Founder of Urban-Think Tank, an interdisciplinary design practice based in Zürich, Caracas, São Paolo and New York. With Hubert Klumpner he holds the chair for architecture and urban design at ETH Zürich. Their book Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities is published this month (Lars Müller).

My kind of town is one that expands and contracts with the inhalations and exhalations of its residents; that is both flexible and full of tradition; and that shows a different face with every corner turned.

My childhood was split between New York and Caracas, the two cities that defined my sense of public place and life. In New York, I found the multiplicity of purpose and pleasure, the internationality, and the outrageous vibrancy that have drawn so many to the city; in Caracas, I was instilled with a respect for the power of the unpredictable – a desire to always remain between the formal and the informal, to leave myself open to experimentation and rapid change. Perhaps it is because of my formative experiences in these two metropolises that I connect with Bombay in such a visceral way.

I’ve spent decades travelling the world, following my curiosity through the streets of many cities. What I find in Bombay, each time I return, is a sharp smell, a savory plate of biryani, a glaring sign, a building emerging from the crumbling foundation of another. It is a bustling, explosive place – crackling with the energy of packed commuter trains and the endless stream of transactions, interactions, collisions and resolutions. When I travelled to Bombay last year with students from our design studio at ETH Zürich, we spent time researching and documenting a Koli fishing village in Back Bay, South Bombay. Wedged between the sea and new urban development, the Koli fishing village is a link to Bombay’s past – a reminder that the original inhabitants of the land were fishermen whose livelihood depended on the sea. Their families are still here, fishing, despite the fact that the city around them has changed dramatically.

Wandering through the narrow streets of the Koli village, past the women’s fish market and the children playing cricket, I marvelled at the unbelievable density Bombay presents – not simply the physical density of millions of people sharing so little space, but the density of history and desire. Many have written about Bombay: its transitions, its people, its struggles; but, it wasn’t until I was in it, until I was pressed on all sides by bodies and scooters and stalls, that I began to feel I actually understood the city in some small way. This is my kind of town: one that demands interaction, one that forces you to explore and to pause, to rethink proximity, purpose, and movement.

Bombay, born as a port city, is defined by mobility in a multiplicity of forms. Its antiquated train system, the oldest of its kind in Asia, carries a higher density of daily commuters than any public urban transport system in the world. Its streets and flyovers swarm with taxis, auto-rickshaws, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles that disregard all traffic laws other than those informally derived from one situation to the next. The city has begun investing in pedestrian bridges that create alternative planes of movement, taking people above streets, neighbourhoods and wetlands. But these physical modes of transportation are only pathways for a greater goal embodied in the city – that of social mobility. Bombay is the primary meeting point of India’s north and south, coast and inner territories, entrenched wealthy and aspiring poor.

As in many other megacities, Bombay’s development is progressing in multiple directions at once, symbolised in its crisis of nomenclature – Bombay versus Mumbai. A city with multiple names or multiple cities sharing the same geography? My friend, Bombay native Rahul Mehrotra, once gave me a day tour that illustrated the kinetics of Bombay’s development and un-development. As some slums are cleared, others pop up; as a tall office building rises in Navi Mumbai, an old, vacant, Parsi apartment building in Malabar Hill crumbles. Migrants pour in from around the country, sleeping on the street for lack of housing, and the wealthy owners of prime real estate spend more days a year out of India than they do in their Bombay beds.

I love cities. They all, in whatever odd, unexpected ways, possess unique identities and supply reasons both to flee and to stay. The cities that I love the most are those that keep me guessing, that present more questions than answers. I believe that Bombay, complete with its conflicts and incongruities, is an embodiment of change. It is city that draws its history in close at the same time that it heaves itself into the future.

First published in AT232, October 2012