‘Don’t lose your waterfront. It will be hard to get it back.’

Richard A Plunz, director of Urban Design Lab, Earth Institute, at Columbia University in the US, agrees that developing a city’s waterfront can be a complicated issue, with warring agencies and problems at multiple levels. But cities can learn from each other to resolve this, he tells DNA.

What is the importance of a waterfront?
There is a temptation to see the waterfront as a recreation and leisure space, and this gets reflected in the market because in cities everywhere, the most expensive housing is on the waterfront. There is a pattern to this: If you take away industry and shipping from the port area, you start building condominiums.

Unfortunately, this model of development doesn’t go very much further; it becomes something of a mono-functional infrastructure. In Mumbai, as in many other cities on water around the world, the port area is very valuable as infrastructure. It should be flexible and diverse, and try to strike a balance between rail, ferry and vehicular transport. For, if you let the infrastructure of a city go, you’ll never get it back. In New York, we’ve tried to put in a more developed ferry service for the city. But the patterns are already set, and it’s difficult to retroactively establish it.
 
Two big problems plaguing the idea of developing Mumbai’s eastern waterfront appear to be those of slum clearance and of multiple agencies holding authority over this area. How can these be resolved?
A port is very crucial, but needs to be better integrated with the city and its workings. In Mumbai, squatters make up 60 per cent of the population, so where they live becomes an issue. We tend to think of squatters as illegitimate and are constantly trying to legitimise them. I am, however, sympathetic with both sides. The Mumbai Port Trust (MPT) has to run a business, but this business that is different from that of the squatters. Yet they are bound in a symbiotic relationship. People are very important to a city. If you move people to places where they have hour-long commutes, you will remove a vital sub-economy of the city, and won’t get it back. Even the sub-economy is important to make a city thrive.

Therefore, there needs to be a negotiation to resolve this problem. Dharavi, with its residents carrying out vital functions like recycling, is a dream for cities like New York where they’re sending their garbage 300-400 miles away for recycling. Looking from the other side, you might think the land occupied by squatters is more valuable for something else. But land use is a short-term profit; the human potential is more long term and substantial.

This problem of integrating a port with the city is not peculiar to Mumbai. It happened in New York too, 40 years ago, when containerisation and the shipping business moved out of the port area because of a lack of space. The locality was taken over for recreation, housing and such. Now there is a strong response to try and bring shipping back to the port area, but it’s too late.

Officials are trying to keep whatever is left of the port and kickstart economic development there by creating jobs and promoting production. But this is difficult to do retroactively. New York went too far in the other direction, by replacing production with service sectors like finance and business. In Mumbai, which has a diverse economy, integration between the port and city can be worked out creatively. 
 
What about multiple authorities?
This can only be resolved politically and, again, through negotiation. We had this problem in New York as well, where a new entity, the Port Authority of New York, was created to deal with various stakeholders and agencies. But first there had to be an agreement between all of them that the situation would improve only if they all worked together. A similar thing can happen in Mumbai if agencies in the city, Navi Mumbai and various other regions come together

You have to correlate all these agencies to maintain the economic advantage of a city. You can’t have separate agencies working separately, and against each other. In New York, the airport and certain aspects of transportation have come under the new Port Authority, primarily because officials realised that air freight is crucial to the economy, and created connections between the various agencies. In fact, the most advanced planning correlates different infrastructure amenities and systems together, and places like Kobe in Japan and Valparaiso in Chile, have achieved this.

New York has seen the downside of losing a port area when containerisation left. The Port Authority still has parts of the waterfront, but sections of the old port area have gone under other controls, especially those that have been redeveloped. We still have one small port area and the community residing there is very vocal about keeping it as it is because livelihood depends on it. They are forcing officials to rethink on how port functions, recreational functions and spin-off production functions can all work together in the same area, and not in huge isolated pieces. That argument holds true of Mumbai. Besides, there is enough port activity for everyone in Mumbai; other large facilities can be developed elsewhere in the city too, and need not be concentrated only in the peninsula
 
What ‘creative’ solutions would you advocate?
In Mumbai, as elsewhere in the world, ports are no longer just shipping operations. They are also real estate operations because of the land they own. For instance, in New York the port authorities built the World Trade Center and, till recently, were the ‘landlords’. They put rail connections under the towers and transport infrastructure all around, mainly to maintain commercial activity in lower Manhattan. But this was also an investment for the city. The situation in Mumbai is more complex — and it’s also a later time.
 
What has been the experience of other cities with waterfront-port area development?
In Kobe after the 1995 earthquake, everything had to be rebuilt. Luckily, the government had the investment to do it and came up with an integrated solution. But all cities don’t get this chance of a makeover. I don’t think anyone has found an ideal answer to integrating the ‘informal’ sector [squatters etc] with the more ‘formal’ work of development. It’s more complicated than having the money for it; it’s a social capital issue.

It’s been relatively easy to take care of this problem in older Western cities. London has considerable docklands, but they were largely abandoned by the time they started to develop. So also New York. In fact, New York in the 1880-90s was what Mumbai is today, with a different economic situation. Antwerp comes closest to the ideal of understanding the relationship of a port to a city and its expansion. Even authorities in London and New York have tried to take lessons from it.

On the other hand, places like Istanbul, which had a very dense ferry system, discovered the disadvantage of sidelining this. It started building bridges — about three or four across the Basra — and traffic was worse than ever. There were bottlenecks at various points. In Seoul, the mayor actually dismantled an elevated highway and ‘brought back’ a river that had been channelled to run under the city. Putting the river back has traffic working better, and both the eco-system and the weather have improved.

What are the lessons for Mumbai in this?
The mayors of cities across the world need to talk to each other in a non-political, non-threatening space. Unfortunately, there is no United Nations for mayors. But if New York, Shanghai and Mumbai were to engage in dialogue, they would find they have a lot to learn from each other. In June, we plan to have a New York-Shanghai mayor’s exchange. Self-education can happen more efficiently by exchanging problems and solutions.