Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

Never in human history have we been faced …

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Never in human history have we been faced with urban situations the likes of which we will see in the Asia Pacific Rim over the next 25 years. New urban forms are emerging in cities such as Bangkok, Beijing, Mumbai, Calcutta, Dhaka, Jakarta, Karachi, Manila, Osaka, Seoul, Shanghai, Tianjin and Tokyo.
The rapid growth of Asian cities has been taking place at a time when the impacts of free trade associations, the globalization of decision- making on investment location, and the impacts of the new information- based industries are having a profound effect on city development prospects. Logic of globalization presupposes that integration of cities like these in the world system operates in a hierarchical set up in which upgrading or downgrading of their respective nation states finally determines their actual placement in the system. Such an up gradation in these cities is happening via means of – Structural Adjustment 1. SAP is causing a major shift in emphasis from the government sector as the engine of economic growth to the private sector as a dominant partner in achieving accelerate rate of economic growth.2
Intervention by capital in struggles over the built environment is usually done through the agency of state power. State intervention thus becomes an omnipresent feature in the complex process of shaping and reshaping of the built environment. Various state regulations, legitimizing control over space epitomize the abuse of monopoly power, as the latter is all too easy to accumulate in spatial terms. The exact mix of private market, monopolistic control and state intervention, however, varies from time to time in any urban development endeavor.
Effect of Structural Adjustment on Urban Form
In case of structural adjustment, the dual process of Cost of recovery and Debt servicing as generated out of the acquired loan for infrastructure and development projects, through the means of development credits via World Bank and IMF is being understood and impact of this economic restructuring is now criticized. The criticism is based on the process adopted by these banks for providing the loan, and in turn the steps that need to be adopted by the third world cities for recovery and paying its debt, eventually.

As understood, that World Bank adopts a four-phase program, while granting the loan being:

  • Privatization
  • Capital market liberalization
  • Market-based pricing
  • Free trade

Such a policy clubbed with the adjusting to the status of ‘world cities’ has resulted in various new emerging forms and geographies within the mega cities of Asia. Policies of liberalization and privatization are resulting in massive private enclaves.  Regional plan of Mumbai and the present Master plan of Delhi are suggestive of the same.3
In India, has comes the advent of Mega- City projects, SEZs, Transport and infrastructre development projects, adjusting the Indian Cities to the world city status. Mumbai is one of the five cities included in the centrally sponsored Mega City Scheme launched by the Government of India in the Eighth Five Year Plan. The agencies like World Bank, USAlD, etc. have recommended that the Floor Space Index (FSI) in the central areas of the city should be increased so that multi-storied structures can come up, providing space for business houses, commercial activities and high-income residential units. This would lead to the creation of a few high-density business and high-income residential districts, pushing out households that could not afford the costs. A large number of the industrial units in the post liberalization phase have come up in the villages and small towns around the big cities. The poor are able to find shelter in the “degenerated periphery”, get jobs in the industries located therein or commute to the central city for work 4. The entrepreneurs etc., associated with modem industries and business, however, reside within the central city and travel to the periphery through rapid transport corridors. This process of segmentation, manifested in different variants in different cities, would bring the large part of rural migrants into the peripheral zones

Illustrative figure to exhibit, the phenomenon that would be generated by new east-west linkages in the city of Mumbai- inner areas of city are getting restructured and poor are relocated to periphery
The future that haunts new world cities in the Asia Pacific Rim, are centered at being ‘non- inclusive’, where the growth is emerging as highly uneven and lopsided. Tools of planning are not fully developed, and new policies of development are being adopted without responding to one entire sect of society: the poor. Result is not just a disparity between rich and the poor, but a whole realm of ghettotization and new geographies. Though the phenomena appears similar to the processes that the first world cities, went through, with liberalization in the pre 90s and 80s, the third world cities can never replicate it. It is for the mere fact, that third world cities would always play the role of both the consumer and the producer, thereby affected by the First world cities. The phenomena would continue, if the present day polices and processes continue. It would either result in a massive rebellion by the deprived, (refer to Muoroto Conflict in Kenya, for its political implications) which would fight back for the rights of an inclusive city, or would continue with lopsided development both economically (where half of the nation still is based on agriculture economy) and socially, and would go through the same adverse effects as undergone by African cities such as Kenya, establishing a direct and a disadvantageous link between structural adjustments and urban poor.
References
Books
E.Rodolphe
Shaping Cities: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design
David Harvey
Post Metropolis & Condition of Post Modernity
Master Plan 2021
Articles
Swapna Banerjee-Guha
Ideology of Urban Restructuring in Mumbai: Serving the International Capitalist Agenda

Rushidan Islam Rahman

Consequences of Structural Adjustment

Policies on the Poor

Barney Cohen

Urbanization in developing countries: Current trends,
Future projections, and key challenges for sustainability



Opinion

There are times you contemplate: what is humanity? …

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There are times you contemplate: what is humanity? …Who are we? … We are simply a set of memories. Memories are our experiences of the past and the recollection of the same which is one of the greatest functions of a human mind. It in actual fact makes us individually unique. If we take away those memories we are just another body with a mind. Try to imagine the result if my memories were taken off and some other memories were put in place. Don’t we see that happening in architecture today? We seem to be disregarding our culture, heritage and traditions and replacing it with some one else’s!

