Photography = Skill + Timing + Luck

Being there at that very moment is more important than which camera you are using, which reinstate the fact that anyone with a reasonable sense of aesthetics can be a good photographer. #theywalkamile #insearchofwater

Ladies with water vessel 

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Interdisciplinary Exploration & Randomness - key to the next big wave of knowledge

It's this notion of specialized segmented knowledge which is hindering the next big phenomenon of world knowledge!

You often see people walking with an air of expertise in certain field of knowledge, they are experts of course no doubt, but the moment you talk about some fairly distant subject, they will say oh that's wonderful but you know that’s not my area of expertise or interest. That’s how we are, stubborn, rigid, and insensitive toward new knowledge, that’s how we have been taught, trained to become a doctor or an engineer or scientist or another specialist soul. A much propagated outcome of intellectual segmentation through insensitive education, teaching designed to produce another of many cogs in the wheel i.e. teaching only to the extent which will suffice a day job requirement and a reasonable income. Though they have various subjects incorporated in the curriculum they are still missing a vital point which we are going to see.

They say Look Mr. "A" you are a doctor, you are not supposed to get into social science, Listen Mr. “B” you are an engineer, you are not supposed to trespass into the field of philosophy, Hey Mr. “C” you are not a physicist so mind your own business of architecture and You Ms. “D for dancer” microbiology is not going to fetch you bread and butter so you better concentrate on different dance forms which we have already listed in Wikipedia. That the languages we understand and appreciate today, this vary language which is hindering the next wave of knowledge! A next wave of knowledge is long due for mankind which is something beyond currently much popular data-mining, analytics and big-data.

Let’s see a glimpse of what this next mutation of knowledge might look like, Mr. Doctor “A” getting into social science finding out that size of family has something to do with survival rate of patient. Mr. Engineer “B” has this sudden realization while trespassing into the area of philosophy that people need products which touches their soul and fulfill their spiritual needs not something which just touches heart and fulfills their materialistic hunger, the Architect Mr. “C” delving into physics and mathematics realizes that his flowery concepts of design aesthetics can have more scientific and lucid explanation and meaning through quantum physics and topology.  Ms. Dancer is enlightened to see the colorful oscillating Nano world through the eyes of microscope and now trying to mimic the oscillating dynamism and moves of cells and microbes and so on!

Contemporary education system is missing out this very basic purpose of learning, their focus is to let the kids memorize the books so that they have a basic knowledge of different field, so that he or she can choose one of his or her subject of interest later on and succeed in their life in the chosen direction. But learning process has to be driven by Curiosity and Absorption rather than Memorizing facts.

Teaching everything or not at early stage of life is irrelevant, what is important here is to plant this seed of curiosity in each child so that they keep exploring and dare to go beyond their chosen comfort subject exploring vast possibilities in later part of life when their education is over, learning when they are grown up in the most productive and receptive period of life, when they are capable to explore, absorb and learn at an unprecedented speed. 

Next wave of knowledge is not about eminent scholars, literary figures or authoritative wisdom, new wave is soon to be triggered by the random individuals scattered across the globe, through a random fusion of currently highly segmented streams of knowledge, knowledge which would be driven by those individuals who will dare to explore the knowledge streams beyond their scope of specialization, streams alienated from their own domain of functioning, no matter what. Go seek anything you never cared for, explore anything you never paid attention to, go seek if you will, if your educational background permits you to do that, if you feel it’s important, if you dare to do that!  ROR of "Randomness" with calculated risk is much higher than the "Calculated surety", every daring business knows that, every successful person adores that, same logic applies to the field of knowledge. If you try to connect the dots of your own learning process, it’s not an accident that you somehow catch hold of best of the websites and online resources truly randomly, on a random time of a random day, it’s not a coincidence it’s a "inevitable reward" of "random exploration" - imagine if you are able to control and master this accidental learning process. This is what coming “Next” in knowledge!    

What planners of urban environment can learn from online environment?

Radical possibilities if they get it right!

