Why be square about circles?
FeatureBy Christoph Pohl
Keywords: Crown controversy, City parks, Bliss forest, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Values of Auroville, Water management, Galaxy model, Land Suitability and Land Use proposal, Master Plan (Perspective 2025), Personal sharing, Right of Ways (RoW), Crown clearing and Environment
Bliss forest is a city park that is densely planted to be a forest. Aurovilians from South Korea may be familiar with a similar concept in the city of Seoul. Other Germans, like me, may have grown up in cities with forest parks.
According to the Environmental Impact Assessment, the HT cable, if laid through Bliss, will require the destruction of 115 rare and native species of trees and shrubs, as well as an uncountable number of regenerating young, rare and native plants. Out of these 115 trees, only 18 are work trees and 10 are neem. In fact, this 30 year-old patch of forest is an excellent demonstration of the process called Ecological Succession, where the native evergreen canopy is by now dense enough so that pioneer species like the work tree no longer regenerate.
The forested areas within the city are crucial for water management and have been located to support Auroville. Roads and buildings in these sensitive areas would be a destructive feature for the city.
Bliss Forest is located along a watershed and plays an important role in water management as it has very high soil percolation rates and aquifer recharge potential. Two major canyons in the city area originate here (see map). According to the Master Plan, both sides of the Crown RoW will have buildings for a total width of 70 metres and, if this goes through Bliss forest, it would have disastrous effects on water management all the way from Bliss Forest to Kottakarai.
The irony is that, even if the HT cable ring would be laid through Bliss Forest, it would still not be a perfectly circular Crown; adjustments have already been made to bypass College Guest House and privately-owned or temple-owned lands (see map 2). The perfectly circular RoW is an unattainable holy grail!
I personally am one of those who find the Galaxy vision for Auroville inspiring and meaningful, because it carries a dynamic and a sense of Wholeness – wholeness implying a space for diversity, imperfections and reality (the messy and shifting lives of humans and the environment). Aurovilians who wish to see the Crown marked in sensitive and diverse experimental ways (not only with roads and cables) are often discouraged by the repeated dismissal of alternative proposals (e.g. the Dreamcatchers’ proposal, and the Land Suitability and Land Use Proposal of Suhasini) which incorporate the site’s existing features into the Galaxy concept.
The Galaxy concept was created on a blank paper, not taking into consideration any of the site’s natural and social features. It is the responsibility of a Master Plan to account for ground realities.
A galaxy has no perfectly circular border, it gradually merges into eternity, just as the map of Auroville Foundation owned land plots do.
The current Master Plan, with its emphasis on perfectly circular roads and large stretches of concrete buildings outlining the shape of the Galaxy, is a simplification that enforces a perfection that is in contradiction to the wholeness of the Galaxy. This is a significant difference between the Galaxy concept and the current Master Plan.
Could the idea of RoWs marking the Crown be diversified to include other creative, beautiful and harmonious ways that merge with reality? Then we have a chance to actually manifest the Galaxy vision!
This is possible with wide community participation in discussions about town planning, instead of allowing such decisions to be solely made by a separate group or authority. In fact, though overlooked by successive TDCs, a participatory Environmental Management process is incorporated in the Master Plan.
Together we can indeed create “a form that is a universal symbol of totality, perfection, the Self, the infinite.”
It is for Auroville to know what it wants. One has to take an inventive step, an urbanistic one that is part of Auroville’s message. One should include contemporary life, human relationships, technology and the respect of nature, within a very creative context to show to the world that it is possible. [...] All new ideas are welcome. All new ideas can combine in a balanced and intelligent use of space, where life and our relationship with nature are all renewed. [...] I am not here to impose anything – it is up to Auroville to find it, to define itself. (Roger Anger, Auroville Today, 1988)