MAKEOVER TIME
CITIES ZIP AHEAD ON GROWTH PATH
Pune ropes in GeNext to design a roadmap for their dream city
Pune ropes in GeNext to design a roadmap for their dream city
Municipal Corp To Offer Youngsters A Chance To Design City For 20 Years..Gouri Agtey Athale PUNE
TODAYS youngsters are tomorrows citizens. Banking on this cliche, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), which has to present its development plan for the city in a years time, plans to use technology to harness youngsters to recreate a city based on citizens suggestions.
We want to document ideas of these youngsters on how the city in which they will live and work, should be. We plan to run a fourweek long contest in the city, in which participants will form multiple teams and use games Electronic Arts SimCity game, which will allow them to simulate a plan for Pune with civic amenities.
The DP for the city is usually in force for at least 20 years and in any case every 20 years, the city undergoes changes, adapting to newer needs, Anupam Saraph, chief information officer, PMC, said. Participants will have to be over the age of 8 years and of course, they do not have to be the youth: older people can also take part, he added. Mr Saraph, who took over recently as the CIO, has in the past devised traffic management plans for the city. While the PMC would like the programme to be held during the summer holidays, when children are free from school curricula, the contest could get delayed to the next lot of school holidays, during Diwali. The reason is that EA, a Nasdaqlisted games manufacturing company, the manufacturer of the SimCity game, is currently otherwise engaged. We are in the process of getting permission from EA to sponsor a certain number of games while the PMC will enable the process, Mr Saraph said. This enabling will mean that the civic body will supply the maps and details of local wards, besides sponsoring exhibitions and documenting the details of the entries. Electronic Arts is a $3.1-billion, California-headquartered, interactive entertainment software company. The over-25-yearold company develops, publishes and distributes software for PCs and consoles. Mr Saraph is hoping the arrangement with EA works out, along with the carrot the PMC hopes to dangle, of the winner spending a day with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, Singapore (set for launch this summer) and a host of other games at EA.
We want younger people to get a feel for urban design, planning and be part of the process of imagining what their city can be like, Mr Saraph said. The DP is a statute which spells out land use for the city, hence covers the all important issue of reservation of land for civic amenities. Once that is done, lifting that reservation is a long drawn out tedious process hence, the need for a well thought out DP. Punes first development plan was devised in 1967, followed by the second one in 1987. The third version was expected in 1997 but this has still not happened. So far, only 50% of the reservation under the 1987 DP has been done.
To complicate matters further, in 1997, PMC brought in 23 fringe villages within its boundaries and a DP for some of these so-called fringe villages has recently been submitted to the state government which has accorded it an in-principle sanction last month.