[Reader-list] Musings on society and space

[zainab at xtdnet.nl]

27th March 2006

This evening, I am at Marine Drive. It has been several days since I have
come to Marine Drive. My fascinations and preoccupations with Khushali and
Aga Mustafa kept me away from here. But the experience of the picnic
yesterday with Mustafa and his relatives and friends made me think that I
am missing out on something if I am not coming to Marine Drive. Let me
explain a little here.

All this while, I have been on Mustafa and Café Khushaali’s case. A fancy
of community space, defining public and space within the confines of a
neighbourhood kept me probing. But I realized that I needed to go back to
the ‘public space’ with which I started my first research excavations i.e.
Marine Drive. There is definitely something different to the publicness
and the space of Marine Drive. There is anonymity and yet marking, unlike
Café Khushaali where anonymity is non-existent (based on the observations
thus far). However, what is present in the space of Café Khushaali are
contests of various sorts – contests based on identity, contests of
definition of legality and illegality, contests between the neighbourhood
and the city in terms of imaginations and representations in the media (I
say representations, as in plural, because Imambada and the Muslim World
in this part of the city are from time to time, represented as illegal,
dangerous and yet, ‘cultural’ and adding to the ‘diversity’ of the city in
the print media), etc.

I landed at Marine Drive at about 7 PM. Work on refurbishing the promenade
has gradually begun. ARC Associates (the consortium awarded the contract
for refurbishing) has begun a little bit of work. Interestingly, little
concrete cube bricks have been laid out on the promenade, about two feet
away from the edge of the footpath. It seems like two walking tracks have
been created. For a moment, I felt that the concrete bricks are being laid
to create a clear boundary between the footpath and the main road. It
presented a sense of boundedness, something that is new to the space of
the promenade. Earlier, the story of the space of the promenade was a flow
characterized by un-boundedness, by a flow of people from the roads to the
promenade, the flow of traffic, etc. In essence, there were no physical
boundaries and yet, behaviours and practices of space helped maintain
certain boundaries. Now, with the concrete bricks laid down, the first
physical boundary has been created. And it makes the space of the
promenade distinctly different.

The plan for refurbishing the promenade is that it will be made to look
world-class, adding to the image of Mumbai as a mega-city, a world-class
city! Perhaps the designs have gained ‘inspiration’ from the promenade in
Dubai. Some consultations were held with the residents of the area as the
design was being finalized. And yet, my question remains that if Marine
Drive is a ‘public space’, then whose aspirations should be reflected in
the refurbishing and additions to the space. Which public has a ‘stake’?
Is there any ‘stake’ at all?
The residents owning flats and living around Marine Drive are largely
individuals who have visited ‘abroad’, seen Manhattan and New York, been
to Dubai, etc. and in a sense, their aspirations are reflected in the new
design. (Interestingly, most of the residents owning flats and living
around Marine Drive are ‘migrants’ themselves, most being Sindhis who
arrived here after Partition, Gujaratis in the textile business who, prior
to the creation of Bombay, had bought property here as investment of their
riches, and some Arabs and Parsis, which largely makes up the composition
of the ‘Marine Drive neighbourhood’.)

It is look at the refurbishing of Marine Drive and I question the notion
and practice of ‘intervention’, particularly interventions by architects,
planners and designers. How do these interventions impact space? What kind
of consciousness and environments do architects, designers and planners
work under? Is design free of politics?

I walk along the promenade, up and down. It appears that the space of the
promenade has been flattened. Yeah, seriously! Contests have been
flattened out. Hawkers appear here and there, but there is no
sense/perception of power, of hierarchy, of politics. A public is here,
oblivious of transformations in the urban, enjoying the sea breeze.

Yeah, space has been flattened. And as I walk past NCPA this evening, I
start to think of society. It appears to me that these days, contests are
either flattened, or eliminated or subverted. And power has now begun to
move into the insides of structure, structure as represented by the new
built forms and spaces, emerging structures of power, top-down politics,
faceless leadership, structures of organization within multi-national
companies, controls of media, etc. And as the politics and contests of the
street are made less and less visible (I will not say invisible because
they are still there, except that now they are not visible to the ‘naked
eye’), power and politics begins to become inaccessible.



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html