Invasive Species

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Dream Spheres and Urban Development

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When she first told me her apartment complex was off NICE road I thought I heard ‘a nice road’. “Oh, great!” I replied, trying to show enthusiasm for surface pavement, “But what is the name?”

“NICE”, she said again, “The toll road, about 3 kilometers from Electronic City.”

There is a lot of ambiguity in India but I can’t say the same for subtlety, especially when it comes to new development. California County, Wall Street II, Prestigious White Meadows, Dream City…these are just a handful of communities I have come across in the past week.

Like many former British colonies, English street names and districts are common in urban India (e.g. Richmond Town, Frazier Town) but it seems, to me at least, that there might be a correlation between the liberalization of India’s economy and the rise in gated communities that make literal references to lifestyles specific to particular geographies. J. Naigar’s and John Stallmeyer’s excellent works on Bangalore helped me understand the city’s explosive growth, particularly in terms of human population and kilometers of land but neither prepared me for the flood of speculative real estate development I have encountered.

Some highlights below:

-Billboards testimonials. These are particularly popular along Bellary Road, from the airport into the city, but also on any toll road—such as the NICE ring road. These testimonials include a picture of an individual in some expressive gesture, such as a head cocked to one side. “I chose to relocate from _______ to Bangalore, and it was the wisest decision I’ve ever made.” A simple, straightforward affirmation. The logic of someone beyond middle age. It seems to recall Bangalore’s former identity as a ‘pensioner’s paradise’, namely because of the year-round good weather. The word is relocate, but the assumption is retire. Retire and invest.

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-Radio. “Ooh gawd, Shriti,” begins one radio ad I heard approximately every five minutes for one entire weekend, “I’ve missed the real estate expo and now I’m back to driving all across the city looking at places.”

“Don’t worry Ashita, the expo has been extended for one week more!” Like all classic infomercials, we are told to ‘hurry’ because this ‘opportunity’ ‘won’t last.’

Another personal favorite is one in which a metaphor between finding the perfect wife and finding the perfect property is utilized. By doing his research, and refusing to settle for anything less than perfect, the man gets both the woman and the two-bedroom flat.

Or, here are some favorite snippets from the August 23rd real estate section of the Times of India (Bangalore edition):

Toast, Cereals and Conversations: Nitesh Cape Cod is located just off the Sarjapur-Marathahalli Ring Road and within walking distance of leading IT offices.

-Niteshestates.com

Get ready to Start your Second Innings at your Own British Colonial Bungalow (sic): Fresh forest oxygen; Zero carbon footprint

-legacyhomes.in

Innovative aquafront: Where happiness Reflects. Exactly Facing the Lake

-innovativeconstructions.in

-Comment: This is not EXACTLY what I would call a Lake, nor is it exactly attractive.

Neo Bangalore—An Address you can flaunt about

Your property can help you fulfill your dreams, just like your family.

-HSBC

Even since my trip here last summer I feel what was a craze has now become an epidemic. That said, it’s hard to know what is aggressive advertising and what is reality. As an employee working in Electronics City, I’m amidst the target population of this advertising. And yet real estate has yet to become the topic of any lunchtime conversation. So is this ‘Exactly facing the Lake’ this ‘Toast, Cereals and Conversation’ a myth?

Regardless of whether or not Innovative aquafront actually faces a lake the reality of this city is uneven development. Bangalorians often talk about how just 20 years back all this area was scrubland. Aside from being called a pensioner’s paradise, Bangalore was also—and is still somewhat—referred to as India’s ‘Garden City’, an image the real estate industry loves to invoke. But can the legend of Bangalore’s garden paradise peacefully co-exist with the reality of high population growth? Can the city successfully attract people, development, and maintain ‘pristine natural surroundings’?

The directions for getting to my co-worker’s apartment were simple. After getting off the NICE toll road I was to turn left at the petrol station and continue down the winding road until I arrived at ‘Sabah Sunscape’.

 The thing was, after a few hundred yards from the petrol station the road went from paved, to dirt, and then back to paved. We passed cows, pockets of dense forest, and area cleared for future development. We came to a fork in the road. The driver stopped a man in a white dhoti who seemed to be walking without purpose. “Where is Sabah Sunscape?” he asked in Kannada. The man gestured straight with a good deal of indifference. After a few minutes we came to a gate and two high rises. I got out of the rickshaw and walked toward the security station on the other side of the gate and told the guard the name of my friend. He checked the roster and shook his head. No one of that name lived there. After a few minutes of debate we solved the problem. I was at Sabah Sunbeam, NOT Sabah Sunscape. I walked back to the rickshaw. We continued driving until we finally arrived at an even larger gate set between two concrete pillars. We had arrived at Sabah Sunscape.

 Later that night, coming back to Electronics City, I started to wonder what makes a city. If Electronics City does not include electronics manufacturing nor does it constitute an actual city, why does it have the name that it does? Electronics City is supposedly the ‘place’ that put Bangalore in the global marketplace, but for the first 15 years of existence it was considered to be outside the city. Now, Bangalore’s development stretches even further south. Was Sabah Sunscape and its environs really part of this Bangalore city? Historically, Bangalore has always been a low-density city. But that did not mean, I thought to myself, that some gated high-rise apartments located in the middle of nowhere could be part of the city, even if the city boundary will eventually give way and include it. Then again, what right did I, a child of Detroit, have to conclude what is urban and what is not?

Is urban the same thing as city? What is a city anyway?

