An idea of architecture that centers around India's real needs
For Correa, housing is not a mere problem of numbers, to be solved by achieving statistical targets through mass centralised means. Neither is urbanisation an evil that needs to be curtailed through state controls. Ultimately of course the two streams merge, because housing constitutes 70 per cent of any urban area.
Correa views the tackling of these problems of different scale as a virtue. In India, "architects are often involved with different assignments at the same time... it makes one see connections between issues, ranging from the practical to the metaphysical. An idea you've been dealing with at the scale of an outhouse suddenly becomes relevant, a day-or an hour-later, when you're looking at a whole township. Or perhaps, conceptualising a new museum typology..."
For the sake of lucidity in understanding the growth of ideas at the micro-level and its merging with the macro-level, the book's divided into two sections; one on houses growing into housing; the other on the town and city growing into the region. Significantly "the projects are presented in an order, largely chronological and thematic". What more could one ask for! A virtual autobiography of a man depicted through his architectural and planning concerns. The story of a true Karm Yogi of our times!
The housing section opens appropriately with an elementary shelter, a low-income "tube house" built in the early '60s and takes one through a fascinating journey, ending ultimately with a proposal to be realised presumably in the next millennium-a multi-storey transitory high density housing at Mhada, Bombay. Traversing these 40 years, Correa's built an incredible variety of housing projects; ranging from a galaxy of luxury private houses, squatters' colonies, to multi-storey apartments and industrial housing, both public and private.
At first glance, one may feel the projects are presented on their own, in seeming isolation, but Correa considers them "part of a much larger spectrum of concerns". Primary among the concerns is the climate and, as a corollary, the use of open-to-sky space as integral to any residential space in India. The milestone projects in this section are no doubt the Tube House ('61-62), Kanchenjunga Apartments ('70-83), the house at Koremangala ('85-88), Previ Housing (un-built project, '69-73), Tara ('75-78) and Belapur ('83-86).
The section that follows comprises only about a quarter of the book, but constitutes the most vital of Correa's concerns. It voices the concern of millions of urban dwellers of India who comprise over 40 per cent of the population but occupy only marginal land. "Why are we so inept at dealing with our urban centres?" asks Correa, and suggests, "that though India had built many sacred towns, the idea of a commercial city inhabited by lawyers, engineers and doctors and administrators" has been looked upon by our political leaders including the Mahatma with an inbuilt suspicion; this despite the fact that he kicked off his Quit India Movement from the Bombay Maidan. Is it the political compulsion of 'numbers' in the voting game that kindles such suspicion and apathy? But the reality is changing fast as the rural-urban population percentage changes rapidly.
As the rural-urban migration accelerates, Correa cites the example of Bombay that "gets worse and worse as physical environment...and yet better as a city. That is to say, everyday it offers more in the way of skills, activities, opportunity, making it everyday more and more of a great city...and yet a terrible place". With this succinct example applicable to all Indian urban centres, Correa's lauded the intrinsic virtues of a city and our criminal disregard of its well-being.
In the globalised world today, we have to accept the city as an "engine of economic growth" that generates and offers the skills we need for development, to the millions of migrants for whom cities are the only hope. "If the cities are properly managed they can generate surplus funds not only for their own development but also help subsidise the surrounding rural areas as well." An interesting inverse theory that can become a distinct possibility in the future.
After stating this in his Urban Manifesto, Correa presents a series of projects which illustrate solutions evolved by him for urban problems. The premise of many of these is revolutionary. Our aim in dealing with cities must be humane. It must be to increase their absorptive capacity rather than keep hopeful immigrants out on the presumptuous assumption that "I came here first, now you stay out, as we're too many as it is." To find viable solutions, Correa realistically enough does not depend on new building technologies. Rather he proposes a "new scenery" based on the judicious use of land, its population density and the intensive role the small entrepreneur may play in urban growth. He suggests low-rise humane development with a malleable built form that the community can shape to its needs-and not grandiose and rigid master plans based on old feudal hierarchical systems.
This book's really the stuff the poetry of architecture and planning is made of. Its poetic content's supported by allusions to the mythical quality that "city" has had in all civilisations. "Cities, since the beginning of Time, have embodied the dreams and aspirations of a society. They're a kind of Platonic Ideal of what life can be." It may also well be the stuff of dreams. These dreams, however, have a place of their own, in the discordant and shrill noises of urban India looking desperately for well-deserved succour which Correa has so profoundly prescribed in his book.