Mumbai Day 35: Interview with Rajeev Thakker

The following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Rajeev Thakker, director of Columbia’s GSAPP Studio X program. Studio X has outposts in major metropolitan regions around the world, including New York, Beijing, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and soon Moscow. Its goal is to foster urban, architectural, and pedagogical innovation in the world’s most transformative urban centers, a bold agenda which has generated much excitement within the academic community at large. I spoke with Mr. Thakker at Studio X’s headquarters in Fort, South Bombay.

TC: I was hoping you could talk about the Studio X program here, and perhaps how it relates to Mumbai as a whole.

RT: Studio X a laboratory for research, and the main focus of the research is the future of cities––exactly what you’re looking at. Each Studio X is fairly different in its organization and, because they’re located in different cities around the world, the primary focus of each studio might be aligned on some issues and initiatives, but some might be wildly different. In Bombay itself there are a tremendous number of straightforward urban issues when we talk about the city today: issues of housing, issues of mobility, issues of public space, development plans. These are, traditionally, the core elements of discussion when we talk about urbanism or urban development. And these are always there––Studio X Mumbai has been a part of this conversation for the last three years, whether it’s with private institutions, academic institutions, NGOs, and government in a very limited capacity. But there are also another set of sub-currents which Bombay has been very fervently developing over the last three to four years. 

One of these sub-currents is public art, and we’ve tried to create a much stronger engagement of artists within the public sphere. The shift from so-called private art to public art, which has only happened very recently, has very much to do with the market, with the economy, and conditions globally. You might know that in the last ten years, the art market in India has opened up tremendously. Artists that were making very very little for many many years, struggling, all of a sudden became superstars on the stage of both international art as well as the domestic art scene.  Consequently, there was a tremendous private growth in terms of how art was evolving within the collector-friendly private art sector. But more recently, in the last four or five years, there was a significant regression in this privatization as the economy faltered; investors were holding onto money and artists were left with vast quantities of unsold work. Some of these artists said, “okay, I’m not looking to sell these pieces, I’m looking to experiment with why I became an artist––let’s see if I could make a more meaningful impact with my work.” So many artists started to work on public art projects, to work with NGOs and other initiatives as a means of somehow engaging the public realm. It has very much to do with urban development, it has very much to do with the way in which we use our city, see our city, respect our city.

Over the past few years, we’ve had a lot of engagement with artists. It’s probably more than most of the Studio Xs. Not that this was the core focus in the beginning––we never thought we would connect artists with one-another––but it just seemed to grow with the flow of things here. By contrast, New York’s Studio X has a lot of overflow from the studio environment at Columbia, and many programs from the school operate under the guise of Studio X. Rio’s Studio X is at a much more advanced stage than we are right now, and the government in Rio has been a great asset to our program there, where they’ve actually partnered with and formulated the concept of the Studio X program with Columbia from the very beginning. So their setup is very different in that way, they have a lot of government engagement, they have a lot of people from the government coming to listen. They get a lot of opportunity to make realistic, practical change in the city. They have good sponsorship and good support. Studio X Beijing has its own issues with government involvement, but they run a lot of progressive exhibitions and shows on modern architecture. They’re more focused on architecture and the city, I think, but less about other kinds of cultural engagements.

Mumbai has been a little more diasporic in that concern, in that it’s looked at art, it’s looked at other disciplines which are not necessarily of primary focus for an architecture school. Trying to see how such diverse topics can engage with a culture which examines the future of cities, and if there are possible trajectories which open as a result, has been our greatest concern. There’s a lot of photography exhibitions and workshops that happen in the space, we’ve had a few music-oriented events. We’ve also had a lot of public art interventions, where people from the studio form groups, create public art installations and performances, and then perhaps bring the content back into the Studio X space. So, in this sense, my intention has been to try and create a studio that is able to converse with the city in a way that is mutually beneficial. It has also been to look at urban awareness from these different perspectives, to see what disparate disciplines have to say about this issue.

