10 Paradigms of urban planning

Ashima Sood

Introduction

Indian cities are characterized by visual dissonance and stark juxtapositions of poverty and wealth. “If only the city was properly planned,” goes the refrain in response, whether in media, official and everyday discourse. Yet, this invocation of city planning, rarely harkens to the longstanding traditions of Indian urbanism – the remarkable drainage networks and urban accomplishments of the Indus Valley cities, the ghats of Varanasi, or the chowks and bazars of Shahjanahabad. Instead middle class visions of the good city draw on a visual lexicon of spatial order and open space that derives from Western and often colonial models (Menon 1997).

This module examines modern planning paradigms that have influenced contemporary notions of the “well-planned” city. It first considers in detail a few key figures that have shaped popular and professional ideas about planning in the West. The following sections shift the gaze to the history of planning in India. Moving beyond the colonial legacy in Indian cities (Module 3.1), it turns to the contributions of the Scottish naturalist, sociologist and urbanist Patrick Geddes. Subsequent sections analyse the ways in which Western models have been “indigenized”, focusing particularly on the careers of modernism and the neighbourhood unit concept in India.

Planning Paradigms in the Anglophone World

The Garden City

First proposed by Ebenezer Howard, a parliamentary reporter and clerk, in 1898, the garden city paradigm inaugurated the modern era in urban and regional planning (Richert and Lapping 1998: 125). In Howard’s conceptualization, the garden city represented a marriage between the most desirable amenities of the city and the countryside, allowing the co-habitation of urban economies with natural surrounds (Clark 2003). The garden city was both a programme for urban reform and a highly detailed physical plan.

Howard’s ideas arose in response to the circumstances of industrializing Britain, where the economic changes wrought by the industrial revolution brought a wave of low-skill workers from a declining agrarian economy into the cities to look for work at the new factories. The resultant mass unemployment, poor quality housing and overcrowding produced a public health disaster in British cities, famously described by Engels in The Condition of the Working-Class in England.

British agriculture was equally in crisis, with increasing concentration of production among a few proprietors and depletion of soils. It was at the confluence of these trends that Howard’s ideas, shaped by prodigious reading, came together in the garden city agenda (Clark 2003; Batchelor 1969).

Emerging indirectly in response to the widely shared critique of industrial capitalism triggered by the work of Marx and Engels, the garden city was a comprehensive programme for urban and agrarian reform. Radical revision of land ownership and property rights was a major component of these reforms. The garden city was to be a systematically planned “new town” built on “greenfield” undeveloped and publicly owned land (Clark 2003). The economic rent resulting from this inalienable tenure would accrue to the municipal government, to pay for public services and social welfare (Richert and Lapping 1998).

Two features of the garden city framework paved the way for its future success. According to Batchelor (1969), it was not so much the novelty of Howard’s ideas as the attention to fiscal and administrative matters that distinguished the garden city paradigm, and expanded its appeal to businesspeople. Interestingly, Howard’s proposals included an early model for a public-private partnership – construction could be financed through a joint stock company but its dividends would be limited, in order to channel land rents back to the community.

Equally important to the garden city’s subsequent mobility was the detailed physical plan Howard created. The garden city was to be arranged in a circular frame, divided by exactly six “boulevards” into Wards for residential housing and amenities. At its centre was to be a public park surrounded by public museums, libraries, theatres, hospitals and other public facilities. Each Ward, housing about 5000 people, was to be largely self-sufficient, with a school and other civic facilities (Batchelor 1969). On the outer limits  would be an encircling Grand Avenue, and an outer ring of factories, markets and other industrial and commercial activity. The garden city was to be surrounded by an agricultural green belt with low population density, to sustain the high quality of natural amenities and demarcate the city from the countryside.

Ranked with the 20th century’s Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright as one of the most influential thinkers on the urban utopia, Ebenezer Howard continues to be the least known of the three (Richert and Lapping 1998). Yet, coinciding with a period of intense interest in city planning at the turn of the century, Howard’s book, out in a second edition in 1902, was a runaway triumph, being translated into all the major European languages, and spawning Garden City Associations across the United Kingdom, continental Europe and in time, the US. Within five years of the publication of his work, plans were afoot to build the first garden city at Letchworth (Batchelor 1969), which grew into a thriving town by the mid-20th century (Figure 1).

Over the course of the century, however, Fishman (1991) argues that the garden city model lost its intellectual power even as it gained adherents. He identifies two discrete aspects to the garden city movement (1) the idea of decentralization, i.e., movement away from overcrowded agglomerations to a system of new towns built on garden city principles, and connected by rail. (2) the idea of self-contained communities combining work and leisure. Looking at the American experience, he suggests that suburbanization undercut these very rationales of Howard’s schema. Second, as Batchelor (1969) demonstrated, even in Letchworth, the earliest experiment of the garden city movement, the basis of public ownership of land had to be given up at an early stage because the dividend limitations on the joint company stock could not be sustained. This put into jeopardy one of the most important pillars of the garden city movement as a political and economic programme.