When we delve deeper into this experience, you wonder -Is there an external influence beyond yourself? Are you as a person “anything” by yourself? You are a part of the influence of the environment immediately around yourself. That could be your family, friends or your immediate neighbors. Now this faction forms the basic group. Beyond this it’s their interaction and interfaces with the other groups. These groups become sub groups .This may later develop into neighborhood. This neighborhood has its own reflection of architecture. Now these neighborhoods then interact with larger neighborhoods which then have an interactive architectural reflection. Now already the basic entity –“you “is almost lost. May be if he is powerfully dominating he could influence the larger neighborhood but that’s very rare. Eventually, these neighborhood and communities become towns and cities. And cities of influence become nations.

However, today there is a sense of the whole world coming together. That’s because all these influences start merging together to a point that it becomes one. It becomes a compromise. A larger language is heard and expressed. That’s the essence of globalization theory – It says that you can have anything, anywhere in the world at the same cost in the same way. But how can we have a single facet in architecture?

Even trees and plants grow differently in different places. Do the plants on the sea side grow the same way as that on the mountains? Heritage originates from nature. Heritage is the nature. You don’t see nature manifested in the same way in two places –then why should architecture be perceived in a single dimension? When this analogy is directed on a higher perspective- the ultimate form of nature is the human mind. All the other forms of existence are attainable. To a point where any other forms of nature can be recreated. The mind that is capable of comprehending and conceptualizing all this is incapable of being recreated. The brain can be recreated but not the mind. And the mind is the human being .And that mind is the “Architecture”! It is the highest form of expression. You can express culture, heritage, tradition, technology, science and you can even express the mind.

Architecturally we have been taken over by defined spaces of a particular technology rather than the traditional “defined spaces” .The logically consequent defined spaces are influenced by the individual where as the technologically derived defined spaces are pre-designed by a mechanical output process which pronounces that a human being requires a definite quantity of space. It becomes a very industrial, mechanical, global logic process. At times, it takes out all the sensitivity, perspective and rationale out of architecture. Architecture we are seeing today could be anywhere in the world. It does not have any identity, depth and it doesn’t speak beyond itself! They are designed on very hardcore functional patterns of production. Unquestionably, a lot of thinking has gone into it but that thinking has happened somewhere else …not here! And when that expression is used in our context it becomes gibberish. It does not echo the specific needs of our environment. Architecture is responsive, contextual and logical. You will have to connect architecture with circumstance and individual spirit. In architecture, you have the ability to infuse certain traits at will and take away a few at will. You are able to push in and pull out at will according to the contextual framework!

Then again, what is global design? It is obviously a preferred language. It’s like English which is spoken everywhere and can be understood everywhere. It is a global language. However when it comes to India it becomes “hinglish”. We improvise it according to the way we spell, write and speak. That means when you come into the smaller plateaus the dialect and parlance changes. It’s is still a language for communication but varies according to the circumstances and context. This is another interesting way of looking at heritage and tradition .The smallest axis of communication is between two people. When a third person enters the dialogue, he may not understand the communication between those two people. But in spite of everything there is a communication- a primitive communication. Now when this communication goes beyond a few people and to the whole of human race and is taken in by everyone two things happen. The larger issue is understood by everybody but the subtle innuendos and inferences are understood only by the minor fractions. This means that your ability to communicate is limited to the other person’s ability to understand. So the understanding and communication gets marginalized to a point that it gets averaged. That means that anything specific becomes communicated between only two people. And that becomes small nodes of great architecture which some one can appreciate when he understands it. But when you put that language outside its context it becomes pure nonsense. Because it makes no sense in a different context- this is happening in architecture today in this country. Dialects that should have worked somewhere are being thrown in someone else’s place without any contemplation.

