Abstract
This article will examine the redevelopment plan of the Bhadra Fort precincts (the Bhadra Plaza) in the walled city of Ahmedabad to understand the city’s projection of its neoliberal visual ability to produce the symbol and space of global habitude. The Bhadra Fort is the citadel, the ceremonial centre of the city of Ahmedabad that Ahmed Shah founded in 1411. Over the years, as the city of Ahmedabad grew and expanded its city limits, this inner core of the city came to be perceived as a site of disease, communal conflict and general residential decline. The Bhadra project promises to transform the fort precincts into a site of leisure and a source of economic revitalization.
I critically trace the rationale of this project taken up by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and Archaeological Survey of India that articulates the seamless integration of the walled city with the rest of the ‘developed’ parts of Ahmedabad. I show that this integration is envisaged as consequent to the complete pedestrianization of the Bhadra Plaza. I argue that the project erases the materiality of its historical space and the history of its use. Unlike de Certeau’s pedestrian whose ways of seeing offered a critique to the hegemony of the planner’s eye, the figure of the pedestrian is now co-opted into the imagination of the Bhadra Plaza.
Ahmedabad is the commercial capital of the state of Gujarat and one of the largest cities in India. In the last decade and half, an increased consciousness around Ahmedabad’s image has been coupled with institutional interest and investment in its cityscape. This investment has been oriented towards fashioning Ahmedabad as an emergent global city, as a crucial node in the network of global capital. National and regional interests in realizing such aspiration are reflected in the readiness to deploy enormous resources to achieve such ‘globality’. Quite apart from economic, socio-political and other indicators, the underlying conception of such globality has often referred back to a fundamental issue—how is the city to be ‘recognized’ as a global city? Ananya Roy (2011), for instance, understands the recognition of the global city in South Asia as a grid of referentiality based on the economic success stories of cities in South Asia. This grid generates an iconic landscape that is not only a pathway to global city formation but also comes to be the norm and measure by which globality in itself can be ‘perceived’. In the case of Ahmedabad, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project, urban infrastructure projects, real estate activity, finance hubs and special economic zones seem to visually indicate the global readiness of Ahmedabad and its peripheries. What is interesting is that this has also been accompanied by a concerted discourse around Ahmedabad’s heritage-scape, articulating the ways the city’s heritage sites make Ahmedabad aesthetically as well as culturally attractive. This article will attempt to map the terrain of such aesthetics in the redevelopment of the Bhadra Fort area in the walled city, and by doing so, it will point to the ways the larger aesthetic transformation of Ahmedabad is projected as necessary and legitimate. In examining the plan for the redevelopment of the Bhadra Fort precincts, I show how it mediates the promise of an integrated Ahmedabad; its economically and socially divided spatial character merged into the idea of a global, coherent, legible and pleasurable cityscape (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, 2012).
The Bhadra Fort is a citadel and the ceremonial centre of the city of Ahmedabad that Ahmed Shah founded in 1411. It was around this citadel that residential settlements came up, gradually defining a city area (the walled city) which Sultan Mahmud Begada, Ahmed Shah’s successor, is said to have fortified. 1 Over the years, even as the city of Ahmedabad grew and expanded its city limits, the inner core of the city or the walled city came to be perceived as a site of disease, communal conflict and general residential decline. This perception of the area’s lack in terms of value and relevance to the social imagination of the city is reflected in the substantial decline in population of the walled city between the 1981 and 2001 censuses (AMC & AUDA, 2006). For a long period of time, the walled city was largely neglected in terms of urban planning but figured extensively in narratives of communal violence. It came to be represented as an area particularly prone to rioting. However, in the last two decades and more, interest in the walled city revived, with great attention being paid to the history, traditions and the conservation of the walled city’s domestic architecture, accompanied by the city government’s efforts to ‘revitalize’ the walled city. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC)-sanctioned project, in collaboration with Environmental Planning Collaborative (EPC) and USAID-funded Walled City Revitalization Plan 1997 (WCRP 1997), is an example. The following extract from the WCRP 1997 makes clear that the decline in the ‘property value’ of the walled city area is wedded to attitudes towards the walled city that regard it as a symbol of dysfunctionality.
