Compact cities

Cities:

“Homo sapiens make buildings—this is a part of their process of synchronisation, their territorialization within the body of this earth. A City-Machine puts to test this simple statement: Architecture Maps the City, and architecture mimics the city: it is in turn mapped by the city. It is the instrument par excellence wielded necessarily by the central powers as they come to form the city. A machine constructed of flows, and architecture shaped by the energies latent in the flow: by itself. The place already has the energy and the material for architecture—gravity, viscosity, gradient, deposition and forces of nature. The urban question concerns, then, the mashing of the Homo sapiens into this machine, the body of earth itself. Homo Sapiens with his urban motives, separated from the body of the earth: standing upright as a number of modern mythologies would have it. In any case, separated from the body of earth and wrapped in a shell of articulated space, made symbolic and meaningful. A City Machine exists in the City like Water in water. It creates series of articulations that come about as organs form within the media, the City as we know it, as its forces constitute a Flexion, a City-Machine is no more than a diagramme of these forces: contained within and shaped by—at once shaping its armatures, the city as is seen and experienced.

www.emsah.uq.edu.au

The resulting condition: we see a ruptured body of the city, if the city was considered a corporate entity; this is a new organism sprouting organs extracted from multiple origins. Organs existent in a state of constant provocation. It is by provocation that they propel themselves and change. Urban systems are generated of this antagonism. One sees the beginning of a vast locational logic, a dispersed system of pseudo places. The bricks of a new city.
The city will then be understood as a vast process of decoding-encoding. Values embedded into its structure [the proximities, exposures: the whole logic of location in relation to the system of flows in-themselves] are decoded, and buildings actuated—representing this decoding. Buildings formalise the de-coded. They come into existence as they represent values decoded and thus exploited: brought into light. Into the domain of exchanges.
The decoding-encoding brings tangible shapes to the form of the city: its’ structures, signification and other identifiable attributes. The city, in other words, becomes a product of uprooting. Of fluid masses of the uprooted, ’I’ is placed within the tensions, the provocations. ‘I’ must constantly adapt, camouflage oneself [mimesis]: one takes a stand, or takes flight. People mirror, buildings mirror. Ephemeral ‘conventions’ come into existence.

Bereft of motives beyond itself the city represents only itself. To itself. Like an animal it constantly endeavours to reproduce itself. And devouring itself in order to reproduce. It contains, is contained and even consumes it’s own excrement. At times, we witness the twilight of the city. It copulates with itself. It computes and becomes a City-Machine.
It is an ethereal city. We inhabit it, wraithlike. We, the dream walkers.”

Text from a city-Machine, web article by Anand Bhatt

What is a City? 

Movement through a city plays an important role in defining the structure of a city – it’s legibility and transparency. Transportation systems are a very tangible layer of the city-Machine: in many ways they are indicators of a city’s relationship with its environment. Initial settlements grew around rivers, the flows of the river (floods, droughts, silt depositions and erosions) determining the pace of life. For example, the city of Old Delhi was built along the banks of the Yamuna River, the fort wall running parallel to it with a “maidan”, or large open ground, between the two. This maidan would host a variety of functions like sports, weekly markets, and festival celebrations. The river has since shifted course, moving about a kilometre further away from the fort wall. More importantly, the powers that be built a Ring Road for the city of Delhi about 50 years ago, said road circling the city and effectively cutting it off from the river. Instead of being a part of city life – much as the Seine and the Thames are fro Paris and London respectively – the Yamuna is now more or less a filthy sewer during most of the year. The only time we even realize we have a river on our doorstep is when we wrinkle our noses and roll up the windows as we zoom by.

There are plans for redeveloping the river edge and they should improve the situation, but as long as vehicular transport is the fundamental driving force behind city planning, monumental goof-ups like this will continue to happen. Maybe it’s easy to speak in hindsight, but the important thing is to learn from past mistakes rather than blithely repeat them. Because cities are more than their transportation (especially vehicular) systems. They are places that are significant to the people who live there… we’re Indians (and proud of it), but we are also proud of our cities, calling ourselves Dilliwalas or Mumbaiwalas. In a few years (who knows?) I may even be calling myself a Sydneywala. And when our cities are clean, safe and healthy environments, then we have good reason to be proud of them.

