Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai
RADEMAC
HER |
BUILDING
BUILDIN
GREEN
G GREEN
ENVIRONMENTAL
ARCHITECTS AND
THE STRUGGLE
FOR SUSTAINABILITY
IN MUMBAI
ANNE RADEMACHER
RADEMAC
HER | BUILDING GREEN
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Building Green
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Building Green
Environmental Architects and the Struggle for
Sustainability in Mumbai
Anne Rademacher
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2018 by Anne Rademacher
Suggested citation: Rademacher, A. Building Green: Environmental Architects
and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai. Oakland: University of
California Press, 2018. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.42
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rademacher, Anne, author.
Title: Building green : environmental architects and the struggle for
sustainability in Mumbai / Anne Rademacher.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044981| ISBN 9780520296008 (pbk.) |
ISBN 9780520968721 (e-edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable architecture—India—Mumbai. |
Architects—India—Mumbai. | Architecture—Environmental
aspects—India—Mumbai. | Urban ecology (Sociology)—India—Mumbai. |
Rachana Sansad (College). Institute of Environmental Architecture.
Classification: LCC NA2542.35 .R335 2017 | DDC 720/.470954792—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044981
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Contents
List of Il ustrations
vii
Preface
ix
1. City Ascending, City Imploding
1
2. The Integrated Subject
23
3. Ecology in Practice: Environmental Architecture as Good Design
40
4. Rectifying Failure: Imagining the New City and the Power to Create It
65
5. More than Human Nature and the Open Space Predicament
91
6. Consciousness and Indian-ness: Making Design “Good”
108
7. A Vocation in Waiting: Ecology in Practice
133
8. Soldiering Sustainability
162
Notes
169
References
185
Index
197
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Illustrations
1. Construction in Mumbai, 2012 2
2. Dr. Joshi delivers a lecture on rainwater harvesting in an RSIEA
classroom 28
3. Dr. Latoo talks with RSIEA students during a field study visit 32
4. A team of RSIEA students prepare a topographical map of the Pali field
study site 54
5. RSIEA Design Studio students explore the Pali project site 62
6. An exhibit-goer ponders a map of Mumbai’s open spaces at the Open
Mumbai exhibition 70
7. “City Forests” were highlighted among the many different types of open
spaces in Mumbai at the Open Mumbai exhibition 72
8. Entering the Breathing Space exhibition at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse 75
9. Breathing Space exhibit-goers explore signboards about open space in each
of Mumbai’s twenty-four Municipal wards 76
10. Looking outward from the edge of the Doongerwadi forest, new
construction looms 100
11. Students and faculty on the field study tour of Govardhan Eco-village
listening to their guide describe the sustainability features of one of the site’s
main buildings 129
12. RSIEA students exploring new construction in one of BCIL’s housing
developments outside of Bangalore 132
13. A graduating RSIEA student presents her team’s final Design Studio
proposal for an eco-resort at Pali 135
vii
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Preface and Acknowledgments
TRACING ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESSES:
CONNECTING PLACES, SOCIAL AGENTS, AND
MATERIAL FORMS
How does an anthropologist focused on environmental and political change in
Nepal come to study among environmental architects in Mumbai?
One of my most constant, and constantly fascinating, groups of interlocutors in
Kathmandu was an extraordinarily committed and effective set of workers for the
non-governmental organization called Lumanti. Tireless in their advocacy, and
fearless in the face of repeated official threats and obstacles, I was fascinated by the group’s tenacity and effectiveness. But I also noticed that part of its strength derived from connections to a robust network of housing advocacy groups across
South Asia. Among the most prominent members of this group was the Society
for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, or SPARC, and the network of orga-
nizations that made up Slum Dwellers International. SPARC’s central office was in
Mumbai, and so, expecting to further my understanding of South Asia’s regional
urban housing politics, I traveled there for the first time in 2008.
