Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai
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ized alternative metrics such as these, and the ways they are used to challenge the IGBC, exemplify the many ongoing contests between “local” and “extralocal” ideas and practices of green architecture.
22. Quotations from field notes, December 11, 2008, during Green Home Technologies Lecture, Auroville.
23. Quotation recorded in field notes, December 8, 2008, Grundfos Manufacturing
Chennai, Regional CEO.
24. Ibid.
25. Field Notes, Design Studio course, March 18, 2010.
4. RECTIFYING FAILURE
1. Readers with a particular interest in the complex politics and multi-scaled audiences that spectacles such as the ones described in this chapter attempt to reach may find these topics more ful y addressed in the chapter, “Emergency Ecology and the Order of Renewal,”
in Rademacher 2011.
2. See Anand and Rademacher 2011 for a fuller discussion.
178 Notes
3. Many figures exist. This figure was published by a Special Commission appointed by the Indian Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Ministry, and reported in the Times of India. See “City of Dreams?” Singh, Mahendra Kumar, Times of India, November 15, 2010.
4. See Anand and Rademacher 2011.
5. United Nations. 2011 Revision, World Urbanization Prospects.
6. Government of India Census, 2011. Readers should note that the overall reliability of such statistics has been called into question. For example, see Agrawal and Kumar (2014).
7. See Anand 2017.
8. In a twenty-four hour period, 994 mm, or 39.1 inches of rain fell on Greater Mumbai.
9. See, for example, Baviskar 2011.
10. See, for example, D’Souza 2002, 2006; D’Souza, Mukhopadhyay, and Kothari 1998.
11. See Daud 2011, 207.
12. See also Villiers-Stuart 1913.
13. On Victorian gardens, see Morgan and Richards 1990.
14. The firm’s website may be reviewed here http://www.pkdas.com/.
15. Mumbai Waterfronts Center and PK Das & Associates 2012.
16. Ibid, 1.
17. Ibid, 3.
18. Ibid, 5.
19. Ibid, 7.
20. Seafront promenade projects at Bandra Bandstand and Carter Road, as well as the Gateway of India, were highlighted with a dramatic before-and-after photo; Juhu Beach il ustrated what was possible, while Dadar-Prabha-Devi Beach exemplified a dire beach conservation and nourishment problem.
21. Mumbai Waterfronts Center and P.K. Das and Associates. 2012, 34.
22. See, for example, Baviskar 2003b, 2009; Rademacher 2009; Ghertner 2013; Doshi 2013; Sharan 2014.
23. According to the group’s website, “CitiSpace (Citizens’ Forum for Protection of Public Spaces), established in June 1998, is an NGO which networks over 600 Resident Associations, Community Based Organisations (CBOs), NGOs, Trade/ Commercial Establishments and individuals in most of Mumbai’s 24 Wards. Our creed is the protection of all Public Open Spaces (such as Footpaths, Playgrounds, Recreation grounds, No Development Zones, Beaches and Mangroves, etc.) and advocacy of the rightful use of those spaces.”
(http://nagaralliance.org/citispace/).
24. This NGO had over fifteen years of advocacy experience among slum dwellers and open space advocates, highlighting the political work of open space provision in contrast to the Open Mumbai emphasis on an aspirational imaginary.
25. The survey was led by Neera Punj and Nayana Kathpalia of CitiSpace, and assisted by architects and architecture students. The website reads, “In 2008 CitiSpace undertook a survey of Reserved Public Open Spaces which was completed in 2013 with about 1800
spaces surveyed. The first phase of the Survey was published in the book entitled Breathing Space: A Fact File of 600 Reserved Public Open Spaces of Greater Mumbai in June 2010. ”
26. Accessed at http://nagaralliance.org/citispace/2012.
27. See Rao 2013, 158.
28. Ecology is usual y traced to its etymological origins in the Greek oikos, or home, and – ology, or “the study of.”
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Notes 179
29. The article continued: “A desperate fire department threw in everything they had in battling the blaze, pressing 26 fire engines into service and managed to evacuate nearly 3,000 employees but could not prevent the blaze from completely destroying the top three floors of the state government’s main administrative building.”
30. The Adarsh Housing Society scandal was publical y exposed in November 2011,
when a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India detailed how various elites from political, bureaucratic, and military domains conspired to alter urban development and construction regulations in the course of building the Adarsh Housing Society in Colaba. In the process, they ensured for themselves luxury flats at rates well below-market value.
In the scandal’s wake, then-Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan, resigned his post.
31. See Rao 2013, 155.
32. Ibid, 27.
33. Ibid, 54.
34. See Rao 2013,145 and the section entitled, “Architects and the Profession” for a more detailed account of factors such as the rise and consolidation of an Indian middle class, the arrival of reinforced concrete cement technology, and important design modifications like the introduction of the toilet inside the flat.
35. “Even though the Trust required that all builders get their plans approved by an architect, the architect’s role was usual y quite superficial at the time.” (Rao 2013, 145).
