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India's Insular Urbanism

By Anh-Linh Ngo, Kristina Herresthal, Anne Kockelkorn, Martin Luce //

“I’m coming from where you’re going – and it’s not worth going there.” Packaged as a parable, Charles Correa reports in his book “The New Landscape” of the mutual incomprehension separating Western hippies from prosperous Indians in the India of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippies, having left the material wealth of the West behind them, wandered dishevelled and barefoot through India’s streets in search of life’s deeper meaning.

Their Asian counterparts, enjoying their newly acquired affluence with ostentatious pride, experienced the gazes of their interlocutors as a direct attack. Each signalled that the lifestyle chosen by the other – characterized respectively by supposed progress and the purported authenticity of a pre-modern way of life – was not worth the effort, that sadly, neither path promised fulfilment. “I’m coming from where you’re going – and it’s not worth going there.” By means of this apt formula, Correa – a long-time authority on Indian architecture – focuses the ambivalence of the process of modernization (cf. Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, ARCH+, no 185, November 2007, p. 58 ff.).

Encountering one another in this parable – albeit with the usual roles reversed – are the beneficiaries and the underdogs of modernization. This encounter demystifies the image of India that has prevailed in the West since the late 18th century, especially in the German speaking countries, one that has allowed India to serve as an intellectual projection surface. The myth of India – which flourished all the way from Romanticism and up to the dropout culture of the hippies – was sustained by a presumed holistic model of life, one that enlightened Europe believed it had rediscovered intact in ancient India. At the same time, this idealized India functioned to an extent as a critique of the rationalism of enlightened Europe, and of its concomitant loss of spirituality. Nearly all of the important thinkers and poets of German Romanticism (among them Goethe, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schopenhauer) perceived ancient Indian culture and its texts in this spirit. As demonstrated by Miksha Sinha, an Indian cultural studies expert, this preoccupation with an idealized India of antiquity also furnished a sense of self-certainty and served the construction of one’s own cultural identity (p. 16 ff.). According to Peter Sloterdijk and Sinha, this “Asian Renaissance,” which was accompanied by an “Asianization of thought” (as pointedly formulated by Peter Sloterdijk; p. 14 f.), provides the key to a postcolonial, perspectival understanding of culture and identity, one that is today more important than ever before.

Very much in the spirit of the perception outlined above, architects too have turned toward Indian architecture as a point of departure. In 1915, in his lectures in popular education delivered on behalf of the Social Democratic Party, German architecture critic Adolf Behne discovered a spiritual affinity joining Indian and Gothic architecture (Manfred Speidel, p. 20 f.). For Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, the East even promised the redemption of Western art, perceived by them as being spiritually impoverished. But even architects such as Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, who no one has ever suspected of mystical tendencies, allowed themselves to be infected by this euphoria over the Orient, perceiving “a goal” in Indian architecture and sculpture.

But what does India mean for us today? At the very latest with the commencement of accelerated globalization and liberalization and the economic policies of the early 1990s, the process of modernization that has preoccupied the Indian nation ever since the achievement of independence exactly 60 years ago has succeeded in dispelling this veil of mysticism, which has now been supplanted in the West by a very different image of India. The spiritual “wisdom” of this “promised land” (Hegel) has evolved into the (IT) “knowledge” of a globally competitive economic power. In their book Multi-National City, from which excerpts of the first German translation appear in this issue, Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi provide an account of India’s steady development into an IT center, a development which must be viewed in the context of the nation’s modernization as a whole. Rather than a-historically mystifying the recently proliferating globalization (which simply represents a further stage in the process of modernization), as many critics have done, these authors delineate the history of Indian modernity in a virtuosic arc: the mood of upheaval in the period following the achievement of independence, testified to by Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, along with many other public buildings and projects; the search for identity during the 1970s and 80s; and the socioeconomic impact of liberalization during the 1990s (p. 56 ff.).


