The Reusable City
Saint Jude: The patron saint of desperate cases, and lost causes. When all other avenues are closed, he is the one to call to and his help often appears at the last moment. A Fitting Metaphor.
We increasingly personify our cities as hectic commuters, as being ahead of a curve, frantic and buzzing and always insanely in flux. Where pockets of resistance appear, they are patted down as being idyllic. In repose. Even static. The big-moneyed elders look condescendingly down on spaces that prefer walking, or say Hello to each other in the early mornings. Our markets, lives and workplaces are getting increasingly more hectic, and the rush is head-felt. What gets lost in all the manicness are processes that require ritual, iteration and a slower plodding approach.
Some things thrive on the mad speed, some die.
A short while ago, a close friend purchased what seemed like a most unlikely site for a home. The dilapidated and long-shuttered Jude Bakery in Bandra. A project of this kind throws up a hundred arguments, all valid, all divergent, and all subjective. Jude Bakery sits smack in the middle of the idyllic Ranwar village, one of the few pockets of its kind in Bandra. Its location makes it an iconic landmark, at the edge of the village. Its solid presence has always hinted to the best of Bandra’s past. Whenever we worked late in the Studio and were walking home at some ungodly hour, fresh bread from the bakery scented the streets with an unforgettable fragrance. The Jude Bakery is symbolic of a type of space that exists throughout the city, a left-over space, an unprogrammed space, a space that forces you to imagine an alternate reality because it’s current form offers no direct clues.
We’ve all seen at least one site like this in our immediate surroundings. A narrow corridor between two buildings. A dilapidated street island. A small overgrown lot besides a restaurant. An empty oil refinery. An old Textile Mill. The next step in the city’s evolution lies hidden in these spaces. Vestigial spaces are the spillover from programmed entities. These spaces by definition are ambiguous, and take on various functions depending on time of day, who’s using them, and how many people have a claim to them. Agna square in Ranwar is hemmed in by short homes, and is a tiny leftover space in the heart of Ranwar village. It becomes, in turn, a tiny chapel to say the Rosary, a Volleyball court, a rain dance floor, a space to dry chilies and masalas, an evening carom tournament location, village wedding after-party space and a multi-headed venue for really any public outpouring of emotion.
The great success of these spaces is that they are never lonely. They are always energised and activated by a constant stream of people. Our promenades are another great example. There have been so many nights where I’ve been drawn to the water’s edge, and then realised that most of the city has heard the same call. Behind the simplest façades lies a powerful polyvalence. Ambiguity lies at the heart of survival. By refusing to be any one space, these become all spaces and more.
A Great way to imagine this is a fast paced time-lapse view of the city. Imagine for a minute, that you’re observing Bombay in motion. Vast landscapes sweep by, buildings crop up and down and vast crowds center around small pockets of the vista. The city throbs like a living thing, it’s massive arterial roads and train lines pulsing with movement. As you focus on one area of this vast canvas, you start noticing smaller details. A tiny area in centralBombay remains static for a brief moment in time, a small blip on an otherwise speedy canvas. In your loving gaze this Gasp is a most beautiful moment.
This brief moment the built form transits drastically changes it’s perceptions with many decade-long assumptions about the building’s purposes and future changing in an instant. We strongly believe the city’s form is shaped by a vast multitude of these evolutionary blips. Our thoughts and efforts need to be increasingly towards extending the length of these gasps. It allows time for a new kind of person to inhabit a structure, aspire, dream, and allow those aspirations to shape his city-view. When clandestine deals are made behind closed doors, the entire city suffers. Myopic perspectives and rushed corrupt deals work to close these life-giving gasps before public access comes in. This is the reason for all the blandness around, a city experience entirely not of our choosing. A knee jerk developer response is to flatten these sites out, and create blank canvases from which new structures can be developed. This attitude results in large soulless urban sprawls, where nothing of the past, and the worst of the present is reflected in a generic and wholly unappealing vision of the future of cities.
Adaptive reuse, the re-programming of spaces to suit new functions becomes a much more valid inquiry. How does an old Textile mill retain its memory but still become relevant to a modern buzzing Metropolis? How can an old unused Oil refinery become accessible to the public today? What potential does a promenade hold as an art gallery? The Bankside Power station, on the south bank of the Thames, shuttered in 1981 is now the proud home to Britain’s National collection of International Modern Art, and receives 4.7 Million visitors a year. It was at risk of demolition for many years, and developers had already smashed large parts of its structure when an impassioned plea for help saved it from almost certain doom.
Saint Jude hear our prayers.
The biggest step forward seems almost a step backward at first look. The gasps we speak about are all around, in and around our homes. Every disused wall is a canvas, every skywalk a garden, every old building a public Art gallery. We need to give ourselves the time and space to breathe through the brief gasps the mad mad city gives us.