Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai
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of eco-social costs and benefits was most visible in the case of the Doongerwadi
Forest, evaluated as it was for its broader array of non-human natural attributes
and processes, but open only to an highly exclusive human public for any direct
use or experience.
Scalar logics of good design introduced yet another clear tension, one particu-
larly visible during study tours. Many of its sources for ecological ideas, values, and strategies mapped to population-sparse, space-rich contexts; nearly all were
sited in contexts other than Mumbai.5 The question of precisely how, for example, a decentralized water management system observed in Auroville might be applied
to a design brief in Mumbai was left unresolved, leaving such questions of how
to scale up, urbanize, and otherwise modify various lessons to fit the Mumbai
context unsatisfied. Although students and faculty were ful y aware of these dis-
crepancies, few discussions took up the direct question of their Mumbai-relevant
analogue. The contents of the toolbox, in this sense, often stood remote from their intended sites of application and relevance.
But perhaps most critical y, good design’s expansive, multiscalar calculus of
environmental justice included the benefits that would accrue to non-human
nature, with the effect of recasting logics of equity and the social good as logics of
166 Soldiering Sustainability
equity and the socio natural good. This further legitimized, as in the Doongerwadi case, exclusive, controlled access to the forest in a city otherwise starved for open spaces. Again, this reinforced environmental architecture as almost automatical y
noble: even in its deferred state, good design “counted” as a mode of doing good.
We began, and we end, then, with a city whose future material form is still
largely unbuilt, and still in-the-making. It takes shape in real time, however rapidly and however divergent its path from the influence of the good design that
RSIEA architects espoused. Demands for open spaces, projections and creative
renderings of a future city mosaic of built forms and urban natures, and stark
socioeconomic inequalities all punctuate the triumphant ascent of this city at
the economic heart of “India Rising.” The more general consolidation of political
power on India’s nationalist right has brought renewed international attention to
India’s social and political economic future, as well as to its environmental one.
Where and how the temporality, aspirational politics, and moral ecology of RSIEA
environmental architecture will fit in the Mumbai of the future is a chapter that
continues to write itself in real time. The ultimate resilience of good design as
ecology in practice remains to be traced and observed, but if its proponents are
correct, it may be the environment itself that remakes Mumbai’s political stage,
perhaps sooner rather than later.
Green experts, their publics, their spectacles, and their hybrid knowledge
forms, all provide guidance for reading the city of the present and anticipating
the city of the future. But they also caution us to disaggregate them, noting the
difference between green knowledge forms and their in-practice social lives, and
the temporalities through which they galvanize moral and political force. While
green knowledge forms may foreground the integrated subject, their lives as ecol-
ogy in practice demand more careful attention to the power relations, aspirational politics, and enduring social structures that organize the moments and contexts
within which they may be operationalized. However dormant or deferred, RSIEA’s
modality of good design gave the urban future a social life that could be both lived in the present and practiced, as anticipated, in the future.
In its dual arenas of training and practice, RSIEA environmental architecture
challenges us to move beyond conventional political ecology analytics in ways that can more ful y engage more-than-human agency, more-than-human exclusions
in our analytical calculus of equity, and the aspirational politics that characterize the socialities of human agency-in-waiting. It challenges us to reconsider the pre-sumptive authority and agentive power of the green expert—the so-called “soldier
of sustainability” who understands, as students were assured, what others do not.
In its guise as good design, RSIEA’s environmental architecture reminds us that
ecology in human, agentive practice depended in large measure on the ways that
practice was made meaningful; it challenges us to forge an analytical place for the political purchase of agency deferred. A vocation in waiting, I have argued here,
constitutes an arena of politics worthy of attention—one suspended in the social
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Soldiering Sustainability 167
structures of the present but unquestionably confident in the inevitability of structural transformation through the agentive capacity, quite possibly, of non-human
nature itself.
I deliberately left the starkest reminders of the power of existing urban devel-
opment in Mumbai to the end of this book. My aim was to underline that in the
case of good design, if we were to measure effectiveness by real-time implementa-
tion, there may be no book to write, no ecology in practice to explore. If it can’t be practiced, after al , how can it have social or environmental value? Indeed, good design as practice was heavily constrained and usual y curtailed; it was nearly
always foreclosed within political economic structures and bureaucratic orders
that showed only passing indications of any transformation at al . If we were to
start and end the analysis with the work of the present, we might rightly look to
arenas of finance, politics, real estate, and governance for the real—and only—
story of environmental architecture (and its absence) in Mumbai.
