Mumbaiker by Tom Morgan

MUMBAIKER MAPPING THE PARAMODERN CITY

TOM MORGAN + SHARKMOUSE

0.0

The Illusory Mumbai:

Context

Mumbai is not a city – at least not in the manner that one would expect after exposure to the senescent capitals of old Europe, to the sprawling exurban extravagances of the American West, to the robust new urban landscapes of the emerging Eastern economies. Despite its conspicuous wealth it is not a Dubai – although elements of that bubble-driven economy have been grafted on to the otherwise alien urban fabric of Mumbai, with varying degrees of success. Mumbai is a city unlike any other – partly, it could be argued, because it simply isn’t a city; not an ancient city, not a modern city, not even a post-modern heteropolis. Mumbai, a cohesion of otherwise dissonant forces – contrariwise cultural manouveres and market forces – is, if anything, a para-modern city – a staggering conglomeration of low-tech villages and hi-tech enclaves; a slum-region where the slum-dwellers are actually more numerous, more productive and better served than the ‘legitimate’ citizens. Mumbai is a city of emergence, where a singular narrative – a potent force that draws in, via means salubrious and salacious, raw material and workers and ideas and dreams from the Indian hinterland – has been constructed from a morass of divisive ethnicities, governmental jurisdictions, economic processes and political expectations. Unlike other major cities in both the developed and developing world, the city has no unitary government body – no real guiding hand. Officially, is an adjunct of the Maharashtra state government; and under policies that ran from independence to the early eighties, was ignored as a cankerous distraction from the very real issue of rural polity and economy 1. Mumbai emerged largely without oversight – and the sheer weight of the spontaneous creativity exhibited; the informal languages of settlement, the street-dwellers, the lucid mass of Dharahvi, with its manufactories and tanneries and blacksmiths and prostitutes and violence and unexpected joy – resists declamatory restructuring. Now that the significance of Mumbai is finally recognised, the authorities are reduced to the formation of idealised structures on the fringes, or on laboriously reclaimed land 2. 1 Ghandi’s influence – an idealisation of the village that ignored the very real problems of emerging industrial metropolises in favour the perfection of the rural condition. And even then, there is no guarantee that the slum-dwellers, seizing the opportunity, will not colonise the still-damp mud. 2 And even then, there is no guarantee that the slum-dwellers, seizing the opportu-

0.0

The Illusory Mumbai:

Context

The following maps attempt to describe the heart of the city – the island city of Bombay – as a holistic entity. In many ways, the city escapes an architectural definition. So much of its mass is spontaneous and liminal – and the fabric which is designed is uniformly begat by mercantile means and measures – that it is better to think of the city either at the level of the individual – of the flanneur navigating a situationist hive, or at the level of a deity – some multi-limbed god watching over the teeming antheap of 12 million souls. This document ascribes to the view of the latter.

Mumbai All maps are at 1:100000

nity, will not colonise the still-damp mud.

Mumbai All maps are at 1:100000

nity, will not colonise the still-damp mud.

Melbourne Shown for comparison

0.5 Built Precedents

Residence Antilia, Perkins+Will Multi-Storey Residence Mumbai, India

Nirmathi Kendras, various Building Advice and Construction Various Locations, India

The residence Antilia is a chimera; a bastard mixture of a thousand different architectural creatures; a fire-breathing monster that instils in one a desperate appreciation for its perverse beauty. At first glance it is a tower – one of the many that cluster and crowd Mumbai’s ever-growing skyline – and a pre-eminent one, at that. Yet the structure – rather than housing apartments, or offices, or the headquarters of a desperately out-of-touch NGO – is a private residence, the dwelling-place of India’s wealthiest man. Still under construction, it highlights both the potentialities and dangers of architecture in emerging economies. It owes no allegiance to the vernacular languages of its locale – nor would it want to; it is both a symbol and a product of an ostensibly cosmopolitan global economy, even its name evokes images of disparities; the Antilles in the Caribbean rather than the Subcontinent. In a manner, the issue of cultural appropriateness is eradicated – the globalised economies have no need for such nationalistic posturing or sign-posting. At the same time, the building shares an underlying language – symbolic, rather than stylistic – with the extant architecture of the British Raj. It is a built exemplar of hyper-consumption – the question of an absence of endemic architecture is disingenuous, it presupposes that there is authenticity in the west. The reality is that the emergent globalising forces have poisoned architecture, whether in Madras or Mumbai or Melbourne or Minneapolis.