36. See Rao 2013, 145–46.
37. This figure is according to the 2001 Government of India Census.
38. See Rao 2013, 204–5 for a list of specific responsibilities.
39. Laxmi Deshmukh, interview transcript, All India Institute of Local Self Government, March 26, 2012.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Accessed at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/548a4e60-c11b-11da-9419–0000779e2340.
html#axzz3EzC28MLD.
44. Laxmi Deshmukh, interview transcript, All India Institute of Local Self Government, March 26, 2012.
45. Laxmi Deshmukh, interview transcript, All India Institute of Local Self Government, June 25, 2012.
46. Ibid.
47. Laxmi Deshmukh, interview transcript, All India Institute of Local Self Government, March 26, 2012.
48. Laxmi Deshmukh, interview transcript, All India Institute of Local Self Government, June 25, 2012.
49. Text to come
5. MORE THAN HUMAN NATURE AND THE OPEN SPACE PREDICAMENT
1. See, for example, Economist Intelligence Unit, 2011, “Asian Green City Index: Assessing the Performance of Asia’s Major Cities.” Munich: Siemens. Accessed at http://www.
siemens.com/entry/cc/en/greencityindex.htm.
2. Ibid.
180 Notes
3. See, for example, Baviskar 2003b, 2009; Rademacher 2009; Ghertner 2013; Doshi 2013.
4. See, for instance, Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013.
5. The City of New York. 2013. PlaNYC Progress Report 2013, 16.
6. See, for example, Baviskar 2003b, 2009; Rademacher 2009; Ghertner 2013; Doshi
2013.7. The Parsis are a Zoroastrian minority group concentrated in Gujarat and Sindh. In Mumbai, the group has roughly sixty thousand members, and a general decline in the overall population characterizes the past several decades.
8. See Bombay Natural Historical Society 2012, 4.
9. “Lose the vultures, lose the soul.” Karkaria, B. New York Times, May 11, 2007.
10. It should be acknowledged that embedded in this moment of imagining a future
Mumbai, the city’s Parsi community is famous for its own anxiety about its future. Although a thorough treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of this chapter, the fact that many regard Parsi religious and cultural identity as itself “endangered” gave a particular valence to the future of the Towers of Sil
ence and the Doongerwadi forest. See Axelrod 1990.
11. Personal communication, March 2012.
12. A vast literature captures a range of issues related to ecological concerns and debates about non-native species. Some instructive articles include Davis and Thompson 2000; Gurevitch and Padil a 2004; Lodge 1993; Mack et al. 2000.
13. A classic starting point for understanding this concept is Costanza 1997. See also Boyd and Banzhaf 2007; DeGroot et al. 2010; and Farber, et al. 2006. More recent critical treatment of ecosystem services as a concept and bundle of practices abounds; an excellent entry point to this literature is Ernston 2013.
14. A classic starting point for understanding the concept of disturbance in ecosystem ecology is Pickett and White 1985.
15. Here, Harvey’s (1999) “Considerations on the Environment of Justice” is instructive.
In pointing to the inherent contradictions of the idea of a universal environmental ethnic, he argues that it is simultaneously impossible, desirable, and inevitable. The inevitability is conditional, however, and ful y reliant on our human social capacity for what he cal s a more honest mode of translation—one in which the terms and lifeways that frame another person’s experience of the environment is a starting point for communication and analysis. The advocate of environmental justice, he argues, must be constantly self-reflexive and humble.
16. Following the concept of ecologies of urbanism developed in partnership with K. Sivaramakrishnan (2013, 2017), I mean to signal here that there may be many ways of valuing, and naming, the multiplicity of forms of life on Earth. These may go unrecognized for their overlap with the content of the natural scientific and policy term, “biodiversity.”
The more expansive content of the concept may be captured in other ways of knowing nature, and its value may be differently designated in those multiple knowledge forms.
17. See “Ways of Knowing Nature” in Rademacher 2011.
18. Heynen 2003, as quoted in Braun 2005, 645.
6. CONSCIOUSNESS AND INDIAN-NESS
1. Pondicherry, December 14th lecture to RSIEA students.
2. Ibid.
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Notes 181
3. In Reigning the River (2011, 15), I suggested that the making of nature and the simultaneous making of meaningful life in the city involves a complex social identity construction process that may beget “new affinities . . . environmental affinities that might ‘foster’
cohesion where other ways of marking sameness and difference (cannot).” These affinities may reveal the many dimensions of existing identity struggles, contests over governance, and collective reworkings of the moral ecologies of city living. In this sense, the “places” of nature in the city are always in a state of refashioning (see also Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2017).
4. See for general grounding on this issue Ghassam-Fachandi 2012; Mishra 2006; Davis 2005; Jaffrelot 1993, 1998; Hansen 1999; Basu et al. 1993; Bhatt 2001; Bhagavan 2010.
5. Paniker (2008, 82) also notes that in 1984, the Indian National Trust for Architectural and Cultural Heritage was established, identifying its main objective as the restoration and conservation of “neglected” art and cultural heritage in India; Paniker interprets this as “the making of public meaning and belief about the Indianness of things.”
6. Paniker 2008, 74.
7. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript.
