Rahul Mehrotra: ‘Every emperor made a New Delhi’

I believe the world is in a period of extreme transitions, triggered by the inequities caused by hyper-globalisation as well as climate change and the way it affects people’s daily lives. This state of flux is obvious in the changing rhythms of nature, its impact on human settlements as well as the political climate that surrounds us globally. Design and planning have crucial roles to play in using this condition of flux to create solutions to endemic inequalities. What are the spatial implications and new formations of the urban in light of the disruption that climate change has and could cause? How do we design for these transitions?

Why are transitions important in design?

In our culture of urban design and planning, we think in terms of ‘absolute’ solutions. For instance, our solution for India’s housing shortage is to quickly build pre-fab units on affordable land at the edge of the city. But nobody ever goes to live there – witness the number of empty high-rise apartments on the peripheries of our large cities. Designing for transitions would mean a completely different design solution. For housing, we should create the conditions where infrastructure can provide the context for people to build. We can’t leap from point A to point Z without thinking of how to get there or how we make that transition. Often, designing for transitions takes us in an unexpected direction and is messy and may not result in cohesive architectonic images. But that’s the only way we will achieve our real goals and not be caught in the illusions of having solved the problem.

Tourists mill at Rajghat on the first day of new year. Express Photo by Tashi Tobgyal

What are architects missing today?

Architects have two choices: to stay with the one per cent and carry on with what I call the ‘architecture of indulgence’, largely centred in and on the peripheries of the large Indian cities or go out and broaden their view of where the problems in the country reside. In India, we have 7,500 places that are considered urban, but nearly 25,000 places that are ‘becoming urban’. These are transitioning settlements, where architects can play a role because there is no capacity in these places to advocate for infrastructure or planning. And, here, young architects will find new forms of patronage which will be important for their futures. So, if architects want to have transformative practices, it should be in these settlements that are becoming urban.

What are we doing right and wrong with the Central Vista redevelopment plan?

The Central Vista is a fascinating project. There are two sets of issues that we have to look at. One is the intent behind the project, which is thinking about what it means to represent political power, and how architecture plays a role in spatially organising governments in a digital world. Then the question that follows is, what does it mean to make such a large intervention in the conservation zone of Lutyens’ Delhi? One can question whose heritage this is, but it’s clearly part of the nation’s legacy, in the same way that Chandigarh is in the context of modernism post-Independence. So, why are we building so much in this zone and not just making it a great public space and building this new government centre elsewhere? After all, every emperor made a New Delhi!

The other question is about the process – what many architects are referring to as a sham competition. In our democracy, there should be much more discussion about an important public and national project like this. Otherwise, the importance of architecture and, by extension, the profession is totally marginalised.

So how do we deal with Lutyens’ legacy?

You could chose to be nostalgic, but can our propositions for conservation be more projective? Even if you drain the Central Vista of all its symbolic and ideological meanings, it still makes for the most beautiful ensemble, a wonderful place where people have picnics, enjoy a parade, and use as a site for protest, all of which is critical for a democracy. It’s in the DNA of New Delhi. So that’s why it is a conservation question. I am not commenting on the scheme, but the implications on the publicness of the space after these interventions are made – clearly it will cease to be as public with a concentration of politicians now living and operating in the area. So, then, it clearly is a trade-off between the security and the imagined functioning of the government and the accessible public space of the Central Vista in the context of the metropolis of New Delhi.

Do you think this is a lost opportunity?

We should be using this opportunity to think about what the representation of democracy at the centre means in the 21st century. In a digital world, the government should be virtually networked and perhaps not employ the spectacle of architecture as is being proposed. The agriculture ministry, for instance, should be sitting at the edge of the city, so that lobbies of farmers, who want to meet the minister or bureaucrats, don’t have to spend exorbitant amounts to travel into the city. Today, ministries can easily talk to each other digitally. What’s this need to concentrate the buildings and then provide tunnels to connect them – are we building for an ‘underground’ government? So the fundamental flaw, in my view, is that there is not enough discussion or imagination in the correlation between the representation of power and the functioning of a government in a digital age. Think about Chandigarh, where Nehru had the vision to use architecture to represent what a modern democracy meant – this would have been a moment in our democracy to ask these hard questions again. Even the more fundamental question about whether architecture is at all a part of the solution. This is really the lost opportunity.

But architects are protesting about this.

The chatter I hear, barring one or two critical articles, is about personalities. However, the project is emblematic of flawed processes. To me, this deadline to celebrate 75 years of Independence, is hubris and is irrelevant. It’s not just a project for Delhi, it represents where India wants to be as a nation. It could have been an opportunity for a good urban design proposition. And then, perhaps, choose architects through competitions from different parts of the country to design the buildings. This would have echoed the pluralism that is India. An autocratic approach will give you a process like this and, probably, an architectural representation that extends from these protocols. The impatience and the distrust of the institutional ecology that surrounds those in power has, perhaps, resulted in such a process. And, if the platform to discuss these sorts of issues more rigorously does not exist, then state-sponsored projects will rapidly lose any democratic spirit and character.