The single largest advantage of online environment over urban environment is that online environment is spontaneously morphing and mutating. It’s a spontaneous collaborative environment with user generated content, individually conceived collective community efforts, within a larger set of easy to understand rules with basic governance and minimal intervention. Best part is that it all comes unasked. All you need to do is to create an online platform intuitive and sticky enough to appeal to masses, leaving rest up to user’s creativity. Users are motivated and willing enough to spend their own time and money and whatever it takes to contribute to this global phenomenon, mostly unasked mostly free, they are even willing to pay for it in some cases, be it social or professional networking platform (Sharing/ Facebook/ Twitter/ Linkedin) or cloud environment (Storage/ Backup) or virtual collaborative tools (Building/ Sharing/ Docs), open source programming environment (Building Blocks/ Learning/ Sharing) or just a platform to share their own piece of mind or simply converse (blogs/Forums). Amazingly this ever-thriving virtual environment with apparently intangible inputs even gets translated into tangible outputs. A self-sustainable virtual community environment with little bit of nuisance andchaos which can be managed and currently being managed through series of governing and control instruments! Wonderful!

Let’s talk about urban environment a bit, parallel to online environment. Let’s identify the obvious constraints and major differences. Urban environment is tangible in nature, things like - raw material, physical infrastructure, resource intensive, capital and labor intensive and then there are governance and management issues since resources are limited and stakes are high. Let’s see some common somewhat overlapping traits; both urban and online environment needs basic physical infrastructure in place some of which are common as well (Power, Water, transport VS Telecom infrastructure/ Wi-max/ Wi-Fi etc. with common later part), both environment require serious manpower to build, sustain and grow, they both demand control and security, both need a heterogeneous mix of business models as well and so on. What comes to mind now? What you are thinking right now absolutely makes sense - with so much of similarities while having “people” and “community” at center stage in both cases, why haven’t we explored the mutual learning possibilities and why we haven’t been able to translate the online functional learning experience into building of physical community called “City”.

Can we do it? Think so; at least we can give it a try! By establishing a logical, statistical, mathematical and philosophical co-relation between the two, leaving possibility to weave the city fabric and its functionality further in future! This analogy of physical (urban) and virtual (online) environment presents a model of self-evolving self-sustainable community further translated into urban community where every member of community is contributing to build the “physical environment”, though they are already doing it “Socially” well at present. Can we give a community or region enough flexibility to shape its own environment, customizable up to their personal needs and choices without hampering the public interest, with basic infrastructure built in place to start with, a set of basic rules to play with, some basic building blocks to kick-start, with flexibility to select platform and tools of their choices to build, with a governing, supportive and helping hand, watchful eyes as well as security and rescue mechanism in place, with some kind of layered public, community and personal finance model and so on, all this flexibility within a controlled and transparent environment. Reinforced by supervisory control and incentive instruments! Building with a vision of “sustainable community” and “fairness ofopportunity” at center stage! Fortunately we have analytical tools, informative resources and accumulated experience of mankind today which can help extract and derive and establish useful correlation between the urban and online environment paving a way for better and sustainable future!

When “Traffic Merging Ahead” on every alternate road, clashes are bound to happen

Bad transport infrastructure and poor road designs leading to conflicts on road.

No one wants to get into argument or fight on the fine morning office hour or while on the way back home, really!! Everyone has some plan for the day ahead, and they really can’t afford to waste time here on road arguing for nothing. But what to do with these urban roads that make these people susceptible to conflict and road rage due to design which lack consistency and continuity. It’s ironical that in the same alignment of road where mile long vehicle queue is witnessed also has a part of stretch like super smooth expressway, either right in the middle of metropolis or connecting neighboring cities, districts and states leading to gridlock. It’s like speedy route to gridlock. So 70-90 % of the whole journey stretch you can cover in 20-30% of journey time, spending rest of the journey in gridlocked section travelling in snail’s speed. Journey on that reaming 10-30% stretch becomes more frustrating because you have just witnessed a test of speed on the expressway like road stretch back on the journey.

