Our embattled cities

Our embattled cities

The Hindu

As urban centres expand to embrace a wide range of entrants, whether in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata or Bangalore, dissensions arise over what the city means. A reflection on the crisis that afflicts them.

" ... successive administrations that governed Maharashtra and Mumbai through the 1980s and 1990s optimistically held up Singapore as an ideal to be emulated, without pointing out the discipline ... necessary to accomplish this aim."

"THE Mithi river? You mean that little nullah?" asked a prominent, but substantially baffled, citizen of Mumbai, when I spoke to him a few days after the July 26 deluge that devastated India's premier metropolis and shattered its cherished self-image as a resilient, all-terrain vehicle of enterprise that would go on regardless, come hell or high water. When the high water rose, on that pewter-grey afternoon two months ago, the city found itself suddenly embattled on four fronts.

The forgotten Mithi ...

First, it had to face the onslaught of the forgotten Mithi, choked with waste, encroached upon by illegal buildings and official reclamation. Simultaneously, it was confronted by a sea swollen by an unusually high tide. With the mangrove buffers stripped away over the years, neither river nor sea encountered a significant barrier. The sky weighed in with a cloudburst. Worst of all, given these circumstances, was the freight of bad karma accumulated by a city that has ignored its problems of infrastructure and waste management; that has allowed an incompetent civic administration to ruin its drainage system in concert with a real-estate mafia whose appetite for space is insatiable.

The floodwater swept over Mumbai's streets and nearly touched its flyovers. It washed through the houses of the rich, the poor and all the classes perched precariously between. It drowned people in their homes, before they could escape to higher ground; it drowned them in their cars, as they sat immobile in haemorrhaged traffic. It wrecked the city's already overstretched transport, communications and supply networks.

In the aftermath of the deluge came further whiplashes of apocalypse: eroded hillsides fell, taking hundreds of makeshift dwellings with them; uncollected garbage piled up and epidemics began to spread. Soon after, dilapidated houses held ransom by populist rent legislation began to collapse with metronomic regularity. Indeed, in a few cruel strokes, the catastrophe of July 26 has achieved far more than a decade of impassioned and committed urban design symposia has managed to do: it has awakened the island-city's denizens to the colossal risks that lurk beneath the thin crust of their everyday life.

Mumbai's ordeal-by-deluge holds important caveats for India's dynamic of unconsidered, runaway urbanisation. The first of these is the belief, promoted by developers peddling guarded and gated Utopias, that the true city is a well-ordered import from outer space: that it can somehow float above its topographical context, pursuing its aims of luxury and repose without regard to the natural features that form its armature. An egregious example of this tendency is the architect Hafeez Contractor, whose assembly-line production of faux rococo and ersatz neo-classical facades has transmogrified Mumbai's cityscape. In an interview given to a leading daily exactly 10 days before the July 26 catastrophe, he airily dismissed the environmentalist appeal for the conservation of mangroves as a shield against erosion and tidal fury, describing these natural safeguards as ghaas-poos, inconsequential clumps of grass.

For that `Shanghai look'

A similar disregard for the natural armature attends the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai. This Singapore-style enclave is usually thought of as having been shipped in from the First World; only after the deluge have people suddenly realised that it stands on the Mithi's banks. In the mid-1990s, the civic administration cleared this area of shantytown settlements through a series of ruthless demolition drives that amounted to acts of "class cleansing", so allowing this grand temple of progress to come into being (it was advertised as housing, among other marvels, India's first international diamond bourse). As this enclave took shape, with its high buildings and wide roads, its designers thoughtfully filled in and paved over the natural streams and soil sinks that had, for decades, taken care of the overflow from the river and heavy rain; further upstream, the airport authorities had already built a runway across the river.

The unearthly splendour of the Bandra-Kurla Complex has often inspired Mumbai's political bosses to imagine that we may yet achieve the Singapore look (or the Shanghai look, in an updated version). Indeed, successive administrations that governed Maharashtra and Mumbai through the 1980s and 1990s optimistically held up Singapore as an ideal to be emulated, without pointing out the discipline — not least the self-discipline practised by the political class — necessary to accomplish this aim. Nor was reference made to the distinctive socio-political order of that South-east Asian nation-state, its intricately balanced ethnic relationships, its authoritarian management of State, economy and society. Certainly there was not the slightest effort to discuss the practical, near-obsessive attention to detail exhibited by the People's Action Party government of Singapore in its distribution of people, resources, spaces and technologies from the smallest to the largest level, as evidenced in Cherian George's Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation, Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000.

