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

by Anne Rademacher

  build it your way, you know, and at least a less destructive way. Just

  because I won’t design it doesn’t mean the work isn’t going to be done.

  Someone is going to do it, and worse than you.

  Kalpana: But you are doing something about it. I think every builder understands that any architect who is giving up that kind of a project

  and that kind of fee and that kind of money—because the fee is not

  small—the moment you say I will not do it, you are impacting the

  person’s mind. He will stop and think that oh my god, that has to be

  something real y strong that this person has said no to doing a project

  like this. It does not come by every day. So when you do that, that

  person will also. It will not be immediate but I think over time he wil ,

  it will impact him in some positive manner. 2

  This conversation underscores many of the issues that would recur as RSIEA grad-

  uates traced their experience once they left the Institute. On the question of the

  138 A Vocation in Waiting

  power of the architect, per se, to catalyze an ecological shift, the answer hinged on the relative power of incremental design interventions. In Arash and Palavi’s

  logic, even “less destructive,” albeit far from perfect, environmental designs were better than those that occurred in a purely conventional scenario. This logic took all incremental interventions as potential y valuable, echoing the RSIEA student

  quoted at the chapter’s outset who acknowledges the imperfection of LEED and

  GRIHA certifications, but interpreted their growing popularity as “a first step

  toward becoming environmental y positive.” For Kalpana, by contrast, meaningful

  and effective action requires environmental architects to refuse projects that they regard as fundamental y destructive and environmental y harmful. This was the

  counterpoint to the logic of incremental change, but to stake this position also

  depended on one’s political economic capacity to do so.

  In the balance of this tension is the willing forfeiture of economic gain, a cal-

  culus familiar in any debate over the appropriate politics of social transformation.

  In the students’ exchange, the “disengage until the proper terms are met” posi-

  tion offered a sharp rebuttal: in India, those who will accept the project exclu-

  sively on the basis of economic necessity are many. Policy and market structures,

  in this logic, are the ultimate purveyors of the kind of change that will create more demand for good design, and therefore enable the form of ecology in practice they

  sought to operationalize. Less clear, of course, was when and how environmental

  or political conditions might force state agents to reform laws and policies, and

  then to enforce them.

  Despite the tension, the exchange above also il ustrates a shared confidence

  that eventual y, as one declares, “there will be policies made by the government—

  they have to, and they will make them—policies that are nature friendly, even for Bombay. In every industry, in everything.” In an important way, the messiness of

  the how questions are far less important in this exchange than the resilient, shared confidence in the inevitability of change. One may be left to hypothesize, perhaps, that the architects regarded the breaking points of ecosystems themselves as the ultimate catalysts for a clearer path to practicing environmental architecture.

  Human power relations, when cast in the context of global environmental crises

  like climate change, natural disasters, pol ution, or habitat destruction, seemed

  inevitably susceptible to reworking—particularly if the agent of that reworking

  was the very environment itself.

  In another conversation among another group of four graduating students

  who had just experienced their Design Studio final project critique, the idea of an inevitable environmental shift repeated. Rather than casting the environment as a

  likely agent that would force the change, however, the participants in this conversation narrated a more conventional, if still dramatic, political economic shift. The shift was well underway, my interlocutors assured me, and its indications could be mapped globally.

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  A Vocation in Waiting 139

  This was, again, a group of three women and one man; here all planned to prac-

  tice architecture in mid-level Mumbai firms following graduation. A field notes

  excerpt from the conversation reads,

  No one said they had joined (RSIEA) with the intention of putting environmental architecture into practice right away, but they described seeing change coming quickly, across the globe. Kabir spoke passionately, and at length, about an inevitable global revolution, saying it had already begun. He cited the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and the rise of groups like Anonymous as evidence that, in his words, “this kind of global capitalism is going to end in our lifetime.”

  Natural y, he argued, what follows it will be more sensitive to the environment; it will support healthier cities and green design because it will value what environmental architects do. Not everyone was as confident that a total, global political economic revolution was imminent, but all agreed that significant global political and economic change is coming, and quickly. . . . To this confidence that global capitalism in its current guise is time limited, Aahna added an ominous assertion. She said that given how “chaotic” urban development conditions in Mumbai have become, they

  are bound to get much worse before they get better. Again, I asked why. Her reply

  was that “greed and profit” fueled all current urban development decisions in the city, and “you cannot take that down overnight.” Aahna said she expects that Mumbai is

  going to implode before a revolutionary change takes place, or, she then reconsid-

  ered, perhaps they will happen at the same time. When I asked what she meant by,

  “implode,” she talked about “suffering and chaos.” Then a long silence fell over the group, until Kabir said, “Watch for the next Occupy movement. It will be somewhere in Asia and it will be even bigger. This is what I expect. They will keep happening and then there will be a huge shift. ”3

  In light of this and the previous exchange, we might understand the training and

  practice of good design not only as a realm of ecology in practice, but also as a

  kind of anticipatory political and professional refuge. Training in good design was a way of ensuring that one had the architectural capacity to make “order” out of an inevitable and approaching urban environmental chaos—a positioning of the professional and personal self against broader forces regarded as both time-limited

  and self-destructive.

