Need for Dining Masterplan of city: most of us will agree!

By - Anoop Jha

From Hmmm to Ymmm 

When you feel hungry, when you don’t want to have homemade food, when you are tiered of cooking, when you are looking forward to a wonderful weekend break or planning for a New Year party or simply want to hangout out with your friends and family, you immediately do either one or more of the following things –

·  You turn to your location based smart phone to find nearest restaurant

·    You google a happening restaurant in your city, resulting lots of confusing results with too much of hassle to filter information

·   You open an online map with innumerous popped up restaurant locations

·    You go to food critic site and find too much about taste and too little about route, location, public transport connection and parking facilities.  

·     You turn to visitors reviews only to find out there are two distinct groups one “for” and other “against” the restaurant sharing their biased opinions, leaving you without any clue what to do.

And in the course of exploring the dining possibilities you are really getting late and getting frustrated while your wife or girlfriend is getting disappointed. What’s the solution?

Structured & Informative dining masterplan

Leaving taste and ambiance reviews to food critics and users, someone has to take the responsibility to create a comprehensive dining map of the city to avoid all this confusion providing relevant details for resident of the city and tourists as well, since intracity leisure trips comprises of a major chunk or travel numbers. Responsibility of providing timely and accurate information related to city amenities whether dining, leisure or other should technically lie with city for providing a hassle free transport and living experience for city population and urban planners can definitely contribute in consolidating and presenting a comprehensive “Dining Masterplan of city”.

Urban Planning and development: finding solutions from chaos itself

By - Anoop Jha

City Constraint is the mother of urban Innovation

In architecture and planning we face different challenges every day, unique constraints for every individual project. Necessity is the mother of invention but “Constraint is the mother of Innovation”. More challenging the constraint more innovative would be the solution; more unique would be the outcome. 

Urban planning constraints can be of different natures like constraint imposed by site profile and contours, high water table constraint, extreme and unpredictable climate, congestion chaos, manpower constraints, and material unavailability, land availability constraints, shortage of energy etc and solutions which emerged from these constraints were driven by these constraints only, e.g. site profile and contours help formulize the form and pattern of city, high water table forces engineers to design buoyant and floating foundations, extreme and unpredictable climate required planners and engineers to manage task in most efficient and least time possible and invent speedy construction techniques, traffic congestion showed ways to innovate in mass transit and public transport mode, manpower constraint called for automation, material unavailability forced to utilize local material for construction and to innovate with local material, land unavailability forced to go high-rise, shortage of energy inspired to innovate and use renewable energy.  

Each one of these challenges gave a reason to mankind to move forward, to innovate; a reason not to stagnate, a reason to search for some solution and thanks to this inherent inquisitive and daring nature of mankind planners, architects, engineers and scientists have always succeeded to find out a unique solution for every unique constraint imposed by nature. So one should be very optimistic when it comes to urban planning and city development, that no matter how challenging is the site for new development of no matter how bad the current situation of an existing city of town is it can be resolved and interesting part is that the solution will emerge from the chaos of city itself, a very unique, localized, and innovative solution of urban planning which once accomplished can reposition the city on an altogether different level of functionality and character never thought of earlier.

How it is to be done should be left to the creativity of planners backed by visions of city administration, voice of city population. Few thoughts on urban redevelopment which emerges from the chaos itself can be - Retrofitting city nodes and transit arteries while retaining the basic historic character and pattern of streets, organizing loose street edges, reinforcing green nodes, defining “influence envelop” of each nodal activity and strengthening localized support infrastructure for that, networking of missing transit links, it’s also time to reevaluate age old Landuse of city etc.

Morphology of Greenfield city projects

By - Anoop Jha

Finding urban and regional morphological context for a Greenfield Development

Deciding a spatial form for a new green field city is rather tricky than the expansion of existing city in terms of defining language of city. What makes difficult to perceive the future form of Greenfield city is the lack of immediate spatial context. So planners have to distinct choices to make in term of deciding built form of city, one is to create something out of imagination, experience, and knowledge which might or might not relate to the regional and cultural fabric and the other choice is to create some city form which is responsive to the regional fabric and climate, and which is contextually sound on different parameters like architecture, street network and form etc.

Is Aesthetic Judgment a vague and biased Decision Process?

By - Anoop Jha

Design Aesthetics beyond Time and Formulas

Tangible aesthetic lies in the material beauty of built form, reflected in form of carefully crafted and designed products, carefully sculpted statues, flowing rigidity of architectural pieces with beautifully created three dimensional spaces, wonderful patterns of urban settlements and city grids.

When it comes to appreciating or judging aesthetics of any design form, same work of architecture or piece of art are judged differently by different individual and communities. There are some famous quotes regarding the same –

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder",

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford ('The Duchess'), Molly Bawn, 1878

"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates          

  them."

David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742

“Beauty, like supreme dominion

 Is but supported by opinion”

                        Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741

Source: phrases.org.uk

It appears that it’s very difficult to appreciate the aesthetical beauty of form and art without being influenced by past experience, reason being human mind immediately tries to simplify and associate any piece of aesthetics with something resembling to past experienced, mind desperately need some scale  and benchmark to compare with. Since every individual and community has their own set of experiences based on conditioning, culture, geographical region, history, livelihood etc. hence they have their own scale and benchmark for judgment. While the object remains the same analysis differ. Surly there are thumb-rules of aesthetic judgment but they also seem to be biased. Beauty and aesthetic is eternal and beyond the grip of time and formulas and should be approached slowly and carefully while being skeptical to our own criteria of judgment.

