CONTEMPORARY urban planning, in its emphasis on developing new areas instead of the old, has through sheer neglect reduced historic towns to slums defying the basic standards of hygiene and health. In completely bypassing the indigenous principles of planning inherent to these towns and cities, it has also undermined knowledge systems which had been nurtured through centuries and generations helping sustain a quality of life more invigorating than that enabled by contemporary planning.

Engagement with nature represented one such knowledge system which expressed itself in many ways to help shape the urban form. With physical form guided essentially by animate rather than inanimate forms of energy, it resulted in settlements of human scale, planned for the people and not the automobile. Because of their relatively high densities and compact urban forms, settlements encouraged a multiplicity of space usage which included open spaces, ensuring greater economy in the use of time, energy and land. The architecture too, in its dependence on local materials derived from nature, not only gave it a distinctive identity, but was also reflective of a self-sustaining ecological model of design. The settlement pattern was climate responsive in the scale of streets, the building form adopted and the materials used.

Traditional urbanism, in its seamless integration with natural heritage, embodied many of the qualities expressed in more contemporary terms such as ‘sustainable’, ‘ecofriendly’, ‘mixed land use’, ‘low rise high density’, ‘pedestrianisation’, ‘green design’ – all concepts that are re-entering the vocabulary of an alternative discourse in architecture and planning of new towns. Urban conservation, in recognizing this linkage between traditional urbanism and nature, needs to make every effort to reconnect with nature in as diverse a manner as existed historically.

 

Historic cities in the past interacted with nature in several ways. The imperatives of nature and natural ecology underpinned all decisions on urban development and nature was the lifeline of the community in more ways than one. For example, the walled medieval town of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh lies on the lower northern slopes of a hill within a basin like physiographic formation. The major streets lie across the slope and the minor ones run parallel to the contours with gradients which once enabled rainwater to flow smoothly and finally exit through the lower level gates, redirected to the various waterbodies around the settlement. This helped to recharge the groundwater and subsequently feed the wells and baolis within the settlement.

However, due to a pattern of development where the street levels were changed and where extensive deforestation in areas surrounding the settlement adversely affected the larger ecology of the region, over two hundred wells and baolis, which in the 16th century fed a population of over 200,000 are today not enough for even 20,000 people because of the depleting water table levels.

In a development paradigm that does not recognize the need for a human relationship with nature and rather, deliberately introduces a false and dangerous dichotomy between development and ecology, natural heritage becomes very vulnerable, especially in urban areas. Traditional wisdom which recognized the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature and which helped determine the original urban form of settlements, should logically guide their future too, as was proposed in the urban conservation plan for Chanderi.¹

Water is perhaps the greatest environmental asset any city has, and thus all historic towns and cities recognized this and chose to enhance its presence. Varanasi is a classic example where the city form literally reaches out to embrace water, both physically and metaphorically, as an acknowledgement of its life sustaining qualities. Agra of the Mughal period is another illustration of how city form responded to the river front by siting forty-two gardens along the Yamuna river, making it famous as a garden district in the 16th century. The river, which also provided a major transportation link from Delhi to other cities along the Yamuna had, by the 18th century, gardens on both banks, containing essentially the residences of the imperial family and the highest ranking nobles, with some transformed into settings for tombs. While most of these gardens have disappeared, a few survive, standing in a completely transformed urban context.

 

And while the city has grown in all directions, it has turned its back to the river and the built heritage on its banks, even as the major landmarks like the Taj and the Agra Fort along the river front continue to attract tourists. The river edge has also changed its character from that of an elite area to one housing the poor and the marginalized in large pockets. The existence of these historic gardens, and attempts at their conservation, offer a unique opportunity to not only help reconnect the riverfront to the city, but also through community driven conservation proposals which engage the communities with the heritage surrounding them, improve the environmental conditions in which people and the built heritage now coexist. This engagement could also provide livelihood opportunities, which in turn would further improve their quality of life and habitat.²

A similar narrative needs to be adopted in developing the riverfront in a sensitive way in historic cities such as Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, all of which have reduced the rivers running through them to little more than an open sewer.