On the contrary, if we built our building our way which can’t be built any where else in the world- it becomes more valuable and distinctive. But if we build something that is already perceived in New York or Chicago- No one is going to come here to see it. Why should they? They obviously have better quality buildings of that nature elsewhere. But if we made our buildings our way – as something that can be achieved and realized only here that will create a whole new enterprise. Sometimes I think that if I had a little more time on any of my projects I would forget the purpose of the project and make the project the purpose. People then may not come there for the function of the building but will come there to see the building itself. For instance, people don’t come to see Tajmahal because Mumtazmahal was buried in it. They come to see it because it is a marvel. We should always go beyond the point of purpose to create architectural masterpieces. This sense of working in timeless as well as temporal frameworks makes architecture unparalleled and extraordinary

As Ayn Rand’s particular brand of humanism called objectivism articulates…” Collectivism as an intellectual power and a moral power is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered. I think men will have time to discover them. It is significant that the dying collectivism philosophy of today has produced nothing but a cult of depravity, impotence and despair. Look at modern art and literature with their image of man as a helpless creature doomed to failure, frustration and destruction. This may be the collectivist’s psychological confession, but it is not an image of man. If it were, we would never have risen from the cave. But we did. Look around you and look at history. You will see mans unlimited potentiality for greatness and the faculty that makes it possible. You will see that man is not a helpless monster by nature, but he becomes one when he discards the faculty: mind. And if you ask me what is greatness: I will answer, it is the capacity to live by three fundamental values: reason, purpose and self esteem.”

Opinion, Others

Making Mumbai a Better Place to Live Dhiru …

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Making Mumbai a Better Place to Live
Dhiru A. Thadani, AIA, CNU
Cities in India are changing every day. Most are becoming worse places to live. There are many intersecting forces for this decline, including, increase in population, failing infrastructure, dependency on the automobile, outward sprawling development, and the inability to provide housing for lower- and middle-income residents.
On a recent visit to Mumbai, I was asked if there were any solutions to alleviate this accelerating decline of Indian cities. What was happening in the West? Why were American cities experiencing a renaissance? Why was the quality of life in cities improving, especially in my second city of choice, Washington DC, while there was a noticeable decline in the city of my birth, Mumbai?

Auto attacks
Auto attacks


Cities are the largest and most complex things that we humans make. Despite evidence to the contrary, the knowledge exists on how to make them well. To the politicians and citizens who want to create a better Mumbai, I humbly offer these 10 suggestions.
1. Streets are for People
What makes a city memorable? For the most part it is a well-defined public realm – public spaces defined by the buildings which enfront them and peopled by a vibrant street life. A successful public realm is one that people can inhabit comfortably on foot. Unfortunately, most Indian cities today, including Mumbai, emphasize automobile movement while disregarding the pedestrian. Sidewalks are non-existent or permanently in disrepair, often having been dug up for utility upgrading. Today being a pedestrian in Mumbai is akin to being a soldier on a battlefield navigating through land mines strewn in one’s path of travel.
Traffic engineers for the most part ignore the real needs of pedestrians. For example, parallel parking, essential to protecting and comforting people on the sidewalk, is often eliminated to speed the traffic. Every aspect of the streetscape, including lane widths, curbs, sidewalks, trees, and lighting can be designed to the needs of either cars or people. Mumbai favors the former.
Mumbai should remove the fence barriers along the edges of streets that enclose pedestrians like cattle. Permit pedestrians to cross streets at grade at all intersections. Whoever designed an elevated pedestrian crosswalk must have been in an automobile. They do not work, and they never will. And you only have to walk through a below grade street crossing once, to realize that it is a bad idea.

