The Kinetic City and Other Essays

In the chronology at the end of Working in Mumbai, the excellent monograph from 2020 on RMA Architects, the firm of Rahul Mehrotra, buildings by RMA are listed and illustrated alongside publications written or edited by Mehrotra. There are dozens of the latter spanning between 1994 and 2018, but they are only a smattering of the architect and educator's prolific written output. The publication of The Kinetic City and Other Essays is therefore fitting, serving to present the breadth of Mehrotra's writing over a period of thirty years. All of it is generally focused on the city; specifically  the essays illustrate his development of the idea of the "kinetic city."
Although the collection of 22 essays does not include one strictly called "The Kinetic City," as the title of the book suggests, the phenomenon is explicitly found in two essays: "Negotiating the Static and Kinetic Cities: The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai" and "Looking at the Kinetic City," a photo essay by Rajesh Vora with words by Mehrotra. The former was published in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, a 2008 book edited by Andreas Huyssen, while the latter appears to be newly published for this collection published by ArchiTangle. In a nutshell, the Static City is the relatively permanent, formal city of concrete, steel, and brick, and the Kinetic City is temporary, built of recycled materials and sometimes used for celebrations in India where throngs of people converge for a few days or weeks.
Vora's photo essay is especially good at illuminating the myriad aspects of the Kinetic City. Mehrotra structures the photographer's street scenes and aerials into four categories: transaction, instability, spectacle, and habitation. To use the first as an example, photos of street vendors in Mumbai (third spread, below) are accompanied by drawings and words illustrating the gradients of permanence and legality, from vendors squatting on a mat with their wares to attached lean-tos that are not demountable but do enable the wares to be locked up. This is followed by step-by-step photos of the dabbawala service (lunchbox delivery and pickup) that is also mentioned in the "Negotiating" essay that precedes it. In short, rather than being separate, the Kinetic City is grafted onto the Static City, the former serving the needs of entrepreneurship, celebrations, housings and the like.
Of the twenty other essays in the book, the one that stood out to me the most was "The Architecture of Pluralism: A Century of Building in South Asia," Mehrotra's lengthy introduction to the volume of World Architecture 1900-2000: A Critical Mosaic that he edited. Although the reprint here does not have as many illustrations as the original, its appearance in this collections commendably makes it available to hopefully many more people than in its initial publication (year ago series editor Kenneth Frampton lamented the bad distribution of the ten-volume set). Furthermore, Mehrotra singles out that essay in his "Preface and Gratitude," writing that Frampton's invitation to edit the volume on South Asia "propelled many subsequent writings," many of which are found in this excellent collection. -- John Hill * A DAILY DOSE OF ARCHITECTURE BOOKS *