Imagine a Mumbai monsoon without a single water-logged hour. Imagine the Mahim beach, not as the big open air toilet that it is today, but as someplace you visit for an evening outing. Imagine a Mumbai that is not just the world’s most densely populated city, but the most eco- and people-friendly one. Is this a pre-industrial pipe-dream?
Not at all, say Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, the duo behind Soak: Mumbai-in-an-estuary — an ongoing civic exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) as well as a sumptuously designed book.
Soak gently urges you to unlearn your ideas on the whys and wherefores of Mumbai’s myriad disasters by taking you on a trip some 300 years back in time. The year is 1661, when a marriage treaty gave the port and island of Bombay, along with its “territories and appurtenances” to the British. John Fryer, a sailor sent by his bosses to take stock of the Empire’s new possession, found only “spots of ground.” No discrete, easily countable, number of islands (seven according to many a GK book). Subsequently, the British, by closing water flows, and constructing ‘reclamations’ of marshes and other areas that were under water for much of the year, created the one continuous block of land that today forms the metropolitan area of Mumbai.
One major effect of such energetic appropriation of land from sea, or constructing land with a definite border as per the various maps that mapmakers put together, was that the water flows that were natural (and essential) in an estuary were forced into narrow, inadequate channels like today’s Mithi; treated as drains for sewage to flow to sea. The result is the battle we witness every monsoon between the Arabian Sea and the BMC.
By tracing the construction of Mumbai, the book shows how urban planning, if it operates at odds with the geographical characteristic of a place, will invariably throw up seemingly unsurmountable disasters — who can forget the Mumbai Floods of July 26, 2005, which, by the way, is one of the sparks for this exhibition and forms its core. By the same dint, if we can come up with ways to retrace these steps, solutions will also appear.
Digging back into Mumbai’s natural history, Mathur and da Cunha, both of whom teach architecture and design at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, present Mumbai as a place in an estuary. If we want to live in an estuary, we have to plan for “gradients, not walls, fluid occupancies and not defined hard uses, and negotiated moments and not hard edges.” Such an approach challenges the Mumbai ‘master plan’ one, which sees the Mithi as a controllable channel, whose ‘riverfront’ can be landscaped (Mithi, by the way is not a river at all but one of the many opportunistic inland creeks that an estuary has). Today, Mumbai can get flooded with as little as 100 mm of rain, hence the need to learn to soak in the rains, not push the water out, says da Cunha. “Soak to flood is an enormous shift. It makes an enemy of a friend; even if it is a friend who is not always welcome… Awaiting the monsoon for better or worse is increasingly being replaced by readying for battle,” write the authors.
As examples of how Mumbai can make friends once again with the monsoon, the authors present five carefully researched projects, one around each of Mumbai’s historic Forts: Worli, Mahim, Rewa, Sion and Sewri. Soak argues that these could return to their original function — as centres of commerce and habitation — if we can make a few strategic changes. One such idea is for a new creek to cut across the sand bank linking Mahim Bay with the Mithi — not only will this enable waters to flow harmlessly to and from the sea instead of flooding the city, it can also be used to dock fishing vessels, as most of the coastal people are fishing folk. Floating barges that grow plants and treat human waste can take care of the problem of open-air defecation, with people being paid — yes, paid — to use these floating toilets. These can actually move to where people live, instead of the other way around. They can, from human waste, produce bio-fuels and manure to sell — a lucrative bonus that construction of pucca toilets and expensive underground sewers cannot offer. Cultivating coconut palms on the shores will bring in additional returns, besides protecting the land from erosion.
The authors say the administration is taking an interest in solutions such as these, which treat Mumbai’s teeming population as a resource, not as encroachers, and what’s more, offer a holistic approach that will make money as well as energy for the city’s needs. A creative, economically-viable model is what Soak advocates. Too imaginative? Perhaps that has more to offer than the failure of imagination that has marked much of Mumbai’s growth till date.
The Soak exhibition is on at the National Gallery of Modern Art till August 23rd, 2009.
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