Forget FSI, go for UDI (Urban Design Index), urges urban design expert from Chicago
Mr.Mahender Vasanandani
There is too much focus in this city on FSI, everybody wants more but nobody thinks of what to give back to the community. If a system like UDI (Urban Design Index) is adopted, the focus on FSI will be diffused. FSI will still be a part of the matrix to get plans approved, but there will be a simultaneous emphasis on the UDI.
This claim was made at the last meeting by Mr. Mahender Vasandani, Director of M Square, who practices urban design in Chicago and has been coming to India for some years to look at the reconstruction, redevelopment and reformation of various cities, especially Bombay. He has been in touch with several leaders in an effort to improve the living conditions here.
Mr. Vasandani said although he was interested in urban planning, he was even more passionate about urban design. A lot of urban planning was being done in India through government programmes such as the JNNURM. Municipalities were being allocated funds to undertake comprehensive planning and told to go for proper infrastructure planning.
But for a city like Bombay, which was ?”already built out”?, it was necessary to go to the next level and to go beyond urban planning to urban design. Urban design basically focused on the quality of the built environment. Based on the experience of other cities in the world, his hypothesis was that Bombay could improve its urban liveability through urban design.
He had been meeting many civic groups as well as some government leaders about the need to undertake an urban design plan for Bombay, its different parts, or wards, and to then build upon the suggested Urban Design Index (UDI) system. One of the benefits of this would be a certain diffusion of the needless overemphasis on the FSI system. ?”Everybody wants more FSI but nobody wants to think of what to give back to the community.”
Mr. Vasandani, who was speaking on ?”Improving Mumbai through Urban Design”?, was introduced by Moy Biswas, his classmate at Kharagpur, and made an attempt to explain how good urban design would improve the quality of life or liveability in Bombay.
It was a fact, he said, that 50 to 60% of the city?’s population lived in the informal housing sector. Most people also knew their history and the reasons
why this sector came up. But with such vast amounts of land being covered by the informal housing sector, the point to ponder was whether such a growth pattern was sustainable for the future.
Other factors to be noted were that the livelihoods of the people residing in them were compromised by poor hygienic conditions and that most such projects came up in environmentally sensitive areas. But beyond that was the question of whether this was the right, sustainable urban solution for the city of Bombay.
On the outskirts of Bombay a large number of ?”single use townships”? were being built. These were suburban enclaves of good housing communities but essentially of single use. It was necessary, in his opinion, to move away from such an approach.
Although the focus was on FSI and good architecture and the stress on building a good skyline, his contention was that good skylines did not make for good cities. It was far more necessary to look at the basic infrastructure,said Mr. Vasandani.
Already, there was an infrastructure overload, whether one lived in Bombay, Delhi or any other city. Traffic jams were the order of the day and it appeared as though ?”dividends”? (such as motorable roads) were being provided even before the capacity was built up. But this was not unique to India and happened in many countries all over the world.
At the same time, Bombay?’s train system was becoming highly antiquated and overloaded. The railways even had a unique term for this, viz., ?”super
dense crush load”?. Given the increasing congestion on the roads, people had increasingly started using buses.
While praising the city planners for proposing a variety of transport systems such as the Metro, the Monorail, the sea-based transport system from Borivli to Nariman Point and so on, Mr. Vasandani added a caveat.
?”The issue is that all the solutions which are being built today will essentially address yesterday’?s problems, or at the most today’?s problems. Growth projections made by McKenzie in 2007 showed that Bombay will grow, as will the surrounding communities like Pune and Ahmedabad; in fact, the entire country will be urbanised
?”But if the population increases, what do we do with the car ownership? Some estimates indicate that car ownership in India is only 15 per 1,000 people at present; however, projections based on the economic conditions of the people showed that by 2030 there will be almost a seven-fold increase in car ownership.
?”Even if the increase is four to five times, then, given the limited infrastructure capacity of today, you can imagine what?’s going to happen in the future…
So we have to think differently, we have to think of new urban patterns for Bombay, both at the urban core and at the urban edges”.?
“?Let us at least make an attempt to follow Vancouver, one of the best designed cities of the world?”
For the urban core, Mr. Vasandani proposed the creation of areas of systematic urban transformation through the adoption of a strategic urban design plan which would identify the needed public improvements. Based on that would be devised a UDI system aimed at creating high quality urban liveability.
As for the urban edges or outskirts, in order to reduce the impact on the infrastructure, it was necessary to create systems under which people would be able to walk to work. Mixed or integrated uses were fine, what with
schools and hospitals, but there was no alternative to creating facilities for people to walk to work.
To explain his idea of good urban design, he gave the example of Vancouver which he called ?”one of the most well designed cities of the world?.” He was not suggesting that Bombay could become like Vancouver over the next 20, 30 or even 50 years, but it would help to learn from different approaches.
?”As long as a city like Bombay is aspirational about improving the urban liveability, the best example we can learn from is that of Vancouver. There
the emphasis on urban liveability is not just to focus on good architecture but on how to improve the public realm, the public environment and how to improve the quality of life of the people living there”.?
