Letters To A Young Architect

by Christopher Benninger

  In 1976 I had the good fortune to do the first project for the newly created Hyderabad Urban Development Authority in its first year of existence. I wanted to explore the concept that the secure urban poor (in this case, Class IV government servants) become the developers for the EWS for whom rental shelter made more sense. So we laid out a township of 2,000 houses, amenities, shopping and open areas where the owners had a small core house with essential services on one hundred square meter plots. These plots were five times the area we had used in Jamnagar. What happened was that the owners quickly built more rooms and rented them out to still lower income groups (often relatives or people from their own villages) at an affordable rent. The tenants used the public health infrastructure (increasing its efficiency several fold) and the landlords harvested rents for loan repayments and up-gradation. These petty landlords paid land taxes, thus playing their roles as tax payers contributing to urban resource mobilization. In the Hyderabad case the two thousand original plots served to create more than six thousand end user shelters for a very low income group – something a public authority could never have achieved. These were three different and unique channels which facilitated access of the poor to housing. This is what I call ‘Social Architecture’.

  I also carried out large scale planning operations for the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority in the mid-1980s in Thane and in Kalyan where I emphasized both macro social and economic infrastructure and user-end access. Generally development plans only calculate the per capita needs for water, electricity and sewage disposal and provide these at the trunk infrastructure level. This leaves out seventy percent of the population who live in slums and sub-divided chawls and old structures. We turned this around and went directly to the users and worked out participatory strategies. Common taps for potable water, bathing places and WCs managed by user groups were provided. At the other end of the scale we looked at the regional water resources, the regional storm drainage networks and transport systems. By addressing these from both ends a viable urban strategy was designed. In Thane, much of this was implemented in the early 1990s, which turned around the city’s economy. This concept of slum up-gradation became a fourth channel, giving the poor access to shelter.

  Why am I not still doing this? First, I am interested in designing concepts and inventing ideas and not in becoming a factory producing housing. Second, I realized that one could have more impact on access to shelter through framing public policy than through construction. Our urban planning legislation was modeled on the British Garden Cities Movement ideas, which included wide boulevards, huge parks, immense house plots, single-function land use zoning and low density as guiding principles. Our élite bureaucrats felt India should model itself upon the West. I knew that neither the government nor the urban poor had the resources to follow this model. The answers to our problems rested in new laws, new town planning standards, new philosophies and new principles. That is why I formulated the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism, which have become the basis of much of my recent planning work.

  Can you give some salient details of the urban and regional development plans you came up with for other South and Southeast Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Malaysia and Indonesia? Have these been implemented?

  I have been involved in the preparation and analysis of plans for existing and new towns in Malaysia (Terengganu); Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan at different levels. In Malaysia I was pushing policy changes as the government was building new towns with over-designed, spread out roads and public health infrastructure. They planned such large plots for the poor and such high technical standards that these could never be handed over to the stakeholders for self management and local governance. They had priced out democracy. Only if a patron authority managed these towns could they survive – with large subsidies.

  Again upper middle class garden cities designed to Western standards were dictating minimum plot sizes, setbacks, ground coverage and other urban development standards. This vision was wrong from the very top, where foreign models were drawn upon and dropped from the sky on emerging economies. In Indonesia I designed the shelter strategy for the rural poor as one of the cornerstones of their first National Rural Development Program. Here also the problem was wrongly stated as ‘how to provide a minimum, standard house to each rural household’, or about eighty-five percent of the population. Development was wrongly seen as the production of ‘things’, rather than of networks and processes.

  The question was turned around by looking at health statistics in rural areas. The bulk of mortality and of morbidity arose from polluted drinking water, poor sewage management and low knowledge levels about disease and sanitation. The new approach was to see the ‘community as the family’ and ‘the village as the house’. Previously, community bathing ponds were used for drinking water and for bathing animals. Sewage leaked into these, making them cesspools of disease. The new house started with functional education, user-end water sources and sewage and sanitation management. The housing program was reinvented as a habitat program: the new house was a new village.

  In Nepal, I designed an institutional system for local participation, micro-level planning and decentralized implementation. In Bhutan I have prepared the physical plans and economic strategies for three new industrial areas that will piggyback on the surplus hydel power and emerging labor force. We also prepared the new capital plan and the capitol complex – designs for the key buildings in the complex. These are now under construction. They will take years to complete.