“The Good Life is Insular“

In contrast to this teleological point of view, Gyan Prakash, historian and member of the well-known Subaltern Studies Group, emphasizes the a-historical behaviour exhibited by the spatial organization of the city. “A-historical” in the sense that urban development does not necessarily proceed in a linear fashion in the spirit of historical evolution à la Hegel. As the site where modernization processes are played out in an intensified fashion, the city does not represent a stage in the transition from tradition to modernity. It does not deliver redemption or betterment for all; instead, it is simultaneously modern and pre-modern. Occurring there in parallel fashion are contradictory developments, while divergent developmental stages exist side by side without ever converging toward a common historical objective (p. 28 f.). In this context, Prakash follows the argumentation of Michel Foucault, who in his essay “Other Spaces” asserted that the era of the teleological fulfilment of history in the form of a linear project now lies behind us: “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” The urban reality of the 21st century is reflected in this characterization. This reality is perforated by temporal leaps. Springing up ceaselessly on the one hand are new high-tech islands of affluence, while persisting on the other are large areas and large groups of population that exist in precarious state of underdevelopment and poverty. This extreme socio-spatial discrepancy is the hallmark of India’s urban development, one which we confront in this volume with the thesis of Indian’s insular urbanism.

“The good life is insular,” writes Gautam Bhatia in his contribution (p. 89 ff.). This bon mot could stand for the spatial development of contemporary cities as a whole. The powers that be have long since abandoned the project of creating a homogenous and modernist space designed to generate life conditions of equality for all. In its place is an economy structured around special economic zones and IT parks, a society marked by enclaves of affluence for the middle classes, by gated communities and shopping malls, and a politics focused on the provision of advantageous conditions for private investment. The result is a form of “insular urbanism” which, while encountered all over the world today, has assumed hitherto unrecognized dimensions in India. In ARCH+ 183, entitled “Situativer Urbanismus” (situative urbanism), the group Urban Catalyst provided us with a definition of this phenomenon: “In spatial terms, this entrepreneurial mode of urban development manifests itself in an ‘insular urbanism’: locations of interest to investors are planned out down to the smallest detail as enclave-style projects, while the territories lying between them disappear altogether from the public’s consciousness.” New for the West, however, is the fact, demonstrated by Urban Catalyst, that the fallow zones generated by such development make possible a new freedom for alternative forms of agency. In India, it is precisely such ambivalent urban interspaces which constitute the basis of existence for millions of marginalized city dwellers. These individuals quickly move into such spaces, occupying and defending the niches that have now fallen into their control, for no matter how precarious they might be, the tight interlinking of such spaces with the larger city represents the sole available survival option (Philipp Rode, o. 86 f.). The enclaves of affluence, then, are woven together as intimately as possible with their larger surroundings, occupied in turn by the majority of the population and characterized by highly precarious conditions. The informal sector, with its inexhaustible reservoir of low-wage workers, provides the new middle classes with the indispensable services which alone ensure their viability. In his portrait of Mumbai, this symbiotic relationship (assuming that such euphemistic expressions are even permissible) is described by Kiran Nagarkar as a characteristic trait of the quality of life of this otherwise dysfunctional megacity (p. 24 ff.).

Regardless of moral valuations, it is precisely here that a critical form of city planning should begin, in order to investigate how this state of affairs affects space and the way it is used. For “what sets middle-class neighbourhoods apart from slums is not time but space; not just physical space but also the space of power.” (Prakash)


