Ganapathy St, West Mambalam, Chennai and Scripps Ranch, San Diego — I have family living in both neighborhoods. .., they ought to have something in common. For starters they both have their fair share of  faux pediments supported by Corinthian capitals.  Both San Diego and Chennai are short on fresh water and dependent on neighboring states. However, San Diego seem to make sure there is still generous supply of  water for saturating the  lawn and the sidewalk park strips after what is becoming the annual ritual of fighting bush fires.

In West Mambalam you can anticipate certain death by heat exhaustion, mosquito bites, air horns  or from the potent mix of  carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides from endless stream of two stroke engines crisscrossing the Ranganathan underpass . In Scripps Ranch one can either opt for death by boredom or cho0se to remain in basement watching re-runs of “Real Housewives of Orange County” in 60″ plasma as the Santa Ana flames begin to lick your back porch.

But why am I leaning more towards West Mambalam than Scripps ? It’s  got to be the fatal attraction and total freedom to paint my home bright yellow and fluorescent orange  embellished by stripped accents for the 6″  PVC columns.

Perhaps I am under  delusion that I can successfully soundproof  a home even when it shares the front wall with a  place of worship… and couldn’t possibly be shaken out of my bed the next morning at 4.45 am when the aging diaphrms of  antique loudspeakers begins to throb with devotional songs at 110db. As they say you need to have blind faith even if it can make you deaf.

Link to a depressing article in today’s Wall Street Journal. But why would the authors pick an extreme case like Lucknow as their case study, I couldnt quite understand… Perhaps Patna didn’t make the cut. Its like choosing Detroit as a case study to talk about neighborhood foreclosures. A bit of smelly trivia from Lucknow – the city hasnt completed any major sewage infrastructure project since before the country’s independence in 1947.  Leaving Lucknow aside, the numbers are pretty startling :

- India has 41 cities with more than 1 million people up from 23 two decades ago.( compare to US that has 9 cities with 1million+ population -http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/us-census2000.html)…very soon half a dozen others will join the list

- India has 25 of the world’s 100 fastest growing urban areas…that compares to 8 in China

Some quick comparison between the WSJ data (2007)  and the information on US cities from city mayors website (2003 data). For those familiar with some the second tier Indian cities..the whole comparison can be unsettling and absurd.. even before one starts thinking about land area, population density, GDP, city budget  etc !! Note numbers are rounded to nearest tenth of a million.

New York ( 8.1 million) ~ Mumbai ( 19 million)

Los Angeles ( 3.8 million) ~Surat (3.85 million)

Chicago (2.9 million) ~ Jaipur ( 2.9 million)

Houston (2.0 million) ~ Patna ( 2.15 million)

Philadelphia ( 1.5 million) ~ Ludhiana ( 1.6 million)

Phoenix (1.4 million) ~ Meerut (1.4 million)

San Diego (1.3 million) ~ Jamshedpur ( 1.3 million)

…and its gets even crazier

9 x [San Jose  -0.9 million] ~ Bangalore  (6.8 million)

12  x [ Detroit - 0.9 million] ~ Chennai (7.2 million)

2  x [ San Francisco - 0.75 million] ~ Faridabad (1.4 million)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124216531392512435.html#video%3D4E0F32B9-66FC-4338-9BE5-F97CC58FC787%26articleTabs%3Darticle%26project%3DIURBAN090

I am poorer by $118 thanks to driving in Manhattan. That would be $115 in parking ticket for misreading the distant sign,  and $3 for diligently feeding the parking meter – which conveniently will not indicate that I cannot park there during that time period. Having other cars parked in front of us certainly didn’t help ( I am sure they got their tickets as well) This is more that the cost of our entire trip from Boston to New York City – almost 400% more than the what we paid for gas for our 440 miles of driving from Boston to New York and back in our ten year old Honda Civic.

After being offered the fluorescent orange envelope, they are all I could see on other windshields for the rest of the trip. Just like you want to check out people’s shoes for the next few days after splurging on  a new pair for oneself. If this is any consolation, I certainly had a lot of company and even tried to pay dues to my parking karma by alerting a driver that she is going to get a ticket if she parks there.  With orange envelopes floating all around my head, I began wondering how much the city is making from parking tickets…and the number blew me away. According to a New York Times article by McGinty and Blumenthal in the fiscal year 2007-08 the city collected more than $624 million in parking fines !!! – more than the entire budget for the department of transportation from 2529 traffic agents half of whom write tickets.

If that is ‘collected’ fines,  not everyone must have paid their dues…certainly not in this economy. Lets say we leave the uncollected fines for a rainy day and just focus on the reported amount. Let me infer some new numbers here. That would be almost 1265 agents writing tickets for $624 million. Which would be approximately $493,000 per agent.  For a salary of less than $30,000 these agents bring in city revenue  at more than 16 times their annual salary. Mayor Bloomberg certain knows a thing or two about productivity even when it comes at the cost of unwarranted personal misery for some.

Would it help if the city updates all the individual parking meters with clearly written  signs that specifies when you cannot park ? It certainly will.  But will the city do it? – I  seriously doubt it. They might hire more agents though !!!

Those twelve inches from last week
started retreating today
Ah ! the joy to see the ground beneath
to hear the water drip from the eaves
..to make do with one less layer

After all, those multitudes of green circles that populate a site plan do more than merely satisfying the cosmetic needs of the two-dimensional graphic.  A federal study completed by the Pacific Northwest Research Station, National Institute of Standards and the US Department of Commerce has established a direct link between the value of homes and the number of street trees in Portland.