Bombay is incredibly complex, as you know, and it’s very easy to say that it’s a dynamic city, that you have to work with this kind of dynamism. But we also have to understand the dynamism in order to be able to tune it into something that can be looked at as something that can be positive and beneficial in the future. That is something which is, I think, very shaky, because it’s not––as you put it earlier––it’s not a very clear response to development as you might find in the Western world. The response here is extremely democratic, this is a true democracy. People do not elect people to do the job; the people do the job. It is truly fascinating, but it’s also truly confusing. So that’s where we stand on almost every front, issues that are changing within the city are not necessarily moving in tandem to other issues, they move at their own trajectory, their own pace.

This has been a big influence for the Studio X program here. Our program does not try encompass everything. It is simply one zone, a cultural space within the city, that tries to assemble these different ideas and perspectives and people, and it’s fairly open to working with anybody. Ninety-nine percent of the time we are always open to collaborating with third parties in the studio, because of the unpredictable potential for what can happen as a result. We don’t always know what’s going to happen within the space. 

The city, in terms of its future development, has to make certain decisions. It has to make certain decisions and those decisions have to be done from a certain perspective, but they have to be influenced from alternate perspectives. That means that one group or one series of groups that have been elected needs to make a clear decisions, so that there’s some kind of line of movement regarding initiatives and actions, some sort of continuity of thought from one moment to the next. But it’s extremely complex here because there’s so many invested groups and parties that do not necessarily exist within conventional bureaucratic structures. Voting banks, for example, are actually important for a certain class of people in Mumbai, but many others think that urban development here is hampered because voting banks are apparently more important than the city’s improvement and direction.

I feel that one method which could be potentially very powerful in affecting change here is this local, or grass-roots methodology of action, which eventually has the potential to spread more like a virus. This virus then spreads and infects other nearby areas, creating further change. This is largely what happens right now anyway, it just doesn’t happen in an absolutely positive way. In some aspects it’s beneficial, with economies being nurtured and formed in different ways, or maybe in generating the social connectivity that’s present in many parts of the city. I also feel that Mumbai, and India as a whole, has to develop as a democracy. That means, even though there are many different people living in a city, they all have to be, in a way, happy, and all in control of their individual and collective future. That’s the goal. The greatest difficulty lies in connecting all of these dots, to somehow harness what’s already happening for the greater good. Without going too much going into any one aspect, like mobility, or housing, or public space, these are the issues that we’re grappling with––and I don’t want to bring up all the other issues of corruption because that’s something can only be changed internally. 

People have to be able to see change in a small scale, in a local scale, to feel that change on a broader level can be a practical reality. There are a lot of groups that are using this approach in Mumbai right now; some are just interested in making Bombay a walkable city, they just want to have change on a neighborhood level. Then larger groups are working on transformational change in Bombay and looking at bigger projects, looking at mobility, looking at urban corridors, newly-developed SEZs and other strategies that are changing the formal structure of how one looks at the city and at commodities within it. 

Right now, Mumbai’s direction is very ambiguous. There’s no way to tell which way it’s going to go. It looks like it’s going downward, but I can’t say it’s going downward, because I think you need a longer-term vision of what the city is going to be like. Right now it’s more ambiguous than negative.

TC: Do you think that has a lot to do with the, as you said, purely democratic nature of the city? It seems so much of what happens here is based on the everyday, and on local structures that have evolved over many years.

RT: It has a lot to do with that, yes, of course, but I’m not advocating a structure which is uniform; I’m more advocating an ability for individuals in a city to believe that the city is a common entity, versus a purely individual space, one that can be controlled in a larger way. It’s a mindset, it’s a mind change. The only way to do enact this change is to show that there are potentials for a better city based on what’s already happening. If those potentials are there, how they can be realized?

