Why we need an urban design commission
This is the second in an eight-part series on life in our cities. It will appear every alternate Thursday………Gautam Bhatia
In the level of urban squalor, greed, civic irresponsibility and lack of urban governance, few cities can rival Delhi. If ever there was a place on earth gone to seed, this is it, this is it.
I have lived in Delhi for the past 25 years. Since the 1980s there has been a steady decline in the quality of urban life in the city. Once it was possible to walk from home to market, home to playfield, and home to school without the burden of population or pollution or fear of traffic. It was possible to use walkways, parks and urban monuments as easy accessways in a way that the urban experience was an integrated seamless whole. To cycle along a lake filled with geese and ducks, stopping for an ice cream under a canopy of low trees, peddling past a stream filled with trout, or waving to a party of schoolgirls canoeing in dappled sunlight, passing through tunnels of brambles and shrubbery, and arriving at the office, perhaps a little sweaty, though refreshed and oxygenated… Sorry, I was thinking of Copenhagen.
The Delhi scenario is slightly different. You wake up at 6am to move the car out of a driveway filled with six other vehicles, then wait to fill two buckets at the municipal water truck and hurry through tea in a windowless room, which in any case overlooks only a neighbours window. Ease quickly into the morning rush hour traffic to spend the next 50 minutes in the makeshift office on the car back seat, making calls, shuffling papers, cursing the cyclist, running over a Rajasthani migrant, and arriving at a parking lot so full that its attendant makes room on the sidewalk
In a city where gladioli blooms are sold against the wall of a public urinal, where access to a French restaurant is across an alley of plastic bags and raw sewage, and grown men defecate at the protected tomb of a Mughal emperor, it is easy to dismiss these ironic contrasts between affluence and destitution as the growth pangs of a developing world city trying to become a developed one. Sometime or another, every place must regret inconvenience for a higher purpose. But now with the city measurably and statistically falling apart, it is getting harder to look at its symbolic risein the number of flyovers, hotels and restaurantsas an urban gain. More and more, the contrast only highlights the reality of its destitution.
In such a situation, it should be a matter of some concern to citizens of Delhi that bodies such as the Delhi Urban Art Commission (DUAC) should spend time debating the aesthetics of public sculpture or assessing the aesthetic worth of individual projects. The quality of urban life, patterns of settlement, improvement of physical infrastructure and other criteria that define the daily lives of citizens seem to be of little importance to agencies such as the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the DUAC, whose efforts are directed towards more heroic endsthe Commonwealth Games and public art. That the new stainless steel sculpture at the AIIMS flyover does not appeal to members of the DUAC is of little consequence to 90% of the citizens who dont have adequate public transport, sidewalks to walk on or public greens or recreation areas to call their own, public space and public life.
When so little is done for so large a population for so long, a sense of indifference and failure is but expected. But equally, it is hard to blame this misdirection merely on apathy when the agenda of civic bodies itself needs corrective realignment.
DUAC was set up in 1973 to advise the Government of India in the matter of preserving, developing and maintaining the aesthetic quality of urban and environmental design within Delhi
The sole purpose of DUAC today is to judge the aesthetic merits of individual architectural projects. Such a premise is completely flawed.
The very idea that the aesthetics of individual projects can contribute to the collective urban quality of the city is questionable. Is good city living merely an outcome of good-looking individual buildings (if that were so, Gurgaon would be a centrepiece of quality urban life), or is it the result of peoples healthy participation in their environment?
In the 35 years of its existence, how has the DUAC improved the quality of urban life in the city? Has it ever attempted to define Delhis urbanity and the future direction it may take by creating specific urban design solutions? Or making constructive suggestions on physical connections between parks and sidewalks, cycle tracks and pedestrian movements and other concerns for parking, landscape and tree cover that may benefit its citizens? Have urban design ideas ever been physically applied to city neighbourhoods? The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding No.
Given the citys degraded condition , is it not time that DUACs functions be absorbed into DDA, and a separate and autonomous DUDC, the Delhi Urban Design Commission, be set up to look after the larger civic design interests of the citys population?