1. Introduction

Cities in India and throughout Asia are changing. Most are becoming unbearable places to live. There are many intersecting forces for this decline including escalation in population, failing infrastructure, increasing dependency on the automobile, outward sprawling development, and the inability to provide housing for lower- and middle-income residents.

On a recent visit to Mumbai, one of the authors (D.A.T.) was engaged in a discussion of solutions to alleviate this accelerating decline of Indian cities, especially Mumbai. Were there lessons to be learned from the West where American cities are experiencing a renaissance? Why was the quality of life in cities improving, especially in his second city of choice, Washington DC, while there was a noticeable decline in the city of his birth, Mumbai? (Regrettably, the other author N.A.S. has never been to India). 

Cities are the most complex things that we humans make. From past mistakes and years of analysis the knowledge exists on how to make them well. To the politicians and citizens who wish to create a better Mumbai, the authors offer these suggestions. Our remarks apply, with only minor local variations, to encourage more humane cities throughout Asia and the world. Even if interested parties understand how to revitalize their city — and many already know what needs to be done — they will have to reverse the construction typologies favored by the all-powerful politician/builder nexus. 

2. Streets Are For People

What makes a city habitable? Besides one’s private domain, it is a usable public realm, defined by buildings that front and define the street, with people adding life and vibrancy to the environment. A successful public realm is one that people can have access to and inhabit comfortably on foot. Unfortunately, most Indian cities today, including Mumbai, accommodate automobile movement while disregarding the pedestrian. Because of nonexistent or cluttered sidewalks, the pedestrian is forced into the roadway alongside handcarts, bicyclists, motorbikes, cars, and trucks.

In Mumbai, more than 93% of the population are pedestrians. The primary space inhabited by pedestrians is the street. The municipality has a responsibility to make streets they inhabit safe and comfortable. Society should reward the pedestrians for their low carbon footprint by creating an equitable environment.

The problem is that, post-independence India unwisely adopted new and untested planning ideas that led to an unsustainable crisis that the Nation now faces. Forces behind urban construction have prioritized fast vehicular flow, to the detriment of all other forms of transport. It is not only the flows that were distorted, but especially the central conception of the value of urban space, how it is used, and to whom it truly belongs. 

For the most part, traffic engineers in Mumbai have concerned themselves with increasing traffic capacity and have ignored the pedestrian. Every aspect of the streetscape, such as lane width, curb height, sidewalk dimension, trees, and lighting should consider and accommodate the majority of the population — pedestrians.

One example is parallel parking, which creates a buffer between the busy street and the sidewalk. It is essential to ensuring the safety of the pedestrian, as well as supporting commerce on a retail street. However, this essential buffer belt is constantly eliminated in favor of lane widening.

Hint 1: REWARD PEDESTRIANS

Mumbai has one of the best transportation modal splits of any major city in the world, with more pedestrians and fewer cars per capita. The city’s carbon footprint per capita is also among the lowest. Yet the city constructs fences between the sidewalk and roadbed and barriers in the medians that ineffectively attempt to enclose and limit the pedestrians’ mobility. Pedestrians are forced to climb stairs to elevated crosswalks in order to cross a street or are funneled into dark, damp, and poorly ventilated tunnels to cross intersections. Elevated and below grade street crossings are unsatisfactory solutions for pedestrians.

This monumental mistake switches priorities. Instead of creating a city for the pedestrian, it does so for the automobile, and relegates pedestrian paths to the very lowest priority. The rules for a healthy, living city are incontrovertible. Plan the physical infrastructure for the weakest modes of transport, then gradually invest in higher-capacity modalities without letting those disturb the weakest modes in any way. Begin by fixing and protecting comfortable pedestrian connections and spaces, then focus on light transport (bicycles, rickshaws), then automobiles, then heavier buses and trucks, and finally trams and rail lines. Whenever two or more flows conflict, the stronger ones have to cede to the weaker mode. Now all of this structure has to be retrofitted, but it is still better late than never. 