The garden city plan also continues to be popular among Indian planners (Menon 1997), who dutifully encircle metropolitan masterplans with greenbelts, that are over time encroached by elite and underprivileged groups. It has also proved to be a durable template for the gated communities that have come to define India’s urban landscape in the 21st century (Webster 2001). As Menon (1997) suggests, the garden city paradigm has travelled with ease across disparate cultural contexts because it has been decoupled from the political programme of radical urban reform and economic transformation envisaged by Howard. This is both its success and its failure.

Neighbourhood unit as concept and planning practice

Another planning paradigm that emerged in the early twentieth century and proved highly adept in travelling across national and cultural boundaries was the neighbourhood unit. Though the neighbourhood has always been at the centre of urban life, in cities such as Paris, Venice or London, its importance as a planning unit in the West had come to be eclipsed by the 20th century. This is the backdrop of the “invention” or rather rescue of the neighbourhood unit as a locus and instrument of spatial planning by Clarence Perry, father of the neighbourhood unit as concept and planning tool (Mumford 1954). The neighbourhood had a life and history long preceding the neighbourhood unit; through his work, Perry installed it as the focus of the planner’s remit.

The neighbourhood unit’s genesis, lay firmly within the preoccupations of late 1920s United States (US) planning cultures. Clarence Perry’s ideas remained situated firmly within the traditions of the Chicago School of urban sociology, and the work of authors such as Louis Wirth, Robert Park and Herbert Miller. Perry’s contribution lay in giving aspatial scaffolding to the concerns of declining social capital and rising urban anomie that pervaded the work of these sociologists, and in placing the neighbourhood at the heart of urban design and rejuvenation.

In designing the neighbourhood unit concept, Perry employed his interests in physical planning in service of a programme to restore and rejuvenate the connections between “individual, family and community”. Residential zoning was central to the conception, as was a laid down configuration of streets to privilege pedestrian access (Vidyarthi 2010b: 76). In all, six “planning principles” defined Clarence Perry’s model of the neighbourhood unit:

1.      A size large enough to serve an elementary school

2.      Boundaries created through arterial streets, to allow traffic to bypass the neighbourhood

3.      Open spaces, such as parks and recreational spaces

4.      Siting of institutions such as the school to be close to the centre of the unit

5.      Shopping districts, one or more, to be sited at traffic junctions and at junctions with adjacent neighbourhood units

6.      An internal street system, allowing adequate incoming traffic load but preventing bypass traffic.

Starting as a tentative concept in the late 1920s, Perry’s ideas coalesced into a more rigid “formula” by 1939. In a book titled Housing for the Machine Age, he defined standards and principles for adoption in varying topographies by physical planners. Yet, even as the idea of the neighbourhood unit was increasingly influential in American planning, it also attracted significant criticism (Vidyarthi 2010b). Two sets of criticism are especially relevant for the Indian incarnation of the neighbourhood unit. First, the neighbourhood unit with its strict planning parameters and rigid ideal of the good city stood in stark contrast to Jane Jacobs’ vision of organic, mixed-use and socially diverse neighbourhoods. And indeed social homogeneity was key to Perry’s view of the neighbourhood unit.

Second, this understanding of “neighbourhood” came under scrutiny not simply for the enforcing spatial standardization and homogenization but also for creating boundaries between different neighbourhoods with an emphasis on “self-containment” (Vidyarthi 2010b).

In a sense, one can describe a city made up of neighbourhood units as a sea of discrete islands. A resident in one neighbourhood unit would have little cause to leave her own unit or interact with residents in surrounding units, in many ways creating and reinforcing patterns of socio-spatial segregation and segmentation (Module 3.6). The neighbourhood unit proved for a variety of reasons extremely popular among Indian planners, as we shall see below.

Jane Jacobs

If Ebenezer Howard pioneered the garden city movement as a solution to the problem of the metropolis, the American urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs believed that diverse and dense cities needed no solution. In concluding her 1963 essay “The Kind of Problem a City is”, she made a startling but typically well-reasoned declaration: “lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” In other words, Jacobs argued that the city itself was a solution to the questions of economic vitality and social cohesion.

Jane Jacobs’ metropolis was mid-20th century New York city, where she lived for more than three decades. Her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written not as plan for building a new city from tabula rasa, but rather as a defence of the “organized complexity” of existing cities (Jacobs 1963). The imperative for Death and Life came from a struggle to save the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Manhattan from the city redevelopment plan of powerful city bureaucrat Robert Moses  (Laurence 2006:155). Moses’ plan involved building a highway right through old Manhattan neighbourhoods. Jacobs emerged as a passionate activist and advocate for the dense fabric of the already existing city against redevelopment that first destroyed and then reconstructed the remnants of longstanding communities.

