The Galaxy Re-visited

Auroville Today: Does the Galaxy have much to teach us? For example, regarding density, how successfully does the Galaxy deal with fitting 50,000 people into such a small area?

Helmut: I don’t think there is a density problem here, unless you compress too much in certain areas. Moreover, the confined size of this city encourages pedestrians because the distances are very walkable.

Anupama: I think mobility is the key thing. Originally, Roger wanted to spread the city because he didn’t want a dense city where there would be no room for nature. However, The Mother insisted that it should be more compact. So Roger introduced the Lines of Force because he didn’t want to compromise the green of the rest of the city, and he wanted the mobility to be predominantly pedestrian. You do not see roads on the Galaxy plan, and this is deliberate. Even the Crown is not a road but a cluster of buildings within which you can circulate the city’s facilities on foot.

However, the Auroville planning office took this plan and converted it into very conventional road sections. This is a type of city that will attract motorised traffic.

Helmut: Roads and streets are usually the forerunners of development. But they do not have to be designated for motorised traffic. We have no proper mobility concept for the city. This is a serious set-back; we might get overrun by motorised traffic with all the fatal consequences for city life.

When we have a very complicated plan like the Galaxy, we need a new kind of development logic to build the town. If we don’t have this, we will fall back on old models, which is what is happening at present – uncontrolled random development. The Galaxy will not get realised this way.

Ganesh: It is important that we change our perspective. In the Dreamcatchers [architects, planners and interested Aurovilians who met to explore innovative ways to realise the city eds.], we tried to look at the Galaxy afresh. For example we asked, do we need roads? If you begin with a question like that, it doesn’t mean that you don’t make them, but it will lead you somewhere else than if you assume that roads are necessary.

Again, when you look at the Galaxy model from above you wonder what it would be like to stand between the high buildings. But if you look from ground level, you do not get that feeling. So we have to keep looking at the same thing from different angles. This will give us new clues.

Anupama: Roger’s Paris office thought the only way mobility can work in such a sunny, humid and rainy climate is if there are many covered walkways. So many of the structures which look massive from above are covered walkways, and everything is joined up to enable people to walk everywhere in the shade. Roger also created one-storey walkways so that when you walk there, you are not overawed by the height of surrounding buildings.

If you look at the Galaxy as an urban form without roads, it is a very fluid space which, frankly, nobody has explored. I should clarify that, according to Roger, the radials are not roads but infrastructure paths.

Anu: For me, the Crown is one of the key elements in mobility. Unless we achieve a quiet pedestrian circulation, we are not allowing everything else to emerge. It’s not about being strict regarding geometry but getting a clean flow of energies to circulate.

David: Actually, Roger was shocked when I described to him how native English speakers understand the word ‘road’.

Anupama: He was very concerned at plans to make the width of the Crown road, including pedestrians and cyclists, add up to 24 metres. He wanted the maximum width to be six metres, and within buildings much less, because otherwise the intimacy would be lost. He actually took one of the planning teams out one morning with a measuring tape to make his point. Unfortunately, they still resisted changing their plans.

David: We are still building according to a density plan that someone in Aurofuture made more than 20 years ago.

Tejaswini: Today, what I feel is missing is the human scale, particularly if I look at the Crown and the first radial. The Crown design encourages speeds of up to 50 km in the city, even though we are talking about a pedestrian city with a maximum speed of about 10 kilometres an hour.

Christian: We are creating a city for the car, exactly what we wanted to avoid. This is the first obvious fact I saw when I came here.

Helmut: The outer ring road is there to take the pressure from the city. It is for faster traffic which wants to go from one zone to another. There should be no motorised traffic on the Crown, except for public transport and emergencies.

So there is agreement that the Galaxy plan has much to offer us?

David: It’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious.

Then why has it taken so long to manifest?

David: This is why I am getting so angry. I have sat for over 20 years in meetings like this with very intelligent people having similar conversations. I can tick almost everything that everybody here has said. But why are we still sitting here? It is because certain far-reaching planning decisions have been made by imbeciles, and anyone stepping in later to try and help has started with a ball-and-chain around their ankles.

In Dreamcatchers, we spent years discussing fundamental issues of planning. But every time we presented something to these people, we hit a blank wall. So, unless we deal with the politics of planning in Auroville, with the fear and the power driving decisions here, we will be sitting here in ten years having the same conversation and nothing will have changed.

Christian: I fully agree. I chose to step out of the Master Plan process because I realised nothing can be done at present to change things.

Anupama: The Galaxy plan is a solution to the problems the rapidly-urbanizing world is facing if it was only recognised. But those who until recently managed planning in Auroville have no understanding of this, and they keep taking decisions without reference to the larger plan.

David: Decisions with profound implications have been made by people with an extreme dearth of imagination. Clearly, if people like that demand the right to determine the parameters of the Galaxy, they can’t manage it. I couldn’t do it, either. The only chance of this manifesting is if all of us brainstorm and work together. If you put this in the hands of people who haven’t got any idea, the only thing they can do is lay down infrastructure, like roads and pipes, which is what is happening at present. Basically, Auroville is being designed by engineers.

