Letters To A Young Architect

by Christopher Benninger

  Letter

  Visions and Devices of Urban Form

  Urban form and patterns have been the subject of urbanism since the ancient shastras provided guidelines for laying out a city. Images of what a city should be have ranged from the practical to the romantic. The vision of Arcadia is a thread running through history, back to the Greek gymnasia in periurban gardens, away from the polluted thinking and degraded form of inner cities. The idea of ‘the garden’ as an escape from worldly chaos can be seen in imperial Roman estates, Mughal Gardens, and in royal Chinese urban precincts. The concept tempers the vast gardens which hinted at an urban design schema in the palatial royal estates at Versailles, Karlsruhe and elsewhere. The urban fringe has been the subject of both ridicule and nostalgia in painting, literature and urban theory.

  Washington, DC links royal gardens to urban planning. The eighty-eight cantonments and hill stations created by 1875 in India were low density, open town plans, as was Lutyens’ Capitol plan at New Delhi.

  In the nineteenth century the Garden Cities Movement attempted to draw gardens into the city and to modulate a neat transition to the rural countryside. Urban planning theory was actually a theory of escape – escape from the city and the realities of contemporary urban life. Frank Lloyd Wright tried to even-grain the transition of urban fabric to almost nil, reflecting an industrialized people’s fascination with the countryside as a place for escaping from reality. Broad acre City, as Wright fancied his dream, was an automobile-dependent, spread-out fabric of orchard plots, peopled by households very much like the multi-millionaires who were his patrons. Ayn Rand hallmarked this individualistic philosophy in her now classic demand, “Never say we, always say I”.

  Le Corbusier’s Radiant City lifts the city on stilts above an undisturbed rural landscape that flows under the detached urban form. Thus the European abstraction of nature is antagonistic. It sees humans and nature in opposition, to be separated. The American construct integrates man and nature. At a more mundane level, Green Belts create a counter-intuitive no-man’s-land, where a jumble of illegal and unrecognized development occurs. Ironically these jungles of neglect are referred to as the ‘lungs’ of the city, trying to imagine an anthropopolis with its lungs hanging somewhere off on the side! Thus, in theory, law and practice, the fringe of the city is an ambivalent realm of the poetic ideal, and the reckless concrete jungle.

  The modern movement, like the Modern Era, saw a marriage between a program of social objectives, technological applications and art. Early twentieth century urbanism, from Ebenezer Howard to the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), was a statement about the social structure and the social organization of the city, equally as it was about efficiency and city form as promoted through the Athens Charter (written 1932-33, mainly by Le Corbusier, and published 1943-44). There were considerations for social justice and for creating social opportunities. The planning principles of the CIAM were largely misused in postwar Europe to create numbing, bland milieus of boring landscapes of gridiron streets and International Style look-alike structures. In the rush to rebuild cities, poetry and lyricism were neglected. As cities expanded, axioms were applied as formulae. Theorists suddenly called upon to create new cities stumbled over the easy solution of repeating boring boxes laid out over chessboard plans. Team 10, the children of the Modernists and the parents of the Postmodernists, searched for abiding themes that would make cities work for people. The public domains and the movement stems, were among their central concerns. Those who followed them seem to have thrown out the baby with the bath water, favoring urban designs devoid of public domains, cut off from open-ended stems, shut in with ‘gates’ and entrance filters, lacking in any social theory of mobility, accommodation, or opportunity systems. Young urbanists were foolishly advised to go to American suburbia and to learn from its artifacts, as if it were the Florence of the twentieth century. Postmodernism ushered in the era of the big, personal, egocentric statement…as if everything were a Burj Khalifa, or the next tallest building in the world! “Never say we, always say I” is the motto!

  Out of the void of Postmodernism, which was too individualistic and idiosyncratic to focus on something as complicated as ‘the city’, emerged the New Urbanists. The New Urbanism is neither ‘new’ nor in any sense ‘urban’. Like the New Economy which follows Ayn Rand’s motto, the New Urbanism is a mechanism for personal ‘opportunity’, created to appear as a vehicle for the public good. These isolated, inaccessible, resort-like elite communities have their roots in Seaside, Florida and in the Disney Development Company’s Celebration adjacent to Disney World in Orlando. Both concoctions reflect the malaise of the late twentieth century. A kind of virtual reality replaces the actual. The Disney ‘make over’ mutating the New Urbanism projects into antique villages. The concept is to create stage sets (usually modeled on the mythical ‘small American town’) of make-believe streets and structures, much like Disneylands and Disney Worlds. The strategy is attracting buyers into the resale market. Instead of ‘communities’ these are created as investment opportunities. They are created as places to ‘park money’ and not to live in! These so-called urban communities have no jobs, no low-income housing, no workshops nor any other aspect of a diverse urban fabric. They are inhabited by white, Anglo-Saxon elites who, contrary to embracing urbanism, want to escape it. Moreover, these are gated communities with security guards at the controlled entrances. The past two decades have witnessed the demise of the ‘public domain’, with the rise of privately guarded, controlled and accessed spaces. Shopping centers, like in emerging economies, require a credit card as a ‘visa’ for entry. Economic profiling is taking over from the apartheid of racial profiling.