  I was struck at first by the overt indictment of capitalism in this conversation, if only because it was so rarely discussed in any overt way during RSIEA training. The culprit in this logic had a shorthand name, capitalism, and the system that organized its social and environmental effects, and which also organized the patterns

  of urban development that kept Mumbai on a specific, environmental y undesir-

  able trajectory, was withering in real time. The rather calm and casual agreement

  in support of an anticipated revolutionary change surprised me. Yet as my conver-

  sations extended beyond graduating students and engaged those who were now

  back in architectural practice, I found that idea of a vocation in waiting—not to

  mention on the correct side of an inevitable revolutionary change—consistently

  140 A Vocation in Waiting

  reinforced. The revolution may be social y- or environmental y driven, but it was

  surely coming.

  Un
derstanding this depends in part on the experiences and responses of dif-

  ferently positioned, RSIEA-trained environmental architects. In surveys returned

  by current students, the overwhelming reply to the question, “What is the greatest obstacle to environmental design in Mumbai?” was simply, “lack of awareness.”

  This reply from a current student exemplified a logic that connects growing envi-

  ronmental awareness with an automatic social response: increasing demand for

  environmental architecture:

  It is heartening to see a lot of awareness campaigns and citizens’ initiatives towards saving the environment and one hopes that these will bring about some amount of

  change, however smal . Lack of awareness on the part of both clients and architects is the biggest challenge and obstacle. Bringing about awareness about the subject can go a long way in creating a demand‐supply system for environmental architecture

  so this knowledge will definitely be helpful in propagating an urban lifestyle of low consumption.4

  Among practicing RSIEA graduates, however, more complex descriptions of the

  political economy of development, its contours, and the nature of the changes that would have to accompany a shift to environmental architecture, emerged. Here,

  certain narrative categories organized depictions of the urban development pres-

  ent in Mumbai. These included social norms and processes, such as bribery and

  corruption, as well as specific actor groups, such as builders, government officials, and architects. These were all invoked as aspects of the lived “market,” or what

  Kabir would perhaps call more overtly Mumbai’s specific experience of global

  capitalism.

  If more enabling structural changes were just on Mumbai’s horizon, what, more

  precisely, was the timeframe architects described? How, and how soon, would

  essential urban development structures enable environmental architecture in

  Mumbai, and, yet again, what would catalyze it? Let us consider first comments

  offered by an architect whom I will call Siddharth, an architect who was complet-

  ing the RSIEA program when we first met in 2008. 5 As seatmates on the long bus journey between Chennai and Auroville, we forged a continued interest in one

  another’s work that long outlived the dusty, sundrenched heat of Tamil Nadu. It

  was there that Siddharth had first described to me his ideas for a set of bungalows that his boss was working on in Africa. On the bumpy bus ride, he sketched design

  elements on a scrap of paper, careful y itemizing how its many aspects harmonized

  with good design principles.

  Since our very first interaction was framed by a discussion of this project, I had thenceforth assumed that Siddharth joined RSIEA because he had a deep commitment to environmental architecture. But years later, in the context of an interview in 2012, he assured me that this had actual y never been the case. Instead, his

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  A Vocation in Waiting 141

  interest in the RSIEA program was simply driven by a love of design; environmen-

  tal architecture was a way to sharpen his sense of connection between built forms

  and landscape. Siddharth described his experience at RSIEA as a way to expand

  his concept of design, not a platform for forging eventual (or inevitable) environmental change. I learned in those later interviews, in fact, that he did not actual y

  “bother” to complete a final RSIEA thesis when he finished years earlier because,

  in his words, “the knowledge was more important than the degree.”

