The challenges of planning the city

Auroville Today: One of the things that L’Avenir is most often criticized for is that its approach to town planning is top-down. In other words, that it doesn’t involve the community enough in the planning process. How do you respond to this?

Sauro: I agree it is a problem. But the apparent top-down approach is partly the consequence of lack of human resources. At present, only four Aurovilians are trained town planners (only two of whom are working with us at present) and to plan the city normally requires the involvement of many professionals. But in L’Avenir three coordinators have resigned, and our fundraiser doesn’t attend meetings. So we are looking for a minimum of three coordinators for town planning, communication and administration, plus support staff. Actually we should have ten coordinators, and each coordinator should have a team of at least 2- 3 people. We don’t have anything near this number of people.

Why don’t you outsource Auroville town planning to professional planners?

This is already happening to a certain extent. However, we get reactions concerning why we don’t employ more architects from Auroville instead. Roger was an architect but he also designed the town and this creates the impression that architecture and town planning in Auroville are the same thing with a strong emphasis on architecture. But they are very different disciplines and require completely different approaches, with different professional profiles of which there are a shortage in Auroville. Town planning is a multi-disciplinary activity that also involves the Geo-physical realities, the socioeconomic factors, the demography, the engineering aspects, the technological development, the legal context etc.

Why have the members who resigned not been replaced?

Our group has been appointed by a Selection Committee which is meant to appoint replacements when members drop out. However, when the resignations came, the members of the Selection Committee began resigning themselves. This happened a few months back. Since then, we have approached many people to take up the work, but nobody wants to do it.

Why?

Many don’t have the time but, particularly for the town planning position, people don’t put themselves forward because of a division of perspectives in the community.

How would you describe this division?

One division is between a defined urban design – the Galaxy etc. – and a strong demand to consider and integrate the geophysical elements. One of the exercises we are doing now is to try to integrate these two aspects: we have given specific assignments on surface water, land use and urban design to Gilles Boulicot, Suhasini and Luis Feducci. We are further expanding the technical team.

The other division relates to the kind of city we want to live in. We have two visions, one which says that there is a consolidated city to be built, and the other which is happy to continue living in a sprawling, decentralized environment.

If, at a very fundamental level, we don’t have agreement upon the kind of city we want to live in, how can you do town planning?

It is very difficult.

Should we not as a community be looking at fundamental questions like this as a first step in any planning exercise?

I agree. Take the Industrial Zone. We have still not decided as a community what kind of industries we want to promote, and whether we want to continue employing people from outside. Whatever we decide will have profound implications for planning.

Who should decide this?

If you look at its mandate, L’Avenir is the body to make these decisions. But personally I don’t think this group can take such decisions in isolation. There has to be community involvement, and for this we need to know what the community thinks.

This is the idea behind a participatory planning process that we are proposing. We would like to get input from stakeholder groups representing nine different sectors of life in Auroville. These are collaborative economic growth and development; sustainable land development – socially and environmentally responsible; integrated planning and design system; collective mobility and non-motorized system; affordable co-created housing; sustainable infrastructure and service delivery; regional synergies; good governance and inclusive citizen involvement; and well-managed city – implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

Each group should identify a strategy for development in its sector and a project that can be a catalyst for the implementation of that strategy. Then these inputs will be translated into a draft zonal plan and, after community consultation on this, a five year development plan will be drawn up.

Will these stakeholder groups have to respect certain parameters?

There always needs to be some kind of framework. For me, the starting-point is the ‘vision’ document approved by the Residents Assembly in 2007. This is quite a well-balanced document because there are technical arguments about the need to integrate urban design with the geophysical reality, and it tries to create a balance between a long-term and short-term approach. It also gives flexibility because while it defines what Roger described as the non-negotiable elements of the Galaxy – 50,000 population, the four zones, the Crown, Lines of Force, Matrimandir and the lake etc. – it gives a lot of freedom to elaborate.

I don’t think we have the option to say we are not developing into a city. We have come here to experiment but there is a limit to this experiment. We cannot change the nature of the experiment itself, which is that it is intended to be a city, a city with a certain economy and a particular orientation on education, among other things.