‍Images on this page: Suptendu Biswas‍

Many people see the 20^th century city model with it’s high rise vehicle-centric pattern as an anomaly, the Modern Architect’s way of imposing spatial order on an otherwise messy existence. In Richard Bolton’s “Architecture and Cognac”, the Architect is portrayed as an all-knowing entity looking down on the city from inside his high-rise office, ordering chaos to his will with set square and parallel bar. The grid city concept (epitomised by New York City) originated in Roman city planning, based on its original use in military camps. It became popular again during the start of the Renaissance, with Mannheim in Germany the first of the Renaissance cities laid out on the grid plan. Many new towns in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom were built on the same principles. This is the result:

Most town planning is based on the notion of separating functions: businesses set up shop in the heart of the city or the CBD (Central Business District), while the actual residences are mostly located in suburbs that radiate out from the business centre. This separation of functions obviously causes problems in that people have to travel large distances to commute between their homes and places of work, which means they have to rely on vehicular transport. As the city grows, the only option is for suburbs to spread out into the countryside while the CBD, constrained as it is within a limited area, expands vertically. Delhi city is actually composed of at least 7 separate organic settlements along the Yamuna, that over time have grown into each other. The city of New Delhi with its hexagonal grid was proposed by Edwin Lutyens as a way of formalising the “haphazard” character of Delhi, while simultaneously highlighting the imperial power of the British Empire. Compared to the high density, low rise character of the old cities, New Delhi is extremely low density, with wide vistas and the Government buildings at its centre, and plotted bungalow development around it. Since development controls don’t allow for any additional development in New Delhi, most of the new construction is illegally done in the older parts, which already have very high densities. The rest of it is pushed out to the satellite towns of Gurgaon and Noida, especially commercial development. Which basically means a whole lot of traffic issues and haphazard construction.

Gridlock

The grid doesn’t work: functionally it’s inefficient and it doesn’t exactly foster a sense of community. So the grid pattern is out. In terms of density, what should we aim for? In Delhi, development controls call for 150 – 200 DUs/ ha. While I don’t really appreciate the use of the term DU (dwelling units) to describe where people live, I believe this probably is the ideal mix, as long as the quality of open space complements the density. This means active public space – nodes around which community activities can happen. In Sydney that just doesn’t happen. There are rows after rows of houses, with a park plonked somewhere at the end.  And with the shift towards very low densities (to the order of 30 people per hectare) in the new urbanism movement, you have to wonder whether we can really recreate an idealistic image of life pre-Industrial Revolution. The car is a reality, burgeoning population is a reality, and environmental degradation is a reality: the trick is to find the ideal balance and create places that acknowledge this and deal with it in a sensitive and practical way. Compact cities are sustainable and habitable, based on precedents in European cities that seem to have stood the test of time. The concept is also based on the recognition that vernacular architecture around the world possesses qualities that respond to climate and culture, something that perhaps Modern architecture failed to acknowledge when applied at large scales. The overemphasis given to vehicular transportation above the pedestrian has obviously not worked as well, which is why more and more developments across the globe attempt to incorporate mass-transit systems to reduce the burden on the urban infrastructure, and create conditions where the pedestrian and the vehicular coexist. In the case of Curitiba public transport is assigned dedicated roads, segregating the two. However, it might also be possible to have the two coexist on the same street (as opposed to road) as in the European context. In Delhi, we probably have the perfect setup in the older parts of the city, with scooters, auto-rickshaws, people and cars jammed together in narrow winding streets. These streets probably don’t function as well as they did before the motor vehicles invaded Old Delhi, but people still manage quite well. And they seem to have more fun.

Case Study – Redevelopment of Jaipuria Mills at Kamla Nagar, New Delhi

In an `journal entry I talked about how design in the city should be about coding “machine seeds” that are generated by, inserted into, and modify the urban matrix. One of the projects I worked on while at Ashok B. Lall Architects was the proposed redevelopment of an abandoned industrial site in the heart of Old Delhi. We proposed a design strategy that uses principles typical of the compact city:

PRINCIPLES OF COMPACT CITY DESIGN (from the lecture notes)

First principles of the Compact City

Concentration/Consolidation
Co-Incidence/Connectivity
Contiguity/Containment
Culturally-Appropriate 
Climatically-Adaptive
Complex Grids

Specific principles of the Compact City

Humane-scale
Medium-density/medium-rise   

Nodal-format

Streets are for people
Shared zones & transit-oriented nodes
Grid-adapted mobility-modes

Infill/adaptive-re-use
Multi-functionality/mixed-use/diversity

Note: Please turn Journal 90 degrees clockwise. The inconvenience is regretted.

Conclusion

Where are you going?
Where do you go?
Lyrics from “Where are you going?” by Dave Matthews Band

He doesn’t seem too happy does he?

References

A City Machine, Bhatt A., www.ab-a.com
Arabic – Islamic Cities: Building and Planning Principles, Hakim B., Kegan Paul International 1979
Environmental Planning Unit, Malhotra J., Architecture + Design Jan – Feb 2000
Experiencing Space, Mass and Surface, Biswas S., Architecture + Design Jan – Feb 1998
Fusion of Landscape and Architecture, Kukreja D., Architecture + Design Jan – Feb 2000
Garden Cities 21: Creating a Livable Urban Environment, Simonds J.O., McGraw-Hill Inc. 1994
Planning by Objectives, Patel S., Architecture + Design Jan – Feb 1998
Rainwater Harvesting, Kundoo A., ARCHITECTURE – Time Space & People September 2003
Sustainable Cities for the Twenty-First Century, Jain A.K., Architecture + Design Jan – Feb 2000
Urban Conservation, Cohen N., The MIT Press 1999