Revisiting the impact of mega infrastructure development.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

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The nature of mega infrastructure projects is such that their impact goes beyond its physical dimensions and boundaries. The impact goes even beyond its defined catchment, described objective, perceived externalities, and statutory confine.

When a mega infrastructure of any kind is introduced in a geographic system, the morphology of the immediate and distant built environment is either going to be evolved, shaped or redefined, ecological and bio-diversity reconfigurations may just get triggered, microclimate are going to undergo changes, socio-economic and demographic equilibriums are bound to change, power dynamics are bound to shift, a period of destabilisation and adjustments are sure to be witnessed, the upheaval of opinions, emotions and aspirations are mostly assured, the opportunity-scape are obviously to be developed and redefined, and vested interests are bound to surface, and of course, few consequences beyond human grasp may also surface.

Build a ring road, make an airport, build a dam, or channelize a river, and all or most of the above phenomenon gets activated and rarely gets acknowledged or addressed in their impact assessment in the totality, complexity, and subtlety of it.

There are certainly positive externalities, but currently, any (negative) impact of mega infrastructure that comes as a surprise, we tend to label them as unintended or link them to external factors or define them as non-linear and characteristics of wicked problems.

The possible reason for the shortsightedness of impacts and events followed by the advent of mega infrastructure are the practical limitations of prescriptive statutory compliance. That is understood, as one has to stop somewhere and define the boundary of impact, contours of liability, and exactness of liability. But it is still wise to consider and assess the impacts beyond the statutory confine and unresolved interests, for the common larger good.

Thankfully, today or anytime soon, most of the impacts of mega infrastructure can be defined and visualised based on historical observations and near-infinite scenario modelling, can be predicted, forecasted and modelled accurately with modern tools, and can be empirically constructed, or imagined beforehand by logic, wisdom and diverse consultation.

Author: Anoop Kumar Jha

Image: Author

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[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please Note, that I am also conducting a FREE 45-minute online individual consultation on your interior design and home decor needs and aspirations if you are in the Netherlands or even internationally. Drop me an email at anoop.jha@gmail.com 

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

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#megastructure #infrastructure #urbanmanagement #urbanplanning #smartcities #urbandesign #landscape #ecology #economy #heritage #tourism #municipality #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Rotterdam #Netherlands #EU #Europe #Asia

Knowing what you are dealing with is the first step of planning –A typical case of island research and development

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

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A typical island, having a strong contained geographic and resource connotation, with a peculiarity of inside-outside, what is there and what in not, been there or not, whether to be disturbed or not

Close-knit native, historical and vernacular communities, having a symbiotic relationship with outside world

Embedded vulnerability due to delicate equilibrium of ecology, microclimate, demography and economy

Higher susceptibility to climate change effects, hazards, communication and supply chain blockage, energy shortage

Embodiment of contradictions – island’s opportunity is its threat, its remoteness is its attractiveness, its abundance is cause of its exhaustion, its beauty and tranquility are its curse, though a place of rejuvenation it also needs a period of uninterrupted rejuvenation

Our time-tested universal success models from planning to business to governance may still fall short of meeting the distinct needs, context and expectations of island geography, community and its biosphere 

Changes we intend to do there and in surroundings might have a nonlinear impact and may me irreversible

Success here may mean different things to different stakeholders. 

Author: Anoop Jha

#island #islandplanning #communityplanning #urbanplanning #islandmanagement #biodiversity #climatechange #travel #tourism #destination #Rotterdam #Netherlands #oceancommunities

How to design Hospitality Graphics to stand out from rest! - follow @urbanoregional at Instagram & Twitter

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

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Follow Anoop Jha @urbanoregional at Instagram with refreshing take on Art!!

Dining in candlelight makes for a perfect evening. #logo #logodesign #logodesigner #design #art #wine #knife #restaurant #dining #dine #wine #designer #ink #graphicdesign #graphics #beauty #beautiful #instamood #artist #inspiration #drawing #studio #sketch #sketching

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After dinner spoon and fork goes to dance floor. #art🎨 #logo follow @urbanoregional #design #art #logo #spoon #restaurant #dining #dine #wine #designer #ink #graphicdesign #graphics #beauty #beautiful #instamood #artist #inspiration #drawing #studio #sketch #sketching

urbanoregionalDesign is how you compose the cutlery once the food is gone! #design #art #logo #spoon #fork #knife#restaurant #dining #dine #wine #designer#ink #graphicdesign #graphics #beauty#beautiful #instamood #artist #inspiration#drawing #studio #sketch #sketching 

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What does growth cycle of design industry looks like?

