Madhav Raman is the co-founder of Delhi-based Anagram Architects. He is an urbanist, architect and writer. Since its inception in 2001, Anagram has been the recipient of multiple accolades, such as the Aga Khan Award nomination, the IIID (Indian Institute of Interior Designers) Award, the Brick Award, the Archi Bau Award, the Design Daily Choice Award 2020 and the 2A Asia Architecture Award, among others. Raman is also a prolific speaker and has given talks at institutes such as the Indian Institute of Business (ISB), the Charles Correa Foundation, the School of Environmental Planning, Institute of Urban Transport and Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Insititute of Architecture. He also hosts a design studio for the School of Planning and Architecture. Raman is a vocal advocate for adaptive urban design and sensitive contextual architecture.

From a building and design perspective, does extreme weather worry you?

The catastrophic events for the urban situation are not structural – things like earthquakes, buildings collapsing because of cyclones or mass fires raging through cities and burning them down – we have mastered the ability in the past to withstand structural damage.

For me, the raging crisis that’s being completely ignored is water. But it’s not an event-based thing. We have not done enough in design and engineering to actively mitigate use of water and deal with waste water. This covers rainwater harvesting to gardening to the whole shebang. There’s been no thought given to the whole water cycle that a building undertakes. In the past hundred-plus years, piped water and sewage – urban planning – happened to Indian cities. So there was a supply and there was an evacuation from the home, but that whole end-process was not handled in a macro centralised way. And there was no thought given to it at the individual household/building level either. One just plugged into a system and then externalised whatever the repercussions were.

Now we are in a situation in the cities, where because of the inefficiencies in the supply of piped water and evacuation of sewage, the biggest crisis is water and water management. The ground dries out, the soil dries out, vegetation becomes difficult. Then we are covering up the water-absorbent soil with cement; the water cycle in the city is completely ignored. Because of climate change, there are periods of 3–30 days where some climate aberrations play out, like deluge-level flooding. And these month-long events tie into the fact that the whole water cycle of a building in a city has not been thought of in a simple, closed-loop system in a granular house level. Therefore, these chunks of water that come onto cities take it to an apocalyptic level.

How can this be addressed by design?

That we have backup generators and water purifiers are the two tell-tale signs of systemic collapse where every home is a fortress and is no longer a castle. There are ways to help this situation, which engineers and designers can come up with. There is dual piping, decentralising the whole water expulsion process and so on. We are at a crisis level where you either innovate or perish. It’s not like you need to be the next smart person who thinks of something new, it needs to be that you rethink your architectural or engineering interventions in a way that prevents ecological collapse.

How does one build architectural, design resilience in villages, cities?

In rural Asia, our sense of resilience has to come from basically creating a robustness. Sort of an anchor infrastructure … buildings that anchor your life. I mean institution building. That’s where you need to build to survive; people in villages don’t have the financial ability to build homes in a way where they can fight the climate. But they can be helped at a community level where they come in to survive that catastrophe. But in cities, it is more on the individual level that people need to look into resilience. For example, slums in a city are a very unique situation because they are unable to bounce back from disasters, as they have not been designed into the city plans. Therefore, what ends up happening is that centralised systems and institutional resilience are captured only by the formal citizen. As designers and engineers, we are not trained to participate in construction in informal precincts. We need bylaws, plots, piped water, piped sewage guidelines, then we can do our business. Both rural India and the informal sector in the cities are blind spots.

What should be the role of the government?

The government is overrated. For ecological change, we cannot trust any government. I think the basic contracts between housing societies and their local government – at whatever scale possible – like Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWA) – are what are going to make the change. The reliance on government for something that is for collective benefit will never be an ambitious plan. There has to be a social movement that needs to accept that we are at a level of an emergency. There needs to be a shift from merely sustainable to being resilient. That can only be a cultural movement. And the vanguards are architects and engineers because we are able to specify that culture. We need to prioritise ecology over sociology, and it shouldn’t be an Earth science movement but a cultural movement. One should not want it because it’s the right thing to do (which it of course is) but you should want it for an aesthetic reason. Our job is to be able to seduce people to opt in to this ecological trend. If there is an urban flood and the belief is that you are not managing water well at an individual home level, people don’t respond well to the idea of penalties or social responsibility, they resist that kind of change. Therefore, our job is to make systems like eco-friendly waste disposal systems and air conditioning a lot more fashionable and cooler. They have to tickle the human inclination for enjoyment and aesthetics. The message should be – don’t do this for the planet, but do it for yourself.

Damage is being done by 5 per cent of the Indians, the top rich Indians. The richest people tend to go through these spasms of voluntary penury. Japan for example – it wasn’t like Japan was always a minimalist society. There was a certain economic comfort after which they became minimalist. Modernism and minimalism came after certain economic comfort. It’s impossible to tell most rich Indians to live like a Gandhian or do the right thing, but they will do it once they feel the enhancement through lifestyle rather than it being like a prayashchit (atonement).

So resilience to extreme climate has to start at the grass roots – at individual design practice and at homeowner level.

Yes. Look at what the Bandra Collective is doing. It’s a thankless job but they are doing it because of their goodwill. That’s what is needed; we need to band together and act locally rather than talk globally though our siloed practices. I feel that all engineering and design practices need to imagine themselves not as global players but as local players. So when a student goes to college in Delhi or Bombay, they shouldn’t imagine to set up shop like I did – in order to achieve global fame and wealth. They should want to go back to their local community and set up shop there and want to be the local hero.