Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai
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Sansad Institute of Environmental Architecture. Although the Doongerwadi
remained an extremely exclusive and unusual open space, the development and
open space pressures of Mumbai’s present brought even this otherwise closed for-
est into direct contact with RSIEA.
My core interest in considering the Doongerwadi encounter here is to return
to the puzzle with which I opened the chapter. As popularly conceptualized, green
or open space advocacy in Mumbai overwhelmingly assumed urban park-making
to be its core task, in part because of a direct association between parks and social equity. It rarely addressed the possible desirability of a citywide range of vegetation types and coverage, or the different access, use, and socioecological profiles that each might enable. Yet when urban greening advocates sought to promote ideas
for a more sustainable Mumbai, the attributes of that more desirable city often
depended on the vitality of various ecosystem processes and functions. Many of
these processes and functions occur only in vegetated areas with, for example,
permeable surfaces or contiguous land cover patches sufficient to provide food,
water, shelter, and space for non-humans.
Stated differently, in open spaces in which the human use scenario is relatively
light or non-existent, such as in the fifty-four-acre closed canopy urban forest that is the Doongerwadi, certain biophysical processes are underway that may depend,
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More than Human Nature 103
in part, on the very fact of restricted human use. To advocate for the benefits those processes bestowed positioned the advocate in some ways against the equal access
logics that underpin environmental justice assumptions. To complicate matters,
Doongerwadi’s existing exclusive use profile was predicated on a narrow, identity-
based logic of exclusive access—a blatant and often pernicious form of social
exclusion. The calculus of social and more-than-human loss and gain at work here
defied the simpler metrics that often guided pervasive open space discourses.
Yet it also cast the Open Mumbai challenge, “How Would You Remake the
City?” in an experiential light, challenging whether a comprehensive inventory of city green spaces and socio ecological access profiles,could exist at all without creating or reinforcing social forms of marginality and exclusion.
Converging as it did with the peculiar bureaucratic temporality of a loom-
ing urban development plan deadline and the anxieties that attend impending,
irreparable cultural and environmental loss, the Doongerwadi case thus sat at the
unanticipated center of unresolved questions of what, precisely, the socionatural
elements of green and open spaces do, and what they might be intended to do, in the Mumbai of the future. Was social exclusion permissible if part of its organizing logic was open space preservation or creation? Could social exclusion be regarded
as an acceptable cost of maintaining a nonhuman species on the very edge of
extinction? Such questions have long histories in non-city spaces, of course; could they be reasonably posed in a city like Mumbai?
One way to engage this question is to note again that the very fact of my own
presence in the Doongerwadi forest was the result of a strategy for discerning and re-narrating the multiple forms of value present there, critical aspects of a defensive stance against the dual threat posed by disappearing vultures and the forest’s swel -
ing real estate value. The speculative appeal of this land suggested the real dual loss: of the vultures, and with them, a centuries old funerary ritual at the center of religious identity production. Those who wished to maintain Parsi identity through the specific funerary ritual that the forest, vultures, and towers enabled were brought face to face with the extent to which the forest itself, through its provision of nonhuman habitat, had enabled the reproduction of that identity for centuries.
Yet the Doongerwadi’s particular “save the forest” agenda seemed unable to
claim a comfortable place in Mumbai’s active open space politics, despite its potential to prevent building development in an otherwise vegetated area. Its necessarily highly exclusive access profile, combined with the specific cultural rituals to which its very existence was anchored, disqualified it from an imagined pool of potential y shared, accessible open spaces—the mosaic of green that comprised a more
“open” Mumbai. The very open space category so active in the previous chapter
not only presumed a general y homogenous quality to open space itself, but also
to the broader suite of uses a given open space might serve. These uses were pri-
marily “social” in the sense of human leisure and access. They were not social in
the sense of explicit acknowledgement that social and cultural practices in specific
104 More than Human Nature
urban open spaces might themselves delineate which human groups were entitled
to access it, and which were necessarily excluded to preserve it.
If not immediately compatible with prevailing open space advocacy discourses,
what place might the Doongerwadi assume in responsible visions of a reimagined
Mumbai? After al , one of the forest steward’s central goals was to better under-
stand the range of ecological functions and forms of life this green space helped to enable. Was there truly a space for more-than-human nature in a future Mumbai
that also aspired to ideals of equity, social justice, and “open” access?