Jacobs sought to upend the conventional wisdom about what made for success in cities, and her work even forced a re-evaluation of the work of planning luminaries such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier (see next section). Her perspective on the role of parks and open spaces in the city illustrates the radical yet commonsensical quality of Jacobs’ critique. Dotted with and surrounded by a greenbelt, Howard’s garden city aspired to bring the “countryside” into the city. Jacobs (1961) questioned the notion that open spaces were necessarily public or community spaces. Instead, she pointed out that parks in low density and low diversity areas could evolve into vacant spaces, prone to anti-social or even criminal activity. But Jacobs did not simply issue a screed against public parks. Based on deep observation, she suggested a series of principles for revitalizing neighbourhood parks, the first of which was that parks should not be too numerous, so that they served to concentrate rather than disperse the public life of the neighbourhood.

Unlike Howard, Jacobs valorised density and diversity as the very raison d’être of the city. An empiricist committed to an inductive approach of drawing inferences from close observation, she proposed several practices for good urban design (1961: 150-151):

To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:

1.       The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than  one   primary  function;   preferably more   than    two…

2.  Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3.  The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce…

4.  There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there…

Jacobs was thus a powerful proponent of mixed use spaces, and an opponent of “Euclidean zoning”, a widespread regulatory regime that attempted to segregate or keep apart residential, commercial, official and other uses (Wickersham 2000). Jacobs activism and reasoned argument eventually defeated Robert Moses assault on Manhattan neighbourhoods, and her ideas enjoyed a wide sway over her lifetime (Sassen 2016). Her insights into the role and function of vibrant streets as well as socially and functionally mixed spaces were also important to the tenets of “New Urbanism”, an urban design movement that stresses sustainable urban living in compact, walkable neighbourhoods (Laurence 2006; Talen 1999, Hebbert 2003). Over the last decade or two, her ideas have sparked regeneration and return from suburbs to inner cities.

On the flipside, Jacobs’ legacy has also become associated processes of gentrification, which have priced out older and poorer residents from central cities in the US (Ouroussoff 2006; Turner 2009). As the urbanist Sharon Zukin (2011b) has argued in a balanced assessment of Jacobs’ ideas, “the self-guiding communities that [Jacobs] espoused… have been submerged by elected officials who pay more attention to real estate developers than to community planners… she underestimated the strength of middle class tastes for social homogeneity and aesthetic coherence that drive gentrification.”

Despite the immense relevance of Jacobs’ ideas in tracing growth processes and the rise of informality in Indian cities, her works remains little explored in the Indian context.

New Urbanism

One of the leading urban planning and design movements in contemporary American cities is “New Urbanism”, which builds on the work on Jane Jacobs, among others. Also called neo-traditional planning (Ellis 2002), this paradigm seeks to restore community revitalization to the heart of urban design (Talen 1999). New Urbanism can best be understood in contrast with and opposition to suburban development, which in the US has been inextricably tied with automobile-dependent sprawl.

Favouring cyclists and pedestrians over the automobile, New Urbanism represents a focused critique of the system of automobile subsidies and zoning laws that narrow transit design to privatised motorised forms of transport. Transit oriented development (TOD), which integrates land use planning with transit line construction (see also Module 3.4) is one of the key design principles of New Urbanism (Ellis 2002). Associated principles include “compact development that preserves farmland and environmentally sensitive areas”; attention to “infill development to revitalize city centres” versus the sprawl of new suburban development; “interconnected streets, friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, often in modified grid or web-like patterns; mixed   land uses rather than single-use pods; discreet placement of garages and parking spaces to avoid auto-dominated landscapes” (Ellis 2002, p 262). In a critical dissection of New Urbanism’s claims to community development, Talen (1999) outlines further elements of New Urbanism’s approach:

1. Architecture and site design fosters interaction in the public sphere, by building porches, and cutting down private lawns and gardens
2. Density and scale privileges residential density and face to face interaction through “small-scale, well-defined neighbourhoods with clear boundaries and a clear centre “ (p 1363).
3. Streets function as public space by prioritizing pedestrian access and use
4. Public space enshrined in “neighbourhood gathering places” that foster civic pride and sense of place.
5. Mixed land use created in multi-purpose residential and commercial spaces, and mixture of housing types to facilitate mingling across social classes (p 1364).

Described as the “most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era”, New Urbanism has gathered adherents around the Congress for New Urbanism (Bohl 2000). Despite New Urbanism’s avowed concern for urban regeneration, Bohl (2007) notes that it has come to be associated with suburban development projects. Yet, New Urbanism projects in inner cities and “brownfield” locations have equally come to be linked with processes of gentrification that displace low income, working class and ethnic minority residents in a process of real estate development and value augmentation (Bohl 2000; Butler 2007) (See also Module 3.6 on gentrification).

