Kinetic City and Other Essays

Rahul Mehrotra is a Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is the founder principal of RMA Architects, which has studios in Mumbai and Boston. RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 and has designed and executed projects including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and unsolicited projects driven by the firm’s commitment to advocacy in the city of Mumbai. In 2018 RMA Architects were awarded the Venice Biennale juror’s ‘Special Mention’ for ‘three projects that address issues of intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies’. His most recent book is titled Working in Mumbai (2020) and is a reflection on his practice as evolved through its association with the city of Bombay/Mumbai. Since 2014, Mehrotra has been a member of the International Committee of Architecture Critics (CICA). Rajesh Vora, a graduate of the National Institute of Design, India, began his career in Visual Communications and has been photographing for over 30 years. A deep-rooted interest in the environment and disappearing habitats has influenced his photographic practice. Vora worked as a photographer with COLORS magazine for over 15 years and often contributed as a researcher and writer. Commissioned to document architecture projects in India and Bangladesh with social relevance, for The Aga Khan Award for Architecture Foundation, Geneva. His concern with urban issues led to myriad collaborations and projects with architects, environmentalists and filmmakers espousing critical views on the social, cultural and political situation in India. His ongoing project, Everyday Baroque, exhibited in 2016 at Photoink Gallery, New Delhi, takes him to Punjab to document the homes of the Punjabi Non-resident Indians. Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is a leading Indian poet. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985–2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/Viking, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2018; published by Arc in the UK as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020), and Hunchprose (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2021). His translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri woman mystic’s poems has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011).Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). Among his curatorial projects are a mid-career retrospective of Atul Dodiya (National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013), a monographic exhibition of M. F. Husain (Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, 2019), and three transhistorical and trans-genre exhibitions developed for the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa: Terra Cognita? (2016), Anti-Memoirs (2017), and The Sacred Everyday (2018). With Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, Hoskote co-curated the exhibition/conference platforms The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2016) and State of Housing: Aspirations, Imaginaries and Realities (Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, 2018). Kaiwan Mehta is an academic, theorist, and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. He is the Managing Editor of the magazine Domus (India-edition); he is Professor and Programme Chair of the Doctoral Programme at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad. He is the author of Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press, 2009) and The Architecture of I M Kadri (Niyogi Books, 2016) and is currently working on two other biographies of architects, Sen Kapadia and Jitendra Mistry. Mehta was Jury Chairman, 2015–17, and 2017–19 at the international residency programme for the arts and sciences at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany. He has curated several exhibitions on architecture, urbanity, and design histories in the last few years in India and abroad. Mehta has conducted seminars and keynote lectures internationally including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Cornell University, New York.

In the chronology at the end of Working in Mumbai, the excellent monograph from 2020 on RMA Architects, the firm of Rahul Mehrotra, buildings by RMA are listed and illustrated alongside publications written or edited by Mehrotra. There are dozens of the latter spanning between 1994 and 2018, but they are only a smattering of the architect and educator's prolific written output. The publication of The Kinetic City and Other Essays is therefore fitting, serving to present the breadth of Mehrotra's writing over a period of thirty years. All of it is generally focused on the city; specifically  the essays illustrate his development of the idea of the "kinetic city."Although the collection of 22 essays does not include one strictly called "The Kinetic City," as the title of the book suggests, the phenomenon is explicitly found in two essays: "Negotiating the Static and Kinetic Cities: The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai" and "Looking at the Kinetic City," a photo essay by Rajesh Vora with words by Mehrotra. The former was published in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, a 2008 book edited by Andreas Huyssen, while the latter appears to be newly published for this collection published by ArchiTangle. In a nutshell, the Static City is the relatively permanent, formal city of concrete, steel, and brick, and the Kinetic City is temporary, built of recycled materials and sometimes used for celebrations in India where throngs of people converge for a few days or weeks.Vora's photo essay is especially good at illuminating the myriad aspects of the Kinetic City. Mehrotra structures the photographer's street scenes and aerials into four categories: transaction, instability, spectacle, and habitation. To use the first as an example, photos of street vendors in Mumbai (third spread, below) are accompanied by drawings and words illustrating the gradients of permanence and legality, from vendors squatting on a mat with their wares to attached lean-tos that are not demountable but do enable the wares to be locked up. This is followed by step-by-step photos of the dabbawala service (lunchbox delivery and pickup) that is also mentioned in the "Negotiating" essay that precedes it. In short, rather than being separate, the Kinetic City is grafted onto the Static City, the former serving the needs of entrepreneurship, celebrations, housings and the like.Of the twenty other essays in the book, the one that stood out to me the most was "The Architecture of Pluralism: A Century of Building in South Asia," Mehrotra's lengthy introduction to the volume of World Architecture 1900-2000: A Critical Mosaic that he edited. Although the reprint here does not have as many illustrations as the original, its appearance in this collections commendably makes it available to hopefully many more people than in its initial publication (year ago series editor Kenneth Frampton lamented the bad distribution of the ten-volume set). Furthermore, Mehrotra singles out that essay in his "Preface and Gratitude," writing that Frampton's invitation to edit the volume on South Asia "propelled many subsequent writings," many of which are found in this excellent collection.