declared with both confidence and optimism, “people will demand it, but nature
will force it.”
As professionals, RSIEA architects’ newly cultivated sensitivity to biophysical
processes and the functionality of urban ecosystems allowed what they considered
to be a unique, and often superior and more complete, perspective on Mumbai’s
urban past, present, and future. Suhasini’s reference to the Mumbai floods is a useful example. She locates their cause deep in urban land reclamation history, but
160 A Vocation in Waiting
in a final assessment concludes that contemporary land distribution, land value,
and political economy will prevent any reversal of resulting drainage patterns.
Nevertheless, she proudly proclaims herself an “idealist,” emphasizing her confi-
dence in the inevitability of significant change, and perhaps, ultimately, “reorganizing” Mumbai in ways that will recognize the legacy of those historical drainage patterns. For her, a generational turnover in municipal and other state agencies
will accelerate change, making today’s very circumscribed environmental archi-
tecture interventions merely temporary.
If the agents of change formed one set of important concerns that emerged as
architects sought to enact ecology in practice, then the pace of change formed
another. The capacity to understand the origins of contemporary environmental
conditions and events, such as the Mumbai floods, in terms of longtime patterns of land reclamation and morphological modification left RSIEA architects equipped
with an intellectual basis for their expectation of more, and more intensive, catastrophic ecological events. This is critical for understanding a pervasive, under-
lying expectation not only of massive eco-social transformation, but also of the
scope for their own opportunities to operationalize what they had learned. By
studying the environment as an integrated subject, and environmental design as
good design, environmental architects might themselves be understood for their
own integrated subjectivity: although ecology in practice was largely aspirational in the present, it was not only prudent, but prescient. It was through their own
integrated subjectivity that RSIEA environmental architects anticipated an essen-
tial place in the Mumbai to come.
Meanwhile, everyday strategies to resolve the impasse between good design
training and the (current) realm of the possible were in part driven by pure prag-
matism, as in the case of Darius, who said, “you accept it; you move on,” or Aditya’s logic of necessary financial and professional survival. These strategies were not, as Aditya joked, “anti-environmental” architecture; they were simply grounded in
the dual belief that whol y necessary practices were, in the present, conditioned
through the actions of other, more powerful urban development agents. Rather
than assume the idealized role of an activist, RSIEA architects held their commit-
ment to good design in service of a vocation in waiting. It was the environment
itself that provided legitimate reassurance that the wait was worthwhile.
Likewise, pride and personal integrity grounded in RSIEA’s brand of moral
ecology implied a critical mindset relative to urban development norms in
Mumbai, and the firm belief that environmental architects could maintain their
integrity despite their embeddedness in a system rife with opaque norms. Nearly
every architect described herself as able to remain separate and autonomous from
the ubiquitous layers of illegality and corruption. Their experiences of a “messy”
present recalled the comments shared earlier by a member of the RSIEA plan-
ning faculty. However pervasive the problem, that professor assumed a standpoint
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A Vocation in Waiting 161
guarded by the possibility of preserving an objective, neutral stance that enabled moral insulation. This she held, despite a city in which:
The kind of mess they have created now even the builders can’t help it. Even the panwal a is demanding with an old building that is to be demolished . . . the illegal tenant who (occupies it) has a goonda . . . It’s very easy to tell that builders have become the leeches who are taking the blood from the city, but now the small fries are also sucking blood from the builders. In huge numbers. The other day the (municipal)
commissioner was saying that every small and big citizen of Mumbai has become
a blackmailer, because he is in a position to take advantage of the legal system . . .
(Even) the middle class people are (doing this). It’s everywhere, at every level and completely normal.
Such narratives of neutrality ultimately crystallized in a moral ecological mode
of belonging, one that mapped to the simultaneously technical and conceptual
aspects of good design, but that completed its contours with repeated appeals to
consciousness. Environmental architecture as good design—consciousness, criti-
cal mindset, and specific techniques—was a lens for assessing present eco-social
dysfunctionality and working in anticipation of future transformation. It was the
means for organizing one’s understanding of the relationship between individual
politics and commitments, professional choices and imperatives, and the some-
times Sisyphean task of environmental changemaking writ large. Good design
provided a metric for personal integrity, bureaucratic transparency, and indict-
ments of categories like builders, state agents, and municipal architects.
