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

  championed, and sometimes contested, official pronouncements about the appro-

  priate path to the Mumbai in the making.

  If the grueling poverty and vulnerability that characterized city life for most

  Mumbaikars could in some ways be assuaged by euphoric narratives of economic

  growth, the city’s biophysical future was that hope’s undoing. Studies of the present and possible effects of environmental degradation, frequent and erratic major

  storm events, loss of coastal land to sea level rise, possibly catastrophic flooding, and, ironical y, sub-continental water scarcity all punctuated predictions for the city’s future ecological reality. 12 Mumbai’s energy and food security scenarios, its water budget, air quality, and vulnerability to storms would all reshape the biophysical stage for the city’s unfolding. 13 New and sometimes massive populations of migrants were expected to mobilize in response to coastal conditions and sea

  level changes across South Asia; this would rework the human landscape as it

  reshaped the urban interface between the city and the sea. 14

  Dire poverty and future environmental stresses thus held the promise of growth

  in uncertain suspension: the idealized key would be to grow in a way that maxi-

  mized ecological vitality as well as economic profits, and that effected more equitable distribution of a vast array of socioenvironmental benefits. To achieve this, a particularly “green” expertise was essential: one that could guide the form of the new city toward environmental and social adaptability.15

  6 City Ascending, City Imploding

  III.

  In February of 2012, on a first walk through the middle class residential neighborhood that would be my fieldwork home that year, I spotted a newsstand display

  hung with the attention-nabbing covers of the day’s latest papers and magazines.

  The week’s issue of Time Out Mumbai was on prominent display, beckoning its readers with an enormous headline: “Imagine Mumbai . ” Intrigued by the premise, and by the cover image of a pleasant, tree-lined coastal urban promenade, I

  bought the issue and tucked it among my things. Later, working my way through

  the magazine’s articles and images, I paused over the many examples of a suppos-

  edly possible future version of Mumbai. This Mumbai was laden with lush urban

  landscapes woven of leafy parks, diverse open spaces devoted to leisure, and veg-

  etated zones devoted to the unique ecology of a healthier, more climate-resilient

  coastline. Each example was at once profoundly unfamiliar, and yet—or so the

  convincing renderings suggested—profoundly possible for those who dared to

  “imagine Mumbai.”

  The portal to this barely recognizable city—communicated in this form to a

  smal , elite, and relatively young readership—based its declaration of timeliness

  and possibility on the particular bureaucratic moment. According to formalized

  urban planning cycles, Mumbai had ostensibly—though not exactly in practice—

  created a new urban development plan in twenty-year intervals. Since 1966, the

  Maharashtra Region and Town Planning Act, established in that year, required

  every municipal corporation to prepare and implement city development plans.

  Cal s to an elite young readership to Imagine Mumbai echoed the task of professional urban planning publics as they debated the appropriate form and content of

  the current urban plan’s successor. In this sense, the future plan for Mumbai could be treated as an open question, ripe for certain publics to reimagine.16

  By this time, the official plan-making process was already controversial, in part

  because a consortium that included French consulting firms had been appointed

  to write the new plan. 17 In part as a response, prominent cal s for public participation (and spectacles that sought to enable it) created a sense among a specific

  subset of elite and professional Mumbaikars that their individual and collective

  acts of “imagining Mumbai” mattered, and moreover, that they could and should

  be galvanized to influence the form and content of the new urban plan.

  Broadly ecological sensibilities dominated the public meetings and exhibi-

  tions through which these publics sought to influence the plan’s form. The idea

  of “open space,” a category encompassing cal s for more recreational and leisure

  space, concerns about public health and well-being, and a host of ecological con-

  servation objectives, came to capture and convey a complex of potential remedies

  for the spatial and environmental deficiencies of the present and the biophysical

  challenges that climate change ensured. In this sense, cal s to integrate urban sustainability concerns into the new development plan assumed the form of a civic

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 7

  imperative.18 To promote the conditions needed to constitute a fuller, more ideal Mumbai was to promote an attendant biophysical and material form.

  The political issue of how, precisely, to ensure that an amended development plan would be both formulated and operationalized, however, was usual y tucked into subtext. This had the effect of foregrounding the planners, architects, and

  other urban professionals who imagined, narrated, and justified it rather than the political economic structures, bureaucracies, and circumstances that enabled or

  prevented them. The urgency of the moment, emboldened by the looming plan

  deadline but already evident in intensifying concern over the risks to coastal cities posed by climate change, seemed to excuse the discursive circumvention of

  the political mechanics of actual change. Mumbai’s complex and famously prob-

  lematic bureaucratic, corporate, and development apparatus would have to be

  reformed, but precisely how was muted, if even present, in cal s to bring urban

  sustainability into the new plan.19

  But back in the pages of the bourgeois print media voice of Time Out Mumbai,

  a young, elite, English-speaking readership was nevertheless called on to take

  responsibility for the Mumbai of tomorrow. The most effective way to do that, it

  suggested, was through design thinking. “How would you redesign the city?” one article asked, suggesting an enticing combination of agentive power and civic duty.