8. Promotional pamphlet introducing Govardhan Eco-village.
9. Invoking cow protection, though treated as largely political y benign in the context of this field study visit, is laden with political symbolism, much of it associated with various strains of Hindu Nationalism. See for example Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Hansen 1999; Pandey 1983; Freitag 1980.
10. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript.
11. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript
12. Rao 2013, 146.
13. Ibid, 146–7.
14. Ibid, 147.
15. Ibid, 148.
16. Rao 2013, 150.
17. Sears 2001, 133.
18. Ibid, 134.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid, 136.
21. Ibid.
22. Field notes, Auroville, December 10, 2007.
23. Auroville’s own public relations material, as reported on its website, lists a Governing Board, a Residents Assembly (comprised of the current full members of the Auroville community), a Working Committee, an International Advisory Council, and a Secretary of the Auroville Foundation. The International Advisory Council was established by the Government of India; it appoints the Council members. In the past, the Council has included such notable figures as Amartya Sen. See http://www.auroville.org/.
24. In his From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, Anker (2010: 167–8) notes that McHarg’s work is sharply critical of Western capitalist individualism and greed. As a remedy, McHarg proposes an Orientalist, holistic ecology as its remedy (Anker 2010, 167–68).
25. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript.
26. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript.
182 Notes
27. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript.
28. Anonymized student reflection on returning from Auroville, transcript.
29. Sears 2001, 137.
30. Accessed at http://www.ecovil age.org.in/perspectives/land-and-cow-a-perfect-
sustainable-system/.
31. A detailed description of the system, excerpted from the Govardhan eco-village website: “SBT system consists of an impervious containment and incorporates soil, formulated granular filter media, select culture of macro organisms such as earthworms and plants. It involves a combination of physical and biological processes for processing of wastewater and it derives its fundamental principle from the functioning of a terrestrial ecosystem. The process by design integrates with the natural bio-geochemical cycles of nature and hence proves to be most effective. The combined grey and black water from all the residential facilities are collected and transported via a water based underground sewerage network to a central collection point. In the first stage the physical separation of waste is accomplished in a primary treatment unit consisting of a perforated screen and gravity-settling tank and an equalization tank. The perforated screen helps in separating the undissolved solid wastes from the waste water and allows it to pass through a settling chamber that has a sloped bottom opposite to the direction of the water flow, thus facilitating the settling of solid particu-lates with higher specific gravity than the waste stream. Then the water enters the open top equalization tank that allows the dissolved pol utants to be exposed to natural sterilization by sunlight and ambient air. In this second stage the wastewater is sprayed, by means of a pump, onto a plant bed which is part of an engineered ecosystem that constitutes two bio-reactors, one for a coarse purification and the other for further refining through recycling.
This ecosystem consisting of soil, bacterial culture and earthworms, mineral additives and select plants, treats the water in a combination of physio-chemical and biological processes.
Purification takes place by adsorption, filtration and biological reaction. The entire waste is processed and converted into bio-fertilizer which is rich in organic content, and is being used in the plant nursery at GEV. The other useful by-product is the Biomass in the form of flower, fodder, fruit and fiber which are also completely utilized in house. Since the entire waste is converted, there are no issues like handling the wastes after treating the water, as is common in conventional chemical based sewage treatment plants. The entire process operates in aerobic mode thus eliminating the possibility of foul odor near the plant, creating a safe and serene ambiance for the people dwelling near the plant. The processed water can be reused in gardening, agriculture and also supports marine life. The SBT plant at GEV can handle up to 30,000 litres of sewage per
day and operates in an 8 hour cycle daily. It can potential y produce up to 20,00,000 Tons of bio-fertilizer per year and most importantly offers an eco-friendly option to the growing menace of waste handling.” (See: http://www.ecovil age.
org.in/perspectives/a-flush-story-iii-soil-biotechnology-plant-at-govardhan-eco-village/).
32. Examples include Desai and Rajagopalan 2012; Rajagopalan 2012; Rajagopalan 2011.
33. Sears 2001, 136. The question of whether the use of vernacular forms can be inclusive rather than exclusive is also posed by Hasan 2001.
34. Sears 2001, 137, quoting Meister (9–15) in the same volume.
35. Architectural Review, August 1987.
36. Cruickshank’s Introduction to the special issue of Architectural Review is cited by Paniker (2008, 97).
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Notes 183
37. Curtis 1987, as cited by Paniker 2008, 98.
38. Curtis 1988, as cited by Paniker 2008, 102.
7. A VOCATION IN WAITING
1. Anonymized quotation from a current (2012) RSIEA student survey response.
2. Field notes from group interview at RSIEA, June 24, 2012.
3. Ibid.
4. Anonymized quotation from a current (2012) RSIEA student survey response.
5. Siddharth currently works in an architecture firm that does not undertake specifical y environmental architectural projects. It employs 70–80 architects, and serves clients all over India. At the time of this interview Siddharth was doing a residential development project in Kochi, on reclaimed land. Siddharth told me that the client wants a gold certification for this development.