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

by Anne Rademacher

I’m the next President of the United States.”

  The fact that an infamous election defeat erased Gore’s presidential aspirations

  aside, I wondered how a film I regarded as a standard among American environ-

  mental studies audiences might come to life in this very different context. At the 40

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  Ecology in Practice 41

  same time, I paused over the very fact that our first collective RSIEA experience, and perhaps even the framing narrative for the welcoming program itself, was An Inconvenient Truth, a 2006 Academy Award-winning American documentary

  film on climate change. I had viewed, and shown, the film several times, drawing

  from it regularly in my own environmental studies courses back in New York. But

  viewing it here, among a group of architects who were now students of the envi-

  ronment, gave it a curious set of new possibilities. Although useful for signaling the global-scale stakes of any kind of environmental training and action, Gore’s

  lecture-driven, PowerPoint slide-laden film struck me as nevertheless awkward

  and somehow out of place. Perhaps an anthropological preoccupation with context

  specificity had led me to expect something that was, at least, more overtly architectural and at most, more attuned to distinctly South Asian concerns and imperatives for green design. Regional environmental predictions were dire, after al , spanning issues of future water scarcity, crippling levels of air and toxics pol ution, enormous coastal populations vulnerable to sea level rise, and massive and expanding socioeconomic inequalities. This is not to say that I hadn’t expected program presenters to invoke global climate change, but rather that locating its narrated starting point with a film made famous in part for the role of a former American vice president

  seemed surprising to me, but quite natural to the audience I sat among.

  The film outlined a historical narrative of global environmental awareness that

  I myself had invoked often when I taught in the U.S. From our auditorium seats,

  we gazed together at Earthrise, the stunning 1968 Apollo Space Mission photo of Planet Earth, followed by the even more ubiquitous Blue Marble Earth photo taken from Apollo 17. These images, and the historical moment of consciousness-raising

  they had come to index, drew us toward an imaginative leap from our physical

  places in an auditorium in Prabha Devi, and the city of Mumbai, to conceptual

  scales of larger regions and even larger global landscapes. An Inconvenient Truth portrayed just that: a scientifical y coherent set of interlocking biophysical systems that were under dire and intensifying stress; these would require dramatic reorientations in politics, economies, and policies to alleviate. We all had a place in the reorientation process: salvaging the global future from the ravages of climate change would involve not only science, but also collective acts of consciousness-raising, environmental stewardship, and decided ecological engagement. From

  the center of this narrative, it was difficult to differentiate between the global, universalized planetary risk the film emphasized, and the deeply heterogeneous

  social and geographic texture of the localized threats that climate change posed.

  To commence our RSIEA experience by focusing on this planetary scale afforded

  a temporary entitlement to think beyond the messiness of places, including the

  place in which we sat, transfixed, and watched. When the very future of an aggre-

  gated humanity was suspended in the balance, the intricacies of Mumbai’s political and social environment—or any of the city’s specificities, for that matter—seemed

  almost a decadent luxury to consider.

  42 Ecology in Practice

  The two-year course began, then, with what might be regarded as a conven-

  tional, Western-centric, undifferentiated narration of environmental belonging

  and responsibility: human beings inhabit a common planet, share a common

  future, and depend on a biophysical context more vast and complex than any

  scale at which we live individual or everyday social lives. To situate the question of responsibility for having caused, or for perpetuating, climate change across a continuum attuned to historical circumstances and power relations seemed to miss

  the global point, and its attendant moral imperative.

  An Inconvenient Truth surely had another possible effect. By opening the RSIEA program with a film so fixed on the global scale, the faculty conveyed to new students that the curricular agenda would prepare them to assume a legitimate place

  in global circuits of knowledge, data exchange, and organized responses to envi-

  ronmental change. An RSIEA degree would activate more than local y situated

  expertise; it would prepare its environmental architects to navigate the global

  arena of green expertise.

  But the lights came up and quickly drew us firmly back into place. A guest

  visiting professor in that term, Dr. Doddaswamy Ravishankar of the Indian gov-

  ernment-owned Housing and Urban Development Corporation, stood before us

  at the prominent if age-worn podium. Behind him the screen that just moments

  before had led us to imagine the vast universals of planetary scales now read sim-

  ply, “The Morality of Sustainability.” As if to balance the blue planet image with an equal y galvanizing regional narrative, he quickly clicked the keyboard to summon

  a new slide. It recited a familiar passage:

  I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer

  this country unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

  Lord Macaulay’s address to the British Parliament, February 2, 18351

  In an instant, India’s distinctive historical experience of European colonial expansion, and Mumbai’s particular political and economic conditions under the British

