In this post, my (email) interview with Bharati Chaturvedi, a name that needs little introduction to people involved in India’s environmental and social justice movements.  The founder of Chintan, one of the country’s most notable NGOs that engages with these issues, Bharati cut her teeth as an activist as one of the founding members of Srishti, during her student days at Delhi University.  Since then she has become a leading voice on issues ranging from urban development to waste management and recycling to climate change.  You can read about many of these in “Earthwatch,” Bharati’s weekly column, which appears on Mondays in the Hindustan Times.  You can also hear her speak in Sunday’s 48c Conversations, where she’ll join Soumitri Chatterjee, Amar Kanwar, Ashok Lal and Sanjay Prakash in an afternoon panel discussion on “sustainable modernities” and urban planning.

Alex: You’ve written about the Delhi government’s plan to install three waste-to-energy power plants, a move fiercely opposed by citizens’ groups, that by essentially subsidizing large-scale industrial recyclers, the city will be pushing informal recyclers, what some call ragpickers, out of work, making “the poor poorer” and taking ‘away their livelihood.”  You ask “where has the Bhagidari gone”?  Bhagidari as a political concept has an enormous potential, but it is also fairly vague–who are the shareholders in this particular arena of political representation?  And who is being left out?

Bharati: I think the discourse about the city is unfolding at two levels-the middle classes and the poor, each with their own vision of  Delhi. However, state policy has privileged the middle classes by opening out doors of communication and capacity to them. Examples of these are Bhagidari, which also allows for RWAs of recognized areas to apply for small grants for things like, say, waste handling. This per se would be a useful and democratic process,  had it been equitable, and had slums and resettlement colonies been able to access the same capacity building (understanding the system, identifying relevant officials for redressal of complaints, learning about waste and how to compost it etc), access to officials and funds. In fact, many of these areas need such spaces and linkages much more than, say, you or me, because the areas they live in are desperately under-served. What I mean when I say under-served is starkly under-served : In some resettlement areas today, there are only a few taps for several hundred households. Consequently, other versions of Delhi-as-home-and-workplace are swept aside and only one version amplified.

On the other hand, there is also a visible, visual and tacit change in the game of claiming the city. I see markers of these in several places all over, but hoardings are the most straightforward. Just a couple of days ago I saw one that said something like : Now, I can go out world class shopping in Delhi. It was sponsored by the Delhi Government. In our multiple-meltdown moments, it seemed to be like George Bush telling New Yorkers (or was it all Americans?) to go out and shop after 9/11. Just before that, I saw the commonwealth games village condos up for sale on a bus stop hoarding. I won’t plunge into the details, but to build housing for use for under three weeks, uproots the poor, totally ignore the natural river eco-system and increase the intensity of floods in Delhi, when they take place (average is once a decade)-this is all an out of control vision for Delhi that is not shared by the majority.

That’’s the way localities like Greater Kailash and Shahjahan Road conquer the rest of the city.

Alex:  The work you do both as a commentator, and as part of Chintan, engages with issues that don’t neatly fall into the categories of either social justice or environmental crisis, but somewhere in between.  Is there a need to fundamentally rethink these categories from the bottom up?  What would you propose in their stead?

Bharati:  Yes, we need to be looking at an alternative to the green-brown poles, and living and working in Delhi offers everyone an opportunity to do that. I think privileged people in Delhi have completely underestimated how deeply dependent their quality of life is on the urban poor and that, a decent payment alone won’t sustain the poor or this quality of life. In fact, we need quality housing, water and infrastructure that services both the poor and the rich (or richer,) otherwise the poor will remain poor and the more vulnerable of them fall through the cracks. This is bad enough as it is, but it also has a deleterious impact on cities per se. I won’t be pompous enough to offer an alternative, because I believe that the alternative will lie in what emerges after a process of critical (and brave) institutional engagement with the urban poor and the middle classes both and with each other, and finding common ground on tangible issues (public transportation and clean air, for example). But I also think that as the elite of the city, we also have to demand this process and learn to be part of the process, because the fact is that our voices are louder right now. If we keep opposing public transportation because it blocks cars, we will have blocked transportation for the 60%  of Delhi. Instead, we could have made a demand for, say, tree lanes. Just an idea, there would have been many more, if there was the consensus that we needed them. Another challenge for citizens is to stop biting the bait of the simple solution. Cities are complex and even citizens of 21st century cities have to learn to think not in black and white, but in layers with interstitial gray between them.

