Reimagining the City’s Future through its Past
‘Several years before, the thought came to his Majesty’s omniscient mind that he should select some pleasant site on the banks of the aforesaid river, distinguished by its genial climate, where he might find a splendid fort and delightful edifices.’
The ‘aforesaid river’ mentioned above — from The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan1 — is none other than the Yamuna. And the ‘pleasant site on its banks, chosen as the location for ‘a splendid fort and delightful edifices’ by the Emperor Shah Jahan, is in the heart of the NCR, the National Capital Re- gion of Delhi.
Most people today would be unable to match this quote to the place. Indeed, ‘distinguished by its genial climate’ is not how residents of Delhi would describe the metropolis. My niece moved into the NCR a year ago after living practically all her life in Mumbai. She disclosed how she and a col- league — who was also an ex-college mate in Ahmedabad, a city that is very hot for most of the year — were wondering whether there is any season in Delhi when the weather can be called ‘good’!
Those of us, however, who have lived here for many more years, may recollect bracing sunny win- ters, balmy springs, and golden autumns. Even the hot summers were not unbearable. They would be punctuated by short dust-storms every three or four days. These, fearsome while they lasted, would immediately bring down the temperature significantly. The season which was perhaps more difficult than the others, was the end of the monsoons. And one of the ways to cope with that, was the typically Delhi architectural device of the barsati. Derived from the Hindi word barsat or rain, this was a room on the roof-terrace in many low-density areas of Delhi, adjoining the mumti above the staircase.
Literally meaning of/for the rain, it was a place where one could specially enjoy the monsoons, watch the spectacle of the clouds and rain, and catch the slightest hint of a breeze. This space — which was essentially just a room (sometimes with a verandah) looking out onto the terrace — worked as an extra room, a family store, or a living area for the servants. It had a fairly flexible in- terpretation, defined as ‘a habitable room/rooms on the roof of the building with or without toi- let/kitchen.'2 It was also often rented out to students or young professionals who could not afford an entire house or a floor. According to some sources, till three decades ago, ‘75% of small rentable properties in many residential suburbs were barsatis’.3
A barsati in Delhi thus, was not just for the rain, but also for an intermingling of streams of differ- ent social and cultural strands. One such barsati, a convivial cheery space shared by three college students on a shoe-string budget, forms the fulcrum of the story and the key moments in the 1981 cult Hindi film Chasme Baddoor directed by Sai Paranjpe. Newcomers to the film, however, may not recognise this setting. There are almost no barsatis in Delhi today, even in the very few houses on plots that have survived the onslaught of developer built high-rise flats. Building bye-laws in early post-independence times which limited construction to two storeys, with an allowance for cover-
1 p.406, The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan, An Abridged History of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, complied by his Royal Librarian, The Nineteenth century manuscript Translation of A.R. Fuller (British Library, Add.30, 777) Edited and Com- piled by W E Begley and Z A Desai, OUP Delhi, 1990
2 http://www.tcpo.gov.in/sites/default/files/TC
3 The Guardian, Debika Ray, 16 December 2015, ‘Rooftop Cities; the transformation of Delhi’s once affordable ‘barsati’ homes’.
ing a small area on the third storey,4 have now changed to allow four full storeys in residential ar- eas. Sky-rocketing costs of land and property have led house-owners to cover every available inch, rather than leave any useable open terrace area. And in the name of globalisation and progress, practically everyone aspires to live in typologies suitable only for climes in the upper northern part of the hemisphere. Even the plotted house-typology as planned and built in British and Post-inde- pendence New Delhi is an imported concept, and one that is sub-urban, not urban in character and potential.
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And so these typologies are fundamentally perverse to our regions: climatically and culturally. Fa- cades that sport large picture-windows, glass balconies, metal pergolas, no usable verandahs or sensible shading devices, inevitably heat up in the summers, block monsoon breezes, and give lit- tle scope to interact with or enjoy the seasons. They are rendered unliveable without consuming huge amounts of energy on a daily basis. Their construction and embodied-energy draw relentless- ly and continuously on the earth, water and air.
As such a building vocabulary becomes the norm, with multiple flatted accommodation on a plot that would earlier house just a family or two — most residential plots now have at least a dozen air-conditioners fitted in. These belch out heat from practically each room in each flat. In a vicious cycle, such energy-intensive and heat-emitting cooling devices transform the city into a man-made emitter of heat, exponentially pushing the demand for air-conditioners even in less well-to-do ar- eas. The dominance of ill-suited industrial building materials such as concrete, over the past seven decades, which radiate heat even after sundown, only exacerbates the situation.
