Sim cities

Visualise this. Houses on one-acre plots with low tiled roofs, two car garages and picket fences, picture windows, neatly curtained, looking out on trimmed lawns — a transplanted subdivision of New Jersey, complete with rambling ranch-style homes? No. Just a private housing estate in suburban Bangalore, built as promised in the brochure, along American lines. I drove around, trying to figure out why they appeared so out-of-sync in the hot Bangalore sun. An American answer to every Indian urban situation produces this sort of misguided animated development, now found throughout India.

Just take the road south of Delhi towards Gurgaon. Behind brick piles, earth mounds and mud shacks of Rajasthani labour force, rise 15 to 20-storey high plate glass skyscrapers built of imported Italian marble, designed by American engineers with South Korean technology. They are global architecture’s repetitive imprint and could be anywhere — London, Dubai or Hong Kong. Built at three to eight times the cost of conventional structures, some of them employ expensive electronic technologies out of place in a city of cheap labour: computer-controlled louvres shield the façade from the sun and floor-mounted sensors move whole elevator banks to pick up a lone passenger.

But the sheer glassiness of the facades is impressive, and hides these less visible facets of the buildings’ economy, efficiency and workability. Cultural globalisation relies heavily on diverse international images to create the right distance from India.

The old India is a picture in perpetual slow fade, carrying in its soft focus, undeniable attractions of forgotten lifestyles: Rajasthani courtyards, Mughal arches, colonial bungalows, an old palace here, a haveli there. No longer desirable, such architectural nostalgia now only sets the tone for tourism, the India of brochures and posters.

By contrast, the new India is an incomplete picture; its makers are on the road to trial and unabashed plagiarism. The perfect picture has already formed somewhere in the world and we are merely buyers on an expensive and indulgent shopping spree. Take an American highway and string it between Mumbai and Pune. Plant a New Jersey suburb in Bangalore, copy a California condominium in Gurgaon. Help yourself to South Korean rail technology, buy yourself German carriages. Ask a Spanish designer to build a world-class airport. Do it, because action must be seen to have been taken, and it’s just too bad if the international amalgam is a mess. The present will create its own future.

The trend towards a totally faceless architecture is a global phenomenon. Compared to what is happening in China, the new buildings of India are only minor aberrations. Even if the State still appears to be tied down to its communist political agenda, China’s economy — and consequently its cities — presses ahead with its modernist vision.

The Shanghai City Centre is the current design toy of the world’s most celebrated architects. London-based Zaha Hadid, Dutchman Rem Koolhas, New York’s SOM, French architect Paul Andrew, are only a few stars in the in the galaxy of professionals working on grandiose projects — museums, leisure palaces, office blocks, banks, hotels and the like. To make way for their personal expressions, huge tracts of housing in central Shanghai were demolished. In Beijing, vast acres of old brick hutong constructions were razed.

But large scale demolition and upheaval is nothing new in a country where State ambitions — ideological or economic — override those of ordinary citizens. Whether it is the Three Gorges Dam, a 1,000-mile highway between Lhasa and Beijing or hi-tech rail links between the East coast cities, the Chinese bulldozer devastates on a monumental scale. Without a whimper of protest, villages are displaced, communities uprooted, and towns submerged. No Medha Patkar voice of dissent is heard. No public interest litigation. How can there be? When the images o