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

by Anne Rademacher

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  5

  More than Human Nature and the

  Open Space Predicament

  Green and open spaces figured prominently in imaginative exercises in urban

  redesign, and they also provided a variable, an empirical indicator for the envi-

  ronmental success or failure of the Mumbai of the future. Assuming even distri-

  bution and access, two conditions almost never met in practice, the logic of open

  space seemed to offer a comprehensive bridge between ecological improvement

  and social justice. It seemed logical y and automatical y connected to promot-

  ing biodiversity habitat, better and cleaner water systems, improved coastal resilience and drainage control, better air quality, and a host of leisure opportunities for inhabitants of a population-dense city struggling for “breathing space;” these would all enhance human well-being. Here was a model for a “truly integrated”

  urban environment, one left unserved by the development trajectory of Mumbai’s

  contemporary history.

  Anchoring collective hope for an improved city to an idealized vision of social

  and environmental vitality is neither novel nor surprising; in fact, precisely such visions feature in sustainable city thinking worldwide. The presence and absence

  of green and open spaces—be they parks, urban gardens, urban forests and con-

  servation areas, or expressed as the simple percentage of city land that is not built up—is ubiquitous in conventional assessments of relative environmental vitality.

  However, as I will show in this chapter, those same spaces present an analytical

  challenge to theoretical and in-practice logics of environmental justice, integrated socio-nature, and the modes of social identity reproduction fundamental to the

  social life of urban open spaces. At the core of this challenge is, yet again, the idea of the environment as an integrated subject, as it is precisely the integration 91

  92 More than Human Nature

  gesture that confounds our best attempts to simultaneously understand human

  and nonhuman transformation.

  PRESERVATION, SCIENCE, AND EQUIT Y: ECOLOGY

  AND THE ANTI-PUBLIC

  A shared element of each event described in the previous chapter, and a general

  characteristic of contemporary middle class assumptions about desirable, livable

  cities with ecological integrity was the presence of plentiful open spaces, also

  referred to as urban open or urban green space. General y, these terms can encom-

  pass everything from abandoned urban lots to dense urban forest stands. Together

  they have come to occupy an automatic place in regional and global conversations

  about desirable aspects of sustainable future cities.

  Indices like the ratio, distribution, and scale of available open spaces often

  figure prominently in environmental policy objective-setting, and together with

  concerns about climate resilience, water and air quality, energy provision, and circuits of waste, these have become standard elements in regional and global assess-

  ments of relative urban environmental quality and performance. 1 In turn, they are often used as indicators of overall human well-being in urban contexts.2

  Challenges to assumptions that more open spaces beget greater social equity

  abound; recent social science scholarship in Indian cities like Delhi and Mumbai

  reminds us afresh that the lived experience of urban open spaces is more often

  one of social exclusion, not inclusion. 3 This literature enumerates injustices and violence that may be social y legitimized precisely because of the place of green spaces in global and more local y active ideologies of open space entitlement. A

  broad literature also shows that expectations for certain modes of sociality and

  “civility” often accompany the regulation of such spaces, rendering them anything

  but open access. 4

  Global open space narratives and metrics are also known to obfuscate the com-

  plex local social processes through which access to such spaces is social y policed, calling into question assumptions that open spaces provide automatic benefits

  regardless of one’s prior place in various strata of social difference. The nevertheless persistent “greater common environmental good” idea, famously reinforced in

  the classic work that defined sustainable development for the international policy community in the nineteen eighties, Our Common Future, continues to enable exclusive and often unjust environmental policies in the name of, and with the

  intention of, promoting social equity.

  For the many who deem the social inequities that can accompany urban open

  space creation unacceptable, but who are nevertheless committed to forging a

  more equitable balance between a city’s material built form and its vital biophysical processes—indeed, for those who, as in the CitiSpace explanation of its Breathing

  Space exhibition, regard open space advocacy as anything but elitist—social equity

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  More than Human Nature 93

  and justice principles must always accompany open space creation. This may mean

  that so-called urban greening marks an opportunity to open new social avenues

  for col aboration, advocacy, and consultation among those most marginalized in

  society. In this way, the provision of access to outdoor, open, safe spaces for leisure activity may be regarded as one of many tools for achieving higher levels of urban social justice.

  In planning and policy circles, metrics that capture the proximity of all urban inhabitants, not just elites, to green spaces, and metrics that ensure a specific set of qualities to all of those spaces, are considered useful safeguards against the kinds of greening injustices that may deprive or further marginalize disadvantaged groups.