Poor level of service and problems like contamination of drinking water, have made the walled city neighbourhoods undesirable places to stay. The housing stock is facing serious problems of dilapidation.…This area also has a history of communal unrest. During riots there is a high risk of fire.…The narrow streets of the walled city have become congested with the increase in traffic volume. While the three bus terminals in this area make it well connected they also add to the traffic congestion. (AMC, Environment Planning Collaborative, & Technical Support Services Inc., 1997, p. 7)
This portrayal of the walled city area along with the perception of its congestion and unsanitary conditions seems to provide the rationale for the expansion of the city. Thus, projects such as WCRP 1997 conceptualize and narrate the decline of the walled city in terms of the shift in the focus of ‘development’ to the western side of Ahmedabad. After the British took control of the city in 1817, the city gradually expanded beyond its walls when British settlers and other elite of Ahmedabad moved out towards the north to settle in areas in and around Shahibaug. The British cantonment areas also came to be set up in these parts. The emergence of the indigenously led cotton textile industry in the 1860s in the wake of the railway link to Bombay in 1864 saw the establishment of factories and mills in the north-eastern and south-eastern parts of the city. A distinct industrial belt developed on the periphery of the walled city beyond the railway lines. These areas also came to house a working class area whose population more or less sustained the profitability of these industries. The city further expanded westwards across the river Sabarmati through a series of town planning schemes, initially implemented by the colonial administration. The first phase of expansion involved acquiring and converting agricultural land to facilitate the reorganization and planning of the city. In the perception of the British administration, this would relieve congestion, reduce urban density and ameliorate disease in the walled city. By the 1920s, when the control of the municipality passed to the indigenous political elite of the city, the organization and expansion of the city was taken up by them. The parts of the city that had expanded to the west across the river Sabarmati came to be associated with affluence and in post-independence India, with particular forms of modern living. This was largely reflected in the construction of new modern residential schemes that nevertheless preserved the sanctity of caste-based living (Mehta & Mehta, 1987). In later years, as more middle class families moved from the walled city to areas in the west of the river Sabarmati, medium rise and high-rise buildings came to characterize the housing construction. A number of educational and research institutions were also set up in these parts, the finance for which largely came from textile mill owners of the city. In time, as Jaffrelot has observed, Ahmedabad came to be disaggregated into three cities: the old city or the walled historic core; the industrial belt with mixed caste and religious population, primarily of the lower middle class and lower class and the western parts of the city marked by a middle class and upper class population (Jaffrelot & Thomas, 2012, p. 50).
As Arvind Rajagopal has observed, the condition of the walled city seemed to justify newer spatial developments beyond it. ‘Indeed, the walled city became a political imaginary, and in urban planning, a metaphor for a pattern that reproduced itself as Ahmedabad grew’ (Rajagopal, 2010). Indeed, the concept of ‘Greater Ahmedabad’ which had gained great currency with the city government is a case in point (Yagnik, 2011, p. 292). 2 ‘Greater Ahmedabad’ or the Ahmedabad metropolitan area would absorb many more villages and towns at the periphery of the urban agglomeration, increasing the size and area of the city. These expansion patterns largely substantiate the largesse the city had received under the central government’s agenda for urban renewal. Yagnik and Sheth (2011, p. 295) observe that the recent expansion of the city is largely a response to Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission’s (JnNURM) criteria for mega cities as well as a result of the nexus between the politician and the builder. 3 As several scholars such as Desai and Mahadevia have pointed out, what exactly the mega city term implied vis-à-vis central and state government aid and the financial burden of the city is never discussed. 4 But the term in itself seemed to signify the possibility of projecting global habitude since Ahmedabad had seemingly joined the ranks of the other six mega cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore. Evidently, while the expansion of the city furthered real estate and political interests, it also seemed to crucially embed itself in a celebratory and legitimizing mega city or global city discourse.
Rajagopal’s observation is also significant in that the walled city area came to be perceived as dominated by a ‘Muslim’ population. Many of the neighbourhoods in the walled city had Muslims, Hindus and Jains, living in close quarters to each other. When combined with general socio-economic blight, the walled city area came to be prone to communal violence, and the perception of the congestion and undesirability of the walled city came to be mapped on to the presence of the Muslim population. The riots of 2002, in particular, were represented as cleansing the walled city area of its Muslim population. This representation is strengthened by the fact that over the years, Muslim families moved out of the city to live in ghettos on the city’s peripheries.
