Every city has stories to tell - What planners can learn from them

By Anoop Jha 

Tender and holistic side of Urban Planning

Every city has past layers of experience covered under the veneers of present. There are mysterious and fascinating stories created by time, locked in the hidden recesses of the city waiting to be explored. Every corner of city has impression of time engraved on its surface, which tells stories to passers by. Stories created by the residents of city and told to residents of city.

Cities are like story book .Older the existence of cities bigger the story book. City is a cumulative experience of mankind; it is result of evolution of mankind as an efficient species. Cities have evolved and will keep growing and expanding like living organism, amidst all this evolutionary history there has been numerous experience gathered by city dwellers which has been passed on from generations to generations, some of which has even become myth.

Nature of Stories varies from region to region and as per characteristics of city. Every city with similar characteristics  have something similar to tell, for instance towns of hills have similar stories derived from the generations of experience emerged from somewhat common experiences of similar climatic conditions, similar terrain, similar lifestyle and available facilities. Modern fast pace cities have somewhat common stories to tell from the similar problems and opportunities available in cities tike, traffic, high-rise living, mass transport, entertainment etc.

Because of such mysterious and interesting characteristic of cities it has attracted attention of , writers, poets, film makers, artists etc. They either dig into the history of city or carefully watch the ongoing flux of life of city to get inspired.

Though all this is an glittering ornament of experience, made with cumulative effort of generations of city dwellers, molded and carved in the heat of time, Its an important role of an urban planner to dig into the history of city to understand the nature and temperament of city, to learn the lessons from the stories of experience and then only plan, expand and revitalize the city which can be readily accepted  by residents of city without their feelings of attachment with city being hurt, with which they have grown. This is an essential part of the holistic planning but unfortunately we tend to neglect this tender but vital part of city planning process.

Caught in the process: Urban and Regional Planning process requires a fresh approach

By - Anoop Jha

Flawed bottom-up process in Urban and Regional Planning

Too much focus on  process and micro management poses many dangers in planning process and leads to content deficit, blurred vision and ignorance to outcome.

Scale of Urban and regional planning demands a macro level approach to begin with. It requires a top down approach which means, vision of the planning assignment should be stated and crystal  clear and outcome after the whole gimmick of  planning process should be defined, planners need to start from there backwards up to the conceptualizing the project and steps to be taken.

whole process should be oriented towards achieving the goal. but most of the corporations, consultants, planners, governing authorities miss this vital point. for example in a normal routine planning process, at preliminary stages of projects only few senior people are involved but as the project moves towards finalization more and more people chip in and give comments which lead to major re-adjustments in the project at the later stage of project which is not good for any projects health, idea is to urge as many senior planners, authorities and stakeholders in the beginning of the project life cycle for the process of review and feedback. Another example of wastage of time in the process is that some of  the corporate bodies often miss the objective of the project, because they are so much caught n the process of corporatisation, making presentation with fancy jargon words, decorating charts, quoting someone else's statistical inferences etc. Their process is bottom up kind, they are least concerned about the future outcome of the project. they want to en-cash the opportunity of present ignoring the future.

Focus of urban and regional planning should be on analytical inferences of gathered data in terms of trends, regional context, indexing of available social and physical infrastructure, resource mobilization strategies, preparing development matrix and and strategic proposal rather than micro managing the process.

Urban Transport Surveillance in Indian Context

By - Anoop Jha 

Only Fraction of Technology Potential is being utilised at present in India

Transport Surveillance in India is at nascent stage,  though it is vital for Transport Management of any city.

The implementation process is slow due to resource constraint and wherever it is implemented either technology is old or underutilized. While Transport surveillance covers a wide spectrum of functions related to planning and monitoring, only fraction of facility provided by advanced technology is being used in India at present. Urban Transport Surveillance is capable of capturing, processing and analyzing huge amount of data in real time and provide timely information to manage the complex nature and unpredictable nature of urban transportation. 

Urban Transport Surveillance package can include many functional and analytical aspects depending on the needs of client, It can give real time traffic movement feed on map by collating all the data captured from different strategic locations like Junctions, Transit Nodes, Multimodal Hubs, which can be accessed online by commuters, It can give stress alarm in case of congestion level and can suggest alternative route to commuters, can inform relevant authorities and departments regarding the stress situations, like damaged vehicle, damaged road of facility, accidents, fire, congestion etc. These technologies have intelligent alalytical tool witch can identify the actual cause of transport stress, for example, it can identify and track the cause of transport conflict, like unidentified objects, Vehicle in stress or any intentional mischief like vehicle going in wrong direction or person crossing the road at wrong place and time, based on pre-installed object templates using size, speed and direction of object, and can warn manual surveillance unit to take immediate action.It can also do behavioral tracking with or without manual assistance, which includes identifying person in stress, or in danger, or tracking suspicious behavior etc. In-spite of such wonderful facilities provided by urban surveillance technology we are utilizing only a fraction of it , and mostly in the monitoring of traffic rule offenders, and to issue challan or fine, which should be tackled by educating citizens backed by strict traffic regulations rather than relying on expansive cameras. Camera and surveillance infrastructure if to be installed or in place, should be used for wider purpose of integrated traffic management and transport research, rather than just recording or monitoring small fraction of traffic rule offenders.

