Protecting the Identity of an Everyday Heritage Street: Dastur Meher Road, Pune Cantonment, and the Draft Building Bye-laws, 2016

Abstract

Dastur Meher Road is a narrow bazaar street in the civil area of the Pune Cantonment, India. It grew in the nineteenth century when the British military invited traders to settle beside its camp. Parsi, Bohra, Goan and Anglo-Indian families-built shop-houses here, with shops on the ground floor and homes above. The result is a street of timber-framed, two-storey buildings with carved brackets, enclosed balconies and sloping tiled roofs. None of these buildings, except a Parsi fire temple, is formally protected, and the street is now changing through demolition, high-rise infill and careless repair. This paper documents the precinct and proposes a framework for its management. The study used archival maps, building-by-building survey, figure-ground, land-use, building-age and height mapping, measured drawings, transect walks, behavioural observation and informal interviews with residents. The findings show that the street still keeps a continuous edge, a human scale and a shared community life across religions. They also show that its survival was partly an accident of planning rules: a permissible floor space index (FSI) of 1.00, against an existing built density of about 2.00, made rebuilding unattractive to owners. A comparison with the draft Pune Cantonment Board Building Bye-laws, 2016 shows that this protection would be lost, since existing floor area could be rebuilt in buildings of up to ground plus four floors, while the same bye-laws provide a heritage regulation that has not yet been applied to the street. Tenancy, low rents, lack of awareness and the absence of design controls continue to erode the fabric. The paper proposes a heritage management framework adapted from international charters and from the policy statement of The Rocks in Sydney. It includes a vision, listing and grading of the precinct under the heritage chapter of the draft 2016 bye-laws, a special precinct regulation, design guidelines for infill and repair, public realm improvements, a heritage walk, a conservation cell within the Cantonment Board and a programme of public participation. Read through the physical setting, activity and meaning of the place, the findings show that the draft rules threaten the identity of the street and not only its buildings. The paper argues that ordinary, unlisted streets such as Dastur Meher Road carry much of a city's identity, and that they can be conserved only if the values of their community are conserved together with their buildings.