Sunday, February 02, 2020
Of Informality and Opportunity, and cities in Post-Colonial Hangovers.
Vendors at the Mehrauli Archeological Park, on a weekend
It struck me as odd, back then, that the metro station for Mehrauli was over a a kilometer of a walk from the outer edge of Mehrauli and possibly another kilometre from dead centre. More interesting was the fact that elsewhere, whereever it was needed to cross a busy thoroughfare a Foot Over Bridge (FOB) was integrated into the design of the station. This was not so in Mehrauli - the Metro Station is on the other side of a National Highway designated road, and a pedestrian crossing with a largely non-functional red-light was the only way to cross until, 2018.
Yes, 16 years after the metro services started in Delhi.
But that is not why i sat down to write this, the issue is bigger than a station and the lack of a pedestrian bridge.
It goes back to a few days ago, riding in the back of a cab from a site visit, those special occasions, when i get to observe what is on the side of the road, the edges, the changes of the city scape.
It also connects, a little unexpectedly, to a walk in the Mehrauli Archeological Park, where i regularly walk my three fur children, where i crossed a group of vendors, and another time chanced to overhear a conversation of one the security guards with seller of Ram-laddu, telling him how it was not allowed for vendors to sell their wares in the park, and how he could impound his things.
What was interesting, was that immediately after this conversation on the possibility of impounding, and the illegality of the selling, the security guard asked the vendor to serve him a plate of those Ram-laddus, and then paid him the 20 rupees that was the regular price of a small plate.
Immediately a few thoughts flew through my head -
The first, that the guard actually paid the vendor, he didn’t even suggest they be given free, or negotiate a price or anything. There was no demand for free service in exchange for allowance of passage.
A second, that there are possibly lacs of people who come to their city in search of a better life and better earning opportunities, who work and exist in an informality that provides much needed services to the city at prices that keep them both affordable and relevant.
And the third, and possibly most important, that Policy may not register this, but even the enforcers of policy, and the public at large understand that there is a need for them and without such people and the varied services they provide, our city and many of privileges we enjoy would not be possible.
The city is an economic entity, there is little that can be said to refute that. The nonsense around art and culture etc doesn’t really apply to a vast majority of the people in the cities we live in. One could argue that geographically, less than 5% of the city is actually given to these functions, and accessed by an even smaller percentage of cityzen.
In our post colonial reality, the city remains an opportunity, for better - education, pay, standard of living, employment and possibly an escape from caste / and employment structures that are very limited in the reaches of rural India.
The city is lorded over by policy makes, bureaucrats, politicians and lawmakers, who ricochet between their various bastions of power in high fancy cars, with a battery of sycophants , support staff, servants and security detail. You won’t seem them step down on the sidewalks, or for that matter use a bus stop or board the metro. Our notions of achievement, development, and progress are hung over from the days of the Raj and an internalised Imperialist aspiration.
Again this thought is not what sparked the idea of this piece. I was riding back in a cab from site crossing the many stations of the just completed Magenta Line, the most recent of the DMRC’s additions to the vast network on Metro that has done wonders to change mobility and the city scape ( of course there are really stupid ideas like the TOD floating around, but we shall not digress) and as i passed each station, i was surprised by the number of sellers, crowding the alighting points - water and nimbu-pani, sellers of cigarettes, boiled eggs and bread-omelette sellers, momos, mobile screen protectors, and parathas, the list gets longer and more interesting at some stations with chow mien carts, chaat, chole-kulche, and litti-chokha.
Vendors outsite the Megenta Line Station, Hauz Khas
Food stalls at Qutab Minar Mentro Station
It also strikes me as odd, that the metro stations, where you could easily have an end to end commute in the region of 90 minutes or more, are devoid of water fountains, have negligible restroom facilities (that are invariably outside if the exit gates, requiring you swipe your card or drop your token to access them, which is even more inconvenient if the station is not your destination station and you are using a token).
So while the network is a transportation boon, in its now 16 years of growth and development, it has sadly remained just that - a conduit for the transport of people across the city.
