trace the resilience of the moral ecologies and temporal sensibilities that main-
tain green design as a tool of future salvage and a marker of identity. While the
structural elements of economic growth, new building construction, and socio-
economic development in Mumbai constitute several books in their own right,
this chapter sketches their formative contours by noting how they converge with
green architects’ agentive efforts.
The contextualized, structural y conditioned figure of the architect returns in
the book’s conclusion; so too does the importance of moral ecologies and temporal
sensibilities for making dormant aspirations into resilient forces shaping social
22 City Ascending, City Imploding
life, social change, and ecologies of urbanism in Mumbai. Indeed, whether study-
ing social change or ecological process or both, our tools of analysis are in a flux that mirrors the lived realities profiled, and suspended in layers of context and
power, in this book.
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2
The Integrated Subject
“At the Institute of Environmental Architecture, we believe that the architect’s primary role is stewardship of the land & environment. It is in establishing this intrinsic co-relation between human beings and the rest of the natural
world that the architect’s creative abilities are realized.”
—Vision Statement, Rachana Sansad Institute for
Environmental Architecture
As I prepared my first invited talk at Rachana Sansad Institute for Environmental
Architecture, my thoughts fixed on the presence of a mutual question between me,
in the role of an invited speaker assumed to be worthy of at least an hour of focused attention, and the audience, a group of professional architects assembled as students of environmental architecture. I’d never trained in architecture, and I’d never met the students or faculty member prior to receiving the lecture invitation. Stil , as I recounted in the preface, the social and ecological processes foregrounded by cultural y charged debates over urban housing, informal shelter, and built space in general had led me to Mumbai, and had, quite unexpectedly, brought me among
them as a guest lecturer.
In a fit of nervousness that my lack of an architecture background might pre-
vent me from sufficiently connecting with the students, I found myself settling on the reassurance of a shared, and always contextual y informed mutual question:
“What does urban ecology mean? ” I had used this question to help me organize my analysis of the very case study my lecture would present, and I realized it was also likely shared with this new and unfamiliar audience. For the architecture students, the meaning, or rather meanings, of urban ecology would form the basis
for my urban ecology perspective on the Kathmandu case. For me, it was a matter
of opening that same question afresh. The architects enrolled in an environmen-
tal architecture program presumably sought a kind of training that would enable
certain new perspectives, insights, and forms of knowledge. In sharing my work,
I thought, perhaps I’d also get a glimpse of the kind of practice that constituted an urban ecology approach in architecture in contemporary Mumbai.
23
24 The Integrated Subject
Beyond the lecture hal , of course, public discourse in South Mumbai buzzed
with discussions of the city’s new development plan. For this short but animated
period, a wide range of the city’s publics found it a bit less preposterous to imagine new, more ecological built forms animating the future urban landscape, supplemented, perhaps even generously, by new open spaces. I held that in mind as I
made my way to Prabha Devi, climbed the open, airy staircase of Rachana Sansad’s
main building, and met a group of RSIEA students and faculty for the first time.
At the close of the presentation I invited questions, and several students responded by offering comparative reflections on similar cases in India. A range of design and spatial concerns that were not part of my usual analytical impulses emerged in
their detailed critique, giving me a first experiential glimpse of the conceptual and technical dimensions of RSIEA’s pedagogy of environmental design. My place as an
anthropologist of environmental architecture was thus quite clearly rendered: as I learned from my interlocutors, and was consulted as a sort of “green expert” whilst discussing the ways my expertise fell short, I would also interact with them intellectual y and personal y. Each encounter made the context even as I sought to document and understand that same context, and I was soon engaged in an ethnography
of the training and practice of environmental architecture at RSIEA.
Immediately afterward, I scribbled notes and questions, puzzling over the unfa-
miliar references and design analytics this group of student professionals brought to bear on my lecture. Specific epistemologies of environmental and social change, and the suite of techniques their profession might apply to the case, seemed to
ground their shared expectations of what urban ecology meant in the Kathmandu
I’d just discussed. Here, I thought, is perhaps an emergent praxis, an ethnographic understanding of which would depend on attending to the ways that experiencing
RSIEA training would codify, activate, and enable a process of translation between a domain general y associated with ecology, and the agentive practice of environmental design.