  Each piece proposed a different strategy or focal Mumbai geography, but all con-

  verged on a single point: “open spaces.” Vegetated, accessible public areas designed with a combination of trees, gardens, and leisure in mind, were a primary tool for achieving a more desirable city, according to this logic.

  To “imagine” Mumbai in this context was thus an invitation to rethink its socio-

  ecological destiny, its spatial configuration, and the patterns that came together in the process of urban development. It was also a confident gesture that seemed to

  imply that such rethinking could itself have real, material consequences. The exercise was a first step that, if mobilized in design arenas that could spark unspecified collective civic agency, might change the spatial course of Mumbai’s future.

  Placing the work of transforming imagination into action in the hands of urban

  professionals, then, bestowed a sense that they could have an influence—or at least a voice—in ensuring Mumbai’s very survival.

  The historical moment was clear and indisputably urgent. True ecological and

  economic vitality were still possible for Mumbai, but the opening signaled by the

  development plan was finite and pressing. It was in this moment, in this complex

  and dynamic city, that I embarked on an ethnographic journey among architects

  seeking training in gr
een design.

  • • •

  In this book, I take special interest in the training, thinking, and voices of a particular group of Mumbai-based architects. Theoretical y, architects were among the

  urban professionals potential y poised to envision, convey, and create a material

  8 City Ascending, City Imploding

  bridge between the city’s present built landscape and the environmental, material, and social city still to come. Architects were among those working to design and

  actualize the estimated 2.3 billion square meters of floor space that would, in fewer than two decades, rise across India. 20 In Mumbai, a subset of architects aspired to do this in a way sensitive to the altered energy, water, and environmental vulnerability profile of the entire subcontinent, while trying to also address the deep

  socioeconomic asymmetries that demanded change. 21 Like architects and planners from many points across history and place, their design aspirations sometimes

  linked to imagining new social worlds that might accompany their blueprints for

  India’s new built landscape. 22 Their puzzle was not simply the form of buildings to design, but how particular design approaches and techniques might help to

  cultivate more desirable relationships between people, material life, and the urban environment.

  In some ways, the architects I describe in this book—“green,” or environmental

  architects—engaged in a practice of hope: hope that the urban future could be

  ecological y and social y reformed, and hope that their profession would position

  them in a way to enact that reform. At its surface, their endeavors might evoke

  ideas like those suggested by David Harvey, for example, in his Spaces of Hope. In it, Harvey directly addresses the theoretical figure of the architect to invite us to consider the social worlds that could inhabit the spaces architects imagine, and

  to invigorate the suggestive possibility of the utopian landscapes of which those

  sociospatial worlds are a part.

  In this theoretical guise, however, the architect is often ascribed some degree

  of agentive power; we look to the imaginative sphere it signals as the source of

  new shapes for human history itself. Echoing this Marxian sensibility may leave

  the reader inclined to regard the architect’s connection to built, material forms

  as automatical y powerful, not only for imagining new social worlds, but also

  for distinguishing the human social world from nonhuman nature.23 Yet, as this work will show, the engaged social world of environmental architecture is

  always and automatical y suspended in a web of socionatural power relations,

  bureaucratic structures, and historical legacies that not only shape the architect’s agentive potential, but the very imaginary itself. The work among environmental architects that I recount in this book aims to show how a set of social agents simultaneously composed important new visions of a more desirable Mumbai,

  and experienced structural limits to their capacity to forge from those visions the city of the present.24

  In a lived reality of resilient and unequal power relations, in a city in which the material development of the urban form proceeds according to far more powerful actors than most urban design professionals, what compelled Mumbai-based

  architects to seek environmental training? What motivated them to enroll in a

  degree program that required significant commitments of time, money, and intel-

  lectual energy, but returned only scarcely discernable leverage to make change?