Considered together, these narratives of ecology in practice allow an extended
consideration of the engaged, practical fate of RSIEA’s good design training for-
mulation. They demonstrate that it is not only too simplistic, but in most cases
simply inaccurate, to suggest that architects graduate from RSIEA with delusions
of endless and transformative agentive capacity. It is similarly shortsighted to
assume that aspirations formed in training simply vanished over time or through
the wear of experience in the complex of forces and structures that shape urban
built form development in Mumbai. Many current and graduating students, as
well as RSIEA graduates across the history of the program, described profound
and resounding certainty in the inevitability—somewhere in the near future—of
urban environmental improvement in Mumbai. Ideas about when, precisely, it
would come about, and the exact scenario that would catalyze it, differed dramati-
cal y, though; so, too, did notions of what would become of Mumbai’s built form
environment, its biophysical environment, and its social worlds in the interim.
The moral ecology of good design, resilient appeal of green expertise, and assured anticipation that the environment itself would set its stage, was almost ubiquitous.
This was the basis of ecology in practice.
8
Soldiering Sustainability
Expectations of ecological decline in cities are well rehearsed, and nearly always framed against a backdrop of unprecedented growth, unprecedented climatic conditions, and unprecedented movements of those displaced by ever more precari-
ous environmental and geopolitical circumstances. The Anthropocene looms large
and ominous, and its biophysical and social realities embolden anxious responses.
This book set out to understand a collective social response to the urban pres-
ent, and the urban future. It traced how ideas of ecology and nature were inte-
>
grated into a specific architectural modality. The geographic and historical setting within which this modality was embedded—contemporary Mumbai—is undoubtedly unique, but the central questions at hand resurface across urban contexts in
the peculiar, uncertain era called the Anthropocene. How, I asked, would agents
craft a social mission to transform the built form of Mumbai, and how would
ideas of ecology galvanize it? What kind of sociality would adherents to that mis-
sion forge and inhabit? Once established as an environmental affinity group, could environmental architects actual y make the kind of change they were now collectively equipped to envision?
I addressed these questions in a historical moment when Mumbai is riddled
with seemingly intractable environmental and social problems, yet also buoyed by
robust economic growth, narratives of global ascendance, and the bold confidence
captured in slogans like, “Consider it Developed.” This tension framed the research in this book, and cast into the foreground the ways it is lived in everyday social and professional life. As my interlocutors at RSIEA described their aspirations to understand and practice good design, they demonstrated the force of a collective
moral ecology, one that conditioned striking—often seemingly impossible—spaces
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Soldiering Sustainability 163
of imagined possibility. These emerged repeatedly, in spite of an endless array of bureaucratic, political, and economic obstacles to operationalizing good design.
As I have shown, the confidence that RSIEA students and graduates espoused
cannot be ful y captured, or simply dismissed, as bourgeois delusion or rehashed
technological optimism. Although both privileged positionality and a context of
ever-evolving technologies were certainly facets of the RSIEA experience, archi-
tects’ repeatedly reflexive posture toward both, and their commitment to specifi-
cal y rendered logics of equity, justice, and more-than-human nature challenge us
to think beyond more conventional political ecological analyses. The force of their shared moral ecology played an undeniable role in fostering RSIEA architects’ collective refusal to imagine the future of Mumbai within the political economic and
material conditions that characterize its present.
At the same time, such confident aspirational politics are not new to environ-
mental activism or to urban design; neither are they unique to the broader tradi-
tion of social uplift through environmental politics present in the many forms
of postcolonial environmental action across India.1 A host of examples might be found in arenas of indigenous knowledge or tribal land rights, for instance, or
through historical figures like Anil Agarwal and his Center for Science and the
Environment; these often made an explicit point of amplifying the positive devel-
opments and hopeful ideas that would energize aspirations for ecological trans-
formation. 2 Many such figures populate the history of Indian environmentalism, urban planning and design, and social justice work.3 The rhetorical promise of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission to improve city life and
infrastructure, along with its program of Basic Services to the Urban Poor, pro-
vide other examples; so, too does the Atal Mission for Urban Renewal. Although
riddled with political complexity and often vigorously critiqued, such initiatives provided professionals of a previous era with concrete policy rubrics that sketched the form of the possible, and, perhaps, energized their adherents in ways analogous to the case in this book.
Yet the aspirational politics formed and reinforced through RSIEA’s moral ecol-
ogy of good design would be misread if we were to regard them as galvanized
exclusively in nationalist or regional political registers, or exclusively anchored to local and regional scales. For RSIEA architects, nested global, national, and
regional circumstances set the stage for an inevitable rise of the environmental architect, however dormant or constrained she may be in the immediate present.