Design industry follows a repetitive elliptical growth path.

If you look back down the development lane of design industry especially visible in product design and fashion industry, you will witness some familiar recurring pattern of growth, repetitive, though every time in a new avatar.

More than say 90 percent of designers still use direct or derivatives of primitive or rather eternal   geometrical building blocks as raw material- shapes and surfaces, like circle, triangle, square, prism, hyperbole  etc. and remaining 10 percent relentlessly trying to unearth some divine pattern or previously unseen building blocks or magic design elements, anxiously looking here and there for some clue, looking into microscope, looking up to nature, science, nano technology, microbiology, history or mythology or whatever or simply resorting to hallucinated inspiration, so that some divine "never before design element" descends upon them out of luck, while still acknowledging that those basic geometric building blocks like triangle and circles are not going to go away anywhere soon, probably never.

So, when majority of fundamental design elements have remained exactly the same throughout the evolution of design industry, this industry is bound to follow a recurring path starting from basics, evolving on the way through innovation, reaching to maturity, taking an inspirational U-Turn and finally going back to its roots, from where it all started. Apparently a perfect circle of growth; but it goes further, we haven’t talked about technology yet, this ever evolving technology provides designers even bigger opportunities, with new materials, new textures, enhance durability and elasticity, new colors, new opacity newer viscosity and so on, which helps prolong this period of growth cycle pushing this circular trajectory to follow an even larger elliptical path, finally going back to its roots just to be born again.

You might also like this post - Artificial Sonic Urban Environment to break the monotony of City!

There used to be character and stories associated with every city street in good old time!

Contemporary Déjà vu streets - the price of mechanization, optimization and efficiency. 

Though green, well groomed, with cool informative signage and everything in place, contemporary city streets lack something, possibly lack of identity, lack of character may be! Every street looks the same more or less, you see from streets of your housing society to the neighborhood to city arteries, apart from little exceptions of some filth some beautification. What has gone wrong with the planners, landscape architects and urban designers today. You should first visualize the impactful streets of historic cities and meandering streets of untouched villages and then have a look at today's super functional streets, speed corridors rather, these are impressive indeed with all its robustness, but these are not impactful, at all, not something leaving lasting impression on our mind, not something to be remembered, not something to be praised by our future generations. Functional but industrial. Templates of supposedly best practices. But we forget that best practices lose their significance the moment we start, duplicating, imposing and transposing them. some of the mass public housing are the best example of how best practices can go wrong. 

Is it that there is no incentive left today at all to plan or design a street with character, is it that cities, public administrations and private clients lack fund (a myth) or we are robbed of imagination, is it that there are some big loopholes and ambiguity in the planning and design guidelines giving planners and designers an excuse not to be creative, is it that we have become so much efficiency oriented that we forgot we are not machines, is it that land is so scarce (a myth again) that we cant afford to have luxury of building streets with a memorable character, is it that after reading all those wonderful street characteristics in school we finally resort to the super efficient mechanized street templates, has it something to do with our optimized geometric city grid and complex infrastructure requirements, is it our drafting software to blame which has almost replaced our dear drawing boards, is it that scope of creativity is increasing being confined to the pedestrian and bicycle streets only, is it that urban designers role has been limited to the extent mentioned in their design guide book which either don't exist or is too vague for the cities of developing countries or too standardized for developed country? You see those bizarre public sculptures and momentous in the streets at places, those are nothing but helpless reactions of creative urban souls who are not being able to create a place called street in the way it should be, due to much propagated and regularized contemporary templates of streets. 

Can we dare to show some creativity amidst this long list of incentives and loopholes for "not to be creative". Can we as a planner, urban designers and landscape experts show them our humane side keeping cities monetary limitations (A myth) aside for a while. Can we design a street with an innate quality of "place" where you would often want to spend your time or something which you would like to appreciate while you driving back home?

Conserving inherited heritage - an urgent challenge!

Need of a micro conservation policy. 

