Green cities – a way forward, today and Tomorrow

The communities of architects/ planners/ city-builders and greenbelters must come together in Auroville to manifest the city of the future (emphasis on “come together”). In contemporary urban planning, planners are now realizing for several decades the critical need of integrated green spaces to reduce the ‘urban heat island effect’ and produce bio climatically designed, livable cities with reliable potable water resources. (The urban heat island effect is basically a bubble of concentrated heat around cities, formed by the reradiation of shortwave heat from hard surfaces that cannot escape the atmosphere.) 

I myself worked nearly 20 years ago in the first movement of green roofs in New York City… in a time when every rooftop was asphalt-black, and New York was a hot, inhuman and environmentally unconscious city. But cities can and do change, mostly by necessity – as the last 20 years have proven in New York. And so does planning, as a discipline. 

The concept – even the idea – of climate change did not exist in the 1960’s or 70’s when the Galaxy Plan was envisioned by Roger. At this stage of early Modernist city-planning, the urban form played the most important role and there were not the tools in mapping to accurately represent “unbuilt” urban form. There was not yet the concept that city form, its buildings and its green spaces, can be designed for human comfort (not in a Modern city design paradigm, although this knowledge always existed in vernacular architecture). This is in no way a shortcoming of Roger or of the Galaxy. It is simply a product of the times. And as the times have changed, we as a human race, in greater and greater globalizing societies, have gained tools for sustainable city design. Just as cities all over the world have begun to critically incorporate such strategies – e.g. by critical placement or construction of urban green infrastructure in places where microclimate can best cool cities, by planning green infrastructure for water security – Auroville and the Galaxy can, too. In fact, it should be said that the Galaxy has the potential for even greater adaptive design than many other city models, as long as it is seen as plastic and adaptive. What should not be seen is a Galaxy vs. Green polarization, a fight between buildings and forests, planners and greenbelters. This is a super-unproductive “way forward” for Auroville and it is really unfortunate that this instructive (though slightly late notice) planning workshop in the January sessions further polarized this existing debate. 

Several months ago, I brought Gerhard Schmitt, a leading computational and artificial intelligence expert in the mapping of urban heat island effect (in Singapore, Switzerland, etc.) to Auroville. Gerhard’s work focuses on computational modeling of cities’ heat production, and the way in which cities can be designed (or redesigned as more often the case) for selective urban green spaces which passively cool the city. Imagine for a second, that cool corridor of air that you often feel on the motorcycle while driving past Pitchandikulam forest. Now imagine this kind of cooling effect intentionally integrated into the city planning to reduce the discomfort in your houses at this relentlessly hot time of year. This is precisely the kind of work proposed by Eble and Dreizeitl in the January Sessions workshop, not at all in opposition to the Galaxy, but as an adaptive integration of the Galaxy to environmental planning logics. 

After visiting l’Avenir and seeing the city at large, Gerhard told me that Auroville has no idea what it already has! Just as cities in the equatorial range around the world are now having to retrofit green spaces for an imminent future of climate change, rising temperatures, drought, water crisis, increased storm and natural disaster risk, Auroville already has this by virtue of the extraordinary work of the early pioneers. Gerhard said that Auroville is like a contemporary urban planner’s dream, and that it must do whatever it can to maintain its present qualities. This means an integral approach in planning that adapts the Galaxy to the conditions of the ground – the land, its surface topography, bunding, water bodies and percolation rates, its underground aquifers, geology, its gradient of plateau to sea level, its forests, farms and parks – all green spaces must play a role in the design of the future city. 

Even B.V. Doshi has tried to re-purpose the Galaxy to design for basic bioclimatic design at the urban scale, strategies such as proper orientation for sun, for summer winds, for sustainable water resources, for green spaces. He failed because we as a community have failed to be plastic enough to see the Galaxy as a model in a constant and perpetual state of “becoming”, a model which can adapt to new environmental necessities much better than conventional cities. This is why we must try to gain new tools in planning that help us as a community to understand what it means – for society and for the land – to complete all aspects of the Galaxy with critical reflection (e.g. do the Lines of Force create wind or sun shadows, overheating issues, inhuman scale issues vis-à-vis the neighbouring villages?). 

We need to support our planning community to gain and implement these new tools and strategies – including through workshops with professional planners like Eble and Schmitt. We cannot afford to be fanatics – neither for the perfect urban form of the Galaxy, nor for buildings, nor for trees. The severe and very scary present water crisis in Tamil Nadu shows us that. We must learn how to compromise, to build and plan the city together. This includes taking stock of crucial initiatives like Suhasini’s Land Use Plan, Gilles’ Water Management Plan for water security and David and Achva Stein’s Greenbelt Land Use Plan in which there was active collaboration with the Green Group. 

It includes taking risks to begin new initiatives. And it means each resident, in his or her own way, working to depolarize the Galaxy debate, to minimize personal opinion in the face of an enormous field of planning complexities. Those working close to the land have enormous potential inputs to share in how the urban plan can be best adapted to the ground conditions. What will it take for us to choose to work together?