  Global y, many cities ratify development plans that are guided in part by target

  ratios of open space to population. New York City’s iconic PlaNYC Sustainable

  Development Plan, for example, proudly declared its intention to ensure that by

  its target date of 2030, “all New Yorkers will live within a ten minute walk to a

  park.” 5 Proximity and access to green spaces then, was deemed in the New York case to be as important as the existence of green spaces in the first place. Similarly, in Mumbai, despite the nuances signaled by P.K. Das and Associates’ typology of

  open spaces, the green space category often became shorthand for human use-

  focused parks, and the majority population’s lack of proximity to parks punctuated conversations assessing Mumbai’s relative failure to secure a green urban future.

  We might draw from this discussion the observation that, in case studies of city

  park-making, a somewhat polar analytic offers two general clusters of thinking:

  one notices the very powerful contemporary purchase of opportunities to remake,

  reclaim, and refashion longstanding patterns of urbanization. Here, to “green”

  a city, and to engage in “good design,” are regarded as acts that promote social

  empowerment and equity. The second cluster marks the exclusionary and often

  violent ways that such initiatives are deployed in practice, and describes the social and spatial marginalities they can recreate or newly produce. Here, the social life of urban greening seems to return forms of social exclusion that replicate or reinforce existing power asymmetries in cities.6

  Notably missing from these two modes of thinking is attention to green or open

  spaces as a complex category that might contain a range of open space forms, in

  which each form enables or dissuades partic
ular types and intensities of human

  and nonhuman “use.” If different types of open space perform unique biophysical

  and social functions, so too will their capacity to generate more social y equitable circumstances vary. Or will they?

  In this chapter, I trace a specific instance in which an open space preservation

  effort raised questions about the category of open space itself, in part through the involvement of an RSIEA professor undertaking precisely the kind of work that,

  in training, the program promoted as good design. The case follows the analytical

  concept of more-than-human nature to consider when and how it introduces the

  problem of more-than-social exclusion. If we differentiate open spaces according

  94 More than Human Nature

  to their human access profiles, that is, along a continuum of heavy recreational

  use (a running track, for instance, or a cricket field) to more restricted scenarios of human use (like a relatively dense, closed-canopy forested area), the very question of what urban environmental exclusions do may be recast, and in the process

  perhaps, urban environmental justice might be rendered more expansive. At issue

  here is the tendency to assume that most, if not al , urban green or open space

  worth advocating should serve direct human leisure objectives for as broad a pub-

  lic as possible.

  • • •

  A few months after I arrived in Mumbai, I received a call from a colleague at a

  major international conservation organization. I have worked in various research

  capacities with this organization over many years, and I maintain an active interest in, and periodic involvement with, their work in Asia. The call wasn’t necessarily a surprise, then, but the purpose behind it was quite unexpected.

  After discussing the status of my Mumbai-based research, my colleague asked if

  I was familiar with what were then recent controversies surrounding the large for-

  est and temple complex in the heart of South Mumbai, the Parsi complex known as

  the Doongerwadi Forest. 7 My longstanding interest in the scope and distribution of green or otherwise undeveloped spaces in Mumbai meant that I was keenly aware

  of this relatively large, fifty-four-acre forested area in Malabar Hil . The forest was established in the seventeenth century as a sacred grove to surround several Parsi Towers of Silence, and so it was an existing urban green space among very few

  in the city. Yet it was also highly unusual because it was such an old, contiguous, closed-canopy forest—in fact, the only closed-canopy contiguous forest in South

  Mumbai (and, save Sanjay Gandhi National Park to the north of the city, much of

  the rest of Mumbai as well). Located in one of the wealthiest and historical y most elite parts of the city, it was even more unusual because access to it was restricted exclusively to members of the minority religious group, the Parsis, and even then, only for specific rituals. Although densely vegetated, this was not a park or leisure space; instead, it was a forest whose central purpose was to shelter and seclude the sacred Towers of Silence inside it.

  In fact, at that time, the Doongerwadi had gained more recent notoriety as

  part of an unfolding drama across the Indian subcontient. The controversial use

  of a relatively new veterinary drug called diclofenac had had observable and cata-

  strophic impacts on South Asia’s population of vultures. Use of the drug in live-

  stock, upon whose carcasses vultures natural y feed, was directly linked to the fatal poisoning and a massive die-off of the subcontinental population of gyps vultures.

  By 2007, the drug’s toxic effects were widely believed to be the primary cause of a dramatic vulture population crash: previously robust regional populations of oriental white-backed vultures had declined to the point of near extinction, and long-billed and slender-billed vulture populations had declined by 97%. 8

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  More than Human Nature 95

  Although banned for veterinary use in 2006, diclofenac remains available for

  human use, and that availability ensures its persistent, widespread (if illegal) use in veterinary applications. Effective, “vulture safe” alternatives to this drug exist, but none was as inexpensive as diclofenac.

