In every way, Kathmandu is increasingly becoming a model of what not to do — in politics, in waste management, in the water sector, in transportation and in construction. Sadly, the same process seems to be underway across Nepal’s emerging cities and towns. Before it’s too late, other cities and towns need to learn deep lessons from how things have gone grotesquely wrong in Kathmandu. They will be doomed like Kathmandu otherwise.

In my essay last week, I had argued that Kathmandu’s buildings would eventually lead to its own demise. I received several e-mails from readers and some of my Facebook friends also commented on it online. Many were thankful to me, albeit a bit terrified by the prospect of Kathmandu turning into a dead city in the aftermath of a major earthquake. Some asked me what I thought needed to be done. One friend was a bit disappointed by what he thought was my scare-mongering. All of them were normal human reactions, indeed. I knew later on that I had forgotten to add a caveat then. A dire future awaits Kathmandu unless two sets of actions are taken with the greatest sense of urgency: Stem the tide of grotesquely unsafe new buildings and retrofit the existing bad ones.

The more I think of this, the more I realise, however, that these are Herculean, if not impossible, tasks both technically and socially. We don’t have enough designers in place who could chart out those actions on a massive scale. Most of our designers — the architects and civil engineers — are adept at promoting the same building frenzy we have been seeing during the last five decades. They make great money making the same designs. They make more money in kickbacks and commissions in buying and selling cement, sand, concrete, iron and other building materials. Most importantly, during the last 30 years, there has been great deskilling in the field of building masonry. A friend who has been trying to promote bamboo, adobe and compressed earth block construction told me recently that he

had to pay very high daily wages to masons who could work with these materials. There are only a few of them left in town, he told me. Most of the current masons  graduated through their cement-concrete-iron building experiences. I doubt reskilling for earthquake resistant as well as ecologically saner building could occur fast enough to avoid the impending doom.

Given the sorry state of our politics, this task looks socially pretty uphill at the moment. It requires a new kind of political process that goes beyond the current naked Machiavellian pursuits of raw state power. It requires a political process that has deep social content embedded in it. It requires political leadership which is open to learning new things. It means a different leadership from the ones that dominate all our political institutions. Just ask any leader in any of our political parties what they think are the serious problems in society. I can assure you that you will be presented with the same clichéd generalised mantras we have been hearing during the last six decades of bikas. As a result, we have a situation in which for each good (read earthquake-safe) building being built, we are adding hundreds if not thousands of others that are both ugly and unsafe.

I am sympathetic to a good friend of mine who cautioned me against creating terror through my writing. But it appears Kathmandu as a city is doomed (I want to be proven wrong, though). In response to that friend’s comment on my Facebook page, I suggested to him that he should work on retrofitting his house as soon as he can so that his mother would not have to go through sleepless nights. When a big earthquake hits, you have to survive to move out of this city. That’s the only way you will not be doomed together with the city.   

The sad thing is that you go out of the valley and you see the same trends everywhere. The same rickety concrete-and-cement structures dot the major cities of Pokhara, Butwal, Narayangarh and Biratnagar, to name just a few. Even far away villages are involved in this. It has become common to see cement-laden mules trudging along mountain trails. Just look at how are our public offices, schools and hospitals are being built.

As part of a teaching tour for a Nepal-related course of an American college recently, I visited several villages along the Gurung Heritage Trails of Kaski and Lamjung districts. Ghalegaon was the first stop. All of its villages were traditional mud-mortar, stone-wall and stone-roof houses. Even here,the schools were cement-concrete-iron structures with tin roofs. As you approach the village, the first thing you see is a chautara — which had a cement platform.

In Nagidhar village of Kaski, almost all the houses had walls built with stone with mud mortar. The roofs were tin. Except for three buildings, the local mother’s group office-cum-entertainment building, childcare centre and health post, which were all cement-concrete structures. The closer you go to the highways and emerging cities, the more you begin to see the prominence of cement-concrete-iron structures. In Chitwan, a prominent hotelier was telling us how he had begun to advise his colleagues not to go after the cement-concrete-iron building model and instead learn from and improve upon the adobe building practices of the indigenous Tharus. A hopeful sign, except, everywhere in Chitwan thousands of new buildings are cropping up that are nothing but copy-cat structures.

Most of our engineering schools had virtually no interest in learning from the Tharus of Chitwan or the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley. Kathmandu’s place as a seat of power went hand in hand with the way it also became the model to look upon when it came to creating our buildings. Every town, big or small, began to ape this city. For its own part, Kathmandu learned the art of self-destruction and self-defilement from New Delhi, Kolkata or Mumbai. Consequently, the most enduring feature of the last five decades of modernisation’s inroads into Nepal was this mono-cultured building frenzy. And it is this frenzy which will be the source of its own doom. Except, sadly, this doom will be very costly both in terms of human and ecological costs. Can emerging towns search for other ways of making buildings?

Anil Bhattarai: anilbhattarai@gmail.com

source: Bhattarai, A. (2010),"Building blunders",The Kathmandu Post, 2 August 2010