The major conflicts between pedestrian and automobiles occur for a few hours a day at a few busy intersections, which does not warrant these drastic inhumane approaches that have become standard. Pedestrians must be permitted to cross at street level. Reward and celebrate the Mumbai walkers for their low carbon footprint and let the automobiles wait. 

Hint 2: REMEMBER VALUE

The primary function of a street is to move people and goods. The secondary function is the creation of value. Memorable urban thoroughfares such as 5th Avenue (New York), Oxford Street (London), Avenue des Champs-Élysées (Paris), and Orchard Road (Singapore) command the highest real estate value, despite the amount of traffic. Beautiful complete streets — in the sense of concentrating and overlapping attractive human qualities — create economic value.

Properties along a street corridor usually share the same economic value as their adjacent neighbors. Properties at intersections generally command higher real estate value than mid-block properties. 

Studies of thriving metropolitan cities indicate that there are two conditions that affect real estate value on sites fronting urban streets. Properties facing a park or green area usually command higher values. As the distance from the park increases, value diminishes. Additionally, higher economic value is recorded for properties on well-connected streets within a city’s network of streets versus properties on dead-end streets.

In Mumbai there is a preference for exclusive residential enclaves. Residents of these enclaves are more dependent on the automobile, they have limited access to goods and services, and longer commuting times as a result of the singular entry and exit from their complex. American suburbs face the same problem, where the collector road becomes terribly congested since it is the only connection to the outside. This is misguided planning with no solution. 

3. Overrule The Specialist 

The city by definition is a general enterprise, and the specialist unknowingly works toward the detriment of the city. Engineers are not alone in their quest to shape the city around specialized needs. The modern world is full of experts who are paid to ignore criteria beyond their profession. Cities need generalists to weigh the advice of specialists against the common good.

People don’t like to be told that generations of specialists forgot or neglected the most important qualities of a city, thus messing everything up! It took decades to realize that the key to life in a city is a respect for and healthy treatment of the pedestrian from all social classes. Older societies of course knew this, but it was the technocratic frenzy of the 20^thCentury that threw this vital knowledge out of the window. 

Hint 3: STOP BUILDING FLYOVERS

The traffic engineers, in their quest to move traffic from south to north, propose building 100 above-ground flyovers without consideration for what this decision does to the quality-of-life for local residents, who have to live with these ugly, noisy concrete monstrosities. And the negative space below flyovers leaves much to be desired.

Imagine for a moment if someone was to build a concrete bridge 15 feet from your bedroom window, so that the privileged few could save a few minutes of time driving through your neighborhood in the comfort of their air-conditioned capsule.

The reversal of good planning sense privileges vehicular traffic, but makes pedestrians (the weakest and most valuable urban modality) go up and over or under the road. “Push around the weakest and coddle the strongest” is a basically flawed idea because it switches urban priorities, even if many bureaucrats support it. No; give pedestrians the shortest, at grade paths while making cars go around or under. Going over the intersection with a flyover results in visual chaos and disintegration of the urban realm.

While enlightened cities worldwide are demolishing inner-city highways in the interest of quality-of-life, Mumbai has embarked on a ludicrous and expensive endeavor to build new inner-city highways.

The Mumbai Department of Transportation also proposes widening existing roads to ease traffic generated by the very sprawl that they cause. Each of these approaches may be correct in a vacuum, but is wrong in a city. It is a proven fact that expanding the width of a street to increase capacity does not alleviate congestion; it only leads to more traffic. This in turn leads to an increase in accidents, which causes further delays, nullifying the goal of the investment. In paraphrasing Parkinson’s famous law: “Traffic expands so as to fill the space available for its occupancy”. 