Mumbai & Cars
Mumbai & Cars

2. Overrule the Specialists
The city by definition is a general enterprise, and the specialist is the enemy of the city. Engineers are not alone in their quest to shape the city around specialized needs. The modern world is full of experts who are paid to ignore criteria beyond their profession. Cities need generalists to weigh the advice of specialists against the common good.
The traffic engineers in their quest to move traffic from north to south propose building 100 above-ground flyovers, without consideration for what this decision does to the quality-of-life for local residents, who have to look and live with this ugly, noisy monstrosity.
Imagine for a moment if someone was to build a concrete bridge 15 feet from your bedroom window, so that the privileged few could save a few minutes of time driving through your neighborhood in the comfort of their air-conditioned capsule.
While cities such as San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Washington DC, to name a few, are demolishing inner-city highways in the interest of quality-of-life for their residents, Mumbai has embarked on a ludicrous and expensive endeavor to build new inner-city highways.
The department of transportation proposes widening existing roads to ease traffic generated by the very sprawl that they cause. Each of these approaches may be correct in a vacuum, but is wrong in a city. It is a proven fact that expanding street width and capacity on existing streets only leads to more traffic. This in turn leads to an increase in accidents, which causes further delays, nullifying the investment’s goal.
The money earmarked for flyover building should be diverted to improving the train and bus network. Additionally, an efficient water taxi service can service both coastlines. As all world-class cities have come to realize, investment in public transportation is the only solution to alleviate congestion. Imagine ten years into the future, what will be on these streets when the price of petrol doubles? Buses not cars.
3. Mix the Uses
Another key to active street life is creating a city that pulsates at all times of the day, with neighborhoods so diverse in use that they are occupied around the clock. Eating, shopping, working, socializing, recreation – these activities are mutually reinforcing and flourish in each other’s presence.
The best parts of Mumbai, have this diverse mix of uses. Neighborhoods are alive during the day when residents are away at work, because workplace and retail are active. Vice-versa in the evening, when the offices and shops are closed, the residences keep the neighborhood vibrant and safe.
Moreover, many businesses such as restaurants, general stores, and health clubs rely on both daytime and evening traffic to cover their rent. The key is to stop building single use zones, such as Nariman Point and Bandra-Kurla which are predominantly workplaces. These places are unsafe in the evening due to a lack of activity. Similarly, stop approving residential enclaves, which are mono-cultures and eventually become residential ghettos.
4. Hide the Parking Lots
In a city such as Mumbai, 90% of the population is pedestrians. The city is obligated to make pedestrians feel safe, comfortable – and entertained.
As the infatuation with automobiles increases in India, so will the need to house these machines. There is nothing more boring than walking past a parking lot. Whether they are open-air or six-stories tall, parking lots must be banished along any street that is inhabited by pedestrians.
In the hands of a skilled designer, parking lots are easy to hide. It only takes a 25-foot-thick wrapper of housing or offices to block an unsightly parking lot or garage from view. New parking structures can easily be built above street-level shops. Enlightened cities globally are putting this requirement into law.
5. Small is Beautiful
People are small when compared to automobiles, and most world-class walkable cities acknowledge this fact with small blocks, small streets, small buildings, and small increments of investment.
The Fort District owes much of its success to its tiny blocks and fine grain that creates an incredibly porous network of streets. Pedestrians like to criss-cross through the fabric, intelligently looking for the shortest routes between two points.
Unfortunately, most of Mumbai has obscenely large blocks that make the city impenetrable. For example, south of Woodhouse Road there is only one east-west connection, making travel between the two coastlines difficult. This problem also exists in the northern part of the city and land for street rights-of-way need to be acquired to help create a true network of streets.
Although 25% of India’s population resides in urban cities, and this number is rapidly growing, building height is another place for smallness. Today’s building codes prevent the making of Marine Drive, one of the most memorable parts of the city. Additionally, it is illegal to achieve the residential density found between Marine Drive and Churchgate rail lines in six story buildings.
Tall buildings place undue stress on a small land parcel. By concentrating population in a single point within the city all systems are pressured including accessibility, parking, garbage removal, water and utility supply, to name a few. In the long run, this creates an unhealthy, unsustainable living condition. A healthy real-estate development community consists of many players, not just a few giants.
6. Save That Building, and by-the-way Remove that Billboard
How many buildings need to be torn down before a city learns the lesson? Every city deeply regrets and laments the destruction of its historic/heritage structures. As a society that pays homage to its elders, historic preservation may be the best way to respect our ancestors. But, it is also justified on economic terms. Market economies suggest that the differentiated product is one that commands a monetary premium. This is why cities like Savannah and Miami Beach can point to historic preservation as the key ingredient in recent booms. It isn’t always easy to find a productive use for an empty old building, but tearing it down makes that outcome impossible.
Additionally, billboards and hoardings illegally installed on buildings and along the highway must be removed. City officials must enforce the recent court ruling. The city should rise beyond this crass commercialism and the visual assault on the human senses.
7. Build Normal (Affordable) Housing
Affordable housing remains a crisis in Mumbai, and the solution is not to build housing projects in the suburbs, which taxes the poor resident with the longest commute. Rather, to be successful, affordable housing must do two things: be integrated with market rate housing, and look like market-rate housing.
Despite the best-intentioned efforts to provide affordable housing, architects should not be permitted to experiment on the poor, or pioneer new design styles for the poor. Most housing projects that have been built in recent years play geometric games that only their designers can understand and appreciate. Experiment on the rich; they can always move out, but the poor do not have a choice. Housing for the poor should provide smaller-than-standard apartments, but they should be stylistically compatible with their neighbors and the context. There should be no visible stigma attached to living in subsidized housing.
8. Build Green / Grow Green
People have been talking about sustainable architecture for decades. However, given the burgeoning population of Mumbai, it cannot afford to be anything but sustainable. History shows us that as a country becomes more affluent, it becomes dumber, by being more wasteful of its resources, recycling less, creating more solid waste, and increasing its dependency on artificial cooling and lighting. This is absolutely true for Mumbai, as the city increases in wealth the less it seems to care about sustainability.
Architects and developers get lazier when it comes to designing buildings that truly respond to the environmental conditions of place. As children we never relied on air conditioning for comfort because the buildings we occupied passively kept us comfortable. Ceilings were higher, transom windows above doorways permitted air circulation, and windows had deep overhangs that shaded interior spaces as well as provided protection from the heavy monsoon rains.
The city needs to mandate that all new buildings be smart by using less energy than their predecessors. As an example, every residential dwelling in Israel obtains its hot water from roof mounted solar panels. This is a viable technology that can easily be adapted to the Indian context.
There is also a strong correlation between green tree cover and real estate value. The more green there is, the higher the real estate value. The new development at Powai is a perfect case study proving this theory. The city should plant more trees!
9. Question your Codes


Review Process
Review Process

The existing building codes that govern new development within the city are made up of incomprehensible statistics like floor area ratios (fsi), setbacks and open space requirements that ignore the differences between pleasant and unbearable urbanism. As mentioned earlier, they make the city’s traditional urban form, the most loved places within the city, illegal to emulate.

