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

by Anne Rademacher

  24. Social structures powerful y conditioned, and even confined, consciousness for Marx, shaping the potential of the human imagination to glean a true sense of the limitless-ness of the possible. Whether or not full liberation from structural y conditioned modes of thinking can actual y be realized remains a core, enduring question around which genera-tions of social analyses continue to organize, albeit with considerable distance from Marx.

  As Harvey wrote, “we often seem to oscil ate in our understanding of ourselves and in our ways of thinking between an unreal fantasy of infinite choice and a cold reality of no

  172 Notes

  alternative to the business as usual dictated by our material and intellectual circumstances”

  (Harvey 2000, 204).

  25. An exemplary il ustration of the importance of temporality in environmental anthropology is assembled in a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute entitled “Environmental Futures” (Barnes 2016). See also McKay 2012 on temporality and humanitarianism, Hetherington 2014 on temporality and development, and Bear 2014.

  26. See Appadurai 2013.

  27. As I have noted elsewhere (Rademacher 2011), Sivaramakrishnan (1999) points out that for Bourdieu (1990, 52), “practice” is “the site of a dialectic between opus operandum and modus operandi, of the objectified products and incorporated products of historical practice.” My consideration of cultural languages of power as part of structure and practice takes cultural meanings themselves to be “produced in social life and permeated by power relationships that are organized in time and space” (Faure and Siu 1995, 213). The interplay of structure and practice hinges on the analytical concept of the human agent. My own study follows Faure and Siu (1995, 218) in their view of the interaction between culture, history, and agency: “history is created and made significant by meaningful, purposeful actions. However compelled human actions and their unintended results may seem to be, social order and change are not guided by immutable laws. Our view of the human agent as the motive force of history treats culture not as an existing repertoire of values that genera-tions learn and practice, but as a process produced in the flux of social life.”

  28. As in my previous work, my analytical posture toward social structure and human agency is grounded in the work of Philip Abrams (1982). His idea of “structuring” invites a process-oriented understanding of the “paradox of human agency” (1982, xiii—xiv).

  29. See Harvey 2000.

  30. See Whatmore 1999.

  31. For example, see Candea 2010; Ryan 2012; Singer 2014; Ogden et. al. 2010.

  32. See Chakrabarty 2009.

  33. See, for example, Ogden et. al. 2010.

  34. See, for example, Gandy 2010.

  35. I note here the use of these terms as shorthand, but caution that both are complex and connote precise histories and have disciplinary implications.

  36. As Keith Murphy has shown in his recent ethnographic work on design as a social process, “design” is conceptual y expansive, and, as such, poses a particular kind of analytical problem. He writes, “design itself isn’t real y a single term, but a collection of homonyms, each of which bears some semantic resemblance to the others, but all of which cover rather different terrain. When we talk about design, we tend to assume we’re all real y talking about The Same Thing, even if we’re not, and this contributes to a fair amount of cross-talk when we collectively think hard about design and its possibilities. I care about this because I wandered to design from other places, and when I landed there, the situation was confus-ing to me. Design was about things to some people, and practices to others. Or forms and aesthetics. Or systems engineering. Or capitalism. Or col aboration and creativity. Or “what it means to be human.” And so on.” (Murphy 2016). See also Murphy 2015.

  37. Within North American environmental studies, sustainability, particularly in design, was initial y widely embraced as a “revolutionary” paradigm shift (Edwards 2005) that promised an entirely new set of technological and cultural norms (McDonough and

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  Notes 173

  Braungart 2002). Architecture, and its green practitioners, were sometimes regarded as part of the potential vanguard of this movement (Gissen 2003; Williamson 2002; Leach 1997; Buchanon 2005).

  38. See Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan 2013; Rademacher and K. Sivaramak-

  rishnan 2017.

  39. See Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan 2013.

  40. See Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan 2013.

  41. See Cadenasso and Pickett 2013.

  42. Since 1980, the United States National Science Foundation has supported long term ecosystem research at several sites in North America (http://www.lternet.edu/). Two of these are expressly urban sites: the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (http://www.lternet.edu/

  sites/bes) and Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecosystem Study (http://caplter.asu.

  edu/). Both urban LTER sites maintain extensive online libraries of data and analyses.

