Faculty Profile

Mumbai Margins: Mitigating Geographies of the Island City, Mumbai, India
GSD 1401, Fall 2008, with: Nazneen Cooper

Abstract
The sponsored studio MUMBAI METROPOLITAN reconsiders 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 are 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 is 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 explores 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 is 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, and to advance an overall attitude to the growth of the Metropolitan area.

The studio pedagogy is therefore 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 is 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 takes place in early October. A publication is 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 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 is 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 comprehensively examines 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 is 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 allows 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 carries 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 carry out field research on personal design agendas within the city and at the completion of the semester specific design proposals are 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 is 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.

The studio reconsiders the Island City of Mumbai as a more livable and sustainable metropolitan landscape. In particular students comprehensively examine the urban renewal of housing district lands, infrastructure, and public open space within a highly constrained setting, conflicted with severe environmental and overcrowding problems yet with timely opportunities to address the increasing population and their distribution within the metropolitan area. The aim of the studio is to generate, test and demonstrate a design model or models that conform to the needs of renewal and the urban landscape within housing districts in the Island City and to do so from the perspective of private/public partnerships, including satisfaction of local aims and perspectives of residents, developers and municipal authorities. The motivation behind the study is to inform sustainable long term planning in the Metropolitan area that will culminate in the completion of the new Master Plan in 2011. The studio explores within the design models the concept of urban "margins" as a geographical, ecological and physical condition within the city fabric and a driving force in shaping the built environment as well as the outcome of long standing economic and social transactions in the city. A sponsored field trip to Mumbai takes place early in the semester and the studio is open to eligible students from all GSD departments and programs.

The words above harmoniously resonate with, and reconcile, a hard-worked land; a city encumbered by fragile yet resilient populations, bestowed with a sacredness by many, constrained by the sea, saturated with the sweat of labor, and shaped by monsoons and real estate.

India is in a period of rapid economic growth and expansion of population in its mega-cities. 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, air quality and soil pollution.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Island City of Mumbai, India's largest and richest city whose wealth is based on trade, finance and filmmaking. The dissolution of large manufacturing industries in the eighties, and the growth of global service economies in the nineties has transformed the city into a global center as well as home to multiple local street micro-enterprises—a melting pot of bureaucracy—free achievement, hard work, entrepreneurial innovation and new, relentless dreams. However it is a grossly inhospitable urban environment where access to the fundamentals of shelter, water, power, sanitation, open space, clean air and public transport cannot be taken for granted by a majority of the inhabitants, and where over 50% of the population reside in slums. Even for those who have access to such services, the city is vastly overcrowded with terrible traffic congestion, and a low quality of civic life. Mumbai ranked 163 out of 218 cities worldwide in the Forbes' quality of life survey and 124 out of 130 cities in the Economist Intelligence Unit's hardship ratings.

Mumbai requires creative yet pragmatic approaches grounded in local codes and regulations to address the distribution of population within the growing metropolitan area, to re-plan basic infrastructure and open space in many of its districts, and to provide a range of methods to attack severe environmental problems and local conditions of sanitation, flooding and waste.

Nowhere is this more urgently needed than in vast array of public and municipal districts in the Island City that house thousands of families in conditions ranging from dilapidated apartments, to workers chawls in even worse conditions, slums to the most vulnerable pavement dwellers. This requires any urban renewal approach to plan for both the reconstruction of existing structures and the development of new infrastructure, buildings and public amenities as part of holistic and environmentally sustainable districts within Mumbai.

The focus of this studio is concerned with a rethinking of the Island City away from piecemeal individual site designs to comprehensively address the regeneration/redevelopment by public/private partnerships of clusters of lands in the Island City of Mumbai belonging to the State agency—the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA). Of the 1700 projects, most are between 40 to 60 years old, typically low rise with a maximum amount of open space around them and house tenant society's as well as municipal or public employees. However most of the buildings and surrounding local streets, lanes, public gardens and recreation fields are dilapidated, crumbling and are in immediate need of urban regeneration. A number of the MHADA lands contain run-down chawls (workers housing) and slums. Renewal lands are now the most desired and therefore contested urban landscapes by all classes, from land-less squatters and working slum-dwellers to established tenants and the middle classes in colonies and estates. These MHADA sites are separate from the over 19,000 private rehabilitation sites (CESS) that are also in need of urgent reconstruction as well as the proliferation of informal slums and pavement dwellers throughout the city. There have been a range of legal, administrative, and planning attempts to legislate the most efficient, and equitable method to address the scare commodity of city land and how existing built fabric and open space may be fairly yet aggressively reconstructed to create additional civic services and amenities. The underlying reasons behind these efforts tend to be the same: to pursue the target of city without slums, the growing need to create housing stock for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), Lower Income Groups (LIG), and Middle Income Groups (MIG) and to address in a sustainable way the current physical degradation and wholesale weathering of the city fabric.

The class develops models using the principles of urban design and landscape renewal to rethink holistically the circulation and infrastructure, pavements and roads, new and existing building structures, community and civic amenities, open space and recreation while optimizing increased FSI and densification of the urban fabric using existing planning standards and relevant codes and regulations. The intention is to bring creative urban thinking to the one of the most pressing issues that faces the Island City and that will ultimately determine how effectively Mumbai can compete in the future as a global financial, technological center and resource center.

