A subfield of ecosystem ecology, the biophysical science of urban ecosystem ecology tends to follow theoretical and methodological innovations in ecology that include chaos theory, disturbance ecology, patch

  dynamics, and efforts to understand spatial heterogeneity. Urban ecology is not

  a science of ful y fixed successional patterns, homeostasis, human “disturbance,”

  and whol y predictive modeling that social analysts have historical y, at times with significant consequences, assumed. 41

  In North America, two urban research sites among the US National Science

  Foundation’s Long Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) initiatives have been partic-

  ularly generative of urban ecology research findings and analyses.42 These centers have long forged new ground in the scientific theory of urban ecosystems, and they have made significant contributions to the analytical tools available to scientists, social researchers, and design practitioners. An exemplary recent volume that captures some of the interdisciplinary accomplishments of this work, and its innova-

  tive models for urban ecosystems, is Pickett, Cadenasso, and McGrath’s Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design: Linking Theory and Practice for Sustainable Cities, 43

  but the wealth of particular and integrative studies produced in the Phoenix and

  Baltimore LTER’s, as well as the many other ecosystem-science grounded urban

  ecology research consortia in North America and beyond, is vast indeed. 44 For the purpose of this project, I wish to note the longstanding efforts among ecosystem scientists to understand human social dynamics, and to meaningful y include

  them in their conceptual and research models.45 Attempts to bridge natural scientific understandings of the way nonhuman nature works and understandings of

  how human societies work are neither new nor exclusive to urban ecology,46 yet ful y understanding how social and biophysical structures, functions, and agents

  mutual y produce one another remains a complex and robust challenge.

  What is striking to scholars in the environmental social sciences and humani-

  ties is the extent to which the science of urban ecosystem ecology has made it

  imperative to integrate human communities and human action into conceptual

  and practical models, not as automatic “disturbances,” but as “natural” compo-

  nents. 47 Similarly, a notable aspect of many so-called green or environmental design interventions is the aspiration to integrate a sophisticated understanding

  of biogeochemical cycles, energy flows, and other landscape considerations into

  architectural thinking and decision-making.48 Both worldwide and in specific locales, various sets of largely standardized metrics have emerged for assessing the degree to which individual buildings are attributed more formalized and quantifiable “green” status (e.g., LEED or BREEAM standards), but in an epistemological

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 13

  and practical sense, as will be explored in this book, environmental architecture

  transcends mere building codes and metrics. It encompasses aspirations for indi-

  vidual buildings, but also aspirations for transforming entire urban ecosystems in coupled social and biophysical terms.49

  In the social sciences, urban ecology signals a vast, multidisciplinary body of

  work that might be clustered into many subgroups, just a few of which I detail

  here. In current anthropological work, particularly that which builds from anthro-

  pological strains of political ecology, efforts to theorize and analyze contemporary urban nature tend to follow longstanding theoretical discussions of “nature-cultures” and “socionature. ”50,51 Rather than enumerate an exhaustive list, it is useful to notice here two nodes of convergence between urban and environmental scholarly

  praxis that have generated new understandings of the dynamics that coproduce

  social and natural change.52

  The first node tends to locate its theoretical anchors in the Lefebvrian asser-

  tion that,
by tracing the capitalist processes that knit together city and countryside, we are poised to recognize a “completely urban” world.53 From this vantage point, urban political ecology might be characterized by its primary attention to

  the multi-scaled conceptual and material systems that organize the flow of capital, labor, information, and power. These systems include cities, but are by no means

  confined to, or defined by them. Geographers have been particularly prolific in

  generating such mappings, while anthropologists and other ethnographers have

  demonstrated the historical and sociocultural particularities of larger scale pro-

  cesses when they are enacted in specific places. 54

  A second cluster of contemporary social scholarship asks how the social analyses of the environment that developed in non-urban contexts might shed new light

  on our understanding of socionatural life in cities. Here, “urban” tends to signal cities and city life. While Lefebvre’s broad urban processes are acknowledged, they do not automatical y configure the field of inquiry. Field sites in this second group are usual y located within or across specific cities or city neighborhoods, allowing researchers to explore how various forms of social asymmetry may be reproduced

  or reconfigured in the practice of urban environmental politics and manage-

  ment. By drawing from its legacy in environmental anthropology, this form of

  socio environmental inquiry affirms the fal acy of a clear rural-urban divide, but nevertheless takes the sociocultural and nonhuman natural life in dense human

  settlements to be distinctive from its non-city counterparts in significant ways.55

  Both strains of scholarship emerged in response to three somewhat distinc-

  tive scholarly conversations in the social sciences, each a quest to rethink modern urban/rural and nature/culture binaries. One involved formal y problematizing

  western analytical conceptualizations of ideal nature as located outside the city, and whol y separable from human culture; a second grappled with turn of the century globalism and economic globalization. 56,57 A third group, galvanized primarily through work in geography, proposed analytics for studying the urban in a way

  14 City Ascending, City Imploding

  that emphasized large-scale, interconnected nodes of power, and the material and

  social flows between them. Here the importance of movement and the notion of a

  simultaneously human and nonhuman “urban metabolism” formed an influential

  theoretical basis for specific research approaches. 58

  Among political ecologists in anthropology and sociology, Amita Baviskar’s

  proposal of a cultural politics approach to natural resources, and urban applica-

  tions of theoretical debates about attributions of agency to nature—such as those

  posed by Timothy Mitchel , Anna Tsing, and many others—challenged social ana-

  lysts of all disciplines to confront the untenable essence of fixed nature/culture dualities.59,60 Among geographers, Castree and Braun’s Social Nature laid useful groundwork for writing, as Braun encouraged elsewhere “a more than human

  urban geography. ”61 This, combined with sensitivities to the political dynamics of scientific knowledge and knowledge production—and particularly to “systems”

  thinking—set the stage for recent ethnographies of urban nature and urban soci-

  ality that defy easy disciplinary classification. 62, 63 Recent work by Timothy Choy exemplifies this new direction.64

