It was an introspective fun to watch Jaime Lerner singing sustainability song on TED. In merely 15 minutes, the Veteran urban planner from Curitiba, Brazil outlines the problems and creative solutions that he applied and any other city can apply to become truly a city for people. In India, people are accustomed to delayed, ill-planned and unplanned developments. Vested interests often lead to exactly opposite solutions. India with her billion-plus people need to be shown some hope and I see it lies here. In this blog post, I am interpreting the quotes by Jaime.
“Any city can be changed in less than three years. It does not the scale of city is and financial resources.” What Jaime said was an enlightening conviction that he shared using his forty years of experience in urban planning. I think this single quote generates enough hope to eliminate pessimism filled in the India’s urban population. If India wants to become a ‘superpower’ then it is not appropriate to be a superpower with a loose bunch of slummy cities.
“Every problem in the city has got its own equation of co-responsibility”. Traffic in most first and second tier Indian cities is a joke at the best. For all valid reasons, the situation is worsening for years and would continue likewise in a foreseeable future. The equation of co-responsibility is a skewed inequality. Participation from different stakeholders, from government to enforcement agencies to commuters, is not involved to necessary extent to balance this equation. The imbalance results in undesired perceptions about rewards and penalty. It redefines common sense. So balancing this equation is a must !
“We teach children how to separate garbage and after six months children teach their parents.” and it is obvious that children learn faster and better than their parents because they lack bias. I am convinced.
“Multiuse city because you can not have empty places during 18 hours a day.” It is a conventional wisdom to build specialist buildings. Offices are offices during day time and empty places during night-time. Same is the story of schools and our homes. Can this be changed? Answer to this question is answer to the question “Can we be changed?”.
“Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget. If you cut two zeros, it is much better !” Lack of money is typically thought as show-stopper in solving problems of a growing city. It’s true for many cases but not always. A good number of problems are actually co-responsibility crises and not money. A host of others are due to lack of creative solutions or vested interests. A very few are because of technology limitations. My take is we need courageous, open, creative and dedicated urban planners that are supported by trust of mayors and peoples.
“Every city has its design !” Copy-n-paste solutions across cities hardly work. A good solution for city X might be a worst solution for city Y. BRTS of Curitiba and Bogota are causing havoc in Delhi and Pune. But it is still not a failure in Ahmadabad.
“In cities, you have to work fast, planning takes time. And I am proposing urban acupuncture” Heard of re-factoring in software? He is trying to be agile in approach and makes sense if done with a good deal of care and creativity.
Cities themselves can not be thought as isolated entities. They are connected to each other with connecting infrastructure, from highways to transmission lines to water supply to internet. Today’s model is verticalization of cities with sky-touching building everywhere. We see a gap of few hundred kilometers between two cities. Good and it has played its role. Going forward a complete new thinking about urban planning is needed. I clearly see need to use systems thinking concepts to solve these issues. Instead of verticalization, it would be a better model of a “Connected World”. Fading the boundaries between cities seems necessary. I am curious about a combination of models of self-sustaining cities and continuous cities.
Mahatma Gandhi had a vision to model Indian cities as self-sustainable cities. Now the World has the same vision.
