Importance of interstate Regional Planning in India

Importance of interstate Regional Planning

India is emerging with above 32% urban growth rate in recent years. In the last few decades, the peri urban areas are seen to be converted into urban areas with a rapid population growth which lead to the economic development of those particular urban areas. The trend of urbanization affects the urban areas in several ways like agglomeration, speculative growth, fringe area development, growth of satellite cities etc. When a city’s growth produces fringe area development, then it is very clear that the city either economically or physically become unable to organize within the municipal limit and ultimately it produces satellite townships or agglomeration.

After that, in future time, the satellite towns merge with the city’s geographic boundary and thus the total growth merge in a common way and produces a complex urban settlement. It is indeed very difficult for the ULBs to control the peripheral areas and satellite towns under the same jurisdiction with the city. This uneven and imbalance development create administrative problem for the ULBs and as a result the need of a city development authority arises for those urbanized areas. In short, the Municipal corporation or authority is not capable enough to control two or more adjoining urbanized areas at a time and therefore a need of combined regional administrative body is being demanded. 

If the development tend to cross the political boundary and meets with the different urban areas of different states; then the scenario becomes hard. Two states are always different by their geographic, economic and political set-up. Therefore, no state is bothering about the urban growth of the other state and indeed they don’t need to be. On the other hand, every state has their legislation for urban development authority and hence the legislation of other state does not applicable for another state. But, when the two adjoining urban areas of the two different states settled nearer to each other; especially in the border locations of two different states, then the urban governance structure has to be rethought with an inclusive idea to bring those areas under same jurisdiction; otherwise both the states have to be suffered for the imbalanced growth and ease of utilization of natural resources.

The basic human nature cannot be controlled by any political interference. Human are supposed to travel from place to another in search for employment, education, relation and so on. As a result, the transportation, new settlements, infrastructure facilities all come automatically to serve the people. So, which urban legislation is there to regularize this growth pattern? Moreover, the climatic behavior, geographic structure and resource management policies also play crucial roles upon the governance of these kinds of urban areas.

Hence, by practical, new regional planning agencies need to be step up for planning and regulating the interstate regional areas. The concept is inspired from NCR planning board to plan and develop the cities of NCR which come under four different political boundaries of Delhi, Utttar Pradesh, Hariyana and Rajasthan yet they are adjoining to each other with a central development node Delhi.

By following the same concept when we look about our country, then we find several such potential zones with respect to their economy, social structure, physical structure and political administration which need to be planned under common regional boundary and legislation. But due to their location in different state’s legislation it is most importantly advisable to form interstate regional development authority which will regulate the particular regions.

It is high time to establish the interstate regional authorities to plan and develop the interstate regions which clubbed together as a common urbanized area but come under different state’s legislation. These regions need to be addressed by sustainable development. India needs a comprehensive approach toward regional planning. The interstate regions might fall under different legislation, having different demographic trends, tribes, class, society and political administration; yet they meet in a common stage of economy and share the resources. Therefore, their characters need to be understood properly and those areas need to be planned under certain common normative approaches.

Aims and objectives of interstate regional planning

1.      To identify the interstate regions and delineate those based upon the delineation criteria.

2.      To establish the interstate regional planning authority to plan, develop and monitor the regions, where the sub-regions must come under different political administration.

3.      To organize and direct the regional development under common legislation for the balance economic and physical growth.

4.      To make policies for using, sharing and conservation of natural resources.

5.      To achieve sustainable development and inclusive economic development.

6.      Irrespective of the political boundary, those urban centers are to be facilitated by common infrastructure, transit systems and development policies.

Approach

This is the preliminary approach by which we try to identify such potential zones across the country and delineate the interstate regions on the basis of delineation parameters. The concept is inspired by the NCR regional planning phenomenon. The final planning and financing is subjected to approval of those regions by the central authority after a detail project report. Our sincere aim is to delineate those regions, identify the development potentiality and prepare a report upon the need of interstate regional planning.

Criteria for delineation of regions

·         Proximity up to 100km radius from the central city.

·         Population growth and density.

·         Inter-city migration of population.

·         Similarity in socio-economic condition.

·         Sharing of facilities and resources.

·         Potential of twin city development.

·         Influence of Industrial corridor for strong economic potential.

·         Development nodes along Golden Quadrilateral.

·         Linkage to other cities and state.

·         Development potential and future prospects.

·         Transportation system and its efficiency.

