urban studies

............. ..................... OTHER CITIES,

OTHER WORLDS ... ... ......................................... .............. .

URBAN IMAGINARIES IN A GLOBALIZING AGE

EDITED BY ANDREAS HUYSSEN

Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

147 Okwui Enwezor

Mega-exhibitions: The Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form

ASIA

181 Gyan Prakash

Mumbai: The Modern City in Ruins

205 Rahul Mehrotra

Negotiating the Static and Kinetic Cities: The Emergent Urbanism of

Mumbai

219 Yingjin Zhang

Remapping Beijing: Polylocality, Globalization, Cinema

243 Ackbar Abbas

Faking Globalization

MIDDLE EAST

267 Farha Ghannam

Two Dreams in a Global City: Class and Space in Urban Egypt

289 Orhan Pamuk

Huzun-Melancholy - Tristesse of Istanbul

307 Bibliography

321 Contributors

325 Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays that make up this volume were first presented as formal

lectures in a year-long graduate research seminar in 2001-2002 at

Columbia University, conducted as a Sawyer Seminar and funded

by the Mellon Foundation. All of the essays have been updated

and rewritten since they were first presented. The seminar was

concluded two years later by a follow-up conference which gener-

ated further discussions and several more essays. Both the semi-

nar and the conference featured architects, urban historians and

theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, literary and cultural crit-

ics, curators, and writers, most of whom came from those non-

Western cities they spoke about. Two essays were commissioned

at a later time to round out the volume.

My first thanks go to the Mellon Foundation for the generous

funding and support that made the seminar possible. The Sawyer

Seminar itself was developed in close cooperation between the

Center for Comparative Literature and Society, which I directed

at the time, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning,

and Preservation at Columbia University. Special thanks are owed

the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

and its deans Bernard Tschumi and his successor Mark Wigley,

the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture and

its director Joan Ockman, and my colleagues at the Center for

Comparative Literature and Society. I am especially grateful to

Rahul Mehrotra

NEGOTIATING THE STATIC AND KINETIC CITIES

THE EMERGENT URBANISM OF MUMBAI

Cities in India, characterized by physical and visual contra-dictions that coalesce in a landscape of incredible plural- ism, are anticipated to be the largest urban conglomerates of the

twenty-first century. Historically, particularly during the period

of British colonization, the different worlds-whether economic,

social, or cultural-that were contained within these cities occu-

pied different spaces and operated under different rules, the aim

being to maximize control and minimize conflict between op-

posing worlds.1 Today, although these worlds have come to share

the same space, they understand and use it differently.2 Massive

waves of distressed rural migration during the latter half of the

i9oos triggered the convergence of these worlds into a singular

but multifaceted entity. This, coupled with an inadequate supply

of urban land and a failure to create new urban centers, resulted in

extremely high population densities. Furthermore, in the i99os,

with the emergence of a postindustrial, service-based economy,

the intertwining of these worlds within the same space became

even more intense.3

In this postindustrial scenario, cities in India have become criti-

cal sites for negotiation between elite and subaltern cultures. The

new relationships between social classes in a postindustrial economy are

quite different from those that existed in state-controlled economies and the

welfare state.4 The fragmentation of service and production locations has re-

sulted in a new, bazaar-like urbanism, which has woven its presence through

the entire urban landscape.5 It is an urbanism created by those outside the

elite domains of the formal modernity of the state and is thus a "pirate"

modernity that slips under the laws of the city simply to survive, without

any conscious attempt at constructing a counterculture.6 This contrasts with

the many historic legacies of modernity in India where instruments such as

the State Plan (referred to as the Development Plan), borrowed from Soviet

socialist planning paradigms, controlled, determined, and orchestrated the

built landscape. With the dramatic retreat of the state through the i98os and

i99os, the space of the "everyday" has become the space where economic and

cultural struggles are articulated. These common spaces have been largely

excluded from the cultural discourses on globalization, which focus on elite

domains of production and their spatial implications.7

Today, Indian cities comprise two components that occupy the same

physical space. The first is the formal or Static City. Built of more permanent

materials such as concrete, steel, and brick, it is comprehended as a two-

dimensional entity on conventional city maps and is monumental in its pres-

ence. The second is the informal or Kinetic City. Incomprehensible as a two-

dimensional entity, it is perceived as a city in motion - a three-dimensional

construct of incremental development. The Kinetic City is temporary in na-

ture and often built with recycled material: plastic sheets, scrap metal, canvas,