Even the most widely-accepted improvements here, though, throw up a tremendous amount of backlash. You would think that, for example, just because something like the Metro has been completed, many people would be happy at its realization––it will increase mobility in the city, it will allow people to get to many different locations in the city that would have been cumbersome otherwise. But not everyone is happy that the Metro is now in place. Forget about the physical nature of the Metro; many people are unhappy because it’s changed the way private companies look at the city, or that it’s changed the way communities were divided in the city. There’s no longer that east-west division. This all has an effect on the psyche of the city’s residents. As a designer, you have to look at how you negotiate these different mindsets, and you don’t know where they’re all coming from, whether they’re political, social, high-powered, low-tech. It is complex, it’s complex to understand that.

What’s happening right now is that people are accepting changes for the wrong reason, they’re accepting changes because they don’t want to fight the change, they don’t want to speak up, they don’t want to question. It’s too much hassle. Who wants to spend twenty years fighting somebody? You might be dead by the time you get anything done. So there’s a very limited viewpoint in that way as to what can be accomplished. But groups have been fighting for many years, and they still keep on fighting. And it’s only going to get worse––if you think it’s difficult now, it’s only going to get more difficult later on because resources are going to be more limited. Land availability is decreasing, water availability is decreasing, power is becoming more expensive, population is increasing. So all these issues will have their repercussions. That’s the beauty of having a democracy like India, you know. There is something wonderful about it, because it is really, truly democratic; you have so many different points of view that influence a single decision. But the problem with the system as it exists today lies in political gridlock. 

Many other cities around the world have dealt with these issues in a positive way, but they’ve never had to deal with the kind of population we have here, and that’s a big factor. Think about Bangkok, think about Jakarta, Rio. They’re all cities that had very similar conditions to those in Mumbai about fifteen or twenty years ago. They’ve all transformed, but with certain areas still being the same: you still see slums in Jakarta, you still see favelas in Rio, in Bangkok you still see people living in very very small houses along the road. It’s very neat, there’s a great deal of respect in these cities for the way people have lived. This is in complete contrast to China, where the government pushed millions of people out of the cities because it didn’t want urban centers to have a poor image. But Bombay isn’t so autocratic. There’s no Robert Moses that is going to break down the Bronx. Everything is subject to very tenuous negotiation, and it simply depends on who wins the argument on a certain day as to how the city is developed.

TC: You mentioned art at the beginning of our discussion. What role does art play in this very complex urban environment?

RT: Like many Western cities, the arts in general––whether they be visual or performative––have always had a very strong way of connecting people. Individuals somehow affiliate themselves with things like art; it breeds a sense of connection. Art becomes the medication that soothes you, the aspect of your life which is not part of this hustle and bustle. Everyone loves to go see a movie, everyone loves to see a musical performance, or to visit an art gallery. Somehow those things are seen outside the sphere of the way in which the practical world actually works. As an example, Chantal Stoman––a French photographer––had an exhibition opening here at Studio X last month. At the opening, someone asked her, “So, you’re a photographer? That’s your hobby?” And she replied, “No, that’s my job.” Many of the artistic realms are seen outside of the traditional sphere of politics, economics, finance. Even architecture is on the border, but in the fact that architecture has to deal with all of this, it suddenly becomes digestible by all these other disciplines. 

But let’s get back to the efficacy of art. If you can fall in love with a painting, can you fall in love with a painting that talks about the city? Or can you fall in love with a performance that talks about the city? Or can you change the way in which people look at that engagement? Art is something for you to understand, it’s a tool for communication. One of the biggest challenges, however, is reaching people with this kind of art. What happens to the other eleven million people that don’t come to Studio X to see an exhibition, or that don’t come to a museum? You go out into the public space, you go out into the street, you go out to where people are. So there’s a lot of potential for that to change the way in which communities think. 

Many organizations have attempted to capitalize upon art in this way as a means of generating social awareness and change. URBS, for example, has run photography workshops out of Dharavi. They’ve started to educate children as to the different ways in which you can see your environment––and they’ve come back with very interesting results. It is really almost like a research project, it’s a research project regarding how art can play a role in communicating to people in the city. Through those works, we hope to see potential for raising issues, or for solving problems which even the most practical of disciplines cannot tackle. 

