of Mumbai as a city of slums certainly underscored the importance of any attempt
to reimagine the city’s urban landscape; it also placed the focus on the architect’s very brief: namely, shelter. As panelists discussed the city’s development plan,
they rehearsed a dire picture of the present, but connected it to new possibilities.
Urban growth projections foretold a massive future buildingscape that did not yet
exist but would rise quickly. Between 2012 and the next common demographic
benchmark year, 2025, the UN estimated that Mumbai’s population would grow to
27 million, a sharp contrast to the city’s official 2011 population of 18.4 million.5,6 This scenario added urgency to the task of forging a plausible urban material and social fabric; the Mumbai of the present was already famously failing to provide basic
services like safe housing, adequate infrastructure, and sufficient reliable utilities.7
It is further important to notice the distinctive spatial politics of twenty-first century environmental projects. Not only is an aspiring urban environmental
architect guided by analytical questions of identity formation (the “we” of simi-
larly trained and value-oriented architects) and tellings of history (defining Indian green architecture), but she is also guided by a somewhat constant scalar code
switching between global y circulating metrics of appropriate environmental
architectural forms and those considered to be uniquely anchored to scales more
accurately defined as “of the place.” The converse is also true. As environmental
sustainability increasingly figures in urban aspirations for relevance on a global map of cities that “matter,” the environmental architect may be regarded as having the potential to hold the power to foreground specific cities on a global stage.
If the iconic global image of Mumbai is so dominated by the idea, aesthetic, and
human experience signaled by global imaginaries of “the slum,” then the chance to
refashion Mumbai’s housing into more ecological y desirable forms not only sug-
gests a chance to rectify the majority population’s unlivable reality, it also potential y assigns environmental architects a central role in any effort to “reform” or refashion Mumbai’s global image.
In addition to housing, the panelists emphasized a second urban failure, one
that placed Mumbai’s biophysical stresses at its center: flooding vulnerability.
In 2005, the eighth heaviest rainfall ever recorded for Mumbai had caused cata-
strophic floods. 8 At least 5,000 people died, countless others lost their homes, and
68 Rectifying Failure
thousands were stranded in life-threatening circumstances on Mumbai’s roadways.
References to the floods—signaled in the simple mention of the date, July 26—
punctuated public events surrounding the new development plan and underscored
the city’s urgent need to be “open” and “green.” At Reimagining Mumbai, the direc-
tor of the city’s Urban Development Research Institute called July 26 a “game
changer, because,” he declared simply, “on this date the city failed.” Environmental catastrophe—the record rainfall—combined with the calamity of decades of specific patterns of landscape transformation, had exposed the city’s distinctive and inexcusable vulnerability to complete socioenvironmental breakdown. The city
could not stand by and wait for such events to be repeated, panelists argued, reinforcing the imperative to reimagine Mumbai.
While some of the environmentalist alarm over demographic growth pro-
jections have rightly been understood through the analytic of “bourgeois envi-
ronmentalism,” those same projections also bear on a biophysical y grounded,
ecological understanding of the damage that decades of water and infrastructure
development patterns have wrought in Mumbai.9 As Rohan D’Souza and others have shown through their critical approaches to hydrology management and patterns of development in India, it is only through attention to historical alterations of Mumbai’s morphology, watershed, and cityscape—in the Mumbai case, often
in the form of landfilling to facilitate urban development—that we are able to see how crucial hydrological patterns may have shifted over time, concentrating and
intensifying flooding incidents in specific areas, and ultimately perhaps prevent-
ing the city from coping in extreme storm events. 10
Reimagining Mumbai was one of a full range of productions, exhibitions, and
spectacles convened in this period, each enabling specific, sometimes highly localized and institution-specific conversations about the possibilities of urban salvage through landscape redesign, city “greening,” and aspirations that nearly always
reinscribed the urgent mission of the architect and urban planner. As social spec-
tacles, those arenas were simultaneously spaces for delineating specific publics and their audiences and for establishing ideas of appropriate metropolitan engagement, civic duty, and entitlement to undertake the active envirosocial stewardship that
would be needed to forge, and follow, whatever the future path toward a reimagined Mumbai might trace. In the event I describe briefly below, the idea of creating and multiplying “open spaces,” be they parks, protected zones, or newly vegetated landscapes, was an essential component of realizing a more desirable future Mumbai;
as such, open spaces—however they were defined in each event—were regarded as
one of the most important attributes of a responsible new development plan.
