‘Oversize kills ingenuity’

Renowned architect from France and one of the founding members of CEPT, Bernard Cohen, warns the city of the implications of the huge constructions and shopping malls that the city has been adopting fast recently. Cohen says the way and the pace with which Ahmedabad is growing, it won't be very far when the city will lose its diverse traditions.

Cohen is also the one who had originally come up with the idea of a Sabarmati riverfront project. However, unlike the current project with vertical walls and large volume of water retained in the riverbed, what Cohen had planned was allowing public access to the river water with a comparatively smaller amount of water retained in the river bed.

If we take just the 'constructive programme' written by Mahatma Gandhi, we have a guideline which is still valid today, here in India and the west. Gandhi is ahead of all of us whether it is Dubai, Shanghai, massive world markets or cities of glass towers.
The concept of swadeshi, efforts to belong to a common and a deeply rooted base is a key to a humanly enriched community. It is the opposite of all that is borrowed, copied and which contributes to making one a stranger in our own culture. It does not mean living in only a small inward looking circle that is insularly, but being very careful not to become oversized, fabricating and buying locally all that is related to everyday life and needs. This does not negate what cannot be manufactured locally.

More important, it safeguards, maintains, encourages the very small shops that line our urban streets, the sidewalk vendors, the thousands of self-employed, those working as servants who contribute so magnificently to the Indian economy in spite of being harassed, pushed or fined.

No shopping mall can replace people-to-people relationships found in the kirana or the fruit vendor who can advise you on what to purchase when. These are men, and often in larger numbers women, who are all highly motivated, have tremendous initiative and imagination and who struggle to make a living with so little. No urban provisions are even thought about for making their life more bearable. One could make larger sidewalks, not to speak of water or public facilities so needed like in the Ahmedabad's Sunday market. If that whole immense sector of India's economy was to be no more, the whole everyday structure would fall apart. hey must be recognised and not harassed.

Oversize destroys the vibrant indigenous component. What is too large or too oversized is destroying all that is vibrant, vital, indigenous and local here in India, in Ahmedabad, in Dubai, Shanghai and so on as in all the small towns of southern France where I live.

World culture is doing what one thinks that one should be doing; copying others only takes us away from own fundamental identities. It's all too fast, too big unplanned. It becomes a simplification and a parody of meaningful human life.

Large constructions taking here a hundred of acres or going higher than the neighbour with more square footage make no sense. The size should be in equation with the real need and not to one's self glory or merely because one can pay for it.

In southern France, in small towns, large horizontal super shopping centres have literally wiped out the small shops, the local tailor, the clothing and the shoe stores, the vegetable and food stores, the hardware stores and so on.

It did not even take 20 years to have erased a vibrant intimate crafts and artisan's economy. All are gone. All that remains in many smaller towns are some specialty stores, and stores setting watches, jewellery and designer clothes for the upper middle class.

With the super markets, super malls or super marts, the face-to-face intimate buyer-seller relationships are replaced by purely mercantile non-personal relationships. The goods in these malls are from places far away and the out-of-season products are made available throughout the year which is destroying the local provision, i.e. the local farmers. Slowly, it makes the people turn away from the knowledge of what is natural to the environment in which they live. Within a generation, the ingenuity, imagination, the age-long knowledge and know-how are lost. All the people, including those who used to produce, become just customers, for now, nobody knows how to make the day-to-day family and community needs locally anymore.

If that is the fruit of civilisation, let us turn away immediately. India's thousands and millions of self-employed small shops, informal vendors, sidewalk vendors are meaningful answer to a global senseless purely mercantile economy and we must be aware and proud of this.
(As told to Dayananda Meitei)