One of the key differentiators of that city was the manner in which a building interfaced with a street. A lot of thought had gone into creating such a high design alternative. This had not just involved creating good buildings, not just good living for the people who resided in them, but also improving the ambient public environment.
In the case of Vancouver what had been designed (and achieved) through a triple layer of landscape buffer between the housing and the street was to make the housing more private and to make the street more secure.
The classic book ?”The Death and Life of Great American Cities”? by Jane Jacobs talked about ?”eyes on the street”?. She wrote that if there were eyes on the street ? the eyes of people living in their homes or in apartments on the street and who retained their privacy despite this ? then the entire urban neighbourhood benefited from an improved sense of security.
Mr. Vasandani claimed that in the case of Vancouver it had also been able to include affordable housing, or non-market housing, which was not very visible from the street.
Apart from this, Vancouver had been able to achieve ?”walkablity”? between different blocks. Thanks to the quality of the public environment which was
the result of a direct and cautious approach to create a mid-block pedestrian walking system, it had been able to improve connectivity from one block to another. This was a key aspect of any city.
Another important point to note was that these achievements were not the result of individual developers enhancing the city, but part of an urban design plan. This design plan was prepared by the Vancouver city department of urban design and planning ? not planning and urban design ? because the city had realised that urban design had to be given greater weightage.
The bottom line was that Vancouver had transformed itself so successfully that it had reversed the problem of the typical American city. In most American cities there was an out-migration from the centre of the city after offices were closed and they became dormant holes. The suburbs were alive, the cities were not. Vancouver had made living in the city so popular that now it had more people living in the city than there were jobs.
In the Western world there was a new term called ?”Vancouver-ism?;” everybody wanted to be like Vancouver and everyone was trying to adopt urban planning based upon the Vancouver model. Several magazines had called Vancouver one of the top liveable cities in the world for the last ten years.
There were other reasons, too, such as good hospitals, universities, colleges, libraries, public transport system and so on, but everything was tied together at the sinews; the city?s networks were based upon the urban design scheme that he had described.
Mr. Vasandani said that well thought- out urban design schemes would also benefit developers and real estate companies that had been struggling to market their projects in the challenging American economic environment of the last four to five years.
Even the Harvard Business School programme for senior executives was focusing on the value of urban design, on what could sell in the market place and the value of making places.
A study by a London-based organisation, published in 2001 and based on empirical analysis, had found that good urban design also delivered high levels of profit for owners and investors. Area regeneration, based on good urban design, delivered economic dividends to society as a whole over a long period of time.
?”Good urban design, based on the COBE analysis, enhances, through social inclusiveness, a sense of safety and a sense of city pride, which we all need to have for the city that we live in.”?
Returning to specific approaches for the city of Bombay, Mr. Vasandani said
that within the urban core the critical part was the preparation of strategic
urban design plans and, based upon those, the proposed Urban Design Index system. As for the urban edges, to differentiate new projects from the current ones, there was the ?walk to work? idea and the idea of integrated diversity.
?”The focus on FSI and on creating great skylines by employing world-class architects is great; I love good architecture, I love iconic buildings; but iconic buildings alone, good skylines alone, do not make good cities, do not improve urban liveability.”?
It was for this reason that he was emphasising the need for preparing strategic urban design plans which would be based on thorough analysis of the living conditions, whether in different wards, or block by block, as in the case of Vancouver, and then making detailed recommendations as part of the urban design plan to cohesively identify the needed improvements in a given area.
Sadly, all FSI applications here were basically spot applications. No one looked at how an urban area could be improved, what were the deficiencies and how the liveability of a given area could be improved.
Mr. Vasandani claimed that he had put forth his proposals in 2011 and had been in discussions for almost two years now. But he was hopeful of signing a contract very soon, before he returned to the USA in June.
Speaking again of the UDI, he said that for any given area, once certain
urban improvements to be privatised were identified, they could be put on a scale (it could be turned into a software), so that any time a developer came looking for more FSI, for every incremental FSI he would be required to do more additional improvements.
?”So the more UDI points he accrues, the more FSI he can get; this is a simple and straightforward approach. But the idea behind it is to give back something to the community even as high-rise buildings are being built.
?”We understand that the issue of FSI is very complex, especially in the case of Bombay which is very dense; a lot of people argue that just increasing the FSI may not be the right answer, and that may indeed be the case.
?”But we need to assess what?’s the capacity for a given area to adopt or
accept more FSI ? and to understand that by going from block to block, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, ward to ward ? and then, based upon
that, to create a UDI system”.?
When he discussed this with the powers-that-be in August, Mr. Vasandani said, the idea was that it would be applied across the board; the UDI system would then be analysed by the municipal corporation because it had the remit to apply the limits of FSI.
One of the most important issues was that of affordable housing in each and every block in the overall township plan; there would then be opportunities to create an affordable housing community; not just housing, but a whole community.
?”The idea, as Mr. Narayanamurthy said, is that India can move forward with the concept of compassionate capitalism, to the extent that if some people are so inclined, they could use this as a good CSR and make the project
more successful,?” Mr. Vasandani added.