Yet the sociality of building green was real, powerful, and perhaps even pro-
foundly political, despite the material absence of much that “counts” as green
building. To confine our understanding of RSIEA environmental architecture only
to its evidence in the material built cityscape is to miss its social, political, and ecological point. Good design’s feasibility depended on far more complex metrics,
expectations, and temporalities, to say nothing of a more expansive understand-
ing of aspirational politics as politics. As Arjun Appadurai has argued, forms of hope and anticipation like those which organized good design are always in tension with aspirations configured by “the dreamwork of industrial modernity, and
its magical, spiritual, and utopian horizon, in which all that is solid melts into money. ”6 Indeed, the city unbuilt is also the speculative city, but the possible future within which to imagine fabulous profits and solidified asymmetries of power and
wealth may also collide with, and give way to, a very different, and yet perhaps
equal y plausible possible future marked by transformed environmental condi-
tions, transformed politics, and an urban form ripe for the good design practices
of RSIEA’s environmental architects.7
Our challenge is to consider together, and to understand in tandem, both the
speculative dreamwork of capitalism and the dreamwork of good design. 8 The latter articulates a regime of value more expansive than capitalist calculations can
capture, yet positions itself in the present within the deceptive arena of bourgeois, professional practice. It seeks simultaneously to do wel , and, eventual y, expects to be positioned to
do good. It espouses a moral disposition that works to embody
practices of ethical engagement, and it expects of its labor a materiality that only multiplies its positive ecological and social effects.9
Recent scholarship on new materialisms has suggested that a truly ecological
study of the dreamwork of capitalism would give close attention to the sometimes
profound and unforeseen ways that materials may be regarded by their users as
things with the potential to bind human beings and the non-human, biophysical
168 Soldiering Sustainability
world in new ways. After al , it was the promise of good design itself—embodied in form and declarative of social aspiration—that bound together the moral disposition that made ecology in practice thinkable in the Mumbai of the present. 10 This is not a trivial fact; it suggests social actors with clear belief in the birth of alternative political economic spaces to be born inside the very latticework that industrial
capitalism continual y reweaves. In the present case, the catalyst for that alternative political economic space may be non-human nature itself, however evasive it
remains of our usual analytical toolbox.
If a broader political economic critique of global environmental urbanization—
indeed, planetary urbanization—traces cityscapes of ever intensified vulnerability and suffering, it also quite notably returns ethnographic facts that trace spaces of astonishing aspirational hope. Once opened and activated, they remind us not
only of capitalist dreams of future value, but also of the more-than-capitalist—
indeed, more-than-human dreams of a different, possible city. They challenge us
to take seriously the deployment of shared environmental affinities as a conscious mode of social inclusion—even in historical moments when the very symbolics on
which they draw are otherwise heavily marked by their violent promise to exclude.
Even as IndiaBul s fragmented into scandal, Mumbai’s new development plan
suffered repeated delay and controversy, and enthusiasm for reimagining Mumbai
notably waned, RSIEA’s environmental architects remained. Their numbers grew,
and their affinities strengthened. They may even, in fact, be stronger than ever in their own generational logic of imminent and totalizing change. The fundamental
source of their inspiration was neither the fate of the development plan nor the satisfaction of putting their newly gleaned green expertise into immediate practice. It lived on, instead, within a sociality of environmental affinity that emboldened collective confidence in inevitable change—a confidence more robust and meaningful
today than it was at this writing.
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Notes
PREFACE
1. Prakash, 2010, Pp.26–27.
2. A rich literature explores the architectural and design dynamics of colonial governance in the making of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bombay. While work like Metcalf’s An Imperial Vision argued that there was a distinct colonial intention to foreground notions of traditional society in its architecture, and to link these notions to fostering acceptance of European ideas of progress, more recent work—notably Chopra’s A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay— shows how the city was forged as a dynamic and shared endeavor. Chopra rejects a historical model that assumes that Bombay was made only by its British rulers, showing instead that both colonial and Indian elites forged the city in negotiated dialogue. Chopra points to specific buildings, their plans and their styles, as well as to specific figures from architecture and planning, to demonstrate the hybrid qualities of the “joint enterprise” of making Bombay. Most often, the Indian elites in question are Parsis. Additional work along this continuum includes Evenson’s The Indian Metropolis, Dossal’s Imperial Designs and Indian Realities, and Kidambi’s (2007) expansive The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920. Considered together, these works demonstrate a scholarly trajectory that has come to appreciate the negotiated qualities of urbanization in Mumbai and the complex interplay of power and social positionality that produce any city’s material forms over time. For the making of contemporary historical narrative in Mumbai, see in addition Mehrotra, 2004.
3. See for example Patankar et al. 2010.
169
170 Notes
1. CIT Y ASCENDING, CIT Y IMPLODING
1. For a review of the intersection of urban planning and utopian thinking across a range of historical cases for South Asia, see Srinivas 2015.