The money earmarked for Mumbai’s new flyovers should be diverted to maintain and improve the train and bus network. Additionally, an efficient water taxi operation can service both coastlines for eight months of the year. As all world-class cities have come to realize, investment in public transportation is the only solution to alleviate congestion. Mumbai’s advantage as a coastal harbor city is woefully underutilized by insufficiently complementing its transportation network using water routes along its eastern edge. 

Imagine ten years into the future, what will be on these streets when the price of petrol doubles or triples? Buses, bicycles, and pedestrians, and very few private cars. 

4. Mix The Uses

Another key to active street life is creating a city that pulsates at all times of the day, with neighborhoods so diverse in use that they are occupied around the clock. Eating, shopping, working, socializing, recreation — these activities are mutually reinforcing and flourish in each other’s presence.

The best parts of Mumbai have this diverse mix of uses. Neighborhoods are alive during the day when residents are away at work, because workplace and retail are active. Vice-versa in the evening, when the offices and shops are closed, the residences keep the neighborhood vibrant and safe. There are endless variations to achieving ‘mixed-use’ along a single street.

Moreover, many businesses such as restaurants, general stores, and health clubs rely on both daytime and evening traffic to cover their rent. The lesson is to stop building single use zones, such as Nariman Point and Bandra-Kurla, which are predominantly workplaces. These places are unsafe in the evening due to a lack of activity. Similarly, stop approving residential enclaves, which are mono-cultures and eventually become residential ghettos.

European urbanists in the 1920s experimented with untested ideas such as separating urban functions so as to achieve an undefined “cleanliness”. With the sole exception of removing heavy industry from urban centers, monofunctional zoning is now recognized as a catastrophe. The monofunctional model created dysfunctional cities, totally dependent upon fossil fuels, and generating toxic quantities of pollutants. Unfortunately, government urbanists relying upon formal urban legislation are still stuck with this discredited idea. 

5. Parking

There is nothing more destructive to the urban experience than having to walk past large expanses of parked vehicles. Flora Fountain is an example of a once beautiful urban space now devalued by an abundance of parked cars. The optimum urban solution would be to park automobiles underground and return the majestic public space to the citizens of the city, following the many global examples where this strategy has been employed. Additionally, land is too scarce and valuable to permit surface parking lots for vehicles in the city.

Urban design and planning that protect urban space from vehicles require tools developed after cars began to invade the open pedestrian domain. For this reason, we cannot go back to pre-industrial city typologies but have to look to particular solutions developed just before World War II, which were themselves unwisely abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not only legislation, but effective design using permeable boundaries such as bollards, colonnades, and minor changes of level that keep cars and parking from invading and ruining urban space. 

Hint 4: AUTOMOBILE STORAGE

Enlightened cities globally are addressing the need to store vehicles that has resulted in an improvement in function and aesthetics. Learning from these best practices, income generating multi-storey parking or below-grade structures need to be built in strategic locations to store the growing number of automobiles. Again, this solution requires a necessary investment, which is often avoided at the expense of the pedestrian city. The seemingly cheap alternative, asphalt-desert open parking, destroys human urban qualities. An estimated 700 automobiles are sold in Mumbai daily. A ludicrous amount given that the number of streets on the island have remained relatively constant.

Short-term parallel parking needs to be permitted on streets that have retail businesses at the street level. This encourages retail activity and provides much needed short-term parking to support thriving commerce and protect the pedestrian.

Just to get one thing straight: diagonal or parallel on-street parking slows traffic down. Traffic engineers, who focus on speeding up traffic, vociferously veto it. But they have always misunderstood that the city is meant to promote the interaction of people in a low-speed environment, therefore central-city traffic needs to be slow. 

Mumbai should provide an adequate number of parking spaces close to residential areas for automobile storage and the minimum amount of parking spaces adjacent to offices and retail. The end goal for Mumbai should be to encourage the reduction of daily automobile trips and charge car owners the true cost of parking.

Hint 5: THE TRUE COST OF PARKING

Parking areas are made using impervious material that contributes to poor water quality and an increase in the urban heat sink that aids the degradation of the environment. As more parking lots proliferate the usable open space decreases resulting in a less walkable city.

