Mumbai: In a city where private greed tends to overtake public good, Shirish Patel was a tireless advocate for equitable urban development. The distinguished civil engineer and urban planner passed away on Friday night at the age of 92.
Patel was the designer of the first flyover in India—the Kemps Corner Flyover—built in 1965. But like many of his generation, he strayed far beyond his profession to engage with the urban and social challenges facing a young nation. He played a role in the early development of Mumbai — helping to conceive and plan Navi Mumbai — and remained actively engaged with urban issues until the end of his life.
Born in 1932, Patel spent his early school years in Karachi before moving to Bombay, where his father Bhailal Patel became the first Indian municipal commissioner. After studying engineering at Cambridge University, he worked on large dams, including the Karina Dam in Zambia and the Koyna Dam in Maharashtra, before starting his own engineering firm. In 1965, he along with Charles Correa and Pravina Mehta proposed a new city across the harbour to take the load off Mumbai. Five years later, he was made chief planner with City & Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco), the agency created to build Navi Mumbai.
“He saw city development as a multidisciplinary subject, and not just about architecture and infrastructure,” said V K Phatak, former chief planner at the MMRDA, who knew him from the 1970s. At Cidco, Patel assembled a uniquely diverse team, made up of not just engineers and architects but also economists and social scientists. “His commitment to social justice in city development was very strong,” Phatak said.
Patel’s interests were diverse and far-reaching—he served on the municipal heritage committee, was involved in research on an industrial solar cookstove, and helped found HDFC, the Housing Development Finance Corporation. He made many trips to see the bridges of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Patel nurtured an abiding love for Indian classical music, and he and his wife Rajani were close friends of the singer Kumar Gandharva. Throughout his life, he quietly supported the education of children in interior India, reaching places that had eluded the govt.
In recent decades, he had become a vocal yet thoughtful critic of Mumbai’s development policies, which he felt had been captured by real estate interests. Although he had built the city’s first flyover, he was critical of their proliferation in recent years, which he described as a “madness” that was destroying the urban fabric and encouraging the use of motor cars at the cost of public transport. He criticised the new coastal road for the same reason.
At the age of 87, he and another planner filed a public interest petition against the govt’s redevelopment plan for the BDD chawls in Worli, arguing that it would densify the area and lead to health and environmental issues among residents. He was not anti-change, however. Rather, he proposed an alternative building plan that would be less dense and create more open space, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Last year, he challenged the municipality’s decision to replace the Malabar Hill reservoir, suggesting that it could easily just be repaired.
“He was a polymath practitioner who was an extremely sharp but measured voice on an array of issues in the city from public housing, conservation, FSI deployment to broader questions of planning and engineering. And a vocal critic of the deplorable state of planning culture in our urban areas—a voice that will be truly missed,” said Rahul Mehrotra, architect and chair of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
