In Full Bloom
The Grand Trunk road, stretching over 2,500km from the mouth of the Ganges, to Kabul, in Afghanistan, is one of Asia’s oldest and longest roads. A wide succession of rulers have added, modified, and upgraded its ancient infrastructure, progressively building on each other’s efforts, to make it more usable and safer for the vast community of travellers using it over the centuries. The choice of trees planted along the Grand Trunk Road is interesting – the overwhelming ma jority are banyans, a tree with massive shady foliage and farreaching life, with some trees clocking over 500 years.
Mulberry and other broad-leafed trees were planted along the hotter stretches, to provide a cooling canopy, and tamarind trees were planted near the caravan-serais so travellers could refresh themselves with the juice of its fruit. The far-reaching vision of the rulers, who selected these over the other quick flowering, quicker dying, purely decorative varieties, which inhabit our cities today, is laudable. To plant a tree that would outlive the context in which it’s in, is an act of great humility and forward thinking, one that we seem to be desperately lack in creating myopic 5-year plans for our cities.
Imagine a 500-year plan for Bombay, and what that might look like. Imagine, for a moment, a city where each structure is some form of garden. Watchmen are also gardeners. There is a bustling building harvest, where the fruits of the intensely planned terrace gardens are equally distributed, and societies have access to fresh produce, farmed right above them. Herbs are pesticide-free, and controlled from source. Children have active growing environments to engage with, not meaningless manicured golf courses. Skywalks are elevated gardens, mass transit systems grow local herbs on their rooftops, that are sold at a discount at stations.
Bombay is one of the densest cities in the world, with over 20 million people crushed into its confines. Given massive space crunches of this kind, it’s almost impossible to imagine large gardens or parks dotting the city. The future of the city lies in reimagining a host of interventions, ranging from sustainable city gardening initiatives, to new forms of green dissent on streets like guerilla gardening.
Rooftop gardens,and communal vegetable patches are already populating our city, creating tiny pockets of resistance and beauty in an otherwise bleak concrete-and-glass canvas. This is a trend that will eventually play out at a city level, with progressively minded governments backing community projects, even subsidizing and providing institutionally backed frameworks for setting these up. Potentially vegetable and fruits are fresher, and available at a much-discounted price, the gardeners themselves define what can and must grow, and how to make best use of the produce. Surplus is sometimes even sold, to fund the next round of plantation. Shaan Lalwani, principal at the Vriksha Nursery, is an active participant in this scenario. “We at Vriksha have seen a steady rise in people wanting to set up small urban edible green spaces; In their home windows balconies and terraces or any other open space they can get their hands on. We have young homeowners flooding their balconies with all kinds of herbs and vegetables, even active societies and ALMs who have taken up to growing food on rooftops and adjoining spaces and then distributing the produce among its members.�
Some of the most forward looking governments in the world are partnering with local design agencies, and architectural practices to develop park-bridges, open spaces that synergise with transport systems, such as Heatherwick studio’s fantastic Garden bridge proposal that spans the Thames in London, in an effort to create more pedestrian linkages across the river. Closer to home, the Mumbai Port Trust’s central kitchen is a beautiful example of this symbiosis. The kitchen situated at the Victoria docks caters to over 2000 employees, and generates almost 20kgs of kitchen waste daily. In a remarkably progressive step, the employees set up a 3000 sq.ft garden on their kitchen terrace, starting with 2 saplings in 2002, the terrace now houses more than 150 varieties of flowers, fruits, ornamental, herbal and medicinal plants.
At the diametric other end of these initiatives, one finds the activist Art track, the active zone of rebellion and activism. Guerrilla gardening movements are finding momentum across the urban landscape, where disused plots are being repurposed to create accidental gardens, thereby adding new functionality to otherwise ignored areas. Seed bombs are the weapon of choice of urban green warriors, where a small time-bomb of mulch, fertilizer and wild-flower seeds thrown onto small promising patches of earth, suddenly erupt into surprising patches of colour on sidewalks – even under sewage grates and gutters. New-age street art materials include Moss Art, where a mix of curd and moss is used on old walls to create living content, a weird new symbiosis where living things fuel creative output. We're seeing this erupt in the West, and just start to take root locally, in more socially conscious artists.
What we're witnessing is the birth of a new civil war of the best kind, where the green stages a comeback against the inhospitable forces of the toxic city environment. Both sides are hiring aggressively, training vigorously and consolidating their forces .
Choose your weapon of choice.