The Interesting City

Yes,

This is what I kept forgetting.

Why is this city interesting? Why everyone is plunging into it? Why everyone wants to study it? Why is it so fascinating? Why are people migrating into it?

Any object/ thing in making is always beautiful! Look at a building being constructed and it looks more beautiful than once it would be completed. (at least that's an architect's point of view). Mumbai, I feel, is still a city in making. Unlike other cities, Mumbai still struggles for a coherent image (out of its cosmopolitan). You see buildings amidst the shanties. You see the shanties just getting transformed into slightly taller buildings, and the slightly taller being converted into larger ones. There is debris all over, there is cement, reinforcement, bulldozers everywhere. Flyovers, skywalks, trains, buses, metros, buildings - all in the process. We see it happening all around us. I think although we hate engaging in all of this, this is that we love about it.

We still have wadis, villages, beaches, padas - how could it then be a city? Just go to the outskirts - say Bhayander and you will see a gamut of adopted culture from the main city. Someone once said: "Mumbai is a village" intending to say - there is no amount of city-like civilian built form here.

Can you imagine what it means to be in a city which is still in its making? 100 years later, when its full, we will be historical. They will write on us as "these people used to take a train from Goregaon to Dadar for their work" - quite possible. No, actually what I want to bring out is that while cities like say New york or London are all almost done, Mumbai is just midway. Now that Other cities are being reacted to, Mumbai is doing it all at the same time. It is building itself, critiquing itself, reacting to itself and growing simultaneously. I think that is what makes it interesting. And in between all of this lie a group of people called "architects", "urban researchers" and the whole group of "activists" and others. Some of them one day will be known as we know of the "surrealists/dadaists/situationist" today!

The only unfortunate thing is that while the other landmark cities that we study today were widely documented, Mumbai has already become far to complex to be documented. Documentation should be available for future study. And we need to still archive a lot of it. How do we begin to even look at this city in process. Is it correct to be evaluating it while it is still in process? To be able to talk about it more confidently, there should be some intensive effort in its documentation. There should be something like a City Document Society - something like a gazzetier. The gazzatier is far too limited in terms of its methods. May be new age tools could be used to start looking and recording the place we live in.

(this post needs to be formalized)