Soon after that first lecture, this study unfolded. I first focused intensely on
experiencing and understanding the pedagogical model employed at RSIEA. By
following an entire curricular cycle among the students, I noted the program’s form and content, its geographic reach as charted in course study tours that extended
far beyond Mumbai, its programmatic flexibility, and its periodic moments of fix-
ity. Completely new to architecture in discipline and practice, I tried to grasp key substantive components, metrics, and the sources (alternately global, regional, and grounded in smaller scale places) from which they derived when invoked in their
“environmental” guise. As I attended classes (hurriedly taking notes on topics like thermal comfort and design or the environmental efficiency attributes of India’s
regional vernacular forms); traveled to places like Chennai, Bangalore, Koorg, and Auroville to study notable examples of regional environmental architecture; and
walked the field site for a capstone design assignment in Pali, I was simultaneously a student, a professor, and a researcher. My life and livelihood stood apart from
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The Integrated Subject 25
the real life stakes of mastering the training and excelling in its aftermath, yet I felt ever more invested, both intellectual y and personal y, in that same training and
its outcomes.
This decidedly unusual field position is not without unresolved complexi-
ties. I am not technical y trained in architecture or architecture education, and
so this book does not pretend to analyze the work of RSIEA architects according
to a specific architectural or educational theory. Nor is it an operational assessment intended to gauge the program’s relative success or failure. Furthermore, to
design the study using RSIEA as its epicenter meant that the singular language
of the Institute and much of the profession—English—left many undoubtedly
important dimensions of the place, situations, and layers of contests within them
either obscured or entirely omitted. The scope of the study, and its potential to
address specific questions, then, must be acknowledged as inevitably partial and
incomplete. The re
ader who seeks nuanced analyses of the issues this book cannot
address may find it lacking, yet I hope nevertheless convinced to enrich the observations and analysis herein through further attention and study.
• • •
In the bustling commercial and residential neighborhood of Prabha Devi, Rachana
Sansad hosts a variety of undergraduate and graduate degree programs in several
urban and design fields. It was founded in 1960 as an Academy for Architecture,
and the school gradual y introduced undergraduate and graduate programs in
art, interior design, fashion and textiles, construction management, urban and
regional planning, photography, music, and event management. Rachana Sansad
is a school bustling with young professionals who have returned for advanced
study or training, as well as students receiving their first professional degrees. It draws from across Greater Mumbai and Maharashtra, and administers all of its
courses in English.
Among its graduate programs is the Rachana Sansad Institute of Environmental
Architecture. Although an Academy of Architecture was founded within Rachana
Sansad at the time of its inception, the Institute of Environmental Architecture
was not established until 2002. From the first semester, which saw an enrollment
of just two students, the Institute has grown to host forty students per year. Each undertakes a two-year, master’s level degree program and earns a postgraduate
degree in Environmental Architecture. A rolling roster of roughly thirty-five vis-
iting instructors joins a core faculty of four—three trained as architects and one as an environmental scientist—to teach courses, lead study tours, conduct field
project work, and evaluate student performance. The Institute maintains its official university affiliation with the Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University
in Nashik.
RSIEA’s public vision statement, declared in printed literature and on its web-
site, describes a conceptual mission in which architects regard their professional
26 The Integrated Subject
actions as automatic environmental disturbances, much in the way that early char-
acterizations of ecology and nature regarded human activity in terms of perturba-
tion and impact. 1 The statement reads, in part:
When architects construct buildings, it has an impact on the environment. It af-
fects the ecology of the place, disturbs the flora and fauna, changes the course of water bodies, pol utes the air and depletes finite natural resources. Is such destruction imminent and inevitable? We don’t think so. At the Institute of Environmental Architecture, we believe that the architect’s primary role is ‘stewardship’ of the land
& environment. It is in establishing the intrinsic co-relation between human beings and the rest of the natural world that the architect’s creative abilities are realized. 2
At the time of this study, most of the students who enrolled in the RSIEA master’s program did so while continuing to work in professional architectural firms and
smaller practices. Few could afford to sacrifice their income to devote exclusive
attention to the course work, and the schedule of classes is designed with this in mind. Nevertheless, the travel-intensive study tours that form an integral aspect
of the program, and are optional, are historical y heavily enrolled. Students may
not be financial y positioned to leave employment completely to undertake the
course, but the level of personal and financial commitment was significant, a point to which I will return in a later chapter. 3
Students come to RSIEA from varied ethnic and religious backgrounds, and
faculty often remarked that they hoped that the religious and cultural diversity
present in the classes would mirror that of the wider Mumbai population. The
male-female ratio slightly favored women at the time of the fieldwork, but by
2017 women constituted 90% of new enrollees. When I asked faculty members
why they thought women’s numbers were rising so dramatical y, answers tended
toward noting that such statistics change from new class to new class of students.
