Mumbai Day 23: Interview with Zameer Basrai

The following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted Zameer Basrai, co-founder of The Busride, a Mumbai-based design studio. We spoke at the firm's office in Bandra West.​

Taylor Cornelson: You’ve just been discussing your urban plan for Bandra West, one of the most luxurious suburbs of Mumbai. Could you explain your concept for this masterplan?

Zameer Basrai: The basic premise of how we approached the project was that invariably the bottom-up processes that form a city are always fighting with top-down processes, there’s always a conflict here. This project was an attempt to create a dialogue between the two. We were working with the community, we asked them what their problems were, meeting as many people as possible: architects, builders, residents. We wanted to get a consensus on what will define Bandra in the next ten or twenty years, and begin to understand what we should start fighting for now which will come to define this neighborhood in the near future. For example, if we had started fighting to preserve heritage structures fifteen years ago, the neighborhood would look very different now––the government would have had some incentive to grade these structures, to protect them from redevelopment. 

This was an attempt at trying to create a bottom-up dialogue, and trying to imagine, twenty years down the line, what will define Bandra, and try and communicate that to the government, because they’re still thinking very much in the short term. So it’s tough to really have a conversation there. But many of these issues are beginning to appear in newspapers now, for example the Mumbai Mirror is taking up our cause, and is attempting to rally political structures to support our vision for the neighborhood. We are actually proposing a pedestrian Bandra; we’ve gone through Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch and everyone, even new urbanists, whatever it takes to build up the momentum towards a pedestrian Bandra. We ended our study with the proposal of micro inserts within the community which would act to make the city more pedestrian-friendly and more comfortable. 

We actually have a map of the neighborhood, which you're sitting in front of, that has many lines across it, each line representing a walking path, and through this method we’re trying to collate the best walks in Bandra. When you see the pedestrian Bandra versus the rest of its fabric, you realize that there are actually already enough pedestrian corridors have some sort of a program, to make some sort of whole from its fragments. That’s something we wanted to prove in a very hard way, saying, here’s a map, there’s enough that’s existing, now how do we save it. We’re not only stuck on heritage structures or greenery, it’s going to be a combination of all sorts of things that relate to pedestrian use. So it could be about mixed-use development, footpaths, even the compound walls which enclose apartment buildings; these are all projects in themselves. Even if these small interventions are considered, they will have an enormous impact on the neighborhood and on the city.

TC: To what extent do you can actually influence future development in Bandra through this sort of planning? In speaking with EMBARQ, I saw a huge map of the formal zoning program in Juhu. At the moment there is a complete disconnect between what is drawn, how it is supposedly zoned, and what I see on the street every day. From everyone I’ve talked to recently, it seems to a very large concern. How can we negotiate with these more ad-hoc developments?

ZB: Well, a lot of our influence in Bandra comes down to notions of aesthetic, of trying to maintain a certain look in the neighborhood which gives it a sense of place. We feel that builders are very ambivalent toward aesthetic; I don’t think they care. They would care if you show them what aesthetic can do to a place. A lot of building guidelines are completely non-aesthetic, they all deal with numbers or setbacks or formal codes, they never talk about aesthetics. This is something we’d like to promote. Even if this means you design one-hundred balconies for builders, or staircase blocks, or even smaller details––whatever it takes to communicate and preserve a Bandra character in the larger context of the city, you do that. 

We’re quite real––we’ve been practicing for some time, so we can’t be impossible about these things, they have to be realizable. Developers are seemingly happy to cooperate with our program, because, at the end of the day, value is largely about character.

TC: To what extent do you think that the suburbs of Mumbai have ossified in their character? It seems as though South Bombay is very firm in its character, whereas in the suburbs everything is still malleable.

ZB: That’s true to a certain degree. Bandra has its own deal going. Juhu hasn’t formed fully; it has its own residential communities, but it hasn’t really formed itself, it’s really an ad-hoc builder domain. A lot of speculation, especially around the nineties, caused these neighborhoods to go through an explosion of building and construction, which we’re only really seeing the impacts of today. 

Because of the preservation plan of Fort, and then smaller precincts within South Bombay, all the available capital to build luxury high-rises was pushed into the suburbs. If you look around here, you’ll see structures with an FSI of five or six; that’s absurd. How can you have FSI five or six in the middle of a village? That’s taking the plot and extruding it up five floors. Yes, it seems ossified in South Bombay, because it’s been there for so long. But this is also true of regions of the suburbs close to the sea, because they fall within a zone that was developed around the same time.

