{"id":60,"date":"2018-07-27T06:43:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T06:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/socp07.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=60"},"modified":"2019-01-01T10:31:55","modified_gmt":"2019-01-01T10:31:55","slug":"60","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/socp07\/chapter\/60\/","title":{"rendered":"Paradigms of urban planning"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIntroduction<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Indian cities are characterized by visual dissonance and stark juxtapositions of poverty and wealth. \u201cIf only the city was properly planned,\u201d 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 \u2013 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

This module examines modern planning paradigms that have influenced contemporary notions of the \u201cwell-planned\u201d 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 \u201cindigenized\u201d, focusing particularly on the careers of modernism and the neighbourhood unit concept in India.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nPlanning Paradigms in the Anglophone World<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe Garden City<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

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\u2019s 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\u00a0(Clark 2003). The garden city was both a programme for urban reform and a highly detailed physical plan.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Howard\u2019s 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<\/em> Condition of the Working-Class in England<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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\u2019s ideas, shaped by prodigious reading, came together in the garden city agenda (Clark 2003; Batchelor 1969).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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 \u201cnew town\u201d built on \u201cgreenfield\u201d undeveloped and publicly<\/em> owned <\/em>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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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\u2019s ideas as the attention to fiscal and administrative matters that distinguished the garden city paradigm, and expanded its appeal to businesspeople. Interestingly, Howard\u2019s proposals included an early model for a public-private partnership \u2013 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Equally important to the garden city\u2019s subsequent mobility was the detailed physical plan Howard created. The garden city was to be arranged in a circular frame, divided by exactly six \u201cboulevards\u201d 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\u00a0\u00a0would 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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Ranked with the 20th century\u2019s 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nNeighbourhood unit as concept and planning practice<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n

Another planning paradigm that emerged in the early twentieth century and proved highly adept in <\/span>travelling across national and cultural boundaries was the <\/span>neighbourhood unit.\u00a0<\/span>Though the <\/span>neighbourhood has always been at the <\/span>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 \u201cinvention\u201d or rather rescue of the <\/span>neighbourhood unit as a locus and instrument of spatial planning by Clarence Perry, father of the <\/span>neighbourhood unit as concept and planning tool (Mumford 1954). The <\/span>neighbourhood had a life and history long preceding the <\/span>neighbourhood unit; through his work, Perry installed it as the focus of the planner\u2019s remit.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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The neighbourhood unit\u2019s genesis, lay firmly within the preoccupations of late 1920s United States (US) planning cultures. Clarence Perry\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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 \u201cindividual, family and community\u201d. 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 \u201cplanning principles\u201d defined Clarence Perry\u2019s model of the neighbourhood unit:<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A size large enough to serve an elementary school\r\n\r\n2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Boundaries created through arterial streets, to allow traffic to bypass the neighbourhood\r\n\r\n3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Open spaces, such as parks and recreational spaces\r\n\r\n4.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Siting of institutions such as the school to be close to the centre of the unit\r\n\r\n5.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Shopping districts, one or more, to be sited at traffic junctions and at junctions with adjacent neighbourhood units\r\n\r\n6.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An internal street system, allowing adequate incoming traffic load but preventing bypass traffic.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Starting as a tentative concept in the late 1920s, Perry\u2019s ideas coalesced into a more rigid \u201cformula\u201d by 1939. In a book titled Housing for the Machine Age<\/em>, 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\u2019 vision of organic, mixed-use and socially diverse neighbourhoods. And indeed social homogeneity was key to Perry\u2019s view of the neighbourhood unit.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Second, this understanding of \u201cneighbourhood\u201d came under scrutiny not simply for the enforcing spatial standardization and homogenization but also for creating boundaries between different neighbourhoods with an emphasis on \u201cself-containment\u201d (Vidyarthi 2010b).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nJane Jacobs<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

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 \u201cThe Kind of Problem a City is\u201d, she made a startling but typically well-reasoned declaration: \u201clively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.\u201d In other words, Jacobs argued that the city itself was a solution to the questions of economic vitality and social cohesion.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Jane Jacobs\u2019 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<\/em> was written not as plan for building a new city from tabula rasa, but rather as a defence of the \u201corganized complexity\u201d of existing cities (Jacobs 1963). The imperative for Death<\/em> and Life <\/em>came from a struggle to save the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Manhattan from the city redevelopment plan of powerful city bureaucrat Robert Moses\u00a0\u00a0(Laurence 2006:155). Moses\u2019 plan involved building a highway right through old Manhattan <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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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\u2019 critique. Dotted with and surrounded by a greenbelt, Howard\u2019s garden city aspired to bring the \u201ccountryside\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Unlike Howard, Jacobs valorised density and diversity as the very raison d'\u00eatre 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):<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nTo generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:\r\n\r\n \r\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than\u00a0 one\u00a0 \u00a0primary\u00a0 function;\u00a0 \u00a0preferably more\u00a0 \u00a0than\u00a0 \u00a0 two...<\/p>\r\n

2.\u00a0 Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.<\/p>\r\n

3.\u00a0 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\u2026<\/p>\r\n

4.\u00a0 There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Jacobs was thus a powerful proponent of mixed use spaces, and an opponent of \u201cEuclidean zoning\u201d, a widespread regulatory regime that attempted to segregate or keep apart residential, commercial, official and other uses (Wickersham 2000).\u00a0Jacobs activism and reasoned argument eventually defeated Robert Moses assault on Manhattan <\/span>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 \u201cNew Urbanism\u201d, an urban design movement that stresses sustainable urban living in compact, walkable <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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On the flipside, Jacobs\u2019 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\u2019 ideas, \u201cthe self-guiding communities that [Jacobs] espoused\u2026 have been submerged by elected officials who pay more attention to real estate developers than to community planners\u2026 she underestimated the strength of middle class tastes for social homogeneity and aesthetic coherence that drive gentrification.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nDespite the immense relevance of Jacobs\u2019 ideas in tracing growth processes and the rise of informality in Indian cities, her works remains little explored in the Indian context.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nNew Urbanism<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

One of the leading urban planning and design movements in contemporary American cities is \u201cNew Urbanism\u201d, 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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 \u201ccompact development that preserves farmland and environmentally sensitive areas\u201d; attention to \u201cinfill development to revitalize city centres\u201d versus the sprawl of new suburban development; \u201cinterconnected streets, friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, often in modified grid or web-like patterns; mixed\u00a0 \u00a0land uses rather than single-use pods; discreet placement of garages and parking spaces to avoid auto-dominated landscapes\u201d (Ellis 2002, p 262). In a critical dissection of New Urbanism\u2019s claims to community development, Talen (1999) outlines further elements of New Urbanism\u2019s approach:<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n \t
  1. Architecture and site design <\/em>fosters interaction in the public sphere, by building porches, and cutting down private lawns and gardens<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Density and scale <\/em>privileges residential density and face to face interaction through \u201csmall-scale, well-defined neighbourhoods with clear boundaries and a clear centre \u201c (p 1363).<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Streets <\/em>function as public space by prioritizing pedestrian access and use<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Public space <\/em>enshrined in \u201cneighbourhood gathering places\u201d that foster civic pride and sense of place.<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Mixed land use <\/em>created in multi-purpose residential and commercial spaces, and mixture of housing types to facilitate mingling across social classes (p 1364).<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n \r\n

    Described as the \u201cmost important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era\u201d, New Urbanism has gathered adherents around the Congress for New Urbanism (Bohl 2000). Despite New Urbanism\u2019s 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 \u201cbrownfield\u201d 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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, \u201cphysical design need not <\/span>create<\/em> sense of community, but rather, it can increase its probability,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>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\u2019 toolkits (Mohanty 2014).<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nGeddes in India<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cnative\u201d settlement in colonial centres such as Calcutta and Mumbai (Datta 2012; Menon 1997).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    To this paradigm, Patrick Geddes, a Scottish sociologist, ecologist and urban planner offered a bracing antidote (Munshi 2000). Geddes\u2019 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 \u201ctown planning\u201d, Geddes preferred the term \u201ccity design\u201d \u2013 an approach that traced its lineage less from engineering, sanitation or architecture and more from the natural and social sciences.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    A regional perspective was also of a piece with Geddes\u2019 holistic vision (Munshi 2013). In a town planning approach influenced by social ecology, Geddes sought to understand the many inter-related factors \u2013\u201c housing, employment, air quality, water supply, the availability of gardens or natural areas, and the nature of cultural identity\u201d \u2013 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\u2019 thinking and was realized through a \u201cregional survey\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nIdeas in Practice<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n

    \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 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 \u201cfeel\u201d for the history, economics and unique culture of each city and its \u201corganic form\u201d. In contrast to contemporary town planning practices, Geddes advised that the laying out of streets always be preceded by an analysis of the \u201clocal needs and potentialities\u201d (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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    A second element of Geddes\u2019 approach was \u201cconservative surgery\u201d \u2013 an emphasis on minimizing \u201cdemolition and disruption\u201d (Datta 2012: 6), and reining in \u201chuman and financial costs\u201d 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 \u201cimprovement trust\u201d initiatives of the type favoured by colonial planners.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Underlying these mainstays of Geddes\u2019 planning \u201cmethod\u201d was a deep respect for the manifestations of tradition in the Indian city (Datta 2012: 4, 9) - the \u201cpurdah\u201d garden as site of a gender-segregated public space, the \u201cchabutra\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    During his time in India, Geddes\u2019 unusual ideas often left him barred from the most prestigious colonial planning projects \u2013 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 \u201cnative\u201d area, comprising a warren of narrow streets, shops, godowns, residences and basti<\/em>s. Geddes\u2019 plan for Barrabazar is worth considering in detail for what it reveals about his method in practice (Datta 2012).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>thanks to its \u201c<\/span>insanitary\u201d conditions and proximity to the European <\/span>neighbourhoods to its south. Geddes brought a refreshing <\/span>scepticism to the prevailing conventional wisdom about the site.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    He began his work with a comprehensive \u201chouse-to-house\u201d survey that provided a strong empirical foundation to his final recommendations. His final report included three major departures from the official \u201cwisdom\u201d 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Geddes\u2019 plan combined the traditional and the modern in interesting fashion: he argued for converting an ancient \u201cMint\u201d 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\u2019s plans for widening streets, in anticipation of increasing vehicular traffic, Geddes prioritized pedestrian lanes.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    We can notice several echoes of Geddes vision as it was fleshed out in the Barrabazar plan to Jacobs\u2019 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 \u201cimprovement\u201d. Indeed, in Lahore, Geddes stood resolutely against an improvement scheme that would have demolished temples, mosques, businesses and houses, criticizing it for \u201cindiscriminate destruction of the whole past labour and industry of men\u201d (Guha 1992: 59). In a report on Patiala, he protested against thoughtless displacement of poor neighbourhoods.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201csanitary voids\u201d of the public park ideal that inevitably required constant policing by outside agencies.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u00a0\u00a0has 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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nSpatial planning in post-colonial India<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    Despite the imaginative scope and geographic expanse of Geddes\u2019 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<\/em> Planning<\/em>, into the 1970s and beyond, continued to uncritically derive planning precepts from Howard\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nModernism in the Indian city<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    \u201cWhat should the city look like in independent India?\u201d was a question that exercised the imaginations of policymakers in post-Independence India (Kalia 2006:133-4). \u201cUnfettered by tradition\u201d was French architect Le Corbusier\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Le Corbusier\u2019s imaginary for Chandigarh included \u201cplenty of unadorned, open space, abundant natural light through large expanses of glass and an intimate connection with the outdoors\u201d (Kalia 2006: 148). Underlying his vision was the use of modern materials and methods. Le Corbusier\u2019s modernism epitomized a break not only with indigenous\u00a0\u00a0forms of urbanism but also the legacy of the British Raj. It was to be <\/span>triumph of the secular and industrial future and a repudiation of the communal past.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    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 \u201cIndianness\u201d through traditional iconography. Elsewhere Le Corbusier\u2019s modernist architecture in Chandigarh was transplanted onto Albert Mayer\u2019s Garden City plan, realized through a clustering of neighbourhood units (Kalia 2006). In Mayer\u2019s view, the neighbourhood unit was a logical extension of the ideas embedded in the Indian village community.2<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s work (2010a, 2010b) careful exploration of how the American planner Clarence Perry\u2019s neighbourhood unit came to be adopted in Indian cities serves as case study of the way in which planning paradigms travel across cultures .<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nNeighbourhood unit in India<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s resounding popularity in the very different social and economic context of post-colonial India owed itself to a confluence of latent ideas.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cdecisive break\u201d 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<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    2\u00a0 See Shaw (2009) for an account of how the modernist imperative was assimilated into Indian conditions in the construction of the residential \u201csectors\u201d of Chandigarh.\u00a0and dilapidation (Module 4.2), the <\/span>neighbourhood unit provided a sense of spatial order and pleasing continuity with the visual vocabulary of the Civil Lines.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201csocial and professional groups\u201d (Vidyarthi 2010b: 85). Similarly Mayer\u2019s 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 \u201csecularism and castelessness\u201d rather than social homogeneity.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cplanning standards for community services and facilities\u2019\u2019 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 \u201cmohalla\u201d. At the same time, the DMP operationalized Perry\u2019s original insistence on \u201cself-containment\u201d to a hierarchy of geographic scales in the city (Vidyarthi 2010a: 266).\u00a0Planning discourse, pedagogy and the standardization of planning practice helped the \u201cassimilation\u201d and \u201cinstitutionalization\u201d of the neighbourhood unit in India (Vidyarthi 2010a: 271-272), because in some ways, the planning paradigm was perceived to be a universally \u201cmodern\u201d, readily and eminently transferable across cultural contexts (Vidyarthi (2010b). The <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    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 \u201ca distinct form of urbanism\u201d. 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn Brief<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Bannerjee and Baer\u2019s (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<\/em>, \u201cthe intellectual concerns and thinking\u201d that underpins a planning paradigm. For example, the need to combat the effects of industrialization on agriculture and public health informed Howard\u2019s garden city programme. The second cluster consists of embodied values<\/em>, such as \u201cthe practitioners\u2019 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\u201d, often captured in physical plans (Vidyarthi 2010a: 264). The third set comprises tacit values<\/em>, which represent the unstated social assumptions \u2013 gender relations, caste and class practices etc \u2013 that form the substratum of a planning paradigm.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    The adoption of the neighbourhood unit by Indian planners was made possible through a rupture \u201cbetween its constituent context, manifest, and tacit values\u201d (Vidyarthi 2010a:\u00a0272). 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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201canti-urban\u201d stance in Indian planners\u2019 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
    you can view video on Paradigms of urban planning<\/strong><\/td>\r\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\n\r\nFor Further Reading<\/strong>\r\n