And so the entire city has become a veritable man-made inferno, as the CSE study on the changing nature of heat in Indian cities shows.5 And the cooling effect of the river — the very reason for the ‘genial climate’ sought by Shah Jahan’s builders to locate a new city here 400 years ago — is ill- used. Disregarded in planning schemes, it is now reduced to a dirty drain except in the monsoons when it swells to threatening proportions. All the emphasis is on using up land to make endless tarred roads, raised or buried metro-lines, endless loops of bridges and flyovers — all of which ex- acerbate heating in the summers and flooding in the monsoons, apart from ceaselessly promoting and pushing automobile transport.
Jane Jacobs wrote many years ago of the phenomenon in her part of the world where “the car is not only a monstrous land-eater itself: it abets that other insatiable land-eater—endless, strung-out suburbanization.”6 Rendered invisible within all this, relegated to the periphery and the most un- liveable parts with the least amount of civic facilities, house the majority of the city’s population, its poorest inhabitants. In hastily made, invariably ill-constructed dwellings, easy prey to the weather that gets more extreme each day. The planning device of suburbanisation, indeed the very concept of the NCR itself, needs to be challenged and changed, if we are seriously looking to make cities humane, equitable and ecologically responsible.7
4 ‘In individual residential plots, normally only two storeys may be allowed plus an optional provision of barsati floor at the top...When a barsati is permitted, not more than 25% of the area on the ground floor or the floor immediately below the barsati or 500 sq.ft, whichever is less should be allowed to be covered including the area covered by the staircase leading to the barsati”. https://dda.gov.in/sites/default/files/inline-files/bbl_1983.pdf p. 94.
5 Anatomy of an Inferno-Decoding urban heat stress in Cities, CSE Webinar, https://www.youtube.com/live/ OwQcgHffJkQ?feature=shared
6 https://www.archdaily.com/1016717/jane-jacobs-cyclist, Peter L Laurence, May 17, 2024 7 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2226585620300637
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If the planning and architecture of cities can cause such unsustainable and severe implications on health, society and environment, the solutions must also lie in tackling it at these levels. In other words, at the interlinked macro and micro scales; at overall planning and regulations as also archi- tectural forms, materials and detail.
To do so, we have to return to the river and give it centre-stage again. Even in the changed equa- tion of the city and its surroundings today and with all the odds stacked against it, the Yamuna — despite its denuded, polluted, smelly state — still exercises a beneficial effect on the environment around it. So much so, that when it was as hot as 33 degrees centigrade at 7.30 in the morning in the month of May 2024, there was a perceptible drop in the temperature along the stretch of the road crossing the Yamuna into Delhi.
What must it have been like living in the Delhi region, when urban form was designed as a re- sponse to the climate, not in defiance of it? In the time of Shahjahanabad, established by the Em- peror Shah Jahan in the middle of the century? Especially at and around the Red Fort, right on the banks of the river — the ‘pleasant site’ that is recorded to have been chosen by his builders? Did the act of constructing an imperial palace and entire city change the attributes of the site and its genial climate? For the better or for worse? In either case, are there any cues we can take from the planning and building of the city then?
What is unmistakable in the vision of the city then, is that the river permeates the very conception of the ambitious new construction venture. Court-histories of Shah Jahan record how: ‘he envi- sioned that streams of water should be made to flow through the proposed fort and that its ter- races overlook the river’.8 The benefits of privilege are of course, evident in the fact that it fell to the emperor and his family to occupy the best location in the new city, ringed around by trees and orchards. One must note, however — unlike today when the richest parts of the city are ironically not those lining the river, but well away from it — that they recognised the worth of the river.
Not just the imperial fort but also many of the havelis, large mansions belonging to the noblemen, were located directly along the expanse of the Yamuna. These overlooked beyond its banks on the opposite side, green fields with practically no intrusion from the city. Thus, the urban landscape just behind the enclosing city walls, as well as the site-planning within the river-walls of the imper- ial Red Fort featured many orchards amidst which were set a very few buildings. It was only the western ends of the Fort and the city, farthest away from the river, which were allowed to have a relatively denser built-mass.
