My tryst with planning has always been about focusing on centering people within developmental processes. However, while on an educational adventure abroad, I couldn't help but notice different orientations to people-centrism.
Sometime during September 2014, during a fieldwork for a site planning studio, I had stumbled across a minor locality disconnected from the informal settlement it was located in.
On further probing, I was told that the mini locality was where, the transgender community of the city lived and I was specifically advised both by my team mates and the people who lived there, not to wander into it.
The unwanted advice naturally spiked my curiosity and I walked in, only to observe and listen to the precarious conditions they lived in. I, then a second year B. Plan student vowed to myself to do something, to change the way they lived and were perceived, but I also had a multitude of queries running in my head since the inception of that very field work.
Questions that I was determined to ask my professor that evening starting with a very basic one:
“Who are we planning for, ma’am?”
A one-word answer: people!, was then followed by one the most invigorating conversations I have ever had. Everything that we had discussed from then on, automatically reverted back to the same question.
Soon after my graduation from SPA Vijayawada and then NTNU Norway to now, working as an urban planning professional, I realize that, the question that I termed to be basic based on one simple fieldwork is actually one of the most important questions that we as planners continue to fail to ask ourselves.
And the result, as I see it, is the disproportionate impact the pandemic is having on us and our cities.
While there is much to elaborate on the effect of the pandemic on humankind, one of the most significant outcomes is an increased focus of urban professionals on what they term to be ‘Post-Pandemic City Planning’.
However, in a bid to instill physical distancing components into a ‘new normal’ to fight future pandemics, our urban professionals are overlooking the impact of ‘quotidian neglect’ and ‘economic growth’ oriented development has had and will continue to have, on people and the urban fabric irrespective of the pandemic.
For instance, a disregard to the ‘originality and historicity of spaces and its integration with the local people’ was noticed in Patna, where the iconic ‘Gole Market’, one of the first ever planned municipal markets in the city was recently demolished to make way for a seven-storeyed commercial complex.
With the current urban development scene plaguing the question of the future, I argue, that the key to solving the negative impacts of our past and present developmental discourses would necessitate a paradigm shift where contextuality and people-centrism should be prioritized in order to address the uncertainty the future presents.
People-centrism here refers to a process where people are treated as the end recipients and are put at the centre of planning processes.
Planning is inherently futuristic and growth oriented, but a prosperous future cannot exist without its people. While I was on an educational adventure abroad, I couldn’t help but notice three different orientations to people-centrism in urban planning in three different countries.
One treats it as a problem, the other as a right and another, as a resource. Confused?
Let me take an example closer to home to simplify things.
I noticed the first orientation while I was doing my bachelors. I remember going on a field study to Vambay colony that was developed under Valmiki Ambedkar Malli Basti Awas Yojana (VAMBAY) in Vijayawada. People from three slum clusters from within the city centre were relocated to Vambay, a place located about 15 kms away from the city.
While the official personnel and the media hailed the relocation project a success, what they deliberately avoided taking into account, was the impact of the entire project on the people and their livelihoods. Turns out, after almost half a decade of its construction, it is now termed to be a notified slum.
It was in Romania, that I noticed the second orientation. We were working on revitalising Sfistofca, a heritage village located further into the Danube delta that had all of 60 people living in its premises.
The village had a severe case of depopulation due to lack of infrastructure and economic activities, but with a change in the political scenario, they were expecting to see enormous transformation in the upcoming years.
The local development authorities and academic institutions, worked on empowering and involving the people in the planning processes where the local community decided on the path of development and helped them in charting out a plan of action for implementation.
The third orientation was noticed on a short personal trip of mine to Røros, a mining village and a UNESCO world heritage site in Norway.
With a decline in mining activities in the late 1970s, heritage discourse in the historic setting of Røros was adapted to accommodate the everyday life of the communities living in the town, integrating culture and heritage with people oriented urban developmental discourses.
Do the last two dispositions seem concurrent to each other? Where the second one ends is where the third one actually begins.
Local developmental authorities in Sfistofca put people in the centre and as the only end-recipients throughout the planning processes, while the local developmental authorities in Røros, not just exercised the people’s right to have their interests centred around planning activities but utilized the resources available at the citizens' end to enhance a commonly shared identity.
The last two orientations look a little too ideal, don’t they?
Could they possibly be workable in India?
This brings me to two additional questions I posed to my professor, that I previously omitted, “why do we not plan for people? and what is it going to take for us to start?”
Serious planning mumbo jumbo ahead!
Since its inception, planning practice in India, has been implementing bricolaged strategies to create contemporary societies based on global urban trends.
Subsequently, this conventional practice of creating contemporary societies began to alienate not just the professionals but the budding planners as well, from the society they live in, in at least four important and complexly interconnected ways.
Firstly, the planning pedagogy favors a spatial, land-use oriented development of contemporary societies with a specific requirement of services different from the one that we live in. Thus, directly negating the existence of current socio-economic, physical and cultural characteristics and relevance of the society, only to validate that which is being taught.
Secondly, as a result, planning practice tends to adopt a universal approach to solving problems, essentially generalizing them in order to achieve certain benchmarks set by the global trends.
Thirdly, stakeholders involved in urban development, inspired by these global trends, draft policies, plans and actions that deal with the spatiality or physicality of spaces devoid the habitat in which they exist or have evolved in, directly catering to a certain sect of the society at large, illustrating Habermas’s (1974) notion of ‘public’ in action.
Finally, as a culmination of all of the above, we see India, as it is today: socially, economically and culturally interconnected with the world in ways beyond comprehension, where the global market is seen arbitrating urban development and thus, indirectly effecting the welfare of the local and materializing into what Paulo Freire calls to be ‘assistentialism’ (1970).
One of the major questions that I think is quite relevant to the professionals in the urban arena is:
if, it is time, we drafted policies, plans and actions that are oriented towards social, physical and economic inclusion of every cadre of the society that we live in?
To actually look inwards for context-specific and people-centric urban solutions, that emphasize the importance of the local or look outwards and keep embracing the global trends of development that we have been following for over half a century now?
Bringing the focus back to the local and their context would surely involve more than just a change in pedagogy but with the current political scenario of the country disposed towards being ‘vocal for local’, it is crucial and implementable now more than ever to comprehending the local, their context, complexities and future aspirations for a SMART, inclusive, sustainable and an all-encompassing urban development.
References:
FREIRE, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 65-80.
HABERMAS, J., LENNOX, S., & LENNOX, F. 1974. The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964). New German Critique (3), 49-55.
Further Readings:
FREIRE, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 65-80.
HABERMAS, J., LENNOX, S., & LENNOX, F. 1974. The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964). New German Critique (3), 49-55.
LEFEBVRE, H. & NICHOLSON-SMITH, D. 1991. The production of space, Oxford Blackwell.
SOJA, E. 1994. W., 1996: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Varsha is an Urban Planner by profession and a bookworm by choice. She is a scrupulous individual who is quite passionate about comprehending and deciphering the nexus of space politics, policies and people-centrism in neoliberal regimes. When she's not being a bookworm, Varsha enjoys sketching, experimenting with Hyderabadi cuisine and exploring life and what it has to offer through travel.
You can write to her at saivarshaakavarapu@gmail.com for further info.