TC: Speaking of pedestrianism, it seems that public space is a critical issue when it comes to the city. Obviously there’s a lack of true public open space here. What impact does that have on the city, and do you think there’s a different expectation as to the way public space is used here?

ZB: Actually, a well-known architect in Mumbai has just proposed a great open space plan for Mumbai. He’s proposed promenading all the edges of the rivers, edges of the Nalas (drains), and the edges of the sea coast. He’s calculated that there’s an enormous area of public open space here. It’s got many problems––mostly because it’s all very abstract, there’s no concrete plans for implementation. That’s what we tried to do in part, to design something very specific for Bandra, so that it could be easily implemented.

In terms of use of public space, the proximity to public space is very important here. It’s very much for recreation. Mornings and evenings there are people walking and running; during the day there’s an intense focus on Cricket. They’re very intensely used in early mornings and evenings. Unfortunately, these classic open spaces are very limited in quantity and quality, and that is one of the city’s biggest challenges at the moment. What we were arguing for is to say that the streets in Mumbai are actually a form of public space, and that we should be focusing on the street as a new public realm. We should be thus designing for the street, attempting to legitimize its use as a public space in some way. Actually here’s a nice example: you know the electrical boxes you see everywhere on the streets here?

TC: Yeah.

ZB: Because the city doesn’t want people to park in front of these meters, and also to help prevent any flooding, city engineers have added a small plinth to every electrical box, which is exactly at seat height, and it’s as big as the radius of the doors of the box, so it makes a perfect seat. Everywhere, no matter where you go, it’s always sat on. Now we can preempt the use of some of these objects: would there be a problem with adding a small detail to each of these electrical boxes in order to make them more comfortable? If private developments are also somehow responsible to the street, it makes a huge contribution to the public realm. It brings a real sense of contribution to the city. Streets are very much used to navigate here: numbered roads, like the ones you see in Juhu, and squarely aimed at encouraging pedestrianism and pedestrian use. City planners have been very conscious as to what they’re doing.

TC: I actually haven’t had an opportunity to visit the eastern suburbs at the moment. How does the Juhu-Bandra-Versova corridor compare to the eastern suburb development?

ZB: It’s damn different. Especially Bandra East––it’s a fully different deal. There’s a very stark difference between the western and eastern side of the railway line, it’s very, very stark. It’s amazing that this was all a closed area at some point, and, as it opened, it opened to a lot of industry, commercial uses, and so on. South Bombay was used as a port, with the Western suburbs used for industrial and residential purposes. The east, at this point, was actually all just marsh. Slowly it’s been developed, but at the moment it’s unreal; there are small, beautiful pockets over there, but when you’re living day-to-day in the East, you can’t understand how you might function. These Eastern suburbs also have a huge issue with slums, car parking, a lack of pedestrian corridors; they very much have to work hard to repair these issues. In the West, we’re dealing with beautification, in the East, they’re dealing with very prosaic issues.

TC: A lot of the strategies that you’ve described so far have been small-scale in terms of intervention. Do you think this is a more successful approach in making a contribution to the city?

ZB: There has to be a balance between small-scale interventions and large-scale plans. Everyone knows you can design small-scale interventions, but you also need large-scale visions. The residents in Bandra, for example, have said that they will happily support the pedestrianization of the road we just walked down to get to the studio, which is incredibly narrow but is currently open to rickshaws and cars. We soon realized, however, that there are so many similar roads like this all over Bandra, and if the government is going to make a move for us, to pedestrianize this scale of road, for this one instance, why not make it more large-scale, make a real plan out of it for the neighborhood? There’s many issues that still need to be solved in a top-down way. 

As soon as there is meaningful support from influential places in Mumbai, it makes a huge impact in the possibility of realization for many projects in the city. In Bandra and Juhu especially, you have all the Bollywood film actors who can petition for development within their neighborhoods. If a major Bollywood star walks out of his house and protests for the pedestrianization of Juhu, it will happen. So it’s very much about tactics here, getting the right people to petition for your cause.

TC: It seems as though many discussions I’ve had so far have always turned to politics within five or seven minutes, with everyone complaining about the ineffectuality of the government here.

ZB: Well, we’re optimists. [Laughs] It’s nice to feel that you’ve moved the government, or you’ve been able to affect actual change. Bottom-up you can do a lot: street art, street furniture, smaller public pockets within neighborhoods. But, at the end, it still requires an okay from the top, which is often very ambivalent about many of these topics. You need to build up consensus from the bottom, and then you can easily get approval from the top once there’s enough movement behind something. One example of this has to do with top-down heritage grading, which everyone hates. Residents understand the historic nature of the buildings in which they live, but they detest official grading because it affects the valued worth of their property very negatively. In this case the top-down isn’t working. There needs to be some bottom-up rebuke which sets the tone of this very high-level branding strategy.

