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

  agenda animated by twenty-first century concerns over environmental change and

  the enduring postcolonial effects of deep socioeconomic disparities. In this con-

  text, the best designs would be responsive to biophysical uncertainties and socio-

  political imperatives, as well as to the conceptual values bundled in environmental architecture training as “good design,” as I will show.

  Focusing on the interface of material forms and social relations can some-

  times seem to reduce urban and political change to technical questions, but my

  intention here is to do the opposite. The chapters to follow demonstrate the many

  ways that social y meaningful aspects of green design were in fact far more than

  technical, so much so that the most advanced technologies and materials often

  assumed a background position in pedagogical and praxis-based designations of

  “good design.” In the foreground stood a more comprehensive moral ecology that

  enfolded core ideas about what was right and necessary for the good of society and the environment.

  To appreciate this moral ecology ful y depends on a careful treatment of the

  ways that architects cultivated and operationalized the specific hybrid knowledge

  form71 they derived together in the context of training. That hybrid knowledge, which was used to characterize environmental architecture as an “integrated”

  subject, fused selected aspects of ecosystem ecology with equal y selective design technologies and social objectives. It was that same hybrid knowledge form that

  distinguished the environmental architect from the architect, and in turn the

  green expert from the urban professional.72 Green expertise, however deferred in its actual practice, nurtured and reinforced a shared hope that Mumbai—and

  indeed, cities around the world—could be remade, and indeed could survive, in an

  increasingly uncertain environmental and social future.

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 17

  A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT IN AN URBAN CONTEXT

  Complex processes like urbanization, green design, and city life are often discussed as undifferentiated categories. Regarding them as universals, however, risks losing sight of a point advanced by Taylor and Buttel over two decades ago: that there are critical limitations to concepts, metrics, and simulations of environmental change conceived at the global scale when we seek to understand how actual change takes place in lived social life. 73 Context, they argued, exerts profound, if highly differentiated, influence on how and when eco-social processes shift.

  Across global discursive and policy discourses, green design circulates with

  prominence and purchase. It is often invoked to provide alternative trajectories

  for housing and infrastructure development, energy regimes, and resilience plan-

  ning. Yet our understanding of the social and political dynamics of green design

  in specific contexts is curiously limited. At best, we have only a preliminary understanding of the cultural and historical narratives from which green design derives its place-specific legitimacy, force, and moral authority. This book aims to more

  clearly define the contextualized social, political, and cultural processes through which green design knowledge circulates, transforms, and is operationalized—

  even if only in aspiration. By attending to these factors, we are better positioned to understand the structural barriers that prevent city-scale ecological change, and to calibrate initiatives to change the actual barriers they encounter. At the same time, we stand to gain a more sophisticated appreciation of the importance of sustained

  aspiration among those who stand trained and poised to implement specific kinds

  of ecological practices.

  The potential impact of green design technologies and practices is obviously

  far-reaching. It is imperative, then, that we understand the particular fusions of scientific and social scientific knowledge that constitute their basis, and the moral ecologies, temporal sensibilities, and ecologies in practice that characterize their contextual variability. Clearly new relationships to the environment are being

  forged through the practice of green design; so, too, are new social relationships and whol y new political ecologies of cities and non-city spaces.

  Toward that end, over fourteen cumulative months between 2007 and 2012

  (including a period of eight continuous months in 2012) I used mixed social

  research methods to understand the social life of green architecture in Mumbai.

  I employed participant observation at RSIEA, in its Master of Environmental

  Architecture classes, and on the educational field trips that are part of the Institute’s curriculum. I undertook additional participant observation among Institute faculty members, and among students who had completed the program and gone on

  to work in Mumbai as certified environmental architects.

  To trace students’ post-program experiences, I administered surveys to all

  RSIEA students, then-present and past. Of one hundred and five total graduates

  at the time of the research, I was able to survey ninety-six. Additional archival

  18 City Ascending, City Imploding

  materials provided information on the historical context for environmental design

  in Mumbai, as well as its contemporary life as a pedagogical undertaking and a

  mode of professional practice. Final y, through a separate interview protocol, I

  administered twenty-seven semi-structured interviews and focus groups with stu-

  dents, and seven interviews among other relevant practitioners. Eight additional

  interviews were conducted with active RSIEA faculty members.

  As a center for dynamic design in India, Mumbai hosts many environmental

  architecture training programs and professional groups. Several are better known,

  and by far more elite, than Rachana Sansad. While I learned a great deal about

  other programs, and met many people active in other arenas of environmental

  architecture practice and pedagogy, I focused my fieldwork specifical y on RSIEA.

