Opinion The enduring idea of Mumbai

As every Mumbaikar knows,a fortuitous economic boom coincided with the first years of Governor Henry Bartle Edward Frere’s reign and the city reaped the benefits as a stunning array of Gothic civic buildings bloomed along the Oval maidan. Today,that serried Gothic line faces an equally impressive massing of Art Deco apartment buildings across the park,the result of a subsequent Bombay boom in the 1930s. It is one of the most spectacular urban spaces in the world,an open-air architectural museum in which two visions of Indian modernity — the first largely imposed by foreign imperialists,the second largely designed by indigenous Mumbaikars — stare each other down across the maidan. Alas,today,as yet another economic boom is transforming Mumbai’s cityscape and the eyes of the subcontinent are again on its urbs prima,the construction projects that again dot the island fail to offer a new vision of the Indian future. Mumbai today is nothing more than the sum of its real estate deals. It seems to be reverting to Rousselet’s lament that “it cannot be considered a city,in the full acceptation of the term”.

Mumbai’s visionary futures of the past,both Frere’s Gothic and the indigenous Art Deco,were the result of true public/private partnerships in which the city channelled the market’s bounty into a cohesive vision through government planning and private philanthropy. The government offered a structure — the public maidan will go here,the public offices and private apartments there — and it offered design guidelines regulating height and style. Rather than stifling creativity,these standards created a theme and variations of urbanism in which innovation flourished as the students of the Sir JJ School of Art decorated the Gothic high court and the Art Deco craftsmen the stucco facades and frosted glass doors.

Today,for all the buzz about public/private partnerships — the shorthand “ppp” was on the tongue of every Mumbaikar when I spent this past January in the metropolis — the balance between public and private is hideously out of whack. Reacting against decades of socialist stagnation,planning has become a dirty word. In new developments,every high-rise building is required to have,essentially,its own private park; zoning rules mandate that each tower be set back from the street in private green space. The idea that the government would plan the city and build public parks at reasonable intervals for everyone to enjoy is now seen as a quixotic,antiquated notion. In a repulsive twist,new developments are even responsible for their own waste management,so the dirty work of sewage treatment is done,malodorously,on-site. The city has gone from a system in which it expected the government to plan everything and the private sector to provide nothing,to an equally short-sighted one in which it expects the private sector to provide everything and the government to plan nothing.

As a result,even the city’s proudest contemporary infrastructure improvements betray a deeper sense of hopelessness. The city’s most highly touted new public works project,the $350 million Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link,is a sleek white bridge to nowhere that connects two contiguous pieces of land. For humble pedestrians,the city has built humbler bridges to nowhere — “skywalks” — that allow pedestrians to walk in a shaded,elevated walkway over slums rather than through them. These laugh-till-you-cry boondoggles bespeak a strategy of urban triage,a dispiriting sense that 21st-century Mumbai’s problems cannot be solved,only cauterised. The basic urban amenities of running water,reliable electricity and sanitation that every other world power has provided for its citizens for decades are considered utopian aspirations in Mumbai.

As this world of flyovers,skywalks and walled-off urban green zones creeps from the periphery into the centre of Mumbai,the city’s characteristic street life,the very urban dynamism that has struck visitors since Rousselet,is threatened. There is a better way. The historic districts of Europe,as well as developing nations like Morocco,were all retrofitted with utilities like running water and electricity centuries after they were built. And the underground Delhi Metro has managed to add efficient mass transit to the tangled streets of Old Delhi without levelling one of India’s historic treasures. Disembarking the pristine,orderly subway at the Chawri Bazar station and emerging in the midst of the teeming markets should be a required experience for every Mumbai architect,planner,politician,and real estate developer.

Even in its current underachieving state,South Asia still looks to Mumbai as a symbol of modernity and the region’s engagement with the wider world — for both good and ill,as the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks showed. Notably,the marauders pinpointed their attack on historic monuments like the Taj Mahal hotel and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus,not newly built icons like the Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link. Since the new landmarks fail to give voice to the ambitions and meaning of Mumbai,to the terrorists,they were not even worth destroying. But Mumbai — the enduring idea as much as the physical city — still drew their fire.

With its unique history,Mumbai long ago had greatness thrust upon it. The only question is whether the metropolis can seize the moment and again build the Indian future. The world is watching. Will the urbs prima in Indis live up to its destiny?

Brook’s latest book,‘A History of Future Cities’,was just published by W. W. Norton in the US and UK

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