Exploring this critique, Bohl (2000) notes that New Urbanism involves an explicit focus on mixed income neighbourhoods, but the intent is lost in practice. Thus while, New Urbanist projects help to reduce the concentration poverty in ghettoes by attracting more high income residents, they also dilute the political power and social capital of working class communities by dispersing some residents elsewhere.

Scholars have also critiqued New Urbanism for its weak basis in social science evidence (Bohl 2007, Talen 1999). At the centre of this dispute is the ability of physical andarchitectural design to shape social life. As Talen (1999, p 1374) puts it, “physical design need not create sense of community, but rather, it can increase its probability,” New Urbanism has thus far not been widely adopted in India, though some of its elements such as transit-oriented development (TOD) are increasingly part of policy-makers’ toolkits (Mohanty 2014).

Geddes in India

Early urban planning in India attempted to apply western solutions to Indian problems (Module 3.1). Responding to the public health concerns produced by industrialization and overcrowding, it sought to secure the European city from the hazards of the “native” settlement in colonial centres such as Calcutta and Mumbai (Datta 2012; Menon 1997).

To this paradigm, Patrick Geddes, a Scottish sociologist, ecologist and urban planner offered a bracing antidote (Munshi 2000). Geddes’ contribution lay in recognizing the vibrant traditions and artefacts of pre-colonial Indian cities, and for placing this historic core at the very heart of the urban planning programme (Datta 2012). Instead of “town planning”, Geddes preferred the term “city design” – an approach that traced its lineage less from engineering, sanitation or architecture and more from the natural and social sciences.

Geddes was a pioneer in many areas and as Munshi (2000: 488; 2013) notes, in addition to the nearly 40 city reports he produced during his 10 year sojourn in India, he was also the founder of urban sociology in the country. Thus an abiding interest in the study of urbanisation was key to his practice as a planner.

A regional perspective was also of a piece with Geddes’ holistic vision (Munshi 2013). In a town planning approach influenced by social ecology, Geddes sought to understand the many inter-related factors –“ housing, employment, air quality, water supply, the availability of gardens or natural areas, and the nature of cultural identity” – that entered into the sum of human health (Grieve et al. 2005: 26 in Munshi 2013: 221). The region as unit of study occupied a special place in Geddes’ thinking and was realized through a “regional survey” framework, which attempted to understand the ecological linkages between the hamlets, villages, towns and cities. Some of these ideas were taken up and elaborated by Indian scholars such as Radhakamal Mukherjee.

Ideas in Practice

        In re-configuring colonial visions of the planned city, Geddes introduced a number of methodological innovations. Most important of these was the ‘the diagnostic or civic survey’ (Datta 2012: 6), which aimed to provide a “feel” for the history, economics and unique culture of each city and its “organic form”. In contrast to contemporary town planning practices, Geddes advised that the laying out of streets always be preceded by an analysis of the “local needs and potentialities” (Datta 2012: 6). Despite pressures from commissioning authorities for quick output, his methods managed to add considerable insight at low time and money expense (Munshi 2000).

A second element of Geddes’ approach was “conservative surgery” – an emphasis on minimizing “demolition and disruption” (Datta 2012: 6), and reining in “human and financial costs” of urban redevelopment (Munshi 2000:488). Where lane widening would do, Geddes recommended against laying streets; if the removal of a few of the worst buildings could help improve insanitary conditions, he argued against wholesale demolition and the “improvement trust” initiatives of the type favoured by colonial planners.

Underlying these mainstays of Geddes’ planning “method” was a deep respect for the manifestations of tradition in the Indian city (Datta 2012: 4, 9) – the “purdah” garden as site of a gender-segregated public space, the “chabutra” for neighbourhood sociability, the tulsi plant as the centrepiece of the Indian home. Datta (2006) notes that this sympathy for the indigenous forms of urbanism laid Geddes open to the charge of being conservative, even though his work otherwise evinced an openness to working class and caste concerns.

During his time in India, Geddes’ unusual ideas often left him barred from the most prestigious colonial planning projects – whether the construction of New Delhi by Lutyens or the Calcutta Improvement Trust (Datta 2012). His first major commission was given by the Calcutta Municipality, a partially elected body,1 to produce a plan for Barrabazar, a diverse mixed use “native” area, comprising a warren of narrow streets, shops, godowns, residences and bastis. Geddes’ plan for Barrabazar is worth considering in detail for what it reveals about his method in practice (Datta 2012).

A highly prized slice of real estate, the bazar was in the crosshairs of demolitions planned by numerous government administrators over the 19th and 20th century, 1https://www.kmcgov.in/KMCPortal/jsp/MunicipalHistoryHome.jsp  thanks to its “insanitary” conditions and proximity to the European neighbourhoods to its south. Geddes brought a refreshing scepticism to the prevailing conventional wisdom about the site.