  Raj, flooded back into the picture. Ravishankar’s aim was not to ponder the authenticity or ubiquity of the quote, but rather to remind his audience that the anthropogenic origins of climate change were not embedded in a uniform global history

  of burning fossil fuels; its very emergence depended on extractive and exploitative global political economic patterns that were themselves administered according

  to specific values and moral sensibilities. The very stuff of Enlightenment notions of progress—the Industrial Revolution, the extractive networks and trade systems

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  Ecology in Practice 43

  through which it expanded, and the modern history of development across the

  postcolonial world, were all quite unevenly implicated in the global environmental conditions of the present. While at the planetary scale we might all share future

  consequences quite likely to be indifferent to which communities are more or less

  implicated in its cause, he suggested, it may also be the case that the political economic circumstances within which climate change was enabled had left us dis-

  tracted from certain historical y practiced or known alternatives. If it was through the colonial and twentieth century postcolonial political economy that the present crisis was forged, then the ecological distortions that came in its wake were inex-tricably tied to historical processes of erasure, domination, and in Ravishankar’s framing, a loss of the very “thing” that made those in the room c
ollectively eligible to claim the identity of Indian.

  An educational undertaking like RSIEA, one that would draw part of its content

  from regional y-specific built forms and ideas that long predate India’s colonial

  experience, thus began to situate itself in an explicit accounting of the respon-

  sibilities that students might consider distinctly “Indian” or unique to “Indian”

  cultural identity in an era of climate change. From this vantage point, Ravishankar implied, the environmental architect in India would learn the scientific language

  associated with the scale of the Blue Marble, but also proceed with an eye toward

  recovering the situated past; such a recovery was essential if we were to redirect the environmental future. We were in Mumbai, after al , a city whose contemporary

  built landscape was woven with the remnants of textile manufacturing and the

  laborer housing that characterized much of the later years of colonial rule there.

  Beyond the transforming mil scape, the city was richly animated by grand, iconic

  structures that daily retold the history of the city’s colonial social and spatial order.

  The meeting point of planetary environmental stresses and appropriately “Indian”

  remedies, according to Ravishankar, would thus partly lie in the architectural

  work of historical reclamation. Though the room was packed with students from a

  complex array of backgrounds, the cultivation of their collective identity as Indian environmental architects had clearly begun.

  “These days in India we have money and technology, but what is lacking are

  the institutional mechanisms to create sustainability,” he continued. These were not foreign to India, he assured us; rather they were deeply ingrained in regional history as ancient and indigenous. A sustainable sensibility need not be imported, he lectured: “We need only look to our own past.” Repeatedly appealing to the importance of “maintaining our integrity,” Ravishankar told students that the long his-

  tory of “imported, Western ideas of sustainability” exposed it as “hypocritical” and profoundly incomplete. Western building practices denied “a place for the intrinsic spirituality of sustainability. It is Western nations that should be looking to us to learn about sustainability; it is only India that can teach them inner growth.” Ravishankar underscored his powerful point by invoking this supposedly innate, essential y

  “Indian” understanding of the intersection of spirituality and sustainability.

  44 Ecology in Practice

  With those in the auditorium riveted, Ravishankar narrated a sharp reversal of

  the colonial calculus of power and dominance: perhaps we were not only here at

  RSIEA to bring Mumbai, the region, or the country into compliance with a global

  trajectory that would reverse climate change. Perhaps the promise of Indian envi-

  ronmental architecture was its power to reorient historical y dominant moral ecol-

  ogies as wel . Assuring the audience that the foundational ideas of sustainability were present in ancient Hindu texts, he said, “most of what we (environmental

  architects) need to learn we can only know from visiting the building site. But the rest we must learn from Indian history and a spiritual focus.” An implied conflation of “Hindu” and “Indian” continued as a discursive automatic, leaving open

  the question of whether and how the various origins of those historical y “Indian”

  traits we would study as sustainable would include the region’s far broader, more

  diverse religious and ethnic attributes. But for the moment, the larger point was

  clear. Training at RSIEA would not involve the uncritical absorption of global y

  circulating metrics, techniques, or narratives of ecological dysfunction. It would expose students to these, but demand in addition the contextualizing skil s to

  accept, adapt, or reject them as valuable, as “Indian.” The stakes were global, but the tactics would be profoundly local. Ravishankar departed to enthusiastic applause,

  and the group sat chattering long after the house lights came up and summoned

  us to a tea break.