  43. Pickett, Cadenasso, and McGrath 2013.

  44. See, for example, Pickett et al. 2001; Rebele 1994.

  45. See, for example, the Burch-Machlis Human Ecosystem model as presented in Pickett et al. 1997.

  46. See, for example, Turner and Robbins 2008.

  47. See Alberti et al. 2003; Collins et al. 2000; Machlis, Force, and Burch 1999; Pickett 1997.48. See Guy and Moore 2005; Campbell 1996.

  49. See Ingersoll 1996.

  50. See Rademacher 2015. See also Lawhon et al. 2014.

  51. See, for example, Haraway 1989, 1991, 1997; Demeritt 1994; Latour 1993; Swyngedouw 1996; Zimmerer 2000.

  52. See, for example, Jasanoff 2004.

  53. See Lefebvre 2003.

  54. See, for example, Harvey 1973; Brenner 2017.

  55. For a rich ethnographic treatment of the ways that ideas and experiences of the

  “urban” and the “rural” intersect in everyday life, see Harms 2011.

  56. Early observations of the untenability of a nature/culture, and by extension nature/

  city, divide, include now classic work that ranges from pieces such as Cronon’s (1995) “The Trouble with Wildnerness” to Latour’s (1993) We Have Never Been Modern.

  57. See, for example, Ong 1999 and Sassen 1991.

  58. See, for example, Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw 1996, 1999; Gandy 2002; Kabirh 1984; Castel s 1996.

  59. See Baviskar 2003.

  60. See, for example, Mitchell 2002; Tsing 2000, 2012.

  61. See, for example: Castree and Braun 2001; Braun 2005.

  62. Science and Technology Studies (STS) has paid productive attention to the social dynamics of scientific knowledge production (Dumit 2004; Downey and Dumit 1997;

  Franklin 1997; Hogle 1995; Stengers 1993; Rabinow 1992), rigorously demonstrating how situated actions and contingent decisions characterize scientific work (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour & Woolgar 1986); this book extends this line of inquiry to architectural practice and problem solving. Work in STS has also shown that technical problems are often defined in

  174 Notes

  relationship to spaces in which, and processes through which, specific forms of knowledge are produced (Callon 1995). This book aims to contribute to work in STS that explores disciplined ways of organizing and making sense of the natural world (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996; Gooding 1992; Lynch 1985) by asking, how do architects acquire, and organize, the

  “ecological” knowledge that forms the basis of their practices? What “counts” as ecology?

  63. See for an overview Orr, Lancing, and Dove 2015; Franklin 1995; Fischer 2007; Latour 1988; Callon 2009.

  64. See Choy 2011.

  65. See Chakrabarty 2009.

  66. See Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013.

  67. For instance, an extensive literature il ustrates the complex ways that postcolonial modernities and cultures shape the built environment. King 2004, and authors like Hosagrahar (2005), Chattopadhyay (2012), and
Rajagopalan and Desai (2012) refine, critique, and enrich debates about the ways that architecture and urbanism intersect with colonial, nationalist, and modernizing projects.

  68. It is helpful here to invoke Foucault’s now-classic discussion of architects, architecture, and space in Space, Knowledge, Power. Here, we are reminded to think of the built environment as in many ways a product and mechanism of Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge. The agency of individual architects is embedded in a web of knowledge forms, social structures, and cultural norms that constitute power-knowledge relations and histories.

  Often, the potential for any form of meaningful agency is ful y negated by those same relations.