For the purposes of this studio a fairly broad interpretation of the word "margin" is employed. Its most common usage is to denote "edge" or "outer edge", "a boundary beyond something should not go" or "limit" in a geographical or spatial sense. Additionally it can also mean a part of anything that is "least integrated with the center". These interpretations are fairly common devices in design thinking and form making straddling as they do between all scales of design intervention from the architecture of individual buildings and their facades to landscape space with particular focus on ecological and geo-spatial concerns to urban design and planning and the disposition and shaping of built fabric, densities and performance. Of particular interest to the instructors are additional meanings associated with margins, for example "most vulnerable" or "least considered" that is commonly associated with classifications of income groups. For the purposes of the studio we use the current designation of HIG (Higher Income Group) MIG (Middle Income Group), LIG (Low Income Group) and EWS (Economically Weaker Sections). It also can denote "profit", "difference or an amount over and above what is strictly necessary", included, for example "for safety or to allow for future changes or delays". The studio explores within design models the concept of urban "margins" as a geographical, ecological and physical condition within the city fabric and a driving force in shaping the built environment as well as the outcome of long standing economic and social transactions in the city. Of particular interest to the instructors are two specific aspects of the varied definitions of the term—urban margins.

The first concerns the role that "margins" play in the building of a comprehensible and integrated structure or framework for the future planning of the city. Recent elements of the built fabric and infrastructure that could rightly organize aspects of the built fabric include economic development areas, for example the port-lands and mill-lands, and large-scale transportation infrastructure projects such as the Trans Harbor Road Link, Bandra Worli Sea Link, Mumbai Pune Expressway and the East-West Roadways. It is the contention of the studio that while these individual projects will shape to some extent the future form of the city and assist in local movement and development through the city that it is to the general city fabric as exemplified by the renewal lands or margin lands where the Master Plan should be most directed and conversely where the Master Plan can be most informed by the studio work.

The second, and possibly most difficult and speculative aspect of this studio is the idea of the ecological term "carrying capacity" as applied to the supportable population of urban sites in Mumbai given available necessities such as infrastructure of water, power, sanitation, movement, community amenities. The term "carrying capacity" while having its origins in the shipping industry in the middle of the nineteenth century is more commonly associated with current ecological studies of bird or animal populations and carrying capacity of lands to support or not support habitat growth. Carrying capacity is thus the number of individuals an environment can support without significant negative impacts to the given organism and its environment and it can change over time due to a variety of factors including: food availability; water supply; environmental conditions; and living space. The concept of "ecological footprint" was developed to examine the more complex consumption by humans of resources. By calculating the average consumption of humans over a small area, projections can be made for that type of population's impact on the environment. Carrying capacity 'averages' the blame for these impacts. It blames the rich for using too many resources, as well as the poor for being too numerous. Carrying capacity calculates the 'average' use of food and resources, which is closer to the billions of poor, than the hundreds of billionaires. This raises the question of whether it is possible to define a measure of sustainability that does not already contain implicit assumptions about the solution to the problem of resource over-use and environmental degradation. It is one of the concerns of the studio to explore this issue as it relates to the renewal lands.

A number of individual MHADA lands are in the preliminary stages of planning and development and digital information is being gathered on various levels of scale and complexity and are made available to the studio. In addition a range of maps, and reports, articles, books and government documents are made available to the studio by MHADA.

Named Bom Bahia for its protective harbor by early Portuguese traders, Bombay(Mumbai) (1) was acquired by the British in the 17th century and developed as the principal port and administrative center for the East India Company, the private company licensed by the British government to trade in the Far East. The Island City is now the capital of the western state of Maharashtra, Mumbai was originally defined by the extraordinary geographical condition of a narrow archipelago of seven low lying marshy islands and underwent over the centuries a steady filling of channels and reclamation of land and reshaping to form a narrow sea-bound solid peninsula attached to the mainland approximately 18 kilometers long by 4.7 kilometers wide (narrowing to a point at its most southerly tip).

It is worthy of note that one sixth of the world's population is currently located in India and of those about 60% are under the age of 25. The population of the Municipality of Greater Mumbai has doubled every twenty years or so, rising from 3 million in 1951 to approximately 12 million in 2001. Roughly 40 percent of the increase was due to the migration of landless rural laborers and their families searching for better jobs and the rest from natural population increase. The percentage of its population living in slums had also risen steadily from 12 percent in 1961 to 54 percent in 2001, the highest proportion of any major city in India. In the 1980's Mumbai was the world's fifteenth largest urban agglomeration in terms of population. By the 2001 census the Mumbai metropolitan area was home to 17.7 million people. Of these, 11.9 million lived in the peninsula of Greater Mumbai itself. The other 5.8 million metropolitan residents lived in neighboring cities north and east of Greater Mumbai, including Thane (1.3 million persons), Kalyan (1.2 million persons) and Navi (New) Mumbai, a new town on the mainland across from the peninsula with a population of 704,000 that had been proposed as a means of relieving Mumbai's congestion. 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.

