Over the last decade, Mumbai’s physical form has undergone such massive transformation that at times it is unrecognisable even to its own residents. Or rather, it is familiar only in an uncanny way, underwritten by the experience and memory of another physiognomy that lies buried or in some cases adjacent to the structures of the new city. Simultaneously there have been a number of initiatives to conserve and preserve the built fabric of specific areas of the city designated as “image-centres” and thought of as representing the heritage of the city. If one thinks of archives and cities at the broadest level, the visual landscape of the city and more specifically, this idea of heritage – as sites and structures mediating the “internalities and externalities of memory” – comes to mind immediately. Heritage, in the commonly understood view, represents collective memory and collective ethos in a straightforward way and taking heritage as the archive of the city recalls a “view of the archive as a container or body, animated by something less visible, usually the spirit of a people, the people or humanity in general,” (Appadurai, this issue). Yet, as the recent and highly publicised drive to demolish roadside shrines in Mumbai demonstrates, there is also a continuous and additive process of subtraction and destruction that forms a crucial layer of the histories of cities whose effects are invisible and corrosive rather than visible and celebratory. In the light of these complexities, this essay is not, per se, an exploration of built form as archive of the city – that is as a repository of its history – but of a notion of city-as-archive, an attempt to understand the nature of contemporary cities through the concept of archive as a principle of order.

That the heritage of the city is formed in the dialogue between the enshrined and the decapitated is often, and deliberately, forgotten. In architectural practice, as Keller Easterling writes in her article Subtraction, “when accepted as a tool subtraction can be part of that architectural ethos that promotes essentialist values, an economy of means, or the removal of some excess that does not provide utility or beauty...” From Hausmann to Le Courbusier, she writes, “to all those self-styled around a succession of similar heroes, tabula rasa is the mode of subtraction most compatible with architectural desire. Like the demolition plan, tabula rasa is a clearing of architecture so that better or corrected architecture can be piled without obstruction.” At times this piling can happen symbolically, without the actual destruction of the pre-existing structure. A very good example of this is the city government’s transformation of the Flora Fountain area into Hutatma Chowk via the building of the new monument to the fallen martyrs across from the old fountain (a legacy of the colonial era), dominating the old through sheer scale and form, an act of “seizing the floor with the next in a succession of spatial aesthetics,” a war of images and histories enacted in and through the capture of the project to produce public space and contexts for commemoration, that is to say, to produce the external substrates for the etching of collective memory.

In this essay, I explore these processes of transformation – both physical and symbolic – of the built form of the city as a way of understanding the place of cities as particular kinds of processes and spaces with a special value in the contemporary moment. The rapid urbanisation of human society in general in the era of globalisation is certainly one of the reasons for this significance. But an equally important reason for the contemporary focus on the city is the emergence of the idea of the city-as-archive. The archive, in the sense that I wish to convey, stands not just for a collection of a set of materials representing, albeit accidentally, collective memory and waiting to be interpreted by future generations. Rather, the notion of ‘archive’ stands for the very possibility of continually recalibrating memory and identity by the production and projection of signs through construction as well as destruction. In other words, the archive is not understood here as the particular location of particular kinds of information that mirror individual and collective memory but as a principle of order by which certain ethical and political claims are made upon space, entangling issues of remembering and forgetting with issues of belonging and exclusion.
While this definition itself might be self-evident, the city is the only site in contemporary societies that allows these kinds of recalibrations to happen on a large and spectacular scale. By exploring the construction of city-as-archive in this sense, taking the concrete, spatial and formal transformations of the city – at once acts of architecture and sites of archaeology – I hope to understand the historical particularity of the contemporary moment in our collective history. This essay therefore presumes the centrality of the city on the one hand for understanding contemporary social and cultural processes and proposes the notion of city-as-archive as one of the devices by which the city achieves this centrality in a contemporary moment marked by violence, destruction and the reorganisation of power on a global scale.

