How representative are “Top something or other City” tags?

Why average outcome doesn’t work for average urban population?

Why city ranking may not necessarily be a reflection of the state and policies of a city and might not be of much direct or immediate relevance for average stable urban population other than attracting business and outside population and tourists? A city provides and should provide a very unique opportunity to each individual through its unique micro environmental influences which most often supersedes the average ambient environment of a city which is showcased by positioning of a city on varied ranking scale ranging from livability to competitiveness and so on. An average ambient environment of any city (economically or otherwise) might not be a reflection of actual environment for an individual or unique sets of individuals with similar needs, like - people falling under different hierarchical economic profiles from extremely poor to ultra-rich, working and voluntarily non-working population, skilled and unskilled section, jobless people, children, aging population, differently abled segment, entrepreneurs, educationalist, illiterate population, people with health and lifestyle issues,  government representatives, corporate lobbies and countless urban social hierarchies and so on and on, each segment with differing needs and aspiration seeking and demanding distinct opportunities and support structure! That “n”th global or national rank of a city which is representation of average situation of city life doesn’t make much immediate sense to each of the above segments since most of the population is either one side or other of average with their very distinct situations and needs from the projected average. It’s not much of relevance unless it gets translated into their customized needs, enhanced economic condition, lifestyle and peace of mind and doesn’t directly relate to their livelihood opportunities and their specific needs. 

Apparently, there is a fundamental issue with the methodology and process of determining rank of a city. An issue with “Samplifying” the population, though samples apparently being inclusive and heterogeneous! Simply being inclusive won’t work, choosing a heterogeneous sample groups also won’t, because both of these approach will only lead to an average outcome, a clumsy generalized outcome which is bound to be alienated from the highly specific needs of individual components and groups which makes the society, which makes that supposedly heterogeneous and inclusive sample as well. Needs of a highly diversified society or a city with further diversified economic profile, age group, ethnicity, regional needs, conditioning and so on can’t be met by a single average solution, no matter how inclusive that solution sounds, no matter how heterogeneous was the sample. For example, you can’t simply average out the needs of a beggar and a millionaire, both part and parcel of a city, and come up with an average solution which should work for both of them. They need totally different solutions to grow and sustain. Hence the ranking of city based on accumulative impression of its different components, both tangible and perceived, which is an “Average” might give a deceptive impression of opportunities which any city provides for its inhabitants, does that sweeping statement like the best city to live in or so means that this particular city provides equal or ample growth opportunities for millionaires as well as the poorest section of the city or to the diversified segments as discussed earlier, or does it anyway gives an account or impression of having diversified livelihood instruments and strategies in form of public policies for different strata of city society. Public strategies and instruments are very distinct and regional in nature which can’t be quantified in a manner to be compared globally or nationally on a same appraisal scape with other cities! We need a very tender approach to deal with specifics of urban livelihood opportunities and state of its people, ranking seems over simplification at times, we need to do a reality check!

All said and done we still agree that city ranking is must, whether on the scale of livability or competitiveness or so on! Because it gives a scale of competitiveness on which city heath is monitored and compared with the benchmarked cities. A scale, on which the growth performance of a city can be monitored! Hence it helps shape the aspirations of a city and helps pave the way for its sustainable future. City ranking has a larger purpose to serve than just to conclude the state of infrastructure and ambient environment, city ranking creates an image of a city which further draws attention of world and hence attracts investment and generate revenues which further gets channelized in the making of a city through increased economic activities, strengthened infrastructure, enhanced regional accessibility, increased livelihood opportunities and so on. But apparently still city ranking is more of the external representation through its image building aspect than the state of actual internal health and opportunities in a city! Also a catch here, while creating a positive image of a city through ranking tools, originally envisaged to attract business and high spending population i.e. tourists, corporate activities etc., this enhanced image also accelerates the process of in-migration from the neighboring regions in search of better projected livelihood opportunities which further calls for urgent expansion of already constrained city infrastructure, delay of which can cause the damage to the same city image which they are deliberately trying to create, hence an image deficit vicious cycle. Focus has to be on autonomous networked decentralization in the region through regional ranking instead of / in addition to city ranking which otherwise encourages choking concentration of city. City doesn’t function in isolation; it’s a resultant of overlapping regional activities hence the focus should be on regional ranking, a periodic regional assessment, assessment beyond SWOT, call it ranking or whatever, which is much inclusive and more realistic in nature.

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.

Anything you find out in Google in 20 seconds shouldn’t be asked in interview!!

Rethinking entrance process for higher education 

University entrance interview, a day in a life of aspiring students, which is going to play an instrumental role in deciding their future course of life, on this occasion one has to be very careful to ask the right questions, and to assess the candidates holistically. Even in that short period of interview candidates should be judged not only on technical grounds but on many more qualitative parameters as well, like their tenacity to learn, adaptability to new environment, receptiveness to new thoughts, respect to righteousness, having courage to put forth their ideas in which they believe, an ever questioning and inquisitive mind etc. different institutes use different mix of these and many other parameters to identify the right minds for their institutes and universities. Good news is that today institution’s focus is already started shifting from simply technical and quantitative aspects to perceptual, analytical and other qualitative aspects of candidate’s persona in the academic interview process.

