Multidisciplinary approach towards Urban and regional planning

By - Anoop Jha

Planning is an inclusive profession

Planning is a versatile and rich field.. Planning in a broader sense includes making plan for day to day activities to city and country planning and even to strategic plans for cross boundary political and trade relationship. Existence of planning as a development tool, both physical and strategic, can be traced back to the dawn of early civilizations. Urban and regional planning is a niche in this wider portfolio of planning process which has evolved through time and nurtured from the strategic experiences of mankind throughout historical evolution, so planning as a profession includes virtually every aspect of life and experience, has tenacity to learn from other disciplines, other fields of profession and from different sectors. It plays a crucial role in creating holistic environment for masses.  

Question is what we can learn from other disciplines and experiences of others. There are not only innumerous experience to be shared and lessons to be learns from other disciplines but also a better strategy can emerge from the amalgamation of different sectoral experiences, called multidisciplinary planning approach.

Participatory Planning: Interoperability of stakeholders for sustainable planning

By - Anoop Jha

Interoperability to fast forward urban and regional planning process

In a democratic setting, urban and regional planning projects are implemented through participatory process and evolves  many stakeholders including planners, individuals, agencies, NGOs, authorities, states and political fraternity and to hence presents a complex challenge to bring all these stakeholders at the same platform and consensus, in the set period of time. Success of project depends on the “Interoperability” of these stakeholders, lesser the friction faster would be the job done.    

Interoperability is a functional aspect of planning during project lifecycle and its operation and maintenance period. It can be defined as an index of interaction of different agencies working together for implementing and operating a planning project. There can be different issues in interoperability like, interstate resource dispute, disagreement on resource allocation, conflict of interest, environmental concerns over negative externalities of project. There is a growing need for strategic intervention at different levels of planning process for a consensus on interoperability for sustainable planning. It’s a tool for cohesive planning process and the need of time.    

Geofencing : Emerging Management Trends in Urban and Regional planning

By- Anoop Jha

Exploring Virtual Technology for Physical Planning

Geofencing is a fascinating technology which virtually defines the domain of real world. They do not have to build a fortress to keep the physical domain of any scale and type safe like the old world, now it can be done with a virtual protective blanket. Domain can be anything from a home or yard or shop to an agricultural field, to a region.

Geofencing are satellite Global positioning system (GPS) based technology concept which demarcates the boundary of a given area and monitors any to and fro movement from and within this delineated boundary. Geofencing tracks dynamism within the static boundary and give alert to concerned authorities and individuals regarding any suspicious or unusual activity through different modes like alarm, sms etc. Geofencing can prove to be a very useful tool for security management, fleet tracking, dockyard operation, individual business owners, farmers, Construction sites, etc. and likely to be a regular feature of projects and properties in near future. 

60th National Town and Country Planners Congress

THEME

Planning and Development 2025: Challenges and Reforms

LOCATION

6^th -  8^th January, 2012

Senate Bhavan, University of Mysore,

Manasgangotri, Mysore -570006

ORGANIZERS

Institute of Town Planners, India

4A, ring Road, I.P. Estate, New Delhi – 110002

PROGRAMME SCHEDULE

FURTHER DETAILS: http://www.itpi.org.in/pdfs/Brochure.pdf

SOURCE - ITPI

Social media and its ignored role in planning process

By- Anoop Jha

Utilising Background noise of social media for better planning

There is always a resistance and hesitance to change, resistance to adapt to new technology, new methods, new thoughts. Same is the case of age old planning procedure. Take for example surveys and participatory planning. Surveys both primary and secondary play a very important role in any Urban and regional planning endeavor and project of any scale and nature, implemented through any agency whether private or Govt. or PPP. Also due to rigidity and shortsightedness of planning process we forgot to include the recently emerged but powerful segment of social structure called Social Media whose feedback and opinion matters a lot. Tech savvy active segment of population who emerged in recent past feel responsible as a citizen to express their feeling towards variety of issues including any particular development and planning issues and projects, some of these collective thoughts out of the massive online “junk opinions” can prove to be a very valuable asset if filtered, tracked, interpreted and incorporated in the project being discussed or for any planning issue in general.  

Social Media feedbacks for planning process and projects are either underestimated due to pre-determined age old procedural guidelines for planning process including, surveys, community participation and feedback, or are untapped due to shear abundance of it. Current situation is that a substantial number of people give their opinion and feedback and willing to share more on some ongoing project as well as project under pipeline, but planners and responsible authorities do not feel responsible even to listen to these valuable inputs coming from background noise of the social media. All these efforts of individuals and groups go into the vain in most of the cases.    

Enabling and channelizing the online focused planning communities like dedicated discussion forums, blogs, social networking sites and online professional communities in the positive direction to get a feedback on a particular project can radically alter the way projects being planned and implemented.  

Future-proofing urban planning

By Anoop Jha

Understanding future dynamics of urban environment

Urban planning projects present a multifaceted and dynamics set of challenges over its project lifecycle and during its subsequent operational phase. Due to dynamic behavior, polycentric domain, complex cross-sectoral interaction, varying scale and time of execution and operation within urban environment it is difficult to perceive future problems, constraints and direction of growth.

Only possible solution to understand the future dynamics of urban environment is to extract static elements in terms of quantitative measurements from the array of dynamic qualitative urban environment and actions like climate, social interaction, active transportation, combining them with the static elements of city like urban built form, concealed infrastructure. Each element of this derived quantitative inventory need to be assigned some index based on its weightage, and based on these indexes a comprehensive urban vulnerability matrix need to be prepared.  After a thorough and periodic assessment of vulnerability indictors from evaluation matrix, relevant revitalisation, prevention and recovery strategies against each item of this matrix need to be listed to for future proofing urban development and environment.  

Dilemma of Technology: Resistance to adoption of emerging Urban Infrastructure Technology

By- Anoop Jha

Choice between proven technologies of past & tempting future technology

Lifespan of any particular technology is so short that people tend to miss many steps of development. Take for example, cell phones - by the time people know that a new sophisticated technology has arrived in market and they make up their mind to go for it, they realize that a more advanced version of similar technology is waiting around the corner, which is going to make the present technology outdated very soon. This ever-changing flux of development makes it harder to make a choice. Though the pace of change varies across the sectors and scale of operation, but is an inevitable phenomenon of 21^st century. And its acceleratingly fast.

Can we match the pace of planning with the fast pace of technological changes? Can we afford replacing urban infrastructure at the pace we replace our cell phone or laptop? So when we plan an urban infrastructure today with age old technological components there is always a fear that very soon this infrastructure and technology is going to be obsolete, and some new method, technology, or component will be in market, and by that time it would be too late and expensive to replace the installed infrastructure, take example of any emerging technology which is going to take over old one like – Faster building Lifts, Gas insulated Switchgears, Online UV Treatment of Water, Vacuum based waste disposal, District Cooling, SCADA, Automated MLP, ever growing sophisticated Surveillance technology, etc.

The challenge for planners is to choose between the age old proven infrastructure technology and latest or upcoming advanced technology. The problem here is the additional cost of new technology as well as unproven lifespan and performance of technology during its lifespan.

Role of an Urban Planner in the light of technological advancement is to plan a flexible, scalable, and modular state of art sustainable infrastructure, which further allows a smooth transition to the next functional technology in course of time with the minimum intervention, effort, time and cost.