The Metro has failed to recognise its own agency, and its own transformative potential. it has now become the venue for dates, for meetings, and is slowly, but without any design intent, morphing into a quasi-social infrastructure out of sheer need. And it surprises me how these aspects have been completely blindsided. I could accept that the first time around when the station at Kashmere Gate opened, with the inclusion of a McDonalds, and some other fast food places, there could have been a lack of clarity.
But 16 years down the line the omissions are disappointing,(possibly deliberate), point towards an intellectual laziness, and represent a huge opportunity that is lost. One would have expected to see last mile connectivity, street food and vends, and social activity transforming the landscape around the interface of the metro stations with the city they are an intrinsic part of.
The way things stand even now, one can see the design and thus also the intent behind the design is opposed to such a possibility. A stance that comes from, and i conjecture here, policy makers who themselves do not use the metro and deem it to be for the “working class.” Or from a deep rooted class divide, that recognises cultural activity, social exchange, and food to be of value to only a certain economically advantaged section of the city that would not engage in such at “transport infrastructure”. It would be too pedestrian (pun intended!)
One must recognise informality, in its many avatars as both economically necessary and infrastructurally vital to the existence of the city. Informality posses an ability to organically grow and change to suit demand, space, season (and climate)and ever-changing taste and so possess a quality that is unmatchable by the more formal and much more resource intensive models of commercial and consumer enterprise the economic powers that control the city wish to encourage. There is a certain dynamic property that guides the informal, that cannot be replicated by the large corporate, multinational / big brand business entities.
While it is encouraging to see a Cafe Coffee Day and Wow momos, or Burger King at metro stations, or kiosks selling bottle water and drinks, it is also necessary to address a changing usage pattern and the needs of a far larger population that drives the metro and keeps it viable. A population who's needs if recognised and integrated into the wider plans of the city and its infrastructure, we should have a safer, more seamless and more pleasurable public space.
It is time we recognised that transport and infrastructure will be the New Democratic spaces of the city, and i could argue, its future monuments. Mobility, and the access to information and digital communication have altered the way we use and interact with the city. But design and design practitioners, especially architects, planners, policy makers and the government have yet to acknowledge it.
I see in the metro and how it interfaces with the city of Delhi as a massive, untapped opportunity - financial, cultural and social, that could multiply the already large impact the metro has had on the lives of all city folk, working, retired, young, old, disabled or otherwise.
Yet when i see the latest of the metro stations to be opened, one cant help but be sad,
that our cities, and how they continue to be designed by architects, and visioned by policy makers, and governed by administration, do not not account for the home-grown, for the small enterprise, for the spontaneous, for signs of hope - do not account for the huge possibility that is the informal.
That the city and its infrastructure is still being designed with a colonial Sahab’s gaze, that lives in a nostalgia of being driven around New Delhi in the back seat of imported car, with a saluting driver, who handles the steering wheel with white gloves. Who’s idea of the city is a sanitised, inch perfect, picturesque and poor-free space.
Not only would that be undemocratic, but it would also be absolutely unsustainable in every aspect - energy consumption, urban services, last mile connectivity, domestic services, food, the list just goes on. It is tiresome to see the same mistakes and same assumptions being repeated again and again. Opportunities for livelihood and ownership of the public space are not only for the rich, and the economically advantaged. Our cities need to be reimagined, our cities need to be designed by people who live, eat, work and most importantly WALK in them (and use its public transport systems!)
Labels: archeological park, Architects, architecture, city design, Delhi, dmrc, informality, infrastructure, integration, magenta line, Mehrauli, metro, policy, transport, urbanism, vendors
Monday, February 11, 2019
74 And Counting!
The NCR, National Capital Region boasts of an Institute of National Importance that is also a Deemed University, The SPA, with Departments of Urban Design, Transport Planning, Industrial Design, Architecture and a lot more, the NCR also has 4 other schools of Architecture and Planning, to add to this fray the Delhi State has School of Social Design at Ambedkar University Delhi, and still we get to see this.
74 foot over-bridges and a skywalk is an appalling waste of public funds to arrive at this conclusion. What is the point of all these institutes if the PWD and the MCD have bureaucrats and engineers with little vision, and even less common sense making decisions. It would cost the government nothing, to put exercises for improving the public realm to these institutions and ask for their well considered opinion and design solutions.