  Urban planning, land regulation and development reflect the most civilized ambitions of any society. Therefore they also mirror the ugly realities of societies. Urban sprawl and ‘strip development’ plague India and the USA alike. The automobile takes command. Loans for cars are cheaper than loans for houses in most countries, and also easier to get. Roads are subsidized and petrol bills, insurance and car payments are all tax deductible! The government is paying a small minority to congest the roads and pollute the air meant for everyone. Public policy nurtures spread and sprawl. At least in India prohibitive taxes temper petrol consumption and automobile purchases. Yet, consumer loans and tax breaks make up for the difference. In any case the local petrol pump is a good place to dump black money. The automobile has had a greater impact on urban form than any other technical or policy intervention. Our policies on the automobile are our policies on the city pattern.

  To a great extent urban form is a play-off between greed and regulation. In the New Economy where one is never to say ‘we’ and always say ‘I’, the plan is one to satiate desire and not to resolve social stresses and find solutions to problems. Those who stand to benefit from a particular urban shape or form usually take on the ‘burden’ of responsibility to shape that form. Opportunities lie out on the fringe, where land is bought cheap, developed and sold expensive. The urban fringe is the Babylon of this new economic frontier.

  A small university town, Gainesville Florida, with a population of 125,000, has an urban area slightly larger than the city of Paris! Why? The elected city and county commissioners are all land traders and developers, who personally benefit from the city services and amenities, which will spread over vast tracts of urbanizing land. They and their brothers across America are leaving their grandchildren a huge debt and an unmanageable network of roads, water supply, electrical and sewage lines.

  All of the above has made city management relatively impossible, with land prices spreading horizontally out from the urban core, over an ever-urbanizing space. Artificially low FARs (Floor Area Ratios) help ‘push’ development out, by making habitable land more rare and costly. Land use planning stimulates a system of ‘bids and prices’, which directs users to compete for land in di
fferent zones. Low FARs geometrically expand the cost of laying storm and sewage drains, extending fire fighting, water supply, telephone and optic fibers. They make the maintenance of law and order near-impossible. Fleeing high prices, residential development leapfrogs from one pocket of inhabitation to the next, overstretching urban systems. Low FARs, vehicle subsidies and land use planning contribute to this sprawl and spread, where densities are too low to support efficient public transport, walkable compact communities, or even basic public health infrastructure. The Charter of the New Urbanism is a delightful document guiding planners and developers on how to plan and lay out ‘good investments’. The people who will live there don’t come into the picture until the deed is done. They come into the picture, along with financial institutions, as buyers and investors. These are high standard guidelines created to enhance investments.

  Instead of master plans and development plans, we must start with a public Charter of Intelligent Urbanism. This would lay out a kind of ‘covenant’ of principles or themes around which the fixed components of the city structure can be fixed. Such a Charter is a kind of Robert’s Rules of Order around which participatory debates on a consensual Structure Plan can take place. A Structure Plan includes the ‘non-negotiable’ parts and components of the city. These parts range from urban corridors along which future movement of people, goods, water, and waste will happen. It includes the establishment of high-density nodes and hubs that gather enough people to support public transport halts, amenities and services all at a walkable distance from compact neighborhoods. The Structure Plan includes a very basic set of regulations on uses that are compatible with one another, and on the connectors, safety and hygiene of the urban fabric nurtured.

  The Structure Plan is basically the application of the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism as physical themes to a spatial arrangement determined by the geo-climatic context. Local Area Plans, such as Town Planning Schemes and private layouts, are kind of mini-master plans that plug into the Structure Plan through a participatory and transparent process of incremental and discrete planning. This ‘process of planning’ makes cities into vehicles for people to realize their dreams. Without such a process of policy, planning and participation, development is bound to be motivated and dominated by vested interests. It is bound to lack environmental protections, social facilitation, or the promotion of efficient infrastructure. The plans that we are producing and the cities we are creating are barriers to the people’s development. These are not artifacts of public interest or in the interest of the public. Only a handful of land traders will benefit.

  There was a time when visionaries tried to ‘imagine’ the ideal city. There were times when cities were conceived as the habitats of societies and as vehicles for improving the human condition. As the New Urbanism is imported into the emerging economies it will become a device to divide society and a mechanism to transfer more wealth to those who already have it in abundance. What is needed is a more accountable, transparent and participatory form of city making. For this we require true principles of intelligent urbanism as a beginning of genuine debate. The Charter for the New Urbanism is an apocalypse.

  (Published in the book ‘The Urban Fringe of Indian Cities, Edited by Jutta K Dikshit, Rawat Publications, New Delhi, 2011)

  Letter

  Five Myths which Plague Urban India

  Myth One: Urban India and Rural Bharat are two conflicting worlds.

