
Things around us shape
us, influence us, and create an experience. They shape our environments, our
economies and our life in perhaps not so obvious a manner. Things around us are
part and parcel of our lived experience.
Human geography
delineates and details how people relate to the world around them, including
the human response to landscape. Going beyond immediate factors like economic
conditions, the human geographer may study, for example, the materials used in
constructing a house, architecture, morals and others, qualitatively
researching a facet of culture. As such, it combines geography, philosophy,
psychology, religion, art and most importantly, the human self.
Among many ways of
studying human geography is a methodology based on open-ended conversations,
which allows researchers to collect data about what people say and what they
do.
A built space, a piece
of concrete, a dam, a water pipe—any piece of infrastructures can ease a human
geographer into studying equations of power, poverty, access and deprivation,
of power and politics.
For Siddharth Menon,
it is built space. Rather than focusing on aspects of design of built space, he
focuses on the tangible: the actual materials of the built space, with what
materials buildings are made, where they come from, who are involved, what it
is doing for them, what it is doing to the landscape.
That way of thinking
connected him to places and people.
“That was my focus as
a practising architect and I have continued to think about building materials
as a critical social scientist,” he says.
Menon got his
undergraduate degree in architecture from Mumbai University in 2011. The degree
took him to drawings—plans, elevations, sections of the built environment, but
it did not prepare him to ask critical questions about the built environment.
He then worked as a professional architect in rural India from 2011 to
2016—Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, West Bengal, and
Odisha. He encouraged building with local materials, techniques, and skills. In
2016, he decided to study the structural conditions under which communities
across rural India are shifting house building materials from kuccha to pucca
or mud to concrete, and entered a Masters programme in Geography at the
University of Colorado in Boulder, USA. He is now a PhD student in Geography at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.
The social sciences
have traditionally used cultural and social categories as frameworks of
analysis. But the recent direction has been to study how materials around us
shape our social life. Menon is writing a thesis on the ethnography of
concrete. He is exploring the social and material life of concrete in rapidly
urbanising South Asia, especially in Kerala and documenting its impact on
economies, environments and on us.
As we have a social
life, concrete has a social life. Oh, sand has it too.
For Fountain Ink,
Menon maps the terrain of his thinking and walks us through the geographies of
his work.
Infrastructures: it’s physical, visual
structures, as commonly understood. But what do they connote, what is their
implication.
There’s been a huge interest in infrastructure construction in the recent past. Recent data suggests most of India’s urbanisation will be fuelled by private housing and infrastructure building. There has been quite a lot of interest on infrastructure in the humanistic social sciences. Until now, scholars started their analysis from social categories like class, gender, caste, and other identities trying to understand how these were being challenged, contested, and transformed, or not. The study of infrastructure inverses that process.
One starts with what
you call ‘physical visual structures’ and then unearths the social process
those structures conceal. For example, a road or a house in India is about the
materials and the form of it, but also about the dreams, aspirations, and
desires that come with it. That may be the desire for modernity, aspirations
for economic progress, and security. All of these emotions are used by
governments to push infrastructure projects because they are known to produce
economic activity. These projects also bring forth a whole set of technocrats
and experts, like bureaucrats, engineers, contractors, labourers, involved in
its construction and who try to engineer this thing and make it happen. So
infrastructure is more than just technical physical things, it is an assemblage
of materials, identities, landscapes, states, people, dreams, etc.
When and how did you encounter this web,
these assemblages and felt like figuring it out for yourself.
After years of
practice, I realised that most clients who wanted to build with mud were
well-meaning elite members of India: social activists, NGOs, intellectuals,
entrepreneurs. Local masons I worked with didn’t want mud at all, everyone
aspired to concrete. I was interested in understanding their reasons and hence
decided to study urban space through a theoretical lens, and hence human
geography.
During my travels
across rural India, I witnessed first-hand the wealth and diversity of
indigenous building techniques across the Indian subcontinent. There exist rich
time-honed practices of building houses with local materials, techniques, and
skills. I never learnt this in architecture school. That’s what first got me
hooked to building materials.
