I have frequently observed Kolkata as a flaneur. Walked among the crowds observing people and the general pace of life. It’s often reminded me of a film I had once seen, being screened at some obscure film festival. It was named Koyaanisqatsi, which means “unbalanced life” in the Hopi language. The film is primarily a montage of slow motion and time lapse footage of cities, depicting different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology.
One of the sequences begins with a sunset reflected on the glass of skyscrapers and shadows of clouds moving across, and ends with footage of the destruction of large buildings. Then a time-lapse shot of people waiting in line, followed by people walking on streets in slow motion. There are shots of machines packaging food, traffic patterns at night, interspersed by shots of people eating, playing, shopping and working at the same speed. In the final sequence a rocket lifts off and then explodes after a few seconds.
If that film were shot in Kolkata, there would have been similar sequences of highways and crowded streets, college campuses and coffee houses, skyscrapers and shanties, rickshaw pullers and office goers, trams and taxis, collapsing flyovers, hospitals on fire – a slice of modern life in the godforsaken third world. A three-dimensional cramped world of discarded, leftover ideas with no room for another dimension or imagination. A world whose heart beats to the random rhythm of deaths, disasters and despair, while we, its trapped citizens go through the everyday motions in circadian rhythm.
In a paper titled The City and the Crunch: Contours of a pending disaster, Dushko Bogunovich, a professor of urban design, predicted an impending “perfect storm” for cities beset by population density, depletion of resources, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. Add to it our specific socio-political reality, and we live through that danger every day. And that is the existential reality of urban living in a city like Kolkata.
Reimagine the city, reimagine Kolkata
But is there a way out? Could there be a progressive, paradigmatic rethinking of urban spaces? We could perhaps start with devising new pedagogical strategies to develop a completely new breed of city-planners and architects, who could re-look at specific urban anthropologies, experience and then imagine a city sensorially, who could draw from the lived experiences of common citizens to plan their city?
Could we, for example, reimagine Barrabazaar – the scene of the collapsed flyover – as one of the Islamic medinas, completely pedestrian, with a productive, yet intimate and secure social life?
Could we have the intellectual openness and enough humanism to construct something of true aesthetic and social meaning and value, instead of painting the city white and blue and rigging it with three street lights per square inch of each road? Could we not have many many more bicycle lanes? Could we not completely do away with the billboards? Sao Paulo has done it with brilliant effect.
Where are the public squares, especially in a city like Kolkata, where the culture of protests is slowly dying away, for lack of uncontrolled public spaces. Who could forget the absolute importance of Tahrir Square in the Arab Spring?
The people, not politicians and builders
Can we not reclaim our city, and recreate it in our own fresh and creative ways?
Andy Forster, an Austrian, has devised a project called “Neighbourhood” through which he publicly expresses his right to the city by promoting “guerilla gardening” – where people plant small gardens in public spaces without permission and tend to them. He also knitted mufflers for bicycle posts and made hats and scarves for statues around the city, in an attempt to humanise the bland institutional face of the cityscape. Could we not think on those lines instead?
Of course these random, crazy, radical ideas will face opposition from political and commercial interests that control the city administration. However, as writer Neal Shusterman says, “Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy”.
So as we try to solve our problems, while creating new ones alongside, we can only hope that we are able to participate and contribute on a decentralised, horizontal scale, and have a real and substantial stake in the future of our cityscapes. Because a city belongs to its people, and not to its politicians, land-owners or developers. So does Kolkata.
Pritha Kejriwal is the editor-in-chief of Kindle Magazine and a research scholar at Birkbeck, University of London.