Mumbai: It’s been less than 24 hours since VB Gandhi Marg in Kala Ghoda, where architect-urbanist-teacher Rahul Mehrotra’s studio is located, was closed. The previous day itself, the road and adjoining lanes had been evacuated and entry of vehicles was prohibited. A section along the road was converted into a cozy alfresco dining space with shade sails, and elsewhere, a pottery maker had set up a stall on the ground. It was an important moment for the city – CM Devendra Fadnavis was inaugurating Mumbai’s first pedestrian district.
But a day later, an hour before noon, it’s business as usual. The street is again filled with lawyers, visitors, brunch-goers and the odd digital creator and his camera-available colleagues looking for a corner for their next content. Parked vehicles have taken up outdoor dining space, crowding the newly-baked gray basalt blocks at either end.
Mehrotra, founder principal of RMA Architects, who splits his time between Mumbai and Boston, and is here for his new exhibition, smiles as he explains a few things about the inconvenience caused by the inauguration – and ends it, with no end in sight, with a shrug. Having played a key role in getting the Fort district designated as a conservation area in the mid-1990s, Mehrotra’s vision for the area is markedly different from the approach implemented on the ground. He reserved his comments for much later in our conversation, but he thinks the obsession with creating a “postcard city” has taken it away from the plan. “And conservation is a really important tool of planning,” he insists.
Excerpts from the interview:
You have a new show, Contexts, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, dedicated to your work and your studio, RMA Architects. The last time we saw an exhibition on your practice was four years ago (curated by Kaivan Mehta). How different is it going to be?
For over 15 years now, Ranjit, Cavan and I have been talking about the need to bring architecture into galleries and museums. While art features heavily in these institutions, architecture remains largely absent. At the same time, we also feel disappointed with the environment around us. This led us to work on three exhibitions (in 2016, 2018 and 2021).
The latest edition, led by Ranjit, is thematically linked to a conference the three of us organized in March called Radical Contextuality. In this exhibition, Ranjit is exploring the idea of how one can imagine things subtly and more fundamentally by reading the context in which architects work – the context, as we would describe it when we teach students in architecture school, is the climate and physical structure of a place, and the geology of the site. Some of us who are more ambitious discover the hidden history of the site. But one can also place his work in the broader context of politics, culture and society. Ranjit is interested in understanding how this extensive study nourishes architecture making it truly embedded in its location.
The show is independently curated by them, with almost no involvement from my side other than delivering the content they choose. For me, this has been an unusual experience, as I have begun to see an entirely new perspective in my work that I may have felt intuitively, but been unable to express.
Over the past few years, Mumbai has undergone dramatic changes. The Coastal Road is redefining the city’s coastline, and new metro lines and link roads are being planned, often at the expense of forests and mangroves. What are your thoughts on the direction in which the city’s development is headed?
Let me tell you an anecdote about this. When these incredible freeways opened to the public – and naturally, I’ve used them – I tried to solicit feedback from my colleagues. It was always limited to expressions like, “Now, I can reach the airport within 20 minutes”, or, “I can finally come to South Bombay from Bandra for dinner”. These were clearly reactions that came from the elite class who owned cars and who felt stifled in terms of their personal mobility.
If you look at it more objectively, I think the bigger, not moral, question is the trade-offs that we make, meaning how many people will benefit from this infrastructure. In Mumbai, it will be only 10 or 12% of people who use or own a private car.
This means that at most 12 percent of the population is benefiting from large-scale structural disruption to coastal ecosystems in times of climate change and rising sea levels. Now, if 70 percent of people use the train system, could we have invested a fraction of that money in air-conditioned trains and stations, state-of-the-art toilets and catering facilities, or terminals designed to improve last-mile connectivity?
Any city develops in evolutionary and revolutionary ways. Social anthropologist Clifford Geertz used “involution” to describe Indonesian rice farmers who, due to a World Bank project, were forced to become more productive. Therefore, instead of growing one or two crops, they were forced to practice multi-cropping – growing three to four crops simultaneously – making it a very complex system. It became highly productive, but it created “involutions” or internal complexity that, while incredibly efficient, was sensitive to malfunction. Development will involve diversity in many ways.
This is important in the context of cities.
In Mumbai, the last evolutionary step was New Bombay. Since then, we have never imagined the city as a big ecology. It’s all about inclusion. Redevelopment is the ultimate fantasy of inclusion – we are able to house more people when building vertically, but we are cramming all our assets into a limited space, and making that same space more complex to use.