Opportunities to make positive change are lost over and over again in this shortsighted vision of development that seems to ail every aspect of our development work.
Labels: architecture, AUD, cityplanning, Delhi, Development, education, foot-overbridge, JMI, mdc, pwd, SPA, SSAA, Underpass, university, urbandesign, USAP, waste
Saturday, June 14, 2014
THE CITY YOU PISSED IN
Case 1.The other day stopped at a red light, a few seconds
later an Audi A6 pulls up along side, the man at the wheel, well heeled with a Hublot
on his wrist, lowers the window and casually drops a disposable plastic glass
out the window.
Case 2.On Sunday last, I went to the Darya Ganj book market,
and I got there before time, the sweepers where still cleaning up, you could
see small piles gathered at regular intervals. Piles of dust and dirt,
wrappers, used condoms, syringes, stubbs, bandages, and unrecognizable things,
all being collected and then disposed of into a hand pushed cart – by hand.
Case 3.At the Mehrauli bus terminal, there are toilets, that
are not used, but a wall is – the toilets are kept locked. I wonder if they did
put up toilets would people use them?
My questions then –
A. If we throw garbage outside our gates on the street
side, or just some where when people are
not looking. And if we have no qualms about dropping the empty chips bag down
the side of the auto. Or out the window in the middle of wilderness on a train?
Would you piss in a toilet if there was one?
B. Is cleaning up some one else’s job- the governements? The
oppositions? The sweeper you so generously pay 50 rupees a month to carry your
dirt?
And so –
You can cry hoarse about how bad/unsafe/unlivable/uncivic and third
world the city is and so why you like London or Paris or whatever white skinned
city is vogue this season.
You can vote all you like for progress and development and
safety and whatever other Sh%# you would want - till the day you don’t drop the
disposable glass, or flick the wrapper or spit on the curb or stop right across
the zebra lines - the city will smell just as it does to me right now –
LIKE A
PLACE YOU PISSED IN!
POST SCRIPT:
The pattern of growth, urban development and progress of the
city doesn’t give you much choice in the matter. Needless to mention is the
abysmal lack of civic facilities or the upkeep of the miniscule number of those
provided, that is only the tip of the iceberg sized issue.
Systematic privatization and /or restricted access to the
city’s so called public spaces has reduced the actual truly democratic spaces
of the city into spaces that are often not accessed by and thus uncared for by
the citizens who most wield the power to have this spaces well kept.
(We do not want to be in our city any more. We don’t walk
its streets, we don’t play in its parks or stroll its boulevards. Our desire
for the more progressive energy burning and upmarket and marketable lifestyle
has removed us from the city into pockets of isolated synthetic environments
which we shudder to move out of. And as consequence the city becomes a monster,
not because it is but it is a sort of chicken and egg situation that once set
in motion the city presumably remains unsafe because those who want to/can make it safe are no longer willing to
be present in it.)
The only truly democratic space in the city is the street,
that the middle class and upwardly mobile would be loath to set foot on. They
are only fit to drive thru and to make condescending glances at the less
fortunate who have yet not risen to the point being able to drive through them.
Or the truly economically destitute – the homeless and the nomadic sellers at
street light and beggars.
Most public space in the city bears a stance of “Do Not
Enter” either in terms of access or
control or by a necessarily requiring financial transaction that in
self-reflexive manner polices and thus keeping large parts of population out.
So what is left of the city - that you, me, the guy in the
fancy imported car and the Metro, the homeless under the may flyovers and the
vegetable vendor is that common denominator that you cannot avoid but would
never want to possess – It would just be a place you would take a leak in if
you if you had to.
Of course another thing is that no one actually belongs to
Delhi – no one is a Delhi-ite if that is a tern you can use. You are either
Punjabi, or from UP or from Bihar or Bengal or Gujju, or from Kerala or from
Bangalore or Lucknow or some other place. Delhi Belongs to no one except the
Jatt boys riding about on 350 cc bullets without helmets! And even they are
dying to get out!
