Elphinstone stampede: Architect says ban ‘monofunctional infrastructure’

Elphinstone Road station stampede: Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences on the loss of lives. Nirmal Harindran

Citing the example of the foot overbridge (FOB) at Elphinstone Road station that witnessed a stampede on September 29 in which 23 people were killed, leading architect and conservationist Rahul Mehrotra said “monofunctional infrastructure” should be done away with.

At the release of his book, “Ephemeral Urbanism”, at the NCPA on Monday, Mehrotra was answering a question regarding the stampede.  He was asked, referring to big ticket projects like the bullet train, if all attention was being given to those who had it. Mehrotra said: “One is that, in a democracy, the only way things will move is if the people’s voices are heard on these matters… secondly, from a design perspective, the problem is caused by monofunctional infrastructure. We should just ban it.”

He said Infrastructure like foot overbridge that serves a single purpose, should effectively be banned. “Instead, we should embed infrastructure with enough space so that it is able to serve several functions. The FOB at the station should then be able to hold small shops, or vendors. And this cannot be done speculatively or retrospectively but only if infrastructure is carefully pre-planned. Flyovers are so tall that if a slab is inserted horizontally, the space underneath can serve a dual purpose of a night school or a night shelter. It also reduces the burden of population on available spaces  in the city, which are already  rapidly diminishing,” said the architect.

Mehrotra cited the example of Navi Mumbai as an important case of speculative planning, the result of which was a rapidly developed city.  “Charles Correa, Shirish Patel and Praveena Mehta, who drafted the first Development Plan in the country in 1964, suggested the growth of Bombay should go east into the mainland territory of India. Maharashtrian policymakers caught onto that idea because they were paranoid about the financial base of Bombay expanding north, into Gujarat. Thus the growth and investment into the development of Bombay into New Bombay was agreed upon by planners and government, and the merits of that agreement are seen in the success of Navi Mumbai as a city,” he said.

Today, development in the form of metro trains is being juxtaposed with heritage structures of south Bombay and many residents of such buildings are opposing it.

“It is too late for this debate. This is a problem of design, which wouldn’t have occurred if the role of planners and government was engaged simultaneously. Now, it has to be thought in terms of being a trade off,” he added.