This planning and location is not merely a situation of using power for personal benefit. It also ac- commodates a larger public function. If a dense collection of small, private dwellings or buildings had been positioned on the eastern edge of the city close too its river-banks, these would have blocked both the river breezes and the river view. They would also have impeded public access to the banks. Instead, the decision to build a low-density of structures ranged within trees and gar- den-orchards, and the provision of open public spaces along the Yamuna, made the space of the river-front both accessible to many people and permeable to cool river-breezes.
This device of constructing a small proportion of built structures close to the river, helped to re- duce temperatures in two ways. The gardens, a part of the noblemen’s havelis, increased the bio- mass in the vicinity of the Yamuna, and it channelised the micro-climate created by the Yamuna deeper into the city. This configuration may be seen as another version of the architectural device
8 p.406, The Shahjahanama of Inayat Khan, Begley and Desai.
of a ‘jali’ — the perforated screens that interspersed and connected what seemed to constitute the continuous facade of the imperial pavilions along the river banks. Such urban and architectural planning ensured that the breezes and cooling effect of the Yamuna were not just confined to the imperial palace-pavilions, or colonised by those lucky enough to be located next to the river.
Not that the Yamuna riverfront was taken over entirely by private, or even by imperial functions. The Red Fort did command a swathe of the central river-view towards the eastern end of the city, and its high fortification walls came between the main Chandni Chowk street and the Yamuna. But on either side of the Fort, the view opened up through public gardens. There were many public ghats too. Flanking the banks on the city-edge beyond the Red Fort, their airy pavilions and chat- tris stepped down along wide steps to the river itself. And the sandy embankments at the foot of the river-front walls of the Fort were also open to the public. Even 200 years after its founding, de- spite the appropriation and apportioning of many gardens and open spaces, and the incursions into the physical and social fabric of the city by the British, a fair number of these still remained — as shown in records such as paintings of the river-facade of the Fort from as late as the 1820s, or the detailed 1846 map of Shahjahanabad, or photographs from a little before or around 1857.
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In my under-graduate years at the School of Planning and Architecture at Delhi, I was unaware that the Yamuna flowed practically under our noses — even though we were located on its erst- while banks, just a few kilometres south of the Red Fort. This was also an outcome of faulty plan- ning and architecture. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the intimidating width of the Ring Road and the looming bulk of the Indira Gandhi Stadium, effectively obscured all sight or sense of the river. On the few instances when I did venture beyond them, as during a memorable bicycle relay-race at our college festival, I was concentrating much too hard on evading the traffic (and ensuring that we did not lose our lead!) to even register the proximity of the river.
This vital component of Delhi, the river — the very reason for continuous inhabitation in the re- gion of Delhi from pre-historic times — did not also figure in the academic design exercises set to us by our galaxy of distinguished faculty, which included many very famous architects. We did go far afield within and outside Delhi to study various architectural and natural contexts. We were also frequently dispatched to the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in our neighbourhood, to observe and sketch its buildings. Indeed, we could scarcely escape the sight of them right from first-year — es- pecially those of us who had places assigned next to the windows, and spent a good proportion of our time gazing out from our class studio on the third-floor.
But the Yamuna did not have any presence or role in developing our design thinking, unless we had family or personal associations with it. Many of us, came to SPA from different parts of the country, as I did, growing up in the environment of far-flung army cantonments all over India. It had already been rendered invisible and superfluous in the planning of the city.
Is that why the Yamuna continues to evade the collective imaginations of generations of graduates and practitioners from reputedly one of the premier institutes of architecture and planning in the country? And so, perhaps the first step in making the Yamuna and other rivers relevant again, is to make them visible again —and permeable as in Shahjahanabad. To create free and public access, and release their banks from colonisation by large buildings, power stations, bus parking, tarmac, high fences, barred stretches, and noxious use.
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How about the rest of the city, away from the river?
If we look at Shahjahanabad, pre-1857, we see that even those of its parts located away from the Yamuna, were devised with an ever-present awareness of the river and its canals and feeder chan-
nels. And with a sense and sensibility that made water a central part of planning and living in the city; that ensured that topographical routes, natural courses and routes to the river were not inter- rupted, built upon or polluted.