Imminent Destruction

In a recent op-ed piece in the Times of India (TOI, 12 January 2004) titled Hope in the Cities: They can be Heritage and Happening,” the author, who is the chief economist for a major international bank, laments that “the building boom in the rest of Asia has effectively erased all history” and that “eventually all Asian cities will look like clones of each other.” The anxiety provoked by this standardisation is also laced with another ambivalence: the lament about “unplanned construction pitted against aging infrastructure and decaying civic institutions” is at the same time perhaps responsible for the survival of architectural examples from the past. In the case of India, “[a]ntiquated tenancy laws, and sometimes sheer indifference,” writes the author, “has allowed a surprising amount of old architecture to survive into the 21st century.” Thus, while the massive transformations of the built environment of Indian mega-cities (as well as of the smaller metros such as Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad) in the nineties – including the rise of housing and office towers and of flyovers over the city – is celebrated as the visible signature of political and economic achievement, from the vantage point of the Far East, our economist foresees standardisation and loss of identity. Only by seizing upon the traces of the past – left accidentally untouched by the march of social and economic progress as well as by changes in taste and judgment – and recycling them creatively can one hope to both move into the global future of all cities and maintain a connection to history-as-identity and history-as-image. It is also true that in an era of lethal violence, these very developments of the recent past (buildings, streets, transport corridors) become the most obvious targets of “infrastructural wars,” (cf. Stephen Graham and Eyal Weizman) whether they concern attempts to disable enemy movements or to symbolically capture territories within cities. But this imminence of destruction is something that pervades both the preservationist instinct as well as the trends that advocate periodic transformations of spatial aesthetics through the “subtraction” and erasure of the envelopes of past architectures.

While our economist recognises that “city-centres cannot be regenerated by turning them into lifeless museums” and that “preservation flows from imaginative usage rather than fossilisation,” in practice, heritage conservation is still caught between what architect Mustansir Dalvi refers to evocatively as “architectural eugenics” or the freezing of the building envelope to confirm to an ‘objectively authentic’ image and the practice of imposing entirely new aesthetics on the grounds of claims to authenticity that are highly politically charged. Moreover, as Rahul Srivastava has suggested (personal conversation), the active promotion of heritage preservation by elite groups of “first citizens” is often a prelude to the appropriation of entire areas by real estate developers who move into action, “seizing the floor with the next in a succession of spatial aesthetics, sometime brazenly adjacent to heritage” structures and precincts and in other instances, on top of an erased landmark. In this context, both heritage structures and ecologically sensitive and/or degraded zones exist as islands amidst the voids and rises of the newly vertical city consumed by the catastrophic, global appetite for urban space while the city-as-image is retailed by politicians, developers and planners as a source of revenue from mass tourism, rentals, festivals and so on.

