Garden cities of India (?)

Ebenezer Howard, an urban planner from late 19^th century UK was quite unhappy with the filthy cities and towns of the newly industrializing Britain.  

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928)

Howard saw a deep dichotomy between the cities and the countryside. Cities offer opportunities for work, but are filthy and unliveable. The countryside is obviously beautiful and nice to live in but offers no jobs.  Ebenezer Howard conceived of a city that combines the merits of the two, which led to the Garden City movement.

He described the above three aspects urban attraction as “three magnets.” The first is the “town magnet” that attracts with its job opportunity. The second is the “country magnet” that attracts with its greenery and opportunity for a comfortable and healthy living. The third is new “town-country magnet” that represents a combination of the other two magnets.

The Three Magnets

The Garden Cities are “ self-contained communities [that] are surrounded by "greenbelts", containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.” (Wiki)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement

In the original plan laid out by Ebenezer Howard, there is a central city of about 58,000 population spread out over an area of 12,000 acres. Around this there are 6 satellite cities connected to the central city by rail and road. The open space between the central city and the satellites is  a green belt.

The entire network of cities (1 central + 6 satellites) will have a population of 2,50,000 over an area of 66,000 acres.

Once the limit of the population is reached, Howard suggests that is time to build a new city.

66,000 acres = 267.09 sq km.

Therefore, if you do a simple calculation, the above city will have a population density of

Population density = 250,000/267.09 = 936 /sq km

which is more than twice the population density of India.

The current population density of India is 460/sqkm

That is, even we pack the entire population of India in garden cities, we will still be occupying only half the land of the country.

But perhaps such a calculation is too naïve. If the half the area of a country is inhabited where do you have farmlands that produce food? How do you accommodate mountains, rivers and other geographical features where habitation is either impossible or impractical?

Furthermore, there is one recurrent complaint against the garden city approach to urban planning. 

The influence of garden city approach can be seen in the planning of a lot of world cities. It led to the division of the city into a crowded and busy business center (the downtown) and   a suburban area with a lot of greenery. People live in the suburbs in spacious homes and commute to the city center for work every day. This created the infamous “urban sprawl” and an unsustainable model of city building.

But the point that is exactly what Howard was arguing against in his garden city model. To me it looks like the “suburb” approach to city building is not a realization of the spirit of urban planning promoted by Howard. It simply tried to bring the village closer to the city and renamed it the “suburb.”

Howard’s vision of a garden city is more organic, cellular and therefore closer to the Nature. In the biological world, every organism is made of fundamental building blocks called the cells. An individual cell does not grow in size indefinitely. As a cell grows and ages to a point of maturity, it divides into nearly identical cells.

A dividing Cell


 A single cell does not grow into a giant central cell surrounded by a bunch of peripheral cells.

But that’s exactly how a lot of modern cities seem to grow.

See this article about how the city of Chennai is planned and developed:

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/the-tough-business-of-building-a-city/article31071614.ece

“Chennai’s planners have always imagined and conventionally planned the city: a stable city core that is expanding outward. Their plans are based on separating the city as core and periphery, where the core is the all-important epicentre, and the peripheries are thought of as spillover spaces.”

But where exactly is that “all-important epicentre” of Chennai, one wonders.  The downtowns of great world cities are filled with skyscrapers that amplify the land area by efficient use of 3D space, creating an enormous carrying capacity, with modern the infrastructure to support a high population density. Unfortunately, Chennai (26,500 /sqkm) has nearly the same higher population density as Manhattan (25,800 /sqkm), while the infrastructures of the two cities are hardly comparable.

Why are our cities allowed to reach such abominably high population densities without a commensurate growth in the infrastructure? The problem seems to arise from the special brand of urban planning – or the lack thereof – that is practiced in India. (See the extremely well-researched chapter on Urban Planning in India in Ankur Bisen’s recent book “Wasted”).

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/the-tough-business-of-building-a-city/article31071614.ece

The same  article on Chennai further goes on to say that instead of core-periphery model one must identify the “multi-centers” in the so-called periphery and develop them as independent entities. Apparently Dutch city planners use such a philosophy of urban planning – not “inside-out” but “outside-in” planning.