 

Natural ecology and cultural ecology were interwoven in all historic settlements, ensuring that nature was both respected and integrated with the everyday life and experience of the people. As a result these urban landscapes, whatever the scale, were and continue to be rich in symbols, meaning and content, qualities that need to be nurtured and further enhanced. Old Bhubaneswar illustrates how pre-colonial or pre-industrial settlement planning was in a complimentary relationship with nature and exemplified an experiential aesthetics which encapsulated the metaphysical and the physical and in its resultant form displayed a synergy between the natural and cultural ecology.

Ekamra Kshetra or Old Bhubaneshwar dating back to the sixth century CE has several tanks and waterbodies around which the urban settlement evolved. Many of the temples are built around or near the Bindusagar, a lake which according to legend was formed by collecting a drop of water from all the waters of the world. Bhubaneswar is not sited on a river bank. But the presence of water in the form of subterranean springs played a major role in shaping the morphology of the settlement, evidenced in the clustering of temples with their tanks in close proximity to these sources of water. Since the geographical extent of these springs is very limited, as they arise out of a common fault structure, it can be conjectured that town planners were well informed of this fact and applied their understanding in siting the settlement very strategically around this zone.

 

Not only did these water tanks act as water harvesting structures, those attached to temples were used by the local residents and pilgrims alike. They were also a source of economy with livelihoods connected to activities such as fishing in these tanks. However, current development practices choose to consciously undermine these indigenous, ecologically sensitive cultural systems. The neglect in the upkeep and maintenance of these tanks, as well as a proposal to fill them up and convert them to parking lots to accommodate the increasing pilgrim and visitor numbers, displays a complete absence of understanding of the value of these tanks. The urban conservation plan focused on reviving both the cultural and natural ecologies connected to these tanks as a means of conserving the urban character of Ekamra Kshetra.³

Traditional design vocabularies encouraged a participatory relationship with nature. Historic gardens such as the Mughal gardens of Taj Mahal exemplify this. The spatial experience within the garden, in its original concept of a Mughal char bagh of the 17th century, was one that involved all the five human senses and was a more complete and enriching experience than what we have today – with a sense of touch that caressed the textures of various plants; taste that savoured the fruit from the orchards; sound that heard the rustling leaves in the wind, chirping birds and the music of bubbling fountains; smell that intoxicated the spirit through the fragrance of scented flowers; and sight that appreciated the riot of colours as the flowers bloomed.

This experience changed with interventions in the colonial period in the 19th century with new concepts of the ‘picturesque’, where the mausoleum became a mere object in space, sitting within a large expanse of newly introduced lawns. Lawns are perhaps the most un-ecological statement we can make in the Indian context as they provide little shade, consume more water and are a monoculture. Contemporary planning practices, however, persist with the lawns and continue to impose alien vocabularies onto historic sites of all scales, creating functionally inefficient and unresponsive environments. There is a trend to increasingly move from an experiential aesthetics to a purely visual one through these landscape interventions.

 

In making a case for the restoration of the original Mughal garden paradisiacal experience in the Taj gardens, it is important to note that the original ‘authentic’ planting patterns, which include groves of trees, make greater ecological sense in their demand for and consumption of water and in supporting a richer and more diverse ecosystem than an expanse of lawns. These trees would also provide much needed shade to the thousands of visitors. And most importantly, the plantation would also provide increased biomass around the Taj Mahal, as regulated by an order of the Supreme Court of India to counter the air pollution that is turning the white marble of the mausoleum yellow.

The orchards would also help sustain the gardens as they originally did over three centuries ago. And in bringing alive the gardens, the visitors would have another dimension of the site to appreciate, that of the gardens. This would help take pressure off from the mausoleum which appears to be the only attraction today.⁴ Historic gardens and landscape design in historic areas reiterate that the design practices adopted produced environs where ecological principles and aesthetics of design complemented one another. In contrast, contemporary design practices focus on the superficial manifestations of nature where image making and beautification through use of insensitive and inappropriate design vocabularies often overshadow the more real ecological demands that have lower ‘visibility’.

