One perspective about the desired transformation of the cityscape in post Covid era.
Thank you. Better to greet you first as you have chosen to read this ‘monologue’ and you may leave the page even much before reaching to its last line. A disease ‘invaded’ our so called civilization, mostly the cities, and now, it seems obvious phenomenon, that it may continue with our present bio-diversity until we succeed to identify ‘Mr. Ronald Ross part II’ again in near future. Yes, I guess, you may casually assume that I am heading towards an intellectual discussion on Covid-19. Trust me; my concern is not biological, not economical and not even political. There might be other concerns too and which is profoundly in relation with our daily life; no matter you realize it or not. It was certainly a funny narrative very commonly screening across the social media. I cross checked the calculations and found it surprisingly correct. Yes, even if the administration starts giving the right vaccine to 1 million people per day, it would take 3 years 10 months to vaccinate the last person of the country (of course after the invention of the vaccine by some genius medical researcher friend of us and also there has to be right industrial technology in the country to produce 1 million samples of vaccine per day). Therefore, without any controversy, we can assume, it would take some years to be feel safe again and probably the situation during A.C. (after Corona) might not be the same as it was in the time of B.C. (before Corona). The change in society is imminent and I thought, after lazily sitting more than 50 days at my residence occupied only with house chores, why not to raise my hand and convey little concerns of mine which might be helpful to somebody in future.
Let me ask you a simple question. What is a city and how you would categorize something else as a ‘non-city’? No, we won’t concentrate on the usual definition of a ‘city’ which is dependent on varying statistical data. You can’t really define the scale of ‘largeness’ of the human settlements which are to be described as cities. A city is very difficult to be defined with its number of populations, density of populations, the occupational patterns or political boundaries as these all are ever changing in irregular intervals depending upon uncertain circumstances and incidents. There are numerous examples where a ‘census town’ defined in our census report is actually a ‘Gram-Panchayet’ in lieu of administrative jurisdictions and available infrastructures. I used to live in such a so-called ‘census town’ which is governed and widely known as a ‘gram-panchayet’ area. Almost a decade ago, I was taught the city to be the ‘biggest creation of man’ and till date, I never found a better alternative definition to describe it. A village or agglomeration of rural settlements is also human creations but not the ‘biggest’. But, we all have some general perception in our minds what is a city and what is ‘non- city’ irrespective of our knowledge about the formal definition of ‘a city’. If you drive a car or sit beside the window of a bus while travelling from Kolkata to Asansol by the smooth national highway prepared by our government, I am sure, you need not to be a high intellectual to realize, where the city boundary merges with rural settlements and where it again starts. What makes you to feel that? Well, that is called ‘Urban Morphology’.
Yes, you rightfully frowned as you reread the last two words. ‘Morphology’ is a usual word of biological dictionary, and apparently has rare connection with development of cities. But, there are some rare ‘stupid’ who believe the city, with its ideal functional behaviour acts very similar to a biological system. Definitely it can’t move, but, there are young cities, lively cities, old cities or even examples of dead cities. It grows from ‘infancy’ to gain maturity with time and if the ‘brain’, ‘cells’, ‘blood corpuscles’, ‘arterial circulation’ systems work perfectly fine along with other organs, one day, it becomes a star or a ‘Metro’. Of course, you can assume the residences or houses we live in as the ‘cells’ which are the smallest component of the structure of a city. And, you are a small ‘blood corpuscle’. What if one day the ‘brain’ forbids you to come out of your ‘cell’ to use the regular ‘arterial circulation system’ to collect the necessary ‘oxygen’ or ‘nutrients’ required for keeping the cell alive as some other blood corpuscles are severely affected by a virus somewhere in some other part of the body, and it may harm you as well if you get in touch with the affected corpuscles by coming out of your cell or using the common arterial system. So, the ‘brain’ has declared it as emergency; the ‘heart’ has stopped all the movements through ‘arterial circulation systems’ and of course, the other ‘organs’ are closed and not producing any ‘enzymes’ or ‘hormones’. Imagine, what would happen to your body in such catastrophic circumstance. The same might happen to our cities too if the similar situation continues for a long time repeating itself until, we, as creators or controllers of the system modify the structure and plan alternatives for the future.
Yes, I am also thinking in the similar line as you. This piece may lose importance if a vaccine is soon developed. But what if, it does not happen and we may need to start rotating the wheel once again in negotiation with the existing immense biological threat to our society? Yes, we might need to ‘negotiate’ with something which we can’t see, and thus negotiation would only be possible by bringing appropriate changes which we can see. The film is rolling towards that hard part where Mr. Corona and Mr. Homo Sapien need to co-exist at least for next couple of decades.
There are wide spread advertisements of the future provisions of sanitizers and thermal screenings in public places (especially in airports or train stations). The question rises, ‘are those sufficient enough to fight against the deadly viruses? The simple answer is ‘No’, they are not. As if, we were having excellent community facilities, clean toilets, disinfected drinking water systems, clean pedestrian facilities in our rail stations, bus terminals, government offices, hospitals and community centres. And if you trust Mr. Google Bhaiya, we touch our face not less than 23 times an hour and touch our mobile phones 2617 times a day combined consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, few packets of hand sanitizers at some remote corners are simply not the solution to a congested rail station in Indian context where 1.2 to 1.5 million footfalls are quite regular. If my math is correct, 125 security gates (assuming 10 passengers per minute per gate) are required to be fully functional all 16 hours of a day constantly to do thermal screening test if you need to check 1.2 million regular passengers coming to Howrah station each day. And if there is one single mistake of technology or one human error/ negligence out of 1.2 million cases a day, there will be a chance that hundreds and thousands of people will get affected in a single day from a single rail station. Do you think automatic sanitizers and thermal screening gates are ultimate rational solution of the situation? At least, I am not convinced.
Why the most urbanized and developed areas are severely affected by Covid19? What made the rural areas not so lucrative for Mr. Corona to spread his family? How many discussions and debates you noticed on media or social media on this topic? Probably, both me and you know which are the most affected cities or states in the country at this moment. Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Howrah as cities and definitely Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu as states would come first in the list. Even if you closely observe the state we live in, Kolkata and Howrah as individual cities and Howrah, Purba Medinipur, North 24 Pargana as districts are the most common names in the discussions now a days. Actually, these names are irrelevant and if your think in rational way, ‘Density’ is the indicative parameter where Mr. Corona gets appropriate ambience to spread in full swing. Density of Urbanization followed by Density of Population makes it worse. Some ‘blood corpuscles’ of the body are poisoned permanently and due to high density of cells in that affected area, the blood corpuscles are spreading rapidly in high frequency throughout your body damaging the ‘cells’ in other parts as well. What would you do minimize the threat? Of course, sensible decision would be to control the high frequency of arterial flow immediately restricting further spread of the poison. Definitely the ‘social dialysis’ by marking containment zones, identifying and keeping the infected corpuscles in quarantine for further treatment for a limited time period will be the next step. Would that really cure the entire structure as a whole for a long term purpose? ‘Social dialysis’ is not a regular and permanent solution for 1.35 billion ‘blood corpuscles’ mapped into a complex structure. Neither it’s feasible to account for every movement of each corpuscle on regular basis. A significant Morphological Change in our cities is the inevitable saviour.
Our cities, like any common biological being have majorly two sections. First one is the ‘Private place’ or the ‘Cells’ where you along with your family live or rest. The visibility or access to these areas is always restricted. It’s always easier to keep your private places or houses hygienic if you follow some common suggestions and recommendations made by hundreds of medical agencies, published in journals and so on. But the other major part of our cities called the ‘Public place’ where you need to go regularly for collecting your desired ‘oxygen’ or ‘nutrients’ needs deeper management. Public places bring/ generate oxygen, food, water, energy to our bodies and helps us to communicate with others. Your ‘cells’ cannot survive for long without collecting such nutrients, oxygen or water and similarly your cities won’t continue to exist for a longer time if you don’t visit your factories or offices months after months. Till date, ‘free flow’ was the common principal and therefore, it’s always tough to keep the public domain as hygienic as it expected to be. My concerns in this document are more related to these ‘Public places’.