Still many prominent educational institutes have apparently not been able to embrace the pleasant change which new information age is providing today. They still seem to be caught in the same old technical assessment issues when it comes to academic entrance process. Still asking basic technical and quantitative questions like it’s a quiz show running instead of an interview. For instance; questions like “Who conceptualised Garden City?” or “what are the sources of municipal finance?” or “What are the main elements/ components of so and so?” or “what do you know about such and such thing?” are wrong questions to ask today. Who designed what in which city in which year in which architectural style, how does it matter here, who cares? Asking such questions to a kid already or soon to be laced with smart-phone is irrelevant these days. Right question to ask are “How relevant you think is the garden city concept today?” (Explain the concept first, even if you have to), “What do you think can be possible innovative sources of income for a municipal body?” (no matter how bizarre is the answer, let’s face it) what are the takeaways from that architectural style (show them the images even if you have to, even if they don’t know a bit about that building or that architect), ask them about their perception, what do they think what’s so great or ugly about that design without being judgmental or biased, how relevant is that design today and so on.

When they have all the quantitative information at their fingertips through internet, social and professional networking and all, they can’t afford to memorize encyclopedia of architecture or planning to get admission in architecture or planning institute, there is no need to do that. These new breed of candidates should be rather judged on their aptitude to analytically infer and logically translate the available information for a better world. They should be judged on their apparent intensity and inclination to learn rather than memorizing capability. After all they will be here in institute for few months or years, so they can always be taught those technical aspects they don’t know yet, but these technical and factual questions are no ground to judge their capabilities, no ground to accept or to reject them at this point of time.  

By Anoop Jha    

    

Where have we reached in evolution of Interior Design?

Analogy of Sculpture and Interior Design

Evolutionary comparison of sculpture and interior design can throw some light on the state of interior design in which it is at present and may pave the future direction for it. If you analyze the evolution of Sculpture, it has evolved from a “symbolic gesture of kingdom and state authority” historically to the “liberalized expression of rebellious creative individuals” in past century to an “interactive public art” at present. When it comes to interior design it has evolved from “utilitarian design driven by necessity” to “lifestyle symbol with expression of wealth” to “uniqueness with technological integration”. The crucial missing point in the evolution of interior design is that it has still to reach a point where a user can interact and relate to it rather than simply appreciating its beauty and ambiance while waiting on a comfortable couch in a lobby or from a workstation of an office.

While the focus of sculpture, individually or as part of landscape architecture or in public domain has shifted from a decorative element to an interactive and engaging public element, the efforts of interior design has remained focused mostly in the aesthetic domain with attention to space efficiency, economic execution and operation even at present. Since all the efforts are concentrated on the aesthetics, ambiance and efficiency part of interior design, majority of architects and designers are caught in to the vicious cycle of making it more and more efficient. It’s high time that architects and designers should break this cycle and create an indoor environment which is not only appreciated by the users but where division of user and space gets blurred, a space where occupant is constantly interacting with its ambient indoor environment in tangible manner, where user have been kept engaged not only by its aesthetics but in terms of physical and mental activities, an informative, interactive indoor ambiance like the case of modern public sculptures.

By Anoop Jha

Deprived of design aesthetics?

Politics of Design and need of Design democracy

Apart from invention of wheel and some other similar historical or contemporary breakthroughs or design innovation which have served humanity to achieve better life and lifestyle, design has evolved in a very controlled manner at least in recent history and apparently it’s not by coincidence, it’s by choice, the choice of few able hands and minds who have manipulated the evolution of design for their personal monetary benefit. Design has lost its freedom and meaning since the commercialization of design has taken place. Contemporary design process has become less of necessity and more of luxury, apart from those which are for advancement of mankind like computers, rocket science and all.

Apparently designs are manipulated across the length and breadth of product industry to skew and control the market demand and trick the customers, whether its car or washing machine or laptop or handbag or any household product. You see, every item has a line of product to cater to every economical strata of society, that makes perfect sense – something for everyone! Story doesn't end here, it’s just the beginning, beginning of whole gimmick of manipulative product development and market control philosophy. Have you ever questioned why the product “X1” that you bought at cheaper price is average in looks, in its aesthetic appeal and in design than the similar high end product “X2” with its classy elegant look? Ever wondered why the products of same company has different aesthetic appearance across its product range, though its same materials, same product DNA, same manufacturer, same factory, almost same production time, same technology? Is it coincident that if you pay less you will get an inferior looking product no matter what is the product and higher you pay better aesthetical products you will get, no matter what is the product or is it that they have purposefully handed over average design to you and deprived you of the great design of the higher range product so that you will come back to buy the better looking product next time? We are not talking about imbedded technology, of course technology comes at a price.

Is it that we have accepted this hierarchy of design aesthetics as an integral part of business and our daily life? This is true for any product; let’s take car, for example.  Is it a coincidence that the same designer or company who produces that strikingly beautiful design of highest segment car with those passionate and careful curvatures of car body also produces average looking box like cars with primitive decades old design sense in its lower price segment? Is it a natural process of design or this vast aesthetic gap between cheap and expensive product has been created purposefully so that people will appreciate and crave for higher segment product? Otherwise what is holding back companies or designers to give a wonderful design and aesthetics to each of its customer irrespective of their economic profiles, with products prices varying primarily due to its embedded technology or robustness and uniqueness of inbuilt content or additional functional features?

But after all how does it matter, since there is no sense of design ownership and appreciation left in all of us after centuries of design exploitation and manipulation, since we seem to have accepted the fact that design and aesthetes are for rich and ultra rich and average person has no right to ask for a better designed product on an affordable price. Design democracy is only possible when people will feel the need for "right of design aesthetics". It’s high time that design community and product development companies should come forward and liberalise the covert design process and shed the design monopoly, which will only help them accelerate product growth process and a common man will get a better designed product in their budget. 

By- Anoop Jha