Sometimes my grandfather likes to tell us about the first house he and my grandmother bought. The street on which the house was built wasn’t completed; they were the first homeowners on the block and because of this, my grandmother got to name the street. She chose ‘Devonshire’ because she thought is sounded very sophisticated.

It’s easy to be cynical of the HSBC quote about family and property, but the fact is that for many people this relationship and its connection to something loosely defined as a dream is very much a reality. Cities are also spaces/places of dreams, or where people go to fulfill something that might be described of a dream. Cities are constantly expanding in order to accommodate all those individuals, all those families, and all those dreams. So, I suppose when I think of it that way I can accept Sobha Sunscape as part of Bangalore and yet, when it comes to the reality of this piecemeal development, these self-contained bio-spheres of swimming pools and tennis courts cropping up in the middle of nowhere, claiming to have the amenities of both urban and suburban life I can’t help but think that these real estate dreams must be destroyed, as the future of the city depends on it.

State Park Trinkets

So I’m writing this from my “cabin” at Maumee Bay State Park in Northern Ohio. It’s quite comfortable, I’m able to surf the internet and look out onto my neighbor’s BBQ. Those of us in the group who thought the cabin’s 8-person jacuzzi too shi-shi have opted to ‘rough it’ and stay in one of the park’s 252 campsites—which also offer wi-fi and plenty of electricity for mobile home and large-screen TV needs. But, this post isn’t supposed to be about the absurd attempt to distinguish between nature and (hu)man; I want to just briefly recount my walk to the nature center.

But before I get into that, let me start by posing a simple question:

Which of the five Great Lakes yields more fish than all other four combine?

Lake Eerie!

Eerie is the warmest of the Great Lakes and enjoys a (literally) fluid exchange with skeptical water bodies like the Detroit River. You can thank Eerie’s rampant pollution for the Congressional Passing of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Established in the aftermath of the Act, Maumee Bay Park was created by the Land and Water Conservation Fund and meant as a ‘Tribute to Lake Eerie.’

Today, visitors can appreciate Northern Ohio’s natural geography via the Maumee Bay Boardwalk, a two-mile elevated path over some of Ohio’s great marshlands. The path then leads to the nature center, which is a delightful place to spend a rainy afternoon.

At the Center we found an elderly gentleman showcasing an albino fox snake, which is extremely rare (1 in every 40,000). However,  the rest of the animals at the center are not exactly indigenous—like the boa constrictor who’s origin is South America but was found in the Park because someone ran over it. Our docent speculated that the snake was most likely the pet of someone engaged in illegal activity.

Part of me wanted to think about how this nature center had become a glorified Humane Society, or the whole history of endangered animals and illegal trading, but mostly I just thought about Cassandra holding that snake in Wayne’s World and the general glory of the Midwest.

The docent put the albino snake back in the cage and directed us to the butterfly house so that we could see something “neat.”  After reaching for the key (quaintly located above the door frame), we walked into a small space with at least 100 monarch cocoons, all in various stages of development. Some were bright green with small, delicate gold beads; those hours away from hatching already displayed the characteristic orange and reds of monarchs.

Of course at this point none of them will make it to Mexico by winter, a grim reality that was quickly offset by the docent’s positive comment:

“Every time I walk in here, I look at those cocoons and am reminded of all those trinkets you used to buy at Woolworths.”

But it didn’t stop there.

A spider on the wall distracted him. “Hold on,” he exclaimed and grabbed the clipboard with the chart recording all the birthing times of the monarchs. In a perfect, Coen Brothers-esque moment, he slammed the clipboard against the side of the wall, and down onto the spider. Being a fairly large spider, it was easy to watch it fall to the ground.

The monarch house might have been a birthing clinic for the Lepidoptera, but I was pretty convinced it was where one might go to die. In fact, all of Maumee Bay State Park seemed to a place where things were born, contained, and killed.

How old is the myth of the ‘natural’? I’d argue it’s as old as our consciousness of the urban. The evolution from agriculture to industrial society brought on what Lefebvre identifies as the death of nature through an ‘ideological naturalization’ or a process that parodies nature by identifying, classifying, and creating ‘natural’ spaces likes gardens, lakes, and open-space parks.

We experience Ohio’s natural environment—which was reestablished only after we had destroyed the ‘original’—by using a boardwalk, a structure that allows us to engage in the natural environment by walking three feet above it. Although there are obvious reasons for this (it protects sensitive marshlands), it’s also a reminder that even in our natural settings we still determine what stays and what goes. So let this be a warning to all you spiders: stay out of the butterfly house.

 

 

 

Aesthetic Selection

“There’s something soothing about seeing an even expanse of green grass that just seems to lower our blood-pressure a bit.”

-American Lawns

A weed is not the same thing as an invasive species. In 1999, former president Clinton signed Executive Order 13112 officiating the definition as “an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” In unofficial parlance, an invasive species is one that doesn’t occur in a specific area. A weed on the other hand is a plant that grows in an area where it isn’t wanted. Although it may grow naturally in the area, it is considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome. It must be gotten rid off. We weed out our closets when they become full of things we no longer want or find attractive. In the suburbs, we weed our gardens in order to uphold the American aesthetic tradition of a well-manicured lawn.

Weeding represents an authoritarian, top-down, aesthetic-driven relationship to our natural surrounding. This is an approach that is inexistent in the natural environment where aesthetic is based on the functionability of the entire system. The suburban tendency to view the common Quackgrass as an undesirable inhabitant of the great American front yard is no different from the political dictator practicing genocide. Mr. President, who is the real invasive species?