 
Codes must be based on a picture of what is desired to be built, not statistical manipulations. Close your eyes and imagine what you want the city to be, and then write a code to achieve it. Around the world a new generation of design ordinances is gaining favor among city planning officials. Referred to as form-based codes, these ordinances regulate what really matters: a building’s height, disposition, location, relationship to the street, and where to place parking. Cities including Arlington, Virginia, and Miami, Florida are adopting form-based codes for their neighborhoods.
10. Don’t Forget Beauty
Joe Riley, Charleston’s Mayor since 1968, reminds us that cities should be places that make the heart sing. For many Mumbai citizens, especially those too poor or infirm to travel, the city is an entire world. For this reason, the city should be proudly maintained, function properly, but also afford moments of beauty.
Yet, the city routinely builds to the lowest denominator, when it comes to building public schools, parks, and government buildings, – the only investments that belong to all the citizens of the city. In the interest of short-term frugality, the city cheats itself out of an honorable public realm and a noble legacy. This was not always the case, and it need not continue.
One only has to look around Mumbai, an incredible city and realize that it contains a handsome portfolio of beautiful buildings, parks, and public spaces. This legacy can and must be continued.

 
Opinion, Others

India is a place where complexity and chaos …

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India is a place where complexity and chaos are embraced as key ingredients in the warp and weft of the urban fabric.
Indian culture also embraces patience. She has waited, and can wait: the still center around which a whorl of change and continuity, parochialism and vision, the very old and the very new join one another in a cosmic dance.
This center is the Extended Indian Family. The business of the nation is passed from generation to generation within this Family, along with language, tradition, and culture. Indians love their extended family, whether freely or out of obligation. They choose to share the same or adjacent living quarters at every socio-economic stratum. Wisdom is dispensed therein; support is given and empathy is freely available.
The nurturing world view required for the selflessness the Family demands has, besides the patience at its center, a tolerant if not respectful attitude towards others. This has enabled a large number of ethnic, racial, and religious groups to live side by side peacefully.
The Family is a refuge from the limits imposed by society. The caste system was, and is, hereditary. Poverty and wealth are hereditary as well. Even governance, where a Gandhi trumps political opposition generation after generation, has a strong familial element.
Enumerating the requirements of a city built to accommodate this moment and the future India must begin with this building block.
Ironically, Indians are now highly mobile within their own country. The newly educated and rapidly expanding middle class participates in a mass migration towards centers of technology and commerce and the prosperity they offer. What begins to break down is the Family. Parents, siblings, uncles and aunts; grandparents and their families are left behind as millions move to Hyderabad and Bangalore and fifty other cities destined to become decentralized centers in the internet age.
What these people achieve is held in very high esteem. Education, affluence, and professional growth conspire to create wealth and erode the Family at the same time. Across the country workers stagger home from 12-hour work days to new apartment blocks, going from co-workers to the television instead of to a relative for gossip and comfort.
They stay in touch with their family members by phone and computer but the physical proximity of others one takes for granted in Indian families is overtaken by the suspicions the culture encourages towards strangers.
Compound this suspicion with an environment of apartment towers which isolate the nuclear family from the ground and from their neighbors, a sense of alienation can arise.
The only public realm is for shopping. Malls and superstores are the town squares of 20th century America and India is following suit.
Slums, interestingly, have the urban infrastructure of a medieval Mediterranean city. Closed to vehicular traffic, they have narrow lanes where every inhabitant knows his neighbor. Urban infrastructure is improvisational but organized and includes waste removal, fire prevention, shopping, medical care, and restaurants.
This lies behind the squalor others pity or fear. It is fragile, but not ramshackle, chaotic but not lacking in clear hierarchy. When tower blocks are built for displaced slum dwellers, many choose a different slum, renting or just giving up their new quarters.
Still, slums appall for good reason. Squalor is the stuff of poverty, and poverty is the realm of the marginalized, disenfranchised and uneducated. The problems of poverty are innumerable; the solutions as varied and complex.
A good place to start would be education. If every man, woman, and child in India had access to basic literacy training and trade school, it would provide many with ascent from abject poverty.
How ironic that the poor can have a strong sense of community but the middle class may be without it, living in new tower blocks isolated from one another.
Starting out with basic goals for these groups of the population: we could propose places for informal interaction for the middle class and basic skill-driven education for the poor. These could be programmatic elements in a new Urban Infrastructure.
What of the rich? Popular belief is that they can take care of themselves very well. They can afford to live with extended family in the traditional manner, and they work and live along side their relatives. The wealthy also have enclaves for gathering with one anther, preferring other people of means as social companions.
One thing the wealthy do desire is immortality. That is why, in the west, they endow colleges, donate buildings, fund research programs and do other works that will bear their name beyond the limits of their mortal lives. Indians venerate their ancestors and that itself, along with respect for elders still living is itself a noble practice.
Western-style philanthropy seems uncommon among wealthy Indians. Indutopia (encouraged by the civil government, itself led by a cross section of the city population) this type of largess would be celebrated and elevated to the highest level of prestige.
The cultural institutions would have benefactors: theatres, music halls, cricket grounds; but so would the neighborhoods of the poor. This, the most populous part of Indutopia, would have quarters bearing any name their benefactor would choose. And what the benefactor could fund is one of the noblest gestures in the teeming city: transformation of the most poor into a class of workers with simple, but useful skills.
