Objective

1. Urban planning:

Urban planning: To recognize that rapid urbanization is an inevitable aspect of the near future and to plan to allow for this growth in a systematic and effective manner, not only for the existing Metro cities but also, in the towns (Tier II and Tier III) across the country.

A town is not an over grown village, neither is a city an over grown town. A town or city has its own changing dynamics as it grows from smaller to larger towns and finally, into small and larger cities.

Humans are even today tied up by their evolutionary roots to feel comfortable and secure only in village level population groups to which they have a sense of belonging. They cannot encompass all the dynamics of the large multitudes of the city in their daily life matters. They need to be able to react with various levels of involvement, with more and different sub-agglomerations therein. The neighbourhoods’ have to have similar social aspects of villages to accord a sense of comfort and belonging to the people.

Architect Christopher Alexander in his book – ‘A Pattern of Language’ sees the public squares as linked to a larger pattern of which the square is a part of. The links are labelled ‘Activity nodes’, ‘Promenades’ and identifiable neighbourhoods. This is a pattern we need to consider.

It is essential that cities be developed as an agglomeration of clusters, each with its own flavours and atmosphere as its people are comfortable with, and yet be able to react meaningfully with the other clusters in the city, each with somewhat different characteristics, for mutual advantage.

The size of each such cluster could be such as can be accessed on foot with less than an hour’s walk from anywhere within it, say 2 to 4 km edge to edge, separated from neighbouring clusters by playgrounds, green belts / parks and water bodies while also, connecting to neighbouring clusters vide metros, roads and bicycle and pedestrian pathways.

Urban planning should therefore be designed around clusters of neighbourhoods. This may be considered ‘old fashioned’ and inefficient to design, but it is the interaction of people within and across such diverse neighbourhoods that add vitality and zest to life in the city and to the well-being of the city itself. Each neighbourhood should have its own character and should include people from diverse social backgrounds within it. Then the concentration of human minds and the interactions between the people both within the neighbourhood and across neighbourhoods will encourage greater creativity and
innovation. The greater the interactions from outside one’s comfort zone, the greater the creativity. Hence, city clusters should force people to mingle and interact meaningfully. It is the exchange of ideas that counts.

Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt, physicists turned urban planners, analysed various statistics about cities and came up with some startling observations:

• All cities work in the same way and give rise to rules or laws that apply to all.
• Creativity of an urban area depends on its ability to encourage the free flow of information and cross- fertilization of ideas.
When people agglomerate, they exchange more ideas and become more productive.
• When people agglomerate, they exchange more ideas and become more productive. The increase in their per capita income, the patents applied for, the number of various facilities in the cities i.e. restaurants, theatres, hospitals, playgrounds etc. and the output of every individual therein all seem to follow a power law correlation of about 1.15, which means a 15 percent increase for every doubling of the size of the city.

Such increase naturally attracts more people to move to a city, which further increases the productivity etc and attracts even more people and so on.

“Cities are this inexhaustible source of ideas” – and ‘As cities get bigger, everything becomes accelerated. Each individual unit becomes more productive and more innovative.” – Geoffrey West

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