Bharati: Artists have the advantage of being able to share complex  ideas in a nuanced, visual way that creates discussion and debate. Much of this works at the emotional and intellectual level and this is the essence of how the arts can be part of muddling through a process for change.  For a more diverse and inclusive system to happen it is very important to create public assent for inclusion. The point remains about the spaces in which artists perform and exhibit, and who traverses these spaces, and in what capacity.

From Treehugger, a story on Margie Ziedler, who in the 1990s pioneered the conversion of old industrial buildings in Toronto into artist communities and centers for social innovation.  This is some good grist for the mill.  I can’t think of anything comparable going on here in Delhi, or indeed in urban India (although I’d love to hear about what I’m missing).  Perhaps the most interesting strand in this discussion for me is her contention that old, but not splendid and historic and (in the Delhi case) INTACH-worthy buildings, have a key role to play in the incubation of new ideas.  She says:

The required reading in my first year included Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. It blew me away, especially the chapter on old buildings — warehouses, factories, buildings that no longer served the purpose they once served. I’m not talking about museum-piece buildings, though they are beautiful and wonderful ingredients of any good city. I’m talking about old buildings whose owners are no longer worried about paying the mortgages, so they can provide cheap rents for people with low earning power — the writer, the inventor, the artist. These buildings are neat parts of the city. I remember reading that old ideas — banking, accounting and so on — can afford new buildings, but new ideas must use old buildings. Right away, I thought that could be a wonderful use for the old industrial buildings I love.”

Sometimes it seems as though public discussion on urban renovation and preservation in Delhi remains restricted to two polar extremes–the ASI-protected historic monument and the glittering new office building–with comfortable (albeit contested) domains carved out for each in a kind of tense, unwritten MoU. (There have been shocking breaches all the same).  Left out of this zero-sum discussion are the vast majority of neighborhoods, buildings and living spaces.  If it is too early for that discussion to start, then perhaps they should at least be protected somehow, for new ideas yet to come.

Any nominations for old industrial buildings that might fit the bill?

I think we’ve probably all had this feeling at one point or another: you’re sitting there in traffic at some interminable, glacially slow stoplight, clouds of exhaust envelop your face, time stops, and you wish to god that there were a flyover there instead.  I know I have.  You can fall into some dark musings in a moment like that, pushed by oxygen deficiency into demonic fits of inspiration, you can start to refashion the city as a whole set of flyovers, one over the other, a flyover over a flyover, until eventually they just build two gigantic criss-crossing flyovers, one north to south and one east to west.  We will live in their shadow.

Perhaps it was one such moment that led to “City of Flyovers” Debarshi Dasgupta’s piece in the current Outlook.  Most of it is fairly run of the mill ranting about the sorry state of Delhi’s urban planning.

The first time – as an undergraduate student in 2002 – when I heard the epithet “city of flyovers” being used by government officials to describe Delhi’s growth aspirations, I laughed it off. I credited the uninspiring and dull description of my city to our bureaucrats and their political bosses. But six years on as I see that vision turning into reality – Delhi since then either has or is building close to 80 flyovers – I have frightfully realised how revealing that epithet is of our model of development and how harmful it has been for a vast majority of us.

It tells us the story of an India that skirts problems rather than find sustainable solutions for them in pursuit of rapid development. Of how the country has opted for quick-fix solutions that benefit a few in the short-run but end up being problems for most in the long-run. This has led to a model of urban planning that has largely pre-empted the majority of the city’s population from developing any stakes in Delhi’s well-being.

