The international character of the studio has meant that students themselves have brought relevant issues and themes from different parts of the world that have been developed project on project in an accumulative way. In the 2012 graduating class Hema Priya Kabali’s project on the metropolitan structure of Mumbai built on the previous outstanding project of Susan Raju (2009), and has continued Susan’s work to look at Mumbai as a problem of metropolitan restructuring in order to open new opportunities for sustainable development at the regional scale. Mumbai is a city that has been thought of in terms of its parts rather than its whole and treated as an issue of defective accessibilities between those parts. What both Hema and Susan have done is raise some important questions about structure and scale and the way these have changed historically in order to define a different way of approaching Mumbai as a planning problem. This different approach uses infrastructure to radically restructure Mumbai’s metropolitan region and place the city in a different relation to that region. Their work, taken together, amounts to a sustained critique of current piecemeal approaches focussed on particular accessibility problems, and suggests a wholesale restructuring of the city is desirable and even inevitable as Mumbai adjusts to a metropolitan scale.
Planning Complex Cities TU Delft 