An interview with Rahul Mehrotra, Founder Principal of RMA Architects, and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, USA.
This conversation was part of an exercise to understand the significance of Marine Drive as a public space, and its relevance in the 21st century. This Art Deco precinct emerged in the 1930s as an unprecedented urban planning project. In light of several recent infrastructural transformations in Mumbai, a few of which also impact this precinct, what place does Marine Drive occupy in the larger imaginary of the city? Mehrotra comments on the design of the promenade, its character, and the planning gestures that shape cities around the world.
Excerpts:
How would you characterise Marine Drive as a public space?
I think the important thing about Marine Drive as a public space is its neutrality. It is a broad promenade with a retaining wall that acts as an elegant seat along the curve of the bay. It’s wide with a road on one side, the sea on the other, and the buildings set in. Since it has no adjacency of built form, it maintains its neutrality.
If you look at other streets, which might even have a wide sidewalk, and the fact that they have a building adjacent to it that encourages certain activities, you begin to get specificity along the space. Because if in some sections there’s shops, then the spillover gets used in some ways; in other parts of the world, cafes spill out on it. So the adjacency of things, of particular things to a public space, always determines its specificity and by extension its character.
Because the promenade of Marine Drive is almost detached from the city and on one side it has the sea, it maintains a fantastic neutrality.
And that is what is wonderful about it, even in its original design, many aspects of which are unfortunately lost. It was finished in the 1930s, which was the peak of the campaign to introduce cement and reinforced concrete as a building material in the city. It was by extension also the peak of the popularity of Art Deco as a building style, and all of those things coincided. Hence, the paving material of Marine Drive was cement chequered tiles. They were those square tiles of two inches by two inches, prefabricated; a huge amount of cement tiles were consumed on the curved promenade.
Talking about placemaking as an idea, in terms of how the public sphere is defined by the way that people interact with it, would you say that this neutrality of Marine Drive allows for improvisation of activities? That is, people can interact however they choose?
Correct. That is the function of a dimension as well as the neutrality. If Marine Drive was half its width, it would have minimised what could be done there. But also, the truth is – there is a broad range of activities that take place there. There’s promenading; subsets of promenading are walking and jogging. Then there is just sitting on the wall. And then there are – there used to be occasionally, I don’t see it happening now – street parades sometimes. It’s a beautiful dimension for parades. But besides that, there are no specific or predetermined uses except perhaps just promenading, which is also part of its neutrality. Because it’s neutral, it doesn’t give you clues in terms of how it can be appropriated. And that’s the beauty of the simplicity of its design.
Is Marine Drive still relevant today in the larger imagination of planning a city? If yes, why?
Short answer, yes. If yes, why? Because it’s neutral. And in Mumbai there are very few spaces that are neutral like that. I would think the Oval Maidan is another case where it’s neutral. It’s neutral in the sense that it has specificity on a temporal scale, which is when the cricketers occupy the pitch. But when you go on Sundays, it’s everything happening together, because there’s no specificity.
In understanding public space, the dimension that we often forget is the notion of temporality, that is, time, which is at different times, different things happen.
And so what’s become, unfortunately, very absent in planning more broadly, is the notion of the temporal scale. Which means, if you can plan a space in a way that you consider what it could do at different times, then you make it more neutral. That’s why downtowns and cities are so problematic, because there are only offices and they lie empty at night, whereas mixed-use districts are very vibrant. So the more specific you get, the more inflexible you get.
With the larger Marine Drive precinct, do you think the vibrancy of a mixed-use precinct is still happening?
I would argue the promenade of Marine Drive doesn’t belong to the precinct of Marine Drive. It belongs to the city. And over 30 years as the city has densified, the use of Marine Drive has intensified. I don’t remember the kind of crowds that I see on Marine Drive today, or even in the 80s, when I was living on Marine Drive with my parents.
So as the city intensifies, Marine Drive’s neutrality is appreciated even more.
That’s why you have a young couple sitting on the promenade even in the afternoon. If it’s warm then you see them all covered with chadars (blankets) and gazing out to the sea and more.
Partly for privacy, partly to protect against the sun. Its relevance and use has become even greater as the densification has occurred. From Bhuleshwar, Dongri and the adjacent crowded neighbourhoods – people come out in droves, largely in the evenings, to see the sunsets.
And that’s the reason why – I’m sorry, this is a bit of a deviation – that, learning from Marine Drive, we should be creating many more such spaces. So when we finally develop the eastern waterfront, we should not be making marinas for the yachts of the rich, but we should be making more Marine Drives, because then people from Dongri can go out there to release the density that they otherwise live in.