Global developments as varied as the rise of green building certification systems
worldwide, the proliferation of comparative mechanisms that ranked world cities
according to environmental conditions and achievements, and impactful sociopo-
litical movements that ranged from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Central, stood
as evidence of global transformations that gestured increasingly outward, and thus political economic spheres that, however local y conditioned and embedded, had
political ecological logics that ensured and reinforced their legitimacy at every
164 Soldiering Sustainability
scale. The so-called inconvenient truth of global climate change itself, perhaps,
stood as the ultimate condition that separated the RSIEA mission of the past from
its moral ecology of good design in the present.
Throughout the book, I traced how a distinctive sociality—framed as an envi-
ronmental affinity—was produced. It combined RSIEA’s version of green expertise
with a post-training commitment to ecology in practice, and drew from a wide set
of references that, through RSIEA training, came not only to be shared, but also
to connect a grounded sense of good design to a much larger regional and global
environmental sensibility. Good design, in the sense of its collective sociality, came to demonstrate how the specific work of urban ecology—that knowledge/practice
hybrid bridging ecosystem ecology, social process, and material form—proceeds
in social life.4 The work of urban ecology enfolded both an integrated subject and the integrated subjectivity of the social agents who espoused it.
The RSIEA case also underscores the peculiar temporality of contemporary
urban sustainability as it is lived in social life: actual good design was always
deferred, and yet ever more urgent. I argued that this temporality was central to
environmental architects’ aspirational politics; the temporality of its own fluorescence depended fundamental y on dramatic, if not catastrophic, ecological and
political shifts. RSIEA-trained environmental architects viewed theirs as a voca-
tion in waiting precisely because certain environmental and political changes would inevitably ensure the need for their skil s. The only uncertainty was whether the primary catalyst would be the environment or human politics; whether the
path was opened by nature, human society, or both, future practitioners of good
design stood at the ready.
Yet to stand at the ready with bold confidence while also embedded in the
everyday structural realities of Mumbai’s urban development involved constant,
undeniable compromise. And thus emerges the second unresolved tension in the
book: despite its social y vital life as aspiration, in practice, good design was inevitably dormant. Even standing at-the-ready, its enactment seemed always almost
ful y dependent on external political economic and ecological activation. We
might therefore dismiss good design’s adherents as political y benign at best, anti-political at worst.
Yet I suggest that we risk a great deal if we are to dismiss the complex social
life of good design as simply ineffective or benign. In part, this argument returns to the peculiar temporality of urban sustainability itself, but it also underscores the very specific ways that conceptualizations of “consciousness,” and explicit formulations—however problematic—of a rhetorical y secular and inclusive notion
of Indian identity point to something more complex. The environmental affinity
>
forged at RSIEA and lived as a vocation in waiting il uminates a steadily growing
social arena in which a shared moral ecology repeatedly reinforced an ecopoliti-
cal mission. In the process, it reproduced and sustained the essential resolve that ensured that the wait was not in vain. The vocation in waiting, I contend, was a
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Soldiering Sustainability 165
space that nurtured an urban environmental politics that, though dormant in the
present, may at any moment find a force to ignite it.
The Mumbai context, of course, carried with it significant place-specific politi-
cal stakes, even as the explicit contours of the contemporary political economy of urban development in Mumbai remained unnamed and un-discussed in the context of RSIEA training. Grossly uneven relations of power and access to resources
are a clear facet of the city’s everyday life, and to ignore those circumstances is to assume a complicit position within them. While it would be inaccurate to interpret these silences as evidence that RSIEA students and faculty did not genuinely care
about putting good design into practice, they do invite us to think careful y about how and when environmental architects configured the temporal calculus of
socioenvironmental transformation and socioenvironmental justice. Good design
carried with it clear moral imperatives, but it also enabled a logic of deferral that allowed architects to make repeated social and environmental compromises in the
present without violating the eventual mission.
The shifting scales of reference so central to this calculus—sometimes focused
on the neighborhood, at other times, the city, and at yet others, entire watersheds, ecosystems, or non-human species populations—allowed a constant slippage
between articulating various costs, and rescaling logics of benefits, that could
be derived or would accrue. Open, green, or vegetated city spaces, more effi-
cient energy use, or cleaner air and water might be valued as “public” goods with
intrinsic capacities to remedy urban unsustainability, for instance, even as gross inequalities might persist between social groups when it came to which groups
might enjoy direct access to those spaces and their benefits. Such formulations
Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Page 30