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METRO ESSAY
Fixing the urban landscape
MADHURIKA SANKAR
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If only planning could start with the basics
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Photo: S. THANTHONI
Pressing need For child-friendly parks and walking spaces
After three years of living as foreigners in Manhattan, a friend of mine concurred with me that NYC’s physical infrastructure substituted for emotional infrastructure. You could escape into an organised, regimented landscape. New York is, pretty much, all avenues and cross streets, where you can locate yourself through a grid.
Being directionally challenged, I loved that. Also, the organised architecture and physical landscaping (Central Park was built from a melange of rocks and swamps, with the intent of being the city’s ‘lungs’), can lend a sense of congeniality to the urban milieu.
But actually, I love Madras’physical beauty, as I do most Indian cities, for the organic, circuitous aspect of it all. It motivates me to develop my own emotional landscape, to juxtapose it with the physical. But how far can we push this quixotic notion?
I used to walk to work in Madras in 2006; my workplace was close to my residence and I found the ritual strangely solemnising. As I survived despite being almost run over every day, it seemed like an oblique proof of the existence of God. At the signal junction, only sheer faith in something greater than the belief that you will make it, can transport you across/over/under and sometimes scarily, ‘within’, on to the other side.
Of course, Chennai isn’t the most congenial city, weather wise. According to the Chennai Corporation website, we have 230 parks in our city, but how evenly are they distributed though the cityscape? Large parks such as Nageswara Rao Park and Panagal Park have children-specific enclaves and walking routes, but how many others do? We have flyovers that do little but shift the bottlenecks, and roads without sidewalks. How many usable, pedestrian-friendly pavements/sidewalks can we account for, and how many of these have been lost as a result of ‘road expansion schemes’ or flyovers?
What is the spread of public sanitation facilities? And how hygienic are they? We emphasise development in a spot-centric way. Why not adopt a pyramid approach by starting with the basics.
As an example of this approach, here are a couple of basic things we need. First, good, sturdy buildings that do not block precious sea breeze from entering this hot and humid city. Second, creating more congenial meeting places even as we grapple with the issue of planning for this rapidly growing metropolis. We need a mix of science and sensibility, and not just a knee-jerk reaction to the economic demands of the day.
We have made some strides. The Metro system that is taking slow, steady shape; the ingenious one-way traffic systems that any an old-school Madras resident will appreciate, and which are enforced uncompromisingly.
Urban beatification (you read right) will happen when we have given the basic majority the basics that elude them. Shelter, food, health and education. Then, the subjective urban landscape will surely take organic shape around that.
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