Bandra is disappearing: Is this what Mumbai calls development?

Nearly 35 years ago, I used to frequent a certain newspaper office in Bombay’s Fort area. So frequently did I visit that the security guard, a hefty fellow named Misquitta, began recognising me and chatting whenever I walked in. When he heard I lived in Bandra, he said, “I do, too! But the place is changing, going down the tubes. All those lovely old bungalows, they’re tearing them down and putting up tall buildings. Bandra isn’t Bandra anymore.”

Over the next few weeks, I wandered Bandra’s streets, admiring bungalows that my friend feared would soon be gone. Several had already been replaced by multi-storeyed buildings, and many more have vanished since. As I write this, I’m counting the ones I remember that still exist. Ten fingers are enough.

Revamping a city

Now, with the coming into force of the city’s Development Control and Promotion Regulations, 2034 (DCPR 2034), there’s a second wave of vanishing: the craze for “redevelopment”. Five- and seven-storeyed buildings are being torn down, to be replaced by towers 18 or 20 storeys high. Anyone involved in this process has heard of the relevant DCPR regulations: 33(5), 33(6), and 33(7), that govern key redevelopment schemes across Mumbai. Their additional floor space index (FSI) rights make redevelopment financially irresistible, particularly in high-value suburbs like Bandra.

I wonder if there’s another Misquitta who will one day mourn: “All those lovely moderately-tall buildings, they’re tearing them down and putting up skyscrapers. Bandra isn’t Bandra anymore.”

It’s true, Bandra is changing dramatically. Across the street, two 20-storey buildings are nearing completion, with four more around the corners. A 10-minute stroll down Turner Road takes me past at least eight others under construction. My own seven-storeyed building is already a dwarf.

What does it all mean? Many more people, for one. A century-old, single-storeyed bungalow becomes a 14-flat building becomes a 28-flat tower: 28 households where there was once one. India’s population has grown roughly five-fold in a century. That itself is eye-popping, but set it against Bandra’s 28-fold increase.

Not just people, either. The bungalows were built when few families owned cars. Still, let’s assume each bungalow had one. Today, one “redeveloped” Bandra building I know of — where once there was a bungalow — allots three parking spaces per flat. That’s 84 cars where once there was one.

Let that sink in. Think of the strain on infrastructure, traffic, pollution and resources.

The shape of a changing suburb

Architect and urban designer Samir D’Monte, of the Bandra Collective, which has redesigned the Carter Road promenade and proposed redesigns for several parks, believes today’s regulations will make Mumbai increasingly unliveable. His recent presentation, ‘This is the Way Bandra Ends’, traces the suburb’s evolution from 1950 to 2050.

The way it is “developing”, he argues, “could transform a typical Bandra street from a community of just 100 residents and eight cars in the 1950s into a corridor accommodating thousands of residents and vehicles in the decades ahead.” His slides show us these imagined corridors: gloomy Manhattan-style canyons, with the first three-four storeys devoted to parking. This dead concrete severs human interaction between buildings and street. That, as urbanist Jane Jacobs’ “eye on the street” theory suggests, makes for dull, unsafe cities.

Besides, the direction the city is moving in further “ignores the existing rich fabric of the city” — like Parsi colonies, chawls, urban villages and, indeed, Bandra’s bungalows — “leading to a stultifying sameness everywhere.” 

Architects Sameep Padora and Shantanu Poredi suggest measures like community-led planning and giving builders incentives to contribute to the neighbourhood. This may produce, as in Ballard Estate, “all-weather walkable streets”. For Alan Abraham, redevelopment “dramatically increases built density without making proportional provision for social and civic infrastructure. Are we creating more parks, playgrounds, schools, hospitals or public spaces to match the increase in population”? After all, Manhattan has its canyons, but it also has Central Park and several smaller green spaces.

Change is the only constant

All of which raises a question: if a once-leafy suburb with few cars and walkable streets is overtaken by bumper-to-bumper traffic, cheek-by-jowl skyscrapers and little recreational space, have we really “developed”? Are there lessons from other cities, or for them? Bengaluru residents regularly lament the transformation of their ‘Garden City’ into a traffic-choked, dust-choked metropolis. Is there no other way?

Then again, places change, inexorably and inevitably. There was a time, after all, when people first came to Bandra to breathe the clean air, enjoy its open spaces and relax by the sea. There were rolling rice fields here as recently as the 1950s, a fact many current residents would find difficult to believe. My late friend Sophie Reuben, who moved to Bandra from Colaba in the 1940s, remembered rice fields interrupted only by the occasional bungalow built by Bombayites who preferred living here to merely visiting from Chinchpokli or Girgaum. Neighbours were too far away to shout across to, Reuben recalled. “And anyway,” she added with a smile, “shouting didn’t fit in with life in Bandra.”

What Bandra are we harking back to and mourning the loss of? Rice fields? Bungalows? Moderately tall apartment blocks? A generation from now, will someone lament the disappearance of today’s 20-storey towers and their dozens of cars in favour of something even more monstrous? Is “monstrous” the right word?

I share D’Monte’s dread; perhaps, this is indeed the way Bandra ends. But has Bandra already ended? I wonder how my old pal Misquitta would answer that.

The Mumbai-based writer is the author, most recently, of Roadwalker: A Few Miles on the Bharat Jodo Yatra.