Transportation is complicated by Mumbai's geographic constraints but made worse by limited investment and maintenance. The city depends on its commuter railroad system that carries 10 million passenger trips per day. Services are very overcrowded, in some segments carrying over 500 passengers per car in rail cars designed to carry 220 persons. Only two major roads ran north south down the peninsula and neither was built to full expressway standards. Comparable problems exist with the city's water, sewage and drainage systems. The city has only about two-thirds of the water needed to meet the demands of households connected to the pipe network, so that most neighborhoods do not enjoy 24-hour service and the slum dwellers rely on carrying water from public standpipes. The drainage system's limitations were illustrated in the monsoon season of 2005, when a catastrophic flooding event (37 inches falling in 24 hours on 27th July) left the downtown flooded for days and killed over 100 people.

In addition it is worthy of note that Mumbai has only 0.03 acres of open land per 1,000 people, arguably the lowest ratio in the world, (London is 4.84 acres/1000 people, New York is 5.33 acres/1000 people, Cairo is 0.21 acres/1000 people).

The renewal lands that are the focus of this studio account for about one third total city area and hold a critical future role in relieving the pressure on the suburban expansion northwards and eastwards and on the existing civic infrastructure.

Beyond the broader issues of the future trajectory of the city's growth and the resulting overall spatial configuration, the evolution of city codes, regulations and laws, and the good intentions of consultant's reports from international finance and investment groups, significant questions are raised for the designer or planner:

The studio's orientation focuses on addressing these questions using the renewal lands and their relationship both to the larger city and surrounding context as well as to the specifics of the regulations, programs, local resources and design expressions that may govern their recovery and adaptation. The studio challenges the piecemeal redevelopment efforts currently underway in the city and explores through geographical, economic, cultural and technological perspectives the individual and composite areas of renewal land sites and the introduction of environmental processes that can be used to act as a framework or system of organization. In particular, the studio explores the role of urban land, built form and environmental concerns at both the district and the local level to rebuild and renew the MHADA lands as the city itself evolves and changes.

Students in the studio develop parallel courses of design investigation. First, the studio produces conceptual planning and design vision and responses to the overall MHADA lands as one of the core urban landscapes of Mumbai. Second, working directly with approaches to environmental repair of the natural and urban fabric students explore localized methods to address regeneration of sites alongside and along with adjacent neighborhoods, infrastructure and working lands. These include increased FSI and new social and cultural programs.

In conceptual proposals for the and their relationship to the City as well as design proposals for individual sites the studio argues against the easy answer and the quick fix, rather students undertake sustainable design proposals that argue for environmental, spatial and cultural complexity and generosity and the elaboration and exposition of the local detail that grounds the daily lives of the City's multiple inhabitants and their families and neighbors.

The strategic location and role of the housing district lands in the continued renewal and reconstruction of the urban fabric and infrastructure of Mumbai and within the regional geography and ecology of the Western Gnats and the Sea.

Secondly, the nature of regeneration and reconstruction efforts of individual housing district lands as models for renewal and redevelopment in other parts of the City and in the Metropolitan area.

Absent from the current re-planning, engineering and design efforts has been recognition of the broader urban landscape and considerations of its ongoing design as an organizing system for the city. The hypothesis explored through the studio by each student is whether Mumbai's future urban environment as exemplified by the spirit, content and direction of the 2011 Metropolitan Master plan can be structured by these concerns. The organization of the studio is broken down into four parts as follows:

Handouts will be given for assignments in each part.
November 13, Midreview: Parts One, Two and Three
Monday, December 17, Final Review, 9.30- 5.30pm, Stubbins

The aim of the studio is to generate, test and demonstrate a design model or models that conform to the needs of renewal and the urban landscape within housing districts in the Island City and to do so from the perspective of private/public partnerships, including satisfaction of local aims and perspectives of residents, developers and MHADA. It should be noted that the studio is not focused per se on the design of individual dwelling units. For the planning or urban design student there is ample opportunity to examine within a non-western environment, the issues, form and expressions of urban development and regeneration, for the landscape architecture student, the concerns of macro and micro-scale landscape systems, ecological strategies and the design of social space and for the architecture student the opportunity to work with the built fabric and open space of past/present and future Mumbai. All students have to address issues of infrastructure, complex social and cultural programs and activities and working within the restrictions and regulations of the Mumbai environment. However it is the intention of the studio to allow class members from all departments to work across discipline boundaries and to explore both the limits and the possibilities of design/planning at varying scales.

Students develop parallel courses of design investigation. First, the studio produces, either individually or in teams of two or three persons, conceptual responses to the housing district lands as one of the core urban and architectural landscapes of Mumbai. Second, working directly with approaches to repair of the natural and built urban fabric individual students explore localized methods to address regeneration of sites alongside and along with adjacent neighborhoods, infrastructure and working lands. Five methods of examining the district and site are undertaken including historical, geographic, regulatory, environmental, comparative, cultural and speculative.

The class will concern themselves with the rationale for program and the issues arising from multiple stakeholders and competing interests, and will develop attitudes to rethinking the sites within the constraints of a dense urban fabric that continues to require or accommodate significant changes over the next decade. It should be noted that the intention of the studio is to develop parallel courses of design investigation. Two interconnected issues will be explored that are necessary for the designer to master- conceptual urban landscape design formulation and design practices that build to individual land proposals from a more expansive and rigorous comprehension of the future environment.