We let our inherited ancestral heritage decay, gathering dust and slowly fading away in the oblivion, inheritance sometimes tangible like that beautiful gramophone, that antique classic chair, that vintage album of family photograph or that intricately carved wooden window of ancestral home somewhere in suburb, inheritance at times even intangible like values, culture, stories and learning, family heritage dilapidated usually due to ambiguous responsibility among siblings, lack of time, lack of alacrity and most importantly in absence of micro conservation mechanism, because we feel disoriented and helpless in absence of such mechanism, a guideline, a supportive hand saying "let me help you conserve your family heritage because we know how important it is for you, and equally important for our nation, because these little inherited objects, antiques, collectibles, vintage photographs, values, stories, prose, poetry, proverbs, lessons, and so on make the larger heritage pool of historical cultural and social importance. You can call it “crowd sourcing of heritage” which subsequently contributing to nation's image building, while maintaining a stock of inheritance. 

This micro conservation mechanism should be prepared by government because heritage even individually possessed is something of national value and something to be proud of and something which should be preserved and documented immediately for the future generation. These family heritage need not necessarily be kept in museum just because it’s of national significance, we can rather let them be with those families and individuals who inherited them, but we must make an effort to help them conserve it, governments role can be as a facilitator, trainer, protector, documenter, providing manpower and finance to restore protect and document every piece of family heritage without getting into affairs of taxation and legality, with sole focus of preservation and documentation of objects of historical importance whether for individuals or for nation, documenting design, motifs, techniques, skill set, learning, stories etc. which are going to corrode and disappear in thin air otherwise!

Said to be the most photographed in the world…

Golden Gate Bridge

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A wonderful destination: Gulf of Aqaba

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The Gulf of Aqaba is a large gulf located at the northern tip of the Red Sea, east of the Sinai Peninsula and west of the Arabian mainland. Its coastline is divided between four countries: Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

The Gulf of Aqaba is one of the most popular diving destinations in the world.

(Wikipedia)

 

Existing and Proposed Tourist Circuits of India

Expanding tourism infrastructure in India

The Ministry of Tourism of India has identified 45 Mega Tourist Destinations/ Circuits in consultation with the concerned State Governments/ Union Territories (U.T.) Administrations on the basis of footfalls and their future tourism potential. Out of the 45 identified   projects, 30 have already been sanctioned. Some of the Tourist circuits along with indicative maps are given below.

ASSAM:

National Park Mega Circuit covering Manas,Orang, Nameri,Kaziranga, Jorhat,Sibsagar & Majouli

 

BIHAR:

Bodhgaya-Rajgir-Nalanda- Circuit

      

CHATTISGARH:

Jagdalpur-Tirathgarh-Chitrakoot-Barsur-Dantewada-Tirathgarh Circuit

GUJARAT:

1) Dwarka-Nageshwar-BetDwarka Circuit 

2) Shuklatirth-Kabirvad-Mangleshwar-AngareshwarCircuit

     

HARYANA:

Panipat-Kurukshetra-Pinjore Circuit 

HIMACHAL PRADESH:

Eco and Adventure Circuit (Kullu-Katrain-Manali)

HARYANA & HIMACHAL PRADESH:

Panchkula –Yamunanagar(Haryana) – PontaSahib

JAMMU & KASHMIR:

Naagar Nagar Circuit (Watlab viaHazratbal,Tulmullah, Mansbaland Wullar Lake), Srinagar

MADHYA PRADESH:

Bundelkhand comprising of Tikamgarh, Damoh, Sagar, Chhatarpurand Panna 

MAHARASHTRA:

Mahaur-Nanded -Vishnupuri Back Water- Kandhar Fort

ORISSA:

Bhubaneshwar-Puri-Chilka- Circuit

RAJASTHAN:

1) Ajmer- Pushkar

2) Jodhpur-Bikaner-Jaisalmer

TAMILNADU:

Pilgrimage Heritage Circuit (Madurai-Rameshwaram-Kanyakumari)

UTTARAKHAND:

Haridwar-Rishikesh-Munikireti- Circuit

UTTAR-PRADESH:

1) Varanasi-Sarnath-Ramnagar Circuit

2) Mathura-Vrindavan

Data Source: http://pib.nic.in/, 

Images prepared with help of Google Map