The rise of “parasitic” gated communities in India’s cities

[nityanand jayaraman]

Interesting read.
ciao, nity

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From: Cyril Sam <samc...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 18, 2012 at 11:31 AM
Subject: ACJ 2011 The rise of “parasitic” gated communities in India’s cities
To: acj...@googlegroups.com


http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/a-conversation-with-urban-planner-rahul-mehrotra/



A Conversation With : Urban Planner Rahul Mehrotra
By NEHA THIRANI

Rahul Mehrotra is an architect, urban planner, historian,
conservationist and academic who recently authored “Architecture in
India Since 1990.” He is professor and chairman at Harvard
University’s Graduate School of Design, and has an architectural
practice in Mumbai and Boston. In a recent interview with India Ink,
he discussed the rise of “parasitic” gated communities in India’s
cities, and the need for planning experts in its smaller towns.

Q.
How would you characterize the changing face of urbanism in India?
What are some of the most pressing problems plaguing Indian cities
today?

A.
I think the biggest challenge for emerging India is going to be twofold:

At the micro level our biggest concern is going to be that of the
immense polarization that is occurring in our built environment. The
between what we call slums or the informal city and large-scale
infrastructure and global architecture is going to set up enormous
social tensions in our society. Global capital is landing in our
cities and bullying its way physically to create a presence and a
polarization which will be hard to reverse and resolve as we go on
unless we address this issue very quickly.

What results from that polarization are conditions like gated
communities, whether they are vertical gated communities or
communities at the edge of the city. Because gated communities usually
have their own water supply, sewage disposition, they are actually
parasitic on the city because they don’t give to the city. They
exclude the city but engage with the city on their own terms, and so
it’s not a two way kind of exchange.

At the macro level what is happening is very interesting because while
the intelligentsia and the elite are focusing on the seven or eight
big cities, the real urban time bomb are the 392 towns that make up
the larger landscape of India. These 392 towns currently contain
approximately 50,000 people each and are projected to grow up to
100,000 people that in 20 years might even be a million people. So
potentially between 250 and 400 million urban Indians will live in
towns that are not even on radars currently.

Now what’s interesting about this landscape is that the levels of
contestation in these places are not so charged, which means that the
possibility for planners and governments to intervene yet exists and
is not as complicated as it is in the megacities.

Q.
Architects and urban planners often say that this middle landscape, of
392 towns across India, is being turned into cookie-cutter
replications of foreign models. What do you think?

A.
I don’t think they are being developed or planned. I don’t think they
have development plans or master plans or any strategy about where
they should go. What is happening is that growth is laissez faire and
disconnected from place.

Developers replicate global paradigms as they intervene in these
places and this gives you the impression that these are cookie-cutter
patterns – like China. The truth is that they are not being planned.

What is even more interesting is that as we put in infrastructure (the
golden quadrilateral highways, airports in all sorts of new places and
improving our railway infrastructure) – these small towns will start
exploding in a pattern that we have not anticipated.

Q.
You argue that democracy expresses itself in a varied landscape. What,
according to you, are the dangers of flattening cities so that they
all look alike?

A.
I think both the architecture and urban landscape of India has to
necessarily be one of pluralism because India is a multiethnic,
multicultural landscape and I think architecture and cities are the
physical expression of those aspirations.

I don’t think we can go the China way, where everything is made in a
singular image; in the mutinous democracy of India that’s going to be
impossible.

Q.
Increasingly in India, enclaves of unique architecture such as Delhi’s
Khirkee village, or Khotachiwadi, in Mumbai are being encroached upon
and damaged by growing development. How can we create a plausible
conservation strategy?

A.
When we worked on trying to get the historic Fort Area of Mumbai
declared a conservation zone in 1995, it was the first legislation of
its kind in India. And together with the Historic core of Mumbai, 13
or 14 other sub-precincts like Khotachiwadi, Bandra village, etc.,
also got designated as precincts. For me that effort had two aspects
to it. One was the dimension that everyone seems to understand and
respond to – which is nostalgia, the heritage value, the memory of a
city, which is very, very important.

