‘Draft CDP represents the height of folly’

VIEWPOINT
‘Draft CDP represents the height of folly’
By Xerxes Desai
The Times of India

Dear Chief Minister, I am taking the liberty of writing this letter regarding the Draft Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) for Bangalore which makes a mockery of urban planning. Urbanisation must be looked upon as an instrument of economic development, as the engine of GDP growth. That requires both a national policy on urbanisation and a host of regional policies initiated by the states. Two key elements of that policy are a balanced spread of urbanisation and a careful planning of the urbanrural interaction. Bangalore’s urban plan is based on the assumption that it must grow as fast as it possibly can without caring a whit about the impact on the rest of the state. Bangalore will grow into a hideous megapolis and the rest of the state will be bereft of the economic stimulus of urbanisation.

Not only has the Planning Group ignored those who are most able to contribute to developing an urban plan but the principles of town planning adopted by it fly in the face of everything that is currently recommended by experts as the best prescriptions for urban development. Consider the following:

• Experts typically recommend against the deliberate creation of monolithic megapolises, whereas Bangalore’s planners wish to pursue such an objective with megalomania. Experts recommend satellite towns and polynucleated cities with multiple work nodes easily accessed by surrounding residential communities, whereas Bangalore’s planners wise to create a large and dense central business district, gobbling up adjacent residential tracts. Experts wish to minimise soul destroying urban crowding, whereas Bangalore’s planners wish to double the existing built form and population densities, in places even quadrupling it. Climate has been a great advantage of Bangalore. But we have seen the city’s micro climate deteriorate in the last three decades. The radical increase in built forms, people and private transport will result in degradation of the micro climate to levels where Bangalore’s climate will cease to be an attraction.

• Experts wish to minimise private vehicle traffic, whereas Bangalore’s planners choose to provide for what they believe is an inevitable explosion of cars. Vehicle pollution is already unacceptably high and the Plan proposals will make a bad situation much worse. Experts seek to make commercial enterprises provide for parking by visitors and employees on their own premises, whereas Bangalore’s planners have not only retained the wholly unrealistic provision of one car park for every 50 sq. metres but sought to reduce the provision for restaurants from one car park for every 25 sq. metres to one car park for every 75 sq. metres. This has been done despite the fact that the actual need in the more expensive areas of the city, based on ownership data, is one vehicle parking facility for every 5 sq. metres, half for cars and half for two-wheelers!

• Experts seek to avoid lining arterial roads with shops and offices on either side since that impedes traffic flow, whereas Bangalore’s planners wish to make every arterial radial road a commercial corridor, grandiosely referred to as “transformation zones”, “mutation corridors” and “commercial axes”. The result will be nightmarish traffic jams, greater fuel consumption and more pollution.

• Experts seek to increase the green areas, whereas the planners of Bangalore are savagely reducing the areas under parks, playgrounds and open spaces in virtually each and every planning district of Bangalore. Experts seek to create distinct work and living environments juxtaposed to minimise motorised transport, whereas Bangalore’s planners wish to create mixed uses where work places can metastasise like cancers just about anywhere in residential neighbourhoods — and which have already so mushroomed even before changes could be made to land use laws.

• Experts see the need to provide for the urban poor who constitute a majority of the residents of cities and who provide a host of essential services to the middle and upper classes, whereas Bangalore’s planners have provided for an unaffordable minimum plot size of 54 sq. metres (or about 600 sq. ft) that translates into a pucca building of 1200 sq. ft assuming a floor area ratio of 2. What are the poor supposed to do? Grab land and create slums in the absence of any real alternative? Cities fail when they fail to deliver land to the poorest sections of society on terms that they can afford.

• Experts wish to learn lessons from their past mistakes, whereas Bangalore wishes to accept what they call “ground realities” and have invented expressions like “flexibility” and “structured continuity” for a process where de facto becomes de jure, where the law sanctions what the lawless have chosen to do, where a fait accompli is the citizen’s fate.

• Experts also seek to learn from common citizens and public and private institutions who are users or providers of civic services, establish popular acceptance and financial feasibility, build in performance metrics for the implementation process and devise measures for effective enforcement. There is no trace of any of these in this document.

This Draft CDP represents the height of folly and a prescription for unmitigated disaster. You must put a stop to it. And now. Let us start all over again. And with the right people and the right attitudes. India has all the ingredients needed for outstanding city planning. What is wanting is political will.

(The writer worked with the team which prepared the original concept for New Bombay. He was a member of the National Commission on Urbanisation and former Chairman and CEO of Titan Industries)