and waste wood. It constantly modifies and reinvents itself. The Kinetic City

is perceived not as architecture, but in terms of spaces which hold associative

values and supportive lives. Patterns of occupation determine its form and

perception. It is an indigenous urbanism that has its pa·rticular "local" logic.

It is not necessarily the city of the poor, as most images might suggest; rather,

it is a temporal articulation and occupation of space which not only creates

a richer sensibility of spatial occupation but also suggests how spatial limits

are expanded to include formally unimagined situations in dense urban con- ditions. 8

The Kinetic City presents a compelling vision that potentially allows one

to better understand the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism and the

Temporary construction for a festival. Photo by Rahul Mehrotra.

changing roles of people and spaces in urban society. The increasing concen-

trations of global flows have exacerbated the inequalities and spatial divisions

of social classes. In this context, an architecture or urbanism of equality in an

increasingly inequitable economic condition requires looking deeper to find

a wide range of places in which to mark and commemorate the cultures of

those excluded from the spaces of global flows. These don't necessarily lie in

the formal production of architecture, but they often challenge it. Here, the

idea of a city points to an elastic urban condition - not a grand vision, but a

grand adjustment.

The Kinetic City, bazaar-like in form, can be seen as the symbolic image of

the emerging urban Indian condition. The processions, weddings, festivals,

hawkers, street vendors, and slum dwellers all create an ever-transforming

streetscape-a city in constant motion, where the very physical fabric is char-

acterized by the kinetic. The Static City, on the other hand, dependent on

architecture for its representation, is no longer the single image by which

the city is read. Thus, architecture is not the "spectacle" of the city, nor does

it even comprise the single dominant image of the city. In contrast, festi-

vals such as Diwali, Dussera, Navrathri, Muhharam, Durga Puja, Ganesh

Chathurthi, and many more have emerged as the spectacles of the Kinetic

City. Their presence on the everyday landscape pervades and dominates the

popular visual culture of Indian cities. festivals create a forum through which

the fantasies of the subalterns are articulated and even organized into politi

cal action. In Mumbai, for example, the popularity and growth of the Ganesh

festival has been phenomenal.9 During the festival, which occurs in August

or September, numerous neighborhoods transform themselves temporarily

with lights and decoration. New public spaces are created to house the idols

of Ganesh for ten days. During the festival period, family, neighborhood,

and city events mark the celebrations. On the last day a large part of the city's

population carries the idols in long processions to the sea, where they are ultimately to be immersed.

Each procession carries tableaux depicting images of both local and global

concerns, with Lord Ganesh mediating the outcomes. These representations

are not based on formal scriptures or predetermined rules; instead, human

ingenuity breaches the boundaries between the local and the global, the his-

toric and contemporary. The images convey the hybrid urgencies of metro-

politan India. 10

The neighborhood processions weave through predetermined

routes in the city, each vying with other neighborhood processions to show-

case the intensity of their followers. Set against the backdrop of the Static

City, the processions culminate with the immersion of the idols, which the

followers bid farewell amid chants inviting Ganesh to resurrect his presence the following year.

Immersion becomes a metaphor for the sp~ctacle of the city. As the clay idol dissolves in the water of the bay, the spectacle comes to a close. There are

no static or permanent mechanisms to encode this spectacle. The memory

of the city is in this instance an "enacted" process, a temporal moment, as

opposed to a static or permanent entity in the form of buildings that contain

the public memory. 11

The city and its architecture are not synonymous and

cannot contain a single meaning. Within the Kinetic City, meanings are not

stable; spaces get consumed, reinterpreted, and recycled. The Kinetic City

recycles the Static City to create a new spectacle.