Providing free or cheap parking within the public realm is a direct subsidy to car owners. On-street parking averages 100 square feet per space, not including the drive lane needed to access the space. Assuming a conservative average price for real estate in Mumbai to be Rs. 10,000 per square foot, a single parking space plus the required access zone would cost Rs. 20 lakhs. At a 10% return the space should yield Rs. 500 a day. By charging car owners the true cost of parking, the city would have ample funds to improve the failing infrastructure. Additionally, this may discourage residents from rushing out to buy new cars that further congest the already overburdened city thoroughfares.

We would be contributing to the customary hypocrisy if we did not point out the major forces massed against our proposals. The government bows to the desires of car owners because they are far richer, hence more politically influential as a class, than pedestrians. The giant international auto industry (manufacturers, distributors, parts and repairs) have conspired to sell cars in India despite the inadequate infrastructure. Greed and short-sightedness within the petroleum industry promotes car usage and blocks any suggestion that car owners pay properly for their parking, or for polluting. This is the reason why the number of cars on the road keeps growing exponentially.

6. Small Is Beautiful

People are small when compared to automobiles, and most world-class walkable cities acknowledge this fact with small blocks, small streets, small buildings, and small increments of investment.

Hint 6: SMALL CITY BLOCKS

The Fort District owes much of its resilience and success to its tiny blocks and fine grain, that creates a porous network of streets. Pedestrians can crisscross through the fabric, looking for the shortest routes between two points.

Two ideas underpin how human evolution requires certain urban morphologies. One is fractality: our brain is wired to perceive many different superimposed scales, hence we seek precisely such a structure in a city. The opposite, giant blocks without subdivisions, is oppressive even though we don’t know why because the feeling of discomfort is subconscious. The second point is the ability to choose. A fractal urban environment gives us a multiplicity of paths to choose from, either for convenience or variety. For decades, misguided urbanists forced people to take a deterministic single path in a city, which goes against human nature. 

Unfortunately, most of Mumbai has very large blocks that make the city difficult to navigate. For example, south of Woodhouse Road there is only one east-west connection, making travel between the two coastlines difficult. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the connection is one-way. This problem also exists in the northern part of the city. Land for street rights-of-way needs to be laboriously acquired to help create a true network of streets.

Hint 7: URBAN DENSITY WITH LOW-RISES

25% of India’s population resides in urban areas that consume 2% of the country’s landmass. As the urban population continues to grow, the obvious housing solution has been taller buildings. However this is another place to consider smallness. Today’s building codes favor height over compactness, preventing the emulation of places such as Marine Drive, which is one of the most memorable parts of the city. Under current open space and setback requirements, it is illegal to recreate the six-story residential neighborhood fabric that exists around Churchgate Station between the rail lines and Marine Drive.

Mumbai’s building types are limited to 1-2 storey slums, 4-6 storey walk-ups, and high-rises. Tall buildings place undue stress on a small land parcel. By concentrating population at a single point, all systems are pressured: accessibility, parking, garbage removal, water and utility supply. Consequently the result is an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unsatisfactory living condition.

Scientific urbanism knows that a high-rise building sucks energy and resources from its ground base, roughly estimated as a disk having radius comparable to the building’s height. These resources come from and deprive the surrounding urban fabric. Nothing is really saved, as the strain on the rest of the city neighboring the high-rise generates unresolvable problems that can be partially balanced only by retrofitting. But doing so is extremely expensive, thus belying the supposed efficiency of vertical stacking. It solves one problem while generating a host of other stresses, all far worse in the long term. 

How many structurally sound buildings need to be torn down before a city learns the lesson? Every city comes to deeply regret and lament the destruction of its historic/heritage structures. Philosophically, Indian society pays homage to its elders, and historic preservation may be the best way to respect our ancestors.

