ABSTRACT
The everyday environment of Gangtok, India, has failed to impress the professionals. Although the city is set in the beautiful foothills of the Himalayas, professionals call its built environment unsightly and disorganized. Public buildings and spaces do have admirers: Most upper-middle-class people and professionals are proud of how well, for example, the main market square is designed and maintained. This chapter focuses on (ordinary) private buildings. The city government has laws aimed at directing the growth of the city toward its ideals, although these hardly address the natural setting. With the high volume of new construction of private buildings, the city continues to maintain its informal (lived) character. For ordinary people, especially the “owner-builders” who have crafted the existing built environment, architects and planners are involved in abstract thinking, impersonal strategies, and expensive projects. As in Daanchi, the modern building forms and techniques arrive in Gangtok without the experts and the infrastructure really needed (Chapter 8). The standardized building regulations of the city have little meaning for Dilip, Dorji, Kamal, and others (discussed below) who operate at the level of individual buildings, immediate surroundings, and local knowledge. The relationships between their buildings and the surroundings are shaped by their individual needs and the requirements of those who are directly affected by these spaces. This chapter focuses on the conflict between the standardized norms and everyday individual building that produces localities. Small property owners are expected to build according to policies and live in the abstract city, in “assigned” spaces within the city conceived by its authorities. Ordinary citizens hire architects and engineers, but only to comply with the law on paper to satisfy the authorities, not when they actually build their houses fulfilling their own needs and wants. They build “by themselves,” with the help of local builders (contractors). These owner-builders introduced in this chapter are not squatters with no legal rights to their land, but belong to a middle-income group.