The Retreat of the State

When the Indian state was founded, the discourse of modernization was driven by the contradiction between city and country. Meanwhile, the state seems to have totally abandoned the objective of even development. In the 60 years since independence, the state has failed to solve the pressing problem of urban poverty, and has proven unable to provide adequate residences and infrastructure. Nearly all large-scale attempts at addressing these issues have brought new problems in their wake. For many people, urban renewal has resulted in the large-scale loss of a viable economic basis. In some cases, slum dwellers have been pushed outward and warehoused in remote districts, where they are no longer able to offer their services, or if so, then only under extremely disadvantageous conditions. In others, the new residences provide neither adequate space practicing handcraft trades, nor sufficient opportunities to sell products to customers locally. This incapacity on the part of the state has led to a wide reliance on self-help efforts; it has also led to the formation of an autonomous branch of the economy, the network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which act as intermediaries, assisting poor people with every aspect of their lives. In many cases, it is no longer clear what agenda is actually being pursued by these numerous NGOs, nor precisely who they are fighting for. Increasingly, the process of balancing divergent interests which is proper to the normal operations of civil society has been functionalized and implemented in a manipulative manner, with private investors or even the state itself founding NGOs in order to pursue narrow objectives, for example the expulsion of slum dwellers from their homes in order to acquire lucrative surfaces for development. Mike Davis refers to this process as “NGO liberalism” (p. 70 ff.). At the same time, the democratic process functions well in India, for slum-dwellers make good use of their right to vote. For this reason, they are a political force to be reckoned with; nonetheless, so-called “vote bank politics” (meaning the unanimous voting of large blocs), does counteract the effects of such assertions of specific interests, and moreover regularly distorts the complexity of the local political reality. “The people who are ‘resisting’ may not even see themselves as resisting” claim Solomon Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari Raman, who argue in their contribution for an offensive “urbanism of occupation” and for a “politics of stealth” (p. 97 f.). Unequivocal judgments would seem to be inadequate; for virtually any statement, it appears, it would be possible to find assertions of the contrary position: NGOs are now said to be advocates of the poor, now their manipulators; slum dwellers as either marginalized, or are instead small entrepreneurs, potential voters and developers (CRIT, p. 84 f.). Government administrators are regarded as incompetent and inefficient, or else as the safeguards of collective interests. In response to the premise that increasingly, planners operate in a climate of uncertainty, both concerning basic principles as well as vis à vis their working partners, we find the subversive practices described by Benjamin and Raman as fluid strategies of appropriation which ensure the functioning of the organism as a whole. Contrary to Western notions, the occupation of public spaces is not merely the consequence of the prevailing understanding of use and ownership, and is not simply attributable to a general lack of space. This form of appropriation does more than contribute chaotic or occasionally picturesque forms of liveliness to the Indian city, but instead also produces a necessary tolerance.


The Paradox of Indian Urbanization

Given the overstrained and to some extent dysfunctional infrastructure of India’s metropolises, the system ought to have collapsed long ago. The fact that it continues to function at all is due, among other factors, to the individual initiatives of residents in many Indian cities, especially in the slums, who have developed their own systems for providing life’s necessities. Despite all of their drawbacks, these do function astonishingly well. Examples are the system operated by Dabba Wallas, which daily delivers many hundreds of thousands of food rations to urban inhabitants; Mumbai’s informal recycling system; and the unofficial sewerage pipelines found in the slums. In his article, Martin Fuchs offers a striking account of the social networks and mechanisms of self-government operating in Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest slum (p. 77).

Assuming that urbanization continues apace, how will the state come to terms with the tasks facing it in the future? For presently, with an urbanization index of 30% (and in this regard, the Indian megacities are deceptive regarding the overall picture), India is far behind worldwide developments, which have recently overtaken the 50% mark. The fact that just a few metropolises are forced to bear the burden of urban development for the country as a whole constitutes the “paradox of Indian urbanization” (Ravi Ahuja, p. 38 ff.). This unequal growth may further exacerbate existing problems. Can civil society alone overcome them? Which existing mechanisms of planning, administration and the balancing of interests are capable of meeting these challenges? The conference Urban Age India in Mumbai in November 2007 will attempt to deal with the central question of how the world’s largest democracy can come to terms with continuing urbanization and dynamic economic development.

Team: Kristina Herresthal, Anne Kockelkorn, Nikolaus Kuhnert, Martin Luce, Anh-Linh Ngo with Daniel Korwan and Jeanette Kunsmann

Urban Age is a series of conferences organized by the Alfred Herrhausen Society in collaboration with the “Cities Programme” of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in order to generate discussions of the implications of global urban development among all of the responsible parties from the spheres of politics, planning, economics and civil society. Support from the Alfred Herrhausen Society has made possible wide-ranging research and the publication of ARCH+ 185. Our special thanks to Wolfgang Nowak (Managing Director) and to Ute Weiland, as well as to Jessica Barthel and Priya Shankar. For collaboration on the contents, thanks to the Urban Age Team of the LSE, in particular Ricky Burdett, Philipp Rode and Pamela Puchalski.

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