In February this year, Mumbai held an exhibition called the State of Architecture, the country’s first major architectural exhibition in nearly 30 years.
Much of the discussion was about questioning the state’s role as a patron for architecture and thereby questioning the role of the architect in contemporary Indian society. In Mumbai, despite the fact that public spaces are an area of constant debate, examples of the state working with professional architects to build a better city are few and far between. There are outliers like the Bandra Bandstand Seafront Restoration, done by P.K. Das and Associates, but there are few others to point at.
A collective of architects and designers based out of Bandra is attempting to change that.
They call themselves the Bandra Collective, and their work is, broadly speaking, an attempt to improve this discussion on public space design, and engage in collaborative dialogue with local government.
As a relatively new organisation, the Collective hopes to inform people about their work by plugging into other NGO and civil society movements, like the NGO and welfare association collective Apna Mumbai Abhiyan, who have also initiated a dialogue on several levels about infrastructure projects.
Their first project, undertaken in February this year, was an attempt to help citizens fully understand the impact of what is arguably Mumbai’s most hotly-contested infrastructure project in the city’s new development plan (DP), the proposed Coastal Road that run along the city’s western coast, connecting Nariman Point to Kandivali.
Try running a Google image search on the term ‘Mumbai coastal road’. What you’ll see is a series of concept drawings showing the course that the road will take through the city. This is interspersed sometimes with visual images of coastal roads in other countries to better provide an illustrative example but that may actually have no bearing to the Mumbai context.
What this would seem to show is that while there is now a concerted movement among several citizen organisations to question the merits of such infrastructure projects and their possible infringements on public space and the city aesthetic, there is little or no understanding of how it might visually alter the physical fabric of the city. There is hypotheses based on what the project might look like, but not the full picture.
The Collective is using their technical knowledge to create a visualisation of the coastal road as it is outlined in the DP. The images, on their Facebook page — facebook.com/ BandraCollective — show, for instance, visuals of the proposed road on the Haji Ali stretch and the beams of concrete that will obstruct the view from the road, and what the road will look like on the Carter Road stretch of Bandra where it will cut off access to the promenade.
“What we are doing with these images is to bring into the visual realm the plans written in documents like the DP and DCR [Development Control Regulations],” says Sameep Padora, one of the architects involved in the collective. “Allowing people to visualise these plans in terms of how spaces will change will help them make more informed decisions.”
That the Collective’s members are all influential design professionals helps make their voices heard, of course. And a helpful local corporator in Bandra has played a big role in the Collective being able to intervene in public space design as professionals. They are now working pro bono with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation officials to come up with better designs for public spaces around the areas in which they live and work. The first project is a redesigning of the pavement space and benches along the inner pavements of Carter Road, a stretch that seems to have got ignored when the sea-front promenade was redesigned. They are now also working with the corporation in creating designs for refurbishing parks and gardens in Bandra as part of the BMC’s plan to add more sport facilities to them.
“It’s often the case that building parks or gardens is seen by the corporation as a process of procurement rather than design,” says Samir D’Monte, another architect who is part of the collective. “So a tender would be put out and then awarded to a contractor who will get a draftsman to come up with a basic design. But these designs then don’t meet the physical requirements of that particular space and what people there need.”
“The role of the architect is marginalised in civic society today,” Mr. Padora says, highlighting a curious flaw in a city where usage and access to space has always been a big talking point. For him and his colleagues, that’s clearly not an epitaph; it’s a challenge.
