Meet on urban spaces

Meet discusses urban spaces

The Hindu

BANGALORE, FEB. 2. If Bangalore is bursting at the seams, it is part of a nationwide trend, as demographics indicate. India is already 28 per cent urban and the percentage might increase to 50 per cent in the next 20 years. States such as Karnataka are already above the national average with 33 per cent urbanisation.

This trend comes with its share of challenges. From water supply to sewerage and from low-income housing to solid waste disposal, urban management throws a complex set of challenges at governments and residents of cities. At the centre of all these challenges is the availability of land and its use.

It is against this background that a national workshop on urban planning was held last weekend by Janaagraha, a movement for citizens' participation in city governance. "Every city is, in fact, the tale of two cities — the legal city of the affluent and the illegal city of the slum-dwellers," remarked Sundar Burra, advisor to a similar movement in Mumbai and a former IAS officer, setting the tone for the discussions.

Space is a factor underlying most urban issues. The goal of the workshop was to explore the value of urban space. It explored the relationship between space and other urban issues from poverty intervention to governance. Given the dual trend of globalisation and rapid urban growth, the speakers highlighted the importance and urgency of appropriate spatial policy, planning and design.

The key outcome of the two-day workshop was the unanimous agreement on the value and urgency of an ongoing conference platform such as India Urban Space, proposed to be held a year from now with focus on multiple issues related to space in Indian cities such as space and market forces, space and the poor, space and infrastructure, space and rural vs. urban and so on. Discussions about each issue are to be anchored through a comprehensively researched position paper.