Engineer & planner, who left his imprint on Mumbai's skyline

TRIBUTE TO SHIRISH PATEL

- Smruti Koppikar

At 92, when most professionals, even the passionate among them, would have shuttered their work, Shirish B Patel was still at it.

One of his last emails to me, among the many received over the decades, detailed why the proposed redevelopment of the BDD Chawls in Worli would take Mumbai further down the slippery slope.

He had consistently argued that "builder-driven slum redevelopment" would not change the lives of Mumbai's poorest. In cities across India, as unequal in multiple ways as Mumbai, Patel argued that land for low-income housing should be taken off the market mechanism that had come to determine property housing prices and availability in the post-liberalized city.