An Alternative Approach to Addressing Core City Housing Through Design Interventions: Case of Kolkata, India

An Alternative Approach to Addressing Core City Housing through Design Interventions: Case of Kolkata, India

Tapas Mitra 1

Sheuli Mitra 1

1 School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India, Neelbad Road, Bhauri, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh 462030, [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT The residential neighborhood continuum, spread across the physical fabric of the core city of Kolkata is representative of the city’s unique character. Due to non-availability of space at the core and overloaded infrastructure, mass housing initiatives in public and private sector across all segments have happened largely in its urban peripheries resulting in consumption of large land banks and cutting off the lower income housing sector from the city areas serviced by large scale trunk infrastructure. The core in turn has degentrified and experiences outmigration and social degeneration. The present paper, which captures a part of a larger continuing research, presents the case of the residential cores of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation where the housing scenario presents certain conditions as follows: (i) Presence of significant building premises where the existing building is in good condition and architecturally significant and is being lived in by the original owners/mix of original owners and tenants. (ii) Decay where the structure has gradually decayed, because of various factors, some of which include, lesser use of the building due to outmigration, downgrading of socio- economic conditions, inability of aged family members to maintain the house etc. and (iii) Transformation which results in modification/demolition of old structures. In all the scenarios mentioned above, the market forces compel a transformation into the developer driven apartment as the predominant housing typology, which is usually unaffordable to the local community and caters only to higher income demand replacing lower income communities in the city core. Also, the housing stock thus generated is entirely out of context and gradually obliterates the character of the core city fabric. The present research devices a toolkit that enables informed decision making in terms of retaining significant architecture, contextual retrofitting resulting in supplying affordable new stock to appropriately fit into the existing urban fabric. The development which occurs on each plot is a result of the combinations of (i) Physical networks of street widths (which determines the permissible FAR) and infrastructure lines (ii) Premise sizes, building types, conditions and built-up areas and (iii) Socio-economic factors relating to the number of stakeholders, residents and aspects of migration patterns etc. The toolkit is designed to perform a rapid appraisal of all these attributes which would help in assessing the future scenarios of development, identify intervention thrusts required and eventually provide design intervention guidelines specifically applicable to these areas at the city level. It further examines and suggests modifications/adaptations in the existing regulatory framework including building level bye-laws and zoning guidelines to enable innovations in building design to retain specific housing typologies, streetscapes and overall imageability of the city core. Through the use of the toolkit, local communities and governments can develop a combination of design strategies by which the core city would be able to retain its architectural character and augment infrastructure simultaneously providing affordable and socially acceptable new housing stock which would enable the immigrant/original resident to live/continue to live at the city core in improved living conditions. KEYWORDS: Core City Housing, housing transformation, design intervention. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Tapas Mitra is an architect and Urban Designer who has been in teaching, practice and research for twenty five years. He is presently Associate Professor in Architecture and Programme Coordinator of Urban Design at the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. His research and publications have been on the core residential areas of Kolkata. He has a Ph. D on transformations in older residential neighbourhoods, from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Sheuli Mitra is an architect and urban planner and possesses a Ph. D in social and economic viability of urban housing . She has been in teaching and practice of architecture and urban planning. Her research areas include

urban studies with focus on urban transformations and the social and economic inequalities in land and housing markets. She is presently Associate Professor in Planning and Dean, Research and Development at the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal.