Nirmithi Kendras – literally ‘building centres’ – are an indigenous response to the paucity of quality housing in the subcontinent. Not explicitly designated as providers of emergency or ‘low-income’ housing, the centres frame themselves as repositories of information relating to ‘lowcost’ construction. The distinction is an important one – in a social landscape still dominated by the remnants of caste, construction mechanisms perceived to belong to untouchables or slum-dwellers would be shunned by the emerging middle classes. The Kendras attempt to be non-partisan, providing services to all – although by dint of necessity much of their work involves projects in both inner city slums and marginalised rural communities. In all cases, however, the centres pride themselves on their close relationship with their clients – often involving them in the building process and creating a situation of ‘crafted’, rather than designed, edifices. The kendras are best though of as a system of architectural infrastructure – providing no clear delimited style – indeed, mixing mughal, colonial and local influences – but sharing a core of information and structural approaches. Their materials are cheap and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary; mudbricks made with a small percentage of Portland cement, for example, are better able to survive the rigours of the environment. Novel solutions developed by one Kendra are shared with all others – indeed, there is no real specified function for such a building centre; one may be research institution, or a design institution, or a microfinance lending institution, or a construction collective, or a combination of all four. Again, this highlights the fallacy of the vanished vernacular – the language of the houses is unimportant (see the simulacra shophouses in Singapore) but the method of delivery is paramount. The Kendras set themselves up in opposition to the globalised forces that have delivered both the towering steel houses of commerce in Mumbai and the dull concrete apartment blocks on the outskirts of Dehli.

Helipad

The residence provides space for: 6 Residents 168 Cars

Family ‘home’

Theatre

And requires the obscene amount of: Garden zone

600+ Staff

0.5 Built Precedents

Residence Antilia, Perkins+Will Multi-Storey Residence Mumbai, India

Nirmathi Kendras, various Building Advice and Construction Various Locations, India

Helipad

The residence provides space for: 6 Residents 168 Cars

Family ‘home’

Theatre

And requires the obscene amount of: Garden zone

600+ Staff

Hole in the Wall Schools, NIIT Computer Kiosk Various, India

Slum Networking, Himanshu Parikh Infrastructure, Planning Indore + various cities, India

There is, perhaps, a tendency to view infrastructure as a series of grand gestures – freeways and flood control canals, underground train-lines and sewers. While this is undoubtedly true, the provision of social or informational infrastructure can upset this adage. The observation has been made that new networks of communications, and new technologies (such as wi-fi and mobile computing) allow developing economies to jump-start informational ecologies – skipping the hardwired, leviathan networks of their developed kin and creating meshes of radio spectra and dissociated hand-helds, or cheap set-top computers. The Hole-In-The-Wall computer kiosks are one such example of a jump-started provision of infrastructure – the provision of computers at street level without the attendant training and regimentation of users one would expect in the west. The kiosks are the epitome of minimal infrastructures – a literal hole in the wall with a cover, a computer screen behind a plexiglass shield, a waterproof keyboard and a joystick. The computer is intended for use by the local children – the height of the screen and keyboard are set deliberately low to dissuade their use by adults – and spontaneous hierarchies have arisen detailing how long anyone is allowed to monopolise the keyboard and the information. Often, the children will nominate a well versed compatriot to act as a mediator between their questions and the PC’s internet linkage; strikingly, all the networks of support, from usage patterns to the provision of payment for electricity, are generated at a grassroots level after the erection of the kiosk. The kiosks provide educational benefits and an osmosis transference of computer literacy skills that segues heavily into India’s massive IT industrial complex. While substantial infrastructure can shape and remake cities, the profound impact of ground-up gestures cannot be ignored.

Remarkably, it is also possible to provide large-scale infrastructures (in the order of sewers, roads and watermains) with a bottom-up approach. “Broadly speaking, a recognisable shift away from the predominantly government and donor driven centralized planning actions… can be discerned in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India. Emerging in its place are increasingly market driven or informal/community based processes… 1” Rather than being ‘primitive,’ there is, in fact, quite a lot that can be learnt – or rather remembered – from the typologies and solutions found in slums. In most functions, slums resemble the primal city – the sort of organic response to topography and terrain that is forgotten in the western, gradated, planned and demarcated metropolis. Slums tend to follow intuitive elements of the landscape – roads run alongside the flanks of hills, snaking past natural drainage channels. This responsiveness to the underlying terrain makes them exceptionally well suited to the rapid provision of sewer and water systems – often all that is needed is a cut-and-cover approach that follows an existing drainage channel. Moreover, these naturally-routed sewers are gravity fed – doing away with the exorbitant expense of pumping stations and their ilk. In a similar fashion, slum-networking is able to consolidate existing roadways and footpaths – with minimal alteration to edge drainage – into the wider transportation networks of the wider city. Unlike the Cartesian grids of the city proper, the slum roads respect the contours of the land – with appropriate culverts they can become useful conduits of rainwater runoff. In a supremely ironic gesture, the ease with which services can be back-ended into the slum conditions means that they actually act as catalysts for the redevelopment of ostensibly richer regions of the city. The slum dwellers are elevated as valued citizens (and in a more cynical manoeuvre, brought under the auspice of the city government as tax-payers) and the city receives substantial infrastructure for a next-tonothing, micro-financed cost. Comparison of CITY vs SLUM with standard topography Streets that cut through existing topography. Sewers + plumbing cannot run at constant grade and require pumping stations.