A few weeks into that first stay in Mumbai, I received a call from the head of
the Rachana Sansad Institute of Environmental Architecture. We had never met,
and I was, until then, unaware that RSIEA existed. The institute head invited me
to deliver a lecture to environmental architecture graduate students on the subject of urban ecology. My first response was a confused hesitation. W
hat, I wondered,
did architects have to learn from an environmental anthropologist? However, in
part out of sheer curiosity about how this community of architects—a group with
which I had not previously had research contact, and a field in which I had no
ix
x Preface and Acknowledgments
formal training—would engage with a lecture on urban ecology delivered from
the perspective of someone trained in environmental sciences and sociocultural
anthropology, I accepted.
Continuing my conversation with the head of the institute, I quickly learned
that RSIEA was the first architecture program in India to offer a formal master’s
level degree program in environmental architecture. It had pioneered what has
since become a widely replicated training model throughout the country, adapted
in some places with a heavier emphasis on theory, and in others with a more inten-
sive focus on professional praxis.
As we discussed the Institute and its mission, it became clear to me that the
form of “environmental architecture” codified through the creation of this formal
degree program, and made up of specific and selected content, was a potential y
important arena for understanding urban ecology in practice in a guise I’d not previously considered. It suggested the potential to challenge my longstanding
focus on marginalized groups and marginal urban landscapes by considering how
ideas and practices of nature are made among a very differently positioned group
of social actors, professionals seeking to balance ecological and social well being through design. The relationship between the built form of slum housing and
environmental politics had occupied my analytical attention for over a decade,
but I understood little about how power and wealth asymmetries figured among
professionals caught between those making policy and those who commissioned
and controlled the making of the formal built landscape. My optic into coupled
political and environmental transformation thus shifted from informal and mar-
ginalized housing to the ways that the makers of the formal built landscape imag-
ined and enacted an alternative eco-political urban future. In the process, I found the distinction between the formal and informal built landscape to be, at best, a
heuristic.
The present project connects to my previous research through its central theo-
retical and analytical questions, but the histories of Kathmandu and Mumbai are
quite distinct, separate, and unique. They undergird dramatical y different social and biophysical settings within which to undertake any study of the social life
of urban environmental sustainability. At the same time, the connective flows
of information, ideas, and affinities that brought these locations together in my
field research experience—as nodes in a housing advocacy network that brought
together Kathmandu and Mumbai-based rights activists—were real and signifi-
cant. Specific relations of power were formed and reinforced as interconnected
local organizations worked to address their cities’ housing and environmental
dilemmas, forms of power we stand to miss if we stop at the conceptual boundary
of two distinctive, separate cities in two countries with whol y distinctive histories.
Nevertheless, Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu, has a long and layered history
as a trading center of many kingdoms; it remained on the outskirts of colonial
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Preface and Acknowledgments xi
empire. Mumbai (earlier Bombay) is quite roundly a colonial city, and its fort,
white and native enclaves, slums, and suburbs have distinctive qualities even as
they compose patterns that one might also see in other modern Indian ports and
presidency cities that were forged in the colonial encounter with the British. As
Gyan Prakash writes, “the physical form of Mumbai invites reflection on its colo-
nial origin . . . in fact, the Island City occupies land stolen from the sea,” and it “bears the marks of its colonial birth and development.” 1 Unlike Kathmandu before the tragic earthquakes of April 2015, Mumbai’s built environment has few
monuments to a deep past, yet it testifies to land reclamation and occupation in
the construction of a vast empire of colonial commerce.2
To recall its past as built on land “stolen from the sea” also invites consideration of the Anthropocene future, in which the entire Indian subcontinent is cast, first and foremost, in a sea sure to “steal” coastal zones afresh. 3 But the coming dynamics of sea level rise and transformed water access patterns in Mumbai and across
South Asia form only one cluster of the many questions that bridge matters of
ecosystem ecology to the contemporary making of this city that was first rendered
through land filling, concretization, and encroachment. Mumbai is many islands
fused into one; its present coastal, littoral, and intertidal ecosystem dynamics are that transformation’s legacy.