Therefore, to assess the recent interest in the walled city, in ‘restoring’ it to its days of civic as well as symbolic centrality, is to see the ways it sometimes intersects with attempts to integrate it with the ‘development’ of the rest of the city. 5 This interest in Ahmedabad’s ‘walled’ city is best represented by the bid to recognize its inner core as a site of outstanding universal value in world heritage as conferred by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 2010, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) nominated Ahmedabad to UNESCO‘s tentative list for the World Heritage City recognition. Soon after, the Bhadra project or the redevelopment of the stretch between Bhadra Fort east and Teen Darwaza (to be called the Bhadra Plaza) in the walled city of Ahmedabad started in January 2012 and was undertaken by AMC in collaboration with ASI. AMC is the monitoring agency for the project with a 1,150 million budget of which 740 million had been committed under JnNURM (Brown, Lyons, & Mahadevia, 2012). The redevelopment of Bhadra Fort precincts (RBP) plan proposes to redevelop and revitalize the historic stretch, the Maidan-i-Shahi, between the Bhadra Fort and the Teen Darwaza or the city gates in the walled city. Envisaged as the ceremonial centre of the city in accordance with Islamic architectural doctrines, the Maidan-i-Shahi was used for royal processions and ceremonies. However, over time, these precincts came to be occupied by the city’s oldest street vending market, the Bhadra market. With a number of shoppers and passers-by, the Bhadra precincts or the stretch between the Bhadra Fort and the Teen Darwaza came to be a traffic intensive area, given to congestion and crowding. The Bhadra project promises to transform the fort precincts into a site of pleasure as well as leisure, combined with the opportunity to showcase the city’s ‘history’. The Bhadra project also promises an economic revitalization of the walled city area by linking it effectively to other ‘development’ projects such as the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project.
I critically trace the rationale in the textualities of the RBP plan that seeks to seamlessly integrate the walled city with the rest of the ‘developed’ parts of the city of Ahmedabad. I show that this integration is envisaged as consequent to the complete pedestrianization of the stretch between the Bhadra Fort and the Teen Darwaza. Indeed, the RBP plan prepared for the Bhadra project by Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) and Vastu-Shilp, an Ahmedabad-based architectural firm and research body, articulates pedestrianization as central to its very aesthetics (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, 2012). I suggest that in naming the pedestrian as the logic of conservation as well as the rationale behind the restoration of the use of the Bhadra Fort area, the project erases the materiality of its historical space and the history of its use. The pedestrian for whom Bhadra is being rebuilt is an urban product with leisure at disposal. Unlike de Certeau’s pedestrian whose ways of seeing offered a critique to the hegemony of the planner’s eye, I discuss how the figure of the pedestrian is now co-opted into the imagination of the Bhadra Plaza.
Bhadra: City Beautiful
Georg Simmel’s thesis that interpersonal relationships in the modern metropolis are determined by the eye rather than the ear is most strongly reflected in Kevin Lynch’s (1965) seminal work The Image of the City. Lynch links the act of looking at the city to pleasure or sensuous enjoyment, and attempts to retrieve the mental image of American cities that is rooted in a citizen’s memory and experience. He studies the ways in which the mental image can be used by city designers to construct a language or a syntax of city space, what Lynch calls legibility. Lynch’s theory is at frequent intervals undercut by his own admission that such a design, such an art of the city, is not stable in itself, since the city is not only perceived, but it is also used and modified, thereby undergoing constant change. Indeed, he calls ‘a beautiful and delightful city environment an oddity’, somewhat of an impossible utopic ideal. Nevertheless, Lynch’s (1965, pp. 4–5) ‘clear’, ‘vivid and integrated’, ‘good’ and ‘distinctive and legible’ environment or environmental setting is deemed crucial for ‘individual growth’, for social cohesiveness, for ‘emotional security’ and for heightening ‘the potential depth and intensity of experience’ as opposed to mundane everyday life in a chaotic city. The idea of a pleasurable city, one that is coherent, legible and structured, constitutes an aesthetic of the contemporary city in India that I will argue is at the heart of the ongoing redevelopment of the Bhadra precincts as per the RBP plan (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, 2012). 6
The Bhadra citadel was built by Ahmed Shah after choosing Ahmedabad as his capital in 1411 for more than residential or military reasons: It was to convey the power and grandeur of the Ahmedabad sultans. As observed by R. J. Vasavada (2011, p. 29), ‘The city gates and the Fort were certainly characteristic forms of Sultanate building enterprise from their indigenous culture, and exhibit grandeur and impressive forms in masonry constructions.’ Patan seems to have been the blueprint for the building of the fort as the Mirat-i-Ahmedi suggests that Patan has a similar citadel form and turrets. The entry from the city into an open space in front of the entrance to the fort was through the Teen Darwaza or the three gates. This space between the Bhadra ramparts and the Teen Darwaza was the Maidan-i-Shahi, a characteristic element of city building by Ahmedabad’s Sultanate rulers. Of this Maidan-i-Shahi, the German traveller Mandelso writes,
The Maidan Shah or the King’s market is atleast 1600 feet long and half as many broad and beset all around with rows of palm trees and date trees, intermixed with citron trees and orange trees, whereof there are very many in the several streets: which is not only very pleasant to the sight, by the delightful prospect it offers, but also makes the walking among them more convenient by reason of coolness. (Commissariat, 1996, p. 22)
It is to this past that the plan for RBP refers to when it states, ‘Realizing the tremendous potential presented by the Fort precinct in becoming a revitalisation symbol that reinstates the sense of grandeur and the power that the city of Ahmedabad exuded in the past’ (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, p. 16). This also ostensibly serves to justify the presence of the barricaded construction activity in the Bhadra area since early 2012. The RBP points to changes in the land use of the area, to the very evolution of the old city area as a commercial hotbed, to changes in the original form of several structures to classify them as ‘pressures of urbanization’ that threaten the ‘traditional’ social fabric of the city. ‘Inadequate infrastructure, underutilisation and existing incompatible uses have culminated in the precinct becoming inaccessible to tourists despite being one of the most significant symbolic heritage monuments Ahmedabad has to offer’ (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, p. 16). Details of misuse, disrepair, encroachments and new structures that have been added without respect to the historic context create the visual profile of Bhadra area in need for planning and renewal.