Anupama: We have always empowered people who knew less to be at the top of the planning pyramid. Many people wondered why Roger was working with these people. I asked him and he said, The Mother told me to do my work and the rest will be done, and I deal with these people because they are the ones there now. He felt when Auroville is ready, the situation will change.

The planning office has never encouraged different studies of the Galaxy to be made. We have had problems hiring outside consultants because the Galaxy plan has been so hotly contested in Auroville. If we wanted to make further studies ourselves, we were called ‘fanatics’ or people thought we were trying to take over the project.

Planning is a series of negotiations and explorations but in Auroville there were these two ‘religions’, the pro-Galaxy and the anti-Galaxy religion, and wherever you went you were bombarded by one side or the other.

But I continue to work on it and keep putting life into it because it is worth it: I learned so much more by talking to Roger and going through his archive and works in France.

Anu: For so long, negativity against the city and Roger has been so strong that nobody could deal with the Galaxy, except through building infrastructure. There are still many closed minds. We need a mind shift to be able to see the realization of the Galaxy not as ordinary ‘development’ but as steps enabling a unified and far-reaching experiment.

Key aspects of the Galaxy are contained in the recently published Terms of Reference for planning in Auroville. Doesn’t this suggest that the Galaxy concept is far from dead?

Anupama: The Terms of Reference have included elements of the Galaxy plan as a compromise, but the fact the Galaxy represents an entirely different form of city, and therefore a different form of mobility, is not penetrating.

Tejaswini: Fortunately, I have not come across anybody who is actually anti-Galaxy. So I think we should talk less about these divisions and more about how we can take it forward. The Galaxy is a given; there’s no debate about that. All that is debatable is different interpretations.

Anupama: I don’t think we can wish away an actual situation of duality. Why do we have this situation? I think what happened was that Mother used to meet Roger daily about the city but in those days there were no reports of these conversations. So people working on the land in Auroville were seeing Roger as wanting to impose something alien upon them, and they resisted.

Helmut: These kinds of controversies happen everywhere in the world with development projects. We are not an exception. Information and participation in the planning process are the best way to deal with it: imposition will always fail.

But certain strong reservations about the Galaxy have persisted. One is that it does not consider ground realities like topography and the prevailing social situation. Another is that it represents the consciousness of another era when there was abundant fossil energy, and architects felt free to manipulate the landscape to fulfill their dreams, as in Brasília and Chandigarh. These people say we need to be building a different kind of city from the Galaxy today if we are to be the ‘city the world needs’.

Helmut: I agree that the Galaxy concept is not adapted to ground realities. This has to happen, we only have to start doing it. I don’t see this as a problem.

Anupama: The problem with Modernism in town planning, which Roger very well understood, is that Modernism got somehow linked with ‘motorism’. Brasília and Chandigarh are all about motorisation. Roger’s approach was actually a counterpoint to Le Corbusier’s. Although he admired his artistic genius, he was very sad when he saw Chandigarh because of this aspect.

What Roger planned here was very different, although the Aurovilians still don’t see it. Roger was compacting the city to enable alternative forms of mobility.

Christian: The architecture of the Galaxy was popular in the 1970s and 1980s but it has been proven to have many drawbacks, including the creation of spaces difficult to supervise, leading to all kinds of anti-social behaviour. You have to listen to the experience of other cities because these kinds of forms are clearly dated. But this doesn’t mean we should reject the Galaxy concept as it has some very interesting elements. We just have to find different ways of materialising it.

Anupama: Roger said that cities keep changing over time. Auroville’s plan is no exception. But he wanted there to be some organizing principle.

Christian: To build a city you have to provide the bones, then the flesh can be organised around them. Unfortunately, the way the Auroville planners have translated the bones is as roads. This is clearly nonsense.

I love the structure of the Galaxy but for me, as a town planner, there are other important considerations. At present, each human needs half an acre to feed and accommodate them. If you make this calculation, you will see that for today’s 2,500 residents plus guests, the surface of the Master Plan area is exactly sufficient. But if you put 50,000 people here, you will need a much bigger area to sustain it. We are focusing on the city as an artistic object but it doesn’t exist on its own. We need to see how it relates to the larger bioregion in terms of circulation and economy.

Anu: We have to see the totality. The complete Galaxy plan for me includes the greenbelt. Until now, most of our greenbelt is forestry, there is very little farmland. We need additional farms to bring more self-sufficiency in food.

Tejaswini: We should not forget, when we talk about ‘ground realities’, that there is still much land that we do not own. Consequently, what is happening now is we are constructing bits and pieces of the Crown, and little bits of a radial here and there. I think we are forcing ourselves to do a few elements of the Galaxy, but this doesn’t make sense. Galaxy elements should not be implemented without looking at the present situation of the land and the present needs of the population.

David: I think the fact that we don’t own all the land is a huge blessing. It allows us the time to finally get our act together, and start manifesting what I believe Mother really saw when she looked at this Galaxy plan.

