Mumbai Architects Tell Us About The Emotional Cost Of Living In A City In Constant Flux

The cities we live in shape how we think, feel, and relate to others. From the design of our homes to the layout of our neighbourhoods, architecture determines how we experience the world. In cities like Mumbai, where change is constant and redevelopment is relentless, the loss of older, more intimate spaces has deep effects on people’s emotional health. The chawls and narrow lanes that once brought neighbours together are now replaced by towers that isolate. As Mumbai remakes itself, the question becomes: what kind of city are we building for our minds?

Architect Sarika Shetty, Partner at SJK Architects, believes that architecture shapes both behaviour and emotion from a young age. “If a school is an uninspiring space, it can do so much damage to how you think, how you behave, how you interact,” she says. For her, the design of spaces where people spend long hours — schools, offices, and homes — directly influences mental wellbeing. In one of her projects for the International Organization of Migration in Geneva, she and her team designed the building “around historic oak and pine trees” and created open staircases and breakout spaces to bring people closer to nature. “When you are enabling humanitarian work in war-torn zones,” she said, “what gives people solace is soil, earth, and nature.”

Shetty explains that sensory cues like light, sound, and texture help people connect to themselves and to others. She describes how scale and light affect our moods — a small classroom can comfort a child, while an airy space with shifting light can uplift an adult. “Scale is something that you can be in awe of, or scale is something that will comfort you,” she says. “Light and shadow and the drama that it creates is something absolutely beautiful when you see the same space emoting different emotions as the sun moves.”

Beyond individual experience, Shetty stresses that architecture can strengthen community life. In her design for a Jain heritage museum near Ahmedabad, she proposed lifting the main museum above ground to create an open, public plaza below — a “non-ticketed space” where anyone could gather. “Community spaces allow for people to come together and allow for dialogue, discussions, conversations,” she says. To her, every city needs spaces that invite people in, not shut them out.

This belief ties closely to the social fabric of Mumbai, a city where physical proximity often hides deep divisions. “In a dense metropolis like Bombay, where buildings do not have space for kids to play — where are your playgrounds?” Shetty asks. She points out that true community can only exist when people of different income groups share the same environment. “In Bombay, the disjuncture is so evident, but both are needy of each other. They fill the gaps in each other.” Her point is simple — when architecture segregates, cities lose their humanity.

Architect Rajeev Trehan, who has spent over three decades designing large-scale projects with Hafeez Contractor, echoes a similar concern. Having worked in Mumbai since 1990, he has seen the city’s skyline and its social texture change dramatically. “It was a bungalow scheme and bungalows became mid-rises and mid-rises became high-rises,” he says. The rapid pace of redevelopment, he believes, must be seen within a “larger, holistic view.” Urban growth, rural sustenance, and environmental balance all have to coexist. “We have to find some systems, ways, something where we can fulfil our needs without really eating up the planet’s resources,” he says.

Trehan also points to the responsibility architects hold. “Architecture is not a short-term thing for an exhibition,” he says. “It stays there for years and it shapes the way people live and how they experience life.” For him, the success of a project isn’t about how it looks on day one, but how it feels decades later — when “people who live there don’t want to leave it.”

Like Shetty, Trehan believes that public spaces are key to collective wellbeing. “Public spaces are key to any city,” he says, drawing on examples like Central Park in New York and Hyde Park in London. He argues that Indian cities need large-scale open spaces where people can gather, walk, and rest, along with smaller neighbourhood squares. “Maybe the developer, the designer, and the local community all come together to make sure they don’t lose out economically, but still create communal spaces,” he suggests.

Both architects point to the same truth: design decisions determine emotional outcomes. The absence of sunlight in an apartment, the lack of public gardens, or the disappearance of old street corners can heighten alienation. As Shetty puts it, “We are all human beings who need connections and emotions to be alive as human beings. And that happens only through conversations.”

Architecture can enable or prevent those conversations. It can build walls or create meeting grounds. The difference lies in how we choose to shape our spaces, and whether we design cities that care for the minds of the people who live in them.

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