This recurrent theme in which the ‘real’ or ‘lost’ experience of the old walled city is tied up with a utopic idea of its past echoes through the presentation on the Bhadra redevelopment during the 2013 World Heritage Week celebrations at Alliance Francaise. As mentioned before, Vastu-Shilp is an architectural firm and study cell involved with the Bhadra project. A prominent speaker associated with the firm presented the key features of the plan. It began with images of the congestion and crowds that used to throng the Bhadra market area along with suggestions of how it may have looked during the Sultanate period. Framed by the question ‘How do we get back to this Ahmedabad?’, while showing a reconstructed image of the Bhadra Fort area as it may have looked in the fifteenth century, the presentation betrayed a particular mode of looking at the crowd. From Mandelso’s description, it is evident that the Bhadra precinct of this period was a space of leisure. The description of the orange and citron trees is intended to evoke a pleasurable ambience. The mention of the market within these precincts indicates the control the sultan exercised over these markets by keeping them in close proximity to the citadel. Despite the markets, the description suggests a broad and open space which along with the elevation of the citadel and the gates possibly marked it with the grandeur required for ceremonial processions and purposes. When the yearning for such a space is juxtaposed with the visuals of the congested and overcrowded Bhadra precincts, the crowd is displayed as a source of conflict. Given that the Bhadra market area is dominated by Muslim tradesmen, and the walled city area is perceived as historically vulnerable to communal violence, the crowd is perceived in this juxtaposition as potentially dangerous. It harbours the possibility of mobilizing itself into a mob, and embodies conflict with authority and policing mechanisms since it is difficult to contain or count. It signifies the conflict over resources in which the agendas of the state and the right to space are contending discourses. The ‘crowd’ in the Bhadra area is in part due to the Bhadra market. The Bhadra Fort area, as mentioned before, had over the years transformed into a commercial and retail centre. Its premises harboured a natural market. 7 The Bhadra market is one of the oldest markets in the city, and caters primarily to a lower middle class and middle class resident population of the core city and of East Ahmedabad as well. Tourists (including people not residing in these parts of the city) may also be led here to view the historical precinct. Clothes, shoes and household goods are the main products sold. The vending business is dependent on pockets of intense pedestrian activity because of which it cannot be easily moved or shifted. The Bhadra area is particularly sensitive in this aspect since most of these businesses are well established, having been in existence for 40–50 years. There is little possibility for a new vendor to obtain space here. As Brown, Lyons and Mahadevia (2012, p. 23) have noted, an agewan (informal landlord) system is in place which offers protection from the police and the municipal authorities and provides access to vending space.
In the wake of the Bhadra redevelopment project, some of these may have transformed into organizations with registered membership in the course of their dialogue with AMC. I was taken to Iqbalbhai who identified himself as the treasurer of SELA or ‘Self Employed Labour Association’. 8 To clear the way for Bhadra’s redevelopment, vendors of the Bhadra market were initially evicted in December 2011 without provision for an alternate space. Several local leaders or representatives, including Iqbalbhai, appealed to the police commissioner and the municipal commissioner after which there was some reprieve. After barricades were built between the fort and the erstwhile UCO Bank in 2012 during Phase 1 of the project, hawkers could be seen squeezed into the little space left over through which crowds of shoppers continued to thread through (see Figure 2). It is reported that AMC had allocated alternate space at Danapith, near Roopalee Cinema, and Gujari Bazaar on the riverfront, but this was not easily accepted by the hawkers. This agitation also gathered much steam after the Street Vendors Bill, 2012 was passed. A statement issued by the municipal commissioner, however, maintains that most of these vendors would find space within the Bhadra Plaza, with a few relocated to the riverfront (TOI, 2013). After the second phase of the barricading extended up to Teen Darwaza, according to Iqbalbhai, several vendors were relocated to other parts of the walled city, without any prior notice. This move not only increased congestion, but also saw a flurry of petitions from vendors already existing in the markets of Dhalgarwad and Pankornaka, protesting the entry of the Bhadra vendors.
