[Urbanstudy] Is Urbanisation Making All Our Cities Look The Same? Here's What Should Be Kept In Mind While Planning The Cities

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/is-urbanisation-making-all-our-cities-look-the-same-here-s-what-should-be-kept-in-mind-while-planning-the-cities-267008.html

INDIA

*Is Urbanisation Making All Our Cities Look The Same? Here's What Should Be
Kept In Mind While Planning The Cities*
 SHREYA KALRA DECEMBER 08, 2016 6.6K SHARES


India is a country of rich history and culture. In fact, there are many
histories and cultures that constitute the story of India and attract
thousands of tourists every year. However, the migration from rural to
urban areas is putting tremendous pressure on the existing infrastructure
of the cities. This calls for building up new structures resulting in
vertical and horizontal expansion of the cities.

During this process, the cities face the danger of losing the very essence
that makes them unique and invite people to feel the difference that they
offer. There is quite a debate about what this 'development' would lead
these cities to. Apprehensive people ask, in the quest to become “modern”,
are Indian cities slowly losing their soul and uniqueness?

Chandni Chowk


The concept of contemporary architecture has been boiled down to tall glass
buildings – a concept adopted by cities such as Dubai and Singapore. While
these cities have stellar roads, highways and general infrastructure, it
must not be forgotten that these cities are much younger in comparison to
Indian cities that date back centuries. There are stories hidden in every
nook and crannies of Benares, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pondicherry and
Jaipur to name a few.

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Vidhya Mohankumar, urban planner, architect and founder of Urban Design
Collective, defines cities as “an archive of time”. She says: “They give
you a sense of different eras, a feel of what has passed. They are like
legacies waiting to be read and unfolded.”

Once upon a time not too long ago, Bangalore was a romantic city that
combined the modern demands of a city in terms of employment and
recreational opportunities while retaining its natural environment through
expansive tree covers and numerous lakes. But, over the years, it has lost
its way because it did not anticipate the growth that would befall the
southern city as the IT boom took off and fell into the trap of
urbanisation – now its citizen cry about the same issues that residents of
Delhi and Mumbai do – traffic congestion and lack of parking space, among
others.

WHEELSTREET
“Our governments are approaching cities from the point of view of
socio-economic targets rather and socio-cultural targets,” adds Vidhya. In
that sense we are only aiming for industrial rankings, but cities are not a
product that need add-ons and deletions, they are “more of a service”.

When cities are approached as products, that’s when we fill them with
unnecessary flyovers rather than making public transportation better. Every
Indian city has something unique to offer – the capital with its monuments,
Mumbai with its seas and Hyderabad with its Nawabi culture and lakes, in
the shift towards urbanisation, we need to ask whether our cities are
slowly loosening their grip on culture and historicity.


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Writing for Indiatimes, William Dalrymple, historian and author, who has
been living in Delhi on and off notes, “There are a lot of negative
changes, apart from the ugly buildings, the unplanned spaces, the
pollution…the water level is sinking, it's an extremely badly administered
city split up into these different blocks. Yet, I think it is one of the
greatest cities in the world. The history, the fact that there's a tomb at
nearly all the roundabouts, a madrasa sitting at the stairway of the golf
course, amazing old hunting palaces or caravan sarais... all that has
survived. And there's also the old kabootarbaaz in Mehrauli or up in the
old city, still the hijras at Turkman Gate, the old city is still such a
wonderful place.”

BBC

Majority of Indians still reside in rural areas that are gradually
transforming urban zones, just like its cities. This transformation is
virtually guided by the West, and hence, the basic identity is waning.

Deepak Mehta, a Delhi-based architect says, “We haven’t been able to
configure our cities with the technical know how’s of the past, culturally
or otherwise. It is true that cities have become more diverse with a
plethora of urban fabrics of the past and the more organised settlement
patterns of the present. We need to respect the same. Past cultural
influences need to be revisited. Also, a more systematic approach needs to
be adopted to usher in new development.”
People and cities work in conjunction with other – it’s a symbiotic
relationship where one feeds of the other. Mehta says ‘It’s a two-way
process” where “buildings are shaped by people, transform it into a
neighbourhood, which in turn influences people”.

So as India’s people become more urban and also more 'Westernised', we’re
also not appreciation local and Indian and there’s no acknowledgment of
what makes us Indian, Vidhya adds.

She cites the example of a town in Sri Lanka, where residents actively
sought for funding from the government to restore their houses in order to
hold on to the architecture of the past. Citizen engagement is of utmost
importance to retain the identity of our cities. Goa, one of the biggest
tourist attractions of India, is losing its Portuguese-influenced houses
for modern box-structured resorts.
If that is lost, isn’t half the charm and essence of Goa lost for where
else in the world can you find Indo-Portuguese architecture?

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AG Krishna Menon, an architect and Urban Planner who has been in the
profession for 40 years, says historical cities do not equal to backward
cities and the traditional and modern can be melded together. However, the
fact that the current government withdrew Delhi’s UNESCO’s nomination as a
world heritage city relays “a certain psychological aspect that historical
cities are backward cities”.
Cities are empty pieces of structure without people. Building urban
identity is a two-way street where the one cannot go without the other.
Currently, the way things are done, the future looks devoid of places that
transport us back to the glorious past. But there is hope that we won’t end
up in boxed structures of a city that are clones of each other.
As the saying goes, we need to look beyond the box and create cities that
are modern, practical while portraying an evolution of time.
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