Historic Preservation: Looking East

The hills and beaches of today’s Indian megacity Mumbai were for centuries little more than a series of sleepy islands populated by fishermen and traders plying the eastern shores of the Arabian Sea. Even under British colonial rule (1661-1948), the city was largely characterized by its grand Victorian public buildings, graceful seafront boulevards, and arcaded shopping districts, particularly around the Fort district, once the colonial hub of the city and today its central business district. Not until after Indian Independence did Mumbai grow into the financial, cultural, and entertainment capital of the world’s second most populous nation. By 2020, the Population Institute projects Mumbai’s population will reach 28.5 million, surpassing Tokyo as the world’s largest city.

Mumbai’s massive growth in the past 50 years exemplifies Asia’s urban expansion: constantly straining all available resources and services, resulting in vast unregulated development in the form of shantytowns and other illicit construction. As Mumbai and other Asian cities grow, their historic colonial and vernacular architectural heritage have received little attention. Real estate speculation, infrastructure development, and a preference for modern forms have prevailed over preservation. 

Local historic preservationists, however, have become increasingly adept at working in these booming environments. Bucking conventional top-down legislative approaches, community-based organizations have pioneered more effective tactics for preservation in Mumbai and elsewhere. Successful strategies from Asian cities may foretell a new era where Western cities follow their Eastern counterparts’ lead in many aspects of urban management, including historic preservation.

Constructing Cultural Significance

In Mumbai, community-focused projects have concentrated on the southern Fort district and the adjacent Kala Ghoda district, bustling commercial areas teeming with street hawkers, employees of the nearby Bombay Stock Exchange, and middle-class residents from the Colaba and Marine Drive neighborhoods. The area boasts a dense collection of colonial-era buildings, including Victorian Neo-Gothic gems such as the Elphinstone College (completed in the 1880s), the David Sasson Library (1870), the Indo-Saracenic Prince of Wales Museum (1914), and the cast-iron Watson’s Hotel, now called Esplanade Mansion (1869). Despite municipal preservation legislation passed in 1995 and the numerous agencies charged with monitoring Mumbai’s historically significant architecture, real estate pressures, community neglect, pollution, and poor maintenance all take heavy tolls on the buildings.

Perceiving the inadequacies of the official process, a local organization, the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), has rallied local planners, community leaders, and citizens to take the initiative in preservation efforts. The historic value of the area, however, has proven the major impediment to engaging community support. For many Indians, buildings dating from the British period of rule conjure grim recollections of racism, exploitation, and exclusion. At the same time, the swelling urban populace of Mumbai largely consists of newcomers who might regard the 150-year-old British buildings with disdain or disinterest. Since the historic value could not suffice as a rallying cry for preservation efforts, the UDRI had to find creative ways to inject new cultural significance into the old Fort neighborhoods.

The UDRI initiated a detailed survey of Kala Ghoda and discovered that the district held Mumbai’s densest collection of art galleries. Seizing upon this distinction, the UDRI helped to establish the Kala Ghoda Association, an organization of art enthusiasts, business owners, and concerned citizens, to enhance the district’s visibility and encourage appreciation of its built fabric. The annual Kala Ghoda Art Festival, launched in 1998, has been an important tool in this effort, raising money for preservation efforts and community-based projects throughout the district. Since its launch, several buildings, including the Sasson Library and Elphinstone College buildings, have received façade cleanings and some interior restorations. More recently, the UDRI and Kala Ghoda Association have begun negotiating with the owner of Watson’s Hotel - which suffered a partial collapse in 2005 and which the World Monuments Fund placed on its 2006 World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites - to stabilize and restore certain public areas of the much deteriorated building.

Preservation efforts, in short, embraced the rapidly changing nature of Mumbai. By “constructing cultural significance,” UDRI executive director Rahul Mehrotra argues, preservationists can use public advocacy to invigorate a community’s appreciation for buildings whose origins are so far removed.

Eighteen hundred miles away, in another rapidly developing regional hub that has struggled to preserve historic buildings, the Bangkok Forum has employed similar grassroots techniques. Founded by Chaiwat Thirapantu, a German-trained local activist, the Forum is a citizen’s group that organizes street-level events and public action, often around preservation issues, using the publicity from these events to advance a more pluralistic urban planning process in Bangkok.