To what extent a city can expand? In the context of Indian urbanization, we have majorly experienced organic non-geometric growth patterns resulting into heterogeneous expansions with sprawls and scattered developments. A city loses its character where the intensity, compactness or to say the grains get diluted/sparse. Imagine the uncontrolled growth of some part of your body like a hump or a tumour which might result in a permanent disorder of your usual activities. Why? Extra pound of weight which is disproportionate with rest of your structure, requirement of extra food, water, fuel, power and ‘labour corpuscles’ to keep the ‘cells’ alive far away from your heart and definitely unnecessary one-way movements of the ‘corpuscles’ to carry all these makes ‘balance’ vulnerable. Again our anatomy usually does not support an organ or a part of body which only exists to ‘eat’ and ‘rest’. So, if you need to drive an hour through highway daily after your work to reach your ‘sweet farm house’ just to ‘eat’ and ‘rest’ then you might enjoy the drive, but it will again affect the said natural balance. Uncontrolled growth of semi-urbanization towards any direction by adding local precincts one after another (like sprawls or small satellite townships) was the first mistake we negotiated. That’s how, Calcutta became greater Kolkata, Bombay added adjacent areas of greater Mumbai with it and Delhi is now called NCR. You need to draw aproportionate boundarye. / limitation of a compact city and beyond that; you need accept the dominant position of nature.
Even if you accept the first mistake you did, you would definitely ask me a valid question. What made the population in the cities ever increasing? Well, let’s find out the reasons for such rapid increment of the population of our cities. Obviously, the reproduction rates of the city dwellers are not higher than the villagers. If you ask Mr. Wiki about the population of Kolkata metropolitan, he would perfectly give you the census data of 2011 which is around 14.05 million. In case of Delhi or Mumbai those figures are around 16.34 million and 18.394 million. You can add up some extra growth rate percentage widely available to get the approximate scenario of today. But, the census will not give you the difference of the population of Kolkata at 11 am of a Sunday and similarly at 11 am on the next working Monday. We usually add up another 2.5 – 3.0 million only through Sealdah and Howrah rail station on a working day. And hundreds of buses/ metros run to bring more. Eventually, the population of Kolkata escalates by more than 25% at working hours. (You may have a research of Mumbai city on similar account and let me know the outcome). So, our city has two types of population. One is fixed (who have permanent residences) and another one is floating (who visit the city on regular basis to earn livelihood and leave at the end of the day). Majority of the available documentations are mainly accounted for fixed population. If you closely observe the fixed population, you would find a major portion of the same are quite young in respect of living permanently in the metropolitan. The moment a migrant unskilled worker or a potential student transforms himself (or herself) with his extra bit of dedication and hard work to a skilled worker, his immediate desire would be to settle within or around the city and to become a permanent citizen instead of a floating one. He would first rent a place to stop travelling daily and eventually, he would put all of his efforts to purchase at least one ‘affordable unit’ at the periphery of the city. That is how micro economy runs. But, with larger perspectives, your anatomy would not sustain if you regularly add up ‘cells’ and ‘corpuscles’ without much control. Accepting the regular influx of population in the form of labours, daily workers or others are the second mistake we negotiated. Therefore, you need to simply prevent the influx of population towards the metropolitan cities.
What would happen to rest of the people if we indirectly discourage the floating population to visit the metropolitan on regular basis? How would they earn their bread and butter? Well, the idea behind planning a city like Kalyani was not only for people to stay there and work in the heart of Kolkata by commuting the daily locals. I am sure, the original concept behind developing the city during 1950’s to 1960’s was also to provide reasonable livelihood to most of its inhabitants. There could be a hundred ‘Kalyani’ or ‘Chittaranjan’ what Dr. Roy envisioned earlier instead of rapidly increasing the outer periphery of Kolkata. Do you know, we have 782 ‘census towns’ as per the census data 2011 only in West Bengal? That means, there are 782 semi-urban settlements each with a population of more than 5000 people, population density of more than 400 people per sq km and with more than 75% of its population involved in non-agriculture works. Even if we could identify 5% of these so-called ‘census towns’ potential enough to be further developed as self-sustaining cities, the scenario could be different. Instead of thinking of a separate entity, we used the existing figure to add new peripheral settlements and drew an imaginary line to mark the ‘Greater Kolkata’ which now has 72 municipalities and more than 500 towns and villages within its boundary. I am sure, even an excellent working bureaucrat can’t name all the municipalities within the boundary of ‘Greater Kolkata’ without the help of any document. Forget about others. I tried my best, but never realized the basic similarity of infrastructures, public health, administrative facilities in between the Uluberia municipality at Southern Howrah and Bidhannagar Municipality (Salt Lake) in North 24 Parganas although both fall under the same boundary of Greater Kolkata. And, interestingly, with our present socio-economic circumstances, we encourage a daily labour from Uluberia to travel up to New Town for some real estate construction work. You need separate, small and self sustaining cities with individual entity. You need more number of cities where people can live happily, earn from reasonable occupations, provide education to their children and get proper health care facilities for their parents without having to visit the metropolitan. Imagination of many ‘sector V’s along with limited housing, supporting retails and entertainment hubs at different locations across the state could be more feasible strategy. That is what we technically call ‘Depolarized Urbanism’.