Could you talk about the design of Marine Drive?
You know, the beauty of the design of Marine Drive is the notion of a void. Often when we design urban space – if you look at the classical tradition, the Beaux Arts tradition, the modernist tradition – urban space has a centre. You either put a monument in the centre and the space is organised around it, or you put a monument at the end of the axis, like in the Central Vista and the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The beauty of Marine Drive is that it is organised around a void – the void of the bay. Here the centre or focal point is empty!
And that’s why, for me, placing a statue in the bay is highly problematic as a design intervention, because the beauty of Marine Drive is also the neutrality of the void. It is a space where the centre is a void. The centre is not a monument, the centre is not an object, it’s not a man-made object, but it’s a reminder of our continuous engagement with the flux of nature, which is the tides of the sea. And that also is what heightens the experience of being on Marine Drive, because you come from the density of Bhuleshwar, or the density of those buildings in Gamdevi, etc., or even the density of ‘A’ road and ‘B’ road and ‘C’ road, it is a mental release because of the nothingness you see – except the distant skyline. And so, that would be completely ruined [if a statue is placed in the bay]. From a conservation perspective, in terms of the intent of design and the intent of Marine Drive as an urban gesture, what we should be safeguarding as citizens is the neutrality of the void, that nothing should happen in the void. And that’s why even in that brief period when they allowed water sports and other activities, it was disturbing to all of us because that beauty in the tranquillity of the bay was lost.
Marine Drive was built on land reclamations; there are currently several land reclamation projects in the city – how would you say they are different?
What differentiated Marine Drive from many other reclamations that were done in the city was the Back Bay, which was a very shallow bay. That’s why it was not the port. The port was on the eastern side, because that was a very deep bay. Another difference of this reclamation was that Cumbala Hill was adjacent to it, so they could cut the hill to bring it in very close proximity. So in terms of logistics of engineering, it was very important for the trolleys and the trains bringing the debris from Cumbala Hill. And so, other reclamations on the east side – whether it was Apollo Bunder, Ballard Estate – were all in a very deep harbour. Those were much smaller increments of reclamation and much more complex. So the precise answer to your question is what differentiates it, is that it was a shallow bay, and therefore it was the most ambitious reclamation in the city, for that logistical reason.
If you stand at Marine Drive at low tide, you can see rectangular blocks of stone going into the water. That was the remnant of the pier made to bring the reclamation landfill. They had done similar piers at Haji Ali which were dismantled; this they didn’t dismantle. The reason they made those piers was because the Back Bay was very shallow. The boats couldn’t even bring mud all the way to say, where Churchgate is, because the water’s line went till Churchgate. Even at high tide, the water used to be knee deep. That’s why they could reclaim the Bay so easily, and that’s why they were so ambitious about what they could do.
The new redevelopment guidelines for Marine Drive allow for redevelopment subject to certain restrictions; for example, the Back Bay sub precinct has to be Art Deco even if it’s redeveloped and maintains existing height. And these are largely being presented as progressive regulations. Do you have any thoughts on these?
They are not progressive. Let me try to answer this in a broader way. Thirty years ago in the Times of India, I wrote a piece which was called the ‘Poetics of FSI.’ I argued that what was going to destroy the city is the application of the same flat building codes and FSI (Floor Space Index) designation across the greater Mumbai region. And what I’d argued for was that every area should have its own regulation.
In fact, the work we did in the Fort Area to get the heritage regulations in, was partly informed by that. In the case of Marine Drive, since it was a historic area, I argued it should have its own regulations. Malabar Hill, I had argued, should have its own regulations and their buildings should be stepped with gardens rather than high-rises so that the form of the hill could be maintained.
I think what has been very detrimental for Mumbai is that we are imagining one set of regulations for every part of the city. And that is a complete mistake. So this is all far from progressive. Doing area wise bylaws and imagining differing forms of the city would be truly progressive.
New and younger buyers are turning towards the gated communities with pool facilities, clubs etc. Marine Drive has an older, largely ageing demographic. Is there a danger of it falling behind in the face of new aspirations in the city?
I think it’s not correct to compare and say that in gated communities there’s such fantastic facilities – does everyone want those facilities? Do I want to live in a high-rise? Do I want a swimming pool with 250 residents looking at me as I swim? I mean, it’s a whole different imagination of how you exist in the world.
I think the nicest cities are the ones that create this diversity and plurality. And that’s the reason why conservation movements are so relevant, because what it’s saying is that there are many imaginations of lifestyles that are simultaneously valid.