The events themselves had peculiar parameters. Both the participant pool and
related, intended audiences drew from largely elite, relatively young, and otherwise privileged subsets of Mumbai’s population. Those who would “reimagine Mumbai”
did not formal y represent its majority, and at times did not even include its citizens, but they formed a collective category of citizens, government officials, urban
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Rectifying Failure 69
professionals, and international “experts” enacting their concern for the environ-
mental future of Mumbai. Embedded in that group were many who possessed or
aspired to possess new forms of green expertise, and many who understood and
supported the general contours of the social, cultural, and environmental reali-
ties such expertise sought to enact. The sphere derived its legitimacy in part from the spectacles themselves, which often stood for evidence of broader “community
consultation.” Each produced an affect that affirmed that open spaces were widely
valued and supported. Despite being civic engagements, however, they were rarely,
if ever, predicated on a whol y inclusive notion of or consultation with the full
range of Mumbaikars who stood to gain or lose from the future form of the city or
the open spaces its green experts so adamantly promoted.
A useful way of thinking about open space promotion through public events
is as a mode of cultivating the city, which K. Sivaramakrishnan and I discussed in Cities, Towns, and the Places of Nature: Ecologies of Urbanism in Asia. In that work, we noted that:
parks and recreation, often twinned concepts, visual y evoke the idea that a city must enfold nature within it, and provide amenities to the modern, civil city dweller to afford time, quite literal y, to breathe in the park. Cross-culturally, the urban park represents plant life, birds, green vistas, clean air, and the uncluttered, protected space in which mind and body can be united, children can play, and refuge can be taken
from the daily grind of city life. 11
Although Reimagining Mumbai was temporal y bound, its idealized connec-
tion between
specific characteristics of urban space, in this case open space, and a socioecological y vital city was neither exclusively postcolonial nor exclusively modern. Sivaramakrishnan and I pointed to Ali’s extensive work on Indian gardens from the Buddhist to Mughal periods, among others, as a treatment of this
issue in premodern green spaces; 12,13 we further noted that urban traces of colonial rule are evident in the very form and location of existing “green” amenities like gardens, parks, zoos, botanical collections, and greenways in Mumbai. Across colonial cities, planners often sought to combine precolonial urban forms with Victorian
ones, thereby forging modern urban natures as a kind of postcolonial inheritance. 14
Thus Mumbai on the verge of a new development plan marked a period within
which specific postcolonial, self-appointed publics cultivated notions of desirable urban open space and the polity that should attend it. To participate in their public events was also an affirmation of entitlement—indeed, duty—to do so. We may in
this sense extend the idea of “cultivating the city” to cultivating civic green expertise.
OPEN MUMBAI
A few weeks after the UDRI/Harvard event called Reimagining Mumbai, a pro-
vocative exhibition opened at the city’s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA).
70 Rectifying Failure
Figure 6. An exhibit-goer ponders a map of Mumbai’s open spaces
at the Open Mumbai exhibition. Photo by the author.
Open Mumbai was a multi-media spectacle of future urban design ideas, all ren-
dered by the Mumbai-based design firm P.K. Das and Associates. 15 It met with such enthusiastic success that its initial NGMA run, from March 15–April 7, 2012,
was extended; it was then re-extended for a month at the city’s Nehru Center.
The project on which the exhibition is based, also called “Open Mumbai,” was
an extensive, ambitious urban plan and proposal for regulatory reform. Original y
intended to be exhibited at the Sir J.J. School of Architecture, the first Indian institution associated with the Royal Institute of British Architects, the move to the
NGMA signaled in part the popular purchase of long-term visioning exercises in
this period. Various extensions of the exhibit only underline this point. The new
venue allowed more public access, and offered the audience a multifaceted, multi-
media performance of translating a highly technical urban development proposal
to a public-civic spectacle of the possible future city.
The exhibition was organized as a multi-tiered walk through the exhibition hal ,
and on my first visit, I found that walk to be ful y consuming. Traversing exhibit sections simulated a journey across the various urban landscapes that made up
the firm’s “open space” rubric for Mumbai. Enormous, encompassing mural-maps
outlined the city’s many and varied neighborhoods, while also typologizing its
spaces—as they are in the present, and as, through a highly guided exercise in
imagination, Das and Associates argued they could and should be in the future.
Consider the exhibit’s introductory text, which is also found in the introduc-
tion of its accompanying book:
As Mumbai expands, its open spaces are shrinking. The democratic ‘space’ that en-
sures accountability and enables dissent is also shrinking, very subtly but surely. The city’s shrinking physical open spaces are of course the most visible manifestations as they directly and adversely affect our very quality of life. Open spaces must clearly be
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Rectifying Failure 71
the foundation of city planning. An ‘open Mumbai’ ensures our physical and demo-
cratic well being. Unfortunately, over the years, open spaces have become ‘leftovers’
or residual spaces, after construction has been exploited. Through this plan, we hope to generate dialogue between people, government, professionals . . . and within movements working for social, cultural, and environmental change. It is a plan that redefines land use and development, placing people and community life at the center of planning—not real estate and construction potential.16
As the exhibition laid out the social and ecological components of “open space,” it also made a clear argument for the impossibility of separating the two. Social and ecological transformation would have to happen simultaneously if Mumbai was
to reach the firm’s goal that it “go beyond gardens and recreational grounds—to
include the vast, diverse natural assets of the city,” while at the same time fostering “non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all
our citizens for leisure, relaxation, art, and cultural life.” This plan, so the exhibition declared, “will be the beginning of a dialogue to create a truly representative People’s Plan for the city. ”17
This would be no minor undertaking, so the exhibition space engulfed its visi-
tors in appropriately massive maps. “Before” and “after” photos from previous Das
and Associates projects assured the viewer of the plausibility of “Open Mumbai,”
even those aspects that seemed improbable and fantastic.
