'India simply has no urban plans'

Award-winning architect Christopher C Benninger speaks to Gargi Gupta in a rare interview about his reason for staying on to work in India and his architectural interventions across Asia.

Christopher Charles Benninger is a revered name among architects in India. An alumnus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of urban planning and Harvard University's architecture school, where he later taught, Benninger came to India in 1968 on a Fulbright Fellowship and later as a Ford Foundation consultant. And stayed back. He set up the School of Urban Planning in Ahmedabad in 1971, together with Balkrishna V Doshi, and the Centre for Development Studies and Activities in Pune.

Benninger, who set up an architectural studio in Pune in 1996, has designed a number of acclaimed structures, most notably the Mahindra United World College, which won an award from the American Institute of Architects, and made it to the final lists for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture Geneva, and The World Architecture Awards, Berlin.

But more interestingly, Benninger is an authority on urban planning; he is a member of the governing council of the World Society of Ekistics, Athens and has advised the governments of India, Sri Lanka Bhutan, Malaysia, Indonesia and other countries, as also multilateral agencies like the Ford Foundation, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UN-FAO, UN-ESCAP, UNICEF, UNCHS on urban planning and regional development plans.

India is going through a real estate boom with buildings of every kind coming up all over the place. But architecturally, are they breaking any new ground?

Architecture mirrors the society for which it is created. It is no better or no worse. The new economy in India is based on its becoming a world destination for out-sourcing, where cost-cutting is the client's objective. But they want to do this with a global touch.

Ninety percent of the projects are "cold shells", where low budgets and fast track schedules are the design brief. Quality and beauty, and creating better places to live in, are not what people are doing because it is not the agenda in the first place.

You were one of the first architects to work with HUDCO and other local urban development authorities, on housing for economically weaker sections. Can you describe the work you did?

In the 1970s, I had the opportunity to design the first affordable housing scheme for economically weaker sections. Located in Jamnagar, it was a system of houses where each one had a WC, a tap, a room and a courtyard with a stair to the roof. In 1973, I introduced the concept of Site and Services (which I had developed as a student in Harvard, as my thesis).

The idea was that poor families could build their own climatic protection, but they lacked the land tenure to allow upgradation, as also rudimentary services like storm water drains, street lights, potable water taps, sewerage connect and access lanes.

My idea was that we provide what they cannot provide and they provide what they can! I was doing this under World Bank funding for the urban development authority at Chennai. This proved very successful as we could provide about 15,000 service plots at the same cost it would have taken to build 1,800 small houses! This idea was replicated by the World Bank globally.

This is a case where India exported intellectual property to the world at no cost! The Bank just picked it up and ran! I worked with Dattatrey and Laxmanan (urban planners at the Madras Urban Development Authority) and we did it only for the thrill of solving problems. Later, we found a number of Washington-based "experts" claiming our invention as their own.

In 1976, I prepared the first project for the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority in its first year of existence. I wanted to explore the concept that the secure urban poor could be the developers for the economically weaker section for whom rental shelter made more sense.

So we laid out a township of 2,000 houses, amenities, shopping and open areas where the owners had a small core house with essential services on 100 sq m plots.

What happened was that the owners quickly built more rooms and rented them out to still lower income groups (often relatives or village mates) at an affordable rent where the tenants used the sanitary infrastructure (increasing its efficiency by multiples) and the landlords harvested rents for loan payments and upgradation. These were three different and unique channels which gave access to the poor for housing. This is what I call "social architecture".

I also carried out large scale planning operations for the Mumbai Metropolitan Development Authority (mid-1980s) in Thane and in Kalyan. Generally, development plans only calculate the per capita needs for water, electricity and sewerage disposal and provide these at the trunk infrastructure level.

This leaves out 70 per cent of the population who live in slums, sub-divided chawls and old structures. We turned this around and went directly to the users and worked out participatory strategies for common potable water taps, bathing places and WCs.

At the other end of the scale, we looked at regional water resources, storm drainage networks and transport systems. By integrating these from both ends, a viable urban strategy was designed. In Thane, much of this was implemented in the early 1990's, which turned around the city's economy! This concept of slum up-gradation became a fourth channel providing access for the poor to shelter. Why are you still not doing this kind of work?

First, I am interested in designing concepts and inventing ideas and not in becoming a factory producing housing! Second, I realised that one could have more impact on access to shelter than through construction. Our urban planning legislation was modelled on the British Garden Cities movement and these used wide boulevards, huge parks, immense house plots, single-function land use zoning and low density as yardsticks. I knew that neither the government, nor the urban poor, had the resources to follow this model.

The answers to our problems rested in new laws, new town-planning standards, new philosophies and new principles. That is why I put down the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism, which became the basis for much of my recent planning work.

What ails urban planning in India?

...is that we do not have urban plans! We just have two dimensional plans marked with colors for land use restrictions and density restrictions. We link up building control regulations for different zones and call that a plan. These are merely restrictions on land development and not catalysts and enablers. A plan guides and facilitates development.

