The Urban Failure
The journey of a Homo
Sapiens, from being a nomad to being the inventor of the so-called God
particle, it has slowly shifted the emphasis of biological evolution towards
the socio-cultural evolution. In spite of the inventions, he has made for
his own convenience, turned down back on him. It wasn’t the inventions that
failed, but he himself failed to incorporate them in their way of living. With
the concepts of the likes of Industrial Revolution and Globalisation, cities
began to emerge vastly with humans tend to get indulged in traffic congestion,
urban sprawl, air pollution, a lack of easily accessible shops &
services, noise pollution and a host of other daily inconveniences. Very often,
these problems are the resultant of bad planning exercise.In Europe, eight out of the
ten European Union citizens live in cities or large towns and the major part is
dealing with the consequences of poor planning. From the past records, urban
planners do get involved in ‘trial and error’ approach, but they generously
failed to have a long-term approach and doesn’t understood the concept of
‘Forward Planning’. The resultant of which made the cities dysfunctional
creating social & environmental problems which for sure does have their
economic cost.
In a city like Delhi, the
national capital of the Republic of India, where every individual thinks for a
better standard of living, the concentration on the quality of life
seemed to have get vanished, which will create situations of havoc in the years
to come. Choked roads, overburdened public transport systems, poorly serviced
neighbourhood can be commonly seem making the life of the inhabitants
unbearable. For a modern town or city to function properly in a way that they
survives, prospers and grows, the strategic decisions that have to be taken are
incredibly complex. It is clear that things will not get better unless all the
different fields of interests, begins to work together. The lack of consideration
of wider impacts of the socio-environ-cultural in the urban planning has
resulted today’s urban problems which needs to get cater off soon. Unfortunately,
many urban planners concentrate just on the planning of land use in isolation
from the other sectors, and they do not get much involved in infrastructure
planning.
The problem of traffic
congestion is quite common in nearly every urban settlements. The most common
approach would be to widen the roads, which may or may be successful if one keeps
in mind the long-term issue. The cross-sectoral approach would be to identify
the real problem for traffic congestion, which is in fact due to an
overcrowding of a neighbourhood. The approach of starting from the diagnosis
part really helps the issue if looked through a wider aspect. This can only be
achieved if urban planning gives itself a multi-disciplinary approach which
will look into the environmental issues, economics, sociology, cultural
patterns, demographics, anthropometry, studying the history of the various
human settlements, to name a few.
Human settlements dates
back and it has evolved not granted by the nature. The study of human
settlements gives the whole concept a wider look. The mention of the father of
Ekistics C.A. Doxiadis needs to be mentioned here as his approach may be the
need of the time now. He formulated the inter-relation of various aspects
which are gradually responsible for the proper functioning of an urban
settlement. It covers various human aspects of living, how they penetrate and
what’s their natural phenomenon of behaviour. The ever increasing population
growth can’t be handled in a magic of the ‘Dr. Jackals world’ , but it
will involve a different number of things which will take a handsome amount of
time. We have to accommodate every birth given by a mother on a limited amount
of space that our nature has provided us. Hence, we have to understand the
nature’s call and than behave accordingly.
The question which arrives are - Do we really need a shift from Urban Planning to some other
concentration, may it be like what Doxiadis name to it as ‘Ekistics’ ?
This question plays a very important role in the future human development of
the entire global society. Or, Can we merge the two of them together to
formulate a new approach ? Or, Urban Planning itself needs some within changes
and it’ll work efficiently than ? Whatever the case may be, it has to be studied and given a serious
concentration to save the humanity from forcing them to live a miserable and
unbearable life. We, humans, have always been in a developmental phase, and a lot can
be improved in the further developments. I carry a strong feeling about humans,
that they had always learnt from their mistakes, and so they will do it
in this case as well. We, human beings are the most advanced species of the
nature and will surely understand the key prospect in the title ‘Failure of the
Urban Planning’ and develop a new holistic approach which urban planning for
years(in most of the cases) have failed to achieve so. The humans gave emphasis
on the economic growth in the last century or so, which has overall made them
way behind of our ancestral fathers. The tagline is – the nature comes the very
first of all the developments, followed by the society and then comes the
economic factor.
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