Trees lined Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazaar: the two widest, most ceremonial and important streets in the central east-west and southern part of Shahjahanabad, where the maximum amount of traffic and activities were centred. Canals drawing from the river-system flowed down their length. Large public gardens — which were essentially orchards — were located adjacent to these streets, and formed the grand finale around their junction with the imperial chowks right in front of the Fort. These tree plantations worked as bio-mass heat sinks: cooling tempers, shading the ground, recharging ground-water levels, filtering dust, and creating places of beauty.
Neither were the poorer people rendered invisible, or pushed only to the outskirts.
They were a part of each precinct and neighbourhood, making the city a place of mixed land-use and mixed-income groups. Availability and ownership of space in Shahjahanabad was not reduced to a single denominator of wealth. It revolved around an overlapping basis of multiple affiliations. The home of each nobleman or prosperous trader or important official did not just house their families but also included around them various other homes and families with whom they had a mutually dependent relationship of patronage and service.
Neighbourhoods, mohallas and katras were organised according to shared trades and professions, and accommodated many income and skill levels related to those communities of trades. Just as within the walls of the Fort, space was organised not merely for imperial use but for a multiplicity of interlinked functions from karkhanas to kitchen-gardens to courts of justice. And for active users, including administrators, soldiers, attendants, craftspeople.
Large havelis — around which smaller habitations clustered — disposed throughout different precincts instead of being concentrated in just one part of the city, repeated the same urban motif of social and spatial permeability. Architecturally, these havelis echoed on a smaller scale the pat- tern of buildings within the Fort, set around and within fountain-courts or gardens of orange, pomegranate, and other fruit trees. Fountain-courts and small orchards similarly formed the theme around which smaller homes in the city were arranged.
Like an Escher painting, as you zoom in and out of the city and Fort, different variations and scales of this interlinked pattern reveal themselves, simultaneously simple and complex. Tried and tested in the Indian subcontinent from Harappan times, this pattern was composed of sequences of walled courtyards-verandahs-halls-pavilions: a fluid building typology with some of its finest ex- amples visible within the Fort, as analysed and described at length in The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad.
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It is not as if the Fort and the city lacked formal ordered and structured avenues, forecourts and gardens. But these were not segregated into manicured, superficial showpieces. They instead al- lowed and encouraged multiple functions by varying users. As one moved into the residential ar- eas from these avenues and public gardens, greater degrees of architectural freedom and territorial adaptation of spaces were permissible. The French traveller, Francois Bernier, was an inhabitant of the newly established city in the mid 17th century. He condescends to grant ‘that the capital of Hindoustan is not destitute of handsome buildings, although they bear no resemblance to those in
Europe’.9 But it is really this lack of resemblance that seems to get in his way of appreciating the logic of the city.
He avers that ‘there are no streets like ours of S.Denis’, and ‘[t]hat which so much contributes to the beauty of European towns, the brilliant appearance of the shops, is wanting in Delhi’.10 And so he cannot shake off his disapproval of the shops, where:
‘For one that makes a display of beautiful and fine cloths, silk and other stuffs striped with gold and silver, turbans embroidered with gold, and brocades, there are at least five and twenty where nothing is seen but pots of oil or piles of butter, piles of basket filled with rice, barley, chick-peas, wheat, and an endless variety of other grain and pulse, the ordinary aliment not only of the Gentiles, who never eat meat, but of the lower class of Mahometans, and a considerable portion of the military.’11
Bernier also observes that the ‘two principal streets of the city’ have ‘open shops, where, during the day artisans work, bankers sit...and merchants exhibit their wares’; that the ‘houses of the mer- chants are built over these warehouses, at the back of the arcades; and that the ‘rich merchants have their dwellings elsewhere'.12 He writes about ‘the five streets apart from the two principal ones’, amid which are ‘dispersed the habitations of Mansebdars, rich merchants and others’... [i]ntermixed with these different houses is an immense number of small ones, built of mud
and thatched with straw, in which lodge the common troopers, and all that vast multitude of ser- vants and camp-followers...’.13
And he notes that the ‘dwellings of the omrahs, though mostly situated on the banks of the river and in the suburbs, are yet scattered in every direction'.14 Himself dependent on the influence and patronage of a nobleman to whose household he was attached, he cannot shake off his disapproval of such a layout, of the many 'wretched mud and thatch houses’15 that are seen throughout the city.
