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