Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai

by Anne Rademacher

  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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