Why have Indian cities turned their back on rivers?
The promenades of Paris and London along the Seine and Thames rivers, respectively; the wharfs of San Francisco and Hong Kong; the broad walks of Miami and the Esplanade in Singapore — the waterfronts in these metropolises are essential to their imagery and add value, social and economic, to the life of the city. Each of these cities has successfully turned its waterfront, from being an economic frontier or transit node, into an asset through interactive design, using the principles of ‘dynamic’ urban renewal.
Yet, with an over 6,000-kilometre-long coastline and more than 150 major rivers, there is almost no Indian city which has developed a waterfront for public use that reflects a shared communal vision. A few cities such as Varanasi and Haridwar have ghats which are used for religious and community purposes. But most others have turned their waterfronts into wastelands where human and industrial pollutants destroy natural ecosystems and sources of potable water.
Lie of the land
There have been some significant waterfront development projects in towns such as Nanded (Maharashtra), Pondicherry, Ahmedabad and Mumbai, with its recent ‘soak’ program. Yet there is need for a strategic vision that sees land and water in synergy rather than as opposed to each other.
Until now, land from the waterfront was reclaimed and the water and land divided and kept firmly apart with the help of berms, steps, sea walls and dykes. Take the memorial parks of New Delhi — Raj Ghat, Shanti Van, Vijay Ghat, to name a few — separated from the Yamuna through landscaping. New Delhi is one of very few capital cities in the world that has turned its rear on its river.
The high cost of redeeming these derelict waterfronts needs to be raised through innovative means by the government. It could try public-private partnerships or lease these areas to private developers to build community centres, parks, mixed-use neighbourhoods and sports and recreational facilities, which promote alternative energy systems, ecological conservation, and multi-modal transit systems optimised for public access. Sustainability, combined with market-based strategies, is the only sensible approach for the renewal of these abandoned spaces.
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Get the tourists
Schemes to revitalise the waterfront should attempt to use the spaces that lie between land and water. Seasonal activities can be integrated into the design, with a podium for festivals — religious and communal, musical and literary, cultural and contemporary — to be held on the banks.
Typically, waterfronts in India are full of historical buildings, some in use and others forgotten. Connecting these would allow the city to map its evolutionary process and showcase it through tourism, thus promoting their adaptive reuse — as seen in the revival of Battery Park in New York, and the Docklands in London.
Water is a fast depleting resource. Why can’t we look at it as an asset that allows us to regenerate our approach to living, to promote instead of suppress ecologies, to embrace diversity in use and space, to accept the unpredictability of natural forces and allow it to change the physical edges of our cities? In doing so we may enter into a more egalitarian dialogue with our waterfronts.
[The writer is a Delhi-based architect]