He began his work with a comprehensive “house-to-house” survey that provided a strong empirical foundation to his final recommendations. His final report included three major departures from the official “wisdom” on Barrabazar: first, he recommended respecting and building upon the existing east-west alignment of streets in line with long-standing traffic patterns; second, he suggested preserving the northeast as residential area and developing the south west as a modern business district. Third, he advocated for maintaining the traditional aesthetic and urban form as a model for new redevelopment where it was required (Datta 2012).

Geddes’ plan combined the traditional and the modern in interesting fashion: he argued for converting an ancient “Mint” structure into a public school but also recommended that old residential buildings serving as godowns be torn down to build modern warehouses. Against the CIT’s plans for widening streets, in anticipation of increasing vehicular traffic, Geddes prioritized pedestrian lanes.

We can notice several echoes of Geddes vision as it was fleshed out in the Barrabazar plan to Jacobs’ ideas on the city. Like Jacobs, who developed her ideas in a different milieu and in a later period, Geddes remained cautious of large-scale demolition and reconstruction in the city, valorising instead its natural organic dynamic as a guide for “improvement”. Indeed, in Lahore, Geddes stood resolutely against an improvement scheme that would have demolished temples, mosques, businesses and houses, criticizing it for “indiscriminate destruction of the whole past labour and industry of men” (Guha 1992: 59). In a report on Patiala, he protested against thoughtless displacement of poor neighbourhoods.

More remarkable, as Datta (2012) points out, Geddes saw community life rather than spatial expanse as critical to realizing the promise of open space. As Jacobs would come to argue in 1960s New York City, Geddes made a distinction between such community spaces and the “sanitary voids” of the public park ideal that inevitably required constant policing by outside agencies.

One can only imagine what the Indian city would have been like had Geddes seemingly radical but eminently sensible ideas come to guide town planning in colonial and post-colonial India. Despite legitimate criticisms of the way he worked (Datta 2012), Geddes  has proved a highly influential thinker, and his view of the city region and the city-as-organism were subsequently assimilated and elaborated upon both in India and in the West by disciples such as Radhakamal Mukherjee and Lewis Mumford (Guha 1992; Munshi 2000). It is not too much to say that Geddes anticipated in his work and writing many of the problems of overzealous and ill-informed planning that continue to plague Indian cities to the present day, nearly a century later.

Spatial planning in post-colonial India

Despite the imaginative scope and geographic expanse of Geddes’ body of work, it left relatively little mark on post-colonial urban planning in India. Instead the knowledge edifice for urban planning in India continued to privilege the application of Western town planning models to Indian conditions (Menon 1997). Menon shows for example the extent to which a widely used Public Works Department (PWD) Handbook of Town Planning, into the 1970s and beyond, continued to uncritically derive planning precepts from Howard’s Garden City. These borrowings often remained uninterested in the social and economic contexts within which Western planning paradigms originated and their relevance to contemporary India.

There were, however, some exceptions to such wholesale and mindless import of Western paradigms. This section examines the intellectual environment within which modernism came to be adopted as the spatial and visual template for signature greenfield development projects. It also traces the spread of the American neighbourhood unit concept in Indian planning discourse and practice.

Modernism in the Indian city

“What should the city look like in independent India?” was a question that exercised the imaginations of policymakers in post-Independence India (Kalia 2006:133-4). “Unfettered by tradition” was French architect Le Corbusier’s modernist response, built into the iconic state capital of Chandigarh. Cities such as Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar and lastly, Gandhinagar may represent the heyday of modernist architecture and urban planning in India (Module 3.5), but the legacy of the paradigm has continued to shape the aesthetic of Indian cities into the present.

Le Corbusier’s imaginary for Chandigarh included “plenty of unadorned, open space, abundant natural light through large expanses of glass and an intimate connection with the outdoors” (Kalia 2006: 148). Underlying his vision was the use of modern materials and methods. Le Corbusier’s modernism epitomized a break not only with indigenous  forms of urbanism but also the legacy of the British Raj. It was to be triumph of the secular and industrial future and a repudiation of the communal past.

Kalia (2006) argues, however, that the new state capitals, including Chandigarh, exemplified the outcomes of a more varied set of influences and ideas. Architects and planners in Gandhinagar, for instance, were torn between the unadorned appeal of modernism and the need to embody “Indianness” through traditional iconography. Elsewhere Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture in Chandigarh was transplanted onto Albert Mayer’s Garden City plan, realized through a clustering of neighbourhood units (Kalia 2006). In Mayer’s view, the neighbourhood unit was a logical extension of the ideas embedded in the Indian village community.2

Indeed, the neighbourhood unit was to become a key element of the modernist achievement of the trifecta of new state capitals — Chandigarh, Bhuvaneswar and Gandhinagar (Vidyarthi 2010b). Vidyarthi’s work (2010a, 2010b) careful exploration of how the American planner Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit came to be adopted in Indian cities serves as case study of the way in which planning paradigms travel across cultures .