In some way its like a thru’ station – everyone is passing
through – here while it lasts , taking what they can while they can take it and
then heading out to some other place. Much like something/someone used.And that
doesn’t help.
It’s all cyclical – it’s a city you piss in, because it is a
city you piss in!
Labels: architecture, Delhi, Democratic Space, Future City, new delhi, Piss, Pissed, progress, Toilets in the City, urban development, Urban Planning
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Thoughts on (and after) Moving..
We don’t usually believe it, or rather, we are dismissive of
this simple fact – that so much of how we live and work is influenced by the
environment we live in.
Recently I moved to another part of town. And in three weeks
I see many changes. I do not need to turn on the lights till after sunset. I
don’t use more than a fan on most days. And, well I just feel rather happy and
excited to wake up on most days and get on the job. (Of course it helps that I
am an architect.) I don’t need to keep running off to a coffee shop to feel at
home and peace from the everyday chores of living and working in a mad city
called New Delhi.
When I look out I see lush green forest, rain washed and
fresh. No traffic noise, and I can keep the windows open at most times. Fresh
air, a light breeze, and that famed notion of a crowded city, with people
locked inside their concrete cubicles just fades away.
I walk to the local market in the evenings and the mornings
some times. And when the rains pour down, it’s nice to sit in the balcony. I
can imagine winter already, morning sunlight streaming into my east facing
bedroom, and fog.
When I sit at my desk, beside a floor to ceiling window that
can be collapsed to take in the balcony, I don’t think, “another day at work”,
its just another wonderful day, to play with paper, pens, drawings, colour,
working on projects where you try to bring some of that easy lightness to
everything.
And as I write I recall the office of the Architect, Ashish
Ganju ,on a farm called Eco Options in Aya Nagar - sunlit in winter, shaded in
summer, a beautiful illuminated and inspiring space. You could hear and see the rain, the winter
‘s cold dim fog and its wonderful sunshine. Not air-conditioned, but
comfortable at all times and not large by any standard yet sufficient. It used
to be a joy to ride the 18 km to work at that studio.
These thoughts are what brought me to write this. We have
come to live in a construct, where the sun, the rain and the wind are to be
shunned - kept out of doors, and barred from ever entering the places we live
and work in. Akin to some unwanted disturbance.
And that takes a toll: on energy to keep them out, on the planet and
system that we continually modify to enable that control and on ourselves. Our
bodies are intrinsically linked to the winder systems, (every holiday you take,
every trek, every trip to pristine “natural beauty” is ramification of that
fact). If nothing else it is unhealthy.
Unhealthy for many reasons - removing and distancing oneself
from the ecological and physical construct that you participate in is one
reason. The other is the huge dependencies we come to internalize – on power,
on sterilsation, on preserving physical and mental health.
A large part of the ecological mess we continue to perpetuate
is fuelled by choices guided by these dependencies. We continue to reduce, and
diminish our capacity to assimilate and engage with the environments around us.
And this does two things-
1. It makes us irresponsible. You only have to step
outside your gate, to the street with its piled garbage, broken footpath, and
waterlogged roads to see the connection. We don’t care for what is outside our
castle.
2. We invariably want and thus possess (if the means permit) more than we would actually need.
2. We invariably want and thus possess (if the means permit) more than we would actually need.
More and more we try to include or contain all that we need
or desire for living within the confines of our private worlds, each sealed
from the other and from the larger picture that we engage with less and less
over time. This is frightening, and if it were to operate at the scale of the 1
billion plus population we have it would be a sheer environmental disaster.
But that’s a much huger picture than I started off with.
Where I was headed out to was the simple idea that so much depends on how we
choose to engage or dis-engage with the environments we live in. The wind, the rain, sunlight – sustainability
isn’t about E-rated glass, and LEEDS ratings and GRIHA, or water harvesting, it
is about an attitude of how you live and where you live. Like all things, it
starts at what we all call home.
Labels: architecture, Delhi, dependancies, ecological, green, home, rain, sun, sustainable, wind
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Thoughts on Water - at the Shamsi Talaab
In many ways, I have come to
believe now, that the attitude to water defines civilizations. Water, wind, sun and rain, (in their many
forms and their many consequences) have through the ages governed how and where
we live.
