Urban Planning Blog

Don’t you get the idea that residents of Lyndoch Road don’t really appreciate all that extra traffic through their neighborhood?

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Ottawa is one of the cleanest and livable cities in the world but an energy and environmental think-tank, Pembina Institute suggests that Ottawa’s peripheral greenbelt is in fact encouraging sprawl and thus longer commutes.

Will the design community respond to the challenge of building the twenty-first century city? Will they rally around the mayor’s plan?

The Metropolis Magazine is asking whether designers and city planners will heed to Mike Bloomberg’s vision of creating a cleaner and greener New York City

co-authored by Rohit Pradhan

Back in the days when Doordarshan (Indian state television) ruled the airwaves, if you tuned in during the weather forecast, you wouldn’t be completely off the mark if you thought that India’s urban regions comprised solely of Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras – conveniently located in four corners of India. It was the natural corollary of India’s development since independence that has always been centered on its millions of villages. The idea of making villages self-sufficient drew its sustenance from the rather utopian Gandhian ideals. India’s early leaders also believed in heavy industrialization which led to development of cities like Jamshedpur–modeled primarily along industrial cities like Detroit in the developed world. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ (in stark contrast to its Chinese counterpart), came only after the post-1991 liberalization when India embarked on a path of economic reforms and globalization. The impact of rapid liberalization and expansion of opportunities were profound especially on the morphology of Indian cities.

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A personal account by Monty C.M Metzger from CScout Trend Consultancy. It is basically a large scale model of the capital city’s layout in preparation for the next year’s summer Olympic games. Not much of a museum.

New Urbanism incorporates neighborhood walkability as one of the pivotal factors in improving quality of life as well as working toward conservancy. Considering that obesity is one of the rising health problems in the United States, walkability measures are also used to promote healthy living. Walkability measures in a neighborhood usually include calculating distances to amenities like schools, grocery stores, parks, libraries, etc. Considering the rise of online mapping services like Google Maps and cross referencing of various locations via innovative mashups, it was only a while before someone came up with a tool to measure the walkability of your neighborhood.

Walk Score is an extremely user-friendly website that lets you measure how walkable is your neighborhood (although the tag line mistakenly mentions how walkable is your house). The website even lists the various benefits of walking; all of which I agree with. All you do is plug in your home address and the website spits out a score between 0 and 100 to measure walkability of your neighborhood; with 0 being completely unfriendly and 100 being extremely friendly. So naturally I put in my home address and got the following result:

As you observe, the tool gave my neighborhood got a score of 54 which is not bad considering I live in a Texan town where everyone loves their cars especially if it is a pickup. Most of the amenities listed are within a mile [a one-mile walk is considered as a standard].

However, I must mention that I live in a relatively amenity-friendly neighborhood and the location was one of the primary factors in choosing this residence. At the same time, if you actually live in their neighborhood, walking to the grocery store isn’t as easy as it sounds even when the measured distance is 0.29 miles. Why? Lack of sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly crosswalks spanning major roads. If you have to go to HEB Grocery, the store mentioned on the map, you have to cross Texas Avenue which has been perennially under construction ever since I got to College Station. Moreover, due to the construction mess, you simply cannot dream of crossing over to the other side without your heart pounding in fear of being run over. This actually is quite a big deterrent to walking to nearby amenities even if you want to. Thus proximity isn’t the only factor in measuring walkability and urban features that actually promote such behavior are important as well.

Proximity to the Wolf Pen Creek park however has made the city of College Station build sidewalks on the way to the park but these are purely meant for exercise or recreational purposes. I would like the city to put in sidewalks not only for recreational purposes but also to facilitate walking to the stores. Like they say, build and they’ll come actually makes perfect sense in creating a walkable community. If you do not have sidewalks, how can you expect people to walk even if the distance is not much?

At any given time, there are many quality lectures going around on university campuses across the nation. But grad school life is such that you scarcely get time to get done with your classes, assignments, and research and generally miss out on being exposed to great work right on your campus. I try to get around to attending the lectures at our own College of Architecture and the George Bush Presidential Library’s Distinguished Lecture series but have lately been unable to do so (after my classes, I keep telling myself.) Most of the time, the problem is time clashes or the hassle of getting to the venue.

But now, thanks to innovative technologies like podcasts and webcasts, such lectures can be made available to a larger audience. “Podcasts of presentations from Virginia Tech’s New Metropolis Lecture Series are now available, free of charge, from iTunes. Sponsored by the University’s Urban Affairs and Planning program in Alexandria, Va., the lectures focus on cutting-edge topics and ideas about metropolitan development in the United States and abroad. Featured speakers have a broad regional, national and international reputation in scholarship, research, and policy” [via email from Shannon.]

The schedule for lectures at Virginia Tech is available here and the podcasts are available a day after the lecture. Although most lectures were held last year, the podcasts I believe are available now. Upcoming lectures include:

March 28, 2007
The New Revolution: Form-based Codes
Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism; Toward an Architecture of Community

April 25, 2007
The Status and Future of Public Transportation in the U.S.
William Millar, President of the American Public Transportation Association.

I love Peter Katz’s work and always wanted to sit in on his lecture. Well, now I can, from the comfort of my home on a lazy weekend. I hope other schools jump on this bandwagon and offer a podcast version of their lecture series.

[tags]podcast, Urban Planning, lecture, series, university, planning, Virginia Tech[/tags]

Any Mumbaikar would be proud of the flyovers and bridges built in recent times and use them as an indicator of urban development. It isn’t long before comparisons with Shanghai start taking root. Only after you scratch beneath the surface, you realize the hollowness of the argument and claims. The recent upswing in economic fortunes of the city and also rest of the country have opened the doors to the usual forms of materialistic pleasures, one of which is your own vehicle. In a city with standing room only, the desire to buy your own car as soon as the cash starts flowing in is not diminished in anyway. Realistically you wouldn’t need a car to get around in Mumbai but then when has practical reason and utility dictated the things we choose to buy.

You would assume that after buying a car, you in addition to having a road to drive your car would also have space to park it wherever you go, right? The statistics tell you otherwise:

There are over 15 lakh cars on Mumbai’s roads, but common parking space
for only — hold your breath — 8,000, thanks to the 100-odd pay-and-park
areas across the city. The city’s vehicular density is 591 vehicles per
square metre, compared to 163 in New Delhi and the international
average vehicular density of 300 [source].

Finding a parking spot in Mumbai, if you have driven there, can be an uphill battle and takes longer than it takes you to drive anywhere.

As environmental activists have pointed out, only 9 per cent of the 14
million people in the city use cars and two-wheelers, but over
Rs10,000 crore will be spent over the next few years on road projects [source: as above].

So if you have no space to park, wouldn’t it make sense to invest in mass transit systems instead of investing in infrastructure that only seeks to encourage private vehicle ownership. Being a democratic country, you cannot dictate what people ought not to buy but you can certainly influence public choice by emphasizing or deemphasizing certain sectors of urban development. Congestion Pricing [PDF link] would just one such tool.

Technorati Tags: transportation, parking, Mumbai, India, congestion pricing, urban development