For any city planning, the relationship between livelihood, housing or housing and mobility is critical – a holy trinity! And then the location of the features follows logically. If mobility is efficient and subsidized, we can provide well-connected affordable land for people to live. Today, the oil crisis has torn apart the American suburb, as it depends on individual mobility to create practical connections between housing and livelihood locations. Unfortunately, in Mumbai we are not paying enough attention to this trinity of domains.
Having invested so much in Mumbai’s built heritage and influencing the policy around it, do you think city officials are sensitive to heritage today?
The city is in an aimless hurry! For many people, it’s a golden goose and everyone is trying to hatch as many eggs as they can as quickly as possible. The nexus between politicians and developers has now been clearly exposed. Planning and infrastructure are therefore chosen to exploit land values. And so, in my mind it’s just greed that’s driving the city.
It seems that our leadership and elite have lost the aspiration to build a good society and are focused on the good life. Unless one puts people at the center of planning fantasies and controls or calibrates that greed, we will never get a society that is centered on the citizen, the region, the common people, equality and greater empathy towards the poor in the city.
Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes what is happening in our city as “the deployment of weapons of mass creation.”
Mumbai is probably the most expensive slum in the world. I am amazed when I visit the homes of rich friends; The quality around them is incredibly poor. You end up in an oasis and it doesn’t make a healthy city. If the transitions between public, semi-public, sacred, semi-private and private spaces are not seamless, it is not a great city. In many cities that we admire, whether in Europe or elsewhere, this transition between the spectrum of public to private is usually very seamless. In Indian cities, they are brutally sudden. And, this is a good sign that we have not got our urban form and big urban culture right.
Your studio is located in the first pedestrian zone of Mumbai. Do you think this is a step in the right direction?
When we talk about pedestrianization of a historic area like the Fort District, it should be done as a comprehensive planning exercise. Which means one has to look at parking and alternative modes of public mobility like hop-on-hop-off buses that ease the movement of people who have decided not to bring their cars inside. This also means walking on many other streets simultaneously, so that it can work as a network. Infrastructure should be envisioned holistically. You have to anticipate what the implications of that infrastructure will be, who will benefit from it, and then create a strategy to implement it. I think what we’re seeing within 100 yards at Kala Ghoda is at least a poorly conceived expensive token.
As a young architect in Mumbai, you worked very closely with the late historian Sharda Dwivedi. Together you wrote about 12 books, including ‘Bombay: The Cities Within’. How important a force was he in your life?
Sharda was very important to my work in Mumbai because she was an insight into “Bombay” that I didn’t really know.
I grew up in Mumbai and certainly knew the city and its culture, but I was not indifferent to the old lost city of Bombay. Finally, I am very grateful to Sharda for making me aware of Mumbai’s assets beyond research as a student (at CEPT in Ahmedabad and Harvard University in Massachusetts).
Spending time with them and researching and accessing archives helped me understand more deeply the processes that created Mumbai. And by learning about these processes – social, cultural, institutional – I was able to better understand the DNA of the city. It was this understanding that later prepared me, for example, to work with my colleagues Sandhya Sawant, David Cardoz, Foy Nissen, Shyam Chainani and others, where we designated the fort area as a conservation area.
Sharda helped in building this confidence. She was a friend, a partner in the scholarship we created, and my best assistant in trying to understand the politics that surrounded me as a professional in Mumbai.
He married architect Nondita Correa Mehrotra, daughter of the late renowned architect Charles Correa. Given your shared background, what do you two enjoy discussing most?
For the most part, my wife worked with Charles Correa and was actually a partner in many of his later projects after the 1990s, which is when we were married. I had worked with him for three years before that, but then I felt that I should have an independent practice and not let these two lives merge. And so, she continued to work with him until his demise. We have been working together on a few projects since then. I think what’s been brilliant is that we don’t spend our evenings discussing architecture, but rather we enjoy seeing buildings and cities when we travel together and make architecture central to the time we spend together.
How has the late Charles Correa informed your work?
I value two things. One was his professionalism. He was meticulously professional not only in the way he worked, but also in his ideological and ethical positions, and in his sense of responsibility towards his clients and society more broadly. I think he carried it as a very conscious burden. More than that, I also learned that an architect has to express, share and communicate with society his values, his position and what he finds important for society.
Do you have any dream for Mumbai which is still unfulfilled?
The Mumbai we all should dream of should be a Mumbai where everyone lives with dignity. And I think the only solution, given the size of the city, is to move very rapidly to larger metropolitan visions, where we invest in infrastructure and other ways that open up affordable and mobility-serviceable land that can connect us all in an equitable way. Therefore, land, equality of land and dignity of living is of utmost importance. I think if people have houses where they can live with dignity, they will build their livelihoods, and more than that, they will survive. But home will be at the center of that imagination.
