To plan for urban, or not
Urban plans are grand interventions to a city that is capable of organising itself.
Plans are overrated. For me, any memorable travel moment arrived, when it was not planned for. In fact, the usual and the mundane are instances from the planned itinerary. It could be that I am a bad planner. And of course, plans matter, they got me to the vacation in the first place. But there is some inhibition in the mind. Our minds are troubled to internalise a view, that order and outcomes can be achieved without plans, and plans can harm them, instead.
Just as India gained Independence from the British, a swarm of bees descended on to the scene. The central planners arrived. Queen bee, Jawaharlal Nehru had a vision for a socialist pattern of society. At that time, it seemed like a well considered and workable idea. The entire government machinery went helter-skelter to make plans. Towns and cities, India’s vital organs, it was felt, needed plans too. In fact Nehru wanted to plan a new city of his own, Chandigarh. These urban plans were called master plans. 118 new towns sprung up, noted to be the largest new town programme, made anywhere in the world, ever. Nehru was involved even in the making of Delhi’s master plan of 1962.
Central plans for economy, and urban plans for cities, were comrades during India’s socialist past. Separated only when central planning of economic activity was abandoned in 1991. Most, not all, economic activities were set free, or liberalised from state control. Urban plans continue to make their presence felt. Realisations that freed the Indian economy, could not transfigure to free Indian cities from urban planning.
To be fair, most urban plans today, remain dormant, but thankfully so! If pursued any more actively than they are, a disaster is in the making.
Cities and economies are a complex order, organised through coordination among trillions of activities, made by billions of people, in millions of locations. What is true for the economy is true for cities, absolutely. Just as central planners cannot coordinate the system at the level of the economy, urban planners cannot master plan the working and growth of a city. It’s not because urban plans are poor or lacking. It’s because cities are living creatures. The life of cities, can at best be guided, not programmed.
How urban planners view cities, is the fuel that drives their ambition. The aerial view captured on paper, grants an urban planner the belief, that they have the knowledge needed to draw lines, circle zones, grid infrastructure, and colour parks. While the study of spaces is a hard skill to attain, the power to draw lines that it grants is unmatched. French urban planner Le Corbusier, when approached to plan Chandigarh, fumed at the ask to travel to India to create his urban designs. He was convinced that anything required, was right there in his studio in Paris. He negotiated for two visits to India, and no more.
To know how cities work, and create order, one needs to take a street view. In a city of even modest size, there are thousands of streets. Each street has its own character, where choices on the use of space are negotiated and settled at, real-time. And they are made by not a few, but many, including residents who live on it, and outsiders who visit them. Commerce of every kind, house dwellings of different permutations, emerge and operate on these streets. Anything done to modify them by taking an aerial view, merely, is destructive.
This is a timeless and now widely acknowledged wisdom made popular by urban thinker and writer Jane Jacobs. But this wisdom existed way before her time. Especially during the times of Indian independence through thoughts and writings of urban thinker and sociologist Patrick Geddes. There was a time when British planners cut straight lines through Indian towns and cities to erase entire neighbourhoods, to make space for wide roads and boulevards. Patrick Geddes was an opponent to this ruthless urban planner mindset. He labeled his thought of witnessing the urban order at the street view, first, and propose any changes after, conservative surgery. Nehru, likely had access to this wisdom, but the project to rebuild India was grand, and the voice of a lone urban thinker, soft.
Urban planning today, continues to operate from the aerial view. In fact, it’s even taking the VR view, where planners dive in with headsets, and tinker with traffic and buildings in the virtual world, to create plans for cities in the real one. Hyper data driven plans, still can’t capture, street level order. And most importantly, even if a living city is frozen in time, it doesn’t mean cities need an external mind to direct the order created in them. While the lack of knowledge is a limitation, but bigger reasons to strike-out the urban planning mindset, is also it’s consequences.
Cities go through a process of gradual evolution. The order keeps transforming, with gradual changes, balanced often like the sound of a harmony. Urban plans are like shock events in a city’s evolution. While radical reforms have their place, a seismic changes can uproot communities and destroy ecologies. Coupled with large transformations is also the funding constraint. Capital for many reasons, is easier to attract for larger shifts, not gradual improvements.
Meteorites of urban plans have struck Mumbai, one after another. At present, Coastal Roads, Trans Harbour Link, Metro Rail expansion, are leaving tremors across the city. The cost is real, yet unseen. Public health, for instance, has taken a beat, with people in Mumbai witnessing higher cases of respiratory infections from dust storms induced by construction debris. The sea of changes will have many winners and losers, real estate prices will take drastic variations, and rents will adjust in unpredictable ways. Urban planners don’t like to crawl, they like to jump. Slow re-development of cities is not part of their job temperament. Larger the scale of planning intervention, tougher and more prolonged the transition for a city.
We build our lives, other people's lives, and entire societies, on plans. Turn around, look back at India's past. Great plans made with thought, guidance, and ambition, made by great, learned people, failed to transform Indian economy. Friedrich Hayek, a remarkable thinker, used all his life to describe why planning, and centralising it, is a fatal flaw. He even thought this was a job description for all his peers, writing in an essay, he expressed, that
“the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”.
An urban planner with an ambition can take the whole society down. India has had a several few. While India buried central planning for the economy, it is important that we question the role of the modern urban planner and function of their master plans.
Also read: Rolling Stones committed the planning fallacy in their song, just as we do in our lives: Time is not on your side, Housefull Economics, Think Pragati, March 2018.