And different lifestyles need different urban forms and architecture to support them. The fundamental problem in a city like Mumbai is that we are flattening our regulations and applying the same bylaws, the same FSI, everything, across the city. Which means the entire city will look the same.
I would argue this is a national malady. If you land in Jaipur airport, it looks the same as if you landed outside Hyderabad airport. Everything is looking the same because we are not being place-specific. Context matters.
And everything that you do, whether it’s conservation, whether it’s lobbying to save Art Deco – context matters. I think we have to collectively as citizens – and that’s why what you all [Art Deco Mumbai Trust] are doing, what conservation movements are about – argue for the plurality in our cities, that we need difference, and that’s what makes urban experiences wonderful.
I don’t think it’s a matter of the young and the old. The young have aspirations. Look at America; the young all move to the suburbs so they can have kids and send them to schools and have gardens. As these folks grow older and their kids have flown the coop, they are all moving back into the inner city now. American cities are recycling themselves to accept older demographies. Cities are dynamic and kinetic and they evolve. Therefore, the more variation you have in cities, the more robust they are. Because people have different requirements, different aspirations, different aesthetic aspirations, different amenity aspirations at different moments of their lives. This is again going back to the notion of temporality, but at the scale of urbanism, not the scale of a space. The temporal dimension is missing in our planning imaginations. And that’s why we get stuck with these blanket bylaws, because they seem to be at the moment the silver bullet that will solve all problems, but they have no relevance in 10 years sometimes. It means a whole shift in thinking about space, thinking about cities, etc.
Do you think that the priority of urban planning at the moment gives greater weightage to one kind of aspiration as opposed to another?
Yes, unfortunately. Planning is about anticipating problems. That’s why I think, the last planning gesture was New Bombay (now Navi Mumbai), where three young people [Charles Correa, Shirish Patel and Pravina Mehta] said, there are going to be three million more people in the city, we need to open up land. We don’t need to open up land in the north, we need to open up land in the east, because that’s where we would be able to make connections across the bay. We can use water transportation, we have high land there now, and climate change, so even more relevant, etc.
That [Navi Mumbai] was the last planning gesture in the city. Everything that has happened after that, what planning has been reduced to in Mumbai, is sitting at a desk, identifying the problems, and then reacting to them. So it’s become a rearguard action, it’s not an avant garde action. Now, when you do that, it changes the whole culture of a place.
So your question of why they’re thinking of only one thing is because this is the problem. The problem is, we have many people in the same space. How do we solve spatially these forms of co-existence we are experiencing in Mumbai?
Thus, you hear a cacophony of opinions: let’s go higher, let’s have more FSI, let’s do this, let’s do that. Or the problem is rent control, so we can’t solve it. So let’s do redevelopment, right? And then for the redevelopment, use the same bylaws you’re using for the high-rise buildings. So it’s all reactions to problems in very specific, narrow timeframes. It’s not about projective thinking in terms of “let’s anticipate what the problem will be.” Planning in its greatest spirit is a speculative activity. Not speculation in the sense of real estate, but it’s looking at the future.
Democracy is partly responsible, because in democracies, when you have five year cycles of elections, decision-making becomes very myopic as compared to autocracies; that’s why Singapore, etc, do so well. I’m not making an argument at all for autocracy, because there are ways within democracy you can do good planning. An autocrat feels secure for 15 years, and therefore can take decisions whose value will be realised in 10 years and be appreciated. Our administrators are making decisions that can be realised in one or two years so that they can be re-elected. Again, I go back to the notion of temporality, time. I argue in my teaching that time is one of the most important things we’ve ignored in the discourse of planning.
The public character of Marine Drive is also the way that people are interacting with the space. Do you think we may be losing sight of people in the larger scheme of concretisation and ‘development?’
Yes! I can unpack that for you. Of course we are losing sight of people; we don’t imagine how people would occupy space. We begin to get obsessed with how protocols and processes can be set up. That’s where regulations get more and more complex. Fungible FSI is like taking it to its limit, where people are completely absent. Again, I’m sorry if this might sound theoretical, but I think it’s a good way to answer your question in a kind of much broader perspective. So how do we imagine cities? What are the kind of terms you come across when you see cities? What do our politicians say? Let’s make it a world class city? Then they say, let’s make it a global city. All these words are used interchangeably! How do we refer to cities and how do we create metrics to judge cities?