Voids

So far, I have mainly talked about the ways that the processes by which built form emerges as an archive (in the sense of a repository of particular forms of information), get entangled with the politics of preservation/conservation in a straightforward sense. Preservation/conservation is the mechanism by which information about memory, history and identity might get associated with a building. In this sense, heritage as archive (albeit not in the traditional sense of being gathered together in one place) is also about transforming the symbols of built form into particular kinds of information having a bearing upon collective memory and identity or even simply into the kind of information that suggests “character” and values the past as past. Modern memory is traditionally associated with preservation, and the notion of an archive is tied, in the broadest sense, to this the principle of preservation upon which in turn, modern practices of evidence and judgment rest. It is interesting to note however that the movements to classify buildings as heritage sites and to promote preservation/conservation became active in cities like Mumbai after the practice of subtraction and demolition for rebuilding increasingly becomes the norm. In an earlier period in Mumbai’s history, for instance, space was created for new constructions through reclamation rather than through the destruction of existing structures (M Dalvi, personal communication).
This is the other sense in which the function of archiving and memory more broadly is being engaged increasingly all over the world today. It has to do with the proliferation of acts of mass destruction, perpetrated by states as well as ordinary individuals through acts of war and terror on the one hand and the work of planned destruction and erasure undertaken as part of the ‘normal’ processes of development which routinely erase the material landscapes, the productions and aspirations of armies of poor citizens. Further, there is also, as the architect Paul Virilio suggests, an elision of the difference between accidental events and pre-meditated events of destruction and disaster. This is especially the case as cities increasingly come under attack and especially the material infrastructure – streets, transports, buildings, pipes and conduits – that is the very condition of possibility of modern cities as we know them (albeit often invisible) comes under increasing attack. Mumbai is merely one among a list of cities thus attacked in the last six months, including Istanbul, Moscow and Jakarta.
I underscore this aspect of targeted destruction for one reason – it brings to the fore a sense of the city as an abstract, unitary space even as it is being torn apart in such moments and despite the everyday fragmentation of the city in every way, from the unequal distribution of infrastructure networks to the unjust access to resources. But if the earlier moment of mass destruction in this century, especially the air bombing campaigns over European cities and the destruction of Japanese cities’ similarly made available cities in their entirety as tabula rasa and as voids, recent forms of urban violence operate in the interstices of existing urban fabrics, whether through the agency of smart bombs or suicide bombers. In this context, an abstract understanding of the city-as-archive must necessarily extend beyond the mere inclusion of information about or views from the various dimensions of city space, and falls outside the purview of the planner’s map of city space and of the planner’s gaze. Such a view limits one to assuming that inclusivity of all kinds of information and from all sorts of perspectives is a sufficient condition for imagining the city as a whole.
The notion of archive in this sense of city-as-archive presumes a unitary space that can be made whole, objectified and supported by the evidence provided by an ever inclusive archive. However, if as I suggested above, ‘archive’ is understood to be a principle of order rather than a location for information and substrate of pre-constituted or even to-be-constituted memory, we need to ask, what sorts of principle of order does destruction constitute? If even preservation/conservation itself is linked to this destructive urge, we need to ask ourselves how we can read the urban fabrics and tapestries constructed through destruction. How should we read the principles of order that constitute these fabrics – deliberately or inadvertently created by mass destruction, by planned destruction and by natural disaster, by environmental catastrophe and the sci-fi landscapes created by continual industrialisation and infrastructure infusion. These are, in other words, landscapes of emergence, in which a certain state of emergency and the provisional, experimental nature of space under production are always at the fore, as spectacle. The city itself emerges, in other words, as a process of planned and unplanned destructions, disasters and catastrophes, process and state of experiment and emergency, shot through with displacements and other provisional experiences. More particularly, it involves a different approach to memory itself wherein the archive is not merely an accessory, tool or instrument but also a practice of intervention into these kinds of fabrics, constituted by voids.

I began this essay with some general remarks about the nature of cities and of archives in the present. Throughout, I have used the notion of archive both in its traditional, material sense of a collection of documents as well as monuments as well as in this more abstract sense of a principle of order through which the city assumes its centrality in the era of globalisation, playing them off each other. But rather than think of the archive’s capacity to accurately represent a past, I suggested that we might use the concept to navigate the voids of the present, as a practice of intervening into and reading the urban fabrics created by these voids, not as palimpsests or as quilts. Further, I also suggested that these voids are not merely created by mass destruction and catastrophe but also by the quotidian transformations of city-space by politicians, developers and planners and moreover, insofar as they involve the materials that make everyday city-life possible (infrastructure, space, bodies), they are as much a part of the ordinary and the everyday as they are exceptional and spectacular. It is in and through such archival intervention that we will grasp the limits of both, the city as space as well as that of the nexus of memory-archive-identity that continues to inform academic discourses about cities as spaces and archives as collections that inform a historical understanding of the development of this space. In an age marked both by destruction and by simulation of memory and identities as well as by the massive proliferation of data, information, its collection and its assemblage, we need to rethink the notion of archive to encompass a dynamic sense of ordering and interpretation, unmoored from the politics of preservation and evidence creation. While it is becoming increasingly important to define and understand the nature of both archives and of cities in the context of contemporary developments, it is also necessary to grasp the extent to which, in the era of globalisation, these two central objects of sociality also mutually constitute each other by reading the centrality of spatial transformations. There is nothing self-evident about this tie but our descriptive and historiographic practices and indeed our notion of history itself may depend upon grasping their creative intertwining.
This essay owes a great deal to conversations with many friends: in lieu of references, the author wishes to thank Satya Pemmaraju, Rahul Srivastava, Carol Breckenridge, Faisal Devji and Kanu Agrawal.