If you agree with the three theoretical arguments (i.e. 1. boundary of cities, 2. prevention of influx of floating population and 3. depolarized urbanism) mentioned above, you will still ask me about the word ‘Density’ which would always be the first target of any pandemic. Yes, undoubtedly our existing cities are quite dense with respect to most of the European or American cities. But, if you look deeper inside of our cities, you would probably find that few regions or urban precincts are denser than the average area of the particular city. A common phenomenon would be to find the residential sections of the low income group having the thickest grains of settlements abutting closely. ‘Dense population’ is a relative word and the population density of a city cannot be judged only with a single figure in micro scale. A figure like 24,306 persons per sq km of area can’t give a detail picture when Kolkata means 205 sq km of land if Mr. Google is correct. Every sq km land of Kolkata does not have similar kind of population density. The figures are nowhere near. You believe me or not, more than 40% of total population of Kolkata lives in slums or in slum like conditions in less than 16% surface area of the entire city for more than two generations. And these figures are not much different for rest of our metropolitan. And more interestingly, most numbers of slum populations exists near the business precincts of the city. A decade ago during my university life, I was part of a planning survey team which was studying the ‘Slums of Kolkata’. I can still remember we did handful household surveys in different slums to draw some basic schematic drawings and prepare some data about how people live in the slums. Sometimes less than 75 sq ft of covered area with a mezzanine floor was only available for an extended family of 5-6 people. Yes, there were community toilets for all, but no schools or active primary health care units within the vicinity. And the average literacy rate was just around 28%. I am sure; any non government professional survey data of recent times about the slums in Kolkata would not be much different. If this is the real micro picture of more than 30% of the households of our city, then, we did another mistake by allowing people to build slums/ slum like conditions just beside our business districts. So, there are huge heterogeneous distributions of urban grains in our cities and undoubtedly, those pin point ‘dense precincts’ would always be the ‘love spot’ of any pandemic virus. Even if we compare the most affected wards with the dense wards of the city, you would find a close similarity in between those. Until, we think of a rational distribution of the grains of our developments, many more dark days may appear in future. If I was taught correctly, it would be an approx 3.5 Cr. construction cost project to give basic ‘affordable homes’ for every 100 households or at least 500 slum dwellers (Build up area of one dwelling unit approx 250 sq ft containing one room with carpet area of 140 sq ft, one individual toilet of 30 sq ft and a small kitchen of 40 sq ft for each families). I am sure, our annual public well being budgets are many hundreds folds bigger than that. You need ‘Homes for all’ by ‘Harmonious distribution of Urban Grains’to keep your public health, education, demographic distributions and of course density distribution of your city in balanced condition.
We recently observed a new typology of zoning pattern (namely zone red, green or orange or the containment zones) across the city. An invisible but deadly virus made us divide the city into separate zones and prohibit the movement across these zones to prevent health hazard. The same concept can be instrumental in solving many other problems. Majority of our offices and commercial hubs in Kolkata are centralized in the central and eastern quarters and the residential regions are in the north, south and west part of Kolkata. If you look closely at the movement patterns, you would definitely observe majority of the population of south, north and west part of the metropolitan run towards the central and eastern part of kolkata at the morning session when the offices start and exactly on the opposite direction or towards Howrah/ Sealdah rail stations at the end of the day. That is how, our uncontrolled development makes majority of our working population to cross the entire city along its width or length twice a day only for the purpose of attending their work. Arterial flows are always diverse in any anatomy as per its biological requirements but those are expected to be rationally distributed. The city needs to be divided into smaller sections for mixed use developments where residential, occupational, educational, health and retail facilities for majority of its inhabitants are within a bicycle ride distance and lengthy multi directional movements of mass population can be prevented. In simple words, a software engineer residing at Joka needs a suitable job opportunity, a shopping mall for his wife, one super speciality hospital for his parents and a quality school for his children without crossing Behala. You may call it Mixed Use developments with a Zoning Plan.