  69. Anthropologists have long taken interest in the imagined relationship between the built form and social form, as well as social change, social harmony, and social process. An early review of these efforts may be found in Lawrence and Low (1990). Buchli (1999) adds important insights to these engagements by showing “how seemingly weighty, inscribed, and totalizing world views (Blier 1987) or ‘spatial logics’ (Hillier and Hanson 1984) can be radical y subverted.” Buchli’s work notes that anthropologists, most often those working in studies of material culture, have formal y and careful y recognized a tendency to “posit a direct, iconic, and at times homologous correspondence between an item of material culture and the society with which it is associated,” and that we must attend to the ways control can be exercised at multiple social scales (Foucault 1977; Shanks and Tilley 1987, 1992). Buchli’s work directly addresses the enduring analytical dilemma of identifying the parameters of human agency, describing the challenge “to overcome the image of (human actors) en-slaved to the fixed meanings and deterministic structures of a given society, where individuals were seen to respond in a mechanistic, and ultimately helpless, fashion to irresistible structural prerogatives as in the unilineal and deterministic tradition in Morgan, Marx and Engels, and all the way through to structuralism (Levi Strauss 1966; Chomsky 1968; Glassie 1975; Deetz 1977)” (Buchli 1999, 8). By layering ecosystems and ecosystem processes into the analytical calculus, we face the complicated juxtaposition of systems that are understood as relatively mechanistic (that is, biogeochemical systems) and those in social life that, although structural y conditioned, are never automatical y pre-configured. See Buchli 1999.

  See also Fennell 2015 .

  70. See examples in Hall 2002 and Anker 2010. For an excellent treatment of a contemporary experiment in urban environmental design see Günel 2016 and forthcoming (2018).

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  71. Here, I use “hybridity” in the sense first proposed in work by Swyngedouw (1996, 2006).

  72. See work by Jasanoff and Martello 2004; Mitchell 2002; Bryant 1998; Blaikie 1999; Bocking 2004; Buuren & Edelenbos 2004; Collingridge and Reeve 1986; Davis and Wagner 2003; Dimitrov 2003.

  73. See Taylor and Buttel 1992.

  74. In Reigning the River (2011, 15), I suggested that the making of nature and the simultaneous making of meaningful life in the city involves a complex social identity construction process that may beget “new affinities . . . environmental affinities that might ‘foster’

  cohesion where other ways of marking sameness and difference (cannot).” These affinities may reveal the many dimensions of existing identity struggles, contests over governance, and collective reworkings of the moral ecologies of city living. In this sense, the ‘places’ of nature in the city are always in a state of refashioning (see also Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2017).

  75. See Braun 2005.

  76. See Appadurai 2013.

  77. Jyoti Hosagrahar (2005, 55) explores anxieties about identity in Indian architecture, observing, “the revised canon about Indian architectural history continues to be steeped in a ‘message of ancient and medieval greatness’ and highlights reasons like the role of institutional bureaucracy.” Her analytical y important references to the control of architectural education by such bodies as the All India Council for Technical Education, the AICTE, remain relevant to an always-changing institutional landscape. In 2009, for example, AICTE

  was reformed with important implications.

  78. Paniker (2008, 58–62) makes a useful distinction between a “discourse level” (architectural historiography) and an “institutional level” (architectural education) in the production of architectural knowledge in India.

  79. Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM).

  80. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

  81. Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA).

  2. THE INTEGRATED SUBJECT

  1. See Cadenasso and Pickett 2013.

  2. Rachana Sansad “Vision” page, http://rachanasansad.edu.in/.

  3. At the time of the work, the total fees per student per year were Rs. 87,000 (which included a refundable library deposit of Rs. 4000). RSIEA provides concessions for students whose financial circumstances prevent them from paying in full immediately. A few scholarships were available for students in their second year, but these did not constitute the bulk of tuition.

  4. Roshni Udyavar Yehuda, personal communication, March 2012.

  5. A portion of the RSIEA website reads, “The Research and Design Cell of the Institute provides independent consultancy wherein a team of students guided by faculty members undertakes projects. Some past projects include Ecotourism projects in Sawantwadi, Restoration of Charolette lake at Matheran, Dahisar River Restoration Project, Environment Improvement Projects in slums such as Behrampada and Mahatma Phule Nagar, Mumbai, &

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  Rainwater harvesting for several housing societies and corporate houses including HPCL, Mumbai office.” See http://rachanasansad.edu.in/.