An Introduction to Smart Growth

Well, before start telling this topic I like to make an idea clear to everyone that this is neither a technical topic nor I like to enter into too much of complicacy. This would be a clear type discussion among ourselves regarding the issues related to smart growth of a city, town or neighborhood and we also like to focus on whether this concept might be applicable to today’s context or not. Let me start with the title “smart growth”-what does it mean or from where it was evolved. This is basically an American term, the idea of smart growth started in the USA and it was extremely successful in that region with their living style and people appreciated it, they carried it and hope, still carrying this idea. We are Architects or some of us are urban planners. We are very much concerned about the quality of life and mostly responsible to plan and design that quality. A growth is an addition. It may be addition to physical structure of a town or may be in economy, infrastructure, education, settlements etc. when we talk about a growth, it consists of many elements. Let us take an example of a town or a city. A growth of a town may indicate its volumetric increase in terms of housing, business centers, educational institutes, transportation, employment generation, travel and tourism aspects etc. when a growth is formulated by certain goal of planning; it is then called a development. Even if at all we are discussing about a growth, many times we neglect the prime factor; that is land. A land is such an element which can’t be generated. Whatever piece of land you have, you need to use it. Therefore, how smartly you are going to use the land and preserve it for your future generation is the prime idea of a smart growth. It implies our inclination toward a sustainable growth where we need to be less dependent on external energy systems. Smart growth insists us to walk, to use sustainable transportation system like bicycle etc. If we start from a small neighborhood or gated community, then smart growth tells us to plan and design the neighborhood such a way that we need not to use other mechanical vehicles to travel inside of it. The neighborhood should be walkable by every corner and by every people. The facilities and amenities should be plotted in such a way that no one needs to go out for anything. If you are able to design such type of neighborhood, then definitely you are saving time and money of the users. It is very much philosophical that in today’s world people do not get much time to spend with family and friends. We all accepted a mechanical life. A survey showed that we spend 20% of time inside our cars or vehicles. If we can save that 20% time and other factors related to it like fuel and money then probably we may be able to save a lot. The concept of smart growth says that lets save time and automatically time will save other elements.

Now, let us understand as Architects that what we can do to bring smart growth in our design and how to do these. Well, the experts said that there are several thumb rules or key points regarding planning and designing according to smart growth.

Smart growth is related to, or used in combination with the following concepts:

New Urbanism

New Community Design

Sustainable Development

Traditional Neighborhood Development

Resource Stewardship

Land Preservation

Preventing urban sprawl

Creating Sense of Place

Development Best Practices

Preservation Development

Triple Bottom Line (TBL) Accounting - People, Planet, Profit

The Three Pillars - Human, Natural, and Created Capital

The smart growth approach to development is multifaceted and can encompass a variety of techniques. For example, in the state of Massachusetts smart growth is enacted by a combination of techniques including increasing housing density along transit nodes, conserving farm land, and mixing residential and commercial use areas. Perhaps the most descriptive term to characterize this concept is Traditional Neighborhood Development, which recognizes that smart growth and related concepts are not necessarily new, but are a response to car culture and sprawl. Many favor the term New Urbanism, which invokes a new, but traditional way of looking at urban planning.

There are a range of best practices associated with smart growth, these include: supporting existing communities, redeveloping underutilized sites, enhancing economic competitiveness, providing more transportation choices, developing livability measures and tools, promoting equitable and affordable housing, providing a vision for sustainable growth, enhancing integrated planning and investment, aligning, coordinating, and leveraging government policies, redefining housing affordability and making the development process transparent. Related, but somewhat different, are the overarching goals of smart growth, and they include: making the community more competitive for new businesses, providing alternative places to shop, work, and play, creating a better "Sense of Place," providing  jobs for residents, increasing property values, improving quality of life, expanding the tax base, preserving open space, controlling growth, and improving safety.

Basic principles of smart growth:

There are 10 accepted principles that define smart growth:

1.     Mix land uses

2.     Take advantage of compact building design

3.     Create a range of housing opportunities and choices

4.     Create walkable neighborhoods

5.     Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place

6.     Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas

7.     Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities

8.     Provide a variety of transportation choices

9.     Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost effective

10. Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development decisions.

You may find it awesome that the authority of western countries like USA has given some “walk score” to any kind of planned neighborhood communities. The more walk score means more sustainable. Now, As an Architect, we need to understand the need of sustainability. Preservation of land and to use and re use it again and again by multiple functional ways. We may go for implementing the concept of “Brown field development” where we can use abundant land or non agricultural land for new construction. We can go for renovation of ancient structures to protect it and to reuse it. Urbanization always affects our forest land and agricultural lands. We lost 60% of agricultural lands whereas more than 45% of forest land converted into habitable areas in past 100 years. We cannot escape from urban amenities or to become urbanized. But the basic thing is that how smartly we are designing an urban land to reduce negative impact on environment and how far we are successful to preserve agricultural lands and make the maximum use of a minimum piece of land is remarkable. How far we are designing a lifestyle which requires less energy, less transportation and gets maximum time to spend a happy life; are all about to thing from right now to grow smartly.

