Why is our urban planning in such a mess?……..Gautam Bhatia
Drive through any growing Indian city: Agra, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Punewhether metro or moffusil, cantonment or industrial township, the unbridgeable gap between peoples demands and civic reality becomes apparent. In dimension, scale, numbers or aesthetics, what people want and what the city offers?are opposing?and?often unmanageable?compromises.
Without doubt, urban Indian aspirations have assumed First-World dimensions in recent years. Lacking the requisite increase in city space, this has taken on absurdand often comicalproportions. Every Indian wants to own a car, regardless of whether it is needed; every Indian who owns a car wants a bigger one; everyone who owns a big car wants a German one. What use it may be put to and by whom is another matter.
A Pajero owner sends his driver in the 3000cc four-wheel drive to pick up a loaf of bread from the market. A company executive owns a BMW Series 7, a driving machine that moves effortlessly at 100mph on German autobahns, but on the overcrowded Indian street, the same car is a sad parody of the original. It is usually stuck in evening traffic between cyclists and rickshaws.
And with no parking space in the home, the street has been privatized with ominous signs: Parking for House D3 only. Tyres will be deflated. Similar levels of overcrowding in municipal lots create a system where cars are jammed against each other in order to maximize space.
Scarcity of water and electricity has been pushed to the background; there is now a new cause: parking wars, one of the many curses of the 21st century city.
Is the city then merely a frame for personal convenience, or is there a community purpose to urban living? If there is opportunity in the city, shouldnt there also be restriction?
The best cities are, in fact, built entirely on undemocratic foundations. They are based as much on the provision of opportunity to citizens as on enforcing a severe restrictive framework on their daily life. That London has some of the best natural parks in the world is the result of numerous ordinances that control the buildings around them, limit activities within, and nowwith the imposition of a congestion taxrestrict the inflow of vehicles into town. Could New Delhi ever place similar restrictions on its city centre, or Lucknow on Hazratganj?
The municipality in Copenhagen provides free cycles to its citizens. Pick up any cycle anywhere in the city, use it for however long you require, and drop it at any municipal cycle lot. Could Park Street in Kolkata, or the old quarters in Ahmedabad or Hyderabad, benefit from a similar scheme? In New York City, prohibitive rates for parking restrict the entry of private cars into Manhattan. People walk, take the bus or the subway.
Along the east coast of the US, many new towns are designed only for pedestrians. Parking lots are banished to the periphery of the town. In our country, however, where a majority of the people own no vehicle at all, the sidewalk has disappeared altogether.
The development of a coherent townscape is also a matter of urban concern.
Just look at our small neighbour. In the low-spreading flatlands of Bhutan, as you negotiate the streets of Paro, it is hard to believe this is a 21st century city, with cybercafes, coffee bars and a populace as intensely urbane as any in the world. The cityscape speaks a different story. All around is an architecture so historic, firm and schooled in the strictest traditions of the mountain kingdom that it appears as if no building has been added after the 19th century. No glass beauty parlours, malls, industrial sheds, no row upon row of public housing. All you see are the coloured cornices and window trims of traditional Bhutan.
Without the self-consciousness of personal architectural expression, city facades are swallowed up into a neutral backgrounda triumph of urbanity over architecture. The city is guided by the urge to suppress the visibility of individual places at the expense of making whole neighbourhoods, whole sections of the town
look, well, whole.
Barely a mountain range away from Paro, the town of Gangtok in Sikkim speaks an entirely different language. Born of the same cultural heritage, Gangtoks lineage is now hidden behind hoardings, bleak shopping arcades of marble, hotels built from Rajasthani sandstone with tinted glass windows buildings that let people know they are different, each outwitting the other in design, detail, colour and gimmickry. Meanwhile, down the mountain stands old and new Paro in ordinary clothes, mute and saddened by the shifting architectural tide of its sister city.
That the Indian city is entirely unintelligible is obvious even in the way movement is recorded in and around town. No longer is it hinged to landmarks or historic connections, but to the temporary blemishes visible all over town: Take a right turn at the Pepsi hoarding, go all the way down past the unfinished flats, and take a left after the market urinal. Is that the civic language of the new Indian city? Humayuns Tomb, Victoria Terminus or a temple street rarely figure in the daily view; they are, like family heirlooms, safely kept away under lock and key.
The illegibility of the present city is related, moreover, not so much to public indifference as architectural irresponsibility. Nowhere in the world has one singular professionin collusion with plannerscontributed to such a complete visual destruction of urbanity. Drawing attention to itself, architectures contribution is a firm disconnection with public life. Beyond the building as a technological artifact, the architects inability to intuitively design for a common purpose has left a lasting legacy of such utter civic remotenessisolated landmarks, derelict plazas, inaccessible parks, disjointed commercial and housing pocketsthat urban lifes satisfactions can now only be measured in personal and material gain: eating and shopping.
In the resounding mess of daily lifethat often resembles urban warfarethe Indian architects desire to create original buildings needs the severest reprimand, and a curtailing of rash and irresponsible practices. Isnt it time we acknowledge the failure of the profession and create a new civic framework for the practice of urban architecture?