City Creative Redevelopment Part 2 – Path Dependency

Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards. - Søren Kierkegaard

What do we mean when we say that cities must be made more orderly to get more from them (e.g. contribution to GDP)?  

It is axiomatic in urban planning that denser, mixed land-use compact cities are more liveable. However, in Indian cities the relationship between urban density and liveability is not consistently positive, particularly in the indigenous city. Often, higher density is the result of over-concentration in the indigenous city or unplanned mixing of land uses (I call it “mixed-up land use”) in the new ones. The congestion forces so generated have a negative spiralling effect on liveability and reduce the positive effects of agglomeration.

Making this more orderly means addressing this uniquely Indian phenomenon.

An India-centric way was championed by pioneering town planner Patrick Geddes, who visited India during 1915 and 1919. He was commissioned by both British and Indian rulers to prepare plans for 18 Indian cities, including Tanjore, Madurai, Balrampur, Lucknow and Indore.

Geddes believed in ‘diagnosis before treatment’ and thus advocated survey as the first step in planning. The survey instrument was developed in civic surveys in Edinburgh and became the model for later surveys. Geddesian innovations have a contemporary ring to them. For example, reducing the number of paved streets in residential areas and turning the land saved into usable forms of open space, which is somewhat similar to place making. He viewed both cities and human beings as wholes, and he saw the process of repair, renewal and rebirth as natural phenomena of development.

His planning instrument was a diagnostic survey followed by ‘constructive and conservative surgery’. The diagnostic survey starts with an assessment of the nature of growth of the city. The city would seem chaotic to the modern eye trained to a mechanical order, however, there is an underlying order of life in its development. The method of conservative surgery is different from the formula-driven development consisting of new grid pattern with forty feet streets through congested localities, which was common practice in India at that time. Moreover, gridirons, while relieving congestion in some parts of the city, increase it in other parts.

Conservative surgery shows that new streets may not really be required, as existing lanes can be substantially improved by rearranging artifacts and activities on the streets. Conservative surgery requires long and patient surveys, often in the field with hours of perambulation and sketching on different sites. Geddes gave up on the mathematical straight line and aimed for a different aesthetic - one more attractive and comparably cheaper.

Diverse historic Indian styles represent a recognition of varying preferences of houseowners. For example, one person may desire an open balcony, another a closed and projecting one, while a third prefers a decorated window. One householder prefers plain whitewash while another one wants a painted plater house, and a third prefers a blue or a green. Slowly this is gaining recognition.

This is the individual and free Indian style.

Thus, there are two pathways available to do creative redevelopment - regular and formula-driven vs. individual and free - the former is found in lines built by British and colonies built by the UDAs and Housing Boards while the latter predominates in the Asli (indigenous) parts of towns.