Comments on: Designer Cities

By: How to Make Trends » Givvup Only Are There

How to Make Trends » Givvup Only Are There — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:20:58 +0000

[...] basically this is a reason to support Atanu Dey’s plan for 600 new mid-sized designer-cities in India. It will give us cities that strike a happy balance between being urban enough to generate [...]

By: sheetal

sheetal — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:45:42 +0000

But how will these cities come up? Surely, it will involve some large scale displacement and considering the resistance to these things that we are now witnessing so frequently ( Nandigram etc.), how will weak-willed, populist governments go about it?

By: dhruv

dhruv — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:01:34 +0000

Hey that was nice!
Sounded like most of the cities i used to design while playing SimCity 3000…great game by the way?
Maybe our “planners” oughta be playing more of SimCity eh?

By: Arvind Ashok

Arvind Ashok — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 03:41:12 +0000

But you dont have to please me with your answers. Problem comes if and when you try to apply your schemes, without proper analysis and a wider lens and collaboration. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there are countless recent examples of projects, especially in ICT, which demonstrate pushing one’s idea rather than designing a good scheme/plan. And yours will be no different. And that is not a big deal in itself. But it will adversely affect the lives of people you are trying to “help”. Trying to help is a poor idea, helping is a much better one.

By: Abhijit

Abhijit — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:14:49 +0000

Interesting idea, that looks good, almost dreamishly good, on paper.

What I would like to know is, how exactly do you intend to bring in the people to live in these deesigner cities.

700m people in 600k (tiny) villages may look good as a statistic, but is rather decieving. A village is not just a population outpost, it has it’s own social structure. Not everyone is equally poor. Not all farmers are marginal. In the average indian village you are bound to come across multiple rich families owning acres of land. Will these people give up their farmhouses and bungalows ? Are they included in your vision for DeCis ? Assuming that they are, will they be supportive of such development projects ? I think not.
Assuming that they are not, then are the inhabitants of DeCis going to be only the poor and the unskilled ?

One thing you do not mention is the governance of these cities. Because this is only the second post of the series, I hope you will address the issue in future.

By: Arvind Ashok

Arvind Ashok — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:34:57 +0000

I have read 2-3 articles of yours, and all of them seem to be painfully narrow-minded. of course, a city is the most efficient structure we can live in, while villages etc are not.
but there are things that cannot be quantified or moved, when you remove a village. i commented similarly on your RISC idea, but failed to receive a response.

there are other things than economics and money in play in this world. what we need is people who can view the problems with a variety of lenses, not just one or two.

also, I read a paper on transportation that talked about traffic congestion in the US. And they said wide roads were a problem. narrow roads, not in freeways but in residential areas and the like, move traffic faster, and smoothly.

Atanu’s response: I try to answer all responses. If I have not answered a point, it is not because I don’t intend to answer. It just takes me longer to do than others. I am very very slow.

Now about my painful narrow-mindedness. Yes, I agree, I am narrow-minded and to some most painfully so. But as Shakespeare so succinctly put it, “I am not obliged to please thee with my answers.” (or something to that effect.)

By: Satya

Satya — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:44:59 +0000

Sabeer Bhatia is apparently working with the Haryana Government on putting up something like a “designer city” in Haryana on farmland (see http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/globalspeaker_bhatia.shtml)

By: shiv

shiv — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 07:10:46 +0000

The problem with this vision is that it is distributed in form and function. While this is great, it will never get the support of the netas and the babus. Simply put the current business model of the ruling class does not want and will not allow de-centralization of any utility. The simple reason for this is that centralized control of critical resources is the basis of the model. Atanu’s model will lead to the role of the city state superceading that of the nation state. Different containers and different mindsets….

By: Patrix

Patrix — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:39:12 +0000

Atanu, I'm sure you are aware of this but the above vision was first seen by Le Corbusier (Ville Contemporaine.)Of course, his 'machine' cities don't agree with our humanist traditions of city building or rather city formation.

By: AG

AG — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:07:22 +0000

Atanu

Very interesting vision.
No doubts that the future of India is resolutely urban.

The core problem here is — who will make these cities happen?
Or to put a finer point, what sort of organisation can we reliably task with making and running such a city?

CErtainly not the Indian governmental machinery — which is incapable of *running* and *maintaining* even existing existing cities (all indian cities have bad roads, no power, no water, no greenery).
The machinery just does not have the vision, intellectual capital, guts or plain and simple capability to get this done.

On the other hand, the private sector can.
What do we have to do to make cities that everyday people can live in while providing a reasonable ROI to the developer?

By: Pavan

Pavan — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:47:40 +0000

Mr. Dey,

I have been a reader of your blog for some time now and while I have had my disagreements, I must say that your perspectives on education and social-engineering are spot on.
I hope to hear more about what you have to say on the subject because it is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. Having recently moved from Chicago to Tampa Bay I have to say that the high-density, mixed-use development of Chicago made my life so much better. Chicago is not the best planned city ever, but the streets were on a grid that made it easy to get from place to place and the developments were mixed use, with residential and commercial plots scatterred within walking distance of each other. I never needed a car in the 4 years I was there because of the availability of commuter rail and I was SO happy.
Tampa is a vast, sprawling mess of cul-de-sacs, single use neighborhoods, and a city planning scheme that makes walking an impossibility. To make matters even more ridiculous, the planners of Tampa never bothered to plant many large shady trees or overhanging structures to provide shade like they did in Chicago. How a city in Florida failed to account for oppressive heat while a city in Illinois did baffles the mind. To make no mention of the horrendous traffic one has to deal with to do the most basic things like grocery shopping.
Sensible urban development and infill is just such a common sense thing that I am baffled it has not caught on.
Yet it seems people in general are too enamoured of the big house with a big yard and no evidence of poverty (within eyeshot), to worry about how much time, money, and health their commutes and lifestyles are costing them. Americans are a funny lot. I recently read an article about parents in most American suburbs refusing to allow their children to walk to school for fear of mysterious paedophiles kidnapping them. None of them bothered to think about the statistically much more significant danger their children are in from the mobs of inattentive drivers congesting the streets.