The exhibition guided its visitor across the vast ecological terrain of the cityscape: seafronts; beaches; rivers; creeks and mangroves; wetlands; lakes, ponds, and
tanks; nullahs (drainage canals); parks and gardens; plot and layout recreational grounds; historic forts and precincts; hil s and forests; city forests; open, people-friendly railway stations; roads and pedestrian avenues; and area networking al
comprised major exhibit stations. Some of these, such as the parks section, were
clear elements of the city’s biophysical space, while others, like “people-friendly railroad stations,” mapped a complex concept of ideal civic society in a specific
design. The scale, color, and consuming details of each element were enhanced by a soundscape that mimicked what one might hear in each place; one section featured
birdsong, while another repeated the rumbling sound of rolling coastal waves. This was the soundtrack to the biophysical aspects of Mumbai.
The exhibit experience offered its viewer reassurance, and even evidence, that
the comprehensive vision of Open Mumbai could be realized through the right
combination of urban design, civic advocacy, and governance. While the exhibit
itself did not focus on the latter’s complex details, the entire undertaking’s
core objective, made clear throughout, was to accomplish “necessary amend-
ments in the DP (development plan) and accompanying DCR (Development
Control Regulations). ”18 The legal apparatus that structured urban development was acknowledged, then, but the chasm between the aspirations depicted
in an exhibit space and their enactment in the actual city was left otherwise
unproblematized.
72 Rectifying Failure
Figure 7. “City Forests” were highlighted among the many different
types of open spaces in Mumbai at the Open Mumbai exhibition. Photo
by the author.
The case for “Open Mumbai’s” exercise in urban aspiration greeted exhibition
visitors, and so framed the intentions for visitors’ overall experience:
Open spaces reflect the quality of life in a city. In India’s financial capital, Mumbai, rapid development and expansion of the city has resulted in the erosion of its open spaces at a rate that is truly alarming. The ‘lungs’ of the city, like recreation grounds, parks, and gardens, along with invaluable natural assets like mangroves, wetlands, forests, rivers, creeks, and the natural coastline, are fast shrinking. It is our opinion that the situation simply has to change.19
Thus prepared, the visitor first met with the
seafront (“With 149 km of coastline
and seven interconnected islands, Mumbai is a city on the sea”20), then moved through detailed accounts of each element in turn. In most cases, proposals for
the possible cityscape were underscored by examples of previous projects. 21 Some came from the firm’s completed work in Mumbai, while others invoked global
icons like New York’s High Line or Berlin’s Spree riverfront. Immersed in Mumbai,
but occasional y gesturing to a world of presumably “world-class” urban open
spaces, visitors were invited to travel across notions of time, space, and the possible urban landscape of Mumbai all at once.
In a manner that resonated with learning ecology as an “integrated subject”
back at RSIEA, portions of Open Mumbai were dedicated to a basic lesson in
principles of biophysical ecology. Sections related to seafronts and beaches, for
example, included primers in elementary coastal dynamics and drainage. Lessons
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Rectifying Failure 73
in beachfront conservation and coastal nourishment accompanied gorgeous ren-
derings of future seafronts that were at present little more than solid waste dumps.
Even aspects of the historical ecosystem, virtual y erased in the present by urban development, were reinvigorated:
Did you know that Mumbai has four rivers? Mithi, Oshiwara, Dahisar, and Poisar
(are) together 40.7 km long. Almost invisible to the city’s population, these rivers are waiting to be ‘discovered,’ protected, and their shores revitalized as public spaces. 22
The exhibition’s visual narrative linked biophysical lessons with social objectives; nullahs, once redesigned, for instance, could host pedestrian and cycling pathways (precisely 81.4 km of them, according to the exhibit), and appealing renderings of park-like promenades and pathways reinforced this sweeping potential. Even the
city’s most notorious environmental problems—like the morphological distortion
and pol ution along the Mithi River, or the progressive degradation of the Sewri
wetlands—could be remedied. Dismal photos of these places in the present were
juxtaposed with green, inviting, and imminently redesigned renderings. In these
Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Page 14