How reliable are socio-economic future projections?

By - Anoop Jha

There are always some uncertainties of projections in planning process.

While preparing vision and development plans, planners heavily depends on socio-economic projections short to medium and long term. Based on such projections development plans are proposed for a region or a city, both strategic as well as physical plan. It is an effort to look into the future and plan according to that. For regional vision plan these projections are based on analyzing voluminous amount of social and economic data of the region collected over long period time and referring to survey data archive, which shed some light on decades of  growth pattern of the region. For urban and regional projects, projections are made based on samples collected over relatively shorter period of time.

There are number of theories, school of thoughts, methods and simulation tools which have evolved in course of time for the socio economic projection. Data gathering process are becoming more and more efficient, Simulation tools are getting faster and efficient as well capable of handling large amount of data in no time, Still there is an uncertainty of projections in current planning projections. Future Projections are as accurate and reliable as its tools are i.e. gathered data, sample questionnaires, size of sample, hetroginicity of sample, inclusiveness of sample, simulation tools- software & Computers,  apart from that there are  other factors like willingness and efficiency of of consultants/ surveying agencies responsible for the outcome, human error, time constraint, political influence. Under so many of environmental influences future projections are bound to be hazy, hence there should be certain provisions of  compensatory flexibility both in terms of tangible and intangible inputs in the planning model, especially in physical planning and development plans, to make plans as realistic and as accommodative and future proof as possible.

Intercity travel congestion - Need for a new regional planning approach

By - Anoop Jha

Too much focus on urban planning and too little regional planning

Intercity Transport

Regional Development Plans in terms of intercity mobility plan are long term planning process which are primarily Policy level decisions and most of the time such projects remain stagnant at strategic level. Very few of these projects gets implemented in time while situation keep becoming increasingly critical, for example- intercity traffic congestion.

Most of the proposed projects are capital intensive and hence undergo long review process and witness relatively less thrust from political arena, while other mounting  large numbers of smaller projects at urban level demands immediate attention at the same time and witness  more political willingness, due to relatively shorter implementation period and medium to small  investment in comparison to regional development project, particularly in Transport sector. 

At national and regional scale government has so many pressing priorities in terms of public welfare and social infrastructure like, health, education, water and sanitation etc. that they tend to push  back some elements of physical infrastructure projects like upgradation, widening of existing intercity roads, crucial regional transport junctions, new bypasses, and expressways link roads.  In regional transport plan another reason of choked intercity transport corridors and delayed project implementation is that regional plan are placed lower in terms of prioritized projects, because their immediate priorities are close to core of the city and as we go further from center of the city nature of project starts changing from urban to regional, and projects in regional category are part of later phases of the projects and mostly strategic in nature with some physical planning proposals. 

Need is to identify and prepare  exhaustive list of planning indexes like, demography, revenue, technology,  covering large spectrum of subjects and society, and based on those index a blanket matrix should be created to arrive at more realistic priority list of project.

Designing Golf Course – Creative side of sports

By - Anoop Jha

Why designing Golf Course is so different from most of other sports

Golf is one of the fastest growing popular outdoor sports in the world. It is quite fascinating and very different from other sports in terms of its playfield design and layout in the midst of lush undulating surrounding; it has a touch of natural ecology with varying texture of surface made of grass, sand and water, with carefully placed and maintained vegetation. Though it is a laborious game but it is quite rejuvenating in terms of environment.

Designing a Golf course is very different from designing fields and courts for other sports like, football field, Race track, tennis, badminton, swimming pool etc. because of scope for flexibility and creativity it provides in terms of planning and design elements for localised treatment while staying within the prescribed standards. Most of the other sports have a very standardized and rigid layout for their field and court, and provides very little flexibility and scope for creativity in design, except envelop i.e. indoor and outdoor stadium buildings / envelop. Golf course provides a much wider scope for creativity which is specific to physiography and profile of site.  

Layout Design Guidelines

Par - 3 :  250 yards [230 M] & below

Par - 4 :  251 to 450 yards [410 M]

Par - 5 :  451 to 690 yards [630 M]

Par - 6 :  691 yards [632 M] or more

Typical elements of a hole on a golf course

1.   Teeing ground

2.   Water hazard

3.   Rough

4.   Out of bounds

5.   Sand bunker

6.   Water hazard

7.   Fairway

8.   Putting green

9.   Flagstick

10. Hole

Integrated Infrastructure for Sustainable Urban Planning

By - Anoop Jha

Integrated infrastructure is the key to sustainable infrastructure planning. Planning at Urban or Township scale involves an intricate system of utility infrastructure like power, water, sewage, drainage, HVAC. All these utilities and services need to co-exist together while every system plays a crucial role in proper function of city as a whole. 

Integrated decentralization for planning

Integration and decentralization both have their own advantages. Integration has some fundamental befits like - optimized resource, saved time, centralized supervisory and partial control, possibility of automation, less manpower requirement, wastage control, resource efficiency etc. while decentralization presents its own set of benefits like- better management and control, output efficiency, better understanding of the system, better control, modular unitisation, replication, last mile value addition etc. but for a sustainable urban infrastructure planning a hybrid these two systems should be used which we can call “Integrated decentralization”. It would advantages both the systems fused together for best results and optimization.