AGENTS OF “ THE MESS”: IMAGINING CHANGE VS.
THE POWER TO ENACT IT
If the timely civic task of imagining a new development plan created an excited air of possibility, the contemporary state of Mumbai’s urban development governance
regime offered its sobering remedy. Perhaps redefining urban socionature and
bringing it more ful y into the city was possible in the future, but in the present, those who wished to access such a reality could only “escape” to it.
Long before the sun rose one Friday in June of 2012, I climbed bleary-eyed
into the back seat of an SUV, the guest of two colleagues, both RSIEA faculty
members. We promptly headed off for a weekend trip outside Mumbai. Our des-
tination was their small plot of land in Ali Bagh, a coastal area 150 km from the
city and worlds away from the population dense, open space-starved metropolis
of Greater Mumbai. My hosts were eager to walk the land they’d purchased many
years before, and that they were now slowly, painstakingly clearing and cultivat-
ing. Their core ambition was to eventual y design a smal , ecological y sensitive
home so they could stay at what they called their “patch of paradise” for a few
days at a stretch.
80 Rectifying Failure
For diversion during the long journey, my hosts brought a fresh, thick stack
of morning newspapers. We surveyed the front pages, and the same lead story
repeated over and over: the day before, a disastrous fire had swept through the
Maharashtra state administrative headquarters, the Mumbai Mantralaya. I read
aloud for my companions this excerpt from the Hindu Times:
A devastating fire swept through the upper echelons of Maharashtra’s government
offices in Mumbai, killing three people, destroying important files and documents, completely gutting the offices of the chief minister and his deputy, and possibly delaying the under-fire government’s plans to overhaul the state’s creaky urban infrastructure and housing projects. The fire, which started around 2:45 pm on Thursday June 21 afternoon, roared uncontrol ably for more than a few hours, terrifying office goers in the vicinity and throwing traffic on the arterial Madam Cama Road, which
leads on to the scenic Marine Drive, in total chaos. 30
On hearing this, one of my hosts interrupted. “There go the records on the Adarsh
Housing Society scam!” The other replied, only half joking, “It’s a good thing we’re escaping to nature!”
If Mumbai’s floods and an unenforced development plan had come to stand
for environmental failure, Adarsh exemplified the opacity and deal-making that
distorted so many of the bureaucratic processes that legislated urban development.
Specific informal processes, often technical y illegal but rarely adjudicated, ensured that the profits and other benefits of construction in the city accrued to those with specific political and economic ties. Despite outrage over flagrant violations of
building codes and laws, or the involvement of government officials at very high
levels, in some ways the Adarsh scandal’s audacity seemed to simply exemplify the
banal reality of regulatory practice in Mumbai’s urban development sector. 31 Public outrage over the scandal eventual y compelled the Municipal Commissioner to
bring hundreds of construction projects to a halt, citing building code violations and demanding compliance. In response, Mumbai’s builders threatened to strike.
The back-and-forth posturing was in some ways less important than the complex
of officials, builders, and financiers it involved. These were the powerful, if dynamic and often elusive, entities that held the most significant control over Mumbai’s
present form and future urban landscape.
Mumbai’s complex of urban development regulatory bodies, and their roots in
previous colonial, state, and municipal bureaucracies is perhaps best traced from
1896. At that time, the Bombay City Improvement Trust was inaugurated, largely
in response to the devastation of the plague. Before this, the city’s primary urban development goal was to attract residents, so both land offers and building activity proceeded on terms that favored property holders. Regulatory leniency became
precedent, and eventual y the norm, making later attempts to impose new policies
very difficult. The City Municipal Act of 1888, for example, had laid out an enforcement regime for a basic set of building regulations (height, ventilation, certain
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Rectifying Failure 81
street widths, setback lines); it also restricted the height of new buildings to 1.5
times the width of the street on the site. Reflective in part of norms and precedent, however, the Act contained no provision for the height of older buildings. Owners
of these simply went on making unregulated additions. 32 Those subject to the new regulations, meanwhile, often simply ignored or worked around them.
In its quest to use urban planning as a tool for promoting ideas of public health, sanitation, and connective mobility in the city, the Bombay City Improvement
Trust joined in a somewhat tense relationship between two prior authoritative
bodies: the colonial entity, the Government of Bombay, and the Bombay Municipal
Corporation, or BMC, composed largely of Indian landlords, industrialists, and
wealthy merchants. In its first decade, the Trust undertook a sanitation mission;
it built worker housing and connecting roads to re-pattern settlement and move-
ment across the city.
