The redevelopment of Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) land on the city’s eastern waterfront (EWF) provides the opportunity to repurpose it in such a way that it unlocks land value and rejuvenates the city. And with this in mind, a designer and urban planner’s challenge is to make it a win-win for all the parties involved, said architect, urban designer, planner and academic Dr. Bimal Patel.
Dr. Patel was speaking at a public lecture in the city on Friday organised by the Urban Design Research Institute. The lecture focused on the sustainable redevelopment of the largely derelict and underutilised land. “A lot of MbPT land can be put to better use,” said Dr. Patel, “There is an opportunity to repurpose it.”
To begin with, said Mr. Patel, additional streets could be aligned with the existing network to improve East-West connectivity. Not enough land is allocated to streets in India, he said. In Mumbai, for instance, 11% of the city is covered by public streets whereas Ahmedabad has 18% of public streets and New York has 33% .
“Space for streets has to be allocated at the outset, it’s difficult to do so once everything is built. Once you have a grid of streets, you can build a highly productive, efficient city,” said Dr. Patel.
The challenge that most planners quote — appropriating land for streets — is an excuse, Dr. Patel said, as there are places in India where an orderly expansion of peripheral areas is taking place.
With an adequate street network in place, infrastructure can be laid out incrementally, he said. “Nowhere in the world is it built in one go. A city-building process is messy, uncoordinated and incremental,” said Dr. Patel.
He also stressed the importance of adding floor space. “Limiting the supply of floor space without limiting people densities creates scarcities. It only results in higher prices,” Mr. Patel said.
Better land use is just as critical, he said. “The character of a city depends on the nature of the public domain: its streets and open spaces.” In Lower Parel, for instance, streets occupied just 12% and there was no open space at all.
Dr. Patel said his vision for redevelopment of the area was “underpinned by urban form”. The plan is different from “text-based” by-laws made by bureaucrats, not architects, he said. Form-based laws, on the other hand, create blocks in the region designed to be sold whole or in parts, as well as “permissible building envelopes” that indicate how much land is available to build.
Citizens who attended Dr. Patel’s lecture raised issues about reclamation of 93 hectares for a public garden in the Development Plan to create public space, the heritage structures in the area, the resettlement of migrants and housing for the working class population in the area.
Dr. Patel reiterated that on all these issues, a win-win approach would have to be adopted.
“This is the last piece of land in the public domain, it’s at 62%. There’s scarcity of land elsewhere in the city because there is so much land available here,” he said. “If you want all the land to be in the public domain, you will probably get nothing.”
He cited the example of the Sabarmati Riverfront Project which he oversaw, wherein 14% of land was monetised to create housing for 11,000 low-income families who lived on the river banks. He said, “Monetising this was considered blasphemous by NGOs, but it allowed the project to happen.”
The EWF project, he said, will open up the waterfront: create large parks, opportunities for new developments that might add to jobs and productivity.
‘It can be fixed’
Port development, he said, is like a peripheral expansion of the island city. “Indian cities have to expand into the periphery. What do we do with the mess that’s already created? For urban planners, that is the bigger challenge,” and it can be fixed, he said.