TC: In the last twenty or thirty years there’s been a huge change in Mumbai as foreign investment pours into the city. I’m constantly amazed: you’ll be driving past run-down residential complexes and suddenly see a Nike store wedged into the bottom of old apartment block. What kind of impact does this have on the city, and how is it affecting its transformation?

ZB: I think this is pretty much inevitable, it seems. Commerce is great, as long as portions of the city are zoned and planned for in this way. In Bandra, this development has been great, especially for streets like Linking Road and Hill Road. Not only do you have these new multi-national retail chains, but you also have hawkers set up on the sidewalk taking advantage of the new foot traffic, so you have this double layer of commercial development along a pedestrian thoroughfare. This contributes to a sense of security in neighborhoods; in some parts of Fort, which lack this informal development, it’s incredibly unsafe, office-workers can’t even step outside late at night. On Sundays they play cricket on the road, it’s so empty. It’s quite awesome, you should go there sometime. [Laughs] Anyway. So these multi-national retailers parasitically invading these single-use structures is actually positive in many ways, it encourages a cycle of use over a twenty-four-hour period. 

TC: The situation you describe in Fort actually reminds me a lot of downtown Los Angeles where I was living recently.

ZB: You went to school in Los Angeles! Sweet!

TC: Yeah, I studied for five years there.

ZB: Wow. I did an artists residency there for six months, at MAC centre.

TC: How did you like living there?

ZB: I loved it.

TC: Really?

ZB: Yeah, although I always talk about it now––you don’t go to walk in Los Angeles, you first drive somewhere, then you go for a walk. We used to do that: plan to go somewhere, drive down, park, and then you walk. Then you come back and drive back again. But I love the city.

TC: It’s nice but, as you just mentioned, you have to drive everywhere. Even to go for a walk you have to drive. As you were just saying, though, at least in downtown Los Angeles, until recently, the whole core was completely deserted after 6 in the evenings and on weekends. Now, slowly, there’s lofts and small cafes, more of a community being built there.

ZB: I had my project on Fifth and Main, where Skid Row should technically start. It was a performance art piece, to highlight this line, because it’s not really visible. On weekends, when Chinatown is up and running, no one really senses the Fifth and Main situation. But at night, suddenly, it’s Fifth and Main again, you can’t cross over. The Art Walks and other activities are all associated with the ‘good’ side of town, but there’s an incredibly sharp boundary dividing this ‘good’ and ‘bad’ half, without any physical articulation.

TC: There seems to be a great emphasis on art in our discussion so far, and it’s a critical theme in a lot of The Busride’s work. Do you think public art is important in a city, even a city like Mumbai? It seems like there isn’t a lot of street art at the moment, and a lot of public space is very utilitarian.

ZB: Anything that brings a smile to your face, or brings respite from your everyday––it’s all of value. Especially if there’s a dead wall, it deserves to be activated in a way. In fact, we’re doing a secret project in Bandra at the moment, where we’re just painting all sorts of stuff at night. Good art shows you possibilities, but there’s a lot of… questionable public art that has been commissioned by the government recently, which probably has a lot to do with who is friends with whom.

TC: I was speaking to another architect last week, who was part of the team that won the competition to redesign Marine Drive. She said that before they’d even really had a chance to develop their winning entry, all of the construction contracts for concrete work, steel work, everything had already been awarded, and awarded to friends of the officials who were in charge. She said they had planned to build the entire boardwalk in granite, and suddenly they found that government had awarded a contract for thousands of cubic meters of concrete. Her firm said, “we don’t have any concrete in our project.” The government officials replied with, “well, you’re going to have to put it in.” So now the entire sea-walk is concrete, because of these favors.

ZB: That’s one thing that happens, something we have to accept, unfortunately. The government has to clean itself up, and we have to keep practicing in the meantime. It’s all over the place, it’s everywhere.

TC: You mentioned earlier that you’re optimistic about the future of this city.

ZB: Unconditionally.

TC: Well, the reason that I actually came here in the first place, and the reason that I started this interview project…

ZB: Yeah, I actually want to hear from you now. [Laughs] What are you working on, what other conversations have you had?