  This allowed me to concentrate my inquiry on a specific subset of Mumbai’s archi-

  tects who are committed to environmental design; it also enabled a richer contex-

  tual sense of the camaraderie that developed between these specific professionals

  who, once they graduated, continued to draw from their common experience of

  training and practice. A focus on RSIEA also allowed me to more ful y experience,

  and therefore better understand, the academic curriculum through which ecosys-

  tem ecology was conveyed as, and then transformed into, design practice.

  It is important to note that, although today RSIEA stands among many similar

  postgraduate programs in Mumbai, the Institute for Environmental Architecture

  was the first and only program of its kind in India when it was inaugurated in

  2002. It was Roshni Udyavar Yehuda, the Program Head throughout this study,

  who authored the pioneering curriculum, and who has since watched it flourish

  alongside many others in the city.

  Caste and class dimensions, ethnic and religious diversity, geographic mobil-

  ity, and linguistic capacity also distinguished the group of architects I profile in this book. In contrast to more elite architecture programs in Mumbai, RSIEA is

  not general y considered the pinnacle of architectural study, either international y or in India. It boasts successful graduates, but it is not general y associated with prestigious international firms or elite national and global connections. Indeed,

  those students from privileged and wealthier backgrounds, or with more interna-
r />   tional educational experience, tend to enroll and participate in other programs in Mumbai’s vast architecture and design community. Focusing on RSIEA offers particular insight into the experience of Greater Mumbai-based, middle and lower-

  middle class professionals who were likely to remain in Greater Mumbai and

  Maharashtra after their training was complete. I use “middle and lower-middle

  class professionals” as a heuristic rather than a clear and constant category here, however, since the architects I learned among were nevertheless quite removed

  from the more glamorous and often transnational world of architectural elitism.

  Most came from Greater Mumbai, and remained in Maharashtra as practitioners

  after they completed their master’s degree. They assembled from extremely diverse

  caste, religious, linguistic, and geographic backgrounds, but all had achieved

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 19

  fluency in English sufficient to train and earn their degree in that language. All had the capacity and willingness to enroll in a highly diverse, cosmopolitan setting for this training. Many took out formal loans to cover the costs associated

  with RSIEA, so they were also sufficiently social y positioned to gain access to

  formalized structures of credit and debt. In general terms, we may think of the

  architecture students at RSIEA as a set of bourgeois middle class professionals.

  Although not from the furthest class and environmental margins of the city—

  as was the case in my previous studies in Kathmandu—students at RSIEA each

  espoused specific caste, class, gender, and other conditions that influenced, in part, how and where their aspirations to make fundamental social and environmental

  change would be realized, and how and where they would face obstacles. As social

  actors, RSIEA architects were beholden to myriad established relations of power,

  constraints to mobility, and, in this specific instance, education or other forms of life-structuring debt. Despite their differences, as I will show, they cultivated what I have called elsewhere an environmental affinity group that allows us to consider them together, and to examine the moral ecological logics they assembled as they

  shared a commitment to “good design.” 74

  • • •

  The ethnography and analysis to follow are shaped by a set of core research ques-

  tions. Each derives from a central and enduring interest in the ways that concepts of nature transform, and how that transformation relates to social and political

  life. I ask, how is the environment made, and made meaningful, in urban settings?

  To ask how the environment is made is to highlight how the pedagogy of environmental design—the selection of historical narratives, notions of social duty and responsibility, aspects of ecosystem ecology that were conveyed and taught, and

  modes of transforming them into essential design techniques and skil s—actually

  constituted a built form bridge between “more than human” nature and more-

  than-technical environmental design.75 Understanding the form and content of that bridge is essential if we are to understand the origins of formal diagnoses of urban environmental problems.

  Likewise, to ask how the environment is made meaningful is to recognize that

  human social action is always predicated on the making of shared values and

  meaning systems. Values and meanings are in turn often associated with particu-

  lar visions of, and fears about, the present and likely future. Arjun Appadurai has noted that green design has a specific discursive quality that tends to bring the

  future into the present; this book explores how that consciousness of present and

  future made processes of identity formation (the we of the collective), narrations of history (in this case, defining Indian green architecture), and challenging or claiming the place of Mumbai on a map of cities that achieve prominence on the

  global stage, were all important avenues for attributing meaning to environmental

  architecture and the work of the architect.76

  20 City Ascending, City Imploding

  We have already seen how the environmental architect can be constructed as

  the vanguard of a social movement, a special subforce in service of changemaking

  in Mumbai. It is important to ask further, how did that vanguard define meaning-

  ful urban nature, and how did it seek to enact it through material practices? What moral ecologies and temporal sensibilities compelled them? For scholars interested in urban environmental change, there is perhaps no more fruitful place for

  answering these questions than among the architects themselves as they learned,

  debated, and sought to practice green design.