Not only that, for cities like Pune the last development plan was prepared way back in the mid-1980s! This is criminal. Fast track cities like Hong Kong and Singapore have used extensive urban planning to assure economic development. In Singapore, all the land belongs to the government and is leased to the private sector for development within very clear urban design guidelines. Sixty percent of the people live in public, government-owned houses.

In India we had the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism! We are confused that the two are mutually exclusive! What we are doing in SEZs and business parks is just the beginning of a more viable system. But we do not have a viable system. There are rare exceptions to this like what is happening in Ahmedabad, where there is a strong private-public partnership and town planning schemes to provide a rational pattern for urban growth.

Cities in India were totally neglected during the first 50 years of independence. There was no understanding that rural regions and cities are all one integrated system. We are now paying through congestion, pollution and unsanitary living standards. Good regional and urban planning is good business. No one understood this. In a way Indian cities disprove economic theory.

It was always thought that economic growth follows the emplacement of economic and social infrastructure. Cities like Pune and Bangalore are growing despite serious infrastructure gaps! The events in West Bengal are not due to "pig headedness"! We have to learn from that experience and put people first! Good planning is participatory planning! Part of our problem today is that the graduates of business schools who have very narrow educations, they are arrogant regarding their limited knowledge and in their poor skills for consultative decision making.

Why did it take you so long to set up your own studio?

I never wanted to live off of the proceeds of an architectural studio. After all architecture is an art, not a business! All of my early works are for NGOs, voluntary workers, or for myself and institutions I was deeply involved in. Harish Mahindra drew me into running a larger studio by asking me to design the United World College of India, which won the American Institute of Architects Award 2000 and which fuelled our client list.

Architects do need patrons to create. We need media coverage to meet patrons! Unless we are careful, it can become a vicious cycle of greed and money making. I have never chased after a client. I am arrogant with clients as far as they must know I am my own man, just like their heart surgeon will not just follow their orders!

On the other hand, I am the servant of my clients and I have to keep their interests above all else! But I do not design for developers who will cut specs and pass on their sins to unknown end-users! It took me so long to set up my studio because I think it takes 40 or 50 years to learn the craft of architecture. I think I am still a student. My teachers are history, my craftsmen and my team members in the studio!

Every new building is a new invention and we can carry into that process learning from the design before it and our earlier projects, but it is new and we have to be humble about it! Our clients are often represented by young managers who know nothing of the building process!

They think one can create beauty in a month or a few weeks! This is an illness spreading like AIDS and we as professionals must educate the public about the disease! It is impacting the character of the urban fabric which nurtures us and which underpins the very creation of wealth we sustain ourselves upon.

What has kept you in India for so long?

I have always felt I am an Indian through and through! From the day I set foot in India, in 1968, I never felt strange or in an exotic place. I love India's people, the landscape, the seasons, the dust, the heat, the dynamics, the food and even the chaos of the cities and the peace of the villages. When I feel out of place is when I step foot off a plane in America! Immediately I think, "When can I get out of here?"

India has its own indigenous architecture, with concepts and designs more suited to local conditions. Do you incorporate elements of this in your designs?

Architecture, good or bad, emerges from its context! One cannot incorporate elements really. Maybe one can decorate a building and make it look indigenous, which is a sham! One has to let designs emerge from the landscape, crafts people, materials and the client's needs!

All of these variables are Indian and thus my architecture is Indian! Even if I experiment in glass and in steel, it is my Indian curiosity about things new and things different. It is my Indian interest to bring outside things in and integrate everything into one huge pantheon of ideas and concepts.

Territorial concerns

Tell us about your consultancy work for South-east Asian countries?

I have been involved in the preparation and analysis of plans for existing and new towns in Malaysia (Terengganu), Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan at different levels. In Malaysia, I was pushing policy changes as the government was building new towns for the poor with such large plots and such high technical standards that these could never be handed over to the stake-holders for self management and local governance!

Only if a patronising authority managed these towns could they survive with large subsidies. In Indonesia, I designed the shelter strategy for the rural poor as one of the corner stones of the first National Rural Development Programme. In Nepal, I designed an institutional system for local participation, micro-level panning and decentralised implementation.

What is this project you are at present involved in in Bhutan?

In Bhutan, I have prepared the physical plans and economic strategies for three new industrial areas that will piggy-back on the surplus power and new labour force emerging. We also prepared the new capital plan, designs for the capitol complex and key buildings in the complex. These are under construction. Perhaps of more interest are the 15 local area plans within the over-all structure plans in four cities in Bhutan.

These plans are for compact urban villages with all basic services and amenities. These are prepared with the involvement of local land owners in which they bank all their land, and after leaving aside 30 per cent for common facilities, are given back well laid out plots equal to 70 per cent of what they handed over. The trick? The new rectilinear plots with road access and basic services are worth five times what their original odd-shaped agricultural land was worth.