BMC will seek your views for new plan for city……Sayli Udas Mankikar
Over 200 architecture students will soon embark on a mission to prepare a Mumbai ‘peoples brief’ for the new city development plan (DP) that the civic body is in the process of drawing up. The brief, prepared by gathering data through citizens’ participation, will be ready by 2013 and will be submitted to the Mumbai civic corporation acting as an outline while framing the new DP.
The new DP will be a blueprint for 438 sq km of space in Mumbai, which will define land use for the city for a period of 30 years beginning 2014. The current development plan expires in 2013.
The new DP will spell out the space allocations as far as housing, sanitation and water supply needs, infrastructure and open green spaces in the city are concerned.
The project initiated by the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) and the Rachna Sansad’s Academy of Architecture (AoA) will conduct surveys in different wards in the city, talk to citizens and understand their urban needs to form this brief.
“The BMC is in the process of inviting public comments for the new DP to be framed, till 2013. We want people to tell us what they feel about their area in terms of hospitals, schools, open spaces, housing clusters and the like… that will be gathered through the survey that we are conducting and putting together as a people’s mandate for the city,” said Pankaj Joshi, executive director, UDRI, who is heading the project.-
The students will, from January 2011, undergo a three-week intensive training on data gathering and understanding how to record the findings and compile them to prepare the document to be submitted to the BMC.
The survey will involve talking to stakeholders from different strata, from different wards and varied age groups. “On an average, each student will talk to 1,000 people through the year from different wards. Also, we will be talking to young people as the plan to be formed will be valid for the next 30 years and they will be directly affected,” Joshi added.
The reason for distributing the students over different wards, Joshi said, is that every ward has separate problems. Some wards have too many slums; some have huge dilapidated buildings, while some have a open space crunch.