Thereafter, elite
urban India thought people in rural India were switching to concrete only
because it was cheaper than local materials, because of its political economy,
they were not aware of the environmental consequences. Very soon, I realised
that is not the case. That’s when I understood that popular knowledge about the
shift in construction practices is limited and I needed to study it further.
Before starting
research, I was strongly against
concrete use because of the environmental damage it caused. I advocated against
concrete both through my practice and my writings and teachings. But I realised
that like other things in life, it wasn’t as black and white. Concrete can also
be an excellent material under certain conditions and one needed to understand
them and its connection to shifting cultural values in our cities.
So infrastructure is more than just technical physical things, it is an assemblage of materials, identities, landscapes, states, people, dreams, etc.
So, what are thoughts on the meaning of
social and material life of concrete. When we use term ‘life’ it implies
existence, growth, and others.
It refers to a recent
move in the humanistic social sciences to take seriously the agency of
non-humans things to shape how social life unfolds. Concrete has a social life.
These are the connections, networks, and relationships that are formed during
concrete construction in cities. Between bureaucrats, cement retailers,
contractors, cement companies, builders, civil engineers, labourers, sand
dredgers, etc. My research aims to reveal these complex structures and actors
that control concrete construction.
But, for a long time
in the social sciences, the science of the material and how it shapes ways of
living has been neglected. Therefore, I will also study how the material life
of concrete shapes different political economic aspects of cities. For example,
sand is a crucial component of concrete. Where is it coming from, what is it
doing to landscapes and people involved in dredging, how is it creating
conditions of extreme climate change events like the 2018 Kerala floods and
landslides, etc?
Concrete...Why? Why does that ring a
bell for you...drive you to study it?
My interest in
concrete comes from my work as a grassroots architect in rural India.
Traditionally all buildings across the world used locally sourced materials
like mud, bamboo, stone, wood, etc. In India, one still finds places where this
takes place today. But this is changing, as people rapidly replace these kuccha
materials with modern pucca materials like cement, concrete, steel,
glass, paint, etc. My personal interest in this narrative emerged when I
witnessed this transition taking place right now. I was particularly interested
in the cultural politics of this transition where the urban elite critiqued it
while living in fancy city condominiums and second homes.
Rural and peri-urban
communities aspired for the same things as their urban counterparts, they
wanted materials like concrete. And they were well aware of the environmental
damage they caused. I came to know when speaking to Bihariji, a mason from
Himachal Pradesh who worked with me. He said that all these rich city people
are coming to our villages to build their second homes in mud, we’re not
inspired by it. We just want to build in pucca.
Concrete is a political material and one needs to study how so...could you please explain. It’s also economic, environmental material and artefact...
Concrete is used in
almost every urban infrastructure. This makes it the second most consumed
material on earth after water. The material is assembled together on building
sites using cement, stone aggregate, water, and the labour of construction
workers. The cement industry has been a great help to the economy of countries.
This can be witnessed with China’s investment in urban construction requiring
cement. This can also be witnessed with the growth of the Indian cement
industry post-liberalisation and with the amount of jobs the cement and
concrete industry provides.
If cement is the
muscle of concrete, sand and stone are the skeleton that give concrete its
robust shape. Sand and stone are extracted from rivers and hills. For concrete,
the best sand is river sand because of its lower salinity and jagged edges.
There are numerous reports of violent contestations around sand mining across
India and of illegal sand mafias.
In Kerala, sand mining
from rivers has been banned except for a few rivers. This forced builders to
look to M-sand or manufactured sand, produced by blasting quarry rock into fine
particles. Rock quarrying has sprung up across the Western Ghats, most of them
illegal, and a lot of them were responsible for the severity of the Kerala
floods and landslides in 2018 and 2019.

What about your observations on Kerala,
in terms of your research.
I’m still at initial
stage of research in Kerala, but it’s a unique case study. First, the
consecutive 2018 and 2019 floods and landslides caused massive death and
destruction. It was well-publicised that this was a human-induced disaster. One
of the causes was excessive development, particularly around cities like Kochi,
which led to unchecked sand dredging and stone quarrying in local rivers and
hills, and all this increased the severity of the disaster. The study on the
use of concrete in urban construction in Kochi and Kerala will be timely in
terms of understanding its role in the environmental degradation climate change
disasters.