Key findings of the study are:

• On average, street trees add $7,020 to the price of a house in Portland, which is equivalent to increasing the size of a house by 106 square feet.
• Street trees increase the value of homes in Portland by a total of $1.1 billion, which is equivalent to annual benefits of $45 million.
• The annual maintenance costs of Portland’s street trees are $4.6 million ($3.3 million is borne by the homeowner), so the benefit-cost ratio of Portland’s street trees is almost 10 to 1.
• Street trees increase annual property tax revenue for the city of Portland by $13 million. 

http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/news/2008/03/trees.shtml

“An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Architecture” by Jagan Shah moderately succeeds at the ambitious task of having to navigate and represent the uneven, unwieldy and often ungainly panorama of contemporary Indian architecture. After going through the well-summarized introduction and a diverse compilation of built and unbuilt work, I am left confounded – Is this as good as it gets? Or has the author opted for the safer route of relying too much on recognizable names and has failed to dig deeper? In the diverse economic landscape of post-liberalization India, for every firm like Morphogenesis that employs scores of professionals to churn out forgettable corporate interiors and tiresome mirror glass facades, there’s got to be more than a handful of Glen Murcutt – style architects and smaller practices improvising and channeling their creative energies in lesser known corners. This volume is a convincing survey of an established and recognized few as much as it is a lost opportunity to identify the works of those who have been overlooked by a neutered Indian architectural press.

The book is a distillation of self-selected works of twenty architects most of who are in their second decade of professional practice. To paraphrase the author, there are shockingly few decent buildings, relative to the overall size of the construction industry. The Mumbai-Delhi-Ahmedabad triangle has its usual suspects, in addition to a generous representation of Ahmedabad-trained Bangalore architects. It’s not surprising to see Chennai and Kolkata’s conspicuous absence given the lack of critical mass of creative architectural energies. However, there is a token representation from Auroville and from Kerala.

The collection has a range of project types from private residences and commercial interiors to institutional buildings and pays lip service to urban design with a collaborative work between S.K.Das and EDAW, rendered in watercolor, which screams “made in corporate USA”. There are hardly any multi-family housing projects featured in the book. Developer-driven flats with ‘two and a half feet thick aesthetic’ proliferated by Hafeez Contractor and his numerous clones my not be the ideal ambassadors of contemporary architectural discourse in India. But multi-family housing is the fast growing segment of housing types and it is disappointing to see just one decent housing project (Andrews Ganj Housing – S.K.Das).

The book does something most Indian architectural journals still seem reluctant to embrace: supplementing photographs by readable plans and sections. It is a relief to see works of the older generation–by the way of Correa, Doshi, Raje, Rewal, Kanvinde, among others—have been relegated only to the introductory essay. There has been enough printed pages showcasing their work in the last forty years, and it’s about time we moved on. Attempting to portray the entire spectrum of contemporary Indian architecture in less than 300 pages is challenging indeed. But I would have happily traded some of those many pages devoted to well-photographed rooms filled with Chinese-made veneer furniture, prefabricated kitchen counters, and terracotta horses in front of ochre walls, to get a whiff of those lesser known architects doing good work, and for a wider oeuvre of projects that engage the public realm.

081203_Boston_MumbaiVigil025, originally uploaded by purpleganesh.

Soft light from warm candles braves the 40D boston winter night….murmer of the interfaith prayers, somber faces and bored kids..glittering christmas lights at a distance and the relentess strobe lights from cop cars…and a show of solidarity for wasted lives and unrealized dreams…is there a point to all this..?

A not-too-idyllic crystal ball projections on China’s growth in the next twenty some years. Link to the business week article by Dexter Roberts that heavily relies on projection numbers from McKinsey’s recent study.

Some Key Projection Stats from the article - China 2025

Infrastructure needs: 170 Mass Transit systems, 40 billion sq.m of floor space, 5 million buildings with upto 50,000 30+story tall buildings

….but, but…what about all those extra cars?

image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Shanghai_Nanking_Road_1930s.jpeg

And finally the outdoor mall arrives in a country with a long tradition of open air markets. And it had wait for Charles Correa and Ambujas to work together. A well written article by Himanshu Burte in livemint expounds the merits of Correa’s foray in creating a decent quasi-public domain for upwardly mobile Indian middle class – though I would have liked to see some more critical observations.

Years ago while waiting for a friend of mine outside Barton Center in Bangalore, I seated myself along the the entry steps only to be promptly reprimanded by the security personnel that I am not allowed to sit on the steps. The only other public place where I was not allowed to sit down was under the dome of St.Peters in Rome. I sat down to start working on my sketchbook to be politely reminded that I can only do that in the pews…perhaps only barbarians sat on the floor, and a catholic church is no place for such uncivilized behavior. But Barton Center is not St.Peters….and the steps leading to a shoddy shopping mall is a bit different from pope’s home office. Contemporary architectural practice in India had to wait till twenty first century to provide outdoor seating in a planned commercial space. How exciting !!

If it takes a Charles Correa to convince the developers not to have any gates and to make sure the mall is seamlessly integrated with the public realm, the prognosis is pretty bleak for most other talented architects to pull off a similar act. The city center mall was open for business in 2004 and we are yet to see more examples based on similar planning concepts and thats a bit depressing.

Link to LiveMint Article