What has prevailed, instead of attention to detail, is the generalising of charade. One of the earliest examples of this was the urban beautification rhetoric of "Clean Bombay, Green Bombay", espoused by the Sena city government in the 1980s, and the hectic construction of more than 60 soaring flyovers in the mid-1990s by the Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party State government, at an expenditure of Rs. 15 trillion for a project that would benefit only the 12 per cent of the population that owned private transport, while ignoring the urgent need for mass rapid public transport to convey the other 88 per cent of Mumbai's citizens.

Ignoring the masses

In the same vein, a few years ago, private developers convinced Maharashtra's Congress-Nationalist Congress Party State Government of the viability of a scheme to insert skyscrapers into the congested Central Mumbai area of Tardeo, imagining into existence an absurdly science-fictional landscape of towers, private bridges and elevators built into Tardeo's overpopulated, overbuilt hills, while ignoring the overflowing gutters, pavement dwellers and overstretched railway system below. By this time, as we have noted, Singapore had been displaced by Shanghai as the dream city of choice. But the principle of the floating facade remained intact. For Mumbai's various elite groups, the First World model provides only a look, an appearance, a monumental theatre of self-congratulation in which the powerful are happy and the weak invisible. The consideration of practical details can only impede the momentum of such a glorious vision.

Cities cannot be airlifted into their natural contexts, in violation of the curve and set of their host ecologies; they must grow in dynamic relation to the resources and possibilities of their settings. By ignoring these realities, India's developer-driven urbanisation has not only produced mass discomfort and established ill-conceived built form as the norm of life; but it has also created deadly scenarios where such large-scale errors are paid for with the death and suffering of the vulnerable.

No participation by citizens

The Mumbai deluge has dramatised the extent to which postcolonial India's cities are founded on hazard, on a permanent sense of crisis. Their denizens are hemmed in by administrations that still operate from colonial assumptions of control, and refuse to permit serious participation by citizens.

Our great cities work because of the migrant populations that service them; but these immigrants from the dying countryside have no access to basic amenities, and must pilfer such necessities as water, electricity and housing.

Equally deadly are the commercial interests that place profit maximisation before the greatest common good, cutting off access to inexpensive mass housing while loading a few zones with built-form burdens that are far beyond their carrying capacity.

Even the populism that ought to ensure India's city-dwellers of a place in the game lets them down: while catering to the special demands of rich enclaves and numerically large ghettos, local politicians remain unconcerned with the broader weave of the city in which all these constituencies must find a mutually enriching fit. In such a city, everyone is a victim and no one is a stakeholder.

While the ideal city — whether polis, urbs or nagara — would create a public sphere where the self can be refashioned and new conceptions of community can be developed, the reverse is true in an India whose postcolonial tensions have been morphed on impact with the forces of globalisation. Our cities are cauldrons of discontent, of rivalry among diverse interest groups.

The larger the metropolis grows, the less coherent its image becomes. As urban centres expand to embrace a wide range of entrants, whether in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata or Bangalore, dissensions break out over what the city means, and to whom; over whether the city can function both as a space of conversation and a ground of individuation, where selves and communities can fulfil their potentialities.

The jostling crowd, a chance assembly of anxious strangers, becomes the reigning trope of the epoch: the unorganised multitudes are not a source of resistance to tyranny, as some theorists fondly believe, but reservoirs of resentment that can be placed at the service of a cynical mass mobilisation.

The kaleidoscope, with its ever-changing patterns of crystal fragments, was once a favoured image for a city such as Mumbai. Today, the metropolis is a broken kaleidoscope. We may have achieved urbanisation, but we have lost sight of that finer, if more old-fashioned ideal, whose very name carried the sense of being shaped and refined by the ethos of a city: civilisation. Such fragmentation speaks of a polity based on sharp-edged dissensus rather than a reconciliation of positions. Writing in The Hindu's Folio ("Cities", August 12, 2001), the noted architect and urban design theorist Rahul Mehrotra emphasised the importance of "advocacy planning", as a mode of bringing together the various constituencies that form a city, to discuss their common future. "Perhaps in advocacy planning we may find a new means for political expression, one in which social and physical conditions are integral in making a city which promotes humane possibilities. The stakeholders of the contemporary Indian city would actually get involved with the `making of the city' and its form. This will give true expression to people's aspirations ... "