1401: MUMBAI METROPOLITAN: Adapting the Airport Lands, Mumbai, India
Department of Landscape Architecture
Studio Option
8 credits
Tuesday 2:00 - 6:00
Thursday 2:00 - 6:00
Instructor(s)
Niall Kirkwood, Nazneen Cooper
Course Description
Abstract
The sponsored studio MUMBAI METROPOLITAN will reconsider the Greater Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and India's densest and most grossly inhospitable urban fabric as part of a more livable and sustainable metropolitan landscape and a locale of shifting civic ecologies, local and global economies and residential environments.
A series of design propositions will be made and tested for the adaptation of lands currently occupied by the 1,450-acre Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport soon to be modernized and reconfigured. A program for new residential townships will be proposed in the available land alongside additional infrastructure, open space and industrial initiatives.
The Airport Lands are currently surrounded by or under the influence of inadequate road infrastructure, working factories, existing residential townships, 200 acres of slum housing in the adjacent Azadnagar shantytown and to the south-east declining mangrove preserves alongside the Mithi River. In particular the class will explore the relationship of this fast emerging yet haphazard Metropolitan landscape in the north and northeast of Greater Mumbai to the surrounding context and to core connections in the Island City to the south. The regeneration of existing land, open space and infrastructure for housing will be proposed in opposition to the current private sector-led approach to the expansion of the Island City through wholesale demolition and reconstruction on public lands. The likely outcome of this approach remains to be tested, especially in combination with, and from a local perspective and it will be a central part of the studio analysis to research and critique current approaches to redevelopment and planning that support private and community activities, including satisfaction of local aims and ambitions, as it will be to advance an overall attitude to the growth of the Metropolitan area.
The studio pedagogy will therefore be focused on three complementary activities; approaches to the adaptive reuse of current public lands, buildings and infrastructure, the development of personal design agendas on local cultural, work, family and recreational practices, and strategies to address the broader environmental and ethical concerns of water, waste and energy infrastructure. It is expected that a range of studio tools will be explored including video, digital model-making as well as low-technology approaches such as street-flyers and field handbooks. A funded class trip to Mumbai and the surrounding metropolitan area will take place in early October. A publication will be prepared in Spring 2009 documenting the results of the studio. The studio is open to eligible students from all GSD departments and programs.
The City by the Sea
Mumbai has been identified as a "gateway" world city in Ham de Blij's recent publication The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization in terms of the influx of global companies and as an entry point into India for overseas commercial enterprises in communications, finance and pharmaceuticals. It is also home to the wealth, dreams, talent and creativity of local industrialists, hawkers, entrepreneurs, gangsters, artists, traders, millionaires, trash collectors, film stars, fishermen and paupers and the multiple residents and rural immigrants who work in the teeming offices and street and home businesses. It is a modern city of ambition, progress, density, poverty, passion and pollution, teeming with industry and the capacity for change all set within a lush, verdant yet vulnerable peninsula landscape of mangroves, tidal estuaries and forests. For the purposes of the studio we will hypothesize that no single viewpoint can claim ascendancy and that any designer whether at the scale of the building, landscape or urban fabric must be open to the needs, desires, realities of the varying population(s) who co-exist within the same urban spaces, the pressures on the city and the metropolitan area from outside as well as the constraints brought about by local regulations and laws and the relative forms of planning and design practices that can work productively in its environment. One area that is of continuing concern and is central to this studio is the nature of housing to be provided to address the growing population(s) as well as the continuing livability of the city. Even here this studio will be concerned with a rethinking of Mumbai away from piecemeal individual site designs to comprehensively address the regeneration/ redevelopment by public/private partnerships of clusters of lands in the Greater Mumbai area.
Modern India
India, despite recent financial instability is still in a period of rapid global economic growth and undergoing a staggering population increase in its already overcrowded mega-cities as well as in their surrounding metropolitan regions. These metropolitan centers are also home to poor quality or totally inadequate infrastructure, overcrowded living conditions, enormous slums, decaying buildings and threadbare open space and are struggling to keep pace with the ever increasing demands for basic services at all levels of society. An over-arching concern is also the damage to the broader natural and built environment and the degradation to the very ecological basis of these agglomerations whether in terms of river and wetland systems, municipal drainage, disease, public health or air quality.