In the following decade, however, thinking about appropriate schematics
of urban development whilst planning for Mumbai’s expansion led a new Trust
chairman to propose a revised approach to meeting the city’s housing and public
health objectives. In 1909, he suggested an “indirect attack” on the housing prob-
lem by developing residential building stock in what would become new suburban
areas in Mumbai.33 In this scenario, building outward to the suburbs represented the chance to design new landscapes that promoted public health. These suburban
landscapes contained elements like careful y placed roads, parks, trees, and a host of environmental amenities associated with promoting human health. Building
Mumbai’s suburbs, then, had a great deal to do with promoting a “healthier” urban
environment.
Rao describes debates within the Trust that actively questioned the relation-
ship between various environmental elements—landscaped boulevards, parks,
and other open spaces—and public health. There was clear agreement, however,
that certain spatial characteristics connected (or enabled the circulation of) urban social life and nature. This was thought to actively create human social and physical well-being, according to Rao:
Orr (chairman of the Trust) was careful to present the boulevard as part of a ‘strong indirect attack on the prevailing unsanitary conditions which are largely due to overcrowding.’ The suburbs were presented not as an escape from the crowded city for
the privileged classes, but rather as part of a comprehensive citywide strategy to attack the problem of overcrowding in the older parts of the city by attracting some residents northward. Kent (chief engineer of the Trust), meanwhile, attacked . . . suggestions . . . that the amenities of the boulevard—benches, trees, strips of green to separate different functions, and so on—should be relegated to the parks that were also envisioned in the schemes. Kent argued that such suggestions were ‘based on the false premise that boulevards and parks fulfill the same purpose, and it may be as wel to compare the two and examine the points of similarity and difference.’ While the p
ark and the boulevard might have some features in common, parks were essential y
82 Rectifying Failure
static places. They provided the ‘lungs’ of the city, and they were also pretty to look at and an ‘attractive amenity to those living within easy reach.’ Boulevards, on the other hand, were of greater importance than parks since they constituted the channels through which ‘the life of the place must pass. ’34
The exchange reminds us that elements of urban nature may or may not “count”
as nature, depending on their placement in urban space. Furthermore, environ-
mental elements and amenities have a long history as tools—contested, at that—in
urban planning; not only were they understood to have the potential to positively
impact public health, but by regarding them as the city’s “lungs,” a consciousness of their place in broader biophysical processes that interconnect with human
social vitality was already present.
Political and economic changes after World War I had important effects on
Mumbai’s urban development mechanisms, as well as on land prices and housing
policies. Through the 1919 Government of India Act, the colonial state significantly reduced its oversight of Mumbai’s urban development and governance; in its place,
ministries elected by a provincial legislative council were granted power to oversee local self governance and public works.
Around this period, the place of architects in urban planning and development
also assumed active prominence. Although the Trust had employed architects to
oversee the continuity of design in its undertakings for some time, in most cases
developers found ways to tailor projects to their own preferences and financial
advantage. As a result, despite their presence, architects had virtual y no influence; the only exception to this was in the case of large public buildings.
In the 1930s, the BMC endorsed the Trust’s policy of requiring architect-cer-
tified drawings for new construction. At the same time, suburban development
schemes assumed a new and powerful momentum—the dimension of Mumbai’s
early urban growth and development history eloquently recounted by Rao. A
new generation of Indian architects, trained at the Sir JJ School of Architecture
in Bombay, came on the scene as participants in an urban planning process and
turned their attention to creating Mumbai’s suburbs. 35
However, observing the rise of the Indian architect, Rao alerts us again to their
limited agentive role. He notes as emblematic a debate that played out in the pages of the Times of India, in which a former Trust engineer described how the architect’s potential contribution to urban development was thwarted. He wrote:36
Now the average Lessee of the Trust has very great confidence in his own ability in house planning and very little confidence in architects, good or bad. He only employs them because he must, and when possible he confines them to drawing up
plans under his direction and obtaining sanction for them from the Municipality
and the Improvement Trust. As regards the construction of the building he, if pos-
sible, has an arrangement with them by which they give advice when asked and pose
as his architects when trouble arises owing to bad work. He pays them as little as he
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Rectifying Failure 83
can and is quite ready to employ an incompetent architect if he thinks him capable to getting the plans passed and consequently capable architects have to cut their fees in order to make a living and reduce their supervision. 37
This excerpt suggests that professional roles bore little resemblance to actual practice or agentive power in the translation of building projects from design to implementation. In fact, this early twentieth century description of the function and
constrained power of architects in Mumbai’s development still resonates, a point
to which I return below.