The studio undertakes a trip to Mumbai funded by the Bombay Dyeing & Manufacturing Company Limited. Students are required to obtain the necessary visa and vaccinations for travel to India. The class visits the Greater Mumbai Region from 29 September to 9 October 2007. Flights, transportation within Mumbai and accommodation is provided by the sponsor along with breakfast and lunch and air-conditioned working space for the entire class at the Spring Mill site offices during their stay in the City. Approximately half of the evening meals will be a continuation of the day's meetings with local experts, professionals and political figures. A collaborative exchange has been established with design schools in Mumbai (Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Academy of Architecture (Rachana Sansad) and L. S. Raheja School of Architecture) and local students participate in a number of the sessions and collaborate with you during the stay in the city. Students are responsible for lunches away from the Spring Mill offices, the few remaining evening meals and incidental personal expenses incurred during the trip, however, these are generally modest.

Activities planned for the trip include an orientation tour of the city including historical, cultural and civic institutions, tour of renewal sites as well as MHADA lands that have undergone regeneration. Additional visits take place to new developments and surrounding context as needed and the studio has cars and drivers at our disposal to move efficiently (as far as that is possible in Mumbai) around the city. During our visit, in addition to carrying out extensive site reconnaissance and analysis, we meet with community committees, municipal leaders, scientists, government experts and officials, local ward political leaders and have dinner and discussion with Mumbai's industrialists, and design and planning professionals. It has been proposed that a sightseeing trip outside Mumbai to Bangalore, Puna Agra or Delhi could be added on at the completion of the studio visit. The sponsor arranges this visit and the Instructors do not participate in it.

Under published GSD regulations the Mumbai site visit is a requirement for participating in, and successfully completing, the studio course, but a waiver to not participate in the trip can be given under certain circumstances. A handout covering the field trip to Mumbai is issued nearer the visit covering the final schedule, background information on daily activities as well as items to pack, clothing, foot-ware and importantly health and cultural issues.

Staying for even a short time in India requires students to take precautions to safeguard against illness. The University Health Services provide vaccines that are necessary for all students. Review the website www.cdc.gov for advice for travelers from the USA to India. In particular advice on using bottled water, eating habits and general health matters is given in a separate handout nearer the time of the site visit.

The assignment of grades for GSD 1402 follow the procedures laid out in the GSD Catalog. The instructor gives written evaluations to each student after the mid-review and final review.

The results of the studio will be assembled and published as an illustrated report in the late spring of 2008. The TA will collect digital copies of studio work after the final review. Class members should prepare a CD. The instructor presents the students' work in the studio to a seminar of interested stakeholders and officials in Mumbai in January 2008.

Nazneen Cooper, Visiting Critic, 2007- 2008
MLA'94 (Assistant Dean, Harvard FAS Planning)
Ms Cooper is a landscape architect and architect and was a consultant to the Fall 2006 GSD 1402 Option Studio Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai . Ms. Cooper grew up in Mumbai and her family are long-time residents of the Malabar Hill District of the city.

Teaching Assistant
Benjamin Wakelin (MArch I)
Ben was a participant in the Fall 2006 GSD 1402 Option Studio- Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai Studio

Studio Consultants
Radhika Garg (MLA I AP) is a current GSD student and Reshna Singh (MLA 99) and Zhya Jacobs (MDes 07) are graduates of the GSD. They assist the studio in preparation for, and after the site visit. Zhya was TA for the Fall 2006 GSD 1402 Option Studio and splits his time between Chicago, Cambridge and Mumbai. The class also uses the resources of the Harvard South Asia Center and the Harvard Center for the Environment.

Note:
This course is the joint copyright of The President and Overseers of Harvard College and the Instructors of Record. No reproduction of any part of this course in any form is allowed without the express permission of the Instructors of Record.

Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai: Repositioning the Cotton Textile Mill Lands, Girangaon, Central Mumbai, India
GSD 1402, Fall 2006

In the funded MAXIMUM MUMBAI, MINIMUM MUMBAI (1) studio the class considers the fate of 600 acres (240 hectares) of lands generated by the closure and current abandonment of 58 historic cotton textile mills in the center of the City of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. Students characterize the legacy and magnitude of the Mill lands in Mumbai, consider their influence on the landscape of the present and emerging city and prepare individual design proposals at a number of levels that shape their subsequent future adaptation, repositioning and recovery. At the heart of the studio is an exploration of environmental processes as a generator of form in urban conditions with limited resources but with extremes of population density, physical deterioration and spatial demarcation.

