[Reader-list] Mills as Public Spaces: Mumbai's Industrial Heritage

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Dear All:

Here is something I have written for the forthcoming issue of Art 
India, a special issue on heritage conservation.

Best


S.K.
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Mills as Public Spaces:
The Industrial Heritage of Mumbai

By Shekhar Krishnan
Art India, April 2005

http://www.artindiamag.com
http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar/millsaspublicspaces
http://www.crit.org.in/projects/girni/indu1
http://www.crit.org.in/projects/girni/kohinoor

In Mumbai, public awareness of urban arts and heritage has experienced 
a significant revival  in the past ten years — in the same historical 
moment when manufacturing industries have closed and factories emptied 
throughout Greater Mumbai. Heritage discourse and conservation practice 
have only implicitly acknowledged this economic context. Since the 
Bombay Textile Strike of 1982–3, entire working-class communities 
across the city have been retrenched and dispersed — in the Mill and 
Dock Lands of central Mumbai, the chemical and engineering factories 
and industrial estates in suburban Mumbai, and across the Metropolitan 
Region. With job losses going into tens of lakhs, and uncertain growth 
prospects for Mumbai, several years ago the media and civic elite began 
speaking of the “death of the city” they once knew, whereas planners 
and academics eagerly awaited the birth of a new “global city”. However 
one described this restructuring of the city’s economy, it is clear 
that manufacturing has declined in value compared to the new service 
industries, not just in Mumbai but in big cities throughout the world. 
The post-industrial landscapes of London’s Docklands and New York’s 
Lower Manhattan are oft-cited symbols of this change — monstrous, 
gleaming high-rise districts dominated by banking, finance, and 
white-collar services. In today’s urban economy, the making and 
marketing of immaterial signs has replaced the production of durable 
goods as the primary circuit of wealth creation.

The concepts and practices of cultural heritage, architectural 
conservation, and public arts, (whether they realise it or not) are 
enmeshed in this new economy of image production. While buildings are 
still very much made of brick and mortar (or steel and RCC), the 
production of images of the urban built environment is one of the 
intangible, high-value commodities of the global city. Whether in the 
space-age absurdity of Hafeez Contractor’s garden city in Powai, or the 
sepia-tinted romanticism of the South Bombay heritage enthusiasts, the 
value of a building has less to do with its physical qualities than its 
iconic presence as an object of consumption. So it is not difficult to 
explain the phenomenal growth of concepts and practices of heritage 
conservation in Mumbai. The scarcity of fresh land and exhaustion of 
new sites to build in Mumbai has forced many architects to refashion 
their practice around conservation of existing buildings, rather than 
construction of new ones. Today the city skyline is commanded by 
towering skyscrapers, not by smoking chimneys — the closure of 
factories in the eighties and nineties was paralleled by the rise of 
the construction industry, and allied sectors in finance, banking, real 
estate and retail. Builders, and not mill-owners or industrialists, are 
the kingpins of today’s global city — and architecture, arts, and 
cultural practice must reflect this new order. Heritage is, quite 
plainly, a smart way of boosting real estate values for high-end 
consumption, and of turning downmarket areas into upmarket ones.

Cultural practices such as the arts and architecture should seek to 
illuminate social and historical change, rather than mystify it, 
providing an imagery and language for us to discuss and reflect on our 
fast-changing society. But as heritage has increased in public 
consciousness and visibility — through legislation and protection of 
listed buildings, the organisation of new city arts festivals, and an 
outpouring of romantic cultural representations from coffee table books 
to films and other media — workers and manufacturing have been obscured 
from public view and memory. Until now, urban heritage has been almost 
exclusively about the colonial city — protecting its built fabric and 
rendering visible its monumental signs — reinvigorating civic pride 
through historical nostalgia. Heritage has primarily been addressed to 
the colonial city, and not about the industrial city. We now need to 
chart a shift in the focus of urban conservationists, arts and heritage 
enthusiasts, and the public, from the monuments and signs of the 
colonial period to illuminating this hidden Other of the picture 
postcards and coffee-table representations — the people, machines and 
places that produced the twentieth-century industrial metropolis of 
Mumbai. The task of historically informed conservation practice is in 
rendering visible the history of the industrial city which has been 
extinguished by factory closures and the flight of manufacturing, as 
well as the new “global city” which is developing around economies of 
services, information and culture.

Over the past ten years, different groups of architects, historians, 
activists and media practitioners have been documenting the city’s 
post-industrial landscapes in the Mill Lands of Central Mumbai (see 
Rajesh Vora’s photography of the mills which accompanies this article 
on http://www.crit.org.in/projects/girni/indu1 and 
http://www.crit.org.in/projects/girni/kohinoor ). Public debates on the 
Mill Lands have for many years been polarised between the trade unions 
and workers’ groups raising issues of livelihood and workers’ rights to 
employment and housing on the one hand — and architects, urban 
designers and civic activists raising issues of public space and city 
planning policy on the other hand. Recently these groups have aligned 
themselves to pursue a public interest litigation on land use in the 
Mill Lands, in which the primary objective is to create more “public 
spaces” in the more than 600 acres of derelict and idle land in the 
inner-city textile mill compounds.

But the mills and other industrial spaces have never been “public 
spaces” in the sense that any citizen could enter them — they were 
entirely closed to anyone but workers or staff, both while they were 
operational and even after the strikes and closures. It is difficult to 
imagine the post-industrial landscapes of Mumbai except as crumbling 
factories and idle chimneys, because most people have never been inside 
of the mills, and the working-class communities that sustained them 
have lost their jobs and housing. When Girangaon (“the village of the 
mills”, as it was locally known) was still the throbbing heart of the 
city’s economy, each textile mill was a miniature city of several 
thousand people working in three to four shifts, day and night. A 
complex network of chawls, markets, maidans, and social institutions 
spread out from the mill gates, integrating the neighbourhood outside 
with the factory inside. Mid-century Marathi literature, poetry, and 
oral traditions contains rich reflections on the life of the mills and 
chawls, but there is today little public imagery and imagination of 
these spaces. The social fabric of Girangaon has collapsed, and the 
physical artefacts and lands of the industrial city are being 
dismantled as we speak.

It is almost impossible to visualise what is at stake for the city in 
the conversion of the mills from factories producing yarns and cloth to 
campuses producing information and services — one form of private 
accumulation giving way to another. Making these mills into public 
spaces and “giving them back to the city” is more than just a abstract 
dilemma of land-use or planning policy. Creating new public spaces from 
the city’s industrial heritage means also creating a public imagination 
for the city which recovers the active presence of work and technology 
in our everyday lives, and challenges the commonly-accepted vision of 
manufacturing inevitably giving way to services. We need to seek out 
new cultural forms by which to narrate these histories, and invite the 
urban public to tell its own stories of work, aspiration and movement 
that produced the Mumbai we know today.

 
SHEKHAR KRISHNAN is an independent researcher and an Executive Member 
of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai. With CRIT, he 
is developing the Industrial Museum Collaboration, a project between 
architects, photographers, activists and historians about the Mumbai 
Mill Lands, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). For 
more information, see http://www.crit.org.in/projects/girni and e-mail 
him at shekhar at crit.org.in.


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Shekhar Krishnan
12, Sri Ranga Nayaki
154, 15th Cross Road
Malleshwaram, Bangalore 560055
India

http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar