Our cities are poorly planned

When building a city from scratch, there are several things to keep in mind. The first is transport — the key underlying parameter that is central to urban planning. One must recognise the fact that people living together in large numbers will need to get around and do this with the minimum amount of time lost. Moreover, people need to be concentrated around transport nodes like stations. In Mumbai today we have a uniform floor-space index (FSI), regardless of where we live, which makes no sense. You should have a higher FSI near the transport node, and then less intense development as we move outwards. Both residential and activity concentration should be heavier near transport nodes.

A township should also accommodate all income groups. A developer designs to maximise profits, but a government authority should consider first the welfare of its citizens. And all citizens. This means each locality should include all income groups. Also, enough land should be set aside for amenities. In Manhattan, the buildable plot area of a locality is less than half the total area. The rest is for roads, recreation spaces, schools or other public-use facilities. In Mumbai, it is mostly a 70-30 (or more) ratio, in favour of residential or commercial development. This leaves little space for amenities. There’s a limit to how much streets can take, and you shouldn’t push the concentration of people beyond that.

We haven’t planned our cities well, and Navi Mumbai is no exception. When we began planning for Navi Mumbai, we had a team of specialists from different fields; from engineering to operations research, economics and the social sciences. When the township completed 25 years, I was asked by the media to rate it. I gave it a 3 out of 10. Not much has changed since.

Several things have gone wrong. From the beginning we had suggested a higher concentration of people near transport nodes. But this was abandoned and a blanket FSI of 1 set down for all of Navi Mumbai. This has led to character-less, feature-less neighbourhoods. As for transport, we’d recommended a bus rapid transport (BRT) system which is ideal in a new city where you can provide for it from the beginning. Just as a railway line has its tracks fenced off, the BRT would have a similarly-defined path, to be used only by BRT vehicles. You could have set down a central track for BRT, with island stations and segregated lanes for all vehicles, so that they all move faster. This, however, never happened.

The main problem in Navi Mumbai is that CIDCO has turned itself into a private developer, selling plots at the highest price and not making provisions to accommodate all residents, especially lower income groups. This would’ve been the only way to avoid the slums that later came up. It could have been like Bhutan, for instance, which has this notion of gross national happiness. It shows that the government is thinking first about its people, and not about making money.

As for its other problems, I had suggested that CIDCO should own and control the water supply systems in Navi Mumbai, but this didn’t happen. Now the problems will be compounded with SEZs, when large chunks of land are given up to developers for commercial and residential projects which will eventually lead to gated communities. I see no place for the poor in those. This will lead to worse-than-ever slums and ghettoisation. But I think such situations are salvageable in any city. If you take planning seriously, many things are possible, especially in less-extensively-developed places like Navi Mumbai.

Shirish Patel is a civil engineer and urban planner, and was part of the original team that helped develop Navi Mumbai.
He spoke to Labonita Ghosh.

l_ghosh@dnaindia.net

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1162599