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