Un-Built Environment

We have a total design failure on our hands. We have ended up with a built environment does not take account of the needs of the vulnerable, it does not produce intrinsically healthy environments either indoors or outdoors, and it has evolved in a manner that has obliterated place. Totally in contrast to what built environment is expected to achieve – to make life safer and more comfortable, productive, and enjoyable. From an ethical perspective we are witnessing a transformation that penalises those without a voice (e.g. children, elderly and disabled), rewards those with higher levels of material wealth (luxury spaces and products) and reorganises the built environment with no reference to any process of debate or consensus building with local residents.

The built environment is a powerful determinant of who gains and who loses in the distribution and redistribution of its positive and negative impacts, and has played a significant role in creating inequalities, inequities, social injustice, loss of community, loss of place identity, and a loss of spiritual dimension of life.

- Warwick Fox

A new Urbanism

The Tamil Nadu post-tsunami reconstruction had many lessons to teach. The lessons were primarily about what should not be done in the next disaster.

A new urbanism has come about in the rural, coastal regions of Tamil Nadu. The landscape has changed dramatically. Where earlier it was dotted with small hamlets, made up of mud and thatch houses, with little clumps of greenery around, clinging to the beach and its environs, it now sees a wave of concrete boxes. Rows upon rows of cheerfully coloured concrete boxes seemingly marching to nowhere. The coastal, rural villages have been transformed into semi-urban ‘townships’. The populace has been precipitated into a new “urbanism” and now adjusts to its implications.

“New urbanism supports regional planning for open space, context-appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. ……”, or so Wikipedia informs me.

But the new “urbanism” that came about in the wake of post-tsunami reconstruction scenario, has a different form, a different substance. The transition from rural to urban/semi-urban has meant severe adaptations for the community – environmentally, economically, psychologically, socially. The villages have had to suddenly face all the issues of dense, urban slums. The disaster did not end with the disaster.

Markedly different from what is “normal” or “traditional” in the area, the design, material and structural response has wholly concentrated on “safety”. An extreme response, no doubt, from a panicky government, to allay the fears of a population that was recovering from a never-seen-before and probably once-in-a-lifetime disaster.

The entire resettlement and reconstruction process was controlled by the Tamil Nadu government in a way that rendered NGOs into mere contractors, and the community into ‘beneficiaries’. The contract was between the government and the NGO and the construction and process was monitored by the local bureaucracy. The designs had to be submitted to the local technical bureaucrats for approval. The government, thus, became the ‘super client’ with all interventions responding to the priorities expressed by this entity.

Added to this, was the fact that in most cases, the beneficiaries did not know which house was theirs, so even if so desired by an implementing NGO, the design, could not respond or be adapted to the lifestyle, occupational needs, community relationships, size of family, special needs etc. of the beneficiary.

The architect/ designer/ planner too, helpless in the face of a political and bureaucratic ‘whip, was forced to adhere to prescribed building codes, to RCC-column-beam-structures and had very little scope to negotiate a better design response.

The uniformity, while trying to eliminate inequity, also eliminated creativity and sensitivity.

The design response very visibly comes from an urban, educated, and a ‘western’, mind, which perceives a compartmentalized lifestyle to be an ideal. Where rural, communal interactions happened seamlessly in a variety of ways – at the well, at the borewell, under the tree, at the tea centre, at the bus stop, at the market, these are now expected to happen in specified, marked-out areas – parks, ‘open spaces’, community centres, and sometimes nowhere. Where the rural home flowed into the street in a single fabric of private and public life, they are now on demarcated ‘plots’, that encourage territorial fencing, insulating the family in a way which is new to the community. The earlier clustered, meandering layouts of the villages have given way to albeit efficient but unfamiliar and rigid grid formats. Where one fostered interaction and connection, the other has transformed communities to nuclear families.

Ramnad, TamilNadu … an organic layout

Except for a few exceptions, the site planning response has been a disaster in itself. Where earlier the acquired sites were undulating, covered by shrubs and trees, and dotted with small water bodies, they now are ‘prepared’ and ‘treated’ – cleared, leveled, or filled. The sites lost their character, their ambience and their soul. The sites are bare, featureless, and the few remaining water bodies only threaten to become potential waste pits. The environmental costs of such hasty action will be borne by the communities for generations to come.

People took what they got, knowing that eventually they will modify their environs to suit their needs and lifestyle. The real architecture, design and reconstruction will begin, once the designers, the contractors, and the donors have gone.

There is a learning here.

If we are going to be faced with climatic extremes – cyclones, earthquakes, drought, heavy precipitation etc., as foreseen by Climate Change, we will be responding almost continually with reconstruction. Will this be our continuing response?

Reconstruction response itself needs to undergo a revitalization. It needs to become a subject to be deeply reflected upon. With solutions and responses to be theorized in the hallowed halls of education, so that eventually it will not remain a knee-jerk ‘response’ but will transform itself into a well-thought out, considered ‘approach’, a method, where sustainability and humaneness become embedded in it.

So that the disaster can end in the disaster, and does not spillover into reconstruction.

(this article was first published in the Indian Architect & Builder; January 2009).

Cloning culture

As Walter pointed out, Hyderabad airport is a good example of George Ritzer’s concept of “Globalization of Nothing”. Ritzer defines Nothing as generally centrally conceived and controlled and largely lacking in distinctive substance, while something is defined as generally indigenously conceived and controlled and possesses much in the way of distinctive substance. In other words, something is being one of a kind, and nothing is lack of uniqueness.

The airport has a “global” quality – undistinctive, uniform, like-anywhere-else airport. I often feel disoriented in such buildings. When standing inside any of these buildings, sometimes just for a moment, I try to remember where I am, which city? It was the same sense of déjà vu at the Hyderabad airport. As we entered it felt like the Turin airport and the inside reminded of the Paris departure area.

It is difficult to understand why Hyderabad airport should not look Hyderabadi. Why it should look like an European airport. The materials, the glass, even the so called ‘artistry’ of encasing the innards of the mechanical equipment in glass…

The motto of standardization is seen in airports, hotels, ATMs, malls, super-markets, metros, metro-stations, expressways, flyovers, traffic-lights, facades, billboards…. Even the models in the advertisements seem to look alike. We are now firmly entrenched in a look-alike, be-alike society. Our movies. Our soap-operas and reality shows. Our buildings. Our lifestyle. Our thinking, too, I am afraid.

I wonder whether we draw a sense of community and safety from within these symbols and motifs of the look-alike culture. We feel less alien. We are with the familiar, the understood. We are part of a larger machinery.

I guess with the fall of the many beliefs and systems, the current society is in a vacuum, in a limbo. Nothing has worked – the American dream, the maoist liberation, the communist revolution. The promise of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ending of the Cold War has proven to be hollow. The liberation brought about by Globalization only tinsel in nature. Do we feel somewhere deep inside that this is not what we wanted? But are afraid to say it, face it? Or is it the bigger, deeper fear of knowing that we do not know what we want?

I would like to think that this not-working out is an indication that something completely different needs to happen. That this is not the path. I would like to think this might be the calm before the storm, the stillness of the turning tide, the pause before the wheel turns. The space where the idea is taking birth.

That the Substance is in the process of being formed, being defined.