Among the simple masonry midrise apartment buildings that house the poor, there would be a network of open plazas with roofs so they can be used year round. In these, the same lesson of the same class would be taught eight hours each day, so people could manage them with other obligations in their lives.
There could be eight sessions, with attendance taken, with midterm exams, and a final one at 12 weeks with examination at the end and a certificate given to show prospective employers. As many of the attendees will be illiterate, testing methods would accommodate this. The classes themselves would build skill sets as is the custom in ordinary school.
Basic literacy, in Hindi and in English, would always be offered, as reading and writing are the first steps out of desperate poverty.
Graduating students would go on to be mechanics, word processors, domestic staff; hotel housekeeping crews, chauffeurs, and will fill all of the menial jobs with the advantage of training and basic literacy. This gives them an edge up in competition for these positions, and may even result in a slight uptick in wages.
Each plaza and the service it renders could be financed (with plaques and ceremonies documenting the event) by the wealthy or groups of middle class citizens. Largess is at the core of all religions, so the gesture could be viewed as piety as well.
Sell philanthropy to the new India. Its wealth and its capacity to help so many are new. There could be posh benefactor’s club, and opportunities to pay for urban amenities are always plentiful and always a cause for celebration.
For the Middle Class a place to meet informally or just experience the presence of others would help offset loneliness. Idealized streets, with shops and fountains and shade tree, could combine with plazas containing restaurants and night clubs (and produce markets during the day) to provide a forum for the chance encounters that humanity sees to thrive upon. Eventually acquaintances would be made, and then friends for those who want them.
In this quarter of the city one may encounter cinemas, a theatre, monuments to Iconic Indians, and opportunities for the wealthy to share their abundance.
Highrise office buildings could identify the city center, a city with life 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The model for this quarter of the town would be any traditional Mediterranean city. In Italy, the “passagiatta” at day’s end is the time
after the heat of the day when the bourgeoisie stroll through the pedestrian quarters of the city to meet and run into friends and acquaintances. In 21st century India however, the streets and squares are carved out of vast parking structures 6 meters in height and fronted on all sides with shops and other urban amenities.
Light manufacturing or back office space could also occupy these spaces, receiving natural light from above through skylights cut into the roof. Whole zones of this space devoted to noon-polluting activities would be inexpensive to erect and would grow outwards as demand for this space increases.
Atop these gargantuan structures, apartment towers rise in sylvan grace amidst densely planted gardens. Their inhabitants would be living in towers in the park, overlooking a pedestrian city bereft of carbon monoxide and honking horns.
This configuration would inevitably be stratified according to social convention, with shops and housing in synch with the level of its occupants’ affluence.
It would also guarantee consistency as the city grows. Parking and back office space built to accommodate demand would have the structure built into it to support housing that may not be needed at that time. Conversely, housing would have to be built on the garden podium to go up.
A Masterplan free enough to actually be put to use without penalty to developers would have to be enforced for a period of three generations.
A city organized in this way could approach the perfect modern Indian city: largess and opportunity for the poor; an ideal mix of city and garden for the middle and upper classes, and a social order informed in part by philanthropy for all.
INDUTOPIA: REMARKS ON THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY INDIAN CITY
India is a place where complexity and chaos are embraced as key ingredients in the warp and weft of the urban fabric.
Indian culture also embraces patience. She has waited, and can wait: the still center around which a whorl of change and continuity, parochialism and vision, the very old and the very new join one another in a cosmic dance.
This center is the Extended Indian Family. The business of the nation is passed from generation to generation within this Family, along with language, tradition, and culture. Indians love their extended family, whether freely or out of obligation. They choose to share the same or adjacent living quarters at every socio-economic stratum. Wisdom is dispensed therein; support is given and empathy is freely available.
The nurturing world view required for the selflessness the Family demands has, besides the patience at its center, a tolerant if not respectful attitude towards others. This has enabled a large number of ethnic, racial, and religious groups to live side by side peacefully.
The Family is a refuge from the limits imposed by society. The caste system was, and is, hereditary. Poverty and wealth are hereditary as well. Even governance, where a Gandhi trumps political opposition generation after generation, has a strong familial element.
Enumerating the requirements of a city built to accommodate this moment and the future India must begin with this building block.
Ironically, Indians are now highly mobile within their own country. The newly educated and rapidly expanding middle class participates in a mass migration towards centers of technology and commerce and the prosperity they offer. What begins to break down is the Family. Parents, siblings, uncles and aunts; grandparents and their families are left behind as millions move to Hyderabad and Bangalore and fifty other cities destined to become decentralized centers in the internet age.
What these people achieve is held in very high esteem. Education, affluence, and professional growth conspire to create wealth and erode the Family at the same time. Across the country workers stagger home from 12-hour work days to new apartment blocks, going from co-workers to the television instead of to a relative for gossip and comfort.
They stay in touch with their family members by phone and computer but the physical proximity of others one takes for granted in Indian families is overtaken by the suspicions the culture encourages towards strangers.
Compound this suspicion with an environment of apartment towers which isolate the nuclear family from the ground and from their neighbors, a sense of alienation can arise.
