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human has become a tool and overall society is developing without considering us as living organism?  

A brief note on Indian city planning and human needs

How human has become a tool and overall society is developing without considering us as living organism?

What is happening to this world? What is happening to our environments? What are we creating out there and where the hell have we left our souls? My soul cries watching the cities, when the sun is rising in the early morning hours. I see children playing between mountains of garbage, I see an old man in dirty clothes, counting his last coins for a chai on the road side, I see people running up and down concrete roads, wanting to move their bodies freely, craving for a glimpse of light and fresh air. Craving for nature. But all they get is a foggy, blurry image of a once beautiful shining dream of wealth, comfort and happiness that now follows its own laws.

In this dream, it seems that India's city development has exploded beyond its scope and has been overtaken by mainly profit-oriented market forces, irrespective long term quality and durability. The shape the cities are taking nowadays is a frightening scattered and sprawling mechanism, which grows too fast to even grasp it. Irrespective of natural habitats it consumes huge areas of land, pure and precious not only to ourselves, but to the whole world. We as human beings seem to have lost our connection to this purity and decided to prefer closed, safeguarded societies in something that we call security. But what is social security? Does it really need to be made up of grey concrete walls that disconnect us from our natural environment and from our natural social being? We have forgotten our responsibility for each other. Social awareness and responsibility if understood rightly, binds us humans together and can overcome the need for external security. Irrespective of that, built realities all over India have become unstructured low dense projects with insufficient social infrastructure that are coming up everywhere independent from each other.

What is the planner's role in this process? We have the power to bring upon change, but we need to step back for a while and reflect on ourselves and the impact of our actions.

The regional planning process in the developing world is not under the control of a central body, neither is it transparent to the public. This and the resulting spatial segregation of the created living environments make communication and connection in between projects difficult. So we as planners have to keep on working individually in a competing rat race, where we are closing our eyes for the opportunities and changes of communication and togetherness, though we already suffer the results on many levels. Infrastructures are overloaded and breaking down. Long distances have to be traveled within a city, while traffic is increasing, roads are congested and noise and air pollution are reaching a critical level. Monotonous project layouts are rebelling against aesthetics and social convenience with low quality housing in mass production, irrespective of individual needs. It seems that the nature of the human being and nature itself have lost their importance in India's growing process, giving space to success, fame and quick money.

It has not always been like this. Looking at ancient Indian planning methods, we can find well-elaborated recipes to build sustainable and ecological sensitive human settlements. But we are not doing that. All we are doing is blindly copying the methods, which are coming to us from all over the world. Though it is very necessary to study all projects which are concerning human growth, from whichever context they may come from, it is even more necessary to understand them fully, understand the local driving forces behind the physical solutions and being able to evaluate them in the varying local contexts to adjust them to local requirements. Whereas India would actually need a coordinated restructuring to get rid of the problems of the fast economic growth, it still seems hard to speak about alternatives. And so the sprawl goes on.

A recent fashion in India are so-called “integrated townships”, developments over 100 acres, planned and constructed in suburban areas to relieve the cities. Developers are private investors. These townships are mainly coming up solitary in underdeveloped, suburban areas, where land is cheap and easily available. These areas require already urgent provision of social and physical infrastructure and interconnectivity. The basic by law requirements based on estimations are not sensitive to contextual circumstances. And with developers targeting at the higher end, a failure of sustainability is precast.

Besides all this society is one of the most important aspects. Human settlements originally have grown out of family based communities, who settled along a river or anywhere where they could find fertile land. These communities expanded naturally according to their very own requirements and developed the facilities and amenities they required to sustain themselves. In the layout of old cities all over the world, we can find clear physical demarcations of societies in form of clusters or pools. In these communities, the society as an entity was taxable and responsible to a central authority. This structure made everybody feel responsible for each other and for the maintenance of society and its environment. With the modern lifestyle, these structures are vanishing. A change of values is driving the new society. What was earlier the family is today the circle of friends or colleagues. Very often pets or even material goods, like vehicles, television or computers substitute inter-human relationships.

We forget where we belong to; forget whom and what we are responsible for. Our responsibility focuses on private belongings, as we are now taxable as individuals, not any more as an entire society.

The build environment is a direct reflection of these phenomena. Spatial definitions become blurry in the mass-construction mania. People are now packed in segregated solitaire objects, high above the connecting ground. As it was earlier possible to access a multiplicity of neighboring houses through the same corridors, we face today four apartment doors when we step out the lift. And most of the time they are shut.
We have reached a point, where we should ask ourselves, what the things that count in life are. What is it that really makes us happy, that really matters? Is it true, what the media tells us? Do we need to be enclosed to be secure? Do we need to force new laws of aesthetics upon ourselves that substitute nature? Maybe at some point, we can remember our beings, our identity, our individual and social needs and jump above the dictate of fashion, fame and success and come together to create living environments in common that can build a society sensitive to itself, sensitive to nature.