Till the 60s and 70s, there were very well known urban commentators like Peter Hall who used the word “world cities.” So Paris, London, New York – these were world cities. Those were our aspirations. And world cities were really cities that disproportionately controlled economic and cultural power. Culture was produced in London, the Beatles, LPs (‘Long Play’ vinyl records) etc, right? Then in the 80s, the most prevalent definition was global cities. The economist Saskia Sassen and others popularised global cities, and that became the most popular metric. How do you become a global city? The metric for a global city was very bizarre. It was cities that disproportionately controlled global capital, and they had benchmarks for it in terms of metrics. The irony is that Dublin was a global city by this metric! Which has not even a million people. And some places like Mumbai never made it as global cities. We struggled – every politician did what they could to attract capital, to make things easy. The whole mill lands went south because they wanted to become a centre of global capital. Mad imaginations.
And the cities that became successful were the cities that minimised the friction for capital to land like Dubai and Shanghai; Singapore was the first one. And they created what I have written about and I call, “the landscapes of impatient capital.” Because capital is inherently impatient, and therefore any terrain that allows it to realise its value becomes very successful.
That’s the success of Dubai, because it’s the only place in the Middle East that didn’t have oil. So therefore, it made capital its generator of wealth. In Mumbai we tried to do that, smoothen it for the capital to arrive. But our city offers such incredible resistances to global capital that it never quite happens. In all of these, any metric of the human being is absent. That’s why I said Dublin is an irony because it’s the smallest little town in that part of the world, and it became a global city because it met the threshold of capital accumulation. It had nothing to do with human beings.
Now, ironically, the only metric, or the only definition that I like for that reason is the notion of a ‘Megacity.’ The megacity came from the World Bank, IMF (International Monetary Fund) etc, because it was related to loans. If they had to give Mumbai loans for transportation, they had to know how many people were going to use the transportation. So by default, the human being became the metric to define the megacity. And they set thresholds that, okay, first it was five million people, it would be a megacity; then they made it seven million, then ten million.
But by default, not by any moral impulse to place the human being at the centre of the imagination. Just by default as a metric to measure how much to plan for, the megacity definition is the only one that has the human being as the metric. Now this discussion and the making of metrics has shifted.
In Singapore, there’s this coalition called the ‘livable city.’ People are beginning to realise that unless you put the human being at the centre, we cannot have a productive discussion on sustainable cities.
And that’s why I call these places of capital accumulation the landscapes of impatient capital. These are very brittle urban forms. They are high-rise, glass towers – they are brittle in their materiality, use and aspirational message. They have no adaptability.
If capital doesn’t become the centre of the world’s organising mechanism in the future, these will very rapidly become archaeological sites!
Given several recent interventions – the Coastal Road project, an upcoming statue in the Back Bay, to name a few – do you think Marine Drive is being reimagined?
When you say “reimagined” – by whom? Do you mean the government is reimagining it? I don’t think so. I have great hope that it’s a beautiful space that will stay. It’s probably one of the most robust public spaces in the world. I think it’s safe. I think the statue in the hollow void of the bay would be terrible. Marine Drive will – not be reimagined, that is not the right word – but its meaning will change significantly. That would be a real pity. And that’s something I don’t know how and who can resist.
Anyway, I think if the bay is left neutral, if that promenade is left the way it is, and we are sensitive about material and design and don’t build too many toilets on the promenade, etc, that space will survive for a long time. Now having said that, if Marine Drive gets completely redeveloped and you have high-rise buildings along it, of course relationships will change completely. But I think with all the work that organisations like Art Deco Mumbai are doing, I am sure its form will stay intact. Even if buildings get reconstructed to that height, I don’t think we should stipulate they should be reconstructed in Art Deco. See what happened to that old Natraj Hotel (formerly the Bombay Club, now Inter Continental). Would you call that Art Deco? I won’t, but it got reconstructed. But since its height is in conformity to the height of the other buildings along Marine Drive, the integrity of the promenade is maintained – that is the critical thing. The overall form of the precinct. But if one of these parameters change, then it’s not Marine Drive.
As a long-time resident, what has your lived experience been with Marine Drive?
For me, the greatest joy of living in a building on Marine Drive [Podar House] was this idea of seeing the city go by at my feet, but also being able to just lift my head and look at the sky and the sea and feel a complete release. Observing the ebbs and flow of nature, that is, the tides, the waves splashing over – a reminder that we have this incredible interlinked coupling with nature in Mumbai, on the edge of the water.
This conversation was recorded on 16 June 2024, with Atul Kumar and Suhasini Krishnan of Art Deco Mumbai Trust.
Header Image: Promenaders enjoy the sunset at Marine Drive, 2019. Source: Art Deco Mumbai Trust