The embodied human energy and resources that it took to build these structures economically justifies their preservation. Building something as solid and as intricate today would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention that it is impossible to find the artisans to do the job. 

Additionally, the character, quality, and craft found in older structures usually commands a monetary premium. This is why cities like Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Miami Beach can point to historic preservation as the key ingredient in their real estate booms. It isn’t always easy to find a productive use for an empty old building, but tearing it down makes that outcome impossible.

Additionally, billboards and hoardings illegally installed on buildings and along the highway must be systematically removed. City officials must enforce the recent court ruling to do so. The city should rise beyond this crass commercialism and the visual assault on the human senses.

Hint 8: DILAPIDATED BUILDINGS

Mumbai has approximately 20,000 dilapidated buildings and a large number of structurally unsafe buildings collapse annually. These are obscene statistics given the dire need for space. Infill development is extremely sustainable, and both pro- and anti-development lobbyists need to arrive at a compromise, which accepts demolition of these dilapidated buildings only if the replacement structure maintains the scale, character, and context of the existing neighborhood.

While an older building may indeed not be economical to upgrade because it was cheaply built in the first place, it is very often the case that it blended well with the scale and character of the neighborhood. This is therefore an important lesson for any improved structure that will substitute it. The art of adaptive design and contextual harmony appears to be lost, and so builders and designers today had better study those examples of the past. 

Hint 9: FUNDING PRESERVATION AND RESTORATION

Mumbai is a treasure chest of beautiful buildings and public spaces. Whenever possible, the historic fabric of the city must be saved and preserved to its original architectural beauty with the removal of urban grime and illegally installed cables, grills, balcony enclosures, and additions.

The global initiative at sustainability has discovered the most economical solution: to save energy and money, maintain older buildings. The most sustainable building is the one that is repaired, whereas the most profligate waste occurs when demolishing and rebuilding. Extractive economic forces would have us believe the latter, because that is an easy way to make a rapid profit at the expense of the city. Yet construction companies can have very good business by repairing and upgrading the existing building stock. 

Mumbai has a wealth of public spaces and buildings, that need to be restored and preserved. Will the latest “solution” — Sky Bridges — attack Mumbai’s finest heritage buildings?

Bollywood routinely searches for international locations to serve as backdrops for their movies, spending exorbitant funds on securing oversea settings, when places of equal if not superior quality already exist close to home. Incentives should be provided to studios to invest and rehabilitate sites within the city that could easily serve as locations for film productions.

8. Build Normal (Affordable) Housing

Affordable housing remains a crisis in Mumbai, and the solution is not to build housing projects in the suburbs or hinterlands, which taxes low-income residents with commuting time and cost. To be successful, affordable housing must be desirable, well located, afford economic opportunities, and be seamlessly integrated within a range of market rate housing. Families dream of recognizable normative housing versus the severe geometric reality that they are provided.

The best intentioned efforts to provide affordable housing by architects have often resulted in experimentation and pioneering of new design styles. Most housing projects that have been built in recent years play geometric games that only their designers can understand and appreciate. This is unethical verging on the criminal. Experiment on the rich; they can always move out, but the poor do not have a choice. Housing for the poor should be compact, efficient, and stylistically compatible with their neighbors and the context. There should be no visible clues that these units are subsidized, avoiding any social stigma attached to public housing.

After decades of oppressive and senseless environments forced upon the poor (not only in India, but all around the world), solutions for affordable housing have re-discovered the updated traditional, pre-industrial typologies. Those worked very well in the past, but looked old-fashioned to architectural culture, which condemned them because the profession cares only for futuristic flights-of-fancy and not about the inhabitants. Now we know that modest-looking and modestly-scaled flats intertwined with small urban spaces and gardens offer the most humane solution for families. 

The traditional Parisian apartment building provided units for all economic groups in a single structure. Affordable units were located in the rear, away from the street, or in the upper attic floors, which were only accessible by stairs. The most desirable units were located one floor above street level, on the Piano Nobile, which stylistically had the highest ceiling heights.

