Putting people at the centre
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A seminar in Kochi sees experts speak out against the top-down planning approach.
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The 74th amendment to the Constitution gives the local self-government institutions a major role in the process of planning and administration.
The amendment has had far-reaching consequences on how local bodies are administered and funded.
Among the tasks entrusted to the urban local bodies under the amendment are urban planning, comprising town planning, regulation of land use and planning for social and economic development. The micro areas in which these prescriptions have an impact are comprehensive, putting people at the centre.
Two papers at a recent seminar in Kochi seeks to put people at the centre of planning, breaking away from the tradition of imposing development plans from the top. P.V.K. Rameshwar, Chairman, Graduate School and Head of the Department of Urban Design, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, asked whether people were the victims or stakeholders in a given development plan.
The fundamental question he raised is can planners and designers improve people’s lives and fulfil their aspirations.
Dunu Roy, Hazard Centre, New Delhi, asked if the political dispensation and “professional arrogance” allow participatory planning.
According to Prof. Rameshwar, planners assume that by virtue of their training and specialised knowledge, they have special knowledge of the development requirements and they make design interventions. He said that current planning was based on a “positivist attitude.”
He said these assumptions gave rise to “a belief in centralised and hierarchical decision-making, theory of probability, oversimplification, contention with an overview, segregation, abstraction, city as economic space.”
“The urban transformation studio,” now in progress, questions this view of planning and design interventions made by urban planners, he said.
The studio questions the premises on which conventional planning is built. It seeks to intervene at the ward level.
Prof. Rameshwar said the intention of the studio was to explore the method/process of participatory development and the role and nature of urban design.
Mr. Roy too addressed key issues in urban planning.
How should a city develop? According to a planner’s imagination? And, what of a city’s dynamics.
He suggested that collection of hard field data could reveal the dynamics of a city and only then could people’s participation in planning begin.
Again, on field data collection, the suggestion is that the questions be consultative in nature, simple, inexpensive to administer, easy to tabulate and amenable to yielding perspectives that people can use.
The experience in Delhi, he said, had shown how to develop such schedules and what data they yielded.
These results have also led to development of norms for areas such as shelter, water, electricity supply and waste management.
K.A. MARTIN
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