But my personal agenda there was much beyond that – it had to do more
with how do you shift the planning debate to area-wise planning and
away from the blanket planning attitudes that have engulfed the
decision-making process in our cities.

For the sake of the future of our cities and for safeguarding the kind
of pluralism that exists (whether it is for reasons of historicity or
particular topographical or geographical concerns), we need to nuance
our planning by having different approaches for different parts of the
urban landscape. And then, of course, mobility, sewage, water supply,
and infrastructure in the broadest sense becomes the thread that binds
it all together as a functioning whole.

Q.
Why hasn’t there been a concerted effort toward conservation of
India’s urban architecture yet?

A.
It hasn’t happened as yet because I believe we have not emphasized the
importance of data adequately.We have not had the data to work with,
there have not been very accurate maps. There was corruption that led
to fiddling with revenue plans, and all sorts of documents were
manipulated to undermine this effort.


Q.
What are some structures you feel are emblematic in Mumbai?

A.
For me personally, the two most important design moves are the sweep
of Marine Drive – that entire stretch of the Maidans, the art deco
buildings – and the other thing that is really emblematic aspect of
the city is Dharavi.

Even today when the Indian cricket team wins and comes home its Marine
Drive where the celebratory processions are held and on a daily basis
a large part of the population of south Mumbai comes there to recreate
and decompress.

And then for me Dharavi is emblematic of another kind of aspiration of
the city for the poor. It’s a place that’s highly productive, in
comparison to the quality of life that it offers people who live
there. But its also emblematic of the real inequities that exist in
our cities and that people have to create home for themselves without
having their basic needs fulfilled, and a total failure on the part of
the government to provide them housing.

Q.
Speaking of Dharavi, what do you think will be the affect of the
growing presence of both vast informal settlements on one hand, and
gated communities that minimize the well-heeled citizen’s interaction
with the city?

A.
I use the word “involution” to describe what’s happening in Mumbai,
it’s a term I borrow from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who wrote
about agricultural involution in Indonesia.

Involution is about creating an internal complexity that makes any
mechanism highly efficient but also highly susceptible to malfunction.
Whereas an evolutionary gesture is how species evolve to be able to
broaden and make more robust their ecology.

I think in Mumbai in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s with ideas for New
Bombay and new metropolitan imaginations was all about evolutionary
gestures. But today in Mumbai we celebrate involutionary gestures –
how we fix sidewalks and upgrade slums.

It’s not that these gestures are not important, but what is crucial is
that we simultaneously address both ends of the spectrum – that is,
celebrate internal complexity but as also diversify into more dynamic
modes.

So I think Mumbai is at a point where it really has to make a decision
because if it keeps becoming more internally complex it will just
completely fail. And so for me, the most crucial questions at this
moment are how we can begin to engage with our metropolitan region
again: think of how we can create self-sufficient neighborhoods,
facilitate public transportation, how we can open up land for more
affordable housing.

Q.
We often hear of a desire to shape cities in India in the mold of
Dubai and Shanghai, ideals of modernity. How can we balance these
aspirations with our actual reality? Should we be looking elsewhere
for inspiration?

A.
I think the real question for us is what is the appropriate city for
our society, our economy, for the kind of inequality that exists.

Looking at Dubai or Shanghai or Singapore as metaphors not only
undermines the fact that we’re a democracy but it also undermines the
fact that the poor even exist in our cities.

I think we can look at a lot of South American cities such as Curitiba
[Brazil] where mobility and transportation has been used to kind of
subsidize the poor and therefore create another kind of form of city.



For those of you who might be interested in seeing what Mehrotra
actually means by saying capital polarises our community, the
following documentary might be of interest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMwceo7nVLY&list=UU9sXw4ZdPEIp6bYGvLW-_iA&index=9&feature=plcp