CITY

Watercourse - buried Street drainage, if present, uses new storm-water channels, at great expense.

Roof dashed over

Watercourse - open. Currently a health hazard but the inclusion of sewer lines allow it to function as a run-off channel, rather than a cesspit.

Hinged Hood - Hides terminal when not in use.

720 mm

Bollard - Children can rest on this when using computer, and encourages crowding round the screen.

SLUM

Protective + waterproof screen.

Roads that follow the run of the land can passively + cheaply channel water toward existing watercourses.

1 Page 101, Constellations: Constructing Urban Design Practices, Columbia University, New York, 2007

Hole in the Wall Schools, NIIT Computer Kiosk Various, India

Slum Networking, Himanshu Parikh Infrastructure, Planning Indore + various cities, India

CITY

Watercourse - buried Street drainage, if present, uses new storm-water channels, at great expense.

Roof dashed over

Watercourse - open. Currently a health hazard but the inclusion of sewer lines allow it to function as a run-off channel, rather than a cesspit.

Hinged Hood - Hides terminal when not in use.

720 mm

Bollard - Children can rest on this when using computer, and encourages crowding round the screen.

SLUM

Protective + waterproof screen.

Roads that follow the run of the land can passively + cheaply channel water toward existing watercourses.

1 Page 101, Constellations: Constructing Urban Design Practices, Columbia University, New York, 2007

1.0 Environmental Concerns

Air Quality: While benign compared to other developing megacities, Mumbaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s air quality poses a significant and ongoing risk to the mainstay of its inhabitants. A noxious morass of vehicle exhaust, particulate matter and chemical aerosols1, blankets the city â&#x20AC;&#x201C; worsening in the warm, still months after the summer monsoons. The following data-points track the particulate measurements of three primary pollutants.

Page 9, Environmental Pollution Monitoring And Control, S. M. Khopkar

1.0 Environmental Concerns

Page 9, Environmental Pollution Monitoring And Control, S. M. Khopkar

400 mg/M3

120 mg/M3

SO2 – Sulphur Dioxide

SPM – Smokey Particulate Matter

Gradients shown at 10mg per cubic metre of air 10 mg/M3

Pollutant – primary source was the coal used in power generation and heavy industry. Declining as a major source of the cities pollution as manufacturing moves to the Navi-Mumbai or Thane complexes.

Gradients shown at 50mg per cubic metre of air

10 mg/M3

A primary pollutant – derived from the open cooking fires of the slums, the waste incinerators in the municipal tips and diesel fumes form the heavy lorries that service the port.

400 mg/M3

120 mg/M3

SO2 – Sulphur Dioxide

SPM – Smokey Particulate Matter

Gradients shown at 10mg per cubic metre of air 10 mg/M3

Gradients shown at 50mg per cubic metre of air

10 mg/M3

A primary pollutant – derived from the open cooking fires of the slums, the waste incinerators in the municipal tips and diesel fumes form the heavy lorries that service the port.

Zoning and Policy: The island city bears the scars of a fractured, haphazard development of jurisdictions. Ward designations like F-East and G-South indicate the subdivision of existing structures – a matter of expediency as population outstripped oversight. Concurrently, the informal nature of much settlement – figures suggesting that up to half of the cities population reside in slums1 – confounds structured approaches to administration. The following informational sets attempt to outline the dispersal of wealth and program throughout the island city. The measurement system for land prices is slightly confusing and appears to be adjusted for a square foot rate. Measurements should be taken as relative, not absolute, indicators of cost. Omitted, for interests of brevity, are the inter-governmental divisions within the Island City. The patchwork of responsibilities (and the glut of operating councils, the MMBW, the greater Mumbai city council, the Maharashtra government) go some way to explaining the accretive, rather than planned, processes of Mumbai’s growth.

70 mg/M3

NO2 – Nitrogen dioxide Gradients shown at 10mg per cubic metre of air 10 mg/M3

Profound pollutant – primary source is internal combustion engines. Peaks in intensity overlap with major transport corridors. 1

p ii, Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai, Vinit Mukhija

70 mg/M3

NO2 – Nitrogen dioxide Gradients shown at 10mg per cubic metre of air 10 mg/M3

Profound pollutant – primary source is internal combustion engines. Peaks in intensity overlap with major transport corridors. 1

p ii, Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai, Vinit Mukhija

Building + Planning Zones: While the boundary conditions appear to delimit growth, the harsh reality of Mumbaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban fabric lends lie to such aspersions. Within the largely unregulated expanse of Dharavi and other major slums, foundries and tanneries content for space with shanties and tall concrete towers. The compositional fabric of Mumbai is frantically heterogeneous.