They have directed choices
of place – for dwelling, for ablution, for cultivation, for congregation and
safekeeping, for control and for protection.
And the many great cities of
civilized cultures have built themselves around these ideas. And chiefly around
the idea of water – as sustenance, as waterway, as beauty and as defense.
I recall visiting villages,
still without bathrooms or toilets, where the places for bathing, and
biological function were carefully separated and placed along the same life
giving stream from which they drew water for cooking and drinking.
The spot for the daily
ablutions was always down stream, away from any point of the village's access to
the stream.
One looks at the City of
Delhi, and it becomes clear how over time the city, seems to have turned its back
on the waters it drew its initial reason of being from.
The Yamuna is a ghastly
sight and smell.
But that is not what got me
started on this line of thought. It is elsewhere, on the high point of Mehrauli
the oldest of the still living historic cities that make up Delhi as we know
it. I was standing on a balcony overlooking the Shamsi Talaab, a large water
tank, flanked by the majestic Jahaaz Mahal, looking out over a thousand years of
Delhi, the talab, broken mosques in ruin, new mosque in white and green, the
Mehrauli Gurgoan road and the Metro.
But right before me, the
Talaab, stood walled, a 5 ft high stone wall, and then a metal grill that keeps
only people – not plastic bags with rubbish, and waste and disposable bottles-
out. The bank of the Talaab is littered with plastic, and packaging, and other such
non-bio-degradeable waste of modern consumer culture. Thrown directly into, or
around the very waters that have for centuries made living on the highest point
of Delhi both safe and favoured.
The fence, the only
recognizable presence of the Archeological Society of India, only helps
reinforce and reinstate the idea that the tank is a rubbish dump. Everything
else is allowed access to the water but the people to whom it historically has
belonged.
This alienation – of
culture, of people, and possibly of humanity itself – from the sources of its
sustenance on a planet of meager means, this is slowly becoming the single most
definitive idea of Modern civilization.
And yet we cry ourselves
sore for “Green” buildings, sustainable design, and a better city. Yet we will
continue to litter our streets, we will throw plastic into every river and
pond.
Like all things, like everything, its all begins at home, right at your door step. I remember once while in Thimphu, visiting family friends, I went for walk in the forests above the Radio Tower, a good hour and half way up the hill to a small temple. On the way back, one of the two I was with took out a big bag, and then with sharpened stick picked off the forest floor proceeded to spike and collect every piece of plastic/ paper and waste we could spot. Once a week she did this, and that week I joined in too. We cleaned a small path in a forest that had stood and nurtured Thimphu as long as it had existed.
Like all things, like everything, its all begins at home, right at your door step. I remember once while in Thimphu, visiting family friends, I went for walk in the forests above the Radio Tower, a good hour and half way up the hill to a small temple. On the way back, one of the two I was with took out a big bag, and then with sharpened stick picked off the forest floor proceeded to spike and collect every piece of plastic/ paper and waste we could spot. Once a week she did this, and that week I joined in too. We cleaned a small path in a forest that had stood and nurtured Thimphu as long as it had existed.
Which brings me back to
where I began, the pond, and the waste on its bank, and a wall, and community
that lives around it that does nothing. Only adds to the waste, and watches in in-action as it is blown by the wind, and strewn across the park and infront of
their houses on the parking street.
How do we change that? How
do we, join all the dots that were once joined, but have been systematically
un-joined. Technologies are only a part of the answer, much of the answers lie
at home, inside and outside our doorways, in the way we choose to ignore and
accept, in the way we have chosen to live our insular, self-referenced and
inward looking lives.
If you walk past Samsi
Talaab, give it a look and think, or if you cross the Yamuna too. And then I
hope you will travel to Pilang or some far off place, miles away from any road,
and see how differently they treat water, and maybe I will not need to make any
more of this argument.
Labels: ASI, city, Delhi, Fences, Mehrauli, Shampsi Talaab, Water, Water and civilization, Water and human settlements, Water and settlements, Water source, Water tank, Yamuna