TC: I got involved in the project initially because I’m interested in future world cities, as they’re called, cities that are going to be of international importance in the next twenty or thirty years. There’s a really great study that was published by McKinsey and Company, a global think-tank, which outlines cities that will be focal points in the next two and three decades. There are a lot in Asia, a lot in China, but this report also singled out Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City. I had originally planned to visit all three of these cities, but unfortunately discovered I only had the money to do one. [Laughs] My heart was always with Mumbai, so I decided to come here and do one city well. As far as the conversations that I’ve had so far, I interviewed someone from HOK––they had a very unique perspective on the situation. Mostly I took away from that discussion is a sense of frustration.

ZB: They are frustrated?

TC: Yeah.

ZB: I would suppose they have amazing access; I mean, they can pay for access. We can’t. Access is a huge thing, in the sense that if you have a friend on the other side [in government], things go really smoothly. We have projects where clients know someone in the DMC and no one comes in for any checks, projects go through without any trouble. These checks are not really a technical check, they’re a check for money. These never happens if someone takes care of a project in a personal way, if they know someone who can help the project go through.

TC: Maybe it’s all relative, but they spoke about Dharavi and said that they had completed a pro-bono study for the slum, but they never had a chance to present it to the right people; no government officials wanted to listen. HOK also expressed a frustration that many of their clients simply wanted imported American architecture, and they weren’t interested in having some sort of a local paradigm. They just wanted curtain walls, concrete, you know.

ZB: They haven’t seen a lot of successful alternatives to this American model, unfortunately. This kind of American architecture, which you can see en masse in places like Shanghai, really looks good to developers, it has a great image value. That’s the biggest catchphrase right now: Bombay to Shanghai, the idea of Bombay being Shanghai has really taken. But a lot of architects who are designing in the local paradigm really hate builders, so they’re staying away from a lot of these high-profile, commercial developments. Charles Correa, for example. Correa’s last big building was the Kanchanjunga Apartments.

TC: Really?

ZB: He hasn’t built anything in Bombay after that. Correa insisted on doing everything himself, because he didn’t trust developers to execute his designs properly, even in the nineteen-eighties. The nineties was when everyone went crazy and built everything they wanted to in Mumbai. If you use a developer here, you hand your drawings over to them and that’s it. There’s no further contact, they don’t want you involved after the initial design process. It’s those smaller aspects, which builders exactly, exactly ignore, that is where the local paradigm would have been made manifest. Maybe that’s why Correa stopped.

TC: Speaking of Shanghai, and in definite contrast to Shanghai, it seems that Mumbai is not terribly interested in architecture. Cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai are very image-obsessed, and Bombay is very much not like that. Do you think this will change over the coming years, or does it simply reflect a different mentality?

ZB: There’s certainly a lot of emphasis on functionality at the moment. It might be that Bombay doesn’t have this same image obsession. I feel that, as Mumbai modernizes, its development might be more aligned with the city’s public program, and not in being proud of private developments. I think Bombay might just find pride in the public sphere, eventually. When all the rivers are cleaned up in Bombay, for example, I think the city will have a very progressive image. But I’m not sure. Do you feel that in New York, also? When you go to the parks and public spaces in New York, that’s when you feel the city. It’s not so much about the skyline, not so much about the architecture.

TC: When I was in school I took place in a study-abroad program to Japan, South Korea, and to China. It was amazing to go to cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai, and to go to the spaces where all of these famous architectural icons are. Hong Kong, perhaps, is a little bit of an edge case, but in Shanghai, if you go to where the tallest skyscrapers are, it’s empty. You see these wonderful skylines, but that’s not where the action in the city is. It’s in the smaller fabric. 

I don’t think Mumbai is about architecture, I think it’s only about urbanism. It’s great, and very refreshing for an internationally-focused city. I think New York simply has so much architecture that it’s a hyper-saturated skyline, there’s no one image to the city simply because there is so much in it, so much architecture that is constantly in flux. In that sense, it becomes about urbanism and public space again, because the spectacle around you is so intense that it all becomes banal, and subverts the typical ‘image’ city.

ZB: Koolhaas said something great about New York when he described the size of a New York City block, which he equated to the maximum boundaries of any one developer’s ego. That’s quite cool; no building can be overwhelming because they are all restrained to an identical, rectangular plot of land. It’s a kind of perfect competition, in terms of urban development, which again puts the focus back on the city, rather than on icons.

TC: I think that’s what is interesting about the development in Bombay, as well, is that no structure here is really focusing on projecting a grand image (aside from the twenty-seven-floor monolith in South Bombay). It seems there’s a very intense focus on fragmentary development, on small-scale, hermetic interventions, and no one is trying to project a totalitarian ego over the city at the moment. I’m not sure if this will continue to be true in the long term––it’s definitely not regulated by The Grid in the same way New York is. But at the moment it makes for an incredible, frenetic urbanism.