| Changemakers

City of the Future: a City in the Sky?
2008-06-16 05:42:22

I just heard the other day that one of the most famous businessmen is now building a house in Mumbai that is 27 stories high, and I said, “How appropriate! One man has a house that has a helipad at the top.” He just lives there and hops in his helicopter from one place to another. You effectively don’t live in the city.

News item: Mukesh Ambani, the fifth richest man in the world with a net worth estimated at $43 billion, is building the world's largest and most expensive home: a 27-story, 400,000 square foot skyscraper in downtown Mumbai that will cost almost $2 billion. Ambani is head of India’s biggest company, the Mumbai-based petrochemical giant Reliance Industries.

The house was originally planned to be 45 stories, but the number of floors was reduced to create higher ceilings. Ambani will be able to leave his new house from the rooftop helipad or exit from street level, 550 feet below. The house includes separate gyms for Ambani, his wife, and three children, six stories of parking, a four-story open-air atrium of gardens, flowers and lawns, a ballroom covered with crystal chandeliers, a 65-seat theater, a spa, swimming pool and yoga studio, and an ice room where you can cool off while snow drifts onto your head.

As it is, when people say they live in Mumbai, they don’t really live in Mumbai. They live in an air conditioned house, and they have an air conditioned, protected car. They are socially-networked, air conditioned people. There is nothing wrong with air conditioning except that as they travel from A to B in their air conditioning, they are so completely unaware of the rest of Mumbai that they don’t look outside. They don’t understand what’s happening.

The way they speak about it is, “Oh my God, now it takes me two hours just to get from point A to point B!” And so they only see the traffic and the problem of traffic congestion. They don’t see why it’s getting congested. They don’t see what else is happening in the city.

That’s where I got the idea for the city design I am thinking about for my next movie, Paani. It takes Mumbai as an example of a city that has grown organically and is limited in its land space, rather like Manhattan which is on an island.

The pressures on real estate are huge, and given that, we are building what we call flyovers all over India so that people can get from A to B faster. I was wondering, “What if they built more?” I realized that they could be building a city above the flyovers, so that the flyovers become the base on which an upper city is built. The upper city is built purely for the rich. What better way to create a gated community than just having it above the flyovers?

So it’s a city in the sky and a city on the ground, separated by hundreds of flyovers. The city above takes all the water for itself and then drip feeds the lower city.

Shekhar Kapur's bloglogin or register to post commentsEmail this Blog entry