Urban Planning in India: Where the focus should go

Urban planning is still considered as a casual work in many parts of our country. Many times Indian government tried to improve the planning mechanism inside the country and as a result the structure of governance in rural and urban areas had been changed. The best part came with the 73^rd and 74^th amendment of Indian constitution in 1992 where it was granted that the governance structure would be formed by both administrative action and active public participation. The urban governance structure was moulded by creating different administrative institutions especially Municipal corporation, Municipality, and Nagar panchayat. The idea of being “urban” is no more a fictional character in understanding. As a general belief, people often get confused to rename any are as urban by observing the infrastructure, facilities and transportation services. But the major thing we neglect that the structure of governance. Government of India defines any area as urban if

a) It has an urban governance structure (Municipal corporation, municipality or nagar panchayat),

b) The population must be above 5,000,

c) Density of population should be 400 persons per square km,

d) More than 75% of male working population must be engaged into non agricultural pursuits. These are general criteria for understanding what does “urban” physically mean for.

 Let us understand the need of planning first. When we talk about planning, it means this would be a process where someone is associated to organize something. When this idea is transferred to Urban planning, then the understanding level will go little higher. A city or a town is a settled portion of land where people use this land for their different activities like residences, business, transportation, parks, etc. The work of a planner starts to study the inhabitants and their daily lifestyle, to understand the use of land and to organize the land in optimum usability by providing better functions and facilities. In other words, urban planners work for improving the standard of life. In this discussion we are not going to make a debate where improvement of economy is called improvement of life or not. Rather we would like to focus on different issues by which a planning mechanism can be better carried out. A life is composed of mainly two things-personal and social. Every human being lives for his own, his family and on the other hand he lives for the society. The importance of education and economy is directly associated with individuals where its affects are indirectly associated the society. Therefore whatever we do personally has some impact on the society in direct or indirect way. The society is composed of many classes and castes. There is always difference of age, sex, education, health and economy. When we try to focus on the urban India, we will see three different clusters. One is elite class with high level economic society, next one is general citizens for whom the markets, railway stations, bus stops are being provided and the last one is slum who work for cleaning and laborious work inside the city. But the interesting part as a planner to be seen is all live in the same geographic boundary. When one demarcates a land by its geographic boundary and calls it a city then definitely some sort of integration must be there regarding the daily life. A planner always observes the city as a whole. Different people have different types of issues and hence someone must be there to solve those issues and provide living facilities to the inhabitants. Here we need the administration. The urban administrative structure was never being formed by observing social issues. It was formed to facilitate the citizens by their preliminary needs in an organized pattern. What are the preliminary needs? You can say a place to live in, some water to serve both drinking and washing purpose, a street for communication, schools for education, workplace to work and earn, health and hygiene etc. Therefore planning spread to several sectors. The prime objective is how to organize the urban land and facilitating the services properly. But a city is always an organic form. It grows by population, by buildings, by facilities but it can’t grow by land. Land is always limited. A city grows by population and then the facilities also need to be grown equally. Population and facilities must stay in proportion; otherwise the balance of the city may decay. If demography is our first stage of analysis, then we see that a city mostly suffer from migration issues. People from adjoining parts of the city often migrate in search of job, education and health facilities which are not available in their place as per their need. If we can provide the same needs in their own places, then we can control the migration to some extent. PUARA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) is that function only by which government can facilitate the rural areas and take two ways profit; one is to control migration from rural to urban places and second is to improve rural life up to a better position. Urbanization is only a profit oriented settlement for all over the world. People love urban areas only for better facilities. Therefore, if we can sort out the facilities and transfer few to rural parts of our country, then a number of rural issues can be solved easily and then we can better improve the urban zones. 

