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

by Anne Rademacher

  moments, the promise of Open Mumbai seemed nothing short of a gleaming eco-

  social reawakening, a literal city transformation.

  Rather than rehearsing an extensive review and critique of Open Mumbai, my

  purpose here is to gesture toward the ways the exhibition articulated an explicit

  and constant coupling of biophysical and social transformation, made possible

  only through the intentional creation and provision of more open, green spaces in

  the city. The exhibit showcased the potential power of urban designers to provide

  their constituency with the contents of a more ecological y and social y vital urban future, and it reminded its visitors that the imminence of a new development plan

  for Mumbai gave the whole exercise particular urgency. The form of green exper-

  tise invoked by PK Das and Associates promised to remake material space while

  offering coupled environmental and social vitality.

  Yet even as it mapped a highly detailed and explicated vision of Mumbai’s eco-

  social future, the exhibition claimed its firm commitment to developing a “People’s Plan.” This seemed a blatant contradiction, but it signaled reflexive awareness that Open Mumbai could be easily dismissed as a top-down undertaking at best, a

  savvy business strategy at worst. To ful y convince its audience, the initiative had to gesture toward civic agency and inclusion, even if the actual and active input of a broader public could be held in valid question.

  Across contemporary urban South Asia, scholars have repeatedly shown how

  the making of urban green spaces—particularly parks, but also more general

  modes of environmental restoration—tends to deflect attention from their some-

  times violent, and often social y exclusionary, outcome.23 In such cases, enacting a

  “clean, green city” has repeatedly obfuscated new and not-so-new forms of mar-

  ginalization and displacement. Open Mumbai made explicit attempts to mark and

  reject such forms of exclusion by framing an ecological y sound city precisely as a

  74 Rectifying Failure

  critique of the social marginality and exclusivity that had intensified in the wake of urban growth. At the same time, the social sphere included in the making and

  viewing of Open Mumbai was extremely selective, and hardly representative of

  Mumbai’s vast public.

  Urban environmental spectacles such as Reimagining Mumbai and Open

  Mumbai simultaneously espoused civic participation, promoted social inclusion

  through the provision of more green spaces, and promoted a particular kind of

  civic green expertise. The rubrics they invoked framed open and green spaces pre-

  cisely as the appropriate antidote to social exclusion, even as their channels and audiences were exclusive subsets of the broader public.

  BREATHING SPACE

  I turn to a final spectacle, consistent in mission with Reimagining Mumbai and

  Open Mumbai, but standing in contrast as wel . Breathing Space, organized by

  the non-governmental organization CitiSpace (Citizens’ Forum for Protection of

  Public Spaces), 24 Tribe@Turf (a subgroup of Royal Western India Turf Club members), and Hathautee (which called itself a “cultural platform” and was more an

  Internet platform than a physical group with constant membership), was a two-

  day semi-public festival to celebrate Mumbai’s existing open space and to advocate for new open space provisions. An extensive exhibition of panels, art instal ations, and craft vendors, as well as two day-long programs of lectures and panels made

  this more of a festival than a singular exhibition.

  Like Open Mumbai, Breathing Space was held at an elite city venue that is

  also a spatial artifact of Mumbai’s colonial past: Worli’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse.

  One motive for using this twenty-three-acre site was to raise awareness that

  its lease faced imminent expiration, but its use profile also made for a some-

  what ironic stage for open space advocacy. Although technically considered an

  open space, a combination of security guards, strict social norms of use, and

  the somewhat erratic schedule that dictates when it opens to the public at all

  (legislated in large part by the horse racing schedule, as during races the track

  is closed) make this a difficult space to access. When not in use for racing, the

  racecourse attracts individuals and families who use it for walks, jogging, and

  other sports activities. During several stays in nearby Worli, I enjoyed regular

  access and use; I also observed both subtle and unsubtle modes of social exclu-

  sion when those who could not claim or feign a place of “belonging” there were

  swiftly denied access.

  As with Reimagining Mumbai, I learned of Breathing Space through the Head

  of RSIEA. She invited me to join her, and together with a colleague from the Sir

  JJ School of Architecture, we headed to the racecourse after RSIEA classes ended

  one evening. We shared a taxi for the short distance between the Institute and the racecourse, but our cab could only inch its way through rush-hour packed traffic.

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  Rectifying Failure 75

  Figure 8. Entering the Breathing Space exhibition at the Mahalaxmi

  Racecourse. Photo by the author.

  In the idling taxi, I asked my colleagues what distinguished Breathing Space from

  the many other similar events in the city that I’d already attended.

