59 58

Exhibition The Shifting City Text Kaiwan Mehta

An ongoing exhibition highlights how the city of Mumbai is a place that marks one's arrival, of one's hopes of 'making it', and the geographies of ‘arrival’ which are established through a range of particular spatial narratives

Mumbai can seem like a fantasy no matter when you or your ancestors got here. Just look at the promotional material produced by developers of super-luxury super-tall skyscrapers across the city. They’re all visuals conjured up to trick some arrivals into thinking they’ve “arrived”. The billboards, brochures, 3D projections and ads show worlds untouched by reality. The apartment’s windows open to sailboat-dotted seas, the race course, a verdant valley or an infinity pool on the podium. Nothing stands between you in the horizon, not even another skyscraper, never mind that the projects themselves spring out from the concrete jungle, right next to a slum, a railway track or a flyover.

This page, top row, and opposite page, top row, centre-right, and bottom: images from photojournalist Ritesh Uttamchandani's body of work titled Mumbai Darshan (c. 2019) [see page 70 for a detailed note]This page, left and above, and opposite page, centre-left: illustrations by artist

Sameer Kulavoor from his series Public Matters (2019)involve filtering and defamiliarising commonly seen subjects through the act of drawing [see page 71 for a detailed note] Next spread: photographs by Ritesh Uttamchandani and illustrations by Sameer Kulavoor

61 60

The city of Mumbai is a place that marks your arrival — a destination in a continuum — hopes of ‘making it’ within the larger cycle of economic and social well-being. To have come to the city and begin living here, as part of its machinery of material and financial exchanges, one has the notion of having entered a world system of objects and spaces. There is a clear corporeal and urban production of this ARRIVED sense — shaping the idea of city-living, and geographies of experience and encounter. These geographies of ‘arrival’ are established through a range of particular spatial narratives: spaces and behaviours of utilisation and occupation, being and becoming; and architecture emerges as the key site of this action and arrival.

The Mumbai Pavilion includes new works specially developed for the exhibition by visual artist and designer Sameer Kulavoor, writer and journalist Rachel Lopez, and photographer and journalist Ritesh Uttamchandani. It incorporates existing works from artist Sudhir Patwardhan, and photographers Pallon Daruwala and Peter Bialobrzeski. The pavilion also showcases extracts from research projects and books Extreme Urbanism IV: Looking at Hyper Density – Dongri, Mumbai (Harvard University) and State of Housing: Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India (UDRI and AF).

ARRIVED-IN MUMBAIThe City of Arrivals: “Come to Bombay, come to Bombay; Bombay meri hai”

This old song describes Bombay as a place of invitation, but where the outsider soon owns the city, and becomes one that defines and shapes the city, and then the city is all yours, and you are the city! Gillian Tindall titled her classic biography of the city as City of Gold and another famous song on the city, rendered in the classic voice of Bappi Lahiri suggests how the city is full of Gold, even while there is no place to sleep for one other migrant coming to the city, playing on the word for ‘Gold’ and ‘sleep’ which in Hindi is ‘sonaa’ for both.

Bombay and Mumbai, you arrive in, in distress maybe, but you surely arrive here in hope and for the promise it offers; you arrive in this city to become part of a ‘global arrival’. From the neo-Gothic architecture that lines the maidans in South Bombay to the high-rises of the 1990s that soar way above the city and view the city as a Google diagram only — architecture and urban spaces have conspicuously represented the arrival of global capital and the forming of an urbanity that is uniquely global in its imagery, but local in the way arriving populations bridge a temperament between native cultures and global representations. Bombay/Mumbai then is a city that is neither fully Indian, nor totally global, and is yet holding both grounds.

63 62

What is this ARRIVAL?The city of Mumbai is a place that marks your arrival – a destination in a continuum – of ‘making it’ within the larger cycle of economic and social well-being; where to have been able to come to the city and begin living as a part of its machinery of architecture and financial exchanges one has the notion of having entered a world system of economics as well as lifestyle. There is a clear material and urban representation of this ARRIVED sense – where a kind of material integration — a sense of becoming part of global objects and spaces is crucial to this experience and awareness.

Mumbai, which is often accused of lacking in ‘good architecture’ or where architecture is ‘driven by commercial competition’ — is actually an interesting site of a particular architectural expression — a landscape of spaces and materials that capture this shifting ground of global capital and the accommodation of people that become a part of this system and experience. To map the development in the last 30 years — approximately since the 1990s— a series of geographical locations of the city, such as the Bandra Kurla Complex, or the Goregaon-Malad Link Road stretch — one may interestingly be able to locate an urbanity of ‘arrival and announcement’ and an urbanity of a kind of economic fluidity. These areas, especially the latter mark a kind of residential geography, often of rental nature, but with a set of architectural and spatial elements that uniquely mark these zones of ‘arrived impermanence’.