Therefore, the presence of the crowd is a register of the various uses of the Bhadra Fort precinct before its redevelopment. The following section will chart the elements of transformation in the redevelopment plan. In doing so, it will map the space of the Bhadra precincts caught as of now in a phase of transition and marked by the transformation of its prosaic uses into leisure. 9
Bhadra: Transforming Use to Leisure
The RBP plan proposes several design components that are to mobilize the intended transformation of the Bhadra precincts. The design and recommendation of formal stalls for hawkers is one of these. These stalls are to be categorized according to the product on sale, neatly stacked along the sidewalk in organized hawker zones. These hawker zones would accommodate and thereby legitimize only a percentage of the many hawkers in the vendor market in Bhadra. This image of a regulated and legal space is not only in sharp contrast to the conflict burdened interaction between the hawkers and the authorities over the legitimization of their presence; but also, as design, indicates that the Bhadra plan designs the control of crowds. For instance, the visual segregation of people is evident in the segregation of the use of space. Thus, the entry to the temple, which already has some tiled surfacing, will be highlighted to visually segregate worshippers from general pedestrian movement. Pedestrian movement is also to be regulated and organized by inserting various cultural and social activities ‘changing at short intervals’. It is evident that these are spatial attempts to disperse the crowd.
This is also reflected in the ways the new Bhadra precinct is imagined in the plan as a pedestrian-only space. The presence of an important city bus terminal the Lal Darwaza bus stop in the vicinity along with heavy vehicular use of this particular stretch to reach the railway station at Kalupur had made this area an intense traffic node. To make this area a traffic free and pedestrian zone, alternative traffic routes are suggested by the plan which includes diversion of traffic along the outer ring of the walled city. To facilitate its vision of a pedestrian Bhadra Plaza, the RBP proposes that parking be restricted before entering the redeveloped historical core. For this, a multi-storey parking lot has been proposed at the existing Lal Darwaza bus depot. At present, the Lal Darwaza bus depot is a much used, much littered and crowded site with city transport buses roaring into its premises every five minutes. The organizational efficiency promised by the idea of a multi-storey parking space makes an uneasy visual link with the experience of Ahmedabad’s many malls. With a single design gesture, the idea of leisure associated with mall-going in other parts of Ahmedabad is inscribed onto the space of leisure in Bhadra.
On the other hand, the UCO Bank and the Karanj Women Police Station signify the more prosaic uses of the Bhadra area in which they serviced the inner-city residents of the area. Since they blocked the view of the fort, their erasure from the redeveloped plaza was inevitable, and they have been demolished/shifted (see Figure 3). In their stead, a fountain and a water channel have been constructed.
The Bhadra Fort also used to house the ASI offices and the district courts. These will give way to provide for the Fort’s revitalization to become a cultural and tourist centre for the city and a fulcrum of all city-based heritage activities. Azam Khan’s Sarai, a historic part of the Bhadra Fort, is to provide for tourism-related needs, food and ethnic markets, and also to function as an exhibition centre. Thus, the plan suggests:
The courtyard of Azam Khan’s sarai is a major space that could be revitalised with landscape elements specific to this area—assigning it with a place specific identity and making it an important public place within the enclosure…The Entrance hall could be revised as a ceremonial hall for public events, sound and light show…the Gallery Spaces within the fort could be used for temporary exhibitions while the terraces could be used for different recreational activities with local cuisine restaurants. (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, 2012, Component 2)
Thus, the Bhadra redevelopment plan projects a space for the leisurely walking tourist by displacing its evolved character as a space of often mundane everyday use. The processes of this displacement fall under two major rubrics. The first being the pedestrianization of the Bhadra Fort and Teen Darwaza stretch; the second being the conservation, revitalization and beautification of the Bhadra Fort and Azam Khan’s Sarai. The intended transformation responds to the congestion and crowding in Bhadra even as its barricades keep at bay the crowd that used this area. By making it walkable and beautiful, a certain kind of conduct is implied by the aesthetic morality embedded into the imagination of a redeveloped Bhadra. This conduct is inscribed on the figure of the desired pedestrian as it emerges from the redevelopment plan.
