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City sprawls and signs
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Billboards and posters are everywhere, screaming for attention. Instead of such visual clutter, shouldn't there be a more organised method when it comes to public property, asks PRAKASH BELAWADI
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IN ONE study, published in the November 1991 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Roger Ulrich, a professor of architecture and urban planning at Texas A&M University in College Station, linked the visual clutter of sprawl developments to a variety of stress-related effects, such as elevated blood pressure and increased muscle tension. Based on the results of his research, Ulrich questioned whether "roadside blight and strip `sprawlscapes' may be in some respects a public health issue, because they are the stuff of experience for tens of millions of people."
Because there is no clear-cut distinction between sprawl and suburbanisation, simple definitions for sprawl are hard to come by. Reid Ewing, an associate professor in the College of Engineering and Design at Florida International University in Miami, says that "like obscenity, you may not know exactly how to describe (sprawl), but you know it when you see it. It's a matter of degree. It's hard to say exactly where sprawl begins and ends."
(Author Charles W. Schmidt)
Overseas visitors to Bangalore have begun to write what we have been feeling for a long time. Apart from the usual rah-rah about Silicon Valley and BPOs, they now write about the hellish congestion, choking air pollution, appalling road conditions, dismal utilities. The noise levels are becoming unbearable. And research on visual clutter may just confirm what is obvious to the senses: ugly signs and billboards breed unease and further ugliness.
Everything else is possibly difficult to reverse or even control. But what about visual clutter? Earlier this year, a society of architects in Washington apparently wrote to the transit authority over a proposal to sell its spaces advertisers: "As the Metro Board prepares to decide on the sale of the visual and audio rights of our beautiful mass transit system, we are writing to express our strong opposition to expansion of commercial advertising and to offer support for several other ideas for additional revenue."
Among the recommendations, the architects demanded that extensive public hearings should precede any decision on the project to sell public spaces to advertisers and suggested that environmental psychologists like Dr. Ulrich should be consulted on the likely health and psychological impacts of the advertisements on transit riders, besides the obvious aesthetic implications.
"We predict vehement public disgust with visual clutter from ad-covered buses and subway cars, flashing lights, and huge banners; the violation of local municipal sign ordinances which have made our metropolitan area one of the least cluttered in the nation; and intrusions of noise and images from video monitors and zoetrope images in the tunnels. Our fear is that, by the time the public experiences this chaos, it will be too late and citizens will be forced to live with an unacceptable situation for many years to come," they wrote.
It seems we in Bangalore have already reached there. The hoardings, movie cutouts, boards on our shops and establishments, buses and government-owned spaces compete for attention, with ever more outrageous sizes, colours, and content. It induces a lowering of self-esteem and ownership about the city.
But does ugliness really induce ugliness? There is the "Broken Window" experiment by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo that has apparently attained pre-eminent status among researchers. Zimbardo placed two cars, with hoods raised and without licence plates, in two separate communities: one in the poor New York borough of the Bronx, the other in the affluent community of Palo Alto. Within minutes of being left unattended, the car in the Bronx was vandalised. In the next few days, it was totally stripped. In contrast, the car in Palo Alto stood untouched for more than a week, until Zimbardo damaged it himself by smashing it with a hammer. Observing the car over the next several days, he watched as it, too, was vandalised, overturned and trashed.
Hoardings, movie cutouts, boards on shops, buses and government-owned spaces now come in ever more outrageous sizes, colours, and content.
The moral or the thesis is that human behaviour is influenced by symbols of harmony and disorder. If a city or one of its areas appears orderly, people feel safer, and even those that feel left out by "progress" are less likely to take it out on public property. But if nobody cares, everybody gives up.
Now that our masters are promising a Metro in the next three years, let us return to the caring architects, who loved their Washington: "Our reasons for opposing expansion of commercial advertising include the following: The Metro subway system was designed in the monumental architectural tradition of the Nation's Capitol. The stations, with their arched cathedral-like ceilings, and open, uncluttered appearance, have drawn praise from design professionals, local residents, and visitors alike. Well-designed advertising displays provide minimal visual intrusion. Metro's public spaces are a part of the common public realm and therefore, should not be for sale."
Bangalore too was a nice place. To quote a well-known architect of our own city: "It is not yet `give-up'able." We hope others in his fraternity feel the same and do us a favour. Get us a style code for advertising in public spaces.
prakash@cfdbangalore.ac.in
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