1 Introduction The Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA) is spread over an area of 1851 sq.km. with a population of about 17 million resulting in a density of around 9,184 persons per sq.km. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) is one of the six districts in KMA and occupies around 185 sq.km, (about one tenth of the land area of the metropolitan area), but houses a population of around 4.5 million with a density of around 24,430 persons per sq.km. The initiatives of affordable housing in the KMA have been spread across the metropolitan area and have been supplied by both the public sector and private sector, albeit in lesser numbers. Early planning documents since the beginning of the 20th century had recognized the need to address the concerns of a large supply of land and housing for lower income groups and had proposed a structured approach to distributing populations in various locations across the planning area in satellite towns, residential nodes and also within the city corporation area, linking these with transport and infrastructure lines servicing these areas. However many of these proposals were never implemented and the city grew in a piece meal fashion. In recent years, with the liberalization of the economy and the increased participation of the private sector in housing markets, the allocation of land for housing became significantly skewed in favour of the higher income population. The state changed its role from provider to facilitator and in the process auctioned/sold/allocated land on peripheral areas to private developers for provision of housing and reduced its role in direct housing supply. This resulted in large tracts of land at the periphery converted to housing for higher income population, following real estate market dynamics. The lower economic segments were almost removed from the formal housing markets. Peripheral locations, which were historically seen to have lower income housing sprawl have now become out of bounds for the urban poor. In this context, there is a need to relook at the older residential locations in the city core which have historically been homes of all socio-economic groups and which have the advantage of being better serviced with transportation and physical and social infrastructure services, as possible alternatives for housing the lower income segments of urban population. These areas have also witnessed transformations with new development replacing the older housing stock and new in-migrant populations replacing the original inhabitants. This paper focuses on the older residential neighbourhoods of the city core as part of the larger metropolitan area. The residential neighborhood continuum, discussed in this paper is within the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) area and is representative of the essence of the city as depicted through its buildings, streetscapes and people. This paper focuses on the aspects of the dynamics of change in old residential neighborhood areas in the city of Kolkata. It is difficult to differentiate these neighborhoods over a larger city scale and locate the ‘edges’. At the physical level, arterial and sub-arterial roads mark the edges, or significant public realms at the city level (a park or a market) help define a neighborhood as a discrete unit. Nevertheless, these neighborhoods are part of a larger continuum spread over and connected over the physical fabric of the city which the present authors call the ‘Grey zone’. The paper further tries to evolve a methodology of assessing the sort of intervention that would be applicable to areas having common characteristics on the basis of certain criteria formulated. A two level approach forms the core of the discussion – strategy planning for certain fragile ‘grey zones’ identified in the context of the whole city and then adopting an area specific action plan within the broader framework. In the process of identifying and evaluating of the ‘grey zones’ the research adopts its theoretical framework from what Habraken calls ‘The structure of the ordinary’ (Habraken, N.J., 1998) that represents the true nature and uniqueness of a neighborhood which becomes imperceptibly, as it were, part of a larger homogeneous collage spread across the city.

2 Research Structure

2.1 Defining Grey Zones in the Context of Kolkata ‘Grey zones’ are areas which have the following characteristics: • Old city districts which have undergone considerable transformation already and do not possess a large number of individual buildings of historic relevance to qualify as a historic district. • Areas where the overall built form however retains a flavour of the past and can in no way be confused with the anonymous new development of the remaining city. • Areas located near major arterial corridors/ commercial districts of the city, having strong forces of land use change and redevelopment acting upon them. • Areas still remaining as predominantly residential areas but with poor level of service of residential and at times basic infra structure. There has so far been no separate classification nor are there developmental/design guidelines or framework of development for all such areas in general. There has been in recent years a trend of identification of old city areas in various parts of our cities and addressing the problems at a neighbourhood level with the help of action research groups and public participation. However, in spite of considerable work having been done by these methods, taking up scattered isolated action areas for intervention appears to be restrictive in approach to solving the problem. It needs to be examined whether the problems of all these residential districts of the city have certain commonalities which could be addressed by formulating a city level developmental framework within which the individual action area plans can operate addressing locality specific issues.

2.2 Positing the Research in Theoretical Framework The Perception School spearheaded by Lynch (Lynch, Kevin, 1960), and the works of Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, Jane, 1961) and Habraken(Habraken, N.J., 1998) , have raised strong point against Modernist City planning advocated by Corbusier during the heydays of modernism in the 30s and 40s, which saw great architecture but not great liveable cities, where the automobile becomes the major protagonist and situates the participator, to borrow the terminology of Edmund Bacon who employs another way of looking at the city from the ‘participator’s’ approach in his book Design of Cities (Bacon, Edmund, 1967) in the automobile dominated realm. Jacobs and her compatriots strongly advocate local interventions and reorganisation of the urban fabric at the local levels as against the monumental urban renewal proposals that dominated the 60s American city planning practices. The Perception School continues to be a major influence in the work of, Tridib Banerjee and William C. Baer, who in their seminal book Beyond the Neighborhood unit Baer, William C. and Banerjee, Tridib, 1984), use perception techniques to delineate the extent of what they call ‘residential neighbourhood areas’ which disqualifies and outdates to a great extent the neighbourhood unit concept of Clarence Perry in his work of 1929 (Perry, Clarence, 1929).

