The art of living in big cities

The art of living in big cities

Metropolis Now!; Ramesh Kumar Biswas, editor;
SpringerWienNewYork, 2000; Paperback, 240 pp

JAKARTA (JP): Ramesh Kumar Biswas is a self-confessed,
unapologetic urbanite. No Wordsworth, like pining for a piece of
pristine, pastoral life for this 43 year-old architect. For he
has left it to the birds and the bees to follow the forests. As
for himself, Ramesh is known to often go out of his way to become
lost in cities. Any city for that matter, for there is no city
that this urban nomad has visited and regretted having done so.

Born in Chennai, India, Ramesh grew up in India and Malaysia.
His love for cities sprawled as he studied architecture and urban
design in New Delhi and Edinburgh, Scotland. He went on to do a
thesis in urban ecology and, after setting up offices in Berlin
and Vienna, he continues to travel around the world lecturing
impressionable students at universities in Paris, Tokyo, Sydney,
Hong Kong, London and Vienna on how to live in a city and love
it.

It is cities with enormous problems that most impress this
romantic with a heart that seems to be carved out of cement. "I
am fascinated by centers of conflict between times, cultures,
generations, classes, minorities and systems; by laboratories for
living in the future," he says.

He likes nothing better than to wallow in streets full of
humor and cruelty, reveling in the shimmering light and the heavy
shadows, enjoying the friendly warmth that comforts and the
danger that keeps him going.

Above all he scoffs at all those who say that for the first
time in history more humans now live in urban centers than in
rural areas.

"This banal statement ignores increasing anthropological,
economic and archaeological indications that in many regions the
city came before the village, which itself was actually a by-
product of certain urban forms of social organization and
consumption," he writes in A State of Mind, the opening chapter
of his latest book.

In obvious defiance of the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith who
feels that the metropolis should have been aborted long before it
became a New York, London or Tokyo, Ramesh recently edited
Metropolis Now, a 240 page tribute to the urban cultures in 15
global cities.

The engrossing book, an armchair traveler's delight, is
illustrated with interesting photographs of each city chosen and
is especially intended for a new urban species he calls homo
urbanus. A species that is no longer interested merely in the
individual facets of a particular city but also in the mystery of
why it is so.

The attempt is to walk away from just a scientific listing of
dates and individuals towards an intimate nearing to people who
make up a city. When he visited Jakarta to research for the same
book, he was as curious about life around the Sunda Kelapa area
as he was of deals being cut in the shadows of the tree-lined
avenues of the central business district.

The result is that the side-walk happy Ramesh, with senses
that have now been citified beyond repair, often succeeds in
convincing the reader that the screech in big cities is actually
the song of birds, all the mechanical uproar only the wind in
trees, and much of the hustle and bustle just the cry of animals
in the wilderness.

About Bombay, one city in the world that is blessed with
thousands of slums where populations occupy only three percent of
the urban area with a sardine-tin-density of 370,000 per sq km,
he writes, "the beach along the entire center of town is free, a
place where even the poor and the burdened go to look at an
infinite horizon and let their eyes rest".

To Hong Kong he goes in search of a dimension beyond urban
architectures and economic structures. For its erotics. In Kuala
Lumpur he found how an intensely, local Malaysian everyday life
evolves in spaces not just in, but also in between all the high
tech Karaoke architecture.

Looking into the future he sees Shanghai as the home of a
Filipino nurse, a Bangladeshi hotel worker, a Spanish cook, an
unemployed doctor from Germany, as well as a specialist carpenter
from Indonesia.

Ramesh is not someone afraid of encircling globalization. For
he is of the firm belief that every global product, be it
architecture, music, food or clothes, slang or lifestyle, has
always emerged fused with specific local elements to mutate
further before being re-exported.

Ramesh is himself the author of six out of the 15 cities
profiled in the book while other equally enthusiastic urbanists
have written about cities as varied and far apart as Soweto,
Istanbul Las Vegas and Moscow. Questioned as to why New York, the
most celebrated city in the world, was left out Ramesh says that
there are already enough Woody Allen films on the city.

But Jakarta, he assures, is very much on the contents page of
the second volume to follow soon.

-- Mehru Jaffer