FROM MY BOOKSHELF | CHAPTER: INTRODUCTION
Introduction to the city character
I started this blog to gather my thoughts on cities and document part of my growth as an urbanist. It would be unjustified if I don’t talk about one of the precursors of the field, Jane Jacobs. “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is circulated amongst students, even after nearing 60 years since it was first published. Through this series, I revisit the book and explore it in today’s context; much beyond the boundaries of American cities.
She starts the book with sharp criticism on urban planning concepts that are inclined towards a utopian scenario. Here, I talk about two of them — Garden cities and the Radiant City.
GARDEN CITIES
I remember being introduced to the topic in my architecture school and being completely lost. It sounded estranged and unfamiliar. Two driving factors of the garden city were monitored density and a great deal of green space. This came up as a justifiable response to the poor sanitation and overcrowded Industrial cities.
However, can it be a “decentrist” solution to the present-day city “chaos”? Can decanting the population to fixed areas in the outskirts be the claimed right way for development? If so, even after 100 years, why do we see cities like Delhi and New York with such a driving city core? Despite the conspicuous inadequacy of this concept, we see the Garden city being touted by politicians [1]
Let’s take a city like Mumbai. Since 1991, the number of people coming to the city has more than doubled. But now we decide that we don’t want more houses. Instead, we want a backyard, a park for the block and a park between blocks. What this essentially does is instead of serving the immediate need — which is housing, concentrate on the green spaces. Yes, we definitely need green areas where we live, but should it be done at the cost of limiting the population? It assumes that neighbourhoods are isolated entities and thus asserts a homogenous character. This addresses its inadequacy and undermines the repercussions of limiting the density. Cities like Mumbai, Manila, Karachi, and Mexico City have shown that people will find a way despite the limits imposed.
“ He [Ebenezer Howard] conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes. He conceived of planning also as essentially paternalistic, if not authoritarian.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
One way to test the success of garden cities was to judge whether they have stood the test of time [2] However, is that the only indicator? Why then do we see only a handful of examples of the theory put in practice? More so, why do we not see more of them in Asian cities that are currently in the flux of development?
Radiant city
Ville Radieuse, or more commonly known as Radiant City was a rational take on urban planning by the maestro Le Corbusier. This was only one of the other conceptual cities he had been working on — Ville Contemporaine [3] and Plan Voisin [4]
“ Le Corbusier was planning not only a physical environment. He was planning for a social Utopia too. Le Corbusier’s Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum individual liberty, by which he seems to have meant not liberty to do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The advocates of the Garden city movement, surprisingly, were and still are distasteful of the Radiant City. However, the latter was only a version of the former, in the sense that it was what Jane Jacobs calls “vertical garden city”. A governing aspect of Le Corbusier’s plan was how the plan revolved around automobiles in the foreground of sophisticated high risers. It is designed for cars. But who are these cars for? People.
Cities today still thrive because of the social value that it holds. Though people come here for jobs, what keeps them here are parks, markets and more such opportunities to interact. Given the global pandemic, have cities then lost the battle? In my opinion, it is not so much that the need for interaction has changed but the extent of it.
Even if the planners advocate planning with respect to cars, I will ask whether that is the only form of mobility? In cities like Hanoi and Chennai, you are sure to find four-, three- and two-wheelers all sharing the same road. How do we then accommodate them in addition to pedestrian traffic? Do we keep including lanes for every form of transport there is? Or do we just write them off because they don’t follow the urbane definition of cities?
I am excited to explore this and much more as I share my insights through this book!
References
[1] Urban Design Journal on Garden Cities
[2] Re-imagining Garden Cities for the 21st Century: Benefits and Lessons TCPA
[3] Ville Contemporaine
[4] Plan Voisin
