Parks, gardens and playgrounds as essential elements of climate mitigation strategy

Parks, gardens and playgrounds as essential elements of climate mitigation strategy

At the heart of this conundrum about public open spaces in Mumbai is the legal framework which allows the BMC to get away with all sorts of hideous plans and non-public interest policies

Smruti KoppikarUpdated: Thursday, June 08, 2023, 11:32 PM IST
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Parks, gardens and playgrounds as essential elements of climate mitigation strategy | Representative Image

This should have been obvious but, perhaps, it is not especially to the esteemed Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation — there is a correlation between Mumbai’s open spaces, which includes green cover, and the high temperatures as well as water-logging or floods that the city routinely deals with now. The greater the number of open spaces and the wider their spread across the 482 square kilometres, the lower the impact of the Urban Heat Island effect in which certain areas or zones register 2 to 4 degrees Celsius higher than their nearest neighbourhoods. Similarly, the more the open spaces, the rain water is absorbed faster into underground aquifers and there is evidentially less water-logging around during the monsoon.

Common sense affirms it, anecdotal evidence shows this to be true, and academic study reports have proved it. Mumbai lost 40 percent of its green cover and a whopping 81 percent of open spaces (barren or without vegetation) between 1991 and 2018 during which there was an average rise of 2 degrees Celsius, pointed out an independent eye-opening study two years ago. Yet, the BMC behaves as if open spaces and green cover in the city are incidental — not central or crucial — to how the city combats climate change impact affecting the lives and well-being of millions. How difficult is it for a municipal corporation with annual budgets of Rs 45,000 to Rs 52,000 crore to evolve and fund a comprehensive policy on open spaces?

For six years now, there has been no clear policy; the last one, though problematic in parts, was rolled out in 2016 but stayed by the then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. Under pressure from elected representatives, the present double-header state government of chief minister Eknath Shinde and his deputy Fadnavis asked the BMC commissioner last month to declare a policy. In the talk — and cross-talk — about allowing parks and grounds on adoption versus the caretaker principle, a few big picture points must be kept in mind. 

First, not all public open spaces are public open spaces. The BMC has, for long, clubbed all parks, playgrounds, recreation grounds and other forms of open area into the hold-all category of public open spaces. This, unfortunately, includes spaces which were handed out for development or maintenance to private parties years ago and have, consequently, become private spaces with not half an ounce of anything “public” about them. Think of the nearest club you would know about, usually steered and run by a local politician; it literally usurped public space and turned it into a commercial private club with membership fees that run into a few lakhs.

The Mumbai Development Plan 2034 (DP) shows that the BMC and the state government understand the need for public open spaces. The DP states: “Public Open Spaces serve the purpose of lungs for the city and impose much-needed balance between the built and the open environment” and describes that among the criteria to define them is the right of access to everyone. In a stark contradiction, it then includes swimming pools, clubs and gymkhanas where access is restricted to members. So, the BMC might put out, according to its Environment Status Report 2020-21, that Mumbai has 291 gardens or parks, 475 recreation grounds, and 355 playgrounds, but how many of them are really open and accessible to the public is a moot question. Even on paper, there aren’t enough; on the ground, when access is factored in, the open spaces further shrink in number.

Second, not all public open spaces need to be green spaces. The emphasis is now on turning open spaces into parks which are landscaped and have template areas for prescribed activities such as walking, jogging, children’s play zone, canopy areas for yoga and classes, and in rare cases, an amphitheatre. Would every neighbourhood want this template, would all people in the neighbourhood want it too? There is merit in the argument that some open spaces must be left open in the classic maidan style with rough and raw edges marking out a space which people can use as they wish.

The BMC should ideally move towards a policy which earmarks maidans as distinct from landscaped parks in every neighbourhood. Not everyone in a neighbourhood desires or uses a landscaped park with monoculture greens; open maidans which lend themselves to multiple and flexible uses should be recognised too. Just because the maidans are brown — not green — does not take away their significance as open spaces. In fact, such maidans are critical as holding ponds during extreme rain events.

Third, the BMC is grappling with the manufactured debate between adoption versus caretaker policy of parks and gardens. Is there really a debate? If the adoption policy led to private interests taking over public open spaces under the guise of developing and maintaining them, and subsequently turned them into private addas often leased out at commercial rates, then the policy needs to be discarded. Or, at the very least, the tightest of safeguards must be inserted to prevent this from happening. The caretaker approach has its own issues too. If, as reports go, it is clear that an open space is leased to an appointed caretaker for 11 months to prevent vested interests from forming, where is the stability and continuity needed? Also, anecdotal evidence is that vested interests, in the form of corporators or officers’ families or frontmen, become caretakers effectively allowing the local political leaders to leverage control.

At the heart of this conundrum about public open spaces in Mumbai — an international city with the lowest per capita availability at 1.24 square metres per person — is the legal framework which allows the BMC to get away with all sorts of hideous plans and non-public interest policies. Under the BMC Act, making and maintaining gardens, parks and recreation grounds is a “discretionary duty” which means it is not obligatory or necessary for the civic body to provide these but the provision can be dependent on factors such as its financial strength.

Herein lies the problem — public open spaces are seen as dispensable and non-critical. The argument I make is that this cannot continue withclimate change impact looming large, in fact already presenting itself with more and higher heat days as well as more intense flooding during rain. All the available public open spaces are not only necessary but extremely crucial to enable Mumbai to be less hot (by mitigating the Urban Heat Island effect to an extent) or relatively flood-free (by acting as holding ponds during torrential rain). The BMC — and the state government — have to begin by seeing them as indispensable aspects of climate mitigation strategies. There cannot be an independent Climate Action Plan and an open spaces policy that does not dovetail into it. 

Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is also the Founder Editor of ‘Question of Cities’

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