2. See Anand 2017. In Anand and Rademacher (2011, 5–7), we discussed how the past two decades of economic liberalization and globalization, in combination with other nation-level reforms, have produced significant economic and ideological transformation in India. Foreign-capital driven speculative investment in newly opened urban real estate markets led some observers to describe economic change in India as “casino capitalism”
(Nijman 2000). But even as Mumbai has been regarded as a city awash with cash, commerce, and consumption (Appadurai 2000), it is also a global icon for discussions of urban informality, inadequate housing, and the patterns of neoliberalism, capitalism, politics, and gentrification that occupy policymakers, scholars, and shape the lived experience of informality and marginality. As we wrote in Anand and Rademacher (2011, 5–7), over half of Mumbai’s population lives in settlements that occupy only eight percent of the city’s area (McFarlane 2008); eighty percent of these live in homes of less than 100 square feet (Sanyal and Mukhija 2001). Over the last century, the Maharashtra state and Mumbai municipal governments have addressed inadequate housing through simultaneous strategies of accommodation, regulation, and demolition (Chatterji and Mehta 2007). See also Roy 2009; Doshi 2013; Weinstein 2014.
3. See note 2 regarding histories of colonial urbanization processes in Bombay.
4. See, for example, Prakash 2010; Hansen and Varkaaik 2009; Chalana 2010; Weinstein 2008; Rao 2011.
5. See Davis 2006.
6. See, for example, McKinsey Global Institute 2010 and Burdett 2007.
7. The global popular press included accounts such as Karkaria 2014.
8. “Planning Commission Draft Report: Faster, Sustainable and More Inclusive Growth, An Approach to the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–17),” Government of India, Aug. 20, 2011,
http://planningcommission.gov.in/plans/planrel/12appdrft/appraoch_12plan.pdf.
9. See McKinsey Global Institute 2009.
10. See Cushman & Wakefield 2014.
11. As we wrote in Anand and Rademacher (2011), over half of Mumbai’s population
lives in settlements that occupy only eight percent of the city’s area (McFarlane 2008).
Eighty percent of these live in homes of less than 100 square feet. (Sanyal and Mukhija 2001). Under the auspices of the Slum Redevelopment Authority and other initiatives, the city faces an enormous and contested rehousing challenge. See also note 5.
12. See, for example, Patankar et al. 2010.
13. Ibid. Although set in a very different regional and political context, Zeiderman 2016
offers an instructive study on the sociopolitical intersection of risk, security, and urban vitality.
14. See, for example, Fuchs 2010.
15. For discussions of expertise in this sense, see Boyer 2008; Carr 2010; Jasanoff 2003; Mitchell 2002.
16. In a now-classic work, Simone (2004) explored the city as a process always inflected with the work of aspiration and imagination. In this case, specific publics were fashioned
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Notes 171
in the social experience of collective aspiration, regardless of its ultimate outcome in the material form of the city.
17. The planning and consulting firm Group SCE India Pvt. Ltd. (a French firm with Bangalore-based India offices) was appointed by the MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Gre
ater Mumbai) to develop preparatory studies for the Development Plan (DP). Once the preparatory studies were put into the public domain, several points were raised and considered by the MCGM. Thereafter, a consultant was appointed to prepare the Draft DP 2014—
34. This was prepared by EGIS Geoplan Pvt. Ltd. (formerly Group SCE India Pvt Ltd.) in col aboration with an MCGM team, under the leadership of Mr. Vidyadhar Pathak, former Chief of the MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority). After this DP was published, public outcry underlined several discrepancies within it. A revised committee was then established to revise the DP, headed by a retired MCGM officer.
18. See, for example, the discussion of civic responsibility and sustainability in the editors’ introduction in Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013.
19. See, for example, Rao 2008.
20. Various firms have prepared projections for future new floor space. According to Rawal et al. 2012, for example, in the next eighteen years, India will add 67% of the floor space projected for 2030, or about 2.3 billion square meters.
21. See Rawal et al. 2012.
22. See, for example, McLeod 1983; Hall 2002; Anker 2010.
23. Through this figure, Marx quite famously proposed relations between human life and the non-human natural world. This familiar, oft-quoted passage set the stage for decades of theoretical and political rethinking, and yet revisiting it afresh grounds us in enduring puzzles. The first volume of Capital (1967 edition) states “Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. . . . By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. . . . We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cel s. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process we get a result that existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose” (pp. 177–78). Quite simply, through labor, Marx considered human beings more as architects than bees. The declaration was powerful in part for its assumption, consistent with existing understandings of bees at the time, that bees did not inhabit sophisticated sensory worlds. See Harvey 2000.