The other side of Architect Bimal Patel
Bimal Patel, Prime Minister Modi's favourite architect, has come in for criticism for his grandiose projects that have caused considerable damage
Bimal Patel, Prime Minister Modi's favourite architect, has come in for criticism for his grandiose projects that have caused considerable damage. Worse, one could say it is his thinking as a planner that poses a serious threat to urban and social life which has attracted little attention
This is realised when one carefully hears him or reads his writing. It is amazing that he has such utterly regressive, anti people views despite the best possible architectural education that he got in Berkeley.
He is very calm, balanced in his presentations but then one soon finds that all his sophistication barely hides his extremely anti-people, pro-builder bias. This is of particular concern because he has considerable influence in architectural education.
Bimal Patel was till recently President of CEPT University, Centre for Environment Planning and Technology of Ahmedabad, for 11 years. His father Hasmukh Patel was a prominent architect based in Ahmedabad. So, he had everything going for him, but he seems to have badly fumbled on the way.
Despite Ahmedabad’s long history of traditional architecture and modern architecture, Bimal Patel shows little interest in tradition, as opposed to Charles Correa, who understood so well, modern as well as traditional architecture. I have with me a copy of his book, Vistara, on the architecture of India from ancient times. Correa had very liberal ideas about architecture, planning and people. He had concern for people, Patel seems totally indifferent, in a subtle way even hostile to common people.
Patel's main idea is redevelopment of buildings, high rise structures, constructing new streets, widening existing streets. It is clear that his obsessions will have a very negative impact on the public arena and ordinary people. He is obsessed with streets but in a totally negative way, democratisation of street life as envisaged by Jane Jacobs seems totally alien to his outlook.
Any architect, planner wanting to widen streets would be expected to insist that it should provide more space for pedestrians and not cars. Planning should be for mobility for people, not cars. He seems completely unconcerned with liberal ideas now widely prevalent in large parts of the West where there is a big campaign for increasing facilities for pedestrians, cyclists . There is a growing demand for congestion tax, reducing parking for cars, definitely there is opposition to free parking of cars on the road.
Patel shows no such interest at all. His whole scheme smacks of being against public transport but he cleverly says urban transport is not his arena and he would not answer questions pertaining to that.
He thinks facilities for pedestrians and cyclists are some fancy ideas, he almost ridicules such democratic demands. This is utterly amazing coming from him. He wants cities to be completely reformed so that our grandchildren can lead a happy life. This cannot be done in our life time, he says. He cleverly absolves the ruling dispensation of its duty to improve lives of people living now, if it takes care of them, this will surely help in making life better for us, for the next generation.
He seems to be on weak ground when it comes to his knowledge of history of urban life. He cites examples of Paris and London the cities that were very dirty and then were vastly improved. We are on the same path, he claims.
This is all so utterly misleading.
Paris and London had great resources with huge surplus obtained through imperialism, robbing poor nations. He cites the example of the book "London 1870-1914 A City at its Zenith" written by Andrew Saint published in 2021 which shows the remarkable progress made by London. Yes, there was progress but it was brought about mainly because politically progressive and liberating forces were at work. In contrast, our so called improvement phase of the current time, which he lauds, is utterly anti people, ugly if you see the buildings being built, I see them daily.
He takes no cognisance of the fact that there was widespread poverty in London even during the later part of the 19th century and this is clearly demonstrated by the famous voluminous work done by Charles Booth. There’s no better place to look than the maps of Charles Booth, a social researcher and reformer whose exploration of the city’s seedier side helped change the way the world views social problems.
These days, Booth is viewed as a kind of godfather of statistics and sociology, a social reformer who recognized the need to face issues of poverty and crime head-on. Born to wealthy parents and a socially conscious family (his cousin was Beatrice Webb, who invented the term “collective bargaining"), Booth became interested in the issues of urban life through charitable work. At the time, Victorian Britain was both wildly powerful and extremely poor. While working on how to allocate a relief fund in London, he realized that the census data he was using didn’t really show how poor London’s people were.
