restaurants. At the same time, if you look at an example, of the village on the outskirts of New York, where they went back into the precedence of spines of streets, anchoring the neighbour- hood. They tried to create a village Dubai as well…
TN: Even in Bangalore with the Phoenix mall.
NG: Maybe the BDA complex does not need to be only retail in that sense. That is what is interest-
ing about the complex because it is not retail. There is retail, with neighbourhood equipment, hos-
pitality, public services, green spaces… The shops are one part of it. It is a community centre in a way….
AS: It is more a convenience store blown up. It needs to be convenient. I don’t want to take my
car, and park it. The interfacing of the BDA complex is very important…
RK: You can make the BDA complex into Brigade Gateway in terms of FSI – that is the commercial value that is inherent in that property. It is 37 acres… No Government will not want to do what Potsdamer did… and it is good that they went to Renzo Piano, who said let it be all terra-cotta and it was all terra-cotta and not Jean Nouvel who would have said, let it be all glass and it would have been all glass…. It is nice, and Potsdamer is a success story. The BDA with good intentions and good methodology and someone responsible on making it look and act right can be a suc- cess story. It is just that we should not discourage the idea because we have a failure in our sys- tems. At the same time people try to cover Commercial Street, Brigade Road, that would destroy it making it something in Las Vegas with neon lights blinking… All those are not real answers, just iconic possibilities. They are not true answers to the system.
I agree with you (Akhila) that there must be participation, in the programme of its writing. Whether it is a mall or these kinds of new enterprises or whether it is Brigade Gateway, which is a huge fail- ure for public activity. Everybody likes to go and hug themselves to the edge of the lake. The big- gest success story is the lake that is created in the project.
NG: We heard about that
TN: There are many lakes in Bangalore and nobody uses any of them…
RK: You need that lake in Brigade Gateway, that is a public event. Just to be able to enjoy the beauty of the lake and do something more to it than just look at the lake. The same should hap- pen. There are methods. Rangashankara, allows every person, with no security screening, you can do a dharna there, it is the nature of the brief of the place. Whereas you cannot do that in Chow- daiah.
NG: Can you do that along the lake in Brigade Gateway? Use it as a public space that does not involve dining along the lake in restaurants?
RK: No. It is not that space at all.
TN: What is your vision for the development of this commercial activity in 20 years? We all know that the mall system will obviously fail in 20 or 30 years because the history of the mall, the mall has been created in the U.S. with the development of the Broadacre and the development of the pri- vate car mobility. The time span of the mall is highly related to the mobility issue in a way.