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 9

  To these central puzzles, this book offers insight into the contemporary power

  of conceptions of the future, showing how shared notions of temporality emerge as

  critical for understanding the reproduction of environmental actions in the pres-

  ent. While a wide range of theorists have issued cal s to take temporality seriously, and authors like Appadurai have persuasively established the place of the future

  as a “cultural fact,” it is only through sustained attention to the everyday life of ecology in practice—here, as environmental architecture training and work—that

  we can come to appreciate the multidimensional role of temporality as it animates

  social structure and social agency.25,26,27 My aim in this ethnography is to better understand and compose an architectural figure, as well as a contextualized actor, who is firmly embedded in the social structures and power relations of the present, and yet compelled by a specific and powerful set of temporal sensibilities to expect, and react to, a dramatical y different anticipated future. 28

  I thus attend to the cautiously confident, deeply aspirational politics that took

  shape among a group of environmental architects in a Mumbai on the cusp of a

  new urban development plan. As I will describe, theirs was a politics of expec-

  tation and possibility that sought to defy both the triumphant pronouncements

  of Mumbai as a “development” mission accomplished, and repeated declarations that enduring inequality and intensifying environmental vulnerability sealed for

  the city a chaotic urban fate. I focus on a social arena of relative, but always compromised, privilege in which actors are neither ful y empowered elites nor ful y

  dispossessed. Unsatisfied with Mumbai’s political economy and its environment,

  the architects I describe organized their aspirations to change both according to

  an emergent moral logic—a moral ecology that, as I will show, relied on the inevi-

  tabilities of the environmental future to reposition their active potential and to remake urban socioecological life.

  Separating social life in the city from the biophysical vitality of the environment has long been untenable, so such separations are inconsistent with the lived social reality of the environmental architects profiled here. Across social theory and studies of social and cultural change, rejecting the modern human/nature divide has opened myriad theoretical and conceptual approaches to nature, and has helped us rethink

  our understanding of social change. Invoking ideas like “species being, ”29 “more than human geographies, ”30 or “multi-species ethnography,” 31 we are roundly challenged across disciplines and analytical postures to reconsider the intersectional arenas previously designated as humans here, in the city, and nature beyond—there, in the

  hinterlands. Marx’s classical line between the bees and the architects no longer holds solid sway, bringing nature “back in” to political economic analytics and humans

  into old categories of nature. Indeed, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, bringing

  nonhuman nature “back in” is no longer a discipline-based choice,32 and conceptualizing agency exclusively in the human sphere is nearly impossible to sustain. 33

  At the same time, “urban nature” has gained new and global y circulating traction

  as a useful, and indeed often essential, conceptual component of the twenty-first

  10 City Ascending, City Imploding

  century city. 34 Urban environments and their futures, concerns often referenced in shorthand through terms like sustainability and resilience, 35 are undeniably central features of cities as they unfold. Urban professionals who mediate this domain thus emerge as particularly needed, desired, and powerful actors on a stage of expertise emboldened by its claim to ensure and safeguard sustainability.

  Or do they? The puzzle at the center of this book is one of coupled environmental and political transformation. Our lens is a collective of architects, brought together by a shared experience of formal training, and rendered a resilient, self-identified community of activist-professional-practitioners in the aftermath of

  that experience. They speak in this book of their passion for a practice that will even
tual y align social and environmental vitality, and they assemble key concepts in interaction and fellowship with one another and with the author, the anthropologist. The sphere of praxis they share merges a particular version of urban ecosystem ecology knowledge with design techniques, creating a science-design driven,

  shared point of reference that they repeatedly indexed as “good design.” The book’s later focus on the realm of post-training, lived professional practice allows us to trace a conceptual and experiential bridge between the work of the imaginary and

  the work of politics. Across the book, I draw from ethnographic data and analysis

  to better understand the relative power of architects as social actors who seek to integrate training and practice. What emerges, I will show, is a specific and important form of green expertise, but one that remains a vocation in waiting.

  Despite the formidable social structures that condition their capacity to act in

  the present, I will describe how architects were nevertheless key agents of urban

  socioecological transformation in a city more often noted for its seemingly intractable un sustainability than for its demonstration that a different, more ecological y vital urban world is possible. Crucial y, they remain agents in waiting: the configuration of bureaucratic power, urban development, and capital that composes Mumbai’s political landscape ultimately suspends “good design” in a future

  still to come. 36

  GREENING THE URBAN REVOLUTION

  Green architecture and design are expansive, conceptual y and in practice. The

  terms invoke other equal y broad concepts, including urban ecology, sustainability, 37

  and urban nature. Like many malleable and oft-employed terms—globalization,

  modernity, and culture among them—green architecture and environmental

  design must be anchored to lived social life if we are to discern their form and

  meaning. In this study, that understanding is derived from the training and

  social world I encountered at The Rachana Sansad Institute for Environmental

  Architecture in Mumbai.

  For analytical grounding, I employ an “ecologies of urbanism” approach, draw-

  ing from previous theoretical work with K. Sivaramakrishnan and the insights of