It’s just a different perspective for art; it’s dealing much more with real issues. There are many artists now who are just interested in engaging with the public and with trying to understand issues through their medium. It’s almost like social practice, in a way, it’s something that’s between art, public art, social practice, and, eventually if you’re talking about the city, then it becomes about development, about how the city is changing. For me it’s been quite engaging, and I’ve learned a lot from seeing such disparate works and interacting with people from many different backgrounds here.

As an example of this interaction, an artist that we’ve worked with recently produced a piece which documented his travels to all the brick kilns that surround Mumbai, to see how these bricks were manufactured. It was fascinating to see the process of making a brick, and to speak to residents who worked and lived around a kiln. Their whole community is made of this brick material, which becomes their livelihood. This artist looked at how these laborers stamp their names on the brick, how their children are raised, how they feel about the future of their work. Rather strangely, all of these bricks eventually become big houses and high-rises in the Mumbai.  The laborers are actually destroying their own land in this process, they’re physically giving their own land in order to build this enormous metropolis. So this was all documented, and it was terrifically provocative––the relationship between rural and urban, of producers and consumers, and so many other relationships.

That’s a very artistic way of looking at the connection between the rural and the urban, without saying whether it’s necessarily good or bad. So it’s a very interesting perspective on the urbanization processes happening here. No one ever thinks about that; you would never think about brick manufacture if you saw a building under construction, you would never think to question where the bricks are coming from. So we bring in issues like that which I find very compelling. Of course the artists are amazing, they do the work, they engage the public, they do everything at their own level, but it’s something we’re trying to pull into conversations here, conversations that have to do with the city.

TC: What have been some of the greatest challenges in running Studio X? The Studio has a very social, connective, and public agenda, and I’m curious as to what has been the biggest challenge in fulfilling Studio X’s mission in a city like Mumbai.

RT: Of course, Mumbai is unique in many ways. In comparison to a city like New York, New York has several institutions that look into the discipline of architecture. So if you want to look at architecture, you have the Architectural League, you have the Guggenheim, you have the MOMA, you have the Van Allen Institute, you have so many groups that talk about architecture. They all connect in many ways as well, because there are many people who float between all of them. Along with all the academic institutions that are in the city, they form a larger body of thought, a broad arena for discussion. 

Bombay has nothing like that––there’s the UDRI, but they’re more development-oriented, they’re not architecture-oriented. Then you have the individual academic institutions, but you have nothing that is truly urban, you have nothing that is truly based off that idea that architecture can truly change a city. There’s no idea like that in Bombay. Bombay is completely driven by a different mentality: the mentality of the developer, the mentality of government. That has been a big challenge because we haven’t had any local mechanisms, like you find in New York, to connect with here. So we’ve had to create our own mechanism. 

So what we’ve tried to do is align ourselves with as many local institutions as possible. That has been a big challenge, to say that you’re a foreign entity and now you want to connect everyone. You’re not trying to steal, you’re just trying to connect, to formulate some sort of common understanding between groups who already operate in Mumbai. That’s something that, hopefully, with time, will change. We’re also very young. We’re only two years old; there are institutions here that have been operating for so many years and yet they’re still not getting anything done, they just keep on doing their work in the hope that something will eventually come out of it. For me, I would like to get things moving, but I don’t see these sweeping changes happening while I’m here in this position. But it will happen at some point.

When people come into Studio X and remark on the lack of consistency of what happens here, I really love it. When people come in and ask, “What’s your focus?” I say, “I don’t know, really.” The city is a focus, but I can’t tell you what I’m going to have next month or at the end of the year, if it’s going to be architecture, or music, or art, or something else. I’m not trying to build a brand here. I’m trying to get interesting people together so we can do something positive for the city.

You can learn more about the Studio X program here.