Biological Clock of City : Collective Dynamism of Population

By- Anoop Jha

Relevance of City Dynamism in Urban Planning

Biological clock of a city can be understood as a collective activity of resident population across the hours, days, seasons, and decades. These varying patterns and shift in activities depend on the characteristics and collective traits of cities or urban settlements like – Character of city like historic, metropolitan, ecological or place of tourist interest, industry type i.e. service, manufacturing or agro business, Economy and business of city, Trade and commercial activities, Religious activities, rituals, Public transit system availability and regulations, political stability and governance.    

A city or town metaphorically behaves like a living organism and hence each one of them has a unique signature activity pattern. In spite of static nature of cities it has lots of innumerous dynamic activities going on within it’s envelop and beyond. Pace and extent of these activities are cyclic in nature and varies across days and hours in somewhat predictable ways and seem synchronized with diurnal variation i.e. cycle of day and night, e.g. two visibly distinct peak hours of activities in any given particular day across the cities. Cities also seem synchronized to different seasons and show different patterns of daily activities as per that season, e.g. Majority of population getting off to sleep early in winters and shops being closed early, accompanied by lesser traffic and activities on street in winter w.r.t. summer.

The reason studying “biological pattern of city” can be an interesting and important are for planners is that till now, while planning or developing a city they have historically and inevitably always assumed that city is a static entity and then they prepare a Masterplan for that city, While it’s a fundamentally wrong assumption and process of planning for a city. Let’s take a fresh look on any random city, you will find that it’s a living, thriving and dynamic entity. The word morphology which is synonymous with mutation, when used in context of urban pattern itself states that city characteristically resembles a living and dynamic entity.

Challenge for the new age planners is to recognise and accept the fact that they are planning for an active, constantly changing and mutating dynamic entity called “City” rather than the past and contemporary notion of city as a static built mass, with some activities being marked in static zones of Landuse in different color on Masterplan. Urban planners not only have to consider the character of the particular city to be built or redeveloped but they also have to consider the present or future activity pattern as well as temperament of the city. 

Sponge like City: An Urban Growth Absorption Model

By - Anoop Jha

Growth and density saturation due to city built mass limitation

Considering city as a sponge with its intricate complexity of mass and void representing interplay of built mass and open spaces of city, both of these masterpieces of structure and space share a very important and similar trait i.e. absorption capacity. One can absorb and hold liquid in its recesses and voids while other can absorb population in its built mass, a slight external pressure on a sponge can cause absorbed liquid to move to and fro within the cavities of sponge and a little higher pressure can cause liquid to be discarded from the sponge. Similarly if we compare city population with that liquid in sponge it is also dynamic in nature and moves to and fro within and outside the city limit, but one crucial thing to be notice here is that both the systems have a limit to absorb in other words they reach a saturation point after some point, after which liquid as well as population is forced to make its way outward towards and beyond the edge of sponge and city respectively. This phenomenon of absorption is related to physical properties of sponge and city.

When it comes to planning or redevelopment of a city, the question here is that who is to decide the critical saturation point of an existing or new city and What should be the absorption limit of a city or urban settlement after which it would be a compromise with the quality of life of inhabitants considering there is no change in built mass of city?  What should be the ideal density of a city considering the emerging new technological possibilities to create large sustainable building complexes, faster horizontal and vertical transport technology? Have we already reached the critical point in most of the cities throughout the world or there is enough scope for population absorption by restructuring, redeveloping any city. Are we able to somewhat predict the sustainable density for a city based on some magical formula?

The challenge here is for the urban planners is to draft a strategic blueprint to create a city flexible and scalable enough to renews itself from time to time adopting latest technological, architectural and planning interventions to absorb the varying growth in course of time for a sustainable future,  considering the scarce land and other urban resources.    

Unexplored role of Education System in Urban Disaster Preparedness

By- Anoop Jha  

They could have taught survival tricks in school!

How prepared an average person in a city is, to face disaster situations of varying type, degree and scale, whether being trapped inside a distressed car, a minor road accident or fire situation in a multistory building or urban flood or earthquake. Even if there are required lifesaving physical infrastructure in place, how many of them know how to operate them, how to use them for their own and others safety, whom to contact in emergency situation, where to look for help, where to report immediately, what immediate measures to take, how to use first aid gadgets and CPR, which are the life saving drugs, where to buy first aid kit, personal safety and rescue tools, what important things to keep ready at hand in emergency situation. These are the simple facts and techniques which could have been taught in the school which would prove vital for survival of individual and society in general.

In a developing country like India majority of population in any city, in terms of disaster preparedness is illiterate. It is an acute need of time due to ever growing urban complexity and has been ignored since time immemorial in the education system. Parents cannot teach these life saving tricks to their children because neither their own parents taught them the same nor the school. Media also fails to spread the information on disaster preparedness because either they simply show the fact that disaster happened or they keep on harping the same old string of political blame game and debate. Neither media nor the politicians know how to tackle those urban disaster situations apart from allocating money for the required support infrastructure and strict and vigilant governance. Surely they are important but the vital missing part is the disaster management education curriculum in the hierarchy of educational system.

There are just a handful of experts on the subject of disaster preparedness. Point is, when it comes to survival education, each and every citizen, not only have to be aware of the ways to tackle basic disaster situations but they have to be expert on that subject. Our current education system is focused on personality building and mass producing technical hands for the growth of country which is of course a great idea but they should equally focus on teaching of survival methods throughout education system and should be made compulsory for the well being of individual and masses.