The Desired Pedestrian
To understand the contours of the project’s aesthetic morality, one must turn back to the presentation on Bhadra during the World Heritage Week 2013, to an account of the seeds of the idea of the Bhadra project. In 1958, B. V. Doshi had been commissioned to design Premabhai Hall, and it is interesting that his first design for the hall was a modernist submarine type of construction, inspired by Japanese design elements. 10 Incongruous to the habitat and historical character of the Bhadra area, the present structure was only completed in the 1970s. It was during this period when ideas for a revitalized Bhadra area took root. Taking a break from his work at his office that was at the time located close to Premabhai Hall, Doshi would walk around and envision the possibilities of transforming the area, offering the onlooker an uninterrupted view of the fort. For de Certeau, the figure of the walker reshapes the space of the city by walking through it. De Certeau equates the act of walking and the trace of his journey with the speech act (de Certeau, 1984). While the system of language prescribes and contains, the speech act enables the user to claim the language as one’s own. The walker of the city is the user of the city. In walking the city, the walker discovers new spaces and reshapes the contours of the city, making it his own. de Certeau’s walker is someone the planner’s vision does not accommodate, given the aerial superiority of his vision. However, this particular account of the idea of Bhadra’s redevelopment posits the planner as the pedestrian. Thus, the design of the transformation envisaged in the Bhadra plan is activated by and organized around the figure of the pedestrian. This in itself may conceptually seem celebratory and radical since the pedestrian is a much neglected user of public urban space in India. However, a scrutiny of the conflation of the figure of the planner on to the figure of the walker in the Bhadra project’s emphasis on walkability and pedestrian activity reveals the reasons for which such walkability is desirable. Such walkability is not merely tied to the historic preservation of the Bhadra area, given the conservation argument that traffic and transport destroy the historic character of the area. Leisurely pedestrian movement is intrinsic to the economic reuse of the Bhadra area. It stimulates tourism and, therefore, expands the possibilities of Bhadra’s reuse as a global commercial space. Thus, unlike de Certeau’s resistant walker, the Bhadra Plaza produces a new kind of walker, one I call the desired pedestrian.
The visuals accompanying the RBP suggest who the ‘desired’ pedestrian may be (see Figure 4). 11 Clearly, such a ‘desired’ pedestrian is the one with the leisure to take a stroll. Unhurried by crowds, with no urgent need to buy or sell necessities, or reach any destination, such a pedestrian would use the plaza for recreation. To have such leisure at one’s disposal is largely an index of the middle class with leisure regulating and sustaining the hours of work. It also belongs to the figure of the tourist who dominates the pages of the redevelopment plan. Both these categories are represented in these visuals. When such leisure activity is in part historically valuable, it becomes an elitist form of educational opportunity. More importantly, the visual also indicates that the vision of the redeveloped Bhadra is predicated on consuming culture and history. Thus, artisans playing music are displayed to good effect against the backdrop of the historic space of the Bhadra precincts, seemingly teeming with brisk business (but organized into neat aesthetic stalls). A shimmering sense of glass buildings in the distance suggests the possibility of ‘modern’ constructions in the area. The use of glass in contemporary construction is meant to suggest a ‘global’ lifestyle but ironically represents an inadequate aesthetic for local conditions and signifies on the enormous costs, especially in terms of consumption of energy, in maintaining the idea of being global. Clearly, the visual betrays the fact that the redevelopment of Bhadra entails the manufacture of heritage for global consumption.
Even though the desired pedestrian provides a disembodied ideological framework for controlling and regulating this space, the norms of conduct inscribed into the furniture of the plaza articulate a very specific figure marked by ‘outsiderness’. It has already been pointed out that the figure of the tourist dominates the pages of the redevelopment plan. The tourist is essentially an outsider, a stranger, in the deviation from the path of habitual journeys to a place of discovery. In viewing the transformation of the Bhadra Fort precincts into a spectacle, a view that is to be consumed uninterrupted by crowds and buildings, residents of other parts of Ahmedabad as well as the walled city residents are transformed into outsiders or strangers while in the space of the Bhadra Plaza. The proposed plaza’s design is intended to privilege the viewing of such transformation. Since the imagined transformation of the fort precincts is alienated from its evolved contextual use, in gazing at the spectacle of history, even local residents may temporarily belong to the space of the Bhadra as tourists. However, the norms of conduct inscribed into its space specify a certain code of behaviour kept in place by the threat of dispossession and illegitimacy. For instance, the curved benches designed for the Bhadra Plaza are intended to discourage unintended uses such as sleeping (see Figure 5 Alliance Francaise, 2013). Benches in public spaces are usually the preserve of the idle, the homeless, or the labouring poor. But the specific design of such seating is meant to exclude any possibility of ‘illegitimate’ ownership or use of the Bhadra precincts. This code of behaviour is supposed to make the Bhadra Fort area walkable and safe, attributes of global habitude driven by the economics of the tourist.
