Guest column: Reimagining our cities- Ideas for the next govt

Fostering communities through planning and design

Like good wine, travel is heady for me. It is ecstasy if the low I hit every so often is any point of reference. Those beautiful spaces that characterize distant European towns - humane, positive and with a visual appeal that pulls tourists from across the globe. Ah, the after taste they leave! Does a traveler from abroad visiting an Indian city look back at his experience with as much fondness, admiration and respect? Would he come back? Despite distinctive geography and history, Indian cities/town struggle to keep up with their world peers. Excellent planning principles were a part of our ancient wisdom, but as if to refute history, our spaces seem so chaotic today. With intelligent system bureaucrats and exemplary paradigms overseas, do we really need think-tanks and expensive borrowed brain for something like traffic engineering? Or will common sense blended with a national will to bring change do?  

Our politics will improve when it has to, but no harm surely in identifying areas ready for a new thought as a fresh government seeks a mandate. Here is what we can do at the macro level, starting yesterday.

Vision and Image

Futuristic vision is a challenge thanks to the changing dynamics and inbuilt idiosyncrasies of this incredible nation. With half its population in their youth, a planner's vision into the future is critical with powerful growth projections and aggressive measures ready in the quiver. Short-term thinking causes incoherent architecture. The million dollar flyovers and sea-links give the impression that they alleviate traffic problems, but they take long to conceive and even longer to be built, choking arteries during construction. This may be investment for future, but when ready, they only bleakly serve the purpose owing to the ever swelling numbers of cars pouring on our roads. In Singapore, a private car is a put-offish commodity financially, and one must leave the car at the CBD peripheral checkpoint after which public transport is the only way in.

India's cultural diversity is marvelous, and we have a head start. Historically, industrialization, modernism and the now ubiquitous concrete-steel-glass construct revolutionized architecture by making any design possible anywhere with convenience and economy. But its flipside brought a sterile facelessness to cities and skylines, amply illustrated in the USA. Conversely historic Europe retained a beautiful sense of permanence and context despite the spread of modernism. Unlike American cities, India inherits history,  with Delhi, Pune, Lucknow, Kolkata dotted with landmarks that are truly cultural insignias. Planning that enhances these local places of interest, traditions, arts, craft and cuisine could create iconic spaces. The line between infrastructure and aesthetics needs to diffuse. Drab ancillaries, garages, access roads, reservoirs, transformers should be allowed pleasing proportions and colors that merge in the overall design vocabulary.  

Urban spectacles banking on water! Think Paris, London, Zurich… Even Morlaix - a tiny historic city on the NW shore of France, around a marina and a viaduct… A waterfront pedestrian zone is a splendid idea for our scale. Imagine colorful inviting piazzas of flowers, banners, lampposts, kiosks and paving patterns with a commercial-cultural buzz!

Airports need excellent connectivity through public transport elevated to the 3C level - Clean Comfortable Convenient. Smart towers and malls are built easy until the cookie crumbles at their access/parking. New flyovers are great as long as the lanes stay consistent throughout the city. Have we not seen a 4-Lane bridge descending down in grace, suddenly bottlenecking in a single lane? Building new roads is not always the need. Improve existing roads and traffic operations instead. Strike a public/private balance by enforcing tolls, fees, fines, and make an award-reward-penalty based clean neighborhoods movement come alive. In American living, neighborhoods force municipalities to penalize a home-owner if his yard is not kept mowed and manicured.

Discouraging the one person-one car equation and encouraging carpools/bicycles is the new-age mantra to fight traffic. (Provide showers in offices for the sweaty!) Copenhagen and Amsterdam have gone out of their way to become bicycle-friendly with safe bike-paths, signals, parking and easy bike rentals. For healthy, thriving communities, quality outdoor life is critical and space planning should define and foster it. How does Spain breed and build fierce world class players in field hockey, soccer and tennis?

Landscaped strips, islands, medians are lungs of a city and tree-lined streets and plazas accentuate dense urban spaces. Visualize a European town sans the sidewalk cafes. The soul would be missing! Olmstead – the pioneer landscape architect gave the world a gift of a great urban oasis with rippling waters, birdsongs and cherry blossoms in the thick of Manhattan. The 845-acre Central Park of New York City is a fine nature-in-a-metro-heart example in the world's financial capital. As are London's Hyde Park and Fenway, Boston. In European planning, roads are more than mere movement corridors, playing many roles in community life. Can Indian roads follow this philosophy?

Yes, third world problems leave systems in perpetual disarray. Single-window licensing is a must and planning projects should ideally be joint forums of the agencies working in tandem and synergy. (Citizen forums, architecture colleges, government authorities, social workers). Will the new government have what it takes to address the needs? Will decision-makers emphatically and empathetically work with architects to respect history and culture? We need a massive cultural metamorphosis. How is it that Tokyo handles as many people as CST-Mumbai with amazing order and sophistication? It is about willingness and commitment.

Spirituality was the soul of India's golden age. It is all about tapping the power within. We can achieve greater depths than we think we can. While following developed world norms, we must preserve our soul. This will take a revolution. A moral, intellectual and educational revolution where we reinvent and respect what national pride means.

To emerge stronger, we need to push our boundaries.

Anita Kulkarni is an architect based in Virginia. She was a visiting faculty member at the University of Mumbai for several years. She is a published author of books and articles in Indian Design magazines and can be reached at anitakulka@gmail.com