Planners divided over FSI

Mumbai is lost in debate on how high the city should go, given the poor civic infrastructure and the high population densities in most regions. While a large section of bureaucrats, town planners and politicos promote the Shanghai way of development, which relies on according higher floor space index to promote development, an equal number of advocates believe that the FSI must correspond to the per capita consumption, which lags at 2.9 square metres per capita.

Even as Mumbai hopes to compete with world class cities like Manhattan, New York and Shanghai, the state leadership has been devising schemes and means to accord more FSI for development. The argument fed is that as the technology and infrastructure of a region increases, so should the floor space index. Examples of Manhattan, where the FSI permitted goes up to 11 are cited. 

However, as urban planner Shirish Patel points out, “What is forgotten is that the per capita floor space consumption of Manhattan is 63.7 sq mt, whereas it is only 2.9 sq metres in Mumbai. When our politicians justify increasing the FSI in the city by comparing it to a New York, we need to remind them of the comparative contests and very different requirements of floor space per capita. For the same level of crowding, New York’s FSI of eight to 11 needs to be divided by nine to arrive at values that would correspond to Mumbai’s floor space consumption.” Patel adds, “The problem is that 10 families occupy the space of one in a redeveloped building. The compounding impact is felt on the civic infrastructure, like traffic and sewage, which is not augmented to cater to this increase in population.” 

Also, in cities like New York the FSI decreases sharply as one moves towards the suburbs. Similar is the case in Paris where planning authorities give lower FSI as one moves away from the city centre. “The city obviously is not following any of the above methods,” said V K Phatak, town planner. “Our policy allows higher FSI through piecemeal development in one acre plot or building-by-building. Such planning will not increase the much needed road space in an area,” Phatak added.

Developers, on the other hand, say it is upon the planning authority to decide whether the redevelopment proposals should take into account the infrastructure requirement. “A redevelopment scheme only works if higher FSI is provided and it becomes cost effective to a developer. In the past four years, as no higher FSI was provided, no scheme was proposed. As to the infrastructure requirement, it is the BMC’s responsibility. In fact, I believe most developers will now go in for cluster redevelopment,” says Pujit Aggrawal, managing director of Orbit Construction and spokesperson for Property Redevelopers Association.

Senior Urban Development officials, however, claims the higher FSI will indeed lead to better infrastructure. ``With buildings going vertical, one is getting more open space. The road width also increases automatically. The civic body is constantly upgrading its sewage and water supply lines. One also have to take into account that the population in the island city has not increased over the past few years. So, there is not much worry,’’ said a senior UD official.  
 m_rajshri@dnaindia.net