Perched on the sea and yet anchored to the soil of the Indian Continent, fabulously rich yet achingly poor, a historic trading seaport and now a modern global corporate center as well as home to multiple local street micro-enterprises, grossly overcrowded with social fragmentation and yet tolerant of the multiplicity of diverse ethnic backgrounds and religions, with a core of civic landscapes and heritage buildings yet overwhelmed with an overburdened infrastructure - sewers, water supply, roads and railways and proliferated with slums on marginal lands, the City of Mumbai still holds sway as India's industrial and financial capital- one that is geographically rich, ecologically adaptive, creative, industrious, stressed- a dense complex unsanitary urban land set in a sultry environment, drenched by the monsoon rains and currently in economic and cultural flux with "dizzying promise and turbocharged ambition."(2)

With the shifting fortunes of the City of Mumbai and the surrounding region (forty percent of India's taxes come from the city alone, and half of India's international trade passes through its port), municipal planning and engineering approaches have been advanced to structure future growth, improve the quality of civic life, to lessen the overwhelming congestion in the urban core as well as to address a legacy of issues caused by the need to relieve overcrowding in the city. The major issues include the need for basic shelter for over half the population and the lack of basic sanitation, flood controls, public transportation linkages (half of Mumbai's population commute from far-flung suburbs to downtown offices, banks and factories) and public access to open space. In addition global shifts in the workplace have removed traditional industries (including the cotton textile industry itself) from the core of the city, isolating the workforce and importantly for this studio rendering significant tracts of land in Central Mumbai available for reconsideration and recovery. The Mill lands because of their labor history, their strategic location in the city core and major disagreements over the changing nature of their projected futures between development agencies and environmentalists among others has led in recently to intense public and governmental scrutiny of these sites. The enactment of Development Control Regulation No. 58 (DCR 58) framed by the State in terms of the Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act, 1966 [the MRTP Act] has, after a number of legal battles, led to the Supreme Court of India upholding regulations covering the allocationof future program use and accountability to private and public stakeholders broadly between the Mill owners for redevelopment, the Maharshtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) to provide housing and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to create "green areas" and civic amenities. A deeper understanding of these key regulations will be given in the initial stages of the studio.

Beyond the broader issues of the future trajectory of the city's growth and the resulting overall spatial configuration, significant questions are raised for the landscape architect or urban planner/designer by the Mill lands—what is the adaptability of the landscape to respond to the dense urban environment of Mumbai and more significantly for the future health and planning of the city, what is the capacity of the Mumbai urban environment to be structured by landscape concerns particularly those where minimum amenities and resources are available? In addition students directly confront the constraints and opportunities afforded by the Mill lands—what are the common landscape issues that these sites share with other abandoned lands in the city and what are the design challenges that arise that are unique to them alone? Finally, can the Mill lands repositioned within the city fabric and their subsequent recovery provide a model or a pattern for future land growth in other districts in Mumbai?

Of current interest to the Instructor and of parallel concern for the studio is the role of current theories and applied approaches in urban ecology to inform these actions. Is it possible to shape the environmental systems, character and form of new or recycled areas of the city, how can natural systems engage in what seems an increasingly hostile place for both humans and the environment and how can the Mill lands relate to other existing landscape spaces and systems in the city and region, for example the western and eastern coastlines, the maidans, the historic Fort area, the mangrove swamps and the Sanjay Gandhi National Park as well as other future interventions.

The studio's orientation focuses on addressing these questions using the vacant Mill lands and their relationship both to the larger city and surrounding context as well as to the specifics of the regulations, programs, local resources and design expressions that may govern their recovery and adaptation. The studio challenges the piecemeal redevelopment efforts currently underway in the city and explore through geographical, economic, cultural and technological perspectives the individual and composite areas of Mill land sites and the introduction of environmental processes that can be used to act as a framework or system of organization. In particular, the studio explores the role of urban landscapes and environmental concerns at both the district and the local level to recover and integrate the Mill lands back into Mumbai as the city itself evolves and changes.

The class concerns themselves with issues of how to engage a group of complex sites in a non-western environment, the rationale for program and questions of multiple stakeholders and competing interests, and develop attitudes to environmental concerns of limited land, water, air quality, sanitation and public infrastructure within the constraints of a dense urban fabric that continues to require or accommodate significant changes over the next decade.

Students in the studio develop parallel courses of design investigation. First, the studio produces conceptual planning and design vision and responses to the overall Mill lands as one of the core urban landscapes of Mumbai. Second, working directly with approaches to environmental repair of the natural and urban fabric, students explore localized minimum methods to address regeneration of sites alongside and along with adjacent neighborhoods, infrastructure and working lands.

Inconceptual proposals for the Mill land district (Girangaon) and their relationship to the City as well as design proposals for individual Mill land sites (which range in size from 1 acre to 25 acres) the studio argues against the easy answer and the quick fix, rather students undertake sustainable design proposals that argue for environmental and cultural complexity and generosity and the elaboration and exposition of the local detail that grounds the daily lives of the City's multiple inhabitants.

A number of the individual Mill lands are in the preliminary stages of planning and development and digital information is being gathered on various levels of scale and complexity and made available to the studio. The TA's are co-coordinating this information. In addition a wealth of historic information and current data in reports, articles, books and government documents are available on the Mill lands and the city.

The studio is open to students of landscape architecture, urban design, planning and architecture with an interest in exploring the adaptive potential of the post-industrial city, and for students wishing to engage in current design and planning issues in a non-western country.

The studio collaborates in the early stages of the semester with the Architecture GSD Option Studio, Fall 2006- Bombay Studio: Urban Adjustments, Negotiating the Kinetic and Static City to be offered by visiting design critic Rahul Mehrotra from Mumbai. Students may also consider taking the following seminars this fall GSD 5316 Landscape Strategies for Low-Income Settlements (Instructor John Beardlsey) and GSD 6442 Ecological Strategies for Disturbed Sites (Instructor Peter Del Tredici).

