For the engineer Himanshu Parikh, 'the brownfield site is continuous with the fabric of the city, as the city is likewise continuous with that of the slum'. He presents the isolation of the terms brownfield, infrastructure and slum as a political device that ultimately impedes urban quality. His river-cleaning projects are case studies in a larger search for methodologies akin to holistic treatments of the 'city as patient' rather than surgical interventions at 'the site of disease'. Rivers are powerful examples because, as he notes, natural drainage conditions so often form the initial armature for city plans, and their decay so often reflects the pattern of slum settlement. Parikh's work is contentious, in part because the results can be hard to quantify, and the cause of failure obscured by a tangle of human and physical factors. But his greatest provocation is a complex scenario that shifts the burden of public work to the private citizen and yet simultaneously positions the economically disenfranchised within the mainstream of development. In many ways it is the nature of brownfield, as unstaked, underdeveloped territory, that allows this scenario of a new kind of grass-roots infrastructure to unfold.
展开▼