Tejaswini: I don’t agree that not owning all the land is a blessing. Ownership of the land is very important for the success of the Auroville experiment. We cannot ignore that today private developers want to make developments in the city area without any reference to the Auroville spirit.

Ganesh: As designers and planners we always try to simplify the project to its true essence. But the trick is to simplify it without losing its spirit and perhaps we have over-simplified the Galaxy concept too much.

Also, we should realise that while we are discussing the rich potential of the Galaxy, what we are actually building today might be very different, and the more this happens, the more the Galaxy gets diminished. So what can we do? Maybe something like this. If somebody asks me to design a building, as an architect I have the usual list of priorities in my head, and they are all valid. But if we are constructing something in the Galaxy area, I think we should add into this mix an understanding of the ‘matrix’ that unifies all this. Then, when we design something today, it can fit with what another architect designs 100 years later. For me, this is the most pressing need, because I think that by not considering the overall concept we might be going against it, even without realising it.

Helmut: We have all done this. As architects, we do not want to just drop our buildings onto the land without an awareness of the larger whole, but so far that is often what we have been forced to do.

How flexible is this Galaxy matrix? For example, could trees be substituted in some places for buildings?

Ganesh: It’s very possible. I see the Galaxy not as a town but as one singular building, a large house. If you are given a part to do, you try your best to satisfy what the project demands of you there. At the same time, you try to decode the Galaxy with your own interpretation of it, with your own choice of materials. So, yes, perhaps you could put a row of trees to represent something of the design. It’s a question of creativity, trying to understand what it can be and doing your best to contribute to the matrix.

David: The Chief Architect was effectively holding the matrix we are talking about.

Christian: A city is like a body, it has to keep renewing itself while growing.

Anupama: Roger was always trying to keep it flexible. People were asking for bye laws to help design the town, but he said if I give byelaws, will it help? Look at all the cities with byelaws, do they always ensure good cities? He was aiming for something higher than that. But that flexibility can be misused by others and become the lowest level. To a certain extent, this is what is happening today.

David: The most interesting thing I found in presenting Crown ways was there was a lot of positive feedback from across-the-board in Auroville. Green belters came up to me and said, I’ve spent my whole life resisting the Galaxy but if it would be anything like that, I’d be in favour. I believe that what I was really presenting was a set of values which people could connect to, weaving together environmental aspects, mobility, everything. We have to present the Galaxy with all these levels, with all these layers of meaning, so that people can connect to it. Without this, the Galaxy concept is too abstract even for many architects to get their heads around.

In 1972, Roger said the city should be at the service of people who live there. It should not be constructed first and then occupied but, “The inhabitants will define the needs of the city by experiencing them”. What do you understand about this?

Christian: With very few exceptions, cities are not built before being inhabited, and all those have failed. Cities evolve at the crossing point of two kinds of energies. One is vision, planification – the vertical axis – and the other, – the horizontal axis – is the energy of life, of those who come there to gather and create opportunities. If a city is just planned, it is dead: if it grows just through the energy of the inhabitants, it spreads haphazardly, like a cancer.

Beautiful cities emerge from a negotiation between the two axes; this is where we are failing at present. If you have a vision and construct it like a beautiful piece of art, it can take centuries to make it into a living place. You can never make a city without incorporating the energy of the citizens.

Two things I conclude from today’s discussion. One is there is so much more to discover about the Galaxy that most people do not know about, so there’s a huge need to communicate this.

David: I think Anupama has made a very important point, which is that many have not seen what she has seen in the Galaxy. This is a consequence of her conversations with Roger. But why didn’t Roger put everything on the table so we could all understand the Galaxy better?

Anupama: He did what he could, but many of his papers and drawings regularly disappeared from Aurofuture.

The other thing is the political dimension. It seems that many of the proposals put forward in the past, as well as requests for further studies, have been blocked by people who do not understand the Galaxy. I would like to ask Anu and Tejaswini, as members of the new TDC/Interface group, if they see this group offering a way forward, both in terms of increasing communication and knowledge and in dealing with the political dimension?

Tejaswini: Definitely, yes. Past planning groups ended up doing a lot of fire fighting but now there is a shift in the whole structure. We are supposed to initiate a lot of technical planning work so, hopefully, there is a space where all the work we have talked about around this table is going to be plugged in.

Anu: I think one of the good things is that now there is a focus upon a general detailed development plan for the whole town. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Anupama: You shouldn’t be sucked into fire fighting, you should focus on the big unifying things. But it has to go together with communication with the community. You have to help it get over its fears, hang-ups and misconceptions about the envisioned plan and to look at it afresh. In any city, planning is a series of negotiations, so Auroville needs a body that facilitates this process and heals past divisions.

Christian: Communication and education is the most important thing you can do. Don’t leave planning to the technocrats; they will just make one more city like anywhere else.

David: If Auroville can truly be open in the sense that the poetry of life has a place at the planning table, we will have done it; we will have succeeded.

Anu: I’m really surprised by the feedback I’m getting concerning what I was expressing about the Galaxy, among other things, in my book. People are very open to it; it’s almost as if I have voiced something that was inside them. So I feel we may be entering a new phase, a new beginning.