Land Value â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Residential: 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 12.5 10 7.5 NA

The land values are approximate and do not take into consideration disputed territories such as slum or informal settlements. In any case, their net value is often far greater than their apparent poverty would suggest; it is this conflict between the allure of market forces and the dignity of housing and self determination that defines much of Mumbaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inner urban development.

Land Value â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Residential: 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 12.5 10 7.5 NA

55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 12.5 10 7.5 NA

700,000 600,000

Population â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Residents:

500,000 400,000 300,000

Mean population figures1. Numbers are shaded independently of the size of their parent ward.

200,000 100,000

1.http://www.karmayog.com/floods/ mumbai_l_ward_plan.htm

55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 12.5 10 7.5 NA

700,000 600,000

Population â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Residents:

500,000 400,000 300,000

Mean population figures1. Numbers are shaded independently of the size of their parent ward.

200,000 100,000

1.http://www.karmayog.com/floods/ mumbai_l_ward_plan.htm

Slum Dwellers: Figures are inexact but even the generalities are suggestive; more than half of Mumbai’s burgeoning population live in slum conditions – in towering tumbling tangles of tin and sheet metal and cardboard and mud-brick that occupy a scant six percent of the metropolitan landmass. The city is an embodied lesson in rank inequality; poverty alongside great wealth, deprived temporary settlements huddled in the shadow of real estate more expensive, more hyper-inflated, than that in Dubai. Of that six percent of occupied territory, over half rests on privately held land; on reclaimed earth, on vacant lots, in the tumbledown ruins of existing tenements. A further quarter excises the territories of local governments; the under-levels of highway overpasses, sportsgrounds, marketplaces, the liminal spaces between old buildings and the arterial trainlines that thread their burdened passage north. The remainder cluster on federal land, on the peripheral points of the ports; on the breakwaters and bunds and beaches of the Island-City. Beyond the settled slum-dwellers there are a further one million mumbaikers that lead an even more precarious existence – a transitory and temporary colonisation of streets and alleyways after the business of the day has been concluded. Sleeping rough in mobile settlements of cardboard and newspaper, nestled down in doorways and loading docks, these are the very literal ‘homeless’ of Mumbai, denied even the tenuous ownership of pilfered land. And then, above the slum and street-dwellers, there are the working poor who inhabit the rapidly decomposing, deliquescing ‘Chawls’ – vast low-rise towers originally built for the mill-workers – for the weavers of cotton, the dyers of cloth.

400,000

Population – Floating:

10,000 No Data

There is a particularly nebulous definition given for ‘floating’ populations in each ward. This designation covers transients (nearly one million mumbaikers sleep on the streets) and the additional presence of day-time workers, members of the service industry and their ilk.

The following data points detail the location of designated and apparent Slum regions. The data ignores non-slum poverty, like the chawls or the pocket towers of the slum reclamation – although such urban constructs were obviously integral enough to the fabric of the city to be remarked upon in maps from the 1900’s to the present.

400,000

Population – Floating:

10,000 No Data

Informal Settlements:

Designated Slums:

Data cribbed from recent aerial photos. Much of the slums visible fall outside of the rigid definition of slum/settlement; the great triangle of Dharahvi, marked here as a solid black mass, is a patchwork of slums in the official reading. The picture is further complicated by slum-reclamation projects, and the existence of hyper-urban enclaves of endemic poverty nestled in amongst the established fabric of Southern Mumbai.

Data taken from the Mumbai Development Plan â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these are the officially designated slum zones in the Island City. Note the sporadic bursts of discernable poverty that pockmark the southern periphery of the peninsula. Poverty within Mumbai is well distributed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this is not a stratified city, but a city of tacit ignorance, a space that functions purely by the blindsiding of obvious suffering.

Informal Settlements:

Designated Slums:

Flooding: Mumbai, as a web-city spun between extant islands – built on tenuous ground, infill between old granolithic islands; as a nest of interlocking tenements where sewerage and drainage are the exception, not the rule; where clusters of hyperdense slum-houses colonise the newly minted soil of the back-beach reclamation – is preternaturally susceptible to flooding. Much of its landmass sits at, or just above, the waterline1. The city’s sewerage network is a patchwork of disconnected catchments. The poor cluster on the edge of the ocean in settlements like Worli and Mahim – old villages now buried under slums and absorbed into the greater body of Mumbai – and are prodigiously susceptible to storm surges and seasonal high-tides. The volatile combination of these conditions came to the fore in 2005 when – over the space of day – torrential rains and an offshore anti-cyclone drowned the island-city in nearly a metre of standing water. The resulting chaos – landslides, subsidence, drownings, looting, and disease – killed 1,100 in the state of Maharashtra – 500 alone of whom perished in urban Mumbai 2. Mexico City has its upland smog inversion, Karachi its earthquakes. For the island city, its not-so-secret shame is flooding. The following information details specifics of this inherent and fundamental aspect of the Mumbai megalopolis – this catastrophic environmental Achilles heel.

