Mumbai Day 9: On Informality and Proximities

In Juhu: A gourmet frozen yoghurt store, which specializes in wedding cakes, "designer cakes," and other high-end Western desserts. Its tile flooring timidly spills out into the street, attempting to claim a small portion of the crumbling sidewalk as its own. Immediately to this boutique's left (blue awning in photograph) is a shop which only sells physical quantities of coal. It has no name or markings. Its interior consists only of a mountain of coal and re-used burlap sacks (for packaging coal). Its staff sit outside awaiting customers.

Much of Mumbai resembles this perplexing compositional strategy: its leap into an era of globalization and international commerce still very much a work in progress. International retail chains sit innocuously next to ad-hoc drink vendors and hastily-constructed cafes; the "formal" city in immediate adjacency to the "informal," a mark of a metropolis in the midst of a radical transformation.

This (in)formal binary is closely linked to the concept of the static and the kinetic, or, in other words, the permanent and the temporal, "architecture" and its ever-changing context. Indeed, like the coal vendor shown above, the kinetic is highly malleable and fluid: it can vanish and reappear at a moment's notice, its program completely disassociated from its momentary form. Mumbai overflows with this type of development. Every square inch of land (especially in the suburbs) is ripe for urban improvisation, for the flourishing (and constant evolution) of the kinetic. Unlike much informal development in India's largest cities, however, the kinetic in Mumbai falls within the marginalized and interstitial spaces of this post-colonial city; next to rail lines, in unfinished apartment complexes, in city streets already filled to capacity with traffic.

What is particularly fascinating about this improvised development is its political, economic, and social genesis. Largely a product of the severe disconnect in Mumbai between the "macro" (government officials and their penchant to bribery and corruption) and the "micro" (the millions of urban poor who live in informal developments within the city), national, state, and municipal political apparatuses have been largely ineffectual in enforcing only "legal" urban development, especially in regions of contested land ownership. Rather, what little "formal" development exists is submerged in a flood of improvisation and questionable validity, producing highly unorthodox (and often fleeting) adjacencies.

Mumbai's density, as well as its developmental constraints, perhaps most closely resemble metropolises such as New York or Hong Kong, both of which developed in incredibly limited confines to become the economic and financial hub of their national contexts. But perhaps what these American and Asian cities have always lacked, in stark contrast to our Indian precedent, is the extreme (and seemingly ever-growing) gap in socio-economic status of its poorest and wealthiest inhabitants. Sixty percent of Mumbai's inhabitants live in slums (a form of the kinetic which occupies a mere 8-10% of the city's surface area), yet the city also contains pockets of incredible affluence. A newly-constructed "house," located in the heart of the city, is a twenty-seven floor monolith currently valued at as much as US$1,000,000,000.

While some regard such improvised constructions as an uncivilized byproduct of intensive urban migration, Mumbai's liquid urbanism, where kinetic/informal processes are engaged in a continuous dialogue with static/formal organizations, shares many similarities with neoliberal market strategies lauded today as the "future" of capitalist development. As Sanford Kwinter explains in his meditative compendium "Requiem: For The City At The End Of The Twenty-First Century,"

"Our societies are increasingly market societies, and our social and personal lives are increasingly exposed to the law of self-organization, information science, and market efficiency. [...] The public institutions and practices whose role was once to invent mechanisms through which markets could be put at the service of ideas, desires, and ambitions formulated in a sphere free of market logic are now commonly demonized as agents of (external and intrusive) 'regulation.'"

The informal/kinetic urbanism of Mumbai behaves much like Kwinter's description of advanced market economies: the liquid responds with unparalleled ease to changing desires, economic forces, and political constraints which move continuously through the terrain of the metropolis. It is bottom-up, self-organizing, and makes visible (perhaps in the purest form) the magnetism of non-physical urban influences. 

Yet I am afraid Mumbai, as it exists today, hangs in a precarious balance. Symptoms of a highly-regulated American urbanism, such as mega-malls and towering housing complexes, have already scraped clean some of the most unique portions of Mumbai's frenetic fabric. The cake shop and the coal store, along with their profound social, economic, and urban implications, may soon be eradicated by an architecture intent on homogenization, security, and "order."

It remains to be seen how the city of Mumbai, and, most importantly, the political bodies of India, will choose to reconcile the static/formal with the kinetic/informal, especially as the nation begins to import developmental, architectural, and urban strategies from other nations of international importance. As of this writing, however, the frictions produced by the aforementioned binaries are unimaginably rousing, a particular logic of urban development unseen in many other of the world's largest metropolises.