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64 Ecology in Practice
of social exclusion and violence, were not the direct focus of this curriculum or
its attendant praxis. Stil , as was suggested in students’ strong reaction against the
“greenwashing” version of green design we encountered at Grundfos, these issues
were inescapable. Much of the time, however, learning good design meant equating
proper practice with the almost automatic byproduct of a simultaneously sustain-
able city and more harmonious society. The precise contours of the bridge between
sustainable city and sustainable society seemed both presumed and, at least in overt curricular terms, omitted, but the responsibility to forge that bridge rested unquestionably with the architect properly equipped to practice good design.
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4
Rectifying Failure
Imagining the New City and the Power to Create It
Did you know that Mumbai has four rivers?
—Open Mumbai exhibition
Greater Mumbai cannot survive as a concrete jungle.
—Breathing Space exhibition
As the students trained to practice good design, parts of the wider city of Mumbai were caught up in a wave of events, symposia, exhibitions, and spectacles that
amplified anticipatory optimism for the city’s new development plan. This chapter
offers the reader one trajectory—the author’s—through a selection of public events that highlighted the possibilities for sustainability suggested by the imminent plan.
In doing so, I aim to pause and rescale our focus from the social experience of
Institute training to the wider city and its publics. These, after al , form an important dimension of the broader social worlds that all of the students lived among.
This chapter addresses the social production of ideas of good design as they were
nested within a wider urban frame for the potential place, and composition, of
Mumbai’s environment. As in the context of the Institute, that frame was produced
in real time, its aesthetic and ecosystem service dimensions promoted, contested,
and reworked across many specific publics and locations in Mumbai.
I note from the outset that each event I discuss in this chapter indexes specific
attempts to influence the extremely complex and layered world of Mumbai’s urban
politics.1 Yet, unlike the RSIEA context, this chapter does not attempt an exhaustive analysis of the events or the publics they created or excluded; while these are important issues worthy of their own book-length analytical treatments, they are
beyond the scope of the present work. I note them here because their frequency
and presence in this period of my fieldwork reinforced in more popular settings
the sense of purpose and urgency signaled by the RSIEA concept of good design.
Like me, students would daily come and go from the Institute in Prabha Devi only
65
66 Rectifying Failure
to pass by, deliberately attend, and often take part in, the events I describe below.
They help us understand, then, the wider social climate within which environmen-
tal architects were situated—one characterized by the active making of self-desig-
nated Mumbai publics who deemed specific social and natural transformations
necessary to salvage the city from otherwise inevitable socio-ecological chaos. By highlighting a set of public events, this chapter then proce
eds to a question that is central to forging a link between any form of green expertise and engaged social
practice: namely, who, precisely, controls urban development in Mumbai?
I proceed, then, to recount a subset of the many spectacles through which the
ideal future city’s contours were defined, debated, and mapped in the lead-up
period to the new development plan. Each was organized by a different group—
and therefore enabled different kinds of claims to legitimacy—and each took as
its central concern not the question of whether one or another vision of an open, greener Mumbai was desirable, but rather which version could be understood and
embraced as the most appropriate, representative, and, ultimately, sustainable.
A few weeks after my arrival in Mumbai, I was seated among an audience of
Mumbai-based planners, architects, and urban professionals in what, like the
RSIEA opening program, might be viewed as both a global and a postcolonial
setting. In the quite Victorian assembly hall of the former Victoria and Albert
Museum, now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, the group
had convened for an event called Reimagining Mumbai. Organized by the city’s
Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) and faculty and students from Harvard
University’s Graduate School of Design, the seminar drew its participants from
Mumbai’s environmental y interested urban professional public, as well as an
international y mobile, elite group of graduate students and their mentors. The
challenge, as the name suggests, was to undertake a daylong, collective visioning
exercise: what would a greener blueprint for the city’s built form—one that would
reorganize its land-use mosaic while meeting the needs expected to accompany a
dizzying future population growth scenario—look like? The program comprised
speeches from Indian and international “experts,” but its singular message was that regardless of one’s home context or degree of familiarity with Mumbai (indeed,
some speakers were visiting the city for the very first time), all assembled were
somehow entitled to register their voice toward the goal of reimagining it.
I was invited to this gathering by the RSIEA Head herself; she was among the
urban professionals who had participated in discussions, projects, and prepara-
tions that informed the event. As such, I’d expected her work or her presence to
be in the relative foreground, but instead the program included some presenters
who seemed to have little or sometimes no prior experience working in Mumbai.
I sat in the audience, then, alongside Udyavar Yehuda, someone who in the RSIEA
context would be leading the group.
The program was eclectic. Some speakers offered comments that seemed to
reinforce what by 2012 had become a rather standard, global y circulating narrative
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Rectifying Failure 67
of Mumbai, informed by its iconic status as a planetary epicenter of informal and
slum housing. 2 Without question, the challenge of re-housing, or differently housing, the estimated 8.7 million people living in Mumbai’s slums is both critical y
important and notoriously tenacious, but international discourses of slums in
Mumbai at that time sometimes had the effect of allowing slum settlements to
stand, in singular dimensionality, for the city more broadly. 3 At times this betrayed the complexity of social, political, and material life in slums themselves; it also supplanted more careful attention to the layered social, political, and biophysical challenges the city faces as a whole.4
Among the audience gathered for Reimagining Mumbai, invoking discourses
Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Page 13
