“Half a million people arriving every morning … nobody leaving”
With this line, Charles Correa’s film, ‘City on the Water’1, sets the stage for a city that is reaching its limits and builds a case for its solution. Correa made this film exactly 50 years ago, in 1975, as part of a larger effort to bring out the urgent need for expansion to the city’s authorities. The proposal was for a new city across the harbour, designed to relieve the intense pressure on Mumbai, to be called Navi Mumbai. But the questions the film highlights go far beyond the proposal. How long can a city keep absorbing people without confronting who has the right to the land resource and dignity?
The aerial shots present throughout the films show a city squeezed between water and demand. Correa points out that the real edges of the city are not drawn by nature, they are drawn by policy, power and money. Mumbai or Bombay in the 60s, was the ‘nerve centre of the Indian economy’, an attraction point for new technology for India, generating nearly half of the entire revenue of the government of India.
A city born out of migration, Bombay’s growth showed no signs of slowing down. As a city, Bombay was a place where, every day, tens of thousands arrived with hopes in their pockets, only to find that the city was both generous and cruel, a contrast that is represented through the film. This brings forth important questions: Are our cities physically capable of absorbing endless demand? Or are we merely redistributing scarcity by squeezing more people into less space, eroding both the environment and the quality of life? A recurring image in the film shows trains spilling out waves of people into the city. These are not just commuters; many are migrants searching for work, shelter and survival. Where does this endless tide of people live?
Result of an overcrowded city with people occupying the streets and pavements.
The camera moves towards the overcrowded pavements, congested chawls, and temporary shelters folded into the city’s cracks and margins. Through this, Correa questions “what is worse, the temporary slums or the permanent ones?” This wasn’t just about Bombay. This is yet the defining crisis of every rapidly urbanising city today.
Long after Navi Mumbai has been built, the core tensions that he outlines – between migration and exclusion, between geography and inequality – still remain unresolved. One of the film’s sharpest insights is how building heights are directly linked to land prices. As land gets scarcer, buildings grow taller, and rather than solving the problem, this ends up raising the price of the land. To address this, he proposed to add more land to the residential pool by decentralising Bombay and expanding to New Bombay.
Graphical representation for the expansion of residential areas by showing two cases: increasing building height vs increasing land area.
Land in the city is not neutral. It is hoarded, speculated on and made into a commodity. It makes it less about living on it and more about trading, leverage and wealth expansion. The URDPFI (Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation) has set a target of 10 to 12 sqm of open space per person in India. However, according to the survey conducted by Project Mumbai in 2021, Mumbai currently has 1 sqm of open space per person2 3. Planning decisions about zoning, density and infrastructure are not just technical; they are deeply political acts that determine who gets to belong and who gets pushed to the edge. Are we building cities for people, or as a commodity? In his book, “The New Landscape”, Correa argues that failure is not technical; it is political4. When more than half of the city’s population lives without formal access to land, basic services, or security, can we still call it a “good” city?
Behind the words “density,” “growth,” and “development” are real and lived experiences of the people. When a city can not offer any more shelter, it does not stop people from migrating to the city; it redistributes them into scarcity. A child growing up on the pavement, a family living in a one-room rental without water or light, and workers commuting 3 hours each way just because the city does not have space to accommodate people near their workspaces. These are not normal circumstances, even if we have learned to cope with them. It is just part of a system that accepts exclusion as a byproduct of urban success. If survival itself becomes the primary occupation of so many, what does it even mean for a city to be “functional”?
Rough proposal plan for New Bombay.
City on the Water leaves us with the thought that cities will continue to grow. But the growth itself is not the crisis. The crisis lies in whether that growth is inclusive or whether it survives by pushing more people into the margins. When a city floats between hope and neglect, whose responsibility is it to keep it from drowning?
To watch the film, click here.
– Written by Dainty Doe Justin, Fellow
Footnotes:
- Correa, C. M. (Director). (1975). A City on the Water [Film]. Film Division. ↩︎
- Virani, S. (2021, November 17). Mumbai has less green than what masterplan shows: just 1 sq m per person. Citizen Matters. ↩︎
- Gokarn, S. (2024, May 31). Pockets of greenery and recreation: How Mumbai is claiming its open spaces. Citizen Matters. ↩︎
- Correa, Great City … Terrible Place from The New Landscape, pg 86 ↩︎
Photo credits: From the Film ‘City on the Water’