CONTEXT “The interdependence of architecture, planning and urban design achieved through the language of landscape, which combines the capacity of artistic visualization and the potent energy of conceptualizing terrain, is the only perceptive way that can challenge the design concerns of overgrowing cities.” Rajiv Lochan, 20093
The image of Mumbai has been cultivated from a terrain of porosity, fluidity and accommodation to one of control, rigidity and an obsession with definition over the last three hundred years.2 What once was a terrain that could adapt and actively participate in the negotiation between, land, water and the ‘in-between’, has become a constricted mass of sub-par infrastructure. This latter state is an amalgamation of a dedicated ideology of separating the ecology of the land from that of the city. The complex situation which I have labeled a crisis has many faces — natural, social, political, economic, cultural, but to understand and delve into these complexities I believe that the best places to begin are the underrepresented spaces within the city where they intersect.
14 | Peripheral Mechanisms
One of these intersections is the ‘edges’ of urbanity. Edges which are neither land nor sea, the edges where urban transitions into the urbanrural, the edges which the two gray areas in today’s metropolis aggressively negotiate to occupy. It is at this precipice that it becomes important to understand not just the physical but the social, ecological and economic structures of these edge conditions, which despite their nonglamorous generalization play a pivotal role as a foil to their extensively planned counterparts. Ignoring this fog of generalization in most traditional media, I see immense intricacy. Understanding this complexity, I think is better served in viewing the ‘edges’ in terms of their component elements and then tracing the connections which enable these to collaborate. This section begins to understand these elements by individually contextualizing them in the city of today.