  Of greater interest are the Local Area Plans we prepared within our overall Structure Plans in four cities in Bhutan. These are for compact Urban Villages with all basic services and amenities. They are prepared with the involvement of the local land owners: they bank all of their land together, and after leaving aside thirty percent for common facilities, they get back well laid-out plots equal to seventy per cent of what they handed over. The trick? The new rectilinear plots with road access and basic services are worth five times as much per square meter as what their original odd-shaped agricultural lands were worth. All of this work is based on the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism. Our last plan in Bhutan was for a very small new town, called Denchi, in the far east of the country. This will act as an administrative center and as a small magnet to pull development to the east.

  Indian cities are overcrowded, their infrastructure rickety. What do you think ails urban planning in India? And how can it be set right?

  What ails urban planning is that we do not have urban plans. We just have two-dimensional plans marked with colors for land use restrictions and density restrictions. We link up building control regulations for different zones and call that a plan. These are merely controls on land development, not catalysts and enablers of urban development. A plan guides and facilitates development. Urban development is a partnership, not a tussle.

  Not only that, for cities like Pune the last Development Plan was prepared way back in the mid-1980s. It is now three decades old. This is criminal procrastination. Fast-track cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, which are centers of economic growth, have used extensive urban planning to assure economic development. In Singapore all the land belongs to the government and is leased to the private sector for development within very clear urban design guidelines. A large percentage of the people live in public, government owned houses. In India we have had the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism. We are confused and think that the two are mutually exclusive. Capitalism is sustained by good planning. What we are doing in SEZs and business parks is just the beginning of a more viable system. But the idea of appropriating land for these from farmers is a flawed concept. Thus, we do not have a viable system. There are rare exceptions to this, like what is happening in Ahmedabad, where a strong private-public partnership and Town Planning Schemes provide a rational pattern for urban growth, much like the land pooling I described in Bh
utan.

  Cities in India were totally neglected during the first fifty years of Independence. There was no understanding that rural regions and cities are one integrated system. Each feeds or starves the other. Cities are the engines of economic development. We starved these engines for fifty years. We are now paying for this neglect of basic economic principles through congestion, pollution and unsanitary living conditions. Good regional and urban planning is good business. No one understood this. We are awakening after a long sleep. In a way Indian cities are disproving economic theory. It was always thought that economic growth follows the emplacement of economic and social infrastructure. Cities like Pune and Bangalore are growing despite serious infrastructure gaps. But this entails a huge human cost.

  A huge investment by the house of Tata was thwarted, shifting the production of the world’s cheapest automobile to the better-off state of Gujarat. The events in West Bengal are not due to pig-headedness. We were all looking forward to the Tata project there acting as a fillip to turn around the economy. But the politicians failed Tata and their own people at the same time. Through inhuman land acquisition they ruined an important investment and employment generation opportunity in their state. We have to learn from that experience and put people first. As in Bhutan, so also in India, good planning has to be participatory, involving the land owners and the stakeholders.

  Part of our problem today is the graduates of business schools who have a very narrow education. They are arrogant, with limited knowledge and poor skills for consultative decision making. Economic development, economic growth and social change all involve participatory and rational planning. We totally lack that today. We must understand that the WTO is not a development strategy. It is not a plan for social transformation, not even a plan for economic development. It is a vehicle for multinational companies to grow and expand. Our challenge is to seek how we can use this growth and this development for the average citizen; how urban planning can integrate a better quality of life with economic growth.

  As a starting point, when we acquire land for large projects we have to do this through land pooling, land banking and rational redistribution. Next, in addition to Special Economic Zones we need Special Habitat Zones that are part of, and complementary to, the Special Economic Zones. We cannot plan only for the machinery of development leaving out the essence of development – people.

  You first set up institutions like the School of Planning at Ahmedabad and CDSA, and much later a firm of your own. Why did it take you so long to set up your studio and why did you set it up?

  I never wanted to live off the proceeds of an architectural studio. Architecture is an art, a labor of love, not a business. All of my early works are for NGOs, voluntary agencies, or for myself and institutions I am deeply involved in. Harish Mahindra drew me into running a larger studio by asking me to design the United World College of India, and that won the American Institute of Architects Award in the year 2000 which fueled our client list. Architects need patrons to nurture their creativity. We need media coverage to meet patrons. Unless we are careful it can become a vicious cycle of greed and money making. I have never chased clients. I am arrogant with clients to the extent that they must know I am my own man, just like their heart surgeon who will not do their bidding. On the other hand I am the servant of my clients and I have to safeguard their interests above all else. But I never solicit work through free designs. I never lower my fees. I do not design for developers who will compromise on specifications and visit their sins on unknown end users.