You probably need a regular working place not more than a ‘bicycle ride distance’ from the place you eat and rest. Bicycle? Not a mistake. You read correctly. Our ancestors just 50 years ago couldn’t think of covering more distance than that in a day for attending their work. Do u still think, using mass transportation on regular basis would be a feasible idea for medical exigencies? We have been able to re-open mass transportation after 50 days of lock down but with limited passengers. Frankly, Kolkata never had so many buses or wider metro services or for that matter Mumbai does not have that number of sub-urban trains to allow quality transportation maintaining zero standing crowd let alone maintaining social distance. And, we all can’t afford to have a personal car. Even the rich citizens of many developed cities in Europe or Latin America use bicycles to reach their offices. The movement actually started with the concept of ‘De-motorization of the city cores’ and ‘green transportation’. There are many positive sides of regular cycle riding and hundreds of articles are available for you to read. It is a top-notch cardio workout, burns 400 calories an hour, strengthens your lower body and muscles, cuts heart diseases and cancer risks, improves lung health, saves your time and money and of course improves your sex life. And if you are an experienced bicycle rider, you would hardly come within 3 feet distance of your next rider thus maintaining much voiced social distance. Didn’t you observe, the milkman who comes to your place every morning to sell milk with a bicycle maintains better physical strength than you? So, what are you waiting for? Buy a Bicycle.
You must be thinking, if you are still reading, what quality of rubbish is this. Well, you may write me your imaginative or real experience of riding your bicycle towards Gariahat market for Puja shopping. Trust me, I never found any other alternative joyous experience than to indulge in some window shopping and have late evening snack from the diverse, colourful, picturesque and of course crowded hawker stalls of Gariahat footpaths with my friends while in college and eventually with my family in recent times. An unorganized retail experience is always lucrative than the organized experience from shopping malls and I believe majority of the city inhabitants as well as the floating population of the city quite enjoy these trades happening on our footpaths and rail stations. From an economist’s perspective, it’s definitely a parallel economy, not always recorded in terms of govt taxation systems, but, certainly quite handful to provide livelihood for millions of people in a third world city. Even, I am, personally quite compassionate towards the city hawkers. But, sometimes, you may need to rethink, what you enjoy eating and what is good for eating. When you attain some age, or when your body is not in normal order, you would definitely think of the undesired cholesterol blocking the regular flow of your cardiac system. Unorganized hawking targeting the cluster of passing crowd/ pedestrians on the narrow arterial/ primary roads/ footpaths of our organically grown cities is undoubtedly difficult to accept to any further extent as you rarely imagine keeping a safe distance of 3 feet while passing through Gariahat. But, it is definitely unimaginable to bulldoze the entire layer of road side vendors selling needles to garments, food, vegetables and what not without thinking of a better and rational alternative. There are multiple possibilities and you may pick an innovative and humane solution. Hawking Clusters for floating Hawkers could be a solution where, you can dilute the crowd by separating the pedestrians and window shoppers. Of course, private or semi public initiatives to bring the city hawkers into multiple and categorized digital platforms would also be beneficial for both the ends. People, now a days, are more comfortable in shopping from digital windows and receiving the products at home avoiding the unnecessary physical exhaustion to visit multiple shops. This would also boost the concept of social distancing. You may refer it as ‘Organization of the unorganized clusters’. That’s how, you can facilitate one weaker layer of the society by making permanent stall area and also opening an window for the local government to earn that extra bit of tax; as well as safeguard millions of pedestrians walking on the roads.
Well, I guess, transforming myself from a nine to seven being at a private firm striving to add my bits and dots for a parallel architectural language to an independent practitioner sketching diverse compilations, i have experienced the needs of these layers while commuting in the crowded local conveyances. This write up is my armature contribution while also lending a hand to fulfill my Quarantine life roaster duties. Can’t guess about you much, but, at least I am tired as it is midnight here with no scope of having road side tea or a balcony special cigarette. Wish, there will be a new dawn when we would be able to see a new light.
Manas Roy
Architect & Urban Designer | Kolkata
20 May 2020
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