Archive for the 'Public Spaces' Category
Suburban Caves Proposal
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region, despite its modernity, has been the location of important settlements going back to the Buddhist period. Some o these earlier settlement patterns have integrated seamlessly with the city over a period of time — while others have remained secluded and forgotten within the metropolitan environment. Many archaeological sites in the city, including ancient caves and medieval and colonial forts, have no physical strategies for their integration with the urban environments. Many of these sites, while physically cordoned off, have been encroached, while others are in a state of dire physical and environmental degradation. This project is conceived to investigate the possibilities of integrating these sites back within the urban fabric and the public imagination at large. Though some of these sites have been appropriated by nearby communities — such as Worli Fort, which is used as a gymnasium, or the Jogeshwari Caves, which is used as a temple — there has been no conscious attempt to integrate these sites within the community or the city at large, leading to their decay.
The project proposal takes up the case of three historical caves located within the city of Mumbai, which while being located in similar topographical conditions along sloped or heavily contoured sites, exhibit starkly different relationships with their surrounding urban environment and communities.
Mahakali Caves, Andheri
These Buddhist caves are located off the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli link Road and are surrounded by the city on one side and the Aarey Milk Colony which is a part of the Borivali National Park, on the other side. Though there is a bus depot in its vicinity, accessing the site becomes inconvenient due to an undefined entry, making these caves more secluded from the immediate context and the City. The extent of the caves and its fairground are clearly demarcated by a fence that circumscribes the entire site. On one edge the site is surrounded by slums and on the other edge the only access road is undefined with construction debris scattered along it. Presently, there is evidence of sparse usage of the caves by the local community for informal recreation, and the fairground has actively assumed a playground condition for the neighbouring slum children. Periodically the caves are visited by tourists and outsiders.
Jogeshwari Caves
This site has been recorded as the earliest Hindu cave temple in India (dating back to 520-550 AD. and in terms of total length the largest) . The caves are located off the Western Express Highway at Jogeshwari. In its present state it been it is surrounded by settlements on all sides located at 2 metres from the periphery. It is actively used as a temple precinct by the local community. They also use it as a part of their daily activity as a play space for children and a reading and resting space for the locals. The environmental state of these caves is precarious as the surrounding storm water and sewage find their way to the caves. Also there is a lot of garbage and construction debris in and around the caves.
Mandapeshwar Caves, Borivali
These caves are recorded as built around the same time as the jogeshwari caves and contained the largest Mandapa and a prominent Garbagriha. These caves were witness to a series of invasions by different rulers. They were converted into a church by the Portuguese. The church and its graveyard form one of the edges of the cave precincts. There are ruins of an old structure over the caves.The caves also have in their proximity other educational institutions such as St. Francis D’Assisi High School and Junior College, Technical Institute, Engineering College, School of Interior Design and Decoration. There are encroachments on the other side of the Borivali-Dahisar road. They have an open space towards the road which is actively used as a playground and a congregation space by the surrounding community. The project would thus document the historical evolution of the caves as well as the present condition of the caves with emphasis towards their structural and environmental conditions. The study will also focus towards understanding the nature of relationship, physical and social, of these precincts located within the city and the surrounding communities and their impact on these historic/archeological sites. The study would then propose ways of integrating these caves back within the city.
Re-Claiming Public Space in Bandra Reclamation
Processes of planning and allotment of resources in the city have relied predominantly on the abstract standards and norms given for specific regions — standards that work like thumb-rules, determining the percentage of a particular reservation, based on the population that the reservation has to serve. The Development Plan, and the reservations made therein, are manifestations of planning based on such thumb rules and norms, dictating the distribution and allotment of land as a resource for ‘public’ and ‘private’ uses in the City.
Such planning however fails to take cognisance — commenting here particularly on public spaces — of the varying nature of associations that different groups of people have with public spaces. Such groupings could be economic, based on age or even on gender. Thus, while classical ‘lungs’ such as open greens, maidans, waterfront-promenade developments, public gardens etc. continue to form the predominant definitions of what constitutes ‘public spaces”, the experience of Mumbai seems to provide ample evidence to the production of various “other public spaces” by different groups of people, reflecting their interests and aspirations. In fact, our studies of existing open spaces in the city — Shivaji Park and Oval Maidan — have revealed that the comparative ‘public-ness’ of these open spaces lies in their ability or inability to be able to act as a harbour for various interest groups (and their smaller unplanned public spatial formations). The production of such ‘unplanned’ spaces lies outside the present realm of the planning process. Consequently, the Development Plan — the state’s essential tool for planned distribution of land as a resource — remains devoid of this softer understanding of the aspirations and perceptions of interest groups, and the nature of their associations with and use of public spaces.