These geographies are established through peculiar spatial narratives — spaces of consumption and occupation — which include from the architecture of corporate head offices, to malls, to call centers. The material and spatial arrangements create zones of suspension — outside time and geography, which allows one work-time in global cycles rather than local sense of day-night, but also casts an environment that is ‘outside location’ — and it is this very precise sense of the city outside-Time and outside-Locale that marks the ARRIVED (in the city) experience.

The above two are often coupled by a range of service networks — a mixture of faceless systems, such as home-delivery systems, as well as old-service systems but with a scattered work-force of people, permanent and impermanent in the city.

ARRIVAL to ARRIVED-INThe larger project focusing on Making Heimat/Making Home while ‘investigating the Urban, Architectural, and Social Conditions of Arrival Cities — looks at how cities become home to strangers, who come to cities in search of life, livelihood, safety, and hope… and in the process, alter the way the city and its inhabitants live. A city is constantly shaped by populations in flux, and the hopes and fears they deal with.

But Mumbai, which is also a city of arrivals, is today a city where people come to feel and become part of the global networks of economy as well as culture. People come to the city to become a part of its global imagination and project a self

The tide has turned. The city’s population has more than doubled since 1991. And in 2011, the suburbs grew faster than the island city for the first time in history. The business districts of Fort and Cuffe Parade; the trading centres of Kalbadevi and Pydhonie; posh Malabar Hill, Peddar Road and Walkeshwar; and the working class areas of Byculla, Agripada, Worli and Mahalaxmi, all had fewer residents. Where’s everyone going? North, it seems. The suburbs grew eight per cent in 2011. Goregaon, Malad, Dahisar, Kurla, Deonar and Thane saw the most new entrants. New commercial hubs, townships, the resettled working class, even new slums are in the suburbs. We now have just over 20 million people. By 2030, we’ll have 28 million.

65 64

At what point does Mumbai end? What happens when people outside the borders start coming in, or when people within the limits start to venture out? Or when the edges themselves start to stretch? In Vikhroli, the lines are drawn between old and new inhabitants of Godrej towers. Long-time residents want mangroves; upstarts want on-site supermarkets. In faraway Kasara, there are weekend villas with pools, golf courses, and two-car parking. Old residents, meanwhile, have water cuts, power cuts and no buses. Naturally, there’s friction. And in redeveloped buildings, old habits and old ideas of community are tested. Can connectivity to the big city alone make a distant neighbour feel like a Mumbaikar? How many generations does it take to turn ‘Them and Us’ into ‘This Is It’?

This spread, top: 'Mumbai Proverbs' by Sudhir Patwardhan, acrylic on canvas (2014)This page, left, and opposite page: extracts from German documentary photographer Peter Bialobrzeski's project

Mumbai Suburbia: Urban environment in crisis Previous spread: photographs by Ritesh Uttamchandani from Mumbai Darshan and illustrations by Sameer Kulavoor from Public Matters

SUDHIR PATWARDHANMumbai Proverbs (2014)

Original size: 90” x 340” Scaled reproduction: 14.5” x 56”

Mumbai Proverbs by one of India’s most important contemporary artists is a significant work that creates a chronology of the city through an interesting memory-history rendering. Patwardhan, as someone who has persistently reviewed the urbanity of Mumbai through his artistic engagements, brings to us in this set of seven panels a material, labour, and work-culture history of the city. The labour that lives and works in the city is simultaneous with the labour of producing the city — the architecture and the spaces that make a city — Gothic buildings, railway stations, industries of goods, call centres, malls, and so on. A history of what has produced the city, and how the city has utilised as well as glamourised itself through architecture, emerges sharply in this body of work. The bodies of people live, travel, move, and work within these structures of glass and steel; these open and closed spaces, producing worlds of exhibition and interiority simultaneously.

PETER BIALOBRZESKIMumbai Suburbia (2017)

4 photographs (each 1000 X 800 mm)

Peter Bialobrzeski uses his photographic lenses to bring us face to face with a contemporaneity of material and infrastructure that shapes the visual and physical experience of being a Mumbaikar today. While debates on identity run parallel to construction wars in the city, the two come together in the photographs of Bialobrzeski very critically. The brashness and rawness of construction, jazzy materials, rampant building activity occupy these images, asking us to wonder about the citizens that ask for these, or try to escape these, or simply survive these landscapes. The city projects a broadness of success and wealth, creating spaces that are today beyond the classical imaginations of squares and streets, or safely divided into inside and outside.