By the post-independence period, a new constitution outlined a land, housing,
and urban development administrative apparatus largely within the purview of
state-level governments. By allotting resources through a series of Five Year Plans, however, the central government also exercised enormous influence. In contemporary Mumbai, a state-level urban planning department oversees the Maharashtra
Town Planning Department, the Urban Development Authority, and provisions
for water and sanitation services. A Housing and Special Assistance Department
exercises authority over housing policy issues, land ceilings, rent levels, and, in the Mumbai case, a suite of often volatile and always foregrounded slum redevelopment policies.
At the same time, several key statutory urban development and planning bod-
ies operate at the municipal level. The Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation
(BMC/GMMC) is perhaps most important among them; it exercised considerable
authority up until the mid-1980s. It is the BMC that is technical y responsible for the city’s Master Plan, including enforcement of related development controls and
regulations. The BMC also oversees public transport and electricity provision in
the city.
In 1992, the Indian Constitution was amended to provide more authority at the
level of urban local self-governance. The Mumbai (earlier Bombay) Metropolitan
Development Authority (BMRDA/MMRDA), created in 1975, gained new regional
planning powers in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, a spatial area that combines
the city and suburban areas which include Thane, Navi Mumbai, Ulhasnagar, Mira
Road, Vasai, Virar, Bhayandar, Bhiwandi, Karjat, and Alibaug. The MMRDA’s
contemporary jurisdiction is therefore quite vast; beyond Mumbai city, it encom-
passes nearly four thousand additional square kilometers and a 2001 population
of nearly six million.38
Contemporary Greater Mumbai consists of two separate legal entities: one, the
Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MGCM), oversees most of the ser-
vices one might associate with municipal responsibility: water supply, sanitation, property taxes, building regulations, public health, roads, and education. It operates through an Administrative Wing, which answers to the state-level authority
of an Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer who is appointed by the state
government of Maharashtra. More generalized authority is exercised through the
84 Rectifying Failure
body’s MGCM Deliberative Wing, which is controlled by 227 local y elected and 5
nominated councilors.
Greater Mumbai’s second legal entity oversees revenue collection and a host
of other governmental functions. Divided between the Mumbai City Collectorate
and the Mumbai Suburban District Collectorate, its jurisdiction extends to two
city regions. The City Collectorate oversees the old island city of Bombay, while
the Suburban District Collectorate does the same for the suburbs. 39
One cannot overemphasize the complexity of an urban development appara-
tus with uneven reach across city, state, and federal agencies. Each has its own
jurisdictional boundaries and dynamic politics. Likewise, one cannot responsibly
imagine Mumbai as bounded by conventional mappings; its built form, coastal
zone, and underlying waste, water, and energy systems are all managed simulta-
neously, but often without coordination across the multiple scales of government
that may have relevant jurisdiction. To think of Mumbai, urban planning, or the
social and political ecology of the region in terms of a singular “city,” then, is nearl
y impossible in this sense; it demands a considerable disaggregation across space,
scales of power, and historical and contemporary distributions of resource and
policy control.
Nevertheless, the two agencies most often invoked, and indeed most directly
involved in Mumbai’s development planning, are the BMC and the MMRDA. Yet
this is not to say they are widely regarded as effective. In his talk at the Reimagining Mumbai session described earlier, Pankaj Joshi called the BMC, “defunct without
support or capacities,” and the MMRDA “at best a financial institution.” Also periodical y powerful in specific issues related to planning and development is the Town Planning Department of Maharashtra. Crucial y, the Municipal Commissioner is
appointed at the state level, the implications of which are that Mumbai’s new development plan—open space and all—would have to be approved at the Maharashtra
state government level.
Thus in sharp contrast, perhaps, to the optimism and sense of the possible
generated in exhibitions like Open Mumbai or Breathing Space, my interlocutors
who worked inside the urban development bureaucratic apparatus often narrated
a general sense of “chaotic development” in Mumbai. They emphasized the opaque
political climate, the deregulation of the Indian economy, and a similar deregula-
tion of the built environment over the past two decades in the city, arguing that
all have converged to transform the economic, sociocultural and material fabric
of Mumbai.
An instructive example may be drawn from my conversations with an urban
reform activist, planning scholar, and professor, whom I shall refer to here under the pseudonym Laxmi Deshmukh. In one of our discussions about the actual location of power to remake Mumbai’s urban landscape, she cautioned that both the
failure of the city’s previous development plan and anticipatory spectacles that
sought a new urban vision for the coming plan had to be situated in a realistic
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Rectifying Failure 85
understanding of the bureaucratic apparatus that operationalizes city policies.
In some moments, she noted, the existing development plan was enacted and
enforced, while in others it was not. She encouraged me to focus on the process
Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai Page 16