9. Build Green / Grow Green 

People have been talking about sustainable architecture for decades. However, given the burgeoning population of Mumbai, the city cannot afford to be anything but sustainable. History shows us that as a society becomes more affluent, its members become less conscientious and more wasteful of resources, recycling less, creating more solid waste, and increasing their dependency on artificial cooling and lighting.

Runaway degradation and urban chocking is a result of decisions taken in high places. No city has unlimited resources, and so it must decide where to spend funds. What doesn’t get built despite overwhelming and pressing population needs, versus what does get built but which lowers living quality for the majority of people, is obvious to all. 

What actually gets done in the city is decided by power brokers from within the ruling class. Those individuals treat the general population as annoying obstacles to their own luxury and privilege. For example, urban legislation that would solve the problems discussed here is blocked; even when courageous politicians manage to pass it, it is ignored and shelved; funds approved for implementing needed changes disappear or are diverted to a pet project that favors real-estate speculation; public space is appropriated and sold to builders; precious trees are cut so that the land can be built on, etc.

In affluent societies, architects and developers have been able to ignore the environmental conditions of place. Affluence leads to more waste and less recycling. A mere 40 years ago, most residential buildings did not require air conditioning for the comfort of the inhabitants. These buildings passively kept inhabitants comfortable by incorporating high ceiling heights, while transom windows above doorways permitted air circulation; units were one room deep designed for cross-ventilation, and windows had deep overhangs that shaded interior spaces as well as providing protection from the heavy monsoon rains. 

It is not the intention of this essay to become a Cassandra of dire warnings about the future of cities. And yet, the message coming from many independent sources emphasizes that cities that do not rely on low-tech and passive energy savings are literally doomed. We are beginning to see annual catastrophes as building schemes foolishly reliant on fossil fuels become dysfunctional during a climate or energy crisis. And so far, these alarming events are tiny warnings compared to what is coming rather soon. 

Mumbai needs to mandate that all new buildings be designed to consume less natural resources than their predecessors. This includes the use of toilets that use less water or gray water, faucets and shower heads that limit water flow, motion-operated electrical switches, energy efficient lighting fixtures, non-petroleum based synthetic materials, to name a few examples. Even the most elementary solutions using solar orientation and low-cost insulation can make an enormous difference. 

There is a strong correlation between green tree cover and real estate value. The more green there is, the higher the real estate value. The new development at Powai demonstrates that increased greenery and open natural space increases property value. Mumbai should encourage programs to plant more trees, and legislate a minimum of three-for-one replacement of any trees that have been cut down, no matter what the reason.

Although this outrage occurred much more in other cities than in Mumbai, there is a moment of national shame when the government “approved” lakhs of trees for cutting down. Without getting into individual details, cutting urban trees raises subsequent summer temperatures and lowers the re-oxygenation rate of the air. Coupled to unavoidable climatic temperature rises, this could lead to the deaths of lakhs of urban residents when the heat exceeds the body’s tolerable threshold. 

10. Question The Codes

The existing building codes that govern new development within the city are archaic and incomprehensible technical calculations, such as FSI (Floor Space Index), setbacks and open space requirements that ignore the differences between pleasant and unbearable urbanism. As mentioned earlier, they make the city’s traditional urban form, the most loved places within the city, illegal to emulate.

Codes must be based on a picture of what is desired and not technical manipulations. Close your eyes and imagine what you want the city to be, and then write a code to achieve it. Around the world a new generation of design ordinances is gaining favor among city planning officials. Referred to as form-based codes, these ordinances prescribe what needs to be built to create a desirable urban environment. Cities are embracing and adopting form-based codes with positive results. 