  I assume in this work that architecture is a field of cultural production in

  Bourdieu’s sense; there is no single and stable voice of all architects, but there are nevertheless important agents and institutions. In the present case, this would

  include, among many others, the All India Council for Technical Education,

  which was reformed in 2009, the Council of Architecture, the RSIEA-accreditor

  Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University, and even the Archaeological

  Survey of India. 77,78 The actions of these institutions simultaneously produce specific cultural goods (in this case often by guiding and certifying a curricular structure) and those interested in, and positioned to, consume them. Many other

  relevant agents and institutions also exist, and exercise influence, at a variety of scales, from the global (such as the international y recognized BREEAM metrics

  or LEED standards) to the regional (such as GRIHA). 79,80,81 Although regularly contested, these institutions and agents were also regularly invoked as sources of legitimacy, and so produced and reproduced the templates for specific kinds of

  built forms, and those who sought to consume the attributes of those forms.

  In the next chapter, I set out to understand the social life and practice of environmental architecture at Rachana Sansad Insitute for Environmental Architecture,

  first through the genesis narratives and curricular goals espoused by found-

  ing faculty members in the Institute, and then by noting the profound—almost

  un believable—sense of optimism and possibility that formed their basis. The study continues to explore how “good design,” a quality foundational to the RSIEA curricular mission and yet very diffuse, was conceived and conveyed. These opening

  sections trace social and pedagogical life at RSIEA through an entire curricular

  cycle, following students on mandatory field trips, accompanying them in the

  classroom and in project work, and describing the gradual formation of alliances

  and affinities that would extend far beyond the two-year master’s program. They

  show how basic conservation biology and systems science principles formed the

  scientific basis for green architectural pedagogy, while specific narrations of history, vernacular tradition, and climatic specificity attached the science to local y grounded techniques and practices.

  Chapter 3 begins by describing the opening session of Rachana Sansad’s 2012

  Environmental Architecture course, which featured a collective screening of the

  American climate change film An Inconvenient Truth. It examines the distinctive

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  City Ascending, City Imploding 21

  blend of global y and local y circulating technical material that was hybridized to produce and convey a Mumbai- and India-specific concept of good design.

  By this point, the reader will find the broader context of the city noticeably

  absent, and so two chapters follow that refocus our attention
on the broader urban and temporal contexts in which RSIEA architects trained. In these chapters live

  debates about greening the city and contrasting public exhibitions calling for new urban plans and designs sharpen our view of the public spectacles that characterized contests over Mumbai’s urban form and future.

  These chapters also reposition our attention onto the concept of open space, an

  omnipresent, quite popular, and yet deeply problematic prescriptive in this period.

  Departing for a moment from my direct attention to RSIEA in order to follow one

  of its faculty members to an important urban forest patch, I trace the politics of exclusion embedded in aspirations and practices of good design.

  Fortified with an ethnographic snapshot of RSIEA and a sense of the urban con-

  text that enfolded it, Chapter 6 then follows RSIEA students through a key aspect of RSIEA pedagogy: their ventures outside the city. Central y important field trips, like the BCIL journey I described in the opening pages of the book, played an

  important role in synthesizing the idea of a distinctly Indian history, quality, and imperative for good design. This section considers some of the sites, their complex histories and symbolics, and the ways that encounters there were structured and

  limited by environmental pedagogy. This chapter shows that regardless of the pre-

  sumptive power of sustainability to render such places instantly neutral, produc-

  ing green expertise was a history-claiming endeavor that depended on a cultural y

  grounded spatial geography to enchant and make meaningful a more global y leg-

  ible choreography of technical training and skil s.

  From the training journeys far afield, Chapter 7 returns to Mumbai to trace how good design aspirations fared in domains of practice. The reader follows

  RSIEA graduates, and students on the cusp of graduation, as they seek to turn

  environmental architecture into ecology in practice. Interviews with a range of

  graduates bring the core tensions between the structural forces of urbanization

  and the aspirations of RSIEA’s green architects to life as we encounter the complex of power relations and bureaucratic structures that modify grand plans. We also