2005 Mumbai Floods: Regions subject to inundation shaded in orange.

1 p. 3, MONOGRAPH ON FLOOD HAZARD IN URBAN AREA, New Delhi School of Architecture and Planning, 2005 2 Report on the Maharashtra Flood, 2005 – ActionAid International.

2005 Mumbai Floods: Regions subject to inundation shaded in orange.

1 p. 3, MONOGRAPH ON FLOOD HAZARD IN URBAN AREA, New Delhi School of Architecture and Planning, 2005 2 Report on the Maharashtra Flood, 2005 – ActionAid International.

Major Sewerage Lines:

Major Storm-water drains:

Sewer lines in the Island-City. Ironically, some of the most valuable real-estate in the metropolitan region â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Colaba Point and Backbay areas â&#x20AC;&#x201C; are under-served, or completely bereft of sewerage services.

Of the 100-odd storm water drains in the city, only three possess tidal barriers. In times of surge-tides or flooding the drains actually act as conduits for sea and floodwater.

Major Sewerage Lines:

Major Storm-water drains:

Of the 100-odd storm water drains in the city, only three possess tidal barriers. In times of surge-tides or flooding the drains actually act as conduits for sea and floodwater.

2.0

Growth of the Island City:

Temporal Concerns

Settlement prior to the Portuguese presence is disputed. The Maharashtra people claim a continued occupation of the territory and point to the existence of Banganga Tank as evidence of the persistent significance of the territory to the Maharashtra state, both politically and economically. Allegedly, the Tank and the attendant temple complex date back to the early middle ages; although there is no confirmed presence of the Marathi in the seven islands prior to the war against Portuguese interests in the late seventeenth century, and the present Tank post-dates the British claim on the region. What there is evidence of is the continued presence of Koli fishermen in the ancient villages of Worli, Mahim and Sewri. These people, inasmuch as it can be argued, are the original inhabitants of Mumbai – the population later displaced by mass migration, both from Maharashtra and further afield. Mumbai was a secondary concern to the Portuguese; who maintained more permanent bases in walled enclaves like Goa. It was only under the British that the fort and harbour were emplaced – the initial European town growing within the fort walls and a corresponding native town growing outside of them. While the walls are now long gone, a palimpsest memory of them is retained in the topography of old Mumbai, in the fountain district where a wide boulevard traces the old line of the ramparts; where the buildings are clustered and crowded together as if they still hunker down behind the protective castellation1. After the walls were torn down in the 1850s, the European and Native towns merged – in the region around back-bay, around the opera house, moving out and up to Malabar hill. Mumbai, almost alone among global megacities, is fundamentally constrained by its geography – there really is only one direction in which expansion can progress – northward – and this limitation creates incredible social and economic pressures on the urban tapestry. Plans to reclaim back-bay have existed since the 1800’s, and it is interest1 p 63, Making of global city regions : Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai / edited by Klaus Segbers

2.0

Growth of the Island City:

Temporal Concerns

ing to compare their earnest and optimistic predictions with the mute reality of what has come to pass. The northern limits of the city housed the industrial concerns – the mills and tanneries that pushed Mumbai from being a simple entreport to the Indian hinterland to a manufacturing giant in its own right. To the east of the fort the docks gradually crept northward, reclaiming land from the shallows of Thane Creek to build breakwaters and bunds. Piecemeal settlements grew at the northern periphery of the island – slums in all but name, clustering around the old fishing villages. The history of the city is one of inflation – of butting up against implacable boundaries, of hyper-densification in the southern extremities and gradual infill in the north. The following data-points, spaced at roughly thirty-year intervals, detail the growth of the city from a curtailed fort to a rapacious, miasmic urban force.

1840 The old fort and the native town, separated by a void that was, rather repugnantly, a ‘killing field’ an open area with clear lines of sight from the fort. Policy and racial attitude shaped, oftentimes very literally, the fabric of old Bombay.

1870

1890

While the native town was able to expand, the burden of the walls weighed on the European settlement â&#x20AC;&#x201C; massive density, in warehouses and stock-offices and merchants quarters hidden behind the high stone walls. Expansion was impossible while the walls persisted.

When the wall came down the fabric of the fort became absorbed into that of the city proper. Nevertheless the ghost of the construct remained â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a gradual syncline tracing the path of the old ramparts.

1870

1890

1910

1930

The city moves south into Colaba point, northward into the flat-land beyond Malabar hill. Racecourses and slums â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all the accoutrements of a burgeoning colonial city â&#x20AC;&#x201C; begin to appear.

The vibrant mill communities of Parel and Worli are thriving â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the origins of Dharahvi are emerging, as settlements grow in the shadow of the coal-smoke belching Tata power plant.

1910

1930

The vibrant mill communities of Parel and Worli are thriving â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the origins of Dharahvi are emerging, as settlements grow in the shadow of the coal-smoke belching Tata power plant.

