Mixed use or mixed-up use?

Allocate specific pockets for mixed use but allow residents freedom to choose the proportion of mixing.

As a student in America years ago, I lived in a low-rise of row houses lining a narrow Philadelphia street. Along the street were two small restaurants, a pharmacy, a provisions store, a coffee shop and a bar. I lived upstairs from one of the restaurants. On summer days on my way to college I walked through a neighbourhood park. In the evening the restaurant often became my living room. In a regular exchange with its stores, bars, restaurants and parks, I derived a direct benefit from the neighbourhood. In every way the place contributed to my daily life. The pleasures of this personal urban landscape 8212; in which divergent occupations, residence and leisure occurred side by side 8212; made the neighbourhood truly mixed use.

Two reasons make a city: convenience and pleasure. First, to have your daily needs met in the most direct way: school, shopping, healthcare, and office, all within reach. Then, and only then, pleasure: the pleasure of monuments, parks and recreation. In the daily exchange with concrete buildings, hard sidewalks, and the hot metal of cars, the two are essential for well-being.

Yet, for these two ideas to succeed, people, places and actions need to be highly interdependent. Is that even a remote possibility in a city of BMW showrooms and migrant labour? Is it possible in a place where you drive to walk in a park; pick up a loaf of bread from the market in your Pajero, where children play on the road? But Delhi8217;s new notification on mixed use has an ulterior purpose. It obviously does not arise from a concern for preserving the current character of Delhi neighbourhoods. Nor indeed to make life easier for its residents. The need to appease its commercial clients, builders and partners in graft has obviously triggered this hasty insertion of the mixed use clause into the rulebook. At present the minor reprieve allowing shopkeepers a temporary stay against court orders only confounds the issue.

Doubtless, in the minds of the Municipal Commission of Delhi MCD, people can be made to adapt to any environment 8212; sleep on top of a moving train, hang from the floorboard of a bus. Indian tolerances for discomfort could surely allow something so common as commercial activity on their street. After all mixed use is not promoting the location of a halal meat shop in the basement of a temple, but less innocuous activities like coffee shops and Hyundai showrooms

below a house.

Can such an attitude of tolerance and co-operation be enforced by zoning regulations and building by-laws? To my mind, a residential street can allow select commerce on the ground only if it contributes to the requirements of its residents. A small tailoring unit may operate on the ground floor of a private home; a coffee shop sit cheek by jowl to an Electrolux showroom. People need tailors, regular cups of coffee, and in neighbourhoods where they change their microwaves and washing machines, even the Electrolux showroom makes sense. The co-existence of such varied functions is possible only if mixed use is seen as a matter of choice, not legislation. Cooperative activity after all is impossible to monitor. Who will be allowed to mix, and in what proportion, becomes redundant when stated in a rule. It only gives the administration another reason to create another pocket of corruption.

Globally, commercial, community and residential uses vie for space with each other 8212; not through ordinance but delicate cooperation. It is often difficult to tell where one use ends and the other begins. Homes locate behind shops, restaurants spill on to sidewalks, Unconstrained by boundaries, public and private areas mix freely, one enlarging into the other. Because of the cultural dimension of mixed use, no convenient recipe is available to all. If in one city a concert pianist lives above a bakery, and in the other an accountant above a dry cleaning establishment, it is only because neither baking nor dry cleaning is considered inappropriate in a residential neighbourhood. Residents gain by their proximity to such commerce.

But in Delhi8217;s muddled situation, where every public action is viewed as competitive struggle, mixed use is not just a misnomer but an impossibility. Builders against residents, shopkeepers against the RWAs, RWAs against the MCD, MCD against the judiciary. In such an atmosphere of suspicion, any ruling that attempts reconciliation is likely to fail.

Story continues below this ad

Where then does the solution lie? For most administrators it lies in field trips to study Sydney8217;s suburbs, or the mixed neighbourhoods of Amsterdam. But the desperation to seek Western solutions is only an admission that any Indian solution will be second-rate, and untested. Sadly, while technology transfers know no cultural barriers, in matters of urbanity few ideas have been successfully transposed; and in putting into effect an ideal of such social complexity as mixed use, in an already charged milieu, the chances of successful adaptation are remote.

Because Indian cities cannot copy American ideals, perhaps a more radical local view needs to be adopted: allocate specific pockets in the city for mixed use, but allow residents complete freedom to choose the proportion of mixing. The ensuring chaos will create an Indian answer. In new areas being developed around the city, revise zoning and building by-laws that do away with archaic setbacks and outmoded garden city ideas, and develop models of mixed use and community living in consonance with Indian lifestyles.

The writer is a Delhi-based architect and author