On the other hand, the domestic architecture of the old city, the symbolic centre of which according to Islamic architectural principles is the Bhadra precinct, was designed to resist the entry of outsiders. The figure of the outsider connotes danger or threat within the aesthetics of the city’s traditional domestic architecture. In this context, The Heritage Walk conducted by AMC and local groups attempts to ‘open’ up the walled city to outsiders through an engagement with its (defensive) architecture. The following section will examine the entry of the stranger in the walled city through the Heritage Walk. I see the ways the confrontation of cultural difference, the threat of strangeness/outsiderness, may destabilize the walk itself. I understand this confrontation of difference as framing questions of safety that are implicit in the design of the Bhadra Plaza.
The Stranger in the Walled City
The following extract from the Justice Jagmohan Reddy Inquiry Commission report on the riots in Ahmedabad in 1969 illustrates the perception of the streets of the pols of the walled city when cast in the light of the violence of the riots that flared repeatedly in Ahmedabad:
The unique feature of this walled area is that the poles or lanes and sub-poles or sub-lanes are so narrow that it is difficult for two persons and sometimes in a sub-pole even for one person to walk. Most of these poles have gates at their entrances which exist as a measure of protection. These poles and sub-poles have always created difficulties in the maintenance of law and order during disturbances and when riots break out, the miscreants come out on the road, commit mischief and disappear before the arrival of the police…[P]eople can move from any two points between the main roads from roof to roof and get on to the other side. In this way, miscreants could take the shortest route through the poles and bye-poles and from roof-tops, while the police have to take a detour and traverse a long distance to reach the other point and could only arrive there long after the miscreants had reached there, caused damage and disappeared. The police however, could not use these poles and by-poles or chase them deep into them for fear of being surrounded and out maneuvered. (Rajagopal, 2010, p. 537)
However, the walled city’s domestic architecture is also encoded with networks of belonging that tie the individual to his family, caste group and community. For instance, the street extends into the house, and in architectural reciprocity, the house extends into the street. The extension of public space into the house is deployed in the form of the inner courtyard onto which all the floors of the house project. A veranda that is embellished with the characteristic wooden facade with brackets and columns aerially encircles and looks onto the courtyard. This is mirrored in the external wooden facade of the house that looks onto the street. This seamlessness between open space, community and private life is further mirrored at a larger level in the pol where spaces around temples or wells are communal spaces that emerge out of everyday ritual practices. To return to the interior of the pol house, one would see that this particular form emerges out of its context, out of the practice of daily life in the pols. Thus, the inner courtyard connected to all parts of the house is also where the theatre of everyday life takes place with ample viewership from the balconies above. Most of the homes in the pol house a large number of people with several generations of one family clustered under one roof with many occasions for everyday theatrics, interaction, celebrations and the performance of religious rituals. The ottla, or the threshold of each house, duplicates the function of the balcony in the ways in which the personal mingles with the public. This is where opinions are pronounced, elders gather and the activities of the street are a source for reflection and commentary. What happens when parts of these streets are marked out for another kind of spectatorship?
The Heritage Walk launched by AMC in collaboration with Foundation for Conservation and Research of Urban Traditional Architecture (CRUTA Foundation) sought to take tourists as well as residents of other parts of the city through some of these neighbourhoods to experience its architectural traditions, religious culture and everyday contexts. Debashish Nayak (2003) of CRUTA Foundation sees several linkages that the Heritage Walk ostensibly generates. For Nayak, these linkages enable urban conservation by bringing local governance, people’s participation and employment together. The fulcrum of these linkages is the act of the walk itself.
The route of the Heritage Walk threads through primarily Hindu and Jain residential quarters of the walled city, a route that is carved out of private spaces and distinguished from other routes in the inner city by (incongruous) terracotta tiles, faux British style lamps and garden benches. 12 A restored facade of Kavi Dalpatram’s house in Lambeshwarni Pol with a bronze statue of the poet on an extended threshold invokes the space of the ottla as the site of communal conversation. 13 However, the site of the restored house facade with the poets’ bronze statue takes up the space of a chowk, an intersection of roads, a place of pause and traffic, where people would have ordinarily gathered. Frozen thus into a performance of the history, not only does the statue and restored facade strip the site of conversation of its context, but it also becomes a site of photography, a secular opportunity for groups or individuals to visibly claim their presence on the walk. Various brochures of the walk suggest that the walk aims to introduce nuances of the walled city’s cultural contexts by threading through elements of this type of settlement. These elements include pol house, the chowk or an intersection, a community well, temples and markets. Significantly, these are all places of gathering. The timing of the walk at eight in the morning ensures that the streets are relatively empty for uninterrupted viewing. At that time in the morning, markets are just being set up—the second-hand books market under the Fernandez bridge, the clothes and jewellery lanes, the markets of dried fruits and spices near Rani no Hajiro and Badshah no Hajiro, the markets of Manek Chowk that transform at night into a street food zone—with the crowds that throng these spaces conspicuous by their absence.