Neighbourhood unit in India

The neighbourhood unit was brought to India in the 1940s by planners such as Otto Koenigsberger in his plan for an industrial development in Mysore Princely State (Vidyarthi 2010a). However, the neighbourhood unit’s resounding popularity in the very different social and economic context of post-colonial India owed itself to a confluence of latent ideas.

Most importantly, the appeal of the neighbourhood unit reflected in part the tremendous resonance of the British Civil Lines — wide roads, gracious bungalows set back from the street and large open spaces — in the urban imagination of the newly emergent Indian elite in colonial India (King 1974/2006). Though the post-Independence Civil Lines were no longer home to racially segregated European quarters, their spatial design elements represented a “decisive break” from the aesthetic and form of the indigenous Indian city (Vidyarthi 2010b: 83). As vernacular urbanisms in old cities such as Hyderabad and Delhi came to be associated with squalor

2  See Shaw (2009) for an account of how the modernist imperative was assimilated into Indian conditions in the construction of the residential “sectors” of Chandigarh. and dilapidation (Module 4.2), the neighbourhood unit provided a sense of spatial order and pleasing continuity with the visual vocabulary of the Civil Lines.

This aspiration to an urban spatiality uncontaminated by the vestiges of the vernacular or indigenous also arose from the class and caste origins of urban elites. These Western-educated elites, concentrated in the modern secondary and tertiary sectors, had little contact with or interest in rural or urban informal India (Vidyarthi 2010b). Moreover, their high-caste social bases bred an aversion for the chaotic, vital and unhygienic social spaces of the indigenous city (Hosagrahar 2005).

No less crucial were the developmental ideologies of the time, which viewed development as a multi-dimensional but linear process, along which the Western nations had advanced farther than India. A technocratic approach to city design and a implicit faith in apolitical expertise helped the import of planning paradigms, such as the neighbourhood unit, from the West (Vidyarthi 2010b). Nehru’s role as planner in chief especially for the new capitals introduced, nonetheless, a note of thoughtfulness and caution in the mandate given to Western planners adapting these models to Indian cities.

Some Western planners such as Koenigsberger did make a good faith effort to overcome some of the fragmentation inherent in the neighbourhood unit by designing Bhubaneswar neighbourhoods to include a mix of “social and professional groups” (Vidyarthi 2010b: 85). Similarly Mayer’s early plan for Chandigarh sought to reproduce the vitality of the bazar in the shopping centres of the neighbourhood units. Travelling far from its roots, the neighbourhood unit was deployed in Bhuvaneswar as a tool for upholding “secularism and castelessness” rather than social homogeneity.

Despite these valiant attempts, the adoption of the neighbourhood unit in Indian cities often followed a one-size-fits-all template. Vidyarthi (2010a) notes that by 1955, the Indian Town Planning Institute (ITPI) had prescribed detailed “planning standards for community services and facilities’’ for the neighbourhood units across the country from Guwahati to Delhi. The Delhi Master Plan (DMP) 1962, prepared by a team of young planners trained in the West, drew upon and indigenized the neighbourhood unit by translocating it to the “mohalla”. At the same time, the DMP operationalized Perry’s original insistence on “self-containment” to a hierarchy of geographic scales in the city (Vidyarthi 2010a: 266). Planning discourse, pedagogy and the standardization of planning practice helped the “assimilation” and “institutionalization” of the neighbourhood unit in India (Vidyarthi 2010a: 271-272), because in some ways, the planning paradigm was perceived to be a universally “modern”, readily and eminently transferable across cultural contexts (Vidyarthi (2010b). The neighbourhood unit model thus stands in stark contrast to approaches such as those of Geddes or Jacobs which emphasized the unique organic trajectories of settlements.

Vidyarthi (2010a: 271) notes, however, that by the 21st century, the neighbourhood unit plan for Jaipur had been fully appropriated, hybridized and converted into mixed use spaces, producing “a distinct form of urbanism”. In this sense, it can be said that the evolution of the neighbourhood unit in India conforms to the processes of diversification and densification underlined by Jacobs and to the unique genius of Indian urbanism celebrated by Geddes.

In Brief

This module has surveyed planning paradigms that have influenced or resonated with the physical, social and economic form of the contemporary Indian city. While the models provided by the garden city movement, modernism and the neighbourhood unit have entered the professional toolkits of Indian planners, others such as those of Geddes or Jacobs remain little known or little embraced.

Bannerjee and Baer’s (2013) analysis of the values carried by the neighbourhood unit concept offers a tantalizing explanation about the factors that determine the mobility of planning paradigms (Vidyarthi 2010a). These include contextual values, “the intellectual concerns and thinking” that underpins a planning paradigm. For example, the need to combat the effects of industrialization on agriculture and public health informed Howard’s garden city programme. The second cluster consists of embodied values, such as “the practitioners’ concerns about creating a physical place to provide opportunities for leisure, recreation, and social interaction, and an environment that is safe, protected, pleasing, and secure”, often captured in physical plans (Vidyarthi 2010a: 264). The third set comprises tacit values, which represent the unstated social assumptions – gender relations, caste and class practices etc – that form the substratum of a planning paradigm.