Most existing open spaces in the city are either occasional destination points or picnic spots — such as Borivali National Park. Out of what remains for everyday activities, most open spaces are being appropriated for private use, through programmes such as private clubs, or because they are connected to institutions such as schools. This seriously limits the quantum of ‘open spaces as public spaces’, available to the common public for daily use. Newer paradigms of public spaces are being defined through elitist and highly restrictive/exclusive programmes such as shopping malls, club-houses and entertainment parks such as Esselworld. These seem to follow a market logic which serves the interests of the elite consumers and developers, more than of the common public. It is vital for usat this juncture to be able to redefine what constitutes the realm of the ‘public’ and the ‘everyday’. In Mumbai, the notion of “open spaces as public spaces” is being challenged, and is in need of review.
IMAGECITY: Formal and Informal Networks
Mumbai in the Nineties: An Archive of Urban Interventions
Exhibition in ‘Images of Asia’ organised by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2003
This exhibition was an effort towards archiving urban changes in Mumbai over the past decade. Mapping the city to decipher such changes has always been dominated by a reductionism of physical conditions — a methodological bias that focused on an empirical, cartographic agenda. The product of this agenda — the map, and its ally, the census — became trusted informers in conceptualising the city. This conceptualisation is characterised by an incapability to understand changes in the urban condition. Its static nature cannot keep pace with urban change, and it is unable to encompass relations that are not physical.
Archiving efforts have been occupied by periodising events, fixing of benchmarks and establishing types. Such approaches are increasingly difficult to understand where urban environments are characterised by an ever-changing landscape — in a state of constant flux where every point is being challenged in its stability. It is difficult to establish a clear set of important architectural landmarks in the city, markers to map development. Nor can the city be reduced to a set of abstractions representing its various physical parameters — like movement, community structure, everyday practices of living, working and creating — on which the urban structure is based. All seem to merge with each other. In order to analyse patterns of growth, we must move away from conventional modes of mapping the physical fabric and built environment.
To shift the mapping process from an extremely empirical impulse and locate it in a larger dynamic requires a new understanding, a new archive and map of the city. We started our archive by scanning through the most accessible advertisements and brochures made for architecture. These indicated both the physical artefact — the architecture — and its socio-economic location. It indicated aspirations and living standards, with a concern for affordability. We found it necessary to see architecture as a cultural practice, rather than as an isolated artefact. We explored the ways in which the formal architecture of the metropolis was perceived – generated various new kinds of cultural and social forms — luxurious housing complexes with all the necessary and unnecessary amenities, new urban spaces for a new culture of elite consumption. These new cultures overlap with and result in violent clashes and struggle with other urban lifeworlds, such as in the Bombay Riots of 1992–3.
IMAGECITY Curatorial Statement by Gustavo Ribeiro
According to recent estimates by the United Nations, the urban population is, in 2007, expected to reach 50 percent of the world total for the first time in history. By the year 2030, it is expected that 60% of the world population will live in urban areas. Six of the world’s 10 largest megacities in 2030 will be in Asia.
IMAGECITY explores a condition of mediation, through a focus on image and sound narratives with a point of departure in a number of Asian cities. IMAGECITY juxtaposes disparate takes on current urban phenomena, comprising both socio-political and spatial events, as recounted by architects, media artists and film makers, as well as designs for new cities and urban areas – projective urban phenomena. No attempt is made in IMAGECITY to integrate the different statements across the different exhibits, nor even to create a middle ground. In presenting the viewer with a rough cut of polyphonic narratives, disparity and incongruence are central elements in the representational scenario IMAGECITY sets up.
The image is the shared medium connecting the different takes to current urban conditions. But the image is not simply a depiction, a lens, an a posteriori event, independent of urban phenomena. The image as a narrative medium, at the very least contaminates the city; it is insinuating, perhaps insidious. It can shape things on the ground and, as some of the exhibits included here suggest, it can be a political weapon. Through that perspective, IMAGECITY is not only concerned with accounting for architectural and urban design practices. It is also interested in inserting such practices into a broader context of urban events, which can in turn inform those practices.
In representing the intensity, dynamism and disparities of contemporary urban developments in Asia, IMAGECITY uses the concept of formal and informal networks. Formal processes are normally associated with official approval of building activity and urban management, accredited banking and real-estate institutions and planning by central and local government authorities. Informal processes are defined in contrast to building production and urban management, which are not dealt with through official systems and which are not financed through accredited institutions.
Following that approach, informal processes are normally associated with urban phenomena such as shantytowns and street vending. But beyond the above clean-cut definition, informality can be seen as a condition which is not confined to specific urban programmes. It can rather be seen as something, which permeates processes of urban production and reproduction, planned or unplanned, scrutinized by officials or not. In that sense, informal processes incorporate on the one hand, daily interaction and communication between people and use that leads to urban changes. On the other hand, informal processes include planning and urban management practices where official procedures are circumvented. Instead of a sharp division between the formal and informal sectors, we propose to look into hybrid practices, which are permeated by what are defined as formal and informal conditions.