This transformative ability of the Kinetic City becomes even more vivid in

the events that play out at Mumbai's town hall every year on 15 August, India's

Independence Day. The Public Works Department (PWD) subverts the mean-

ing and symbolism of the architecture of this classical building by reconfig-

uring it for an annual ceremony when the governor of the state addresses the

208 RAH UL MEHROTRA

Immersion of the Ganesh idol. Photo by Rahul Mehrotra.

citizens. To ensure the ceremony is protected from the monsoon rains, the

PWD builds a structure, a sort of large porch built overnight in bamboo and

cloth, which attaches itself to the building. The decorative trim and other

ornamental highlights graft on to this classical building a local and perhaps

traditional sensibility that momentarily transforms the architecture. The con-

servationists in the city protest each year, decrying such construction as an

abuse of the legislation that protects heritage buildings, but they ignore the

fact that this is a reversible action, well within the bounds of even the holiest

of preservationists' canons.12 The intended image of this symbol of colonial

power, a celebrated asset of the Static City, is subverted and recolonized by

the Kinetic City. The PWD alters the significance of this building momentarily

to expand the margins of the Kinetic City.

This notion of cultural preservation takes on a critical dimension when

applied to the preservation of the built environment in these contexts. De-

bates about the conservation of the Static City have often revolved around

the idea of"cultural significance," an all-encompassing concept that emerged

clearly in the 1980s. To be more precise, it first emerged in what is referred to

as the Burra Charter, one of the many resolutions made by the International

Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites to

define and guide conservation practice. Adopted in Burra, South Australia, in

E M E R G E NT U R BA N I S M 0 F M U M BA I 209

Town hall of Mumbai, with its thirty-four steps. Photo by Rahul Mehrotra.

Town hall of Mumbai transformed on Independence Day. Photo by Rahul Mehrotra.

Victorian statues in the garden of the Bombay Zoo. Photo by Rahul Mehrotra.

1979, the Burra Charter defined cultural significance as the aesthetic, historic,

'~ ientific or social value for past, present, and future generations. Implicit in

th is definition is the belief that "significance" is static. It is a definition that

1 s "object" -centric (devoid of life) with its roots in the debate propagated by

I he antiquarians of the Renaissance.13 What is the validity of a notion where

( u ltural memory is often an enacted process, as in the Kinetic City? Or where

111eanings are fluid like the Kinetic City itself and often complicated in post-

l olonial conditions by the fact that the creators and custodians of historic

environments in the Static City are different cultures from those that created

them?

What, then, might be one's cultural reading of the Kinetic City, which

now forms a greater part of urban reality? In this dynamic context, if the

production or preservation of architecture or urban form has to be informed

hy one's reading of cultural significance, it will necessarily have to include

I he notion of "constructing significance" in both architectural and conserva-

l 1on debates.14 In fact, an understanding that cultural significance evolves will

l hallenge as well as clarify the role of the architect as an advocate of change

(vnsus a preservationist who opposes change)-one who can engage with

F M E R G r N T U R B II N I S M 0 F M U M B A I 211

both the Kinetic City and the Static City on equal terms. Under such condi

tions, a draining of the symbolic import of the architectural landscape leads

to a deepening of ties between architecture and contemporary realities and

experiences. This understanding allows architecture and urban typologies to

be tr~nsfor~e~ through intervention and placed in the service of contempo - rary life, realities, and emerging aspirations. The Static City can thus embrace

the Kinetic City and be informed and remade by its logic.

The phenomenon of bazaars in the Victorian arcades of the Fort Area

Mumbai's historic district, is emblematic of this potential negotiation be:

tween the Static City and the Kinetic City. The original use of the arcades was

twofold: first, they provided spatial mediation between building and street;

second, they were a perfect response to Bombay's climate, serving to protect

pedestrians from both harsh sun and lashing rains. Today, with the informal

bazaar occupying the arcades, the original intent of the area has been chal-

lenged. The emergent relationship between the arcade and the bazaar not

only forces a confrontation of uses and interest groups but also demands

new preservation approaches. For the average Mumbai resident, the hawker

provides a wide range of goods at prices considerably lower than those found

in local shops, and the bazaars that characterize the Fort Area arcades are

therefore thriving. For the elite and for conservationists, the Victorian core

represents the old city center, complete with monumental icons. In fact, as

~he city sprawls, dissipating the clarity of its form, these images, places, and icons acquire even greater meaning, for preservationists, as critical symbols

of the ~i.ty's historic image. Consequently, hawking is deemed illegal by city authorities that are constantly attempting to relocate the bazaars.