So we should fix limits for participatory discussion. Among them should be the understanding that our present lifestyle is a transitional one, and that the present 2,000 inhabitants cannot look only at their needs but have also to consider the needs of the future population.

This touches upon two different visions of development. Some people feel we need to focus upon present needs and that long-term development should be left aside with a certain trust that it will evolve in the light of circumstances. Others feel it is important to get the larger vision down on the ground as soon as possible as that will create a certain energy field which will attract more people to this project. Isn’t this one of the crucial questions that need to be resolved?

Yes, these are two very different visions of the development of Auroville. So there has to be flexibility: we need to find a balance between present needs and the ultimate vision. The most obvious example is the International Zone, where we have this idea of the national pavilions but it is the zone with the least development and the proposals we are receiving are sometimes very different from the approved plan.

In this zone, we have had the tendency in the last few years to approve all the projects that have been submitted, even if they didn’t comply with the long-term urban design.

In the Cultural Zone we have also accepted projects which were not foreseen when the overall zone plan was studied by Roger. However, sectors one and two of the Residential Zones are at quite an advanced stage of planning, and when you get down to that level of detail you lose a certain degree of flexibility.

Another problem which creates distrust is that we miss the intermediate layer of planning.

We have a Master Plan which is very general – it doesn’t even include most of the studies and parameters made by Roger – but, with a few exceptions, we don’t have detailed development plans. So although the Master Plan has been approved, there is little information about what kind of developments may come up on a specific plot of land. That is why we are giving professional assignments for preparation of a detailed development plan that identify the plots to be built on with density and elevation, the infrastructure network, the green area and the areas not to be built on because of water preservation or other natural feature. We have started this exercise for sectors 1 and 2 of the Residential Zone and would like to undertake it all over the city area, although not necessarily at the same level of detail. It will be an important tool of communication and transparency because everybody can know what is envisaged for a particular portion of land and will know what to expect and where to look for a place for their projects. We have started this work with Luis Feducci and we want to start working with the participatory planning groups on this intermediate level. It is not easy: we are already on the sixth version of sectors one and two and I’m sure more versions will come. But basically the attempt is to bring transparency to the community about how planning decisions are taken.

You speak of the ‘ultimate vision’, which assumes that you know what the city will finally look like. But how can you plan for a city where it may take up to 40 years to reach its planned population level? Many things can change in that time. There will be advances in technology, in mobility, in the consciousness of its inhabitants. Today you are creating a planning template on the basis of the Galaxy. How do you know it will have the same validity in 25 years time?

We cannot know this, which is why we have to preserve space for future developments. We need to develop but keep the options for the future as open as possible.

You mention that Roger did planning work in the Cultural and International Zones. What kind of work did he do, and what is the status of this work? Is it a given, non-negotiable?

We have not yet come to this level of discussion. Both the Cultural and International Zones have been quite deeply studied by Roger. He laid down broad urban lines, but I think there is still a lot of scope for interpretation. Nevertheless, the fact he has done this work means that in these zones we are following a negotiated process involving temporary arrangements or projects which answer to new needs not previously envisaged.

Nobody outside the planning group knows about Roger’s work in these zones. Shouldn’t this information be communicated to the wider community?

Well… the work on the International Zone is very well known, whereas it is true that there is less awareness of the work on the Cultural Zone. It should also be said that there are certain discrepancies between the Master Plan and the work of Roger. This is partly because the Master Plan was prepared to take into consideration certain government parameters; partly because it was kept very general to achieve the maximum consensus possible for land protection; and partly because Roger’s ideas evolved after the Master Plan was accepted. This happened, for example, with the mobility parameters. This is another reason why people accuse us of following a top-down approach to planning, because in our planning process we refer not only to the Master Plan but also to Roger’s work which was not included in that document. Now we are working on creating a brochure of Roger’s work to make the information on the process more accessible.

Roger’s later ideas concerning mobility are contained in a 2005 document. The main changes seem to relate to the radials. In the Master Plan there were only eight, in the 2005 plan there are twelve, and they are arranged to represent Mother’s symbol. What is the status of this mobility plan today?