Conversations with female students, on the other hand, emphasized that contin-
ued graduate study in any field often allowed young women to delay getting mar-
ried, even if only temporarily. University admission is official y described as per merit and government reservation policies, but at the time of the fieldwork I met
very few students from the social categories official y considered “reserved.” The academic profile of students tends to be strong, with most having achieved a position in the “first class” as undergraduates. 4
At first glance, RSIEA’s degree program in Environmental Architecture looks
extraordinarily ambitious, perhaps so much so as to be quite unrealistic. A wide
range of courses not only covers basic concepts in the ecosystem and environ-
mental management sciences, but also an extensive array of environmental topics
in design technologies and techniques, information systems for landscape analy-
sis and mapping, law and policy, and the social sciences. A quantitative methods
course is included in the required curriculum, as are group field projects and a
ful y independent final thesis. In addition, RSIEA regularly organizes and hosts
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The Integrated Subject 27
public programming that explores contemporary questions in environmen-
tal design. The Institute’s location in Mumbai allows it to draw from differently
trained and positioned voices to address questions of urban sustainability, urban
development, housing, green building techniques, and policy reform. While far
from the most prestigious architecture graduate program in Mumbai or in India,
the Institute is widely recognized as the first of its kind, and is in this sense a path-breaking pioneer.
Like its students, the core and visiting faculty are also practitioners in their
relevant fields. Their demographic and cultural composition varies from year to
year, but during my field work period the faculty’s male-female ratio hovered in an almost even split. Instructors were of various ages, from early thirties to late sixties, and their cultural backgrounds included Gujarati, Marathi, Tulu, and Muslim. In
addition to teaching together, several faculty members also practice professional y in the context of the Institute’s Research and Design Cel , which regularly serves as a source of case studies used in RSIEA courses.5
• • •
How does one forge an environmental steward from a practicing architect? More
precisely, and consistent with the Institute’s stated mission, how does one assem-
ble a pedagogical bridge between conventional architecture and its environmental
alternative? As the first program to attempt to build that bridge in India, it seemed important to understand where RSIEA came from and the logic that brought its
founders together.
Tracing the Institute’s genesis narrative might begin with its founding scientist, now a senior core faculty member. A modest and observant man in his sixties, Dr.
Ashok Joshi holds a master’s degree in zoology and a Ph.D. in environmental sci-
ence. He has never received formal training in architecture, yet he described the
earliest germs of the RSIEA idea as the product of his conversations with architects about the absence of an integrative way of thinking about ecology and built space
in Mumbai. Recounting his personal intellectual and professional trajectory, he
described a specific ki
nd of learning that he experienced in settings which brought multiple disciplinary approaches to environmental questions:
When I was doing my master’s degree, we had a scientific program that was over-
seen by the United States National Science Foundation . . . it involved students from different departments and . . . we took up the issue of pol ution. They said that this was an integrated subject; it cannot be (addressed) by (just) one department. So it involved botanists, chemists, zoologists, and people from all different branches of the sciences. . . . (From) that I learned . . . the basics of environmental studies. And then for my Ph.D. I took up an environmental problem: the effects of pesticides and human wastes on fish . . . . From 1976–82 I was working as a scientist on two different projects dealing with ecological impacts. . . . Around that time, one of my friends, an architect, started discussing the environmental aspects of architecture. He would
28 The Integrated Subject
Figure 2. Dr. Joshi delivers a lecture on rainwater harvesting in an RSIEA classroom. Photo by the author.
ask me questions about plants, water treatment, or ventilation . . . and when I asked him why (he had not learned these things) in his architecture training—you know,
at least some basic things about the environment—he said, “wel , it’s just not part of it.” I understood very clearly then that there was a huge scope for architects to learn about the environment. So we combined his architecture knowledge and my ecology
knowledge and we came to Rachana Sansad. We asked them if we could start a course, and we proposed it to the Maharashtra State Board of Technical Education. . . . Eventual y we framed an entire (curriculum) and the Board gave us permission to give a diploma. . . . So for about three years we were giving this as a one-year course. 6
Soon the one-year program became a two-year, master’s degree-granting program.
He continued:
For three years we did that course, and after that the YCMOU (the accrediting uni-
versity) expressed an interest. So we expanded the course and (curriculum) and got approval for a master’s degree—two years. . . . Initial y we had only two students, but when it became a master’s degree, we had an intake of twenty.7
Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Page 6