[Reader-list] 3rd Posting: The Urban housing scenario in Kolkata

Fri Mar 25 20:38:39 IST 2005

Dear all,

This is my 3rd installment and hope you will enjoy it.

Ive already stated doing field works and this installment is largely built up on what Ive gathered so far from the projects Ive visited during last one month. 

Specifically, this time I chose urban housing projects as the subject of my. I wish I could share with you the photos! These are photos of the upcoming urban housing projects, getting constructed to cater to the needs of the up and coming section of the city. 

While staring at those images (all are artists impressions, the image of a future perfect tense, as it were), something flashed upon my inward eye (pardon the Wordsworthian cliché)  something, which I got to know while surfing, just a few days back. 

Something that calls itself BUBBLE CITY. 

A futuristic urban capsule to be built in Dubai, and to be stationed high up into the air.

And thus my thoughts on this 3rd installment began to roll.

Regards

Sovan

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT BUBBLE CITY

Entertainment offers the image of something better to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives dont provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes  these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that the things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.

(Entertainment) presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.

                                    --Richard dyer (Entertainment and Utopia)

Now what is this Bubble City?

a city that will be stationed 200 meters above the earth with the help of two giant helium balloons. Entire city will be powered with solar energy and it is expected to cost around $30 million dollars.

This "Bubble City" will be a kind of big glass bubble including a hotel, a theme park and a museum. It will be lifted via two helium balloons and a special motor, which keeps it in the air 200 meters above the ground.

The bubble city is not a rumor. The process is simple thinking of it scientifically; equal charges particles on both sides repel each other causing floating.

All these are things, which I got from various postings on the net (search engine: Google. Keywords: Bubble City Dubai)

And then, I noticed the following:

"A few months ago one of the newspapers did a spoof about a project called Bubble City," said Sohrab Motiwalla, a longtime Dubai resident who tracks development trends. "It was going to be a huge city encased in a glass bubble, suspended above Dubai by helium balloons. The problem was that it took people here a few weeks to figure out it was a joke." 

(An Arab Politics-Free Zone)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26000-2004Dec25_2.html

Firstly, I was bemused, to say the least, trying to figure out what this city will look like. There is a visual clue on the net, which is meant (or, so it seems) to be a kind of a rather intelligently practical joke.

Now, I just started to think if there is any link between this fantasy called Bubble City and the reality of the presently booming real estate scenario in Kolkata.

Seems that there is a link. And not a very far-fetched one.

If one thinks that bubble city is conceptually a capsule, far from the madding crowd on the earth, and so, a perfectly utopian space, dedicated for the high and mighty section of the population, then the link Im talking about begins to appear.

Literally, what all the large housing projects in present-day Kolkata promise is nothing but different versions of the Bubble City (albeit sans the anti-gravitational mumbo-jumbo).

Topping the list is South City a huge urban housing project coming up at a prime location in south Kolkata. This project calls itself a 31 acre city. 

And, why not?

The officials claim that once completed, its going to have a plethora of 35-storey building (whew, thereby giving a slip to the force of gravitation!), Indias largest mall in the heart of the city, multiplex, food courts, huge departmental stores, Indias biggest swimming pool, a school spread over 3.5 acres, 24 acres of greenery etc. 

I know that such a long list of facilities to be provided at the project under discussion might read like a promotional campaign, but what Im trying to establish is simple: isnt this a bubble city where the residents can always live happily, snug into the cocoon of the proposed city area?

The other projects I surveyed seem to corroborate this argument. Be it the Aster Greens at Rajarhat, Bengal DCL Housing Development Companys Condominium project Uttara (A Gated Community spread out over 5 acres, as the company says), the Sunrise Point towers of Bengal Park Chambers Housing Development Ltd., or the Larica Township, located at the northern suburb of Kolkata everywhere the promise is that of a self-sufficient space of living, where the residents need not bother about the goings-on in the world outside. 

Obviously, there are differences in the things they offer. But, the strain underneath remains the same. Come, see the Paradise! And the paradise, as we all know, is a utopian space. 

What is really striking is the fact that the vocabularies of utopia are placed in such a manner that they seem to fall in line perfectly with the developmentality that has, since last one and a half decade, been tightening its grip over the urban scenario. 

These bubble cities are perceived as constructing the much-coveted future of the city. A perfect combo of entertainment (or infotainment, or edutainment, whatever be the lingo!) and global life-style, these are the places where the home and the world meet each other. 

A home is a city. A Bubble City. 

To end with, let me give you a clue to another posting on the net. This is an image, with a brief semantic text, which reads: Sometimes we all feel a little trapped in the city where we live.

I would request you to take a look at the image placed at the following URL: http://www.upallnitestudios.com/html/bcity.html

The image is a suffocating one. The concept of the city within a bubble, with its entire splendor, is seen as a transparent prison. Maybe, a utopia that we just cannot escape. 

But then, who is afraid of Utopia?

Visibly, a large section of the residents of Kolkata seem to lap it up. Those who cannot dream so big are perennial left-outs. The bubble cities will bypass them easily, with least or no sting of conscience at this high noon of market economy. Together the urban space of Kolkata is going to have 

a texturology in which extremes coincide  extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterdays buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and todays urban irruptions that block out its space. --- Michel De Certeau (Walking in the city)

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