Twenty five years ago, when I entered architecture school in India, I found myself amidst an evolving dialogue on the identity of a post-colonial nation. By the early nineties – thanks to a handful of first generation, post-independence, Western-trained Indian architects – the best architecture in India had become a dominant mode of national identity. These talented, erudite and articulate architects had over three decades, transcended the Western Modernist ideologies and idioms they had trained in, and begun to develop a sophisticated Indian Modern architectural language using formal and spatial symbologies from India’s pre-colonial traditions – cosmic diagrams, passively cooled courtyards, the use of local stone, earth colors, folk art etc. These projects were a breath of fresh air compared to their early brutal concrete antecedents. For many of us, it almost seemed like these architects could do no wrong. They were our heroes, and their search for “Indian-ness” in architecture seemed as timely as it was inspiring.
Occasionally, these architects would get into larger issues of city planning – serving on national and local urbanization commissions, designing master plans, or even provoking propository ideas for Indian cities. They occasionally spoke or wrote about it, and their building-dominated monographs even had a few sprinkles of their urbanism dabbles. For many of us young architects or architects-to-be, these efforts were our only real link to the city planning profession. Even though there was an established profession of urban planning in India, with a national institute to edify it, not a single figure in Indian city planning was garnering the kind of attention the best Indian architects were enjoying. India had architectural heroes who were increasingly gaining global fame, but for almost four decades since independence, we had not seen a single urban planning hero. India had its own Fumihiko Makis and Ricardo Legorettas, but no one even came close to being a distant parallel to a Patrick Geddes, Edmund Bacon or Allen Jacobs.
Perhaps this was inevitable. After all it is far easier for architects to make their mark – their best built work is amply visible. Planners on the other hand do things that take a lot of time to come to fruition, and much of what they do remains invisible to mainstream eyes – zoning regulations, master plans, urban strategies, economic development, advocacy, activism etc. And unless they are able to articulate the importance of these efforts, they remain largely below the conventional media radar. Geddes, Bacon or Jacobs shot to limelight through their studies, advocacy and writing. They had been able to articulate the importance of urban planning in the West as both a discipline and a profession. They had been able to make it matter.
Alternatively perhaps, India was not ready for urban planning talk. In a society that is ambiguously regulated, and enmeshed in the most complicated urban issues such as poverty, social injustice and appropriation, the Indian city – as both product and process – had come to be something quite cumbersome compared to what Western planners were writing about. When it came to buildings and urban form, there was hardly a clear physical context to respond to in the first place. And the generic Indian public realm – an appropriated, semi-ordered, amorphous entity that sustained itself magically – was too complicated to engage with, leave alone transform or shape through planning, policy or design. It was therefore, all the more easier for the best Indian architects to make idiosyncratic buildings without worrying about what was around them, and make them provocative enough to create a national and global stir. It was, meanwhile, far more difficult for Indian planners to be at a parallel cutting edge.
But things began to gradually change in the nineties, for a number of reasons. First, there was a paradigmatic intellectual shift in North America and Europe, where a number of influential architects – from Christopher Alexander to Charles Moore – were re-prioritizing the making of urban form and the public realm over one-off buildings. Second, manifestos, movements and rhetorics like New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, Post-Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism were dominating the North American architectural academy, and diffusing the lines between architecture and city planning. Many Indians who received advanced degrees in architecture, urban design or planning in the West in the late nineties and beyond were insinuated with these notions, and those who returned back to practice in India were naturally drawn or interested in engaging with the Indian city as a canvas for practice, far more consciously than their predecessors. Urbanism was emerging in India – as it had in the West – not as an academic theory or an occasional project by an architect, but as a franchised profession that was invested in making better cities by bridging the disparate disciplines of architecture and planning.
Well into its post-1991 neo-liberal economy, India now has an increasing ensemble of urban designers, planners and activists – many trained as architects – who have made the transformation of the Indian city their primary professional concern. From rethinking streets and public transit, reclaiming neglected naalaas, planting public toilets, to recasting urban regulation, the increasing ubiquity of such concerns is as refreshing in post-liberal Indian architecture, as the search for “Indian-ness” had been before.
In fact, an intellectual shift has occurred across India itself – from concerns of post-colonial identity to those of neo-liberal urbanity. There is the new Prime Minister’s “100 Cities” proclamation. There have been major gatherings like the 2014 Urban Age Award event. There is the founding of the Institute of Urban Designers – India in 2007, and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (an interesting parallel to the Indian Institute of Technology that was incepted three years after India’s independence) in 2009. Terms like “Liveable Cities,” “Green Cities,” “Smart Cities” are all over the place in India today (even though what exactly this means is still not necessarily clear.) For the first time in its recent history, Indians from all walks of life – entrepreneurs, elites, politicians, civic leaders, activists, urbanists, architects, artists, spiritual leaders and, best of all, ordinary citizens – are invested in some form or the other in the “city.” Whether this represents the coming of age of a born-again nation, an intellectual outcome of its thriving economy, or a practical response to living in the “century of cities,” this shift cannot be underestimated. It is an unprecedented moment for the world’s largest democracy.
The best thing about all this, is that Indian citizens are finally recognizing that cities are not shaped by architects, but by numerous other entities to a far greater a degree – politicians, administrators, economists, activists, transportation engineers, developers, planners – with architects coming much later into the equation. And progressive architects in turn are recognizing their real place in the complex game of city making. This is a good thing, because, for all the theoretical positions and ideologies that are making “better cities” in the West, the fact is that Indian cities are way too complex for clean manifestos and movements. Indian cities are and will be shaped by a complex web of practices – far more complex than the West. The Indian city will continue to need sparks of tactical brilliance – like NGO’s, citizen groups and activists – that can advocate and act towards immediate change, particularly at the vast bottom of its economic pyramid. It will need ideas with ambition and optimism, and this is already happening through experiments in “smart technology” by entrepreneurs, technocrats and scientists. And it will need waves of long-term and systemic policy reform, and this will have to come from enlightened politicians and administrators. They may not be easily visible, but many such progressive struggles are well under way. These efforts need to be highlighted and brought to the forefront. The new heroes of Indian city-making (not architecture) – multifarious and multidisciplinary – need to be identified and recognized, so that their work may inspire and inform many other campaigns and endeavors. In their struggles, successes and failures lie the seeds of India’s urban future.