  In addition to disrupting basic decomposition patterns in India’s livestock, the

  vultures’ disappearance had dramatic consequences for Mumbai’s small but his-

  torical y relatively elite religious group, the Parsis. For centuries, Maharashtra’s vultures were the key to funerary rituals prescribed by Zoroastrian (Parsi) religious tradition. In this ritual, Parsi deceased are laid out on high, open platforms in special y constructed enclosures known as Towers of Silence ( dokhmas). There, on the sky platform, decomposition takes place through the work of scavenging

  birds—vultures. As the vulture population crashed, the decomposition process

  that had functioned for centuries on those platforms was disrupted, and the Towers of Silence in Mumbai harbored more and more deceased whose final funerary

  rites were disturbed and even halted. Without the rapid decomposition ensured

  by the vultures, bodies laid atop the towers breaking down only very slowly. The

  anguish and delicacy of this matter fueled outrage inside and outside of Mumbai’s

  Parsi community, and brought to public consciousness the religious group, their

  ritual, the function of the towers, and the near-extinction of India’s vultures. It also brought to public consciousness the extraordinary urban forest within which this

  drama was unfolding.

  Media coverage tended toward the sensational and the macabre, adding layers

  of insult and pain to an already wrenching situation in the Parsi community. To

  the horror of Parsis and non-Parsis alike, news articles graphical y described an

  accumulation of dead in the towers, with no natural catalysts for total decompo-

  sition. Seeking alternatives while desperate to maintain the integrity of their life cycle ritual, the community adopted experimental measures. They activated solar

  collectors atop some of the towers, in hopes of artificial y assisting with natural decomposition, with unsatisfactory results. Debates about whether to continue the

  traditional funerary practices at all ensued, and the degree to which these practices were “modern” was set against the backdrop of an increasingly dire and untenable

  situation in the towers. The intensity of the debates gave this socioecological story a sense of urgency and purchase far beyond Mumbai, its Parsi community, and

  the region. Articles in the New York Times and Harper’s Magazine, among others, brought the unfolding drama to the attention of readers worldwide.9

  For as long as the Towers had existed, so too had the Doongerwadi forest that

  surrounds it. Original y far larger, the contemporary fifty-four-acre closed canopy forest today represents South Mumbai’s largest patch of unmanaged and therefore

  presumably ecological y robust green space. Indeed, it is one of very few spaces in South Mumbai that can qualify in any way as “green.” But as noted earlier, this was by no means a green space in the sense of an open access park or leisure space. It was a solemn forest, accessible only to Parsis and even then under very controlled

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  circumstances. The Doongerwadi remained a forest over time likely because it sheltered Parsi life cycle rituals. These were sustained in large part by much broader ecological processes, most prominently the vultures and the specific patterns of

  decomposition their activity enabled. One might argue that the vultures had as

  much to do with the preservation of this forest area as the presence of the Towers of Silence themselves, or even the strict controls on human access and
use beyond

  visiting for purposes of ritual. The stakes of a grave situation in the vulture population thus extended directly to green space, religious ritual practice, and human identity formation itself.

  On the phone, my colleague explained that her organization, which has for

  decades based a significant portion of its programming on efforts to revitalize

  endangered animal and plant populations, had taken an interest in the vulture

  decline in Southern India. She asked if I might consider assisting with a pro bono effort to better understand the green space at the center of the vulture issue: would I be interested in looking at the Doongerwadi forest “as a green space?” That is,

  could I help to assess the forest’s ecological value in a way that bracketed, insofar as was possible, the volatile religious and identity politics issues that had dominated the vulture controversy, and focus instead on the fifty-four acres of forest that surrounded the Towers as an ecosystem in the conventional, exclusively biophysical

  sense—as a bundle of ecosystem characteristics and services?

  She explained further: while conducting advocacy work to mitigate the vulture

  die-off, some members of the Doongerwadi forest stewardship community had

  contacted the organization to learn about precisely these qualities. In a sense, they wished to understand the forest “as a valuable open space,” but not as a public park or a place of leisure. They wondered how it functioned “as a forest,” and whether

  that function bestowed values on the Doongerwadi beyond those that the com-

  munity already knew and affirmed. For centuries the forest had been cherished

  as a sacred grove and a shelter for the Towers of Silence, but the community now

  wondered how else it might be valued, both among Parsis and by the city at large.

  To compound the tensions inside and outside the Parsi community over the

  loss of vultures and the dysfunction it had wrought, the Doongerwadi forest faced

  another sort of unprecedented pressure. Over time, and under present conditions