  The answer was quick, and invoked Open Mumbai for contrast. This exhibi-

  tion, our colleague explained, was based on “action research,” in part the product of long-term citywide advocacy by the NGO CitiSpace.25 Breathing Space would feature instal ations about each of Mumbai’s twenty-four wards, all represented in panels that would each highlight one—perhaps among many—open space issue

  that the residents of that ward (or presumably those residents who interacted with CitiSpace advocates) identified as important to them. My colleagues preferred this more intentional y consultative model, explaining that Open Mumbai could easily

  be dismissed as an advertisement for the design firm PK Das. They agreed that

  Breathing Space organizers made a more genuine attempt to report their research

  findings rather than a presentation of a finished and stylized development pro-

  posal. If achieving a “people’s plan” for the future of Mumbai’s urban landscape

  was truly an objective, Breathing Space exemplified a consultation process more

  likely to assemble one.

  In fact, the successive ward-panel groups that characterized the CitiSpace exhi-

  bition of its research created a distinctive visitor experience. In contrast to Open Mumbai’s guided path through biophysical spatial categories careful y curated

  with images, texts, and soundscapes, Breathing Space visitors were invited to wan-

  der the municipal and social category of “wards.” They were free to linger and

  move about at wil , invited as well to areas devoted to other kinds of information tables, food and craft vendors, lecture panels, and—quite strikingly—to simply

  76 Rectifying Failure

  Figure 9. Breathing Space exhibit-goers explore signboards about

  open space in each of Mumbai’s twenty-four Municipal wards. Photo

  by the author.

  notice being at the racecourse, immersed in outdoor “open space” itself. The light, sound, air, and dirt of the semi-forested event area, its wide, dusty racetrack in the distance, merged the event about open space with an experience of open space.

  One traversed the exhibition and pieced together its messages at one
’s own pace,

  and according to one’s chosen trajectory.

  On arriving, my colleagues and I were greeted by various acquaintances; sev-

  eral people active in the city’s urban planning and design communities had also

  thought this a good evening for Breathing Space. We made our way directly to

  the ward-by-ward exhibition, where we found rows of visual panels—narrative

  mosaics of text, maps, photos, and satellite images. Stationed nearby each ward’s

  cluster of interpretive panels was a CitiSpace worker or volunteer, ready to discuss the content of each board, and eager to offer more detail, context, and guidance.

  Data reported throughout the exhibition were drawn from a comprehensive

  survey, completed by CitiSpace in 2011, of six hundred reserved open spaces across twenty-four Mumbai wards.26 Standing before my first panel, I asked the woman stationed there to tell me more about the project.

  She explained that each panel was devoted to one issue that citizens living

  in that ward identified—by no means the only issue, but something that “gave a

  glimpse of what’s happening” throughout Mumbai. Each ward was presented in

  light of a profound but well known contrast: official allotments of open space as

  legislated by the previous official development plan bore little to no resemblance to the map of actual open spaces on the ground. The old plan was not a reliable blueprint, then, for determining the active mode of land use, nor was it a tool for

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  Rectifying Failure 77

  locating actual open green spaces. “There is a terrible mismatch,” the exhibit volunteer told me, “between the ground reality and the development plan; we rely on

  citizens to tell us, day in and day out, what’s happening.” She explained that a large part of CitiSpace’s mission involves advocacy; once an illegal use of a reserved

  open space is identified, the group assists in filing Right to Information (RTI) petitions and, when appropriate, in moving court cases forward.

  Breathing Space emphasized ward-by-ward derived accounts of the actual land

  use profile across Mumbai in order to make the case that at present, the urban

  development plan was of little use for charting the city’s future. The failure of the plan, according to the exhibition’s promotional material, led to a wider failure—a

  “fatal ratio” of persons to open spaces throughout the city:

  Mumbai is a city of remembered open spaces. “There used to be a playground here”

  and “Where have all the trees gone?” are laments one hears more and more. All too

  often, the culprits are the very guardians of these assets and we, to whom these persons are responsible, lack the knowledge or the will to act. Saving our parks, gardens and open spaces is not “elitist” or an aesthetic quest. It is protection of health and wel -being—physical, mental, social and emotional—of al , especial y the most vulnerable: the under-privileged, the young and senior citizens. On this score, Mumbai is in crisis. India’s National Building Code lays down that there should be at least 4

  acres of open spaces, accessible to al , per 1,000 population. Mumbai has less than one-hundredth of that: 0.03 acres. Transforming this fatal ratio is a challenge each of us must accept. Greater Mumbai cannot survive as a concrete jungle. 27

  In contrast to Open Mumbai, Breathing Space relied less on cultivating a collec-

  tive imaginary of the future possible urban landscape, and more on amplifying

  accounts of mis-allotments of open space. This placed development plan monitor-

  ing and enforcement at the center of its mode of cultivating civic green expertise.

  Like Open Mumbai, Breathing Space sought to mark and reject the social

  exclusions that often accompany efforts to expand urban open spaces. In these

  cases, the ecological y sound city was invoked and mobilized precisely as a critique of the social marginality and exclusivity that had intensified in the wake of urban growth, even as the very specific public which invoked it was itself quite exclusive.