If you think about it, that’s exactly the spirit of the garden city. Let each city be developed as a self-contained unit with different zones for business, manufacturing, education, residence etc. The zones will be swaddled in a rich greenbelt giving the city the look and feel of the country. Once the city grows to a certain size in population, further development will be prevented, and a new city will burgeon at a certain distance from the original city, always ensuring the existence of a green buffer zone between two adjacent cities.

But one problem is, if we take the garden city approach for Indian cities, we will have to turn half the land into an inhabited area, which may not be acceptable, because as per the original conception garden cities have less than 1000 people per sqkm.  What then is an acceptable population density for a city?  If we take the example of Amsterdam, and London, both well-planned cities, with population densities of about 4,500 /sqkm, much higher than 936/sqkm.

 
Therefore, if can build garden cities with densities of about 4,500/sqkm, which is 10 times the current population density of India, we will still be inhabiting  only a tenth of the land area, leaving the rest of the land to the Nature.

The population of India is thought to reach its maximum of about 1.6 billion by  about 2060. By that time our imaginary green cities will only have a population densities of about 5,600/sqkm.

Can’t help fantasizing a future India where there are no more filthy, crowded cities and towns. The entire peninsula is filled with green and glorious garden cities as shown in the figure below.



Garden Cities of a Future India

Writing is like producing movement

Writing is like producing movement. There is the simplest kind of movement that is produced by the brain… it is produced as a fast reflex to a shock received from the world. It involves no thought. It is a simple conversion of one form of information into another, one form of energy into another. The movement that is released is informed by the stimulus. In the world of writing, certain kinds of translation work are similar to this movement.

Then there are movements that are still dependent on and are specified by the sensory information from the world. But these involve thought, a certain permission from the will of the performer.  But here too it is the world that does most of the work.

The more serious kinds of writing, something that can be said to be original, are like voluntary movements.  

Here too there are types of voluntary movements. In the classification of William James, the 19^th century American psychologist, firstly, there are the ideomotor movements in which there is a pre-existing idea that guides the movement, like for example a well-practiced dance movement. This is like writing about the visit to a monument, or at a slightly grander scale about the history of a nation.

There is a second type of voluntary movement, - it is as voluntary as voluntary can get – in which movement emerges purely from within. Like a strong gush of fuming water from the depths of a geyser, it issues out of the depths of consciousness. It flies unaided, propelled by nothing but the strength of its wings, and soars free like a giant eagle. Writing always needs a subject. One necessarily writes about something. But there is a world of difference between writing that rolls out on a prefixed idea, and writing, in its purest and most original forms, that leaps out of the writer’s mind, charts out its own course, brings with it its own idea-companions, chooses the vehicle that can carry and stabilize its movement, with the writer remaining through the whole time a pure and transparent instrument and nothing else.

The best and the truest kinds of writing simply writes itself. The less the writer gets involved in the business the better. From somewhere inside... ideas and words and lines emerge, like dainty objects from a magician’s hat, from the depths of the writers being. Water molecules find their own clever pairings and form the enchanting geometries of the snow flakes, just when the weather is right. Likewise, in the purest forms of writing, torrents of words self-organize into lines that are lyrical, apt, shimmering with a supernal meaning. All that the writer has to do is supply that inner atmosphere and remain calm.

Sometimes the first few lines might be triggered and impelled by a few superficial objectives the writer may have on his mind. The first few words that emerge might be a clothing on those first thoughts. The Consciousness simply uses those thoughts as calling cards, an invitation for the writer to tune into Itself. Once the connection begins, and the channels of expression  open, the river of meaning that flows out is often vastly greater than what the writer originally intended to write about. He is pleasantly surprised by page after page, tome after tome, that seems to be welling up from within. Where is all this coming from? What exactly is in him? He will find his own depths bewildering. Because these depths are  actually not “his” depths, just as when you dig deeper than the foundations of your personal dwelling, very soon you will find yourself in the bowels of the Earth far from anything that is “yours.”

In this sense, writing is a form of exploration of the Self. Very soon the writer will come to realize that there is a whole universe of things inside, a universe that was there all along but he never knew. It would be too vain to say that that universe is inside him. A more apt language would be to say that the writer is only a channel, a willing or a fortunate portal onto the infinite world of Consciousness.

Image credits: https://www.livescience.com/49244-imagination-reality-brain-flow-direction.html