2.3 Research Framework The present paper, in its research structure presents three distinct phases of inquiry. The first part of the study analyses the metropolitan city structure from the perspective of planned initiatives affecting housing supply. . The spatial structure of the city, its chronological growth and impact on older city areas are analysed. It then establishes the morphology of the city and identifies parameters and attributes of defining the neighbourhood typologies in the core city area, which fulfil the requirements of ‘quintessential’ Kolkata residential neighbourhoods. A detailed inventory of works on city morphology and neighbourhood structures, available in research works across the world, is critically examined and subsequently the appropriateness of these available models, when applied to Kolkata, is evaluated. Selected case study areas are then identified as representative samples of residential neighbourhoods in transformation, from the possible qualifying zones.

In the second part of the work, detailed surveys (physical, socio-economic and cultural) of the two chosen case study neighbourhood areas of Kolkata, are undertaken. An examination of the data collected, reveals patterns of development and neighbourhood transformation. The transformation of neighbourhoods and also individual residential properties, are documented through chronological spatial data analyses and socio- economic surveys to understand household level transformations and the impact of these on neighbourhood characteristics. The study concludes with an analysis of the key attributes, which help retain the essence of ‘quintessential Kolkata neighbourhoods’. An attempt is also made to assess the vulnerability of neighbourhoods to total transformations and identify the different attributes which are responsible for the transformation correlating their own inter relationship, which affect the dynamics of change. Based on the cumulative impact of the effect of these attributes, suggestive intervention strategies are put forward, with a commentary on the possibilities of taking this research forward.

3 Analysis of the City Residential Locations in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area An analysis of the planning interventions in the metropolitan area over time demonstrates the impact on the residential development of the city. A spatial mapping of the population density and the residential land prices reveal that newer peripheral locations with good connectivity to the city core are showing increases in both density and price escalations at a higher rate. However, the absolute density remains the highest in the core city areas within the limits of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

Figure – 1: Population distribution and residential price relations in KMA (source: Authors Research)

Delineation of the ‘Grey Zones’ of Kolkata A study of urban morphology and transportation network at the city core of Kolkata, as depicted in the map in Fig. 2, helps delineate the ‘grey zones’ of the city.

It is observed from the map, that large areas along a major North-South Spine (Central Avenue under which the Metro Passes), even though are having the locational advantage of prime properties show stagnation and trends of a gradual degenerative process. After the introduction of the underground Metro Rail, locations of the surface dispersal points have become major areas of passenger interchange, but inspite of this, the areas have not been considerably rejuvenated, nor have their land values escalated to the extent envisaged. The complexities in property ownership, litigations and large number of stake holders with divergent development agenda are the main factors responsible for the lack of a dynamic transformation in these areas. However piecemeal addition and alterations have taken place and often obliterated the original character of the buildings. Due attention needs to be given to the ‘block behind’ – one block deep from the main artery where the built structures speak of a craftsmanship of a bygone era and the original structure is still retained, but the activities housed in them abuse the built structures and conditions of disrepair mutilate them beyond recognition.

Figure – 2: Transportation network and city morphology (source: Authors)

Figure – 3: Map showing ‘grey zone’ delineation, study patches, the Metro spine and major road network (source: Authors)

These neighborhoods are representative of Kolkata. The ad-hoc and gradual transformations that have happened to the neighborhoods have not changed the perception of their essential character. They remain static in the collective memory, frozen in the frames of the films which have been made on them. The architect, urban designer and planners, who would work on neighborhood rejuvenation and housing intervention will have to work within these multiple layers of mythic spaces and changing urban structure. In the map depicted in Fig. 3, it is evident that large chunks of the city fall under the ‘Grey zones’ which are formed along the north- south Metro rail spine and along the perpendicular street network which intersects it at intervals. Having identified two residential patches in the ‘grey zone’ of Kolkata, empirical studies on physical transformations, socio-economic factors and perceptions of residents were conducted. Representative Housing typology documentation and transformation studies were also undertaken.

