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Ever wonder why organic cities like Bombay, Delhi, and Pune often make for fond memories and monotonously planned cityscapes like Chandigarh and Brasilia often conjure up images of dry, boring, and monotonous life? In part, America also suffers from the impersonal touch of its suburban life after the notable white flight from the inner cities in the 60s and 70s. The answer is simple: separation of living areas from social areas that are often connected to commercial businesses. Your local bania is probably located on the street level of the area you live in or maybe is just a walk away. Most of your daily needs like grocery shopping, hair salon, tea/coffee shop, eating joints, parks and playgrounds are merely within walking distance and you often tend to bump into your neighbors everyday. Atrios also ponders on this simple truth of city planning:
“What puzzles me is the fact that there are relatively minor changes to how we construct our suburbs which would both allow some people (not everyone probably) to reduce their degree of auto dependency while simultaneously adding a bit of nearby "small townness" for the rest of the nearby residents. One can transform an absolutely tiny piece of land into something more resembling a town — build a few blocks of mixed residential/commercial development with street level shops — without fundamentally transforming the way most people live….Many of the early suburbs already have this (and many such earlier suburbs tend to be incredibly pricey, and not just because of their proximity to the urban core) pattern of development, but it’s rarely replicated these days.”
Kevin Drum however blames the residents themselves who wish to isolate themselves in their areas of protective solitude (Crash, starring Sandra Bullock addresses this issue), away from the ills of the society. But I fail to see this problem in India where social ties are stronger although stratification by income and caste/religion aren’t uncommon. But in more cosmopolitan towns where often land is at a premium, convenience wins over social barriers.
For e.g. the housing society I used to live in Panvel, India was
ironically called Middle Class Co-op Housing Society. Initially
envisioned as a haven for middle-income (politically correct term now)
people, it was hardly middle-class by the time a full-scale housing
boom hit after the suburban train from Bombay arrived only a ten-minute
walk away. Mostly planned on a plot allocation basis, the bigger
thousand square meter plots were now valued at almost a crore.
Subverting the society’s regulations, smart builders built apartment
buildings which not only recovered their cost but also dramatically
changed the social fabric of the microcosm. Although I haven’t been
home in almost 3 years, I have heard of easily accessible retail stores
and more families moving in (each plot now has eight families at least
instead of only one few years back). The four-acre central open space
now has a jogging track and an playing field with budding cricketers.
People would welcome a mixed development where possible because it not
only makes daily services more accessible but also makes your living
area more vibrant. More people in India in fact mean more security
instead of the other way round in America. Senior citizens also don’t
have to take pains to travel far for their minimal needs and in return
are more comfortable in seeing people around. Help is only a shout
away.
Things however are different in America. No wonder city planning is as contextual as it can get.
by Patrix | on Friday, June 17th, 2005 at 5:00 am | 
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June 17th, 2005 at 6:58 am reply
Unplanned cities have the ‘old-world-charm’ which planned cities don’t unplanned cities have monuments, which planned cities don’t, etc etc..
June 17th, 2005 at 9:24 am reply
Honestly, I hate the suburbs. Have u heard of this thing called new urbanism or somesuch? I had heard about it on NPR sometime back, and it sounded pretty interesting.. would you care to write up on that as well??
June 17th, 2005 at 10:16 am reply
tell some poor guy in bombay with poor hygiene that he is lucky to be living in old world charm.
June 17th, 2005 at 2:07 pm reply
Right. I guess it’s technically called “sprawl”, with Atlanta being one of the worst examples (Emory magazine, February 2005). The other disadvantage of the separation is that there is virtually no activity around residential areas, leading to a potential safety problem. The biggest problem is that, if anything, it increases people’s dependence on cars even more, because unlike NYC for example, nobody can walk down a few blocks to get to commercial stores (every possible commodity in the case of NYC).
June 17th, 2005 at 11:15 pm reply
I live in a steadily worsening community of sprawl known as the Research Triangle of North Carolina, although my actual domicile is in the urban core of Durham. Right now the developers have the upper hand and they pretty much dictate the rules. For an impassioned brief against suburbanization and the laws and zoning codes that encourage it, read the work of James Howard Kunstler (Geography of Nowhere; Home from Nowhere). He, too, points out that the places people choose to visit for their charm (Savannah, Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, and all the cities of Europe) are exactly the communities that are unthinkable under today’s patterns of outward sprawl.
What’s missing in many of these discussions is how the social aspirations of middle class people feed this trend. Many middle-income people are willing to accept a 45 minute commute in exchange for a cheap 5,000 sq. ft. McMansion.
June 18th, 2005 at 10:23 am reply
Zoning is the elephant in the room. We make it ILLEGAL to produce anything but sterility. And then we point fingers at everything but the zoning laws. Then the ‘new urbanists’ attempt to simulate organic growth through - you guessed it- more laws. Very risible. Here’s an insane idea for you - let’s remove zoning restrictions (or most of them) in swaths of suburbia and see what evolves over the next decade. Could be very interesting.
June 18th, 2005 at 11:27 am reply
As Bert Wiener correctly points out, zoning is one of the major issues. Right now, it is illegal in most cities to build structures like the pre-WWII buildings that many people find ennobling and charming.
An interesting celebration of the unplanned city is the London travelogue Fat City, by Jonathan Raban.
Also, the suburban sprawl pattern of development is heavily subsidized by local, state, and federal governments through FHA loan guarantees and interstate highway construction.
If zoning laws were lifted and the subsidies were ended, a very different (likely more mixed-use, integrated, human scale, and higher density) development pattern would result.
Although I am a conservative, I could not commend more highly the work of James Howard Kunstler, despite my ideological differences. He just released a new book, The Long Emergency, which is his vision of what will happen to the US as oil production moves past its peak. His writing is funny, clear, and compelling.
July 18th, 2005 at 5:56 pm reply
Being an architect and urban designer myself, i would like to throw some light on the discussion.
New Urbanism, is something of an ideal, and frankly very good in theory, but very impractical. There are a lot of proponents of the theory and u will see a lot of new towns especially in US based on New Urbanism, but they dont really succeed. Society is not utopian. Therefore its practically impossible to build factories near where you live so you can walk to work.
Recent studies show that suburbs consume nearly as much energy as cities while supporting fewer people. Also the destruction to nature, ecology, topography etc by this concrete sprawl is devastating.
Ever wondered why New Jersey gives out flood warnings at the slightest downpour ?? Its because there is so much paved area…roads, parking lots et al, that water cannot runn and be absorbed in the ground as it is supposed to be. And the economies of scale do not allow for elaborate stormwater drainage systems to be laid out.
I am not saying that we should abandon suburbs and make our cities bigger. But Suburbs and New Urbanim is not the solution.