1. The term Maximum City is openly taken from the title of the recent excellent 2004 publication by Suketa Mehta on Mumbai (Bombay) - Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, (now issued in paperback!)

2. Time Magazine in June 26, 2006 in a cover story on the re-emergence of India as a global economic and cultural force urged..."if you want to catch a glimpse of the new India, with all its dizzying promise and turbocharged ambition then head to its biggest, messiest, sexiest city- Bombay (Mumbai)."

The decline and subsequent regeneration of industrial and manufacturing districts concentrated within the core of large urban population centers is an increasingly common phenomenon throughout the world and yet there is no other issue that is as amenable to the current Indian Continent than the challenge of recycling urban centers beyond their recent industrial and manufacturing past. There are few cities particularly with Mumbaib's large population (12 million - but the exact number is difficult to define due to the vast number of informal settlements and slum dwellers who evade census gathering) where opinions about the future of these centrally located lands are so sharply divided. For more than half of the cities population without formal housing their main goal is simply to have basic shelter, for the displaced industrial and textile workers- steady employment and homes, for the city's middle class- public safety, health and civic amenities coupled with good transportation links, for business leaders and industrialists projecting Mumbai as a world class high tech marketplace and for the Mill owners and companies the regeneration of their Mill land assets as vital and successful enterprises.

All this takes place within a single city that is home to the wealth, dreams, talent and creativity of industrialists, hawkers, entrepreneurs, artists, traders, millionaires, paupers and the multiple residents and rural immigrants who work in the teeming offices and street businesses. It is a "Maximum" city- in ambition, density, poverty, passion, population, pollution, capacity for change and pure latent opportunity.

The island city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is the capital of the western state of Maharashtra, and the most populous city of India. It is worthy of note that one sixth of the world's population is currently located in India. Mumbai was originally defined by the extraordinary geographical condition of a narrow archipelago of seven low lying islands and underwent over the centuries a steady filling of channels and reclamation of land and reshaping to form a narrow seaward land mass attached to the mainland approximately 18 kilometers long by 4.7 kilometers wide (with only 1.3 kilometers width at its southern tip).

In the 1980's Mumbai was the world's fifteenth largest urban agglomeration in terms of population. Along with its neighboring suburbs, Mumbai now forms the world's 4th 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 12 million people live in slums or on the pavements, and high housing costs have pushed even middle-income families to distant suburbs. While the Mill Lands that are the focus of this studio account for only 0.65% of the total city area they hold a critical future role in relieving the pressure on the suburbs and existing civic infrastructure that has suffered recently from catastrophic flooding events (37 inches falling in 24 hours on 27th July 2005). In addition it is worthy of note that Mumbai has only 0.03 acres of open land per 1,000 people, arguably the lowest ratio in the world, (London is 4.84 acres/1000 people, New York is 5.33 acres/1000 people).

Mumbai's cotton textile mills were India's first modern industry, built more than a century and a half ago. The first Indian cotton mill, "The Bombay Spinning Mill", was opened in 1854 in Mumbai by Cowasji Nanabhai Davar and by 1870 there were 13 mills. Cotton exports grew during the American Civil War, when supplies from the USA were interrupted. At the end of 1895 there were 70 mills; growing to 83 in 1915. A period of stagnation set in during the recession of the 1920's. The rapid growth in mills was sustained by a large migration of mainly Marathi speaking workers into the city. Most often, the male member of the family would work in Mumbai, leaving the rest of the family in the village. These workers were initially accommodated in hostels. Eventually, these chawls as they are known became tenements, with full families crammed into single rooms. The mills filled up the district of Parel and then expanded westwards all the way to Worli. Until the 1970s they thrived, but cheaper power looms soon made them unviable. Then, an 18-month mill workers strike in 1982 forced several to shut down and since then a steady decline and abandonment of the Mills and their lands has been recorded.

The Mumbai Cotton Textile Mill Lands in the central downtown district are located from Mahalaxmi and Byculla in the south, to Worli, Lower Parel and Prabhadevi in the west, and Parel, Lalbaug and Dadar in the north. To the east are the vast Port lands facing the sea. The network of walled Mill lands, public streets and lanes, worker's chawls, residential neighborhoods, street markets and maidans (public open greens) are known locally as Girangaon, the "village of mills." Dotted throughout these areas are barely functioning, or closed textile mill sites, 33 are privately owned, 1 is managed by the Maharashtra State Textile Corporation (MSTC) and 25 are managed by the National Textile Corporation (NTC) a nationalized public sector company formed in the early 1970's. The Mill Lands traditionally consist of five main elements: multiple versions of the single storey saw-tooth roofed industrial building housing the cotton sorting, spinning, weaving and dyeing processes, a three or four storey office building complex, a prominent smoke stack, a pond to supply water to the factory all set within grounds comprising walled perimeters, roadways, alleyways, courtyards housing rusting machinery, machine parts and crumbling overgrown gardens, and groves of mango and coconut trees. Constructed in the nineteenth century a number of the Mill sites hold potential heritage buildings and structures but realistically many are crumbling and are beyond repair. In addition chawls (indigenous workers housing) are often found within the Mill Lands, still occupied even though the Mill has long closed. The 58 Mill sites are not contiguous but scattered throughout the Girangaon district although there are concentrations of two and three sites that share common boundaries or adjacencies.