The only public realm is for shopping. Malls and superstores are the town squares of 20th century America and India is following suit.
Slums, interestingly, have the urban infrastructure of a medieval Mediterranean city. Closed to vehicular traffic, they have narrow lanes where every inhabitant knows his neighbor. Urban infrastructure is improvisational but organized and includes waste removal, fire prevention, shopping, medical care, and restaurants.
This lies behind the squalor others pity or fear. It is fragile, but not ramshackle, chaotic but not lacking in clear hierarchy. When tower blocks are built for displaced slum dwellers, many choose a different slum, renting or just giving up their new quarters.
Still, slums appall for good reason. Squalor is the stuff of poverty, and poverty is the realm of the marginalized, disenfranchised and uneducated. The problems of poverty are innumerable; the solutions as varied and complex.
A good place to start would be education. If every man, woman, and child in India had access to basic literacy training and trade school, it would provide many with ascent from abject poverty.
How ironic that the poor can have a strong sense of community but the middle class may be without it, living in new tower blocks isolated from one another.
Starting out with basic goals for these groups of the population: we could propose places for informal interaction for the middle class and basic skill-driven education for the poor. These could be programmatic elements in a new Urban Infrastructure.
What of the rich? Popular belief is that they can take care of themselves very well. They can afford to live with extended family in the traditional manner, and they work and live along side their relatives. The wealthy also have enclaves for gathering with one anther, preferring other people of means as social companions.
One thing the wealthy do desire is immortality. That is why, in the west, they endow colleges, donate buildings, fund research programs and do other works that will bear their name beyond the limits of their mortal lives. Indians venerate their ancestors and that itself, along with respect for elders still living is itself a noble practice.
Western-style philanthropy seems uncommon among wealthy Indians. Indutopia (encouraged by the civil government, itself led by a cross section of the city population) this type of largess would be celebrated and elevated to the highest level of prestige.
The cultural institutions would have benefactors: theatres, music halls, cricket grounds; but so would the neighborhoods of the poor. This, the most populous part of Indutopia, would have quarters bearing any name their benefactor would choose. And what the benefactor could fund is one of the noblest gestures in the teeming city: transformation of the most poor into a class of workers with simple, but useful skills.
Among the simple masonry midrise apartment buildings that house the poor, there would be a network of open plazas with roofs so they can be used year round. In these, the same lesson of the same class would be taught eight hours each day, so people could manage them with other obligations in their lives.
There could be eight sessions, with attendance taken, with midterm exams, and a final one at 12 weeks with examination at the end and a certificate given to show prospective employers. As many of the attendees will be illiterate, testing methods would accommodate this. The classes themselves would build skill sets as is the custom in ordinary school.
Basic literacy, in Hindi and in English, would always be offered, as reading and writing are the first steps out of desperate poverty.
Graduating students would go on to be mechanics, word processors, domestic staff; hotel housekeeping crews, chauffeurs, and will fill all of the menial jobs with the advantage of training and basic literacy. This gives them an edge up in competition for these positions, and may even result in a slight uptick in wages.
Each plaza and the service it renders could be financed (with plaques and ceremonies documenting the event) by the wealthy or groups of middle class citizens. Largess is at the core of all religions, so the gesture could be viewed as piety as well.
Sell philanthropy to the new India. Its wealth and its capacity to help so many are new. There could be posh benefactor’s club, and opportunities to pay for urban amenities are always plentiful and always a cause for celebration.
For the Middle Class a place to meet informally or just experience the presence of others would help offset loneliness. Idealized streets, with shops and fountains and shade tree, could combine with plazas containing restaurants and night clubs (and produce markets during the day) to provide a forum for the chance encounters that humanity sees to thrive upon. Eventually acquaintances would be made, and then friends for those who want them.
In this quarter of the city one may encounter cinemas, a theatre, monuments to Iconic Indians, and opportunities for the wealthy to share their abundance.
Highrise office buildings could identify the city center, a city with life 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The model for this quarter of the town would be any traditional Mediterranean city. In Italy, the “passagiatta” at day’s end is the time
after the heat of the day when the bourgeoisie stroll through the pedestrian quarters of the city to meet and run into friends and acquaintances. In 21st century India however, the streets and squares are carved out of vast parking structures 6 meters in height and fronted on all sides with shops and other urban amenities.
Light manufacturing or back office space could also occupy these spaces, receiving natural light from above through skylights cut into the roof. Whole zones of this space devoted to noon-polluting activities would be inexpensive to erect and would grow outwards as demand for this space increases.
Atop these gargantuan structures, apartment towers rise in sylvan grace amidst densely planted gardens. Their inhabitants would be living in towers in the park, overlooking a pedestrian city bereft of carbon monoxide and honking horns.
This configuration would inevitably be stratified according to social convention, with shops and housing in synch with the level of its occupants’ affluence.
It would also guarantee consistency as the city grows. Parking and back office space built to accommodate demand would have the structure built into it to support housing that may not be needed at that time. Conversely, housing would have to be built on the garden podium to go up.
A Masterplan free enough to actually be put to use without penalty to developers would have to be enforced for a period of three generations.
A city organized in this way could approach the perfect modern Indian city: largess and opportunity for the poor; an ideal mix of city and garden for the middle and upper classes, and a social order informed in part by philanthropy for all.