  A bit later, reassembled in the auditorium, another speaker, a representative

  from Govardhan Ashram, addressed the group. This particular semester, RSIEA

  would conduct a weekend study tour at Govardhan—a sort of “test run,” the pro-

  gram head told me, to determine whether the ashram was an effective location for

  staging some of the program’s experiential curriculum. More details of that study

  tour and the ashram itself await in a later chapter, but in the context of RSIEA’s welcoming ceremony and following Ravishankar’s impactful declaration of the role of

  Indian “spiritual focus” in environmental architectural training, the appearance

  of an ISKON ashram spokesperson hinted toward a very specific rendering of the

  form that “spiritual” might take. 2 At a time when India’s Hindu Right was gaining political strength and dominance, it was difficult to reconcile the diversity of the new student body and RSIEA faculty with repeated references—both overt and

  implied—to Hinduism specifical y and a conflation of spirituality and environ-

  mental thinking more general y. Would contextualizing environmental architec-

  ture for “Indians” automatical y invoke shades of Hindu nationalism?

  The focus on spirituality faded from prominence, however, as a set of lectures

  focused more directly on retelling aspects of the urban planning and development

  history of Mumbai. Mishkat Ahmed, an architect and urban planner based in

  Mumbai, gave a talk that invoked the case of Navi Mumbai, the planned town-

  ship area northeast of South Mumbai, to explore how development plans might

  address socioeconomic asymmetries or certain social and environmental ques-

  tions. She focused heavily on the well-known Indian architect Charles Correa,

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  Ecology in Practice 45

  who played a central role in conceptualizing and advocating for Navi Mumbai.

  Ahmed used Correa as a more localized counterpoint to the global figure of Vice

  President Gore, reifying his prominent place in the regional planning imaginary.

  But she also echoed the previous talks insofar as the emphasis on Correa allowed

  her to directly relate responsible action vis a vis the environment to “Indian” ideas and practices.

  Though Correa’s reputation as an architect-activist has been exhaustively

  debated, the content of those debates was rhetorical y less important in this

  instance than the invocation itself: here was a figure quite familiar to RSIEA students whose efforts in the case of Navi Mumbai could be used to reinforce the

  idea that environmental architecture and the idea of an Indian moral ecology were

  logical y connected.

  In some ways, there was nothing necessarily new in these repeated discur-

  sive linkages between Indian “traditional” architectural knowledge, a generalized

  notion of Indian identity, and socioecological problem solving. There was also

  little new about drawing on Charles Correa to substantiate such claims. At least

  since the 1980s, conventional transnational architectural discourse about Indian

  identity:

  inevitably considers architecture as an agency historical y influenced by, and capable of influencing or solving, future social and cultural problems and challenges perceived to be a given in Third World situations. By not so complex translation, hence, such architects are then promoted variously as visionaries, cultural messengers, or as Charles Correa is considered, an “activist” of such a necessary and radical
change.3

  But what was perhaps notable here was the recurrence, in this earliest experience

  as a collective of RSIEA students, of claims to the transformative, almost agentive power of activating “Indian” identity in the context of contemporary environmental architecture. The vast contents of both would emerge across courses, field experiences, and collective engagement, but our starting point reinforced the notion that responsible environmental design could only derive from a specific, Indian historical rigor. Over time, the curricular case for this would build for individual projects and their pasts, but also for deeper patterns of power relations and social organization. The experiential field visits I detail in a later chapter were a key arena for this.

  Invocations of simultaneous global belonging and regional historical specificity

  thus traced a discursive arc that began with the moral urgency of global climate

  change but concluded with tellings of the contextual, and even individual, life-

  worlds of Mumbai’s situated architects. In both starting and closing the opening

  program, the leap from environmental architect to activist was in fact no leap at al .

  • • •

  Environmental architecture’s moral imperative thus framed, its contents—as the

  concepts, design techniques, and architectural technologies that constituted “good

  46 Ecology in Practice

  design” at RSIEA—would be its essential building blocks. In the weeks and months

  after the opening ceremony, I reported daily to RSIEA to attend classes, travel with students on field study and project excursions, and puzzle over occasional assignments. According to Dr. Joshi, the founding faculty member introduced previ-

  ously, even as modifications to the curriculum “updated” course content, hybrid

  teaching strategies and methods were an enduring ideal:

  When we started, (we emphasized) . . . more of the classical things like recycling and reusable materials and how the environment works. Then right from the beginning

  we (took) students to live projects. And now we want to do this even more. Taking

  them to places like Auroville, water treatment plants, or to different buildings where innovative materials like compressed earth blocks are used . . . this shows them examples of how it’s done and that is central. In fact, in the new curriculum there’s more of that now. And we try to give assignments to students that emphasize self study.