The adoption of the neighbourhood unit by Indian planners was made possible through a rupture “between its constituent context, manifest, and tacit values” (Vidyarthi 2010a: 272). It could be argued that such a break could not be accomplished for the ideas of Jacobs or even Geddes, given that their methods depended on rigorous empirical observation and context specificity; however, buttressing such an argument must remain on the agenda for future scholarship.

In an incisive dissection of the town planning imagination in India, Menon (1997: 2934) argues that planning practice has ascribed to British models a haloed universality. Urban planning in India meanwhile remains derivative. The reliance on physical planning templates provided by the garden city or neighbourhood unit paradigms, stripped of their social and physical contexts, has also led to an “anti-urban” stance in Indian planners’ approach to densification and diversity. To reform planning practice in a direction more attuned to the realities of Indian cities would require an overhaul not only of planning paradigms and pedagogies but also of how town planners view and understand the city (Menon 1997).

It is worth asking: how would the aesthetic and function of the Indian city be transformed if planners, like Jacobs or Geddes, paid attention to its organic dynamics and informal logics (Module 4.1-4.3)? That is an urbanism worth imagining.

For Further Reading

• Baigent, E., 2004. Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jean Gottmann: divisions over ‘megalopolis’. Progress in Human Geography, 28(6), pp.687-700.
• Banerjee, T. and Baer, W.C., 2013. Beyond the neighborhood unit: Residential environments and public policy. Springer Science & Business Media.
• Batchelor, P., 1969. The origin of the garden city concept of urban form. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 28(3), pp.184-200.
• Bohl, C.C., 2000. New urbanism and the city: Potential applications and implications for distressed inner‐city neighborhoods.
• Clark, B., 2003. Ebenezer Howard And The Marriage Of Town And Country An Introduction
• to Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (Selections). organization & Environment, 16(1), pp.87-97.
• Datta, P., 2012. Patrick Geddes and the metropolis. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Occasional Paper, History and Society New Series 5, New Delhi.
• do Rio Caldeira, T.P., 2000. City of walls: crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo.Univ of California Press.
• Ellis, C 2005, ‘Lewis Mumford and Norman Bel Geddes: the highway, the city and the future’, Planning Perspectives, 20, 1, pp. 51-68
• Ellis, C., 2002. The new urbanism: Critiques and rebuttals. Journal of Urban Design, 7(3), pp.261-291.
• Ellis, C., 2002. The new urbanism: Critiques and rebuttals. Journal of Urban Design, 7(3),
• Engels, F., 1987. The condition of the working class in England. Penguin UK.
• Fishman, R., 1998. Howard and the Garden. Journal of the American Planning Association, 64(2), pp.127-128.
• Fishman, R., 1998. Howard and the Garden. Journal of the American Planning Association, 64(2), pp.127-128.
• Goldstein, S., Planning the Millennium City: The Politics of Place-making in Gurgaon, India.
• Guha, R., 1992. Prehistory of Indian environmentalism: intellectual traditions.Economic and Political Weekly, pp.57-64.
• Hall, P., 2000. The centenary of modern planning. Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience, pp.20-39.
• Hebbert, M., 2003. New urbanism—the movement in context. Built Environment (1978-), pp.193-209.
• Hosagrahar, J., 2005. Indigenous modernities: negotiating architecture and urbanism.Psychology Press.
• Hospers, G.J. and Van Dalm, R., 2005. How to create a creative city? The viewpoints of Richard Florida and Jane Jacobs. foresight, 7(4), pp.8-12.Howard, E. and Osborn, F.J., 1965. Garden cities of to-morrow (Vol. 23). MIT Press.Jacobs, J., 1958. Downtown is for People. The exploding metropolis, 168.