Kerala is also
important because it has the been at the forefront of sustainable building
initiatives through the work and legacy of Laurie Baker. It will be important
to see how his values are being challenged, contested, extended in today’s
Kerala.
Could you give personal examples of how
concrete affected the local environment, how it redrew social relations, and
how it affected local economy.
In the Kangra valley
of Himachal Pradesh, houses were always built with adobe or sun dried mud
bricks, bamboo, stone, wood, and slate tiles for roof. All these materials were
sourced either from your land, village or within a 35 km radius. With the rise of
pucca houses, there have been changes. Local rivers have been licenced
to the kedaars or contractors who arrive with tractors and extract sand
and stone from the riverbed. This alters the rate of flow and course of rivers.
Coupled with climate change and precarious living in the Himalayas, there is a
disaster waiting to happen. When houses were built with mud, all the skills
were also sourced within in the village, the money spent on a house circulated
in the village economy, to the mason, carpenter, stone cutter, all of whom were
neighbours.
This has changed with
market products, where the money is funnelled straight to the banks of fancy
corporations in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru, leading to stagnation in the
village economy. In terms of social relations, earlier all building tasks were
performed by a master mason along with a team of apprentices and helpers.
Everyone knew what they had to do and how the overall project would evolve,
they were skilled to different extents.
Concrete has given
rise to building contractors who come with truck loads of migrant labour, low
paid and tasked with the menial and laborious job of mixing and pouring
concrete. This has led to de-skilling of local labour force and a strain on
social relations in the village. The contractors are invariably from higher
castes, thereby widening existing social inequalities. Also, it increases the
gap between higher-paid experts like contractors, engineers, architects, and
lowest-paid labourers, who are mostly migrants and primarily women.
How does concrete get entangled in
socio-material realities and how did it become part of human life and hence of
politics.
Politics happens when there are contestations around something. With the social transformation that is being fuelled by concrete construction, it’s leading to more contestation between different sections of society. Some communities are benefiting from it, others are not. Historically, cities use concrete because of its robust, timeless qualities. While the material is associated with modernity its roots are also very rudimentary; almost any person can with minimal training use concrete to build. This aspect has really led to democratisation of building practices, since anyone can buy a bag of cement and build it. These aspects have made it so pervasive across the Indian landscape.
How does concrete provide a framework or lens to study different aspects of life such as power, poverty, access and denial and so on...
After water, concrete
is the second most consumed material on earth. One can’t walk two feet in a
city without encountering this basic material. It is the de facto
material of urbanisation across the world. Hence, it becomes a fundamental part
of contemporary life in cities; in concrete are hidden dreams, desires, ideas,
discourses. For example, in Himachal Pradesh, people liked to build with pucca
because it represented progress and development, people felt emotions like
pride and prestige when they owned a concrete house; concrete became a useful
means of storing value, concrete also opens up a lot of historic questions in
terms of state-led development initiatives.
Historically, concrete
has been around for more than two millennia; it was used by nomadic tribes in
west Asia and by the Roman empire, so it is not a new material. The main thing
about contemporary concrete is that it used Portland cement, which was patented
in the 19th century in England and then exported to every part of the British
empire to make colonial and military infrastructure. It could do things that
traditional materials could not, like span longer distances and carry heavier
loads. It created a feeling of awe for the colonised people. Thereafter, in
postcolonial India, big projects like dams and canals were promoted by the
state as “temples of modern India”, new modernist cities like Chandigarh were
built out of concrete. In these ways, concrete became a synonym for development
and modernity in India. These reasons make concrete a good analytical lens and
framework to look at larger social relations in contemporary Indian cities.
Concrete is a great way of storing value, both cultural value and economic value, people call it liquid rock. Once you build a house in concrete, it should last 2-3 generations, that’s the goal for people, so it’s a great place to invest money since a well built concrete house will last long.
You say you have gone from critic of
concrete to believing it works under some circumstances.