Many people with little understanding of history, do not know that Haussman, who redeveloped much of Paris in the 19th century and made it famous, did it at a great cost, demolishing beautiful buidings and removing thousands of poor people. It was also in part a military project against the background of a history of repeated revolutions in the city to make it difficult for the poor to organise an uprising against injustice. France also enjoyed a huge financial surplus at that time as David Harvey has made so clear.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Napoleon III and his prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, adapted Paris to the requirements of industrial capitalism, endowing the old city with elegant boulevards, an enhanced water supply, modern sewers, and public greenery. Esther da Costa Meyer provides a major reassessment of this ambitious project, which resulted in widespread destruction in the historic centre, displacing thousands of poor residents and polarizing the urban fabric.
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Drawing on newspapers, memoirs, and other archival materials, da Costa Meyer explores how people from different social strata — both women and men, experienced the urban reforms implemented by the Second Empire. As hundreds of tenements were destroyed to make way for upscale apartment buildings, thousands of impoverished residents were forced to the periphery, which lacked the services enjoyed by wealthier parts of the city. Challenging the idea of Paris as the capital of modernity, da Costa Meyer shows how the city was the hub of a sprawling colonial empire extending from the Caribbean to Asia, and exposes the underlying violence that enriched it at the expense of overseas territories.ar.
If one measures by his yardstick, London, New York and other cities should have been wonderful places to live for the grandchildren of people who lived in the earlier period. This has not happened for obvious reasons, inequalities remain, the rich are becoming more and more powerful. Streets which are so dear to Bimal Patel for the wrong reasons are a site of conflict daily in New York between the rich and the poor so New York Times carries a regular feature Street Fights.
Big parts of London are now taken over by Arab money, many buildings are ugly drawing the ire of serious architects. Bimal Patel obviously knows better with his vast experience but he apparently does not want to see the truth. He admits that many of India’s architects are reduced to doing work of finding loopholes in regulations to get more floor space index and other benefits for builders. He needs to take an objective view from the outside, not one so closely tied to vested interests from the inside.
Bimal Patel has imbibed little from his progressive mentors. His doctoral work, he says, was mainly with Prof. Richard Walker, who was a Marxist urban geographer – a protégé of Prof. David Harvey. He says:
"Through him I became deeply interested in the Marxist theory and spent a vast amount of time reading the literature and coming under its spell. My dissertation was about how architecture is transformed once the building production is organized as commodity production – how organising building production as real estate development transforms the dynamics of architectural design.
"While at Berkeley, and for some time later, I was convinced of the power of the Marxist world view. But later as I grappled with finding workable solutions to real problems, I realised the shortcomings of Marxism. Marxism offers the most penetrating and insightful diagnoses of the ills of capitalist societies. Strangely, he finds the solutions it provides are not only not workable, they are positively harmful. I had to spend a lot of time re-educating myself after my doctoral education!
"Over my five years at UC Berkeley, I learned from many terrific teachers, read a vast number of books, attended many courses and got to interact with people from all over the world. But what was truly astounding was the institution itself. An academic institution with thousands of teachers, 30,000 students and 8 million books on the campus – one could study anything in the world that one wanted to."
One can understand what may be perceived as his intellectual timidity, a Marxist world view would definitely bring him in conflict with rich clients. But how is it he is not even liberal in his approach, shows absolutely no interest, understanding in the most important of urban thinkers like Jane Jacobs? In practice, his whole approach is of a very sophisticated individual who shields his basic dislike for the masses and their aspirations.
Patel said something strange at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics and the Pune International Centre last year. He said:
"Don’t demonise builders, they are doing a very important job."
That would not be so bad had his statement been in keeping with reality. Sad, he said this in Pune where multiple crimes committed by a builder and his father are coming to light after the drunk minor son in the family driving the unlicensed luxury Porsche car killed two young IT professionals.
