Urban design touches people on daily basis as they interact with city: KT Ravindran

The increasing concentration of people in cities has prompted a reevaluation and adaptation of urban spaces to accommodate the multifaceted demands of contemporary living. This urban influx has triggered a dynamic interplay between the built environment and the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of urban life, leading to a redefinition of urban design principles. In conversation with KT Ravindran, Urban Planner, spoke to Ayesha Saeed, Senior Reporter, Urban Update, critically examine the rising trend of urbanisation, acknowledging its potential for economic vitality while highlighting the significant challenges it poses for the well-being of city dwellers

It is evident that urbanisation is on the rise. It is growing continuously at a rapid pace, and according to some projections, it will rise in the upcoming years. However, is the increasing trend of urbanisation beneficial to cities and their residents?

My answer would be yes and no. It is positive from the perspective that it will bring more vitality to the cities and negative that we have failed very severely in taking care of people who live in cities. So, when you have a growing city, that means you’ll be bringing vitality to the economy. But in our current scenario, we will be also bringing deprivation and misery to a lot of people who live in the cities.

Why do you think we failed the city dwellers? Given the economic opportunities and employment prospects offered by growing cities, one would assume that people choose to live in them?

Because we have deliberately concentrated all the economic benefits in cities, we have not managed to guide them for a more equitable distribution. So there’s a high concentration of all the so-called urban privileges in a small geographic area, which is the core of the central city. Then there is a whole population which is not central to that whole growth story. They always keep getting the crumbs from the growth. I think that’s where we have failed, both in terms of housing and economic opportunities. The two crucial things why people come to cities is because they have economic opportunity, that’s livelihood and as well as they can find some kind of shelter. And on top of it, there are also other softer benefits like having movie halls, medical facilities, and also socially becoming an equalizer. People lose the boundaries of their caste and they are more leveraged when they come to the city than that bondage that they have in the villages by lower caste and Dalits and so on. It enters into a gray zone when they come into the city. And that’s a liberating factor.

What is an inclusive city? How does it look like? And how do the people coming into the cities can be taken better care of?

It depends on the quality of growth. What we call growth is not just a neutral growth. What we normally call growth is a higher GDP and economic output. How it is distributed as public benefit to people has never been part of the discourse.

There’s only been how to grow, how to grow more, how to have a stronger economy, how to invite more investments into the city, how to invest more money in public utilities, infrastructure. This is what we call growth.

How is urban design a part of the larger discipline of urban planning?

Well, it is not true that urban planning is a larger discipline and urban design is a smaller discipline. That’s a common perception. Even when we are taught also, we’re taught in that way but that’s not essentially true, because you need intervention in different scales in cities to improve the quality of life. If you have a very good regional plan and subsequently, if you have a well worked out master plan, it doesn’t mean that it’ll affect the quality of life. It will only tell you what you should not do, and not what you should do to improve the quality of life. So, when you want to actually improve the experience of living in cities, you cannot do without urban design.

Urban design touches people on a daily basis as they interact with the city, so their lived experience in the city becomes the final focus of urban design. But whereas planning has many other concerns, you cannot say that a concern about having a balanced regional growth is more important than having good quality of life, nor the other way around. So all this we draw up and add one part of the binary.

That’s how we have learned about this discipline, because it came as a reaction to urbanisation and urban planning, as we see today. It came as a reaction to two things- first was the environmental degradation due to runaway industrial growth. Second thing is the growth of cities in which health conditions were so poor, that for instance, plague was a central cause for the development of planning as a profession.

It’s after the plague that they realized that urban planning and better sanitation facilities in cities are centered on the health of people. So this whole system of sanitation, water supply, all these were invented post plague and delivering them became their primary objective of planning. It still didn’t touch the daily lives of people on ground planning, meaning that they ignored the floor of the city.

Cities were thrown up by industrialisation because in early years, all the industries were concentrated in the town center and all the labor also lived there. And the most polluted place was the most overcrowded place. It had a maximum amount of urban services demand and cities were not able to meet those demands.

So then people started moving out of suburbia to find a better quality of life. So it’s that movement which now stays in our head as the final body for good urban planning. But there are reactions to negative conditions.

And you cannot define quality of life from reactions to negative conditions. You have to seek a more positive thing. You will see joy in the city, how you live happily in the city.

I RECENTLY READ ABOUT AMSTERDAM BECOMING THE WORLD’S CYCLING CAPITAL. In the fifties when motorisation of the roads was starting, there were rising accidents that were happening. And there was activity to reduce motorisation and increase cycling and walking over the next few years. IT WAS AS IF THE GOVERNMENT MADE POLICIES AND THEY WERE IMPLEMENTED.

But the problem here, Ayesha, is that we are looking at the whole issue from just one perspective. They don’t have automobile based economic growth. They don’t have it.

We are doing that. Our growth engine is driven by the economy that’s generated by production of automobiles and all the other accompanying things like the banking system, the loan system, the insurance system. All these financial instruments are working overtime to meet the automobile industry’s requirement because it’s a big generator. So somebody takes a car and sells it for a certain amount
of money.

The insurance company is in business, banks are in business because they’re giving the loans. The recovery agents are in business. Whole spin off.

It’s a whole economic ecosystem and that whole ecosystem is revived by the automobile industry. And we have now become slaves of that because we can’t think without it. Amsterdam doesn’t have that problem.
Someone else is making the car, someone else is producing the buses, and someone else is producing the bicycle. The European economy is very well organized within their own economy. The Netherlands, for instance, produces all the flowers for the European market.