1960

2006

Methods of expansion in the island are being steadily exhausted. On the mudflats to the east salt-pans are being replaced by manufactories and housing ‘colonies’ and, despite all efforts to counter them, by opportunistic squatters and slumdogs.

The island is almost entirely urbanised – scant patches of unused land remain in the mangrove flats to the east, but even the half-completed backbay reclamation has been overrun by the detritus of a newborn slum and the incongruous massing of the city’s primary embassies.

1960

2006

Bombay Landgrab – the evolution of the island-city: On one level it seems disingenuous to examine growth of the urban fabric and the growth of the substrate that supports it as two independent variables. The two are coterminous and inextricably linked – the latter driven by the insatiable appetites of the former. Yet there are enough disjunctions – disconnections in intent – to regard them, if not as distinct concerns, then as divergent siblings – sharing a familial history but tracing increasingly oppositional paths. The history of Bombay/Mumbai/The Island City is one of human hands pitted against implacable natural forces. The original landscape consisted of seven separate granolithic islands, rising in humps and hillocks from the low mudlflats and mangrove tangles of Thane creek. Some were sizable and supported fishing villages – some, like Colaba or Old Woman Island, were little more than rocks or sand-spits; barely cresting the high tide. A series of civil engineering projects – foremost among them the Hornby Vellard, which bankrupted the fledgling colony even as it dammed the tidal estuary between Mahim and Bombay islands – gradually joined the seven isles and islets into one continuous mass. When the fens and marshlands were drained, when the last piece of extant land was cemented, attentions turned to the shallow Back Bay – planning to excise new lands from Malabar hill right round to Colaba point. Only some of these plans have been carried to fruition. The mainstay of the reclamation has actually occurred in the mangrove flats to the east of the island – to the flat-land of salt pans and estuarine marshes – and, in typical Mumbaiker fashion, the denizens are not the intended apartment dwellers, but opportunistic slumdogs. The following data-points detail the expansion of the cities landmass, between the time of the seven islands to the present day.

18th Century The seven islands of bombay.

1840

1870

1840

1870

1890

1910

1890

1910

1930

1960

1930

1960

Parks: Mumbai’s urban fabric is conspicuously lacking in open and accessible public spaces. The following data points delimit regions that could be loosely described as parks or gardens in the western sense – indeed, the mainstay are formed from colonial era and Victorian gardens – and neglect other open elements, such as markets. Also absent are the incredibly evocative regions like ‘Mahim wood,’ a forested zone in the north of the island that vanished in the late 19th century. Tellingly, land-use maps from the early 19th century show much of the islands as primarily agricultural – with vast tracts of oil-palm plantations, and a heavily wooded region running from Worli to Mahim. The history of the city is one of rampant colonisation – encroachment, the hungry overtaking of any and all available land. Only cemeteries and marketplaces seem inviolate – able to resist onrushing tide of urbanisation.

2000

1890

1910

1890

1910

1930

1960

1930

1960

Tanks: Mumbai’s supply of water has always been precarious. Until the mid-twentieth century, much of its municipal water supply was drawn from great sunken cisterns – replenished each year by the monsoon rains – and known colloquially as tanks. While many of them have vanished, they remain as linguistic palimpsests; there are a plethora of ‘Old Tank’ roads in the island city. Moreover, as some of the few existent open spaces in the tumultuous morass of the city, after their decommissioning they were often pressed into service as public parks or ‘maidans.’ The following data points chart the growth of Tanks between 1850 and the present-day. Even as isolated elements of data, patterns are evident; there is the persistent dot of a tank on Malabar point – the religiously charged ‘Banganga Tank’ – a prosaic infrastructural element that has metamorphosed into a religious symbol and a semi-mythic image of Maratha suzerainty over the islands.

2000

The existence of the tank – apparently a Hindi worship site since the mid thirteenth century – is taken as evidence of the pre-settlement significance of the site to the regional Marathi people; a claim that angers the endemic Koli settlers who formed the mainstay of the islands population until the arrival of the British. (Indeed, it is from Koli that the noxious racial epithet ‘Coolie’ is derived.)

2000

1870

1890

1870

1890

1910

1930

1910

1930

1960

2000

1960

2000

Trains + Transport Linkages: Mumbai is defined by its trains 1. Despite infrastructural works like the Worli-Bandra sea link, and the growth of highway and freeway overpasses in the city’s distended suburban hinterland, the trainlines remain the arteries of the Island City. The following data-points show the growth of transport corridors and infrastructure, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Fascinatingly, these points show one of the few recidivist tendencies in the Island City – the Churchgate line, which, at one point, stretched nearly to Colaba point, was dismantled in the early nineteen-thirties. Moreover, there is tentative evidence to suggest that – for at least tow or three years in the 1880’s – a trainline ran on trestles, or on an earth embankment, over the mud-flats of Back Bay. While this is not incontrovertible, the lack of any corroborating material other than a map from German guide book casts aspersions onto an otherwise audacious image. A trainline running south over back-bay presents an incredibly seductive image. On trestles, or on a rock/earth berm, the line would have blocked off the shallows of Chawpatti beach rendering the Nepean Sea Drive stagnant. Perhaps this is reason enough to dismiss it as fanciful; yet the image remains.