All the usual suspects appear: Blueline buses, the exponential increase in cars on the roads, all of the many nightmares faced by pedestrians, encroachment on public spaces, the whole kitchen sink, everything short of the draconian enforcement of the smoking ban at Volga.  But have a look at the article’s header: any piece that begins with a photo of those “sprouts” (ahem) at the AIIMS flyover has got to have something good in store.   You know the ones, the shiny chrome globules on spindly snaky little tails emerging from the earth like the lifeseed of some alien master race?  They shouldn’t expect much love from Debarshi Dasgupta:

Encroachment of public space in our cities for promoting private interests is also worryingly picking up. Urban public art – so important to cultivate a sense of belonging to a city – has been used for other interests.

Recently put up at the AIIMS flyover, “Sprouts”, an urban art installation made with steel from Jindal, is less of art and more of avarice. To be fair, its dubious artistic merit may be defended by some. But what is certain is that the Delhi Urban Arts Commission – a public body meant to vet urban art – was never consulted before the installation of Sprouts. Why should a public artwork, aimed at celebrating the “arrival of a new India”, be put up so undemocratically? Why should scarce green space – used by people to lounge about freely – be pulled down to make way for more steel? And that too if it is was built at a cost of around Rs 4 crore and will be maintained for Rs 1.5 lakh each month.

I confess I had no idea that the sprouts were meant to symbolize the arrival of a “new India.”  I had thought that… oh never mind.

If you’ve ever wondered how to describe the sprawling areas on the outskirts of Delhi, torn between urban, exurban and suburban, allow me to introduce you to another term: periurban.  Who knows who coined it, but the webpage for a periurban research project in Melbourne gives a very concise definition:

Peri-urban areas form belts of non-urban land fringing metropolitan centres. They are often neither fully urban nor rural but form a mosaic of often incompatible and unplanned uses. They usually contain important natural resources, remnant biodiversity and significant landscapes, often remain important for agriculture and recreation, and attract diverse populations of people. These areas are under increasing worldwide threat from development and overuse.

A more fulsome and interesting discussion of periurbanism and the challenge it presents to urban theory and the study of the developing world in particular can be found in this interview with gadfly academic Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz (1990), Planet of Slums (2006) and about a hundred other works too numerous to mention.  The interview appears on the BLDG blog, here’s a relevant excerpt:

BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about the vocabulary that you use to describe this new “post-urban geography” of global slums: regional corridors, polycentric webs, diffuse urbanism, etc. I’m wondering if you’ve found any consistent forms or structures now arising, as cities turn away from centralized, geographically obvious locations, becoming fractal, slum-like sprawl.

Davis: First of all, the language with which we talk about metropolitan entities and larger-scale urban systems is already eclectic because urban geographers avidly debate these issues. I think there’s little consensus at all about the morphology of what lies beyond the classical city.

The most important debates really arose through discussions of urbanization in southern China, Indonesia, and southeast Asia – and that was about the nature of peri-urbanization on the dynamic periphery of large Third World cities.

BLDGBLOG: And “peri-urbanization” means what?

Davis: It’s where the city and the countryside interpenetrate. The question is: are you, in fact, looking at a snapshot of a very dynamic or perhaps chaotic process? Or will this kind of hybrid quality be preserved over any length of time? These are really open questions.

There are several different discussions here: one on larger-order urban systems – similar to the Atlantic seaboard or Tokyo-Yokohama, where metropolitan areas are linked in continuous physical systems. But then there’s this second debate about the spill-over into the countryside, this new peri-urban reality, where you have very complex mixtures of slums – of poverty – crossed with dumping grounds for people expelled from the center – refugees. Yet amidst all this you have small, middle class enclaves, often new and often gated. You find rural laborers trapped by urban sweatshops, at the same time that urban settlers commute to work in agricultural industries.

This, in a way, is the most interesting – and least-understood – dynamic of global urbanization. As I try to explain in Planet of Slums, peri-urbanism exists in a kind of epistemological fog because it’s not well-studied. The census data and social statistics are notoriously incomplete.

Here’s my question for you: if we loosely define the “public” as comprising a set of individuals and institutions that are neither the State nor the Market (in other words, if we follow old Habermas at least this far), then should “public” art be here in the city center, or out in the periurban halo that surrounds it?  Or both?

