(Un)safe as houses

Another monsoon in Mumbai, another house collapse. Deaths and injuries, as expected. Even the reportage for such tragedies has become rote, matter of fact.

Collapsing buildings in Mumbai have occurred for a variety of reasons, from tampering with RCC frames to overloading.

Dilapidation of built fabric in Mumbai isn’t new either. People continue to live in buildings they cannot afford to get repaired, just as they cannot afford to lose locational advantage (as repairs would mean having to move out). Tenants will allow a building to crumble even as they enjoy the stability and security of the old Rent Act, paying a pittance to a landlord who has long ceased to care.

Before the millennium, though, there was a go-to place for such structures on the brink—the Repair Board. To use its full title, the Bombay Building Repairs and Reconstruction Board was specifically formed in 1971 by the BMC to address the material welfare of cessed buildings (dilapidated tenanted buildings upon which a cess was levied).

The older cessed buildings in Bombay built on both sides of the fin de siècle were densely backed four-storied tenements, with sloping roofs and masonry façades. What is relatively less known is that several had timber frames that carried the load of the structure all the way to the ground. Many of these façades had timber cantilevered balconies, corridors and stairways.

After around a century of nonstop occupation, these frames were both strained and corroded, and needed to be replaced by steel columns and beams to extend the lives of the old buildings. Given Mumbai’s ferocious monsoons, leakages from roofs and walls were unremittingly aggravating and the Board had the skills to deal with those too.

The Board provided competent consultants, both architectural and structural, and had a roster of contractors who knew how to make these unusual buildings structurally sound and leakproof. Officers in municipal wards kept tabs on the wear and tear of such buildings. Despite the usual bureaucracy, the much-reviled Repair Board gave buildings a new lease of life, at least for a decade at a time.

The old board has since given way to the Mumbai Building Repair and Reconstruction Board, governed by MHADA from 1992. This new board is also mandated to look after cessed buildings. However, there seems to be a steep decline in the number of buildings going in for repair and refurbishment, and dilapidation or imminent danger of collapse does not seem to be the reason for this.

Since the 1990s, the paradigm has shifted. A city, that once accommodated multitudes through easy tenancy, like an absorbent sponge, has now become rigid, like dead corals, due to the shift to the ownership model and the fetishism of real estate. Habitation is now measured out in coffee spoons of FSI rather than the monthly rental for a kholi (apartment). Even families living in cessed buildings for three generations or more now look to gain ownership of their tenements, free from the clutches of an often ineffectual or even absent landlord. And in this grey area, the developers come swooping in.

Today, the push and pull of post-liberalisation aspirations has convinced long-term tenants that the only future is home ownership. For cessed buildings, the way forward is therefore to find a developer who will take the old building off their hands, demolish it, build a new one on the old footprint (per current by-laws) and rehouse the older tenants while creating more space to be sold at market rates for profit (and in order to subsidise the rehousing of the old owners).

The notion of a free, new house with several promised ‘amenities’, while obviously attractive, brings several challenges with it that the current development rules don’t seem to acknowledge. But are the apparent gains that attract a homeowner to let go of a rental home—that they may have lived in for generations—for an ownership flat in a newly constructed building commensurate with their expectations?

A new building is built according to new by-laws. These allow floor-to-ceiling heights of less than 10 feet. Room sizes, other than the living room, may be as narrow as 9 feet. Kitchen widths may be even less. New buildings constructed with RCC technology allow external walls to be as thin as half the length of a brick. There may be no balconies at all.

Unlike in the older homes, where outer walls built in solid masonry provided insulation from the elements and timber balconies modulated sunlight and allowed cross ventilation, new buildings only offer sliding windows that barely open halfway. The only significant advantage, it must be acknowledged, are the toilets within, and legal ownership.

While these seem seductive enough for a possible future, in the time it takes to find a developer that can take on the project, buildings can deteriorate to the point of collapse. People die waiting, instead of approaching the available authorities to tackle the immediate problem of strengthening a deteriorating building.

An unforeseen downside of this reticence to approach the Repair Board is the loss of skills.

Carpentry was once a necessary component of the building process, like masonry, glazing or stucco ornament. The Repair Board has the requisite resources to work with timber, but if there is no further call for this, such craft will inevitably decline. Today, perhaps the only craftsmen in Mumbai who can address timber appropriately in building construction are those working for contractors on conservation projects.

One of the final arguments for repair is that of sustainability. Any building that has lasted for four generations and is still being used contains a large amount of embodied energy (the total energy required to acquire raw materials, process, transport, construct and finish a building). In comparison, there is a significant amount of energy expended in demolishing, hauling debris, and raising a new building with current technologies and materials.

Our newly constructed buildings are no angels when it comes to carbon footprints or energy savings. Thin walls and inadequate ventilation ensure that. Even at a rough estimate, one cubic foot of constructed RCC releases nearly seven kilograms of carbon dioxide.

Older buildings, despite their wear and tear, were constructed with fairly high-quality materials with better craftsmanship and detailing. They used bricks, timber, lime and glass in elegant and appropriate ways.

Renovation allows for extending a building’s longevity and preserving its elegance in our changing world. It is already sustainable, having ‘paid for’ its embodied energy over its lifetime.

A readjustment of attitude towards our built fabric can contribute to mitigating the energy crisis that is already upon us. It is this same readjustment that can save lives, if the inhabitants of ageing buildings give them the same kind of loving attention that they might extend to their parents and grandparents.