The absence of the crowds is troubling for without the public use of these spaces, these sites that the walk maps are rendered meaningless. On the other hand, the few people one glimpses along the way are women engaged in the work of the house or relaxing after an early start to the day after the men have left for work. Often the place of work is in the other side of the city, not necessarily in the walled city itself. Thus, most of the men leave their homes to travel to work early in the morning. When the walkers of the heritage trail pass by these homes in the pols that the trail traverse, they are witness to a phase of pause, of brief leisure in the domestic routine that largely revolves around the arrival and departure of the men. This form of leisure is not commercially viable; it does not provide an ideological or aesthetic basis for organizing and displaying a historic space. Instead, the women sitting outside on their thresholds, conversing with each other or attending to chores briefly turn spectators to the spectacle of the walk. Indeed, the motley crowd of foreign tourists, tourists from other parts of India, students, city residents must present an opportunity for curious scrutiny. What is the result of the intersection between these different kinds of spectatorship, of the confrontation of difference when both the watcher and the watched watch each other? What happens when the theatre of the pols intersects in this fashion with the theatre of the walk? (see Figure 6).
The trail of the walk is the trace, the afterlife of the cultural context of the pol. The absence of crowds, the empty spaces of the pols within the ambit of the Heritage Walk, show that value has been placed on the vision of the outsider or of the stranger to these neighbourhoods. For not only must the pols be ‘emptied’ of its people to be seen, but they must also be non-threatening. What potentially disrupts that vision, interrupts it and destabilizes it is when the watched turns watcher, when the moment of leisure that belongs to the women residents of these pols disrupts the hallowed cocoon of the walker. That intersection of gazes is simultaneously intimate and evaluative. However, there is nothing in the methodology of the walk itself that may translate this moment of intersection into ways of cultural interaction. The anxiety of confrontation, the anticipation of threat to strangers in the walled city and the difficulty of negotiating a teeming and congested pol have determined the present structure of the walk. Therefore, even as the guide mediates culture, the inability of the walk to close distances is also the inability to transform the intersection of viewership into an opportunity to experience cultural difference.
The View of the Street
In Bhadra, the lessons of disrupted vision in the Heritage Walk seem to be well applied. In Bhadra Plaza, the crowd is not only dispersed, but the opportunity for cultural confrontation is also diffused. By dispersing the crowd in this fashion, any encounter with cultural others are minimized. Thus, the Bhadra plan designs the control and regulation of the crowd. As suggested before, the furniture of the reimagined Maidan-i-Shahi or the newly termed Bhadra Plaza represents this regulation of the crowd (see Figure 7). It is the furniture of leisure that enables the survey of the historical scene. Thus, benches and other street furniture, especially at the fort’s entrance, are to become a ‘place of pause to orient visitors to the tranquillity of the interiors’ (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, 2012). These interiors are imagined in the RBP as constituted of broad walkways, street furniture, paved granite road surfaces and neatly mowed lawns with plant shrubs and orange trees arranged in straight lines. On the other hand, the hawker’s zone is to be kept to the minimum to avoid crowding even as their presence is organized and legalized. ‘This will also legalise the vendor market and allocate place for every vendor to continue with the livelihood lawfully’ (CEPT & Vastu-Shilp, 2012 Component 1). Indeed the new hawker stalls or specifically designed portal frames in arcade form that will be placed along the edge of existing buildings along the proposed pedestrian path from Bhadra to Teen Darwaza will in part screen the old shopping buildings from view. It is evident that aesthetics is to help exhibit the monument and the monumental space. If the Heritage Walk was endangered by the watchful or even interested stare of the insider, the RBP redirects the gaze of the visitor to the monument and its beautified spaces. By investing in the furniture of leisure which encourages the leisurely view of the historic space of the Bhadra precincts, the RBP in effect invests in the mental isolation of the viewer. With signages, dustbins, kiosks and toilets that articulate a street space that responds to the figure of the global tourist, the imagined Bhadra Plaza’s streetscape is to be emptied of possible threat or danger and made knowable as well as mappable. In using design elements that attempt to control its streetscape, the RBP plan also seems to inscribe a certain kind of conduct and an emptying of context that can only come with the control of congestion, crowds and violence.