. Th~ challenge ~n. Bo~bay is to cope with the city's transformation, not by i~ducmg .o~ polanzmg its dualism, but by attempting to reconcile these oppo- site condit10ns as being simultaneously valid. The existence of two worlds

in the same ~pace implies that one must accommodate and overlap varying uses, percept10ns, and physical forms. For example, the Fort Area arcades are

a spe~ial urban component that inherently possesses a capacity for reinter- ~retatr.on. As .a~ architectural or urban-design solution, the arcades display i~credible resilience; they can accommodate new uses while keeping the illu- s10n of their architecture intact.

One design solution might be to readapt the functioning of the arcades,

212 RAHUL MEHROTRA

1 1·~ 1 rn cturing them to allow for easy pedestrian movement and to accommo -

il .i ll' hawkers at the same time. Restructured arcades, providing an illusion

11 1 I he disciplined Victorian arcade or the exterior fa<;:ade, could contain the

1111orphous bazaar within. With this sort of planning, components of the city

wo uld have a greater ability to survive because they could be more adaptable

111 drnnging economic and social conditions. There are no total solutions in

.i 11 urban landscape charged with the duality between permanence and rapid

11,111 sformation. At best, the city could constantly evolve and invent solutions

lor the present through safeguarding the crucial components of historically

1111portant "urban hardware." Could "Bazaars in Victorian Arcades" become

,, sy mbol of an emergent reality of temporary adjustment?

Clearly the Static and Kinetic Cities go beyond their obvious differences to

1·s tablish a much richer relationship both spatially and metaphorically than

1 heir physical manifestations would suggest. Here, affinity and rejection are

, i multaneously played out, maintaining a state of equilibrium via a seemingly

i 1 resolvable tension. The informal economy of the city vividly illustrates the

rnllapsed and intertwined existence of the Static and Kinetic Cities. Dabba-

walas (literally, "tiffin men") exemplify the relationship between the formal

.ind informal, the static and kinetic. The tiffin-delivery service, which relies

on the train system for transportation, costs about 200 rupees (four dol-

lars) per month, with an annual turnover that amounts to roughly 50 million

rnpees (around a million dollars). Approximately 4,500 dabbawalas deliver

,111 estimated 200,000 lunchboxes every day. A dabbawala picks up a lunch

liffin from a house anywhere in the city. He then, through a complex network,

helps deliver the tiffin by lunchtime and return it to the house later in the day.

'I he network involves the dabba, or tiffin, being exchanged up to four or five

times between pickup and return, with the average box traveling about thirty

kilometers each way. The efficiency of Mumbai's train system, the spine of the

linear city, enables this complex informal system to work. The dabbawalas

have thus innovatively set up a network that enables an informal system to

take advantage of a formal infrastructure.15

Entrepreneurship in the Kinetic City is an autonomous and oral process

that requires the ability to fold the formal and informal into a symbiotic rela-

tionship. The dabbawala service-like other informal services, which range

from banking to money transfers to couriers to electronic bazaars-lever-

E M E R GEN T URBAN I S M 0 F MUMBAI 213

ages community relationships and networks and deftly uses the Static City

and its infrastructure beyond its intended margins. These networks create a

synergy that depends on mutual integration without the obsession of formal-

ized structures. The Kinetic City is where the intersection of need (often at

the level of survival) and of the unexploited potentials of existing infrastruc-

ture engenders innovative services. The trains in Mumbai are emblematic

of a kinetic space that supports and blurs the formal and the informal, slic-

ing through these worlds while momentarily collapsing them into a singular

entity. In this space the self-consciousness about modernity and the regula-

tions imposed by the Static City are suspended and redundant. The Kinetic

City carries local wisdom into the contemporary world without fear of the

modern, while the Static City aspires to erase the local and recodify it in a

written "macro-moral" order.16 Inspired by modernist urban-design tenets,

the Static City periodically remakes the Kinetic City in its own image.