 

Historic urban environments through a vast palette of design elements provided a range of opportunities for interaction with nature to capture all its sights and smells. Historic towns had green, blue, brown open spaces existing as baghs, bagichis, kunds and waterbodies, and maidans and chowks respectively. The terraces and courtyards were also a major component of this open space system. These open spaces through their multi-functionality were very ‘generous’ and ‘adaptable’ in their spirit and content. For example, the cluster of open spaces in settlements like Chanderi, with a temple, a tank and a tree are used as work spaces, community gathering spaces, for rituals and festivals and as outdoor living spaces for the residences around. This diversity gets undermined and goes unacknowledged when master plans recognize only green spaces as open spaces defined as ‘district parks’, ‘neighbourhood greens’ and ‘tot lots’.

This phenomenon further translates itself into planning ‘standards’ adopted by contemporary planning practices which, with an emphasis on quantity rather than quality, while providing a basis for stocktaking and a measure of standard and quality of life, reduce nature and natural heritage to only numbers and figures. They tend to ignore the social meanings implicit in their design in historic areas. Failure to recognize this heterogeneity of open space systems and citing lack of open space as one of the reasons to declare Shahjehanabad as a slum in the first master plan of Delhi in 1960, a city once considered as a matter of pride to belong to in the 17th and 18th centuries.

 

In historic settlements the integration of nature and natural heritage with the lives of the common people also ensured that it was cared for by them. The ‘commons’ around historic settlements for sustenance of the inhabitants was one such example. Chanderi had a thick forest cover as the ‘commons’ enveloping the fortified andar and bahar shehar which had an ecological, social and economic role. The ‘commons’ as a green, thickly vegetated area, helped improve the water table to recharge the wells within the settlement, provide timber for construction in the vernacular housing, and harvest fruit to sustain the local economy.

In contrast, contemporary planning practices often view nature as a planning tool and means of controlling urban form, evident in the ‘green belt’ concept, where even as a green area it stays out of reach of most people of the city. In historic settlements, planning and design began with community participation, local control and individual engagements with the immediate natural environment. The urban conservation plan for Chanderi, in recognizing this, proposed social forestry as part of the afforestation programme for the barren land around the settlement.⁵

To conclude, our heritage, both built and natural, is continuously being embedded in new contexts and facing new challenges. It is important that the narrative of conservation be spelt out against the larger development of the area, where conservation becomes relevant in economic, social and most importantly, in ecological terms. In times where design with nature has come a long way from being a ‘subject’ replete with social meanings and intents to a superficial ‘object’ at times ready for sale and conspicuous consumption, conservation of natural heritage provides us an opportunity to retrieve the richness of relationships with nature that existed in the past.

In recognizing the shift from feudal to capitalist society, there has been a concurrent eco-philosophical shift from eco-theology to a technocratic view of nature. Additionally, contemporary Indian architecture and landscape design in the 21st century continues to stay as a tangent of global design activity, where the sources and forms of design are still largely unconnected to the dominant local cultural themes and traditions.

 

During the last century new building technologies, faster communications and publication of professional journals have further ensured that design products, landscaping fashions and planning practices are increasingly advertised and then exported, imported, borrowed, copied. Being deliberately designed for international consumption, they reduce the possibilities for regional adaptations. Consequently, in the realm of landscape design today, while most schemes incorporate the trappings of nature like lawns, trees and waterbodies, they are designed with very little regard to the cultural responses to nature, resulting in virtually identical schemes of landscape design cropping up in urban India in complete negation of the local contexts.

This new aesthetics has meant that nature is not just being marketed but is also used as a device for marketing, or as packaging material for the promotion of various products. Promoters offer a remarkable range of housing complexes such as ‘the forest’, ‘charmwood village’, ‘green meadows’, ‘green fields’ – all rich in terminologies of traditional rural environments and natural landscapