City Creative Redevelopment Part 1 – The Origins
All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas. - Jane Jacobs, Urbanist
During the past decade, there has been a growing recognition to make our cities more livable. The recent Budget announcement to creatively redevelop cities is a manifestation of this call.
What is creative redevelopment of cities?
Urban India consists of ‘cities in a city’, which have developed through the ages by a process of accretion of settlements. During medieval times, accretion occurred as a response to invasions, physical expression of a new political regimes or ideologies, and regional and political interests. Nearly all accretions occurred around central marketplaces (e.g. Delhi’s Chandini Chowk, Abid/Koti in Hyderabad). In other words, city growth was organic.
To the market center the British added planned areas for Britishers (civil lines) and the military (cantonments/military lines), and railways. These were planned in the sense of being grounded in geometry, like the grid pattern. Thus, at the time of Independence, India had two forms within cities - organic and planned.
Post-Independence urban planning focused on bringing order into existing cities in two ways: First, by relying on conventional planning principles to set right city parts that had experiences organic growth. Second, establishing government entities like Housing Boards and Urban Development Authorities to ensure that future accretion (colonies, like RK Puram in Delhi) followed urban planning principles.
When the National Commission on Urbanization was set up in the 1980s, three types of spatial forms were visible in Indian cities:
Asli city or the indigenous parts (e.g. Chandini Chowk in Delhi, Abids in Hyderabad),
Lines (e.g. cantonments built the British), and
Colonies built by housing boards, urban development authorities after independence.
The Indian economy was opened during the 1990s. Existing urban planning tools, like master planning were inadequate to cater to the demands of a rapidly growing economy. To get over this limitation, entrepreneurial state governments improvised planning tools to rebuild cities. For example, FSI as we know it was dispensed in the erstwhile State of AP.
The result was that huge quantities of capital entered select cities (e.g. Hyderabad, Bengaluru). This inflow was not spread uniformly over the entire city but concentrated on certain parts of land. Global capital randomly touched down on particular areas, leading to their rapid development. Cities became game boards to shuffle land uses, that is, mix and redistribute to achieve economic growth agendas.
What emerged was a mix of planned and organic growth. Planned growth was driven by the existing urban planning tools, while organic growth was fueled by the imperatives of rapid economic growth. This sort of growth can be truly described as chaordic - a mix of chaos and order. This has led to sub-optimal economic outcomes where India gets about one-third of GDP from urbanization as compared to other countries in the West, South-east Asia and the Far East. To set this right is one of the goals of Creative Redevelopment of cities.