1870

1 Three quarters of trips are taken on partially subsidised public transport – p 4, Public Transport Subsidies and Affordability in India, Maureen Cropper, World Bank, 2007

1870

1 Three quarters of trips are taken on partially subsidised public transport – p 4, Public Transport Subsidies and Affordability in India, Maureen Cropper, World Bank, 2007

1890

1910

1890

1910

1930

1960

1930

1960

2000

3.0

Emergence

Patterns of Emergence in the superimposition and manipulation of these provided data-sets.

3.0

Emergence

Patterns of Emergence in the superimposition and manipulation of these provided data-sets.

Land: A superimposition of historical land reclamation.

Caution – Regions subject to inundation: [Overleaf] A comparison of the topographies and the regions prone to flooding – unsurprisingly, it is the former fen-and-marshland – primarily the great lozenge that stretches from the vellard to Mahim Creek – that is so susceptible to storm-tides and floods.

Land: A superimposition of historical land reclamation.

The evolution of slums: In a city like Mumbai, one is struck by the essential dichotomy of the slum; slum-dwellers are at once the most entrenched, and most liminal, of its urban population. Their dwellings exist at the heart and at the edge but have precious little of a presence in between. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the conflicting mechanisms of slum growth; the established entrenchment and expansion of existing low-income infrastructure contrasts with the emergent processes of co-option and colonisation of fallow land. A third process, the temporary occupation of thoroughfares and transport corridors – a situation that accounts for nearly one million of Mumbai’s residents 1- exists as a complementary adjunct to these primary mechanisms, but its antecedents – rooted in itinerant populations, caste disparities, and entrenched poverty – are ancient and predate the former. Watching the growth of the city – from its pre-infancy as a fortified port amidst malarial swamps to the existing para-modern metropolis – it is clear that Mumbai’s slums evolved from two counterpoising points; established rural or fishing villages or new opportunistic claims on the undeveloped fringes. The former is characterised by regions like Worli and Mahim, on the island’s north coast, where existing fishing villages – some with buildings predating the British settlement2 – were incorporated into modern slums. The latter is characterised by the new slums that occupied the old salt-pans to the west of the old city – slums fed by great migrant populations that tumbled into being in the seventies and the eighties as a result of economic liberalisation and fundamental shifts in rural economies. Meanwhile, mega-slums like Dharahvi exist as uneasy conglomerations of both; a mixture of the old village architectonic, with its temples and maidans, and the newer forms of corrugated iron shanties and the tall concrete towers of the slum-reclamation projects. On a more general level one is struck by the gradual dissolution of the city fabric as it meanders north – the core of commerce collapsing into a thousand feuding fiefdoms of articulated poverty and wealth as the historiographic mass of the city expands out into the salt-pans and mud-flats. 1 2 out/

167, The making of global city regions http://www.airoots.org/2009/01/incremental-development-i-preserving-street-lay-

In the firing line: One of the revelations that emerges from the superimposition of temporal schedules of Bombay and Mumbai is the discovery that old Mumbai evolved as twinned cities; the defensive posture of the fort-town and the open ‘heteropolis’ of the native city. Discussions of racial polity aside 1, the division is marked by a broad swathe of land – an open space between the walls of the fort and the native settlement 2. This was a defensive esplanade – a clear area open to the firing lines of the massed ranks of cannon and musketry. The boundary persists into the present day; a palimpsest reminder of, if not a factual divide, then a mutually understood disjunct between European and Native populations.

The empty land between the fort and the native town was kept clear to allow for a defensive firing perimeter. In these two contemporary photographs – taken just before the demolition of the fort – the distinction between the two settlements is readily apparent.

Slums + Urban Fabric Current slum zones shown in red, plotted over urban fabric - where darkness denotes age. Slums tend to cluster around emergent areas of the island city, and are notably absent from the old core. The irony is that Colaba point and Malabar hill, the wealthiest points in South Asia, sport slums due to their relentless land-reclamation efforts.

1 Which may prove disingenuous. Govind Narayan notes, in his contemporary history of 19th century Bombay, that ‘If the area is clean and the air good they [the British] take up residency in any place.’ However, the native town was striated and patterned into ethnic divisions – Parsis, Muslim communities, Guyjuratis. There was also a significant Indian population within the fort, at least until the disastrous fires of 1830. The creation of the native town was a result of population pressure, not overt racism, and Bombay always existed as one of the few syncretic cultural entreports in the subcontinent. 2 P 43, Three Colonial Port Cities in India, by Meera Kosambi and John E. Brush, Geographical Review

Land + City: A superimposition of city-fabric and the substrata that supports it – darkness denotes intensity and the lingering passage of history.