Someone else is making some other consumer goods. So they have attained a kind of specialized production and balancing system within themselves. While they have outsourced nuisance things like production automobiles, they have sought new markets.

So, we have to see from that larger macro perspective to be able to understand why we are the slaves of these markets. We cannot go without it. We are riding the tiger.

Look at the story of Delhi and how there was a bicycle master plan proposed there in mid 2000 by the IIT and they made a comprehensive bicycle master plan for the city. It provided details on how bicycles can be used by higher section of people to commute, to work or to study or all that. European cities are now talking about 15-minute cities. We are talking about like 2 hours a day.

From what I have seen in smaller cities, the concept of 15 minutes’ cities is still possible. But how is it possible for us to implement this idea in cities like Delhi where every person commuting to work has to have like 45 minutes to 1 hour minimum time to travel? So how is it possible for us to implement it here? See, it comes from the basic industrial logic which is driving urban planning. That is, if you segregate things and you put them in an orderly connection by mechanical means, they function better.

I HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY NEXT. What motivated you to concentrate on environmentally friendly and sustainable urban design, and how has this approach impacted your work?

Basically, if you look at just the basic relationship between human beings and nature, that’s where the whole city has a certain way of defining that relationship, which is what causes its ecological footprint.
In other words, if the physical environment is impacted, the internal environment of people is also impacted and vice versa. So the two systems are connected. Nature and human needs are connected.
Not only like an exploitative relationship of nature by man exploiting. Not just that, but there is a subtle balance between the two. Once you understand this, you cannot think about planning for human beings outside nature. It’s one and the same thing. And if you look at the current conditions of the construction industry, for instance, consuming 40 per cent of all energy requirements, we are creating a humongous amount of indestructible pollution.

If you look at aluminum, beginning from mining, which is such a disruptive activity, and it dislocates people, it pollutes the environment; it destroys forests, and destroys sacred hills. It’s a disaster that’s happening but very well for us to use.

You look at, for instance, destruction of the Aravali Hills by stone and sand mining. Those Aravali Hills have become shining glass buildings in the city. The direct transfer is that hill is this building.

So, when you look at urban fog and you are lamenting about the loss of the environment, we are being very myopic as to what are the consequences of our actions and what is our responsibility towards those actions. So it is not understood. It’s not taught in schools of architecture, it’s not taught in schools of planning.

What is your perception of sustainability?

The issue of sustainability is pretty old now. The discussions have been around for a long time and the perception about sustainability has also evolved.

It has become more and more complex. And finally if you look at the SDGs, they have a certain way of looking at it in a broader spectrum.

That’s one side. The other is dealing with recycling and toxic outputs. So we are inputting so many resources into the building and we are outputting very toxic outputs in terms of pollution, in terms of consumption energy or cutting down trees.

So there is a changing view about sustainability. One thing is the whole discourse about dealing with waste and introducing new dialogue on introducing a cyclical system, a cyclical environment in which consumption is reused and redefined.

What will become of the building debris? Will it rise to a new building or will it pile up in landfills? Will it go into the river beds and destroy the river systems? This is what is actually happening now in India. So sustainability now has what you call good sourcing and final reduction and repurposing of waste material. Building debris for instance is a very major issue and it is not being tackled at national level in this country.

Lastly, I would like to know how you envision urban design developing in the future and what obstacles these designers must overcome.

Well, I think urban design is about cities or about settlements. So every form of challenge that is faced by the city is a concern for the urban. It’s about a holistic vision, about the quality of the environment, a holistic vision about the lived experience of people in cities. How do you improve that lived experience? You can do anything in many hundred different ways in which you can improve the environment and that will change from context to context, from city to city, from problem to problem.

You cannot say that certain areas are concerned with cities. For instance, the issue of climate change is a serious concern. Now we know that dislocation and disruption of life in cities by flooding is now a central concern of every city. That is an area of concern. How do you bring out a framework for the built environment which mitigates or improves the resilience of the city towards a calamity like flooding? You can say that the fundamental problems that Indian cities are facing is that we are very ill prepared to face consequences of climate change. Our economists have not planned.

We have great economists in this country. I’m not blaming them. I’m saying that we have those resources. But are we using the best minds as think tanks to come out of these problems and how to solve them? Because fundamentally the planning process, not just urban planning, is a question of recognizing the problem before it becomes an emergency. That’s planning after the city is flooded. If you come out with some palliative measures and beautification after that, next year it’s going to flood again and the quality of life of the people will go down.

And when it comes to the urban poor, the impact of the flooding is many fold. It’s like inorganic pollution which makes you more and more vulnerable and your body doesn’t get used to benzene pollution and it becomes more and more vulnerable. It doesn’t bring you immunity.

The city is as far as it’s conceptualised as a mechanized system. It is only going to bring in less and lesser tolerance and displacement. And that’s a direct area of concern.

If we can refocus our attention from large motor investments to improving neighborhoods as an organised urban design process that will improve quality of life over time, much more vastly building in resilience for people to live with the kind of hazards which are going to come from climate change. That is the level design function. It cannot be solved by a land use plan.

The problem that I’m seeing is that urban design is not about just visual improvement of cities or beautification of cities which is very wrongly understood very often by governmental organisations. They don’t understand it. They think it’s about beautification. That’s a very narrow view of what beauty is. Every kind of problem which a city is facing is everybody’s problem, including that of the regional planner’s problem to ensure that you don’t cannibalise wet areas upstream so that your city won’t be flooded.