Engineer, planner who built Navi Mumbai and India's 1st flyover, dies at 92

Shirish Patel, one of the pillars of urban planning in Mumbai, is perhaps best known as one of three authors, along with Charles Correa and Pravina Mehta, for their plan to develop Navi Mumbai across the harbour, and for coordinating the work of a multi-disciplinary team for the planning and construction of this new city.

- Pankaj Joshi

I first met Shirish Patel, who died in Mumbai on Friday at 92, in the late 1990s when he was an integral part of the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC), and later got to know him better when he was on the board of Mumbai Metropolitan Region Heritage Conservation Society (MMRHCS) and at the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) where he advised us on city and regional planning issues.

These interactions gave me a first-hand insight into his multi-disciplined persona. We worked relentlessly on several of Mumbai's urban issues, and although our association of over two decades had a huge number of failures and also a few successes, our interactions fructified into lucid urban thought and language on critical problem-solving in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

One of our innovative recommendations to conserve and maintain Mumbai's heritage fabric was to focus on providing 'heritage incentives,' and not just saddling people with heritage regulations which seemed burdensome to many.

We also studied Mumbai's development control regulations, preparing a serious critique, especially on DCR 33 which doled out additional FSI for several categories, generated out of thin air. We facilitated the opening up of the Development Plan process to a decentralised rigorous public consultation and advocacy through agreed-upon values and principles. We drafted out copious documentation to use population density as a tool for creating good urban plans rather than the market-led FSI measure.