method of examining the “context in its
context,” we discover that our sphere of
concern (the context of the context) can
actually be acted upon from within our
sphere of influence(our more immediate
context) and vice versa — each nourished and
clarified by the other.^3 Most importantly, these
narratives clearly illuminate the narrow
circumscription of architects’ territory of
operation in the business-as-usual-model of
practice. It also sheds light on ways to better
understand the site as mediated through and
embedded within a larger scale of economic,
social and political processes. Through this
broader scope, designers can potentially have a
more far-reaching, progressive social impact
beyond the immediate sites of our projects.
Working in Mumbai
Our approach to working in Mumbai, where our
practice is based, has been to use the city as a
generator of practice, continuously considering
its urban context in relation to the evolving
democratic landscape of India. In this way,
our aim, as designers, is not only to contribute
to the larger national discussion, but also to
hone an approach that responds at once to the
dynamic urban context of Mumbai and the
broader (and ever-shifting) context in which
the city is nestled. In order to do this e
ffectively, the city of Mumbai has served as a
laboratory that has enabled our involvement
with a wide range of activities and provided
invaluable learning experiences. In turn, these
lessons have been consistently woven into
our design approach and have enabled us to
evolve an architectural vocabulary that
connects spatial and architectural elements
from the past with a contemporary approach to
building in an urban environment — the
context of a majority of our commissions. At
RMA Architects, viewing the city of Mumbai
and surrounding region as a generator of
practice has also enabled us to develop a
methodology that draws from a more elastic
definitionof the design professions by accepting
multiple disciplines as simultaneously valid
modes of inquiry and engagement, particularly
in the kinetic urban landscapes of Indian cities
and their peri-urban regions. A recognition of
the complementary nature of seemingly
disparate disciplines has made available a
spectrum of operations through which we
engage with an otherwise complex landscape.
Today, the evocations of local
specificity(fetishising the local, whether its
craft or tradition) are a simplistic way to
critique the homogenising effects of
globalisation. This results in “the fetish of local
specificity”as a way of resisting the global
trajectory. It is a superficialand perhaps
symbolic gesture at best. In fact, the notion
that globalisation amounts to homogeneity
and should be resisted, is perhaps an overused
and unproductive approach for architects.
This is because differences are not just about
local specificit. In today’s world, the potency
for design lies in the way differences are made
relevant and then networked, globally.
Therefore, in using the city as a generator of
our practice, the understanding of meta-
narratives are critical in situating the
practice in a broader landscape — the “context
of the context.”
Some meta-narratives that are used to better
understand this question of context range
from the disjuncture that the modernisation
project brought to bear on a traditional society
like India, where the aesthetic of modernity
preceded social modernisation. The scholar
Sibel Bozdogan argues this point, citing
conditions where aesthetic modernity in
architecture — and, by extension, the city and
modernist architecture — arrived before an
independent bourgeois, industrialisation,
capital markets, and the usually-accepted
characteristics of modernisation.^4 Naturally,
this reversal raises many questions about the
pre-conceived aesthetics often applied
universally in architectural practice. On the
other end of the spectrum is the political
transition in countries like India which, over
the last three decades, has been opening its
economy and transitioning away from
socialism to-wards a more neoliberal paradigm.
Urban India began to liberalise its economy in
the1990s and has been characterised by
physical and visual contradictions that coalesce
in a landscape of incredible pluralism that is
charged with polarities. With globalisation and
the emergence of a post-industrial, service-
based economy, urban space in Indian cities
has been fragmented and polarised, with the
rich and poor jostling for access to amenities.
Today, private capital chooses to build
environments that are insulated from their
context. They are created without the burdens
of a social contract that facilitates citizenship
or even acknowledges the multifaceted
complexity of a modern city. These gated
communities take the form of vertical towers
in the inner city and sprawling suburban
compounds on the peripheries. In fact, in the
state-controlled economy, the physical
relationship between different classes was
often orchestrated according to a master plan
founded upon the notion that housing was an
entitlement and that proximity to employment
was necessary for all. In the new economy, the
fragmen-tation of service and production
locations has resulted in a new, “bazaar-like”
urbanism that weaves its presence through
the entire urban fabric.
Thus, working in Mumbai is about negotiating
global flows so as not to erase and remake
landscapes but, rather, to occupy local fissures
to create fascinating hybrid conditions and
startling adjacencies. The design challenge in
this condition depends on how to make these
disparate worlds blur — can the thresholds
between them be spatially softened? As a
practitioner, social access and its clear
relationship to the articulation of spatial
arrangements becomes a critical aspect of