67 66

PALLON DARUWALAThe Imperial (2006-07)

Set of 4 images in sizes: 1 of 86.6” X 57.5”, 3 of 43.3” X 28.7”

As the building goes higher, it refuses to interact with the ground, the street, and so the public. Human interaction is contained within the unit-home — the apartment— which now folds up within its own self. Sprawling balconies or terraces in high-rise buildings look out and connect with the stars and the skies but forget the city they emerge from. The city is only a view-scape — a stereoscopic entity rendered as picture. Not the skyline one once saw out of low-rise buildings or across open spaces, but it is now the aerial view of the city. The aerial view distances the city; it creates an object

to be viewed from distance. The city is crawling, it is brightly lit, it is an apparent geometry of built and un-built spaces and objects, a map you until now saw only on paper — the city is up for ‘viewing only’ — it is the ‘object’ of beauty and disgust. It is there only as a view, not a terrain you walk and breathe, negotiate and live through. The city is distanced as much as the home encloses within itself. The window now is only an opening, not an umbilical extension into the city. The photographs by Pallon Daruwala heighten this sense of the aspirational high-rise, while making us encounter the realities of its construction — material and labour, grit and grind.

This spread: photographs by Pallon Daruwala heighten the sense of the aspirational high-rise, making us encounter the realities of its construction — material and labour, grit and grind

69 68

into the future of finance, and the culture of a globalising community. So, Mumbai is no longer only the city of ARRIVALS but a city you enter to feel ARRIVED IN. What are the material, urban, and architectural, as well as spatial structures that produce the projection of a Global city where people have ARRIVED IN — is something the Mumbai pavilion will explore.

EXTREME URBANISMExtreme Urbanism IV – Look at Hyperdensity in Dongri, Mumbai (2017)

Book edited by Rahul Mehrotra, Apoorva Shenvi, and Jessy Yang; Project by Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

(Extracts) The Bhendi Bazar Redevelopment project has been an interesting case in the contemporary history of Bombay and Mumbai — as a redevelopment project, as the potential and cautions regarding cluster redevelopment, as well as regarding community housing, social politics, and community aspirations. The history of many inner-city clusters through their contemporary struggles with decay and redevelopment, or transformations and

aspirational redevelopments, points to the interesting continuum of past and present of the urban form and people and communities occupying these physical fabrics. The transforming landscapes indicate how the sense of arrival and arrived-in are in a constant tussle and jostle, impacting financial and materialas well as visual fabrics of the city and the life of its residents. The study by the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, in its detailed pedagogic approach produces the locality within a wider spectrum of historical and global issues, making the city a much more connected space than one defined by nativity or community; especially when communities temselves today travel and house in multiple global locations despite often frantically identifying with a native centre.

This spread and next spread: various details and installation views of the exhibition

RACHEL LOPEZNew Gateways Within (2019)

A collection of 10 essays

Rachel Lopez is thinking aloud about the city — moreover the changing nature of the city — in this collection of ten essays. A journalist who is making sharp and perceptive notes about her city, the spaces she lives within, and often we are losing out on — has turned her eye now to capture that which is new, and demands comprehension, or rather escapes explanation to the naked eye. The changing geography of this city, navigated through digital connections, taxis (old and new), real estate hoardings, promises of greener pastures and starrier skies — is all captured in the essays by Lopez, trying to

understand, one more time, afresh.... what are we all made up of in cities such as Mumbai? The city is described here beyond its stereotypes — and in many essays, the stereotypes that have been overused to describe Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai are now read with completely new experiences and cases; addressing ‘the shifting city’. Via these narratives , she draws the new landscapes that have no Gothic buildings, nor art districts, or colonial histories to a reality of today: the today of shortened histories and instant pasts.

70 71

The Shifting City curated by Kaiwan Mehta — in collaboration with the Architecture Foundation, and Rahul Mehrotra as project advisor — is on display at the Goethe Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, until 26 May. The exhibition is a part of the project Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country, which was the theme of the German Pavilion presented at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 2016 - La Biennale di Venezia. It features the works of Sameer Kulavoor, Ritesh Uttamchandani, Rachel Lopez, Sudhir Patwardhan, Pallon Daruwala, and Peter Bialobrzeski, as well as extracts from Extreme Urbanism IV: Looking at

Hyper Density – Dongri, Mumbai (Harvard University) and State of Housing:

Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India (UDRI and AF). Exhibition photos by Anil Rane — courtesy Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai and Architecture Foundation. All texts and photographs published here are with the permission of the gallery.