I cannot give a clear answer. It’s true that when we try to make any kind of road we refer to this document, because it is the only mobility concept that we have at present. But it has been criticized for various reasons and, personally, I feel a new mobility document has to emerge.

One of the criticisms of the mobility plan is that it ignores ground realities. For example, one of the radials would pass through a local village, Bharatipuram.

I agree this is one of the main points of difference and discussion at present. I don’t know what will be the outcome of the debate but the main point is to try and find a place for everything – for Roger’s ideas, for issues which has been raised in the land use document by Suhasini and for things that may emerge from the participatory process.

In fact, we are already discussing certain updates to the Master Plan. For example, it has to be seen if the outer Ring Road needs to be everywhere a motorized distribution road. In my view, in certain sections it may retain only the main function to delimit the area of the city. It could even be a cycle path or a simple infrastructure corridor like, for example, on the perimeter of sectors one and two of the Residential Zone where it would pass through an established forest. Also, there seems to be consensus in the planning group that the Right of Way for the ring road should be reduced. In other words, with reference to the Master Plan, we have defined the Crown but the radials and the Ring Road are more open to interpretation.

This flexibility is not being communicated to the larger community. Shouldn’t you work much harder on explaining this, as well as the rationale behind your planning process?

I totally agree. I don’t have a solution about how to improve communication except to try to lay out all the information upon which we are basing the planning process. For example, people don’t understand why we want a more concentrated development in sectors one and two of the Residential Zone. They ask why we want to cram them together when there is so much land around. But the idea is to create on a small scale a full-fledged model of how we could live in Auroville; we want to create an embryonic system of social life which we can experiment with and improve. If we don’t do this now, if we postpone this until we have a population of 5,000 or 10,000 people, then it will be too late to do the experiment. This is the main reason for the densification. Mobility is also another important reason. If services and residences are clustered in development nodes the need for motorized transport gets largely reduced.

What about the rationale behind your mobility planning? Some people ask why you are building a major road in the Kottakarai area when there are much more pressing mobility needs – for example, upgrading the much-used dust road between Certitude and the Solar Kitchen.

Our mobility priorities are, firstly, to provide access to planned clusters of development. Kottakarai is one of these areas and we are working there to provide new access for the Industrial Zone and the industrial area of Mangalam and Pony farm which we are trying to develop. The Cultural Zone is another, which is why we have recently completed the Transition radial.

Regarding the Certitude-Solar Kitchen road, we prefer not to develop this as it is not on Auroville land and we cannot control its use. Instead, we are studying a new access road for Aurovilians to the city. This could be either the Reve radial or another road on fully Auroville land which would begin somewhere midway between Certitude corner and the telephone exchange.

Would this conform to the 2005 mobility plan?

Most of them do conform, some of them not. Definitely things can happen that won’t fit into this mobility plan, although probably they would be looked upon as temporary developments for the next 10 – 15 years.

But who defines what is temporary and what is permanent, what can evolve and what can’t?Is it L’Avenir? If so, what is the purpose of participatory planning? The suspicion is that L’Avenir is continuing with its own vision of planning irrespective of community concerns, and that any wider participatory exercise is simply cosmetic. You talk about the Master Plan being approved by the community, yet certain changes have been made since without community knowledge or approval. What is the status of these changes?

I understand what you are saying, but I’m not sure I can answer it. What I can say is that we are trying in our planning process to harmonies three different conflicting elements – the conceptual design; topography and geography; and the demands of the present society and the needs of the future inhabitants.

The other issue the community would like to know more about is your internal process in L’Avenir. Before this group came into existence in 2007, there was a conflict between the Development Group and Aurofuture: the Development Group wanted to incorporate ground realities, while Aurofuture felt that whatever did not conform to the ultimate plan should not happen. L’Avenir was set up to incorporate these different approaches to planning and, hopefully, to resolve them. How successful have you been in doing this?

Clearly, we still have different views within L’Avenir. For a long time we had members whose different approaches to planning, at least in public, were quite extreme. Within the group, though, there was a tendency to be flexible in order to find solutions. I have seen people who have a reputation of being very rigid in their approach sitting around the same table and, when confronted with the daily reality, taking up the responsibility to be constructive and cooperative.