An interesting new study has been published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Letters.  The authors crunched data from some 300 cities around the world, including Delhi, looking at the physics behind urban street patterns.  A short synopsis of their surprising results has been published in the New Scientist.  An excerpt:

French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. The resulting patterns are much like the veins of a leaf.

The similarity that these road networks show is accounted for by a process that the authors describe as “local optimization” and results in networks with a consistent patterning.  This suggests that top-down models of urban planning only go so far:

The study’s results might be important for understanding urban growth and “sprawl” says Barthélemy. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a proportion that continues to increase.

“The approach could even help city planners to better predict how some street networks will evolve and to plan accordingly,” he adds.

Previous models of urban development assumed that efficient transport across the entire network motivated the system’s growth - as if planned from the top down. Focussing instead on the structure of local connections seems truer to real life, says Flammini.

Ok now everyone get over to Google Earth and see how well this works for your neighborhood…

Via BLDGBLOG, a story in the Telegraph about the effects of the global financial crisis on Dubai’s building boom, that begins with a reference to one Babu Sassi, ” the cult hero of Dubai’s army of construction worker.”

Known as the “Indian on top of the world”, Mr Sassi is the crane operator at the tallest building on earth – the 819m Burj Dubai. Sassi’s office, the cramped crane cab precariously perched on top of the Burj, is also his home – apparently it takes too long to come down to ground level each day to make it worthwhile.

In his absence, stories about his daily dalliance with death are discussed in revered terms by Dubai’s workers. Some say he has been up there for over a year, others whisper that he’s paid 30,000Dh (£5,300) a month compared with the average wage of 800Dh (£140) per month. All agree he’s worth it. One chat room post said: “[Sassi] must be a real expert at cranes or totally insane.”

The rest of the story leaves Babu Sassi far behind, and that’s too bad, says the BLDGBLOGger:

1) the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct (perhaps raising the question: what is the ontology of construction cranes?) – is totally awesome; 2) further, the idea that crane operators are subject to these sorts of urban rumors and speculations brings me back to the idea that there might be a burgeoning comparative literature of mega-construction sites taking shape today, with this particular case representing a strong subgenre: mythic construction worker stories, John Henry-esque figures who single-handedly assemble whole floors of Dubai skyscrapers at midnight, with a cigarette in one hand and a hammer in the other (or so the myths go), as a kind of oral history of the global construction trade; and, finally, 3) there should be some kind of TV show – or a book, or a magazine interview series – similar to Dirty Jobs in which you go around visiting people who live in absurd places – like construction cranes atop the Burj Dubai, or extremely distant lighthouses, or remote drawbridge operation rooms on the south Chinese coast, or the janitorial supply chambers of inner London high-rises – in order to capture what could be called the new infrastructural domesticity: people who go to sleep at night, and brush their teeth, and shave, and change clothes, and shower, inside jungle radar towers for the French foreign legion, or up above the train tracks of Grand Central Station because their shift starts at 3am and they have to stay close to the job.
How do they decorate these spaces, or personalize them, or make them into recognizable homes? It’s like a willful misreading of Heidegger as applied to the question of building, dwelling inside, and thinking about modern infrastructure.

It all boils down to what the author calls “the micro-tactics of dwelling inside strange but temporary homes.”  I was reading this and couldn’t help but consider our Delhi.  There are many, many strange but temporary homes micro-tactically dwelt in by short- and long-stayers around here, little jugaad constructions of tarp, rope, tree and wall; flimsy brick shanty chawls on the banks of toxic nallahs where the pigs wallow; ambassadors’ backseats… So out with it, dear readers: any interesting dwellings to report, micro-tactics for short-term survival in a strange city?
On a different, albeit related topic, for those interested in periurbanization and “the comparative literature of mega-construction sites,” a quick ramble through the Gurgaon Workers’ News is always in order.  Check out the photos, and look in the current issue for the impact of the credit crunch on shining periurban Gurgaon, our own little Dubai…