• Jacobs, J., 1961. The death and life of great American cities. Vintage.
• Jacobs, J., 1963. The kind of problem a city is. PUTNAM RG, FJ TAYLOR & PG KETTLE (1970) A geography of urban places (Toronto: Methuen) p, pp.329-342.
• Jeffries, Stuart, 2015. How to build a city from scratch: the handy step-by-step DIY guide.
• TheGuardian.com, 30 June.
• Kalia, R., 2006. Modernism, modernization and post‐colonial India: a reflective essay. Planning Perspectives, 21(2), pp.133-156.
• Kennedy, L. and Sood, A., 2016. Greenfield Development as Tabula Rasa. Economic & Political Weekly, 51(17), p.41.
• King, A.D., 1974 (2006). The colonial bungalow-compound complex: a study in the cultural use of space. Journal of Architectural Research, pp.30-43. Reprinted in Patel, S and Kushal Deb (ed) (2006) Urban Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 43-48.
• Laurence, P.L., 2006. The death and life of urban design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller foundation and the new research in urbanism, 1955–1965.Journal of Urban Design, 11(2), pp.145-172.Laurence, P.L., 2015. Becoming Jane Jacobs. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• McFarlane, C., 2008. Governing the contaminated colonial and post‐colonial Bombay. International Research, 32(2), pp.415-435.city: Infrastructure and sanitation in Journal  of  Urban  and  Regional
• Menon, A G Krishna, 1997. Imagining the Indian city. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(46), pp.2932-2936.
• Mohanty, P.K., 2014. Cities and public policy: An urban agenda for India. Sage Publications India.
• Mumford, L., 1937. What is a city. Architectural record, 82(5), pp.59-62.
• Mumford, L., 1946. Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Reply. The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, 22(1), pp.66-69.
• Mumford, L., 1949. Planning for the phases of life. Town Planning Review, 20(1), p.5
• Mumford, L., 1954. The neighborhood and the neighborhood unit. Town Planning Review, 24(4), p.256.
• Munshi, I., 2000. Patrick Geddes: Sociologist, environmentalist and town planner. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.485-491.
• Munshi, I., 2013. On the Margins of Sociology: An Appreciation of Patrick Geddes’s Work in India. Sociological Bulletin, 62(2), pp.217-238.
• Obeng-Odoom, F., 2015. The Social, Spatial, and Economic Roots of Urban Inequality in Africa: Contextualizing Jane Jacobs and Henry George. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 74(3), pp.550-586.
• Ouroussoff, N., 2006. Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York. The New York Times, 4, p.30.
• Paletta, Anthony, 2016. Story of cities #32: Jane Jacobs v Robert Moses, battle of New York’s urban titans. TheGuardian.com, 28 April.
• Passanti, F., 1997. The vernacular, modernism, and Le Corbusier. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 56(4), pp.438-451.
• Peace, A., 1980. Structured inequalities in a North Indian city. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 14(2), pp.239-260. Reprinted in Patel, S and Kushal Deb (ed) (2006) Urban Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Pethe, A., Nallathiga, R., Gandhi, S. and Tandel, V., 2014. Re-thinking urban planning in India: Learning from the wedge between the de jure and de facto development in Mumbai. Cities, 39, pp.120-132.pp.261-291.
• Richert, E.D. and Lapping, M.B., 1998. Ebenezer Howard and the garden city. Journal of the American Planning Association, 64(2), pp.125-127.
• Rogers, Ben, 2011. Jane Jacobs was the seer of the modern city. TheGuardian.com, 19 May.
• Sassen, Saskia, 2016. How Jane Jacobs changed the way we look at cities. TheGuardian.com, 4 May.
• Shaw, A., 1994. Urban Growth and Land-Use Conflicts: The Case of New Bombay.
• Shaw, A., 1995. Satellite Town Development in Asia: The Case of New Bombay, India. Urban Geography, 16(3), pp.254-271.
• Shaw, A., 1996. Urban policy in post-independent India: An appraisal. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.224-228.
• Shaw, A., 1999. The planning and development of New Bombay. Modern Asian Studies, 33(04), pp.951-988.
• Shaw, A., 2009. Town Planning in Postcolonial India, 1947-1965: Chandigarh Re-Examined1. Urban Geography, 30(8), pp.857-878.
• Smith, N., 2002. New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy. Antipode, 34(3), pp.427-450.
• Talen, E., 1999. Sense of community and neighbourhood form: An assessment of the social doctrine of new urbanism. Urban studies, 36(8), pp.1361-1379.
• Turner, Christopher, 2009. Mother Courage. TheGuardian.com, 12 September.
• Vidyarthi, S., 2010a. Inappropriately Appropriated or Innovatively Indigenized?: Neighborhood Unit Concept in Post-independence India. Journal of Planning History, 9(4), pp.260-276.
• Vidyarthi, S., 2010b. Reimagining the American neighborhood unit for India. Crossing Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices, pp.73-93.
• Vidyarthi, S., Hoch, C. and Basmajian, C., 2013. Making sense of India’s spatial plan-making practice: Enduring approach or emergent variations? Planning Theory & Practice, 14(1), pp.57-74.
• Webster C, 2001. Gated cities of tomorrow. Town Planning Review 72(2), pp. 149–170.
• Wickersham, J., 2000. Jane Jacob’s critique of zoning: From Euclid to Portland and beyond. BC Envtl. Aff. L. Rev., 28, p.547.
• Zukin, S., 1987. Gentrification: culture and capital in the urban core. Annual Review of Sociology, pp.129-147.
• Zukin, S., 2011a. Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. Oxford UniversityPress.
• Zukin, S., 2011b. “Reputations: Jane Jacobs.” Architectural Review, Oct. 26.