A Conversation With: Urban Planner Rahul Mehrotra Rahul Mehrotra is an architect, urban planner, historian, conservationist and academic who recently authored "Architecture in India Since 1990." He is professor and chairman at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and has an architectural practice in Mumbai and Boston. In a recent interview with India Ink, he discussed the rise of "parasitic" gated communities in India's cities, and the need for planning experts in its smaller towns. How would you characterize the changing face of urbanism in India? What are some of the most pressing problems plaguing Indian cities today? I think the biggest challenge for emerging India is going to be twofold: At the micro level our biggest concern is going to be that of the immense polarization that is occurring in our built environment. The between what we call slums or the informal city and large-scale infrastructure and global architecture is going to set up enormous social tensions in our society. Global capital is landing in our cities and bullying its way physically to create a presence and a polarization which will be hard to reverse and resolve as we go on unless we address this issue very quickly. What results from that polarization are conditions like gated communities, whether they are vertical gated communities or communities at the edge of the city. Because gated communities usually have their own water supply, sewage disposition, they are actually parasitic on the city because they don't give to the city. They exclude the city but engage with the city on their own terms, and so it's not a two way kind of exchange. At the macro level what is happening is very interesting because while the intelligentsia and the elite are focusing on the seven or eight big cities, the real urban time bomb are the 392 towns that make up the larger landscape of India. These 392 towns currently contain approximately 50,000 people each and are projected to grow up to 100,000 people that in 20 years might even be a million people. So potentially between 250 and 400 million urban Indians will live in towns that are not even on radars currently. Now what's interesting about this landscape is that the levels of contestation in these places are not so charged, which means that the possibility for planners and governments to intervene yet exists and is not as complicated as it is in the megacities. Architects and urban planners often say that this middle landscape, of 392 towns across India, is being turned into cookie-cutter replications of foreign models. I don't think they are being developed or planned. I don't think they have development plans or master plans or any strategy about where they should go. What is happening is that growth is laissez faire and disconnected from place. Developers replicate global paradigms as they intervene in these places and this gives you the impression that these are cookie-cutter patterns - like China. The truth is that they are not being planned. What is even more interesting is that as we put in infrastructure (the golden quadrilateral highways, airports in all sorts of new places and improving our railway infrastructure) - these small towns will start exploding in a pattern that we have not anticipated. You argue that democracy expresses itself in a varied landscape. What, according to you, are the dangers of flattening cities so that they all look alike? I think both the architecture and urban landscape of India has to necessarily be one of pluralism because India is a multiethnic, multicultural landscape and I think architecture and cities are the physical expression of those aspirations. I don't think we can go the China way, where everything is made in a singular image; in the mutinous democracy of India that's going to be impossible. Increasingly in India, enclaves of unique architecture such as Delhi's Khirkee village, or Khotachiwadi, in Mumbai are being encroached upon and damaged by growing development. How can we create a plausible conservation strategy? When we worked on trying to get the historic Fort Area of Mumbai declared a conservation zone in 1995, it was the first legislation of its kind in India. And together with the Historic core of Mumbai, 13 or 14 other sub-precincts like Khotachiwadi, Bandra village, etc., also got designated as precincts. For me that effort had two aspects to it. One was the dimension that everyone seems to understand and respond to - which is nostalgia, the heritage value, the memory of a city, which is very, very important. But my personal agenda there was much beyond that - it had to do more with how do you shift the planning debate to area-wise planning and away from the blanket planning attitudes that have engulfed the decision-making process in our cities. For the sake of the future of our cities and for safeguarding the kind of pluralism that exists (whether it is for reasons of historicity or particular topographical or geographical concerns), we need to nuance our planning by having different approaches for different parts of the urban landscape. And then, of course, mobility, sewage, water supply, and infrastructure in the broadest sense becomes the thread that binds it all together as a functioning whole. Why hasn't there been a concerted effort toward conservation of India's urban architecture yet? It hasn't happened as yet because I believe we have not emphasized the importance of data adequately.We have not had the data to work with, there have not been very accurate maps. There was corruption that led to fiddling with revenue plans, and all sorts of documents were manipulated to undermine this effort. What are some structures you feel are emblematic in Mumbai? For me personally, the two most important design moves are the sweep of Marine Drive - that entire stretch of the Maidans, the art deco buildings - and the other thing that is really emblematic aspect of the city is Dharavi. Even today when the Indian cricket team wins and comes home its Marine Drive where the celebratory processions are held and on a daily basis a large part of the population of south Mumbai comes there to recreate and decompress. And then for me Dharavi is emblematic of another kind of aspiration of the city for the poor. It's a place that's highly productive, in comparison to the quality of life that it offers people who live there. But its also emblematic of the real inequities that exist in our cities and that people have to create home for themselves without having their basic needs fulfilled, and a total failure on the part of the government to provide them housing. Speaking of Dharavi, what do you think will be the affect of the growing presence of both vast informal settlements on one hand, and gated communities that minimize the well-heeled citizen's interaction with the city? I use the word "involution" to describe what's happening in Mumbai, it's a term I borrow from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who wrote about agricultural involution in Indonesia. Involution is about creating an internal complexity that makes any mechanism highly efficient but also highly susceptible to malfunction. Whereas an evolutionary gesture is how species evolve to be able to broaden and make more robust their ecology. I think in Mumbai in the 1950s, "60s and "70s with ideas for New Bombay and new metropolitan imaginations was all about evolutionary gestures. But today in Mumbai we celebrate involutionary gestures - how we fix sidewalks and upgrade slums. It's not that these gestures are not important, but what is crucial is that we simultaneously address both ends of the spectrum - that is, celebrate internal complexity but as also diversify into more dynamic modes. So I think Mumbai is at a point where it really has to make a decision because if it keeps becoming more internally complex it will just completely fail. And so for me, the most crucial questions at this moment are how we can begin to engage with our metropolitan region again: think of how we can create self-sufficient neighborhoods, facilitate public transportation, how we can open up land for more affordable housing. We often hear of a desire to shape cities in India in the mold of Dubai and Shanghai, ideals of modernity. How can we balance these aspirations with our actual reality? Should we be looking elsewhere for inspiration? I think the real question for us is what is the appropriate city for our society, our economy, for the kind of inequality that exists. Looking at Dubai or Shanghai or Singapore as metaphors not only undermines the fact that we're a democracy but it also undermines the fact that the poor even exist in our cities. I think we can look at a lot of South American cities such as Curitiba [Brazil] where mobility and transportation has been used to kind of subsidize the poor and therefore create another kind of form of city.