Things become worse when variety of vehicles start competing for the lanes with suddenly reduced carriageway near bottlenecks at every few hundred meter due to variety of reasons like poor road design, bad road geometry, old narrow bridge, recent construction and maintenance works, frequent vehicle breakdown, faulty or unrealistic traffic signals (it’s unbelievable that there are also around less than 10 seconds of green signal assigned for some stretches at some busy road junctions) etc. at least similar is the case in many developing countries.

This induced conflict is result of lack of cohesiveness and isolated accountability among different agencies and consultations hired at different point of time, for revamping urban transit stretches and systems. In Urban scenarios, Road stretches cannot planned and designed in isolation, hence no question of isolated accountability, like trunk routes cannot be designed in isolation without  considering feeder traffic flow. What is happening here in bottleneck situations is that vehicles are allowed to reach the bottleneck at high speed which encourages quickly accumulated high volume traffic at bottleneck, and then the real struggle begins, people ruthlessly competing for limited lanes!! It’s a painful experience of struggle for daily commuters, not because of slow speed but due to immense psychological pressure and tiresome drive to negotiate that rude, ruthless competing traffic while trying to protect their asset and peace of mind. No wonder it also leads to frequent road rage incidents. Even if bottleneck situation is unavoidable there has to be smooth transition from high speed stretch to the bottleneck point, which can only be done through proper road design, sensible signage and its highly visible locations, commuter education, manual or automatic traffic assistance and guidance, strengthening alternate route, staggered office timing, land use restructuring, etc.

Disposal on the go - For a cleaner city you deserve.

Disposal at the source of generation- Case of Travel generated waste!!

Environmentally responsible
waste management 

Some of us occasionally of habitually buy and carry a plastic pack of chips, a paper wrapped snack, a can of coke, a bottle of juice, a paper mug of coffee, fruits and so on in our car or other vehicles while traveling in city, and disposing those paper, plastic, metal or organic residues in a responsible ways becomes an issue. Depending on the Education level, economic exposure, existence of local transport and environment laws, pro activeness of implementation measures, people’s behavior vary in a cityscape across the region, across the cities of world. Even within a particular city people show different level of responsible behavior depending on economic profile of zone, surveillance and enforcement level.

In many cities of developing countries people tend to pollute the city roads and transit routes by dumping such food waste and byproducts from their vehicle irrespective of occupants education and economic level even in presence of such laws to prevent them, due to lack of willingness to keep their cities clean or lack of enforcement measures or absence of sensible waste disposal infrastructure. Garbage bins if provided are either so scarce in numbers, so inaccessibly located, are in utter unhygienic conditions, surrounded by mounds of open dumped waste, either overflowing of underutilized, that people even if they make up their mind to act in environmentally responsible ways they immediately lose their interest to do so.

In this particular kind of waste generation scenario which emerges on the go should have a “disposal mechanism on the go” itself. Garbage generated within vehicle should be disposed off from vehicle only at pre-identified locations, why to carry it everywhere you go, why to keep garbage in your car just because you couldn’t get the time for weeks to dispose it off on foot to some disposal bin located somewhere. Why not to stop them throwing garbage on road by providing them hygienic garbage bins approachable from within the car along the transit routes, at places where traffic is bound to be slow, somewhere near toll plaza ticket counter, somewhere near the parking entrance, in some of dedicated service lanes of the city etc. 

Walkability demands flexibility : new approach to neighborhood planning

By - Anoop Jha

Number of available choices defines quality of urban environment and experience

Walking and jogging  trail

Image shows actual walking trail around a lagoon in some part of Santa Barbara, with different route options for people to choose from, one shorter complete loop around waterbody and other longer route which also includes dotted segment. Close view  of lagoon is an incentive to walk extra length of dotted route otherwise people can take shorter route if they are in hurry or tiered. There has be different available exit choices for people, to make any pedestrian or walkable plan successful whether its planning of park or commercial complex or mega exhibition pavilion.

[Handpicked Books]

What is common between Ahmedabad and Paris?

By - Anoop Jha


Quite apparent similarity in transport network at places !!!  

Transport network of any city tells story of its evolution. 

Similar City Transit Fabric 

IMAGE DISCRIPTION:

First - Road junction near Saint Lazara Terminal, Paris, France

Second - Mithakhali 6 Rasta. Ahmedabad, India

City evolves in course of time; there are many factors which shape the form and fabric of city, it can be climate or natural physiological constraints, or economy of city or prevalent transit mode, or land constraint etc. though there are vast difference in the built form of city of Paris and Ahmadabad there great similarity in the city fabric in terms of transit network, which is more apparent in terms of “road junctions” where many road arteries are radiating from the junctions as high as 6 to 8 across the city, possibly it is due to common circular and radiating overall form of city with a river dissecting it from the middle in both the cases, which makes it difficult to plan city in grid iron pattern. 

Barrier-free Environment: A long way to go

By- Anoop Jha

Contemporary fragmented Barrier-free planning calls for integration

Accessible Urban Planning

In the developing countries like India very little attention has been given to the planning of barrier free environment for Differently abled and old age population of any existing city. Though many of new cities and township projects consider and incorporate the design elements of barrier-free environment in actual implementation of such principals following the prescribe guidelines are doubtful and need a comprehensive survey and documentation as part of post occupancy evaluation both at building level as well as master-plan level. In most parts of the existing cities there are not sufficient facilities even for normal pedestrians like, continuous footpaths, not to speak of facilities for differently-abled and old age people. Though there are “Guidelines and Space Standards for Barrier Free Built Environment for Disabled and Elderly Persons” but there are also loopholes in term of final outcome of implementation and functionality at building and city level for creating integrated barrier free environment. These guidelines need to be mandatorily integrated with the comprehensive Transport Masterplan, Zonal Plans, masterplans, local area plans, township and housing plans. Considering the importance and urgency of issue these guidelines and standards need to be implemented as widely and as strictly as possible for the well being of citizens.

Pedestrian Vehicular conflict : why can’t we seem to find a solution?

By - Anoop Kumar Jha

Missing Human Behavioral Analysis aspect in Transport Simulation Model

No matter how functional and mathematically sound a transportation plan and related infrastructure design for any city or stretch appear before implementation, there is always a conflict between vehicular and pedestrian circulation which appears only once the transport plan is in place and functional, it’s the story of every city and every stretch. Blogs and forums are filled with discussions and captured photographs of such pedestrian vehicular conflicts.

It’s a conflict between pedestrians desire to take easiest and shortest route and transport planners age old scientific approach planning with modern simulation tools. Its conflict between “human desire” and “scientific approach”.  

In a country like India, apart from education and enforcement there is one missing crucial aspect which leads to pedestrian vehicular conflict in urban setting, that is understanding of human behavior and learning from past and other projects mistakes. It appears that common man collectively always appear smarter than the panel of planners, designers and implementation and enforcement agencies, because no matter how sound they make any system or transport plan people always find out loopholes in it. People are willing to take the dangerous shortcuts, break the law and even risk their life to reach the destination quickly. There is almost similar pattern and language of such human behavior across the cities and towns of India when it comes to intra city travel, but transport planners do not seem to observe and learn from such cases. Its high time that they should observe, document and incorporate human behavioral analysis in the transport simulation model to arrive at a successful transport plan for a city. 

Transport plan, systems and tools also need to be regionalized or localized, because what works in Bogota  or America or Europe might not work in Delhi or Surat or Jaisalmer  if replicated in-toto. 

Daily space curve of a common Urban Man

post by : Anoop Jha

An average working person in a metropolitan city goes through a funnel of fluctuating space experience following a somewhat definite pattern on an average working day – from home to public transport to office to public transport again and back to home. Let’s call it “Daily Space Curve”. It’s a space footprint available to a person on an average working day, distributed across a day and across the standard route followed to complete the day activities.

Individual Space Curve

Daily Space Curve can prove to be one of the comparative scales while studying and comparing the standard of living or livability of different cities. Larger the space footprint available to a citizen more livable and desirable would be the city.

[Handpicked Books]