As New Urbanists around the world have experienced, where localities insist on their antiquated codes from the 1950s, there is hardly anything that can be done to make their city human again. Yet codes can be changed overnight by political authority, once enlightened urbanists convince legislators of the enormous benefits of doing so. Clearly, inertia has to be overcome, plus the shock of realizing that the old set of codes, in place for decades, is wrong. It takes courage to admit such a mistake, even if it was implemented long ago by persons since dead. 

11. Congestion Is Your Friend

One of the authors (D.A.T.) first heard this phrase when visiting Vancouver, a thriving modern city, which exudes a high quality of life. The premise was that without congestion, people would continue to drive in their private automobiles and there would be no incentive to invest in public transportation and pedestrian life. With a limited land mass similar to Mumbai, the city officials understood the need for a highly efficient and coordinated transportation system that included rail, bus, water taxis, private cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. This multi-modal coordination could only be achieved with unbearable congestion, inciting citizens to demand an alternative to private automobiles.

Travelling by transit usually saves on time and cost, plus trains consume far less energy than cars.

The technocrat’s conception of an ideal city goes back to the 1920s, and is a vision empty of people! This picture represents a dead city. By contrast, the living city is congested and teeming with activity. But like any complex dynamic system, it has an optimum operating range. Up to a certain degree, congestion denotes commerce, life, and movement. But over-congestion is unwelcome and denotes a bottleneck somewhere, or a more serious planning mistake that can only get worse. Checks and balances are required, to be implemented intelligently by those who understand how a living city works. 

Referring back to the misunderstanding that gave rise to monofunctional zoning, its original proponents wanted to “clean up” the city. They didn’t realize that they were in fact erasing its living processes. And by doing so, they actually generated vast amounts of useless transportation that consumed energy for no reason other than to connect what had formerly been connected by proximity. The city desperately tried to stay alive, but at a greatly increased energy cost. 

A sidebar from Vancouver that is applicable to Mumbai was legislation that encouraged all buildings in the center city to provide wide (3 meter) overhangs over the sidewalks to protect pedestrians from the region’s abundant rainfall.

12. Don’t Forget Beauty

The revered and honorable Joe Riley, Charleston South Carolina’s Mayor from 1975-2016, reminds us that cities should be places that make the heart sing. For many Mumbai citizens, especially those too poor or infirm to travel, the city is their entire world. For this reason, the city should be proudly maintained, should function efficiently, but also afford moments of beauty.

Unfortunately, Mumbai routinely builds to the lowest common denominator, when it comes to building public schools, parks, bridges, and government buildings. Public buildings and open spaces belong to all the citizens of the city. In the interest of short-term frugality, the city cheats itself out of a beautiful public realm and a noble legacy. This was not always the case, and it need not continue.

One only has to look around Mumbai, a wonderful and inspiring city, to see that it has an incredible portfolio of beautiful buildings, parks, and public spaces. This legacy can and must be continued. In a country known for some of the most beautiful structures in the world, India has a lot to live up to.

At this point, we would normally conclude our essay and trust that decision makers will follow our recommendations in the near future. But, alas, “beauty” still needs to be explained, otherwise all of our counsel is for naught. Not having a common measure for beauty, the default building style today is intolerably ugly. Architects are stubbornly unwilling to re-use any of the multiple design tools leading to beauty in the pre-industrial period of humanity. 

Biologically-based beauty is innate because it is a product of human evolution. Uneducated people react instinctively to beautiful things and buildings, except for occasional deviations influenced by images seen in the media. But the decision-making class has adopted its own set of criteria for beauty, which depend on transgressive and unnatural forms. The human body reacts to those with distress and anxiety. 

The implications for architecture are profound. What most people would consider beautiful may be marked by the fashion-driven intelligentsia as worthless, and as worthy of demolition. Conversely, what the intelligentsia propose as a beautiful new building may make normal people uncomfortable and even ill. Politicians are unfortunately influenced by this class of society to destroy what is most beautiful in a city, and we witness this vandalism occurring all over the world today. Mumbai is warned: please be aware of and counteract this potentially disastrous problem.