HOUSING CHRONOTOPESState of Housing — Aspirations, Imaginaries and Realities in India (2018)

Exhibition curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta; Project by Urban Design Research Institute and Architecture Foundation (Extract: Chronotope 22/80)-This selection of 22 housing projects in the city and extended regions of Mumbai, stretching to Belapur and Lonavla (from the 80 chronotopes in the State of Housing project) indicate the landscape of dwelling and built-form in the city, that is constantly growing to fit in aspiation, and home those making the city their location of

Arrived-in. Housing is a crucial aspect of urban growth and migration combined, and hence, we focus here on how the community as well as the market has approached the sense of need and aspiration, demand and imagination of people settling in the city with strong sense of being ‘at home and in the world’ simultaneously in the city. This selection of 22 projects cuts across a spectrum of rental housing to private-city development, community support to speculation and super-high-rises. It indicates how the urban and physical imagination of a city gets shaped and how hopes and rights are planted in the idea, and the notion of home, dwelling, safety, as well as an ‘address to be in’.

RITESH UTTAMCHANDANIMumbai Darshan (c. 2019)

Set of 117 nos in size 7 X 7”

Ritesh Uttamchandani uses the logic of a journalist and the art of a photographer to document the everyday city.He is as sharp as a good traveler and perceptive like a local. These combinations produce a collection of photographs that come together to render the everyday as lived, as constructed with objects, and buildings. His photographs capture the complex and tentative relationship between people and objects, people and places, and behaviour across the three. The material city is produced in its details, and people struggle to live— into a lifestyle, they build relationship

with things and make marriages with objects — and Uttamchandani is sharp in capturing the changing material landscape of the city, and incorporated attitudes and habits of its residents and users. The city, in accommodating wealth and aspirations, produces a visible as well as subtle landscape of objects and materials — cell phones, hoardings, shopfronts and fumigators, cleaning systems and fitnes combined with religiosity, eating habits, and making space while decay and rot also demand a place. This landscape, which is not about dystopia, but a way of addressing the reality of utopia, is something this body of work brings to us with a critical finsse, and an observers delight!

SAMEER KULAVOORPublic Matters (2019)

Set of 44 nos in sizes 9.5 X 9.5”, 6 nos in sizes 5.5” X 5.5” Cafe (2019); BLUES (2018); Series 2 - A (2017); Series 4 - B (2017)

Sameer Kulavoor has been a chronicler of crowds; he recognises within the behaviour of crowds the sense of space and a notion of that which is urban or togetherness of strangers. Strangers make an urban street but they are all part of a similar system — of work, life, and production in the city — the urban world of objects and spaces. In his more recent works, Kulavoor is more sharply addressing the ‘lonesome city-dweller’, where dwelling within global networks makes you alter more local relationships, and where being crowded in a digital world demands you to be a physical loner. As spaces of living and being change, along with change in cultures of work and labour: the mall becomes the new public space, replacing the classical square or the street, while the cafe becomes the shared workspace. In Mumbai, there is a simultaneity of orders and spaces — the mall and the railway station, the cafe and the 9-to-5 worker — creating new imaginations of the clusters of spaces and habitable infrastructures we all occupy, travel between, live within, and even work around. Kulavoor captures in his new drawings this sense of city, in the dwellers and their locations of dwelling.

73 72

LIVINGON THE EDGE: Ev

eryd

ay

clas

hes

b

etw

een

ar

riva

ls a

nd

th

e ar

rive

d

In Mumbai, the kaali-peeli taxis ply up to Bandra and Sion. The local trains halt at Virar, Khopoli, Kasara and Panvel. Greater Mumbai’s limits end at Dahisar and Mulund. The MMRDA includes Thane district, Uran and Pen – satellite towns and villages whose economy is inextricably linked to Mumbai’s. And depending on which real-estate ads you’re reading, the centre of Mumbai is Wadala, Bandra, Sion, Kurla, Ghatkopar or Goregaon,

So at what point does Mumbai end? What happens when people outside the borders start coming in, or when people within the limits start to venture out, or when the edges themselves start to stretch? Can connectivity to the big city also make a resident of a distant neighbourhood feel like a Mumbaikar?

There was, for a while, a very popular online meme called Obnoxious Townie Lemur. The illustration of the animal would accompany hilarious, en-pointe captions that reinforced the stereotype of the snobbish, privileged South Mumbai resident for whom the world ended at Worli. “Malad? Actually, I visit Malaysia more often.” “As soon as I crossed the sea-link to Bandra, my 3G stopped working.”

