Which brings us to our third issue, viz., housing the urban poor. It is indeed a wrench, for this is an area involving totally different kinds of knowledge and skills: in economics, sociology, land policies, mortgage-rates and so forth. Yet even here, we will find that the spatial continuum we have been discussing is of decisive importance not only for housing, but for the very survival of the cities themselves.
Many are already aware of the scale of the problem. All over the Third World, from Africa to Asia to Latin America, migrants from rural areas are pouring into towns and cities to find work. The world has not seen such epic migrations since the 18 th and 19 th centuries—when Europeans, through their military prowess, redistributed themselves around the globe, for much the same reasons. This is an option not open to most Third World countries today. Hence we must see our cities, like Jakarta or Bombay, for what they are—substitutes for migrating to Australia, growth centres for absorbing distress-migration (especially in the tertiary and bazaar sectors), on a scale which is truly mind-boggling. For in stance, Bombay in 1965 had a population of about four million; today it is over eight. By the turn of the century, it is expected to cross fifteen million. To generate urban land on a scale commensurate with this demand, necessitates a transformation of the transport network, job locations, desire lines. And so forth. In short, a restructuring of the city.
In this process, I believe that the architect has two crucial roles to play. First, in conceptualizing the new growth options, and second, in establishing the ground rules which will generate the housing. Now both these tasks necessitate an understanding of space (and its alternate uses); but, of course, it is the second which relates so clearly to the continuum we have been discussing here.
For there is much more to housing than just building houses. The room (the box) is only one element in a whole system of spaces which a family needs in order to live in a city. This system is usually hierarchal, starting from the private family zone, and moving on to the doorstep (where you greet your neighbour), then to the water tap or village well (the community meeting place), and finally to the great maidan (the principal focus of the city).
Each element in this hierarchy consists of a mix of spaces (from closed box to open-to-sky), in a delicate balance determined by the cultural and economic context of that particular society. In a warm climate, many of a family’s most essential activities (like cooking, sleeping or entertaining friends), do not need to take place within the four walls of a box, but can occur in verandas and courtyards. Under Indian conditions, where such spaces are livable for more than nine months of the year, the point of trade-off between cost and benefit can be determined—and the most economic and efficient patterns of housing identified. In most Third World cities, these turn out to be low-rise high-density configurations making extensive use of terraces, verandas and courtyards. For in a warm climate—like cement and steel—space itself is a resource.
This conclusion is an extraordinarily important one. First of all, it describes a habitat which people can build for themselves—and that means not just sites-and-services, but also the kind of indigenous vernacular architecture one finds all over the world, from Mykonos to Rajasthan to the casbahs of North Africa. Furthermore, it is of decisive relevance to employment. For while money invested in high-rise steel and concrete buildings goes into the hands of the few contractors who can build such structures and the banks which finance them, this low-rise pattern of housing is built by small masons and contractors—which, of course, generates a far greater number of jobs exactly where they should be generated: in the bazaar sector of the economy, where the rural migrants are looking for work.
Of course, these and all the many other benefits (incrementality, identity, variety, etc.) become possible only when we realize that the way to low-income housing in the Third World is not through increasingly sophisticated technology but through more extensive use of the open-to-sky end of the continuum. This is where indeed our efforts should be directed—and where the people themselves have been so incredibly resourceful and innovative. It is we architects who have been remiss.
For the developing world is eager for innovation and change. Much more so than in the West, where the past (perhaps because it is receding so fast) evokes so much nostalgia. ‘I have seen the past—and it works!’ Which is indeed ironic. For it is societies like India who live with the past all around, who accept it in their everyday lives as easily as a woman drapes a sari—these are the societies most impatient to invent the future. They see the past everyday—and much of it doesn’t work, much of the time. Thus, we have Mao Tse-tung restructuring China through his system of communes. And we have Mahatma Gandhi with his non-violence and his Sarvodaya movement.
To invent the future . . . architecture as an agent of change. This is our fourth issue—and perhaps the most basic one of all. Past and future, continuity and invention—how is the balance struck? If we look at Mao or Gandhi, we find that neither of them was hung up about whether an idea was new or old—or indeed where it came from—so long as he knew he could make it work in the context of his own people. Thus Mao’s communism stems from a German who lived halfway around the world and a whole century earlier, and much of Gandhi, of course, derives from Emerson and Thoreau. The genius of both men was that they could stitch these ideas into an old social fabric and produce a seamless wonder. New ideas making the past work. (And vice versa!)
‘There are no great men,’ said Stendhal apropos of Napoleon, ‘there are merely great events.’ And, one could perhaps go further and say: there are great issues. For we are only as big as the questions we address. And this, to my mind, is the central riveting fact of life for architects in the Third World. Not the size or value of the projects we are working on, but the nature of the questions they raise—and which we must confront. A chance to grow: the abiding virtue of a place in the sun.
Sri Yantra
The Public, the Private and the Sacred
I
We live in a world of manifest phenomena. Yet, since the beginning of time, man has intuitively sensed the existence of another world: a non-manifest world whose presence underlies—and makes endurable—the one he experiences every day. The principal vehicles through which we explore and communicate our notions of this non-manifest world are religion, philosophy and the arts. Like these, architecture too is generated by mythic beliefs, expressing the presence of a reality more profound than the manifest world in which it exists.
In India, these beliefs are all-pervading. They surface everywhere since they are not confined to formal art and philosophy but thrive in popular incarnations as well. Thus, in the overcrowded centre of a commercial metropolis like Bombay, every twenty feet or so we might find a sacred gesture—a rangoli (a pattern of coloured powder) on a doorstep, a yantra (a geometric depiction of cosmic order) painted on a wall, shrine or temple.
These gestures are a crucial and inte gral part of the spaces we inhabit. Al though there is much discussion among social theorists, architects, planners and others, about the public and private realms that constitute our habitat, there is hardly any attention paid to this, the sacred, realm.
Yet, when we look at human society across history and around the planet, the sacred is perhaps the most important realm of all, for it expresses the invisible passions that move us. Consider, for instance, the various countries of Europe. Do we not find Italy (which, like India, is filled with sacred gestures) the most compelling? When we arrive in France, the Catholic religion and the Latin culture are similar, but the gestures are less frequent. France is more secular, so it does not move us quite as much. When we get to Switzerland, we hardly find any sacred gestures at all. Is this why Switzerland can never be as riveting, as evocative, as Italy? The chocolates are delicious, the scenery is beautiful, but it is not quite the same. To the Japanese, Mount Fuji is sacred; to the Swiss, Mont Blanc is just a very high mountain. This difference is of decisive importance to their architecture, and to their lives.
In