Girgaum Chaupati, from 1850 to today. Mumbai’s developement is characterised by intense and voracious expansion - a directed process constrained by natural boundaries. Bombay behaves like a Hong-Kong, or a Manhatten - rather than a Melbourne, Dallas or Dehli sprawl.

Extent of the ‘Killing Field’

Land + City: A superimposition of city-fabric and the substrata that supports it – darkness denotes intensity and the lingering passage of history.

Extent of the ‘Killing Field’

Flooded value: The superimposition of land values and catchments regions prone to flooding exposes an intuitive truth – it is the poor that bear the brunt of the periodic inundations. The reasons for this are two-fold; primarily, the wealthy have congregated along the few points of high ground in the manufactured island – secondarily, the slumregions are notoriously under-serviced. This is a confirmation of a normative pattern in most Indian metropolises; the rich clustering along the hillside, the poor in the flood-plains and mudflats. Ironically, as the pioneering work of Himanshu Parikh 1suggests, the organic nature of these impoverished regions, and their intuitive reaction to natural topographies, actually makes them better suited to the retrofitting of new sewer lines and roads than the apparently wealthier hill-side suburbs.

See ‘Slum Networking’ in section 0.0

Polluted value: Similarly, the comparison of S02 particulate matter and land values – indicated here by increasing opaqueness, with black being the most expensive of regions – exposes, again, distinctive patterns of wealth and capital. The rich are fringe dwellers – pinioned to the edge of the island, in the enclaves of Malabar hill and Colaba point. The geographic heart of the city is blanketed by clouds that are at least ten times as dense as those on the periphery. The divide between these two Mumbais – between the rich and the poor – is as marked and palpable as the old colonial esplanade that divided the European and Native towns.

Concluding Remarks: Mumbai is an illusory city. The urban practices that define western metropolises, and the didactic processes that define the urban conglomerations of the Tiger economies, are palpably absent. It is a city built on mud – reclaimed from the sea. It is a city marked by violence – quite literally, with a great wedge driven between the old fort district and the remainder of the city. It is a city that faces outwards, jealous of space – where, out of sheer necessity the desperately poor co-habit with the staggeringly rich. It is hoped that this document presents some indication of the staggering complexity of Mumbai – which is less an architectural edifice demanding classification or observation as it is a schizoid mess, teeming antheap of activity and humanity that would devour any egoist mad enough to attempt such a survey. With that said, a companion work approaching the city from the perspective of the street is also in the process of compilation – pending on-the-ground research, photography and surveying.

Remarks on the content: The mainstay of this work has been self-derived otherwise arcane resources. A primary concern was the conversion of this data into a more tangible, machine editable format. The contents of this booklet and the supporting AutoCAD files and an extensive bibliography are contained on the enclosed CD-ROM. A survey of possible future investigations is also included, in the hope that others may find this work useful and be able to expand upon the – admittedly – inconsistent data-scapes.

Remarks on RMIT’s polarities: Advanced Architecture There is a tendency to think of advanced and emergent architecture as the architecture of ‘blobs.’ This rests in part with the aesthetic and formal languages of its dominant practitioners; the SIAL

laboratory, around which the AA pole has coalesced. In truth, the AA pole is as much an enabler of other polarities as it is an independent design approach. At its heart is a voracious, hyper-consumptive appetite for information – for raw numbers to force into parametric models, for data-points to explain novel and unforseen elements of the urban fabric. These models form, and inform, the basis and bases of other architectural investigations. Before embarking upon urban, ethical, spatial, oneiric or experiential, it was deemed prudent to develop an overarching model of the city – a meta-state that might better illuminate these closer investigations. My response to the rubric of Advanced Architecture was to collect, collate and catalogue all available information – socio-economic, meteorological, haptic, geographic – and feed it into a cogent model of the city. The following pages outline the data-points collected, and are followed by a series of interrogative mapping exercises, which leverage the crossreferenced data to explicate some glaring disparities in the urban fabric of Mumbai. At heart, I see the efforts of Advanced Architecture as being the creation of various models or software ‘toys’ that might better explicate complex and emergent systems. Expanded Field: Xfield deals with ephemera – both in terms of metrics and mechanisms. If advanced architecture is centred on the collation of datasets, then expanded field revolves around the appreciation of the ‘sense’ of a space, the history of a space. Architecture in the expanded field is phenomenological – a very real manifestation of the much trafficked ‘poetics of space.’ Moreover, it is an ‘expanded field’ in a very literal sense – drawing in practitioners from associated disciplines; artists and sculptors and landscape workers. Unfortunately, much of the information that might segue into the expanded field drawing set has already been covered by the data-model – issues such as the persistence of poverty as a result of geographical influences, the palimpsests of water reservoirs preserved as tanks and other lingering temporal exigencies.