Leaving aside his conviction about the superiority of streets and cities of in his own country, what does the record by Bernier as an independent, outside observer, tell us? To me it reveals a number of things about the physical form and social structure of the city:
How it is designed to be inhabited by the rich and poor alike;
That it is the richer inhabitants who travel out (to their large estates, private gardens and
baghs in the suburbs), while the very heart of the city makes space for the poor;
That there is an endless variety of people who throng the market in front of the Fort and the
'royal square’ adjoining it — the same space, where at night are encamped the Rajas who are assigned guard-duty for the Fort, and where the royal horses are exercised in the morn- ing;
That the main entrance streets of the city have markets — not empty promenades or un- peopled vistas;
9 pp. 248-9, Francois Bernier: Travels in the Mughal Empire, 1656-68, First Published London 1891; Reprint Asian Educational Services AES, New Delhi, 1996
10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 p. 245 13 p. 246 14 p. 247 15 p. 246
That these markets do not just display expensive 'lifestyle' wares (as in the malls today) but also basic grain and staple food for all, that include the less affluent;
And that these markets additionally accommodate artisans too, the mainstay of the eco- nomic system and the industrial base of the city — i.e. they make space for skills and knowledge as well as goods. In other words, the economic, technical, industrial, commer- cial, recreational aspects of the city are seamlessly integrated.
Such an urban character — democratic despite a political dispensation governed by a monarchy — is worth applauding and emulating. All the spatial and architectural clues of an inclusive city are here: multi-functional flexible spaces catering to mixed-land use and mixed income groups; a pro- liferation of public open areas used differently by various people at different times of the day. A city that makes the rich (who can afford it) travel out to the periphery of the city and keeps the cen- tre accessible for the less rich while creating opportunities usable by all classes and kinds of peo- ple; a city that organises market and support activities on main travel nodes. A city that celebrates the river it draws life from; that gives back to the earth to stands on.
A humane, equitable and ecologically responsible city.
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Yet, like Bernier, our references for urban models are increasingly based only on those that gener- ate an impressive public appearance and show, or are characterised by imposing and awe-inspir- ing regularity. The Dutch educator and architect, N J Habraken, in his masterly analysis in The Ap- pearance of the Form, explains the different world-views and ‘fundamental collective images con- cerning shared space’.16 These govern both the role, and therefore, the form of public space. In Western contexts, these are generally inviolate and cannot be questioned. Thus, predetermined geometries and fixed boundaries define and present public space with authority. In many Middle- eastern and eastern cultures, however, public space is an arena as well as an outcome of negotia- tion. There is less obsession with creating form. Instead the emphasis is on a complex web of rela- tionships and usage, which in turn generates and accommodates particular social and territorial patterns in an economic and efficient manner.To put this in context, imagine for a moment that the India Gate vista leading up to Rashtrapati Bhawan has colonnades and arcades hosting a variety of goods for the rich and the poor; space for formal markets and spontaneous pop-ups; for craftspeople to work; for tailors, watch-repair stalls, food stalls. Not prim lines of trees but dense orchards and public spaces — free and open for street vendors, musicians, story-tellers, artistes and orators to practise and perform.
Imagine the city as a place of learning and healing. Imagine the effect of the simple expedient of planting many native fruit, medicinal trees and shrubs. Big garden groves lining the wide dusty roads. Of planning for people rather than vehicles. Of cleaner air and happier citizens. And withal, more bird and animal life, cooler temperatures and less road rage, I daresay— even in May.
If that flight of imagination seems utopian, naive, or just plain difficult, we can instead invest in an effort of memory. Of a lived summer not so long ago. An uncertain summer, when despite the ominous fear of the virus and the devastation and havoc especially wrought on the poor, the air was cooler and non-toxic, streets and skies were unprecedentedly welcoming of vegetation, birds and animals.
16 p. 34, ‘Sharing’, The Appearance of the Form. Awater Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2nd edition, 1985.
And if we are to continue to imagine transformations, why then, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing: ‘I'd rather be a forest than a street’.17 And if not, I’d rather get the forest into our streets and our cities.
17 From "El Cóndor Pasa (If I Could)”, a 1970 cover by Simon & Garfunkel (with English lyrics by Paul Simon, on the al- bum Bridge over Troubled Water ) of "El Cóndor Pasa’ — the 1913 orchestral musical piece composed by the Peruvian com- poser, Daniel Alomía Robles, based on traditional Andean music.
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