As mentioned, contemporary concrete came to India through British colonial rule in the late 19th century. Thereafter, it was used by the postcolonial state to build dams and modern cities, it came to be associated with modernity. Today people will go to any length to make a concrete house, even if that means going into debt. They might just have money to make the house half pucca and half kuccha, an incremental way, they will do that; some houses might only have a pucca plaster, it might be kuccha from the inside, people will also do that, so the cultural value of using concrete plays out in different ways on the ground.
Concrete is a great
way of storing value, both cultural value and economic value, people call it
liquid rock. Once you build a house in concrete, it should last 2-3
generations, that’s the goal for people, so it’s a great place to invest money
since a well built concrete house will last long.
There is also an issue
of maintenance. Mud houses need to be maintained every day/week in terms of mud
and cowdung plaster. This has also changed with concrete houses, since
maintenance costs have gone down, but heating and cooling costs have gone up,
because mud houses are thermodynamically much better. So, there are many
factors why people are building concrete house, and all of them need to be
taken into account.
Why is this research important?
We live in an increasingly urban world where two-thirds of world’s population is set to live in urban settlements by 2050 according to the latest UN study. India is set to add more than 400 million urban residents by then. Most of this urbanisation will take place through housing and infrastructure in peri-urban regions of cities with concrete. It is imperative that this widespread concretisation of the Indian landscape occurs as equitably as possible without further social and environmental inequalities. My research on concrete construction in peri-urban Kochi will have important policy implications for these expanding peripheries.
The first goal is to
identify the structures of the phenomenon of ubiquitous concrete use. The next
goal is to inform policies of both urban planning and environmental regulation
regarding concrete construction. The latter is still a while away.
One should care
because we live in a world where climate change is a daily part of reality, and
our actions have a direct impact on all our interdependent lives. Concrete is a
crucial part of this reality as it is the de facto material of
urbanisation across the Global South. Across India, we see how sand has become
a rare commodity with violent struggles for its control, a lot of which is for
concrete. Therefore, it’s important to study how we build our houses, why we do
so, and its effects of social and environment.
What role do architects have in urban
and rural India...given climate crises impacts like flooding, heat, heat island
effect, and disease.
Architects don’t have
much of a role to play here, because in developing countries like India, less
than 10 per cent of all buildings are built by architects. The rest are built
by home-owners, contractors and local masons. I would argue that the impact of
architects in India is negligible. It’s more important that we understand how
the remaining 90 per cent of India builds, especially in times of extreme
climate change events, because they are going to be more frequent and more
severe.
You have travelled a lot. Please share
your personal experiences in some of the places you had been to.
I worked in different
part of the rural India, there exist fascinating ways of building in different
parts of the country. Himachal Pradesh uses sun-dried mud brick or adobe, UP
also uses the same, Telangana uses cob construction, Sunderbans uses wattle and
daub, etc. These techniques are time-honed and linked to agricultural
lifestyles. Since agricultural lifestyles are changing, so are the ways of
building homes; roads are connecting remote villages to the market, trucks come
in and bring factory-made commodities like cement and steel. So there is a whole political economy of
urbanisation that make some of these energy intensive materials very cheap to
use as compared to local materials. Here you also have state-led policies that
promote pucca houses as a part of development, which promote more
cement, but because of concrete’s colonial and postcolonial history, it has
also cultural significance.
It’s not just any
material; it’s a material that carries with a great deal of cultural
significance, as it is the material of the elite. These ideas are also
propagated by the cement industry with their ads for cement taking it to
different parts of the country. According to the last census, India has 833
million people in rural areas, by 2050, 430 million of this population is going
to be living in urban areas, so that means 430 million people will be building
concrete houses. Environmental damage will be huge, both in terms of carbon
dioxide emissions while manufacturing cement, and sand and stone extraction for
making concrete, especially in light of how these contribute to floods and
landslide in Kerala.
Combined with global climate change, which we know is happening, this really will spell trouble for all of us. But the problem with natural disasters is that while everyone might be using concrete, floods and other disasters, affect people differently, depending on their position in society. We understand that concrete has a lot of benefits to build our cities, but important thing is how we use it judiciously.