In an era of climate change and popular demand for more sustainable cities, a
standard answer to such a question is often expressed in terms of the biophysical
ecosystem functions that can be quantitatively expressed as ecosystem services. 13
Such services include, but are not limited to, energy and carbon dioxide conserva-
tion, often quantified as sequestration value; air quality improvement and mainte-
nance; urban hydrology regulation (reducing the rate and volume of storm water
runoff, mitigating flooding damage, reducing storm water treatment costs, and
enhancing water quality); ecological stabilization through the provision of wildlife habitat, soil conservation, and biodiversity enhancement; and noise reduction. But these benefits accrue in different ways, in part depending on the characteristics of each urban green or open space. Ecologists often differentiate between them by
assessing the level of disturbance, that is, the scale and frequency of human use, or other types of active management. 14 Examples of such interventions include, but are not limited to, clearance of forest areas for leisure activity, use of forest areas for waste disposal (even if the waste is organic), removal of downed trees, ornamental pruning and other forms of aesthetic vegetation removal, and planting vegetation species with particular management objectives in mind. Chemical inputs like
fertilizers and pesticides that might be commonly applied in more park-like set-
tings with human heavy access and use scenarios constitute another significant
intervention. Since very little management activity occurs in the Doongerwadi
forest, in its urban context it is not just a rare, closed canopy, contiguous fifty-four-acre forest. It is also a low-disturbance urban forest. But the very vocabulary that considers human access and use as a disturbance sits uncomfortably at best within
conventional frameworks of environmental justice.15
Popular advocacy for open space in Mumbai made noticeably little conceptual
space for the desirability of low-disturbance urban forest; for one thing, the term disturbance itself seemed to underline the problem with exclusive access, since only certain users would
qualify as “disturbers,” while others would not. In the
Doongerwadi, sacred grove status enabled some amount of cultural and identity
justification for this, but even here its power was limited to members of the minority Parsi community or those who automatical y valued biodiversity as a thing in
itself, so defined and so coined. 16
But if we take seriously the conceptual transformation from social exclusion
to something that approaches more-than-human exclusion, we face an uneasy
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More than Human Nature 105
predicament: how can we advocate ecological resilience and social justice simulta-
neously? To foreground more-than-human-exclusion in the Doongerwadi case is
in some ways to position a low-disturbance urban forest as espousing more value
than its so-called high-disturbance, i.e., many kind of parks and counterparts. Low-disturbance forests usual y contain greater biological complexity and redundancy of forest functions, which usual y leads to more and more functional ecosystem services, and resilience to a multitude of natural and anthropogenic stresses. It is also more likely that plant and animal species that ecologists would classify as native, along with greater general biodiversity, will be found in low-disturbance forests. Final y, a low-disturbance urban forest is potential y so valuable in ecological terms because of its structure: a mature, low-disturbance forest typical y has a vertical forest structure that is stratified into dominants, canopy, sub-canopy, shrub, and groundstory layers.
In each of these layers, vital and often interlocking ecosystem functions occur.
In short, if an expansive conceptualization of justice seeks simultaneous and
legitimate places for human and more-than-human nature, the Doongerwadi for-
est could be framed as far more valuable as a closed access, minimal y managed
forest than any park that currently exists in the city, or, for that matter, that featured in the public exercises of “imagining” a desirable future Mumbai. Since ecologists often argue that broad ecosystem benefits, like a robust hydrological system that ensures clean and plentiful water, or vegetation that ensures clean air, accrue to everyone, they might also argue that a forest like Doongerwadi is extremely
valuable to everyone in Mumbai whether or not they ever set foot in it, or even
pass by. Indeed, the two characteristics—accessibility for leisure uses and optimal ecosystem service provision—often occupy two ends of the “open space” spectrum
that this case brings to light.
A further obvious difficulty in the present case is that using its low disturbance/
ecosystem services value as the basis for saving the Doongerwadi from real estate
development would likely result in a massive, and yet sanctioned as science, dis-
turbance: the construction of an aviary intended to save the vultures and, just as in the case of the forest itself, the human life cycle ritual in which the vultures were indispensible. It was unclear at this writing whether and how the ecosystem services profile of the forest would change if the aviary were to be established.
• • •
To precisely define the ecosystem services and value of the Doongerwadi forest
in accordance with the forest steward’s request, a sense of the forest composition, structure, and dynamics was necessary. This involved completing a standard set of
silvicultural assessments, typical y called a forest inventory. The basic mapping of the types and abundance of flora and fauna species, as well as a maturity matrix (an assessment of which species are present in which age classes), were completed, all by the senior professor of botany and regular visiting lecturer at RSIEA mentioned above. It is here, perhaps, that we are reminded of one dimension of ecology in
106 More than Human Nature
practice as it intersected with the concepts and techniques espoused in training
settings at RSIEA. Good design, in this case, necessitated just such an inventory; it was only in an accounting of the built and unbuilt components of the site, and
a clearer accounting of the larger scales and systems to which the latter were connected, that one could claim to have laid the necessary groundwork for integrated, good design thinking. And although it was not posed as such in this case, it is precisely integrated thinking that raises the question I conclude with here: what was the place of more-than-human nature in the future of the Doogerwadi, and how
did humanity stand to lose and gain in its wake?