It wasn’t long before a counter meme was born: the Righteous Burbie Raccoon, who saw the bright side of life on the wrong side of the Mahim Causeway. In Raccoon’s world, “Suburbs are cool because…” Aksa Beach is

cleaner than Marine Drive, there are fewer naaka bandis, all the cool malls are here, and so on.

No one remembers the Raccoon. The Lemur’s genius didn’t come from glamorising a wealthy citizenry with a higher standard of living and better access to resources. It came from its self-assured, insular view that south Mumbai was the only Mumbai, and consequently de-legitimising the experiences of anyone who lived outside the bubble. Raccoon, who fought condescension with community spirit, didn’t stand a chance.

Both memes have now run through the life-cycle of internet fame, and the characters are now friends. But south and north are hardly the only turf wars playing out in the city.

In Vikhroli, the lines are drawn, obviously, between those who live on the gated Godrej properties, and outside it. But crucially, they’re also between old and new inhabitants of those Godrej towers. Longtime residents can’t fathom why the upstarts would want on-site shopping and a supermarket when they could have 1700 acres of mangroves. The new residents can’t imagine why their four-crore home can’t keep out mosquitoes.

On Bandra’s Waroda Road, the alleys are too narrow for garbage trucks. So for decades, collection has been manual. A van comes around twice a day, with a municipal collector ringing a gong indicating his arrival. Every other night is a fight. Residents of the new high-rises, mostly renters who fell for the neighbourhood’s higgledy-piggledy homeliness (which includes the narrow alleys), will complain of the noise, park their cars at the van’s designated spots and prevent the collector from doing his job.

Even in faraway Kasara the sparks are starting to fly. The last stop on the Central Railway north arm is fast emerging as a destination for spacious second homes, weekend villas and clusters of holiday homes. The plots come with swimming pools, golf courses, in-house catering, staff that organises bonfire parties, two-car parking and other frills that Kasara has never seen before. Older residents, those who’ve been here since the 1980s when train connectivity to Mumbai was improved, on the other hand, live a different life. There’s six hours of load shedding, water cuts, unmetered rickshaws, and no hospitals. They have no access to the villas’ rainwater reservoirs, golf carts and backup electricity generators. Naturally, there’s friction.

It’s the opposite in Karjat, where the onetime weekend retreat is now a buzzing market for cheap apartment housing. Those who moved here in the 1980s and 1990s seeking peace and a place to unwind are now up against new locals who’ve moved into their primary homes. Weekend evenings are particularly tricky. How might one family hold a well-deserved party at their farmhouse, with barbecue, music and loud laughter, knowing their new neighbours in the adjacent plot need equally well-deserved night’s rest because they’re catching the 6.45am train to work in Mumbai the next morning?

Money talks in Mumbai; in Navi Mumbai it sloganeers. Non-resident Indians sank $63 billion in real-estate in India’s metros in 2018, over $20 billion in Mumbai alone, and Nerul’s Seawoods enclave is purpose-built for them. But the dollar-colony residents are being scuttled by very systems designed for them. Seawoods Estate NRI Complex, the largest in the area, with 46 buildings spread across 52 acres isn’t managed by a cooperative society like housing complexes in Mumbai. Instead, each flat-owner is a shareholder in the company run by a board of directors, who elect a chairman. And instead of maintenance dues, residents pay quarterly fees, which are the company’s income. But unlike regular housing societies, residents have no idea how the money is used and there are constant squabbles over transparency. The society’s board members hire bouncers for AGM meetings.

Mumbai’s fastest growing satellite towns are Mira-Bhayander and Navi Mumbai, where entire blocks of apartments stay locked all day, and reports of residential break-ins and thefts of just-bought smart TVs make the news every day.

But you don’t even have to go that far to find clashes. In old neighbourhoods on the island city –Mahim, Parel, Lalbaug, Byculla and Charni Road – chawls and modest tenements are being clustered and redeveloped to accommodate old and new residents in bigger, roomier towers. Here’s where old habits, old ways of life, old rituals of neighbourliness and old ideas of community are tested. And new dynamics must be forged. The first year typically brings the same problems. The housing society takes time to elect a head. The water typically runs out as old residents learn how to budget.

It takes a whole generation before ‘Them v/s Us’ turns to ‘This Is It’. Where does the city end? Perhaps it ends at the point at which we stop being accommodating or believing we belong.

NEWGATE-WAYS

WITHINRachel Lopez

This spread: an excerpt from New Gateways Within, a collection of ten essays by Rachel Lopez published for the exhibition [see page 69 for a detailed note]