  Many rural élites and urban theoreticians have seen cities as parasites on rural areas, sucking unearned profits off the backs of peasant labor. This was in fact the early colonial strategy to facilitate a wealth creation pyramid with the Presidency cities at the apex. Over two centuries, social, economic and political links integrated the forward and reverse exchanges, creating dependencies in everything – from consumer goods to urban labor force needs. The current exponential growth of the economy will accelerate dependence on an enhanced, and indeed a better-educated, labor supply.

  As recently as a generation ago, most of us espoused a simple urban-versus-rural paradigm. This idea was tragically wrong. The first two Five Year Plans totally neglected cities and industrialization in favor of rural development. Other than a few mega-dams, fertilizer and steel projects and their related company townships, there was little investment in urban services and transport infrastructure. It was only in the early seventies that urban development corporations and the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) emerged (with HDFC entering a bit later), focused on housing finance for the middle classes. The National Housing Bank came even later. For two decades these institutions focused on meeting housing gaps, filling the missing numbers of projected housing needs instead of facilitating shelter processes and emphasizing the creation of basic infrastructure. There was never a concept of facilitating people and the private sector to solve their own problems.

  In 1986 I was engaged by the Asian Development Bank to write a position paper for their Board arguing that the ADB should enter the urban sector. I had to serve them platitudes such as ‘cities are where civilization happens’. I had to tell them that cities are the economic engines which create products, jobs and a positive balance of trade. Throughout Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong excluded) there was a strong rural bias based on the myth that cities and villages are somehow at odds. To invest in urban infrastructure was wrongly thought to be taking from the villages. Or, conversely, there were those who thought installing one urban water tap, would cause ten rural families to migrate to use it! Like most paradigms which oversimplify things into binary opposites, the urban versus rural paradigm was taken, at a great cost to both urban and rural India, as a parable of truth. At the same time rural development policies were focused on economically advanced districts, leading to rural pauperization in most areas, and a ‘push’ of migrants to cities that were ill-prepared to receive them. This, too, was due to a costly myth.

  In fact urban-rural regions are an integrated socio-economic mechanism that works holistically to produce raw materials, train pools of skilled workers and managers, and bring together clusters of economic inputs which create what we know as wealth. If they are integrated, each catalyzes and enriches the other. Without urban areas there are no markets for agricultural goods, and without thriving hinterlands urban products have limited markets. Economic regions have now become global in many respects – a realization that has reached us only in the last decade. For decades the urban versus rural myth starved India of adequate urban and economic infrastructure.

  Myth Two: Illiterate rural masses flood cities, crowding and congesting them.

  A thread of ‘common wisdom’ around the world is that rural-urban migration is the root cause of urban ills. This is wrong. Rural-urban migration is part of the process of industrialization, commercialization of crops, improved rural health and education, media and transport. The availability of cheap and willing labor has been one of the key factors in India’s economic success. Policy makers took an ostrich-like attitude toward the role of cities in modernization and ignored the need for urban infrastructure. When the Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai declared war on illegal hutment dwellers and started demolishing their shanties and trucking them forcibly back to their villages, it soon emerged that about seventy-five percent of the civic body’s own employees lived in these habitats! Had they been pushed out of the city, Mumbai would have come to a standstill. In fact all key sectors that contribute to the urban economic base would have faltered. Instead of tackling the problems of urban infrastructure, low income shelter and services, many of our urban experts pondered how to stop in-migration. In the early 1990s HUDCO set up a special Working Group to analyze ways to ‘cap urban growth’!

  Policy makers and planners had at hand a number of cost-effective strategic options which were only half-heartedly adopted. The most basic was the Slum Improvement Scheme, which brought basic hygiene and essential infrastru
cture to the ‘end user.’ The Busti Improvement Programme of Kolkata was an effective variation of this idea and it reached several million people. In the early 1970s we also used ‘site and services’ in Chennai to quickly produce about 15,000 serviced plots on which people could build their own shelters. Instead of letting local politicians colonize public lands (from which they harvested huge rents in the form of protection money and vote banks through sporadic promises) in an unorganized and chaotic manner, the government should have taken the lead and made access of the poor to shelter and urban services a key platform of their urban strategy. It was the de facto public policy to leave this task to party workers and solve the related problems thereafter in an ad hoc manner. The same combine of elected officials-colonizers discouraged the lower income groups from making fair payments for services and facilities, creating an impression that the rich subsidize the urban poor. Effective policy could have extended land tenure and essential services to these households, making them tax-paying, ‘pay your own way’ citizens. But it was in the interest of our system of governance to keep these households in a dependent and demanding survival state, rather than raising their status to self-supporting citizens. In fact these people were ‘invisible’ as illegal settlements were not even shown in most official maps, plans and documents.

  Myth Three: Urban plans stifle economic development and growth.

  It is a myth that urban planning is a barrier to economic development. In fact good planning is good business. The best planned cities have performed economically better than the unplanned ones.