The average Mumbai resident has 1.28 square metres of open space. Smaller than a bathmat.
Walking through Mumbai a day after visiting the Mumbai Collective, one thought kept surfacing and wouldn’t go away: open space here is the costliest thing in the city. The rarest privilege on offer, and almost nobody has any.
We then googled the numbers. The average Mumbai resident has 1.28 square metres of open space. Smaller than a bathmat. In the city’s wealthiest pockets it rises to about 9.4, and that counts as good news.
You can watch what that number does to people on any Saturday morning. The highways toward Lonavala and Alibaug fill with the same instinct: get out, find air, find something green, come back before Monday. Somewhere along those highways the instinct hardens into a purchase. A plot. Two acres, maybe three. A place of one’s own in the hills.
We understood the impulse. We weren’t convinced it addressed the problem.
Consider what a plot actually gives you. A rectangle, surveyed and fenced, with more rectangles being sold around it. A developer buys a hundred acres and draws lines, smaller and smaller, until the landscape becomes a hundred parcels, because more parcels mean more buyers. The openness that made the land worth wanting is the first thing subdivided away.
Then the rectangle becomes your entire world. You solve for water alone: your borewell, your tanker in April. You solve for power, road access, security, and the slow problem of who watches the place during the fifty weeks a year you aren’t there. Your attention narrows to the boundary. What happens on the far side of it is somebody else’s business, and what they build there may have nothing to do with what you imagined. You own your acres. You don’t own your view, and you certainly don’t own the ecology that made the land beautiful in the first place.
Look at it plainly and it’s the same arrangement Mumbai already gave you. A small private box, a large public unknown. The box is bigger and the air is better, but the logic hasn’t changed.
So we asked whether the unit itself was wrong.
What if the thing you bought into wasn’t a plot but a landscape, held whole, by a group small enough to keep it whole? Pool capital. Buy scale no individual could justify alone. Then refuse to draw the lines.
The Mumbai Collective is 103 acres held by 45 households.
The Mumbai Collective is 103 acres. Nearly 88% of the land stays open, as forest, orchards, trails and water bodies, and all 103 acres are yours to walk. The houses are capped at 45. Houses designed in response to the climate. Not a concrete glass structure. Nobody arrives in a later season to sell the ridge behind you, building a five-storey building.
A plot asks you to defend a boundary. A landscape asks you to understand a system, and understanding has a way of turning into care, and care into work nobody warned you that you’d enjoy: planting, walking the bunds after rain, spotting migrant birds, and tracking flowering cycles of fruits. Meanwhile, the land is designed to regenerate. Each year it holds more water, grows more food, carries more life.
Open space became the costliest amenity in Mumbai for a reason. It was divided, then divided again. So would you like to do it once more, to a hundred acres, and find yourself in the same box three hours from home?