As a result of the parallel issues of densification and uncontrolled expansion of the city over the last ten years, Greater Mumbai is making serious efforts to continue to advance its commercial advantage on a world stage through the municipal sale of public land for private and joint ventures and with new construction and engineering initiatives without ensuring that adequate steps are taken to address its grossly inhospitable urban environment. Among the four areas in Mumbai under close scrutiny by recent planning and design efforts have been the mill lands in the midtown, the eastern waterfront/port lands on the south-eastern seaboard of the city, the north/south rail lands that carry daily commuters to and from the commercial districts in the south, and the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) public housing lands scattered throughout the city.
These areas are central to the revised 2011 Greater Mumbai Master Plan along with a further area, the 1,450 acre Airport Lands to the north of the City that has recently announced plans for its consolidation and re-planning to coincide with the construction of a new airport located 35 kilometers away in Kopra Panvel, Nava Mumbai (New Mumbai). This initiative has opened up surrounding lands in multiple ownerships for adaptation as housing districts along with much needed improvements to the infrastructure and connections to the Island City. The class will comprehensively examine the adaptive reuse of the Airport Lands for residential townships in opposition to the current expansion of the Island City through wholesale demolition and reconstruction to orient the city towards a more strategically coherent expansion and urban growth.
Housing and Townships.
Along with its neighboring suburbs, Mumbai now forms the world's 5th most populous metropolitan area, with a population exceeding 20 million within an overall area of 4,355 square kilometers. However living conditions in the City of Mumbai itself with an overall area of only 85 square kilometers have deteriorated to the point where more than half the city's 14 million people live in slums or on the pavements, and high housing costs have pushed middle-income families to distant suburbs or to remain in below standard apartments. Slum dwellings typically lack water, power, sanitary services or both and the average population density in Mumbai's slums exceeds 200,000 persons per square kilometer. Even non-slum housing is crowded and many families live in one-room apartments. Households in Mumbai have an average of only 2.9 square meters (31 ft2) of residential floor space per person.
Slums are located on lands that tended to be unprotected. For example, on vacant government land, by filling in coastal wetlands and mangrove swamps where development was legally prohibited, or on the railroad right-of-ways. The slums houses not just the very poor, but also many of the lower middle class, including clerks, teachers and office workers. After national independence (1947) Bombay as it was still known remained a regional capital. After the formation of states in the mid 1960s it became the capital of the Maharashtra State. The landscape of the city was characterised by new industrial districts, town planning schemes, large mass housing colonies, bungalows and apartments in suburban areas and some commercial districts. It was at this time that slums started to appear in the city- zones of dense settlements governed by porous legalities, popular politics, and tactical negotiations over space and survival. Currently townships are being planned and constructed in a haphazard way in Mumbai. Townships are districts of the city that provide all the amenities of a civic life with the exception of places of work. These are generally located at some distance from the townships and require connections to public transportation such as rail or roadways.
Structure of Studio
The Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport is India's largest aviation hub and currently serves as the main entry point into Mumbai and the State of Maharashtra for local and international visitors. The Airport Lands are surrounded by factories, 200 acres of informal housing in the Azadnagar shantytown (slums and street dwellers) and to the southeast declining mangrove preserves alongside the Mithi River. Therefore, the aim of this interdisciplinary studio will be to generate, test and document urban strategies that adapt and reuse the Airport Lands and will also seek to generate new relationships between landscape, infrastructure and urbanization. The working between multiple scales will allow the discovery of potential sites for intervention and where the social needs of residents can be negotiated within the emerging forms of urban development.
The class will carry out exploratory exercises and analyses into the history, environment, culture and urbanization patterns of the city prior to the field visit. During the site visit in addition to the formal class schedule, students will carry out field research on personal design agendas within the city and at the completion of the semester specific design proposals will be prepared involving four prominent components: adaptive reuse of land for residential townships, buildings, open space and infrastructure. Approaches for implementing the plans will also be investigated, as they would influence the development of the 2011 Greater Mumbai Master Plan.
A publication will be prepared in Spring 2009 documenting the results of the studio along with class materials from the Mumbai GSD Option Studios of Fall 2006 and 2007 carried out by the Instructors.
Teaching Assistants
Aron Chang (MArch I), Corey Zehngebot (MArch I)