The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat organizes its big event in Mumbai this year. It has a clear agenda – believing that the move towards urban sustainability is one that should look at tall buildings as a means of accommodating growing urban populations. This releases land for other activities – including environmental preservation.

photo credit; dubbagol.com

The theme of the conference is ‘Remaking Sustainable cities in the Vertical Age’. While there are several questions to be raised about the nature of such conferences and their legitimacy as fountainheads of disseminating pre-digested knowledge as universal truths – we would like to take this opportunity to enter the debate. Indeed, it is vital to see it as a debate and not part of a prefabricated set of supposedly correct assumptions.

At first glance the idea of verticality translating into open space is an attractive one. The most self-evident example of its relative success is the Manhattan – Central Park story. At the same time there have been several critiques made about any simplistic logic of spatial use in such an audit-culture mode of looking at cities.

The transformation of form does not translate into an accompanying change in attitudes and practices of space use. Release of land by high-rise cities such as Chicago did not translate into a guaranteed sustainable set of practices for released land. In fact the tendency of cities to depend on the hinterland for water and power supply overrides most such benefits. It is often the case that the neighbouring region finds much of its water supply directed not towards ecologically sustainable practices as much as providing basic substances to the cities. The desertification of regions around urban stretches is a well documented fact.

At the same time no one is saying that there is no space for tall buildings in an urban vision. The history of high-rise urban structures are pretty ancient. The problem starts when tall buildings are presented as a solution to the problem of urban density – accompanied by tall claims of sustainability – overriding the several critiques about the nature of these buildings. The taller they go, they often land up being more expensive, high technology dependent real-estate, which then is used by families or activities that need more per-capita space anyway. Thus reducing their validity as density absorbents. The accompanying lifestyles need more road space – more liesure activities (golf-courses included!) which do not in any way measure up to a rational use of released land.

More pertinently – to keep urban economic energies flowing – affordable and inclusive urban growth needs to accompany verticality for a healthy city. The story of Manhattan is not simply the story of the high-rise – it is also a story of bridges connecting the neighbourhoods around making everybody within affordable reach. No vertical growth can happen without an accompanying horizontal growth in a dynamic urban economy. The question of containing land-use does not hold. Yes – the idea of the high-rise as part of a great construction industry is appealing. The problem is they depend so much on high capital and we have seen how so many economic bubbles that burst recently have – at their heart – a real-estate related controversy. So is it worth critiquing the claims of the above mentioned conference at all? Nothing like a bit of debate to start the new year! Seasons’ Greetings!

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