Opinion

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The Autocentric city!
The Autocentric city!

“Most problems the developing world is facing become better as one gets richer. Except for transportation, it gets worse.” Enrique Peñalosa, the revolutionary urbanist and the former mayor of Bogota said to me in an Interview in Mumbai, even as the rush-hour traffic soared in the backdrop. His words echoed in my mind as India and the world at large got a peek at the $2,500 Tata Motors car for the first time at the New Delhi Auto Expo last year. The remarkable engineering feat by Tata is a proud moment for India; but, it is also a sign of a looming social catastrophe.

The launch of the people’s car commercially is bound to further aggravate the already congested roads and pollution in the sub-continent’s cities. Anyone who has been through the noisy, smoggy and never-ending traffic jams in any of India’s cities will recognize that we can barely handle the current traffic, let alone think about managing the 300 million new car owners that the $2,500- $ 3,000 cars can attract over the coming decade.

The combination of poor mass transit and the public fascination with the personal automobile has meant huge investments on road infrastructure by India’s civic authorities. The trend is obviously unwise considering the belief among urban experts that road building, though fundamentally essential, moves in a vicious circle.

“The world’s experience over the last 40 years is that the more roads you build, the more they will get filled up”, said Peter Hendy, the Commissioner of Transport for London said during his visit to India.

But the Indian urban planner’s historic obsession with low-density urban development strategies has created relentlessly growing cities and American-style urban sprawl that depend heavily on the roads and thereby personal automobiles. This sort of urban form makes public transport difficult to function, and favors roads and personal vehicle owners over mass transit. But such private automobile-centric urban design is known to make today’s large cities unproductive. The loss in working hours due to long commute times is already taking a toll on urban dwellers in most Indian cities. The current unchecked urban form also has an economic impact on the citizenry. According to a study conducted by Alain Bertaud, former principal urban planner, World Bank, “In Bangalore, India’s information technology capital, the consumer loss from density restrictions is equivalent to 3-6 percent of the total household revenue.”

More importantly, as the developing world gets set to house some two billion new inhabitants into its cities in the coming decades – It is clear that the world’s sustainability is also largely trusted with the third world. Auto-dependent urban centers with increasing pollution and reliance on fossil fuels can be disastrous for the planet’s future. The urban design concepts of the future should give serious thought to the vital issue of accessibility and transportation, and embrace design tenets that endeavor to reduce energy use and preserve ecology.

A number of experts have promoted the compact urban form as an ideal response to sustainability challenges. Compact urban patterns make use of less land area thus conserving crucial green space and farmland, help reduce travel distances, promote walking and encourage use of public transit. A number of cities in Europe like Amsterdam and Oxford, and Portland in the US have been engaging in policies of compact urban form. Research indicates that compact high density cities use half as much energy and generate half as much air pollution per capita vis-a-vis a sprawling city.

The transport solution for the future cities is to focus on creating top notch urban transit like Bus Rapid Transit, Metros, and Light Rails along with bicycle paths and friendly pedestrian ways that can help move millions around efficiently. Cars undeniably offer the greatest personal mobility, but they are bound to be insignificant in cities of the future.