The issue of housing most vividly demonstrates the process by which the

Static City reorders and remakes the Kinetic City. In Mumbai, for example,

approximately 60 percent of the city's population does not have access to

formal housing. This population lives on approximately 10 percent of the

city's land in settlements that are locally referred to as slums. It is estimated

that about 70 percent of the city's population works in the informal sec-

tor. This number has risen with the new liberal economy, which curtails

bargaining capacity by fragmenting labor. Despite its informal nature, the

subaltern population's productivity allows Mumbai to be competitive on a

global scale.17 This population lives in the interstitial spaces of the cities-

road edges, drainage channels (nalla spaces), edges of railway lines-and

must engage in innovative means of negotiating everyday life. Dish antennas

and a web of electrical wire and cables are juxtaposed with homes covered

by plastic sheets or with walls made of empty drums- a kaleidoscope of the

past, present, and future compressed into an organic fabric of alleys, dead

ends, and a labyrinthine, mysterious streetscape that constantly modifies and

reinvents itself. The Kinetic City, like a twitching organism, locates and re-

locates itself through perpetual motion. Flow, instability, and indeterminacy

are basic to the Kinetic City. Regular demolitions exacerbate the tenuous

occupation of land by the inhabitants of these settlements, inhibiting any

investment the occupants might make in their physical living conditions.

')1A 0 A l-l 111 ••~ 1111n I""--------------------~--.....

Thus, the Kinetic City is fluid and dynamic, mobile and temporal (often as

a strategy to defeat eviction), and leaves no ruins. It constantly recycles its

resources, leveraging great effect and presence with very little means.

The expansion of the Kinetic City only heightens the growing contradic-

tions evident in the islands of concentrated wealth that are increasingly mani-

fest in gated communities throughout the city and the edge-city suburbs. The

popular metaphorical reference to "making Bombay Shanghai" is emblematic

of the one-dimensional imagination that planners and politicians bring to

bear on decisions about the city's development.18 An obvious extension of the

Shanghai metaphor is the notion of remaking the city in a singular image and

using architecture as the spectacle to represent a global aspiration. The radical

transformation of the physical nature of the city is seen as the most immedi-

ate method to make the city viable for integration in a global network of

cities and economies. New highways, flyovers, airports, corporate hotels, and

convention centers (followed by the secondary development of museums,

galleries, parks, and progressive urban regulations to demonstrate further

compliance with international urban standards) are all critical elements for

the Static City to achieve this perceived integration. Such global implications

also raise political questions that challenge the democratic processes of city

governance.

Ambiguity regarding the urban form of Mumbai and the dominant image

of the city prompts the question "Whose city is it anyway?" This question

goes beyond the politics of occupation and challenges the processes by which

the city is made. The making of the city is perhaps most critical when nego-

l iating between the Static and Kinetic Cities, for it is also an effective point

of intervention. Through the city-making process, globalization and its par-

l icular transgressions in the urban landscape are realized, but that process is

.dso how the Kinetic City can resist or participate in globalization as well as

I l'Configure itself socially, culturally, and spatially.