Arguably, the ecological ruptures through which contemporary Mumbai was
made over the past one and a half centuries were, at the time of my fieldwork, more dramatic than those that had shaped Kathmandu. But as two of the fastest growing metropolitan centers in the region in the later part of the twentieth century, Kathmandu and Mumbai experienced similar conditions as wel . With the project
at hand anchored to Mumbai, then, my challenge was in part to bring a legacy
of tracing political-ecological connections between two South Asian cities to a
grounded investigation of the unique ecological, historical, and social context of environmental architecture in Mumbai. It was also to move from an optic on the
social experience of informal housing and slum advocacy to a formal and profes-
sional world of practicing urban architects. It is this endeavor that I undertake in Building Green.
• • •
Learning a new city is neither easy nor automatic, and a single lifetime is hardly
sufficient to become ful y acquainted with any city’s layers. I first arrived in
Mumbai dependent on the care and guidance of others, and many years later I
remain a student of its vast and constantly changing ecosocial landscape. The project that informs this book would have been impossible without the generous and
vibrant intellectual and social worlds that opened for me a welcoming space, and
that invited me to learn, teach, and dwell among a group of urban professionals
committed to an alternative vision for the city’s future.
xii Preface and Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the students, faculty, and administrators of Rachana
Sansad Institute of Environmental Architecture for their extraordinary warmth,
consistent col aborative support, and endless intellectual gifts. I worked among
them as an anthropologist with keen interest (but no prior training) in architec-
ture, and this in itself could have been rightly regarded as burdensome at best,
boldly reckless at worst. Yet the faculty and students received my presence among
them in quite the opposite spirit: they embraced the perspective and background
I could contribute, and they patiently shared their own. My respect for this com-
munity of teachers, learners, and practitioners has only deepened with time, and
it is my sincere hope that the content of this book honors their unbounded gifts of time, insight, and powerful, determined aspiration. I have assigned pseudonyms
to all
of the student-architects who appear in Building Green, but as very public figures, most faculty members are named. I must emphasize here that this study,
the analysis, and the core arguments I advance are my own. So too, are any errors
that remain in the text.
While in Mumbai, an intricate web of intellectual and personal support gave
me the critical input and restorative energy I needed to complete this work. I am
deeply grateful to the Anand Family, Nikhil McKay Anand, Ramah McKay Anand,
Shaina Anand, Roshni and Abraham Yehuda, Bharati Chaturvedi, Brinda Chugani,
Urvashi Devidayal, Rohit Tote, Kapil Gupta, Devika Mahadevan, Amita Baviskar,
Bharati Chaturvedi, Aban Marker Kabraji, Khojeste Mistree, Priya Jhaveri, Dr. C.S.
Lattoo, Shilpa Phadke, Arjun Appadurai, Shekhar Krishnan, Maura Finkelstein,
Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, Harris Solomon, and Ar. Sharukh Mistry. Ar. Mishkat
Ahmed provided essential research assistance as I conducted the survey work
for this study; her creative energy and thorough engagement with this project
breathed unusual life into quantitative data collection and management.
Several organizations provided the research support that made field work for
this project possible. I am grateful to the American Institute for Indian Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Max Planck Institute, and Partners for Urban
Knowledge Action & Research for their assistance in Mumbai. In addition to other forms of support, colleagues at TISS generously provided much-needed office space
for reflection, interview transcription, and writing. Midway through a significant period of fieldwork, I received a New York University Global Research Institute
Grant, which afforded me a productive period to write while in residence at NYU-
Berlin. There, Gabriel a Etmektsoglou, Roland Pietsch, Nina Selzer, Sigi and Almut Sliwinski, Susanah Stoessel, Carmen Bartl-Schmekel, and Miruna Werkmeister
welcomed me into their worlds, and often their homes as wel . My preliminary
analytical work on this project was challenged and strengthened through deep
engagement and thoughtful critique from colleagues at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where I was appointed as a Visiting Fellow. I am
especial y grateful for instructive guidance from Francis Zimmermann, Miriam