This method may useful to work against uneven urban sprawl. Higher education institutions, good health care facilities, minimum job guarantee, improved transportation system and roads, hygienic living with a house all can be facilitate to the rural areas too. Indian rural citizens are facing the only problem that is negligence. Probably this matter of discussion can’t be concluded without pointing out the effective solution. Providing facilities can never give the planning strategy. What to provide, how to provide and for whom to provide these three are the major questions often arises in front of a planner. The active participation of citizen is more important than making of policy by government. Every citizen must understand their needs and must have a desire to make that possible at their own locality. This thing may carry transparency in planning policies and developing strategies. People should be active for demanding in proper way by understanding the issues. If we fail to participate, then perhaps government will become fail to implement. A planning must be inclusive from every manner. Planning should not be limited to urban areas completely; it should be spread to the rural zones too. Inclusiveness brings both administration and citizens together by which citizens can explain their needs and administration can examine and take proper policy work. India is considered as one of the rapid urbanized country in the world where we have approximately 40% of urbanization by 2013. But still the urban planning in our country is not satisfactorily developed. What could be reason for it? Till now, planning has been serving as a task of government, where there was no participation of citizens and hence many planning policies failed to achieve their goal in our country. The duty includes focusing out the actual potentiality of the area, whether it is urban or rural. Every urban area has some definite development potential. That development potential if hidden, then it is needed to be extracted. One may say about resources, water bodies, possible economic zones etc. A town planning work must look at every possible factors of development equally and appreciate the best. Even preparation of Development Control Regulation (DCR) is also considered as a challenging job. People often forget about the green belt, play area and many more refreshing zones for the hassles of concrete construction and hence the town planner too. Metros like New Delhi is likely to lose the safety concerns while upcoming major city like Raipur (Chattisgarh) is running away from environmental parameters and become polluted day by day.  The prime importance of urban planning thus missing in our country and it is suffering from misguiding by lack of understanding of both Governments and citizens. If we planners fail to think about a safe and environment friendly city, then who will think for it? This is perhaps the important time to think about that inclusiveness. A city must be planned inclusively by social, physical, economic, safety and environment parameters. If we need to develop our urban zones, then we have to think for making self sustainable, self sufficient and safe cities. A real inclusive approach in planning, proper governance structure and active public participation may lead to next era of planning where we can dream for happy urbanization in India.  

The beginning of a day

How a day begins? Well, I am an Architect today. I teach in a college too. But often I wonder about myself and my work that how those came to such solid beginning even though I was not 1% serious about myself and my profession. I literary jumped into this profession by my own choice. Let me confess about that. Today when I go to deliver a lecture in the classroom, I feel suffocated. The only thing makes me unsatisfied that most of the students come to this profession not by their own choice but by their parents' irresistible dreams and the resultant of time with unable to clear any Engineering or so called Medical entrance examinations. So, we found a mix culture inside the classroom. Half dozen of pupils were prepared harshly for the entrance examinations as if their aim in life would be such stupid entrance tests and if once they got admitted to a profession or undergraduate course, their life would be fulfilled. Another bunch of pupils don't know why they are here and what to do in future and the rest couple of pairs might come like a fortune to my profession, that is to study what Architecture is. In the very beginning of this writing I clearly mentioned that I was unable to catch the ideas of the profession. Yes, nothing serious about this. My life started in a typical Assamese village having 60% literacy among them 5% were aware of any technical course and 1% people knew about a professional course like Architecture. I bow to all those inspiring quotes, by which I am able to stand here to look forward. What makes me an Architect is still a question for me. I was never a confident student, always afraid of result. I did not speak a single sentence in English while I was in Assam and therefore my English is still as poor as a Japanese guy. Now , suddenly I was thrown to such a gutter where there was no relation with my usual life and forcefully I had to welcome a new style which was ready to mould few innocents like me. So, dear readers, probaly you may now able to understand my situation where and how I was fully fragmented by time and society. I missed my school days, my green village, those cows and golden rice fields, dusty paths and Assamese Bihu songs. I could not accept poha, samosa, pav bhaji and other components to make my life in a new way. But it happened. I had to. And unknowingly I did it. Many times I cried to my father for changing the institution, but if I remember, I never argued to change my Profession. May be it was the affect of the place which I was unable to accept in me. But I loved my profession very much, will be loving till my end. Then exactly what happened to me? My friends found me as a good guy having talent in both academics and non academics. But did I find myself ever? I was completely failed to understand myself and therefore I lost one year, simply failed in the examination. Probably it was the biggest learning for me. I never failed anywhere. I never asked for anything, so usually there was no meaning of fail or pass. But this time when I need to achieve something for me, I simply failed to acquire it. I started to get something and the beginning became uneasy. Then how to fight for what I want? I found myself not aware of what I want. It took many months to create that awareness inside me to say "Now have a start". I like to thank my next batch of students who accepted me as their own and helped me to create an academic awareness inside me. Finally I became an Architect, with good academic performances.  I have changed A-for Architecture in my life. And I can say it is not a tough thing for anybody who has failed for the first time. Simply need a change, a self-awareness about what we want. That's enough to reach a goal.