Unlike Mumbai, Bangkok has no colonial legacy - the Kingdom of Siam, under King Rama I and his Chakri Dynasty, famously evaded European rule. Rama established Bangkok in 1782 - then known as Krung Thep - across the Chao Praya River from its predecessor capital, Thon Buri. Absolute monarchy ended in 1932, but the Chakri Dynasty has persisted to this day, holding a place of prominence over the decades alongside Thailand’s autocratic and democratic leaders. The Thai government has traditionally used historic preservation as a vehicle for promotion of the monarchy. As a result, historic preservation activity in Bangkok has traditionally been of a top-down nature, focusing on royal monuments and frequently neglecting vernacular architecture and informal urban spaces.

One neighborhood full of such architecture and spaces is the Banglamphu district. An exceptional example of Bangkok’s early urban development, Banglamphu contains a diverse assemblage of temples, mosques, royal palaces, shophouses (hybrid commercial/residential spaces), and vernacular wooden buildings.

Beginning in 1997, the Bangkok Forum began working with a broad coalition of local residents, students, and business people to organize and promote a festival in Banglamphu. Their aim was both to galvanize community participation in the district’s future, and to draw attention to a particular building threatened by demolition: the old Teachers’ Council (Khurusapha) Printing House, which dates to the 1930s. Though lacking official historic or aesthetic distinction, the building nevertheless occupied a prominent position in the neighborhood. The Bangkok Forum’s coordinated campaign, aided by Silpakorn University students who gave presentations on the building’s early history, ultimately persuaded the building’s owner, the Treasury Department, to cancel demolition plans. The Khurusapha Printing House was converted instead into a multi-use community center, supporting a cafe, library, and performance venue.

Like the Kala Ghoda Association and UDRI, the Bangkok Forum’s objectives were not preservation of historically or architecturally significant buildings per se, but rather the empowerment of local communities to direct change in their surrounding built environment. Frequently in Mumbai, Bangkok, and other emerging Asian megacities, the rapid pace of development, hegemonic role of government, and market forces often rob citizens of their voice in planning decisions. Engaging the public in planning decisions by bestowing new significance on a historic urban space, however, proves not only a highly effective preservation tool, but can give a voice to citizens in the dynamic Asian urban environment.

Challenging the Very Notion of the City

As the Australian urban designer Richard Marshall points out in an essay on Asian megacities, the current urbanization in the East can only challenge “the very notion of the city - what it is, how it works, and the kind of urbanities it is capable of supporting.” Although he does not mention it specifically, one of the “urbanities” that the new megacity must support is the historic built environment. Mumbai and Bangkok demonstrate that even in the face of powerful interests - including development pressure, neglect, and top-down policy making - organized citizenry can reclaim the process of urban change in their cities.

To be sure, many challenges remain. In Mumbai, a city where over half the residents live in slums or on the street, participation in an arts festival might not represent the most sustainable model for engaging large portions of the population in historic preservation. Nor do the success stories above represent the norm in the Asian megacity, as anyone observing the sad fate of Beijing’s Hutong neighborhoods or Yangon’s colonial architecture has witnessed.

Nevertheless, as Asian cities come to define the urban norm in the 21st century, preservation strategies that work in them must be highlighted, refined, and shared throughout the region. Tactics developed in the new Asian megacities also have the potential to make their way back to North America and Europe, challenging the traditional conventions of historic preservation practice there. The emerging emphases in Bangkok and Mumbai on community-level (rather than top-down) action, on negotiating the relationship between the dynamic populace and the static urban environment, and on accommodating the shifting values of new constituent communities, all represent worthy objectives in the West, as well as the East.

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Logan, William S., ed. The Disappearing “Asian” City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Marshall, Richard. “Asian Megacities.” Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design. Ed. Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Mehrotra, Rahul. “Constructing Cultural Significance: Looking at Bombay’s Historic Fort Area.” Future Anterior 1.2 (Fall 2004): 24-31.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2001 Revision. New York: United Nations, 2002.