  It was a lack of open and green spaces, and a more general lack of environmental

  sensitivity in Mumbai’s urban design, that had exacerbated the socioeconomic dis-

  parities of the present, according to this narrative.

  Classic urban anthropological studies such as Caldiera’s City of Wal s have sensitized scholars to the paired struggles over demands for social inclusion that accompany urban democratization and the material and spatial modes of enacting

  exclusion that often arise in response. Yet Mumbai at the cusp of a new develop-

  ment plan witnessed an urban environmental arena that simultaneously espoused

  civic participation, promoted social inclusion through the provision of more green spaces, and forged a kind of civic green expertise. Here, open and green spaces

  were rhetorical y crafted precisely as an antidote to social exclusion, even as its

  78 Rectifying Failure

  channels and audience were an exclusive subset of the broader public. Urban

  nature was made meaningful, in this sense, for its attributed power to create equity and inclusivity across public life; at the same time, it was assumed to facilitate greater environmental sustainability and urban “well-being.”

  Although Breathing Space did more to point toward the bureaucratic, corpo-

  rate, and institutional apparatus that operationalizes the city development plan

  than did Open Mumbai, both were predicated on the idea that the public assem-

  bled for these events, however exclusive in the context of the entire civic body,

  had real power to achieve the goal of more green and open spaces. Left in the

  background was the necessary and detailed discussion of how the cityscape of the

  present could be physical y transformed according to the expressed will of that

  civic body, however exclusive or selective.

  • • •

  Throughout 2012, dozens of exhibitions, from highly commercialized showcase-

  style conventions intended to display “green” building products or promote and

  debate specific practical techniques and metrics, to those oriented toward aware-

  ness-raising, public education, and advocacy, took place across Mumbai. The out-

  lines of events above suggest just some of the contrasts, issues, and assumptions

  that characterized urban greening advocacy as Mumbaikars anticipated the new

  development plan and a future of environmental and social stresses.

  Despite the veneer of unprecedented newness, however, neither tensions

  between architectural design and elitism, nor the relative civic nobility of imag-

  ining Mumbai’s future or tracking its present, are necessarily new or novel. In

  his House, but no Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964, the historian Nikhil Rao offers important reminders that attach public fervor over

  remaking the city to a much deeper history of creating the peculiar urban land-

  scape that is Mumbai.

  To take just one example, Rao describes the inaugural speech given at then-

  Bombay’s 1937 Ideal Home Exhibition. Delivered by Prime Minister B.G. Kher, it

  focused not on the homes of the future—the point of the exhibition—but on urg-

  ing architects to work to solve the vexing problem of housing the city’s desperate poor. Rao discusses the Director of the Indian Institute for Architecture’s response: (The Director) acknowledged that the finer details of room design might seem grotesque ‘ . . . to those less fortunate . . . who live in squalor and dirt, not to say filth.’ Yet such experiments as the exhibition were necessary, he argued. Through their ‘carefully worked-out rooms,’ they allowed visitors to know
‘what to look for and what to demand when the subject of a home is in question.’ The planners of the exhibition thus sought, through a staging of ideal domesticity, to actual y work out the parameters of the home for all Bombay’s citizens, not just for those few who could afford bath fittings by Garlick and Company or steel furniture by Al wyn and Company or

  Godrej Boyce and Company. 28

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  Rectifying Failure 79

  If ecology is sometimes shorthanded as “the study of home,” 29 we might read a similar tension in the events given the most descriptive attention in the previous section. One presented its assembled public with ideas of what they should desire, while the other emphasized existing, already vocalized desires. Both placed the

  appropriate “place” of open and green city spaces at the center of ideas of the ideal urban home.

  Although couched in narratives of the unprecedented, in fact the tension

  between advocacy-based and more elitist exhibitions captured in the contrasts

  between Reimagining Mumbai, Open Mumbai, and Breathing Space returns the

  focus to the social production of good design and green expertise as knowledge

  forms and ecological practices—whether expressed projects of social justice or as

  broader exercises in imagining and representing the possible. Here, in an arena

  filled with claims about the necessary presence of a specific kind of space—open

  space—and its specific characteristics—socioecological integrity—lies the con-

  tinuation of that aspiration to final y and “actual y work out the parameters of

  home.” The urban home of the present deemed unacceptable, and the future noth-

  ing short of potential y catastrophic, those parameters and their environmental

  dimensions were undeniable aspects of contemporary civic responsibility, or, as

  I suggested previously, cultivating civic green expertise. Designers and architects who had mastered good design and citizens who mastered civic green expertise

  might then claim a place in the work of transforming the social and biophysical

  city by reshaping its urban material stage. Whether and how those experts were

  actual y empowered to do that remained largely unaddressed.