  It took me so long to set up my studio because I think it takes forty or fifty years to learn the craft of architecture. I think I am still a student. I think I am still learning. My teachers are my craftsmen, history and my team members in the studio. Every new building is a new invention. We can carry into that process the learnings from the designs before it and from our earlier projects. But each project is NEW and we have to be humble about it. Our clients are often represented by young managers who know nothing of the building process. They know nothing of art. They think one can create beauty in a month or a few weeks. This is an illness spreading like AIDS and we as professionals must educate the public about the disease. It is impacting on the very character of the urban fabric which nurtures us and which underpins the very creation of wealth from which we gain sustenance.

  What has kept you in India?

  I have always felt I am an Indian through and through. Maybe in my previous life I was born in a village and lived there in contentment. From the day I set foot on Indian soil in 1968 I never felt strange or in an exotic place. I love India’s people, the landscape, the seasons, the dust, the heat, the dynamics, the food and even the chaos of the cities and the peace of the villages. When I feel out of place is when I step off a plane in America. Immediately I think, ‘When can I get out of here?’

  How far do you incorporate Indian architectural elements in your designs?

  Architecture, good or bad, emerges from its context. One cannot really incorporate elements. Maybe one can decorate a building and make it look indigenous, which is a sham. One has to let designs emerge from the landscape, craftspeople, materials and the client’s needs. All of these variables are Indian and thus my architecture is Indian. Even if I experiment in glass and steel, it is my Indian curiosity about things new and things different. It is my Indian interest to bring in outside things and integrate everything into one huge pantheon of ideas and concepts.

  (Interview to Business Standard, New Delhi, on 11th and 12th August 2007)

  Letter

  An Interview by Harsh Kabra of The Hindu

  How do you look back on your many decades of association with India and its architecture?

  Architecture is composed of many layers of reality and architects are trained to deal with such multi-layered complexities through templates and prototypes which can be mindlessly applied to typical problems. Architectural schooling can either open up multiple windows to self discovery (education) or pattern one to copy out the right prototype each time (training). After one’s architectural schooling there are the onslaughts of fads, fashions and pop thinking that rein in one’s creativity. The media conveys the messages of what is right and what is wrong. Young people try to find the thread of their future in the weave of the media. Then there are the frameworks of the ‘gurus’ who have projected their correct ways and manners of resolving complicated conundrums. Quite unintentionally, settling in India saved me from all of these forms of entrapment and enclosing paradigms. When I settled in India in 1971 there was no television, internet, affordable phone system or international journals. I was fortunate to ‘miss’ the entire love affair with ‘Postmodernism’. I hardly knew it was happening until it was over. That was when we got an internet connection in 1998, twenty-six years after I left America.

  That India has thousands, no millions, of gods only reflects India’s intellectual bent toward multiplicities of interpretations, perceptions and conclusions. Seeing things in manifestations, rather than searching for the ‘absolute’ truth, is India’s single most creative strength. Nothing is fixed or boxed in; everything is in flux and changing. An idea is seen in multiple ways, from diverse angles and in various mutations. There are avatars of even the greatest of concepts: never one singular ‘correct’ path. If I have any credo it is this continuous change, and the deceptiveness of the ‘absolute’ truth. I would rather search for the Good, than know the Truth. The Indian schema is more concerned about the core of a concept and its many physical and ideological interpretations, analogues and metaphors, than in axioms, principles, laws and rules.

  India therefore has been my natural, organic home as an artist and architect. I would have been stifled by my own success in America. In America and Europe I would have always been seeking creativity and have been trying to find myself with blinkers on, leading me in one ‘infallible’ direction a
long with the mob, not letting me see all of the alternatives. The media, money and fame would have been pointing me to the pre-defined ‘right direction’. India is my land of being. America is a land of seeming.

  But isn’t America a great country where you studied in great universities and taught at Harvard?

  America is great because you can pretend to be what you are not; India is great because you can find yourself and be what you are. I learned a lot at Harvard and MIT because I had the singular good fortune to be taught by inspiring teachers. But when I started to teach at Harvard I realized I was falling into the trap of ‘seeming’; I was hiding my true nature to seem like something I was not. The taste makers were making me over. Madison Avenue left its calling card, and that I was getting seduced scared me. It was a fatal love that made me panic. I liked what was happening to me, but I knew it would kill my inner soul. At the first opportunity I fled to India.

  People often ask you about your views on contemporary Indian or Western buildings that are coming up. What do you think of them?