  After leaving RSIEA, Siddharth shifted from the small environmental design

  firm with which he’d worked in 2008 to a much larger firm of seventy architects;

  his current firm undertakes projects all over India. Few of these, he told me, had environmental dimensions; when I asked why, Siddharth said flatly that the builders were not asking for them. Seated together in the open-air institute cafeteria in 2012, I asked Siddharth his working impression of the scope for environmental

  design in Mumbai. His quick, sharp reply caught me off guard, in part because

  I’d been focused in the days prior on interviews with current students, so many

  of whom expected at least some scope for environmental design practice upon

  graduation. He said:

  There is no scope for environmental architecture in Mumbai. For any project, the

  commercial aspect—the profit—is much more important than environmental im-

  pact or the design aspect. Because final y (builders and investors) want to earn . . .

  it’s more about money than real architecture or environmental values. I don’t think it’s possible to change this until everything changes. Right now the politics and economics are completely against environmental architecture here. Only a whole new

  economy will create a scope to practice real environmental architecture and design.6

  What was missing from the conversation with Siddharth was the confident assur-

  ance that such a “whole new economy” was somehow imminent. So long as build-

  ers and developers were profiting, he could find neither scope for good design nor promise of political transformation.

  Conversations with other practicing graduates offered a similar view. Aditya, a

  2009 graduate whom I’d first met during the study tour to Chennai and Auroville

  in 2008, told me when we sat down for a 2012 interview that he had initial y hesi-

  tated to accept my request for an interview. He was eager to say hello after several years, he explained, but he was concerned, in his words, “because basical y my

  experience is anti- your thesis.” I asked him to elaborate on what he meant, and he replied that he understood me to be studying actual environmental architecture in

  Mumbai. Yet since graduating, he had been doing almost exclusively “anti-envi-

  ronmental architecture,” not by choice, but out of the necessity of his work. “My

  work,” he repeated, “is anti- your thesis.”

  Aditya works for a large, well known firm of over seventy architects; the

  practice is focused on mid- and high priced luxury residential developments in

  Mumbai. Several of Aditya’s projects have high visibility and recognition in South

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  Mumbai, the most exclusive part of the city. During one of our 2012 conversations

  in a teahouse not far from the Institute, he described his dire view of the scope for environmental architecture. He based his view on his work experience:

  No, for residential buildings, I don’t see any scope in Mumbai to practice environmental architecture. . . . I don’t think it’s real y possible in Mumbai. Not only are the builders looking for their profits, but once it is built and lived in, in residential buildings everything is about personal consumption. If I am paying for my flat, then I think I can use AC for twenty-four hours a day. I can consume, and consume continuously. Just that example, AC is normal y on all the time if you’re in a high rise building. In fact these luxury high rises have central AC. These are 3BHK and 4BHK.

  So real y, where is the green design here? Not in the building itself, and then not in how people use it once they live there. There is no energy efficiency. No water efficiency. Nothing.7

  When I asked whether in the design and construction phase there was scope, at

  the very least, to use alternative materials or make other simple interventions

  (according to the “incremental change” logic discussed above), he replied:

  Like for meeting green building criteria? I’m not seeing this used very often in residential developments. Maybe on paper or in their advertising, but no, the environ-

  mental architecture we studied in RS
IEA, this is completely not possible in residential development in Mumbai. In reality, by being a residential architect in Mumbai I am working in an anti-environmental practice. It’s not what I was hoping for. 8

  RSIEA boasts a number of prominent graduates in Mumbai; among these is a

  wel -known builder whom I will call “Contractor.” Contractor employs huge

  teams of architects, and among them is someone I shall call “Darius.” Darius met

  with me several times to discuss his experience as an architect in a large builder’s firm in Mumbai. At his invitation, we spoke over tea on the open-air deck at

  the very exclusive Bombay Gymnasium. This private club in the heart of South

  Mumbai was original y established in 1875, when its membership was limited to

  the British. In the present, it remains exclusive, but its membership boasts a partial who’s who of Mumbai’s elite. “Bombay Gym,” as it is often called by its mem-

  bers, is remarkable in many respects, but prominent among them is the relatively

  large plot of open, green space it occupies in the heart of South Mumbai. Shaded

  with dense mature trees, the plot’s perimeter marks a clear boundary between

  the relative environmental calm of the club space and the dense, bustling city just beyond its borders.

  From the comfort and relative calm of this place, Darius and I discussed his

  work experience. When I asked how it shaped his view of the scope for practicing

  environmental architecture in any sector in Mumbai, he emphasized the historical

  moment for urban development in India—not in the sense of an imminent new

  development plan, but rather in the context of the broader global economy. The

  relative economic boom in India, he said, would trace a predictable continuum in

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  A Vocation in Waiting 143

  which a consumption-hungry urban middle class drives a specific phase of capital-

  ist market growth. Referring backward to the neoliberal economic turn in India,

  he made the inevitable comparison to a prototype consumer society, and in doing

  so explained his sense that the current political economic order will not only continue, but that the state and market balance in contemporary India is in part to