Even when he spoke the record of Pune builders was widely known. Meeran Borwankar, former Police Commissioner of Pune, had herself spoken out about the politician-builder nexus. She was on record saying how she was pressurised to complete the handover process of a three-acre prime plot belonging to Yerawada Police Station to a private builder Shahid Balwa who was later arrested by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2G Spectrum case. The name of Ajit Pawar, Deputy Chief Minister, also figured prominently in that case just as it does in the latest Agarwal Builder case.
Besides, the question is what kind of cities are builders building, that is the question, apart from numerous violations daily tumbling out in the media, many of the constructions are monotonous, ugly.
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It is a horrendous sight to see high rise buildings on either side for miles together as one approaches Pune from Mumbai. And the urban planning is so bad that there is terrible traffic congestion, it takes hours to reach Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park in Hinjewadi, Pune. The result is many companies are leaving the IT Park.
And, this is the kind of planning in what is called a green field project where planners have few obstacles to deal with. It was an open land then. One can imagine what a terrible job the planners and builders must be doing in what are called brown field projects where there is existing development to deal with before going for new development.
Sad that Bimal Patel made the observations in a function associated with the hallowed Gokhale Institute.
In 1930, D. R. Gadgil, an admirer of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and a friend of Ambedkar, established India’s first centre for social science research, the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. A year later, P. C. Mahalanobis, who was close both to Tagore and Nehru, established the Indian Statistical Institute, which co-ordinated the writing of the Five Year Plans in independent India in 1949.
In 2020, Bimal Patel faced some sharp questions from students who had gathered in large numbers to hear him. One student sarcastically asked without referring to him directly as to how other architects were going to find work if one person was going to bag all the contracts. It was clear from the audience reaction that not many shared this view.
I noticed Bimal Patel is a cool and very clever person. He replies to the most inconvenient questions without getting ruffled. Obviously, he anticipates them and is prepared. He cleverly begins replying to such questions saying, "Let us put it this way", and so he goes on.
He also cleverly skirted questions about housing for the poor and the responsibility of those in power. He was in the city to talk on the eastern waterfront development on port trust land in Mumbai at the invitation of Urban Design Research Institute UDRI. He spoke a lot about creating streets in his new project in Mumbai and also mentioned that one of his gurus was Allan Jacobs, the noted architect in the U.S.
The point is the vision of streets envisioned by Jacobs is entirely different from architects like Patel who want to create streets not so much for more interaction among common people but for the high rise densification they are so devoted to and which is so much loved by property developers.
See how different is the vision of Allan Jacobs from his disciple’s.
Jacobs has said:
“Streets are places of social and commercial encounters and exchanges. They are where you meet people – which is a basic reason to have cities in any case.”
“As well as to see, the street is a place to be seen. Sociability is a large part of why cities exist and streets are a major if not the only public place for that sociability to develop."
Orijit Sen, a designer, said of Bimal Patel:
"While most people rightly hold Modi responsible for the wasteful Central Vista project being built on the dead bodies of lakhs of ordinary Indian citizens, I would like to shine a spotlight on the chief architect of the Central Vista Project – Bimal Patel.
"Patel is a contemporary of mine. He studied architecture at CEPT – a sister design school to my NID in Ahmedabad. (Students from both institutions were close, and shared a camaraderie as well as friendly rivalry.) He is the son of Hasmukh Patel – one of Ahmedabad’s most prominent architects of the previous generation. He went on for further studies to UC Berkeley. He has built a star studded career, handling some of India’s most prestigious projects. He has won plenty of international awards."
But he has hitched his life’s work to the patronage of a mentor whom Sen calls a fascist. The Central Vista Project is not the first time Bimal Patel has designed spaces at Modi’s behest. The Sabarmati Riverfront Project is another example of a wasteful project designed by him that resulted in the displacement of lakhs of poor riverside dwellers.
He is a classic example of how the privileged, influential and already wealthy designers build careers and further their prospects on the ruined lives of the dispossessed.
[The writer, Vidyadhar Date, is a Senior Journalist, Culture Critic and Author of a book on public transport. The Views expressed here are personal.]
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