  The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s previously mentioned, provocative call

  to rethink how scholars do their research in the Anthropocene Era brought the

  environment—its past, present, and possible futures—into sharp theoretical focus

  across the social sciences and humanities. 65 A call for disciplinary scholars to reconsider the place of nonhuman nature and biophysical processes in all manner

  of inquiry, this work underlined the impossibility of responsible consideration of nature without social life, and vice versa. Studies of urban ecology, to this mode of thinking, automatical y demand contextualized, ethnographic approaches to

  urban social and biophysical change. In outlining our analytical approach, K.

  Sivaramakrishnan and I contend that these must remain interconnected with, and

  anchored to, historical y produced social structures and imagined socionatural futures.66

  But what is the relationship between analytical and theoretical approaches to

  urban ecology and an actual, lived life of environmental architecture? In this book, my dual focus on environmental architectural pedagogy and practice assembles an

  inquiry into the ways that urban ecology’s prescriptives took social and material

  shape. I consider what conventional architects studied, and the extent to which

  they were able to do what they sought to do from their specific professional and

  historical positions in Mumbai. My goal was to observe whether and how ideas

  of what can and should be, according to the dictates of “good design,” gave way to actual built forms. It is, after al , together that these comprise the material form of cities—precisely those things meant to be resilient and enduring in the biophysical and social fabric of a city.

  A rich literature underlines the utility of distinguishing between architecture

  and design, as the historical, spatial, and political assumptions signaled by both are complex.67 In its very basic sense, architecture usual y points to the making

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 15

  of individual structures, while design and its close associate, planning, signal the broader, specific, and desired interconnections between them. Keeping in mind

  their very distinctive, and quite consequential, histories, the reader will notice that in this work, I tend to use these terms interchangeably. This simply reflects their usage by the environmental architects with whom I worked and learned at RSIEA;

  but it should not be read as a dismissal of the very important theoretical insights that scholars of architectural history, postcolonial urbanism, and nationalist politics advance when they disentangle these processes careful y. 68

  In this work, the reader will notice the ubiquity of the term “good design,” which RSIEA architects employed to mark an ecological rubric for how a built form

  should be conceptualized, sited, and interlinked with underlying water, energy,

  nutrient, and waste systems. Such contextualization gave singular built forms an

  assumed embeddedness in environmental processes at a variety of scales, includ-

  ing site-specific questions about orientation to light or shade, as well as questions of placement in a watershed or a mosaic of land use and land cover patches. In

  this sense, environmental architecture and “good design” were two expressions

  of a simultaneously singular and scaled undertaking, and green expertise was

  distinguished by the commitment to engage complexity through thought across

  multiple scales.

  Thus the reader will also notice that the phrases “green architecture” and “green

  design” are also used interchangeably in this book; here again, I do not wish to

  imply an analytical conflation of architecture and design. I follow instead the terms that RSIEA architects used to index the wide array of technologies, materials, and conceptual approaches to building practices that they believed would improve the

  overall sustainability profile of a building and wider site, a city, and onward to an interconnected city-countryside continuum of urban landscapes.

  Conceived in this way, we might consider the assumption of automatic embed-

  dedness in broader environmental systems as a sustaining logic for linking “good

  design” to a transformativ
e movement. That movement, in both global form and

  place-based expression, often explicitly aims to change core concepts, forms, and

  practices of ecology in and of cities.

  As an ethnographer, I draw guidance in this book from the lived experience

  of contextualized, everyday life in a specific historical moment, and in the social processes through which people consciously described and experienced city space

  in the making. My hope is to explore the coupled social and biophysical choreog-

  raphy, however suspended it ultimately remained in the realm of aspiration, that

  brought urban ecosystem ecology into harmony with architecture, and ultimately

  with urban social forms. In doing so, I notice and mark points of friction, mean-

  ing-making, and experienced limits.

  It is with care that I chose architects as the focal community for this work. Despite the compelling place of both the theoretical figure and the social agent, cultural anthropologists usual y defer to the expertise of archaeology and scholarship in

  16 City Ascending, City Imploding

  material culture to address the relationship between basic units of social organization and architectural forms, artifacts, and practices. Yet we have sometimes, intentional y or unintentional y, embraced rather rigid associations between built forms and social forms. In fact, the very endurance of architectural forms has sometimes led to fixed and determinative approaches to social explanation.69 In this study, imagining and making built forms are key social practices through which architects consciously and intentional y bridged their understanding of ecosystem ecol-

  ogy and their intentions for a more “sustainable” social reality in Mumbai.

  Just as was true in earlier reference to the science-social science interface, the idea that material form and social life are interconnected is neither new nor novel.

  Among a host of examples in architecture and design history, the Green Cities

  Movement and related experiments in environmental design were in part intended

  to promote social vitality, and sometimes even social rehabilitation, by creating

  ecological y contextualized built forms. 70 Likewise in this project, contemporary green architects often expressed intentions to promote or enable revitalized social configurations through their material designs. Unlike much modernist architecture, however, those intentions were grounded in an environmental restoration