Once the professor’s reports were filed, it was possible to specify the
Doongerwadi’s conservation value in more precise scientific terms. Species rich-
ness, functional groups, and species traits like rarity could all be determined, and from these, certain monetary values could be derived through ecosystem services
calculations. Consistent with the forest steward’s wishes, a new way of knowing,
and conveying, the Doongerwadi’s value could now be articulated.
This returns us to the limited utility of our existing analytics when it comes
to social analyses of urban greening. Recall that on one hand, a wealth of studies explore how the opportunity to “green” a city, and to engage in singular and collective exercises that rethink the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature
within them, is often analyzed in terms of its potential to promote or reproduce
notions of civility and citizenship, empowerment, political praxis, and the desir-
able place and form of “nature” in the city. Another cluster of work outlines the
exclusionary and often violent ways that urban greening is operationalized, point-
ing to the marginalities that park-making can recreate or newly produce.
We note in this case that it is important to avoid the analytical conflation of
parks and ecology, even when this conflation is restated as an ethnographic fact.
The relationship between city green spaces and the ecological systems in which
they nest—in the present case, for example, forest ecology—suggests an analytical
imperative to remain attuned to the extent to which green space politics and their agents do or do not promote a continuum of human use and management scenarios intended to maximize the attributes that, for lack of a more robust analytic, I have indexed here through the rubric of ecosystem services. Yet the life and death stakes of the Doongerwadi case are simultaneously biophysical and social, and we
are poised to miss these dimensions if we undertake a more typical assessment of
the ratio of open spaces to a city’s human population.
Similarly, when political ecologists describe the multiple “ways of knowing
nature” that characterize any contest over the environment, 17 we have historical y demonstrated the ways that science has claimed relative power and dominance,
leaving us compelled to amplify other social experiences and narrations of nature
as equal y situated and legitimate “alternatives.” But the present case forces a careful assessment of that stance; the Doongerwadi forest steward undertook a sci-
entific assessment as just one in a range of strategies for maintaining the forest,
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More than Human Nature 107
its related non-human species, and in so doing reviving the religious rituals per-
formed therein. The alternative bundle of values that the forest assessment was
intended to enable did not constitute an overt call to elevate the scientific characterization of the forest over other formulations, or to bring back long discredited modes of conservation that sought to establish clear boundaries between territories for (nonhuman) nature and places for people. But it was—like the forest
steward’s own gesture of welcome to me—a layered attempt to develop and opera-
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tionalize a fuller knowledge and experience of more-than-human urban nature, in
part in service of mutual y reproduced human and nonhuman lifeways.
In a now classic piece, the political ecologist Nick Heynen addressed a quan-
dary similar to the one the Doongerwadi case compels us to consider in another
guise: noting what he called “the production of injustice” in urban forestry, he
argued that while environmental justice movements tended to demand univer-
sal and equal access to the benefits of the urban forest, “the resulting distributed urban forest may not address global environmental concerns as effectively as the
larger forest islands that have resulted from uneven development. ”18 The vultures, rituals, and towers of the Doongerwadi show how Heynen’s quandary, which he
framed in terms of global and local is, in fact, also evident at the city scale, and would certainly characterize the city-countryside continuum. The problem of
demand for “equal access” is also one of nature-making itself; it risks leaving out a wealth of species, habitats, and systems on which the humans who seek access to
those spaces may fundamental y depend.
If integrative, good design thinking compelled agents of environmental archi-
tecture and other urban environmental professions to promote optimal ecosys-
tem vitality, then the Doongerwadi case also raises questions of how, when, and
why differently positioned social actors deem it appropriate to create and main-
tain green spaces that are largely social y exclusive. The challenge, quite simply, is to extend the social justice imperative of inclusion and equity beyond human
beings themselves. This challenge is, after al , inseparable from those presented by unequal social power relations, ideologies of belonging, and human social identity construction, but it is also inseparable from the logics through which human
social groups select which aspects of non-human nature thrive, and which meet
their demise. As the fate of the vultures reminds us, the two are inevitably and
inexorably interconnected. The environment, as Dr. Joshi explained earlier in the
book, is indeed an “integrated subject.”