The Minimum Minimum City. City. The
What does it take to fit something the length of an average adult Great white shark into something about one-tenth the thickness of a human hair?
Anyone who’s struggled with a laptop charger knot would imagine; a lot of care. Yet, our beloved doublehelical strand of DNA effortlessly folds and compresses itself into this very size, into the nucleus of our cells. Staggeringly enough, if the entire DNA in our over 100 trillion cells are unwrapped and laid end to end, a string is created that could reach the moon no fewer than 6000 times. Mind boggling statistics of this kind exist in almost every organ, be it in the intense folding of the brain, the massive corrugations of the intestines or the inconceivable branching of our system of blood vessels.
Somehow, overall it seems like our bodies contains organs and systems of fantastical sizes, all packed into unbelievably efficient formats within a humble shell, that somehow also work incredibly well. What came first? The impossibly long stretches or the infinitesimally minute sizes? The miles of neural highways or the need for memory?
What could be equally true, is this 'predisposition' to compaction came first, and life followed this principle; slowly achieving its myriad variety of forms. A culture of compaction defines our existence, where impossibly large lengths, areas and volumes are miraculously accommodated into impossibly small spaces.
The culture of compaction is endemic, and the city is its manifestation.
It’s interesting to look at this on a larger scale. If we believe the tendency to compact is implicit in the way we organize ourselves,it makes our Cities the obvious mode of expression. The evolution of Bombay, from a string of disjointed islands, to the infinitely complicated, corrugated beast that exists today is a perfect example of this principle at play.
It may seem fairly obvious to the casual onlooker that the City generates compaction, by it’s limited confines, by the millions of people jammed together, by it’s clogged roads and processes. If the city phenomenon has emerged spontaneously from a predisposition to compact itself, one can understand many things in this light. We're surrounded by compressions and rarefactions, the mass public living rooms ( or bedrooms ) of the Maidans and Promenades, the larger-than-life skyscrapers that are ill-adapted microcosms of the city itself. The city is a womb, stretching and accommodating the almost grotesquely crammed foetus within it, stretching, folding and reaching its breaking limit, but almost never yielding. There’s always a little more space, a little more wiggle room till the end birthing moment where it all slides out.
All this struggling and squeezing is the genesis of our city experience, a common lament, that collective sigh that defines our non-conscious environment.
A few years ago, when the urge to live right next door to work, and grab that extra half hour of sleep hit, I started to look for places in Ranwar Village, the tiny hamlet in Bandra where we were lucky to score a studio. The only place available was a 160 sq.ft room, previously rented out to two students, whose two mattresses had filled up the room. I took it up without thinking too much, since it had a fantastic tiny staircase leading up to a small roof that overlooked Ranwar, the perfect Chai and smoke spot. It was only when I started packing up my stuff that the panic set in.
And then, as most magically happens when beyond desperation, inspiration struck. I proceeded to make a wish list, a king-sized bed, a living room set-up, a walk-in wardrobe, a study, an entertainment area, and of course, a walk-in library. Somehow magically, (with the help of a few hardware manuals, and some detailed design) a small shape-shifting apartment emerged, with sliding walls,and miraculously enough space for all the junk that one accumulates in 28 years of meaningless hoarding.
The apartment had somehow expanded, in a timeshare way, to accommodate all the trappings of a full-fledged home.
Eventually, places take on the energies people bring to them.
The Ka’aba becomes holier with each pilgrimage; Gods become more powerful with each prayer; Film stars become more adored with every imitation haircut. Our common fears, adorations and worships shape the universe and our interactions with it, and the city experience is no different.
Compaction culture fundamentally changes the way we behave as citizens. In a city like Bombay, where space to live is a resource like any other, to be maximised and used preciously, sensible directions come from exploding the potential of tiny spaces, much like the loft apartments in New York, or the folding and sliding gizmos populating Tokyo apartments. Across the world, hyper-designed environments are creating responsive and multi-functional formats for living, where studio apartments double up, walls slide, beds fold, and a lavish lifestyle aspiration co-exists with an even bigger space crunch. The camaraderie that exists on the street is symptomatic of a culture of compaction, where the closely drawn personal boundaries foster a sense of interdependence. The city offers up the large living room, where everyone can have a whiff of fresh air and a cool breeze, before retiring into their tiny living quarters. One cannot exist without the other.
When cities force people into tiny spaces desperation and a little imagination allow us to expand into tiny vacuums, and create fun, even magic experiences.
Compaction tends to create new hierarchies. Locality becomes more important that lavishness. The connected few choose to live in tiny spaces in the city center, rather than facing long commutes and endless traffic-lines. Lavishness of space tends to become meaningless, looked upon as obscene. The large, double volumed apartments we’re all nostalgic for are replaced by new, harder working formats, where time of day will increasingly define what your home looks like. Everything is scrutinised, everything is functional.
There is a certain air of hyper utility that is spawned off the smart-phone using, minimally minded aesthetes, that makes the large-scale waste of space as criminal an offence as the large-scale waste of water or food. Further corrugations of apartments allow each unit to become more responsive, more connected, and more part of the larger city organism. What we can learn from the organic systems that follow this principle is the beauty of optimisation, of fluid and well worked out services backbones that birth this new symbiosis.
Welcome to the Minimum City.