The growing movement of slum associations and networks in Mumbai is

,, potent illustration of effective intervention. These associations engage with

I Ill' formal world of the Static City while mediating the contradictions inher-

r11l in issues of legality, informality, and the mobile and temporal strategies

11! the Kinetic City. One such successful movement is the alliance between

I lrl' nongovernmental organization Society for the Promotion of Area Re-

sources, the community benefit organization National Slum Dwellers Fed

eration, and the Mahila Milan, an organization of poor women . 'thi s alli

ance is essentially united around concerns for securing land and access to

urban infrastructure. It has successfully negotiated between the formal and

informal worlds in the city, as well as across national boundaries through a

network of alliances working with slum dwellers around the world. Besides

representing efforts to reconstitute citizenship in cities, these alliances form

what Arjun Appadurai calls a "deep democracy," referring to "[a] model that

produces poor communities able to engage in partnership with more power-

ful agencies-urban, regional, national and multilateral-that purport to be

concerned with poverty and citizenship .... [V]ertical collaborations and

partnerships with more powerful persons and organizations together form

a mutually sustaining cycle of process. This is where depth and laterality be-

come joint circuits along which pro-poor strategies can flow." 19 It is through

this restructuring of the city-making process that the Kinetic and Static Cities

can be intertwined beyond the physical and thus better engage the inhabi-

tants of the city.

In such conditions, the urbanism of Mumbai represents a fascinating

intersection where the Kinetic City- a landscape of dystopia, yet a symbol

of optimism - challenges the Static City- encoded in architecture-to re-

position and remake the city as a whole. 20 The Kinetic City forces the Static

City to re-engage itself in present conditions by dissolving its utopian project

to fabricate multiple dialogues with its context. Could this become the basis

for a rational discussion about coexistence? Or is the emergent urbanism of

Mumbai inherently paradoxical such that the coexistence of the Static and

Kinetic Cities and their particular states of utopia and dystopia are inevi-

table? Can the spatial configuration for how this simultaneity occurs actually

be formally imagined?

In spite of these many potential disjunctures, what this reading of the city

does celebrate is the dynamic and pluralist processes that create the urban

Indian landscape. Within this urbanism, the Static and Kinetic Cities neces-

sarily coexist and blur into an integral entity, even if momentarily, to create

the margins for adjustment that their simultaneous existences demand.

216 RAH U L ME H R 0 TR A

NOTES

1. Kin g 197 6.

2. '!his unprecedented demographic shift has not only transformed the social make-

up of Indian cities but has perpetuated an incomprehensible landscape charged

with intense dualities - which are cultural and social, as well as economic. This new

demography comprises mainly rural migrants, who form the urban poor, bringing

with them new skills, social values, and cultural attitudes that not only determine

their ability to survive in an urban environment but are also, in the process, altering

the very structure of the city. The different attitudes of rural migrants that influence

the way the city is used and perceived are also emblematic of the more universal

phenomenon of global flows that are transforming cities across the world and of

local resistances which emerge in landscapes characterized by uneven development.

Furthermore, the presence of the urban poor makes explicit another crucial divide-

that between those who have access to the formal city and the infrastructure that

goes with it, and those who do not have this access and therefore lack the basic

amenities in the urban system.

3. Distinct manufacturing zones and segregations have now shifted spatially to services

and manufacturing occurring in fragmented areas in the city, which are networked

through the efficient transportation system the city offers. Similarly, the markets on

which these economies are dependent have been fractured, giving rise to adjacencies

of use and urban form previously not experienced in the city. See Shetty 2005.

4. Chatterjee 2003.

5. The fragmented nature of the new economy in Mumbai was well documented by

Prasad Shetty (2005) . One interesting observation had to do with the changing pat-

terns of mobility in public transportation, particularly with regard to trains . While

the city's population between 1991 and 2001 grew by 22-40 percent, train travel in-

creased by 42.37 percent (from 4.95 million to 6-4 million passengers). Thi s was

largely due to significant changes in work and production patterns. Small -scale

operations and individual agents now connect manufacturing nodes that are frag-

mented across landscape of the city.

6. Sundaram 2ooi.

7. Chatterjee 2003. 8. Weddings are an example of how the rich, too, are engaged in the making of the

Kinetic City. The lack of formal spaces for weddings as the cultural outlet for ostenta-

tion has resulted in public open space being temporarily colonized for consumption

by the rich as spaces for the spectacle of elaborate weddings. Complex wedding sets

are often constructed and removed within twelve hours - a transitory spectacle set

up by the rich in the public domain for private consumption. Again, the margin of

the urban system is momentarily expanded.

9. In its present form the Ganeshotsava, as the festival is referred to locally, was re-

E M E R G E NT U R B A N I S M 0 F M U M B A I 217