4 Conclusion: Development of a Tool Kit Template The future of a neighborhood patch depends largely on the transformation that happens in each premise. The nature of new development that takes place then determines the transformed character. This new development is dependent on the existing bye-laws. The gradual transformation in the physical fabric and hence the visual perception of the neighborhood over time, is largely impacted by the development regulations applicable. In addition to the transformation scenarios presented, the present building regulations play an important role The research included a study of the impact of the present regulations.

Road width is the primary factor which controls building height and FAR in Kolkata. Thus the new development is largely guided by it. Hence a distinct contrast would exist between the peripheral edge and the block behind in terms of activity, built form, architectural expression and streetscape.

It is thus argued that the existing building regulations are inadequate to handle the complexities of redevelopment in these zones and have actually contributed to the destruction of the imageability of these areas. Developer driven building typologies are coming up largely facilitated by the regulatory framework.

The following key points emerge strongly from the study. Need for: i. identification of ‘grey zones’ within the city, ii. declaring them as a distinct type of zone, iii. with a different set of building regulations and iv. introduction of urban design control guidelines for these areas, v. development of appropriate housing options for the local community along with supporting social infrastructure This research can contribute to accomplishing the first task of identification and prioritising of areas of intervention, from where access to project funds can then be garnered. A sample template which can be used to document the premise level characteristics and form a tool of rapid assessment of the pattern of transformation is designed. The pattern which emerges would be linked to the pattern of possible interventions to get the development blueprint guidelines. The template is presented here in Fig. 4.

Fig - 4: The Rapid Appraisal template (source: Authors)

The template above is devised as a tool to map the interrelationships between various values of attributes. Matching Physical and social attributes forms the key to contextual development. By judicious assessment of the available housing stock in the city core, residential demand for the local communities can be met, instead of developer driven new stock replacing the old and removing older populations from the city core along with the old housing stock.

The template works on a principle of ‘joining dots’. For a given premise, a single line joining the various attributes can be drawn. Each value of every attribute is marked with a colour code on a scale of red-yellow- green. Each value that an attribute takes up, represents whether it resists transformation/is neutral to transformation (i.e. maintaining status quo)/ or is prone to transformation. These three cases are depicted by the colours red, yellow and green respectively. The line which joins the values across attributes would pass

through a combination of red, yellow and green dots and help identify the future transformation of the premise. Fig. 5 demonstrates one such case.

Fig - 5: Demonstration of the Application of the Rapid Appraisal template (source: Authors)

Each premise can document its physical, social and area level attributes through the use of this toolkit. The sum total of all the premise level transformations gives the pattern of transformation of the entire neighbourhood. It is argued that ‘if there is a pattern of transformation, there is a pattern of intervention’. Based on the pattern of transformation, a pattern of intervention can be suggested as the most appropriate strategy for redevelopment. The ward committees which are the smallest administrative unit can be empowered to take decisions of the future of the neighbourhood development based on informed decisions of the community and not be driven by speculative development options only, by the use of this tool kit.

The research methodology is being further developed through pilot studies in various grey zones of Kolkata, using satellite images, updated Smart maps from KMC (survey maps of Kolkata to a scale 1:600 done between 1903 and 1910) and using the Rapid Appraisal Template developed. While undertaking this study it was noticed that while the attributes of transformation identified in this study are the prime factors affecting neighborhood character, there are other parameters which differ from case to case and have a bearing on the future of neighborhoods. Further research is also extending to other cities having similar development patterns of juxtaposition of new and old areas. This would test the validity of the template and the methodology applied as a research method of a better informed decision making tool to develop city specific intervention strategies in older city core areas, to address their inherent conflicts between financial feasibility and place imageability and supply appropriate housing typologies.

Acknowledgement The authors thank the residents and officials of the Urban Local Body of the study patches in the residential cores of North and South Kolkata.

References 1. Bacon, Edmund, Design of Cities, New York: Penguin Books, 1967. 2. Baer, William C. and Banerjee, Tridib, Beyond the Neighborhood Unit, New York and London: Plenum Press, 1984.

3. Habraken, N.J., The Structure of the Ordinary, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1998. 4. Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961. 5. Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1960. 6. Perry, Clarence, The Neighborhood Unit, a Scheme for Arrangement for the Family-Life Community, Neighborhood and Community planning, Regional Plan and Survey, Vol.7, New York: Regional plan Association of New York, 1929.