Architectures of Exfoliation

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The research presented here is the outcome of an exploratory phase of inquiry of the School of Environment and Architecture’s larger project titled Of Mumbai’s wet mud and muddy waters: Urban complexity and the knowledge-action paradigm. In this phase, we have advanced settling, lifespaces, aqueous flows and material practices as heuristic devices to map and analyze the processes, forms and politics of habitation in an estuarine landscape. Our narrative inquiry employs a ‘deep listening’ to the oral histories of fifteen households from four neighbourhoods in the estuarine landscape of Mumbai’s Dahisar River. In narrating textual and visual stories of each household, we unravel fragments of intersection between the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ histories of four localities in suburban Mumbai, and advance the following arguments as hypotheses and questions for further exploration.

First, different intensities of wetness in diverse territorial settings allow for the settling of varied income groups. The diverse settings of land and buildings in the inhabited sea are not only porous to the differing intensities of monsoon’s waters but also to particular groups of people. For instance, the estuarial system of Dahisar River consists of neighbourhoods with varied territorial settings such as urban villages (gaothans, koliwadas), town planning schemes and privately plotted subdivisions and layouts, and even unplotted vastis on agricultural land or aqueous environmental commons, on the one hand, and housing typologies such as chawls, bungalows, and low-rise and high-rise apartments, on the other hand. The differing intensities of wetness in these territorial settings encounter practices of institutional, legal and political pluralism to absorb (or not) the settling of varied income groups. If maps do perform the creative role of framing imaginaries of new eidetic and physical worlds, then one ought to ask: How can practitioners from the design field think through the logics and ethics of representing these encounters in ways - of thickening or thinning the map - to expand the porous capacities of territories to hold aqueous as well as socioeconomic flows?

Second, wetness weaves in the lifespaces of households in the inhabited sea with varied and changing rhythms and temporalities of linear time (for instance, changing household configurations, livelihoods, entrepreneurship, social and economic networks, and builtform) and cyclical time (for instance, seasonal, annual and everyday routines). For instance, flooding is not new to the housing experience in the estuarine landscape of Dahisar River - according to our protagonist households, the memory of the earliest flood dates to the 1960s while the 2005 flood marked a watershed event after which the frequency and fears of flooding have only increased. In fact, monsoon’s everyday seepages and leakages, and extreme events of floods have generated a life for a majority that is lived year round in an envelope with varied intensities of afflictions from biotic and abiotic substances and odours. The afflictions that these substances generate in buildings are also mirrored in the intensities of afflictions to bodies. Yet, in the meantime, households are engaged in anticipatory practices of calculating opportunities and risks to negotiate the spatialities of wetness to endure and improve their life chances. We, therefore, ask: How do the temporalities embedded in plans intersect with the temporalities of linear and cyclic time in urban life? How do individuals and groups pay attention to one another and to ‘things’ in the varied and changing rhythms and temporalities of their habitat in shaping practices of calculating opportunities and risks? For instance, how do configurations of people, activities and the estuarine landscape become infrastructure for the circulation of biotic and abiotic substances and odour that shape afflictions to human bodies, and what are the practices of care that emerge in paying attention to one another and things in the habitat?

Third, the changing and intersecting rhythms and temporalities of linear and circular time shape the material practices of foliation and exfoliation of builtform. We define (ex) foliation as the processes and forms of layering, shedding, folding and fission that shape builtform transformations as the disjunct forces of settling, lifespaces, aqueous flows and material practices intersect. We advance this hypothesis in the face of emerging aspirations of urban renewal via redevelopment using the policy tool of incentive Floor Space Index in the inhabited sea of Dahisar River. In fact, in connection to a process that is being termed as the slow creation of climate refugees, the watershed event of Mumbai’s 2005 flood (and floods thereafter) have combined with the everyday dilapidation of monsoon’s wetness and led to the redevelopment of a spree of new single or double stilted, high-rise apartment buildings in the estuarine landscape of Dahisar River. Our protagonist households tell us that they aspire to a new, “free” house on an elevated in-situ ground, and are willing to play a wait and watch game in the incentivised floor space policy market to achieve their aspiration. However, not everyone is able to get access to a redeveloped house on an elevated ground as such opportunities are compounded by court cases over property rights, long bureaucratic processes to acquire property and house titles, demonetization, the limitations imposed by development control regulations and allied policies, and now even the pandemic. Multiple practices of retrofit and repair have emerged in the meantime that attempt, in their own ways, to make housing typologies resilient to monsoon’s everyday wetness and its extreme events. In thinking conceptually about repair and retrofit, a focus on the intersection of the social and natural histories of localities thus compels us to complement the metaphors of the ‘sponge’ and ‘forest’ as infrastructures for holding wetness, which some architects and urbanists have drawn our attention towards, with that of (ex)foliation. How could the metaphor of exfoliation be drawn into a creative encounter with the sponge and forest to develop strategies of living with the monsoon in the inhabited sea at multiple scales ranging from the small to the large?