Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

CITIES: AUGUST 12, 2001

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Making Indian cities

Rahul Mehrotra

The writer is an architect and conservation activist. He is one of the founder members of the Urban Design Research Group (UDRI), Mumbai, which has done pioneering work in urban heritage conservation in India.

Over the last three decades, urbanisation has shown unprecedented rates of growth, devastating the physical form of our cities which have been unable to deal with the swelling numbers. While this compression of people in a limited space symbolises optimism and is characterised by many positive attributes, it has spelt doom for the urban form of our cities.

R. Prasanna Venkatesh/Wilderfile

In a city, the pieces are essential to the well-being of the whole. How these pieces are put together and their relation to one another, is what is particular about the design of a city. It is for this reason that a city is often described as a machine - the little parts adding up to create the grand design. In contemporary India there is little logic that determines these relationships in a city, from the overall plan or structure of the city, to its integral components, physical as well as social infrastructure, buildings, open spaces, streets, signage and street furniture. How these are administratered or orchestrated to work as a unified whole - greater than the sum of the parts - is what makes appropriate and relevant urban design.

Large-scale architecture in cities is usually site-specific, bound by client intentions and restricted (more often than not) to superficial styling. Planning (in the sense of master plans) has rarely even attempted to represent issues pertaining to the physical form of cities. It is precisely to fill this lacuna that the discipline of urban design should be considered, bridging the void between architecture and the larger concerns of cohesiveness and legibility of the overall urban form. The precise goals of urban design should be the creation and maintenance of those parts of the public realm that are crucial to the collective urban memory.

Unfortunately, in India today, architecture is no longer seriously considered by planners as an instrument for the structuring of the urban landscape. This has partly to do with the attitude of architects who have not engaged sufficiently to influence city policy, which in turn implicitly determines what they can build. In fact, architects have almost no "policy sense" and this is perhaps endemic of a larger cultural problem in India where there is a slightly non-empirical bent of mind. As a result of this, far greater premium is paid to symbolic action - represented often as policy decisions endorsed and legitimised by politicians. In V. S. Naipaul's book An Area of Darkness, he touches upon symbolic action when he describes the sweeper who sweeps the corridor in his hotel and at the end of the day, it is dirtier than when he started sweeping. A symbolic action whose result is contrary to what is wanted - a tendency to go off into abstraction by creating a symbolic gesture to solve a perceived problem.

Rahul Mehrotra
The unfinished edge - the poor crafting of the edge of a road, pavement and the building blocks of a city have become emblematic of the physical state of Indian cities.

Representative of this mindset is the notion of centralised urban planning - a situation where planners, in abstraction, evolve policy across a city. In terms of urban design, this often results in standardised building control rules that are imposed evenly across Indian cities - be it for greenfield sites or historic city centres. Again, a symbolic solution, one that supposedly addresses the issue of equity - by treating all citizens (across the city) equally. In reality however, it is an attempt to abstract on account of a deficient database to understand emerging patterns and plan for these. In fact, this mode of centralised urban planning implies that entire cities will be recast in the same mould and image - resulting in monotony of urban form. In addition, the idea of blanket rules, applicable for an entire city, cannot by definition be responsive to topography and natural environment.

Moreover, if buildings on waterfronts, hills and hinterland are to be essentially of the same form, the natural features of the land would inevitably be destroyed, thereby negatively impacting the ecological balances that exist in the rich and diverse natural systems that form the hinterland of cities. Also, this will continue to obliterate the sense of a city as a group of precincts, neighbourhoods and communities with their differing physical forms, expressive of particular climatic conditions, economic situations, cultural backgrounds and lifestyles - all the wonderful indicators that give ultimate expression and uniqueness to the form and style of a city.

Historically the most robust urban environments (and perhaps the world over) have all grown and evolved with active citizen participation, coupled with enlightened patronage - where a set of shared values, beliefs and rules have implicitly guided the parameters that determine the urban form of a place. That is a series of incremental decisions, though consensus is then expressed in the richness and coherence of the form resulting in a clear image as well as allowing for localised idiosyncrasies and individual expression. In contrast, today the repetitive nature of our cities coupled with this total detachment at the neighbourhood level is wreaking disaster in the way our cities look and are evolving in terms of their form.

Rahul Mehrotra
A street in South Mumbai - lack of urban design controls for new development produces an incoherent form and destroys the structure and identity of the historic city.

Reorienting urban design approaches

Perhaps a recognition of the multiplicity and dualities in the Indian cityscape being simultaneously valid could be a first step in reorienting urban design approaches in India. It would then seem appropriate that the pluralism in Indian cities be given expression through appropriate mechanisms - that urban design policies for different areas are evolved individually and separately, for the different cities and the many worlds within them. Planning policies, with urban design issues as one component, really should be made on an "areawise" basis - where this "area" would become the basic planning unit which displays some cohesiveness and consistencies beyond its topographical and architectural characteristics. Then it will be possible for laws and policies to be written to focus on the problems of each area. Once policy makers recognise the characteristics of a particular area, laws can be evolved to make the urban form respond, not only to its physical constraints, but also to the social city or regional level and the area level - where people can present themselves, their needs and aspirations and connect to the larger planning process. This would be a crucial shift not only in terms of the evolution and formulation of the plans but also their implementation.

Rahul Mehrotra
Incremental growth - a slum in Mumbai. While the inherent energy in incremental growth must be harnessed, some city interventions to regulate public places could create an appropriate balance.

Of course, crucial to these dynamics is the participation at both levels, of the citizen in the policy making process. At the city level, the policy making body should largely, or ideally, comprise professionals, to focus on the technicalities at a city level cannot be successfully achieved without sufficiently depoliticising the planning authority. But more crucial in the decentralised planning model is the process that should be set up at the area level - at the level where people have to get involved.

To make a decentralised system work it is important that a substantial body of people within the profession of urban planning and design work with the concept of "advocacy planning." This is particularly pertinent when policy problems are cast in a context of technical analysis too abstract for the ordinary citizen to comprehend - how many architects, leave alone citizens, understand the implications of the development control rules which directly effect the urban form of our city? Advocacy planning has its origins in the perception that such groups need urban planners and designers to make their case and to express their aspirations at the inception of development plans and planning strategy for city. Therefore, it should represent a search by planners and urban designers for a new kind of clientele - a constituency.

There already exist in Indian cities a number of citizens' groups which represent different issues ranging from low-income groups and squatters to conservation of historic precincts. So far these groups most often stop short of proposing solutions and limit their response to "protest". Advocacy planning in its truest sense would be realised when these groups or practitioners are able to review and evaluate specific planning proposals which affect their constituents - be it low-income families, heritage committees or an entire neighbourhood - and go further to help them develop planning strategies, physical design and implementation programmes. That is, to act as planning advocates for the different areas of a city in order to make public and city-level plans reflect the needs of the different citizens.

Rahul Mehrotra
The relentless repetition of the same building type across the Indian landscape is producing cities of essentially the same monotonous form - a view of Navy Nagar, Mumbai.

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 city" and its form. This will give true expression to people's aspirations in the built form of cities - and facilitate urban design to play its role in making legible and cohesive city form.

It is from such an engagement that will result the finished edge - the definite gesture, all the way from the kerb of the city's streets to the variety in urban form. And from this process hopefully will emerge the new Indian city, complex in its pluralistic composition but with a robust urban form that facilitates many possibilities - truly making the existence of urban Indians in the next millennium pleasurable and meaningful.

Note: A longer version of this article first appeared in the Marg Volume entitled "2000: Reflections on the Arts in India".