Module 3.2: Paradigms of Urban Planning

Module 3.2: Paradigms of Urban Planning Role Name Affiliation National Coordinator Subject Prof Sujata Patel Department of Sociology, Coordinator University of Hyderabad Paper Ashima Sood Woxsen School of Business Coordinator Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi Surya Prakash Content Writer Ashima Sood Woxsen School of Business Content Reviewer Prof Sanjeev Vidyarthi University of Illinois-Chicago Language Editor Ashima Sood Woxsen School of Business Technical Conversion Module Structure Sections and headings Introduction Planning Paradigms in the Anglophone World The Garden City 1 Neighbourhood unit as concept and planning practice Jane Jacobs New Urbanism Geddes in India Ideas in Practice Spatial planning in post-colonial India Modernism in the Indian city Neighbourhood unit in India In Brief For Further Reading Description of the Module Items Description of the Module Subject Name Sociology Paper Name Sociology of Urban Transformation Module Name/Title Paradigms of urban planning Module Id 3.2 Pre Requisites Objectives To develop an understanding of select urban planning paradigms in the Anglophone world To trace the influences and dominant frameworks guiding urban planning in contemporary India To critically evaluate the contributions of 2 planning paradigms to the present condition of Indian cities Key words Garden city; neighbourhood unit; New Urbanism; modernism in India; Jane Jacobs; Patrick Geddes (5-6 words/phrases) Introduction Indian cities are characterized by visual dissonance and stark juxtapositions of poverty and wealth. “If only the city was properly planned,” goes the refrain in response, whether in media, official and everyday discourse. Yet, this invocation of city planning, rarely harkens to the longstanding traditions of Indian urbanism – the remarkable drainage networks and urban accomplishments of the Indus Valley cities, the ghats of Varanasi, or the chowks and bazars of Shahjanahabad. Instead middle class visions of the good city draw on a visual lexicon of spatial order and open space that derives from Western and often colonial models (Menon 1997). This module examines modern planning paradigms that have influenced contemporary notions of the “well-planned” city. It first considers in detail a few key figures that have shaped popular and professional ideas about planning in the West. The following sections shift the gaze to the history of planning in India. Moving beyond the colonial legacy in Indian cities (Module 3.1), it turns to the contributions of the Scottish naturalist, sociologist and urbanist Patrick Geddes. Subsequent sections analyse the ways in which Western models have been “indigenized”, focusing particularly on the careers of modernism and the neighbourhood unit concept in India. Planning Paradigms in the Anglophone World The Garden City First proposed by Ebenezer Howard, a parliamentary reporter and clerk, in 1898, the garden city paradigm inaugurated the modern era in urban and regional planning (Richert and Lapping 1998: 125). In Howard’s conceptualization, the garden city represented a marriage between the most desirable amenities of the city and the countryside, allowing the co-habitation of urban economies with natural surrounds 3 (Clark 2003). The garden city was both a programme for urban reform and a highly detailed physical plan. Howard’s ideas arose in response to the circumstances of industrializing Britain, where the economic changes wrought by the industrial revolution brought a wave of low-skill workers from a declining agrarian economy into the cities to look for work at the new factories. The resultant mass unemployment, poor quality housing and overcrowding produced a public health disaster in British cities, famously described by Engels in The Condition of the Working-Class in England. British agriculture was equally in crisis, with increasing concentration of production among a few proprietors and depletion of soils. It was at the confluence of these trends that Howard’s ideas, shaped by prodigious reading, came together in the garden city agenda (Clark 2003; Batchelor 1969). Emerging indirectly in response to the widely shared critique of industrial capitalism triggered by the work of Marx and Engels, the garden city was a comprehensive programme for urban and agrarian reform. Radical revision of land ownership and property rights was a major component of these reforms. The garden city was to be a systematically planned “new town” built on “greenfield” undeveloped and publicly owned land (Clark 2003). The economic rent resulting from this inalienable tenure would accrue to the municipal government, to pay for public services and social welfare (Richert and Lapping 1998). Two features of the garden city framework paved the way for its future success. According to Batchelor (1969), it was not so much the novelty of Howard’s ideas as the attention to fiscal and administrative matters that distinguished the garden city paradigm, and expanded its appeal to businesspeople. Interestingly, Howard’s proposals included an early model for a public-private partnership – construction could be financed through a joint stock company but its dividends would be limited, in order to channel land rents back to the community. Equally important to the garden city’s subsequent mobility was the detailed physical plan Howard created. The garden city was to be arranged in a circular frame, divided by exactly six “boulevards” into Wards for residential housing and amenities. At its centre was to be a public park surrounded by public museums, libraries, theatres, hospitals and other public facilities. Each Ward, housing about 5000 people, was to be largely self- sufficient, with a school and other civic facilities (Batchelor 1969). On the outer limits 4 would be an encircling Grand Avenue, and an outer ring of factories, markets and other industrial and commercial activity. The garden city was to be surrounded by an agricultural green belt with low population density, to sustain the high quality of natural amenities and demarcate the city from the countryside. Ranked with the 20th century’s Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright as one of the most influential thinkers on the urban utopia, Ebenezer Howard continues to be the least known of the three (Richert and Lapping 1998). Yet, coinciding with a period of intense interest in city planning at the turn of the century, Howard’s book, out in a second edition in 1902, was a runaway triumph, being translated into all the major European languages, and spawning Garden City Associations across the United Kingdom, continental Europe and in time, the US. Within five years of the publication of his work, plans were afoot to build the first garden city at Letchworth (Batchelor 1969), which grew into a thriving town by the mid-20th century (Figure 1). Over the course of the century, however, Fishman (1991) argues that the garden city model lost its intellectual power even as it gained adherents. He identifies two discrete aspects to the garden city movement (1) the idea of decentralization, i.e., movement away from overcrowded agglomerations to a system of new towns built on garden city principles, and connected by rail. (2) the idea of self-contained communities combining work and leisure. Looking at the American experience, he suggests that suburbanization undercut these very rationales of Howard’s schema. Second, as Batchelor (1969) demonstrated, even in Letchworth, the earliest experiment of the garden city movement, the basis of public ownership of land had to be given up at an early stage because the dividend limitations on the joint company stock could not be sustained. This put into jeopardy one of the most important pillars of the garden city movement as a political and economic programme. The garden city plan also continues to be popular among Indian planners (Menon 1997), who dutifully encircle metropolitan masterplans with greenbelts, that are over time encroached by elite and underprivileged groups. It has also proved to be a durable template for the gated communities that have come to define India’s urban landscape in the 21st century (Webster 2001). As Menon (1997) suggests, the garden city paradigm has travelled with ease across disparate cultural contexts because it has been decoupled from the political programme of radical urban reform and economic transformation envisaged by Howard. This is both its success and its failure. Neighbourhood unit as concept and planning practice 5 Another planning paradigm that emerged in the early twentieth century and proved highly adept in travelling across national and cultural boundaries was the neighbourhood unit. Though the neighbourhood has always been at the centre of urban life, in cities such as Paris, Venice or London, its importance as a planning unit in the West had come to be eclipsed by the 20th century. This is the backdrop of the “invention” or rather rescue of the neighbourhood unit as a locus and instrument of spatial planning by Clarence Perry, father of the neighbourhood unit as concept and planning tool (Mumford 1954). The neighbourhood had a life and history long preceding the neighbourhood unit; through his work, Perry installed it as the focus of the planner’s remit. The neighbourhood unit’s genesis, lay firmly within the preoccupations of late 1920s United States (US) planning cultures. Clarence Perry’s ideas remained situated firmly within the traditions of the Chicago School of urban sociology, and the work of authors such as Louis Wirth, Robert Park and Herbert Miller. Perry’s contribution lay in giving aspatial scaffolding to the concerns of declining social capital and rising urban anomie that pervaded the work of these sociologists, and in placing the neighbourhood at the heart of urban design and rejuvenation. In designing the neighbourhood unit concept, Perry employed his interests in physical planning in service of a programme to restore and rejuvenate the connections between “individual, family and community”. Residential zoning was central to the conception, as was a laid down configuration of streets to privilege pedestrian access (Vidyarthi 2010b: 76). In all, six “planning principles” defined Clarence Perry’s model of the neighbourhood unit: 1.

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