  6. Dr. Ashok Joshi, interview transcript, March 2012.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. See http://rachanasansad.edu.in/.

  10. Dr. Ashok Joshi, interview transcript, March 2012.

  11. This follows work by Goldman (2001) and Li (2008) on eco-rational subjects, as well as Agrawal’s (2005) application of these ideas directly to an environmental domain, demonstrating the utility of the concept of “environmentality” as a social process that is constitutive of environmental subjectivity. A range of work has followed in this vein, as environmental anthropologists have noted the ways that certain configurations of institutions, knowledge, and politics relate in turn to subjectivities that reinforce certain conceptual categories and notions of proper care for the natural environment. An excellent recent account may be found in Mathews (2011).

  12. Field notes, July 12, 2012.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. The literature on commensurability in political ecology studies is vast, but an instructive starting point may be found in the work of J. Martinez-Alier, particularly 2004.

  16. Field notes, July 2012.

  17. Roshni Udyavar-Yehuda, Rajeev Taischete, and Mukund Porecha were also partners in Enviro-Arch, an environmental architecture firm.

  18. Field notes, April 17, 2012.

  19. Field notes, April 8, 2012.

  20. Text of email message dated October 10, 2014.

  21. Udyavar and Shah 2010.

  3. ECOLOGY IN PRACTICE

  1. Text of PowerPoint slide presented by Dr. Doddaswmy Ravishankar, Opening Day

  Ceremony, RSIEA, 2012.

  2. International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON).

  3. See Paniker 2008, 113.

  4. Dr. Ashok Joshi, interview transcript, March 2012.

  5. See Carson 1962; Lovelock 1979; Hernandez and Mayur 2010.

  6. Through his Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock (1979) advanced the idea that the

  Earth’s biosphere is useful y conceptualized as an organism, the constituent parts of which constitute mechanisms for self-regulation. RSIEA course material introduced this idea without endorsing it as fact or fiction. It was invoked to
mark an influential way of applying systems ecological thinking to the scale of the Earth’s biogeochemical complex.

  7. Jasanoff 2004a, 2004b; Latour 1993; Mathews 2011.

  8. Mathews (2011, 23) notes that a rich literature in science and technology studies outlines these points more substantively. He notes in particular how Gieryn (1995) argued that the boundary between political and technical domains is constantly reworked and contested, while Hilgartner (2000) argued that scientific advice is always in some way shaped

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  Notes 177

  by the assessments of its audience. Any application of scientific knowledge in practice may be seen, in this way, as automatical y public—a performance of expertise.

  9. An instructive starting point for thinking about such forms of interdisciplinary borrowing may be found in Dove 2001.

  10. Field notes, December 11, 2008, during Green Home Technologies Lecture,

  Auroville.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Carrying capacity in this sense is general y defined as the total population of living organisms that a defined habitat area can support.

  14. RSIEA “New Curriculum” Program document.

  15. Quotations in this section are derived from field notes, March 17, 2010.

  16. Field notes, March 17, 2010, in a class meeting of “Sustainable Building Design Principles.”

  17. See http://www.unep.org/ietc/SATAssessing/tabid/56441/Default.aspx.

  18. For an instructive critical account of indicators and metric formulas in arenas of governance, see Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury 2015.

  19. See Elkington 2001.

  20. See http://www.environdec.com/en/What-is-an-EPD/#.VFJNrNwtCBg.

  21. Over the past decade, standard Euro-American metrics for assessing the sustainability of built forms, such as LEED and BREEAM, have been engaged, contested, sometimes reinforced, and sometimes reworked, in India. The U.S. Green Building Council, which developed LEED standards, played a foundational role in establishing the World Green Building Council, a consortium that includes national councils worldwide. Among these is the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC). Concerns among Indian architects and builders that these standards were not always the most appropriate measures for built form sustainability, as well as reservations about the relationship between the IGBC and the Indian construction industry, led to the development of alternative national and regional guidelines for green design; examples include ECOHOUSING and GRIHA. Local-