The Mill lands have been the subject of public speculation, acrimonious newspaper articles and intense private scrutiny by professional designers, engineers, government officials and heritage organizations. At stake for the Mill lands are three major issues:

The Milll lands strategic location and role in the continued growth and expansion of the urban fabric and infrastructure of Mumbai within the regional geography and ecology of the Western Gnats and the Sea. The need to reconsider the structure and urban landscape systems of the Girangaon district (the "village of mills") where the majority of the Mill lands are located and finally the nature of regeneration efforts of individual Mill sites as models for growth and development in other parts of the City.

Absent from the current planning and engineering efforts has been recognition of the urban landscape and considerations of its ongoing design as an organizing system for the city. The hypothesis to be explored through the studio by each student is whether Mumbai's urban environment can be structured by landscape concerns. The organization of the studio is broken down into five parts as follows:

Students in the studio develop parallel courses of design investigation. First, the studio produces in teams of one to three persons conceptual planning and design responses to the overall Mill lands as one of the core urban landscapes of Mumbai. Second, working directly with approaches to environmental repair of the natural and urban fabric individual students explore localized methods to address regeneration of sites alongside and along with adjacent neighborhoods, infrastructure and working lands. Five methods of examining the district and site are undertaken - historical/geographic, regulatory/environmental, comparative, cultural and speculative.

The class concerns themselves with the rationale for program and the issues arising from multiple stakeholders and competing interests, and will develop attitudes to rethinking the sites within the constraints of a dense urban fabric that continues to require or accommodate significant changes over the next decade. It should be noted that the intention of the studio is to develop parallel courses of design investigation. Two interconnected issues are explored that are necessary for the designer to master- conceptual urban landscape design formulation and site repositioning and design practices that build to individual Mill land proposals from a more expansive and rigorous comprehension of the future environment.

The class visits the Greater Mumbai Region from 6 to 15 October, 2006. Flights, transportation within Mumbai and accommodation are provided along with working space for the entire class during their stay in the City at the Spring Mill site. Individual expenditure is necessary only for food and any personal expenses during our stay in Mumbai. Students are also required to obtain the necessary visa and vaccinations for travel to India. Activities planned for the trip include an orientation tour of the city including cultural and civic institutions, visits to one of the last working cotton textile mills to see the production and manufacturing processes, tour of abandoned Mill lands in the study area including the derelict sites and building structures as well as Mill sites that have undergone initial commercial redevelopment of modest to appalling quality. Additional visits take place to the Mill lands and surrounding context as needed and the studio has cars and drivers at their disposal to move efficiently (as far as that is possible in Mumbai) around the city. During our visit in addition to carrying out extensive site reconnaissance and analysis we meet with labor leaders, mill owners, historians, environmental scientists, and heritage consultants, government pollution experts and officials, ecologists, local ward political leaders and have dinner and discussion with Mumbai's design and planning professionals and writers engaged in the evolving Mill lands. It has been proposed that a side trip to the Taj Mahal in Agra could be added on at the completion of the studio visit as we transit through Delhi. This would have to be at individual student's own expense and the Instructor will not participate in this additional visit. Under published GSD regulations the field trip is not a requirement for participating in, and successfully completing, the studio course but it is strongly recommended.

The results of the studio are assembled and published as an illustrated report in the late fall of 2007. In addition the Instructor presents the students' work in the studio to a seminar of interested stakeholders and officials in Mumbai in January 2007.

Niall G Kirkwood is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology and Chair and Program Director of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He is also founder and current Director of the Center for Technology and Environment (CTE) a research center based in the Landscape Department. The "Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai" Option Studio, Fall 2006 is part of a five year CTE research initiative on Mumbai that focuses on applied design research, executive education and technology transfer related to the post-industrial city. This studio builds on Professor Kirkwood's recent research activities related to urban centers where post-industrial land and resources playan active role in the changing form and characterof the civicenvironment. Examples include the docklands of Belfast, Northern Ireland, and oil refineries in northwest Mexico City, landfills in Tel Aviv and manufacturing sites in Northern Spain.

Teaching Assistants and current students- Debashree Karnik (MAUD) and Zhya Jacobs (MDes) are residents of Mumbai and have carried out initial document and resource gathering in Mumbai this summer. In addition Jennifer Toy (MUP) has carried out map research and resource gathering in Cambridge. The studio will consult with Nazneen Cooper MLA94 (Harvard FAS Planning and GSD Alumni) whose family are long-time residents of Malabar Hill in Mumbai and Varna Shashid MLA06 from India who is a recent GSD graduate. The studio will also use the resources of the Harvard South Asia Center and the Harvard Center for the Environment.

Altered Faces: Reworking the Teheran Corridor, Seoul, Korea
GSD 1404, Studio Option, Spring 2004
with: Alistair McIntosh, Woo-kyung Sim

Course Description:
The topic of the studio is the temporal nature of the urban landscape in the 21st century global city. As continued urbanization expands centers of population around the world, the built landscape still holds to the humanistic idea of an evolving reconstruction of the natural world whose face is marked by cultural endeavors and in which each successive alteration reworks the dimensions of the material city surface that is found in place. The studio transforms the strategic alteration of public infrastructure into a precise examination of the present urban landscape and speculate through design action about the global city's future environmental properties and form.

Three interconnected issues are explored that are necessary for the designer to master- design formulation, site trajectory and design practices that build from individual detail proposals to a more expansive and rigorous comprehension of the future environment of a global urban center. The instructors focus on these issues to develop techniques in each student to tackle individual plans and their elaboration. In particular, natural site processes will be considered as robust and vital to the design enterprise rather than sentimental or incidental.

The study area is located in the southern part of the City of Seoul, Korea and contains large-scale infrastructural elements built for the 1988 Olympic Games around an intensely developed fabric all set within an elongated granite valley.

Studio Methodology
The studio is structured around work in areas of design investigation of particular interest to the instructors: The first concerns the act of making in the contemporary urban landscape. Students explore an ideology of objectivity regarding the tectonic and typological elements of the contemporary urban landscape. The second area of design concerns the productive engagement with the given site in Seoul. Five methods of examining the site are undertaken; historical/geographic, phenomenal/environmental, comparative, cultural and speculative. The third area of design concerns the practice of landscape design in a manner that is congruent with the first and second points.

Studio Site
The site for this design investigation is an existing section of the City of Seoul in Korea that stretches from the Woo myun Mountain in the west to the Olympic Park in the east, a distance of approximately ten (10) km. The future replanning of the Teheran Corridor as it is known is currently underway through a demonstration project titled ‘Greenway Corridors’ under the auspices of the Korean Ministry of Environment and the Landscape Architecture Research Institute at Korea University.

Site Visit
The studio takes a required trip to Seoul in late February (approximately 19th- 26th February), funded by the Landscape Architecture Research Institute at Korea University and the Korean Ministry of Environment through the auspices of Professor Sim of Korea University. The class examines and studies contemporary as well as historic landscapes in the Korean tradition.

Motor City Landscapes: Detroit Riverfront Studio
GSD 1310-10, Mary Margaret Jones, Niall Kirkwood, Fall 1999

This studio focused on Detroit’s Riverfront—first, at an urban scale from Belle Isle to Cobo Hall and from Jefferson Avenue to the river, and then at a specific and developed design scale for a site east of the Renaissance Center. At the heart of the studio was the issue of reclaiming riverfronts for public occupation in the core of cities and within vast systems of existing and proposed urban infrastructure. These issues are faced all over the world, but perhaps nowhere as poignantly as in Detroit. The site has an archaeological nature, making legible various phases of modern attitudes toward riverfronts and downtown developments. Juxtaposed on the site are remnants of industrial uses, leftover neglected land, complex infrastructure systems, large-scale developments, and an internationally renowned plaza. Access to the river is sporadic at best, and yet the opportunities to capitalize on this resource that has historically fed the city are immense. Studio objectives included exploring the extent, form, and expressions of new public open space in the post-industrial city and addressing the relationship of urban life to natural processes through the study of two contiguous systems: the city and the river. Both the initial site visit / workshop and a final presentation in Detroit at the conclusion of the studio were funded by General Motors.

Reclaiming and Reconfiguring Urban Passage: Philadelphia and the Delaware River
Studio, Spring 1995

This studio investigates the chronology of passage through space as it relates to the production of landscapes. The study explores the junction of a city and its river edge through an examination of the composite of successive built interventions of human movement which structure specific urban sites in both their vertical and plan dimensions.

The focus of the study is narrow and precise: sketch design proposals which address the realignment, separation, and connection of natural and constructed surfaces of movement. The studio after the midreview works toward the development of individual proposals for the physical design of open space, infrastructure and building program.

The study area is located adjacent to the Delaware River on the eastern edge of Centre City, Philadelphia. The general site boundaries include a major bridge crossing, an existing national historic park, an interstate highway (I-95), abandoned shipping piers, and a failed urban commercial development. The studio works with programs which support, develop, or extend existing transportation and open space systems and which address the possibility of urban landscape design to structure and represent the experience of contemporary public life.

Reclaiming and Releasing Urban Public Space: The City of Philadelphia/The Schuylkill River
Studio, Spring 1994

The studio investigates the reconfiguration of a city in relation to a river. The authoritative roles of the city and the river in constructing an urban landscape are addressed through the conflicting procedures of reclaiming and releasing urban public space. The focus of the study is narrow and precise: the field research of a detail, the drawn analysis of a transect, and a landscape design proposal. Through the realignment of natural and constructed surfaces, the studio works toward landscape proposals of economy, strength, and precision for apublic site in a marginal condition. The study area is located in the floodplain of the Schuylkill River on the western edge of the city of Philadelphia. The site boundaries include a geologic fall line, an art museum on a mount, a covered interstate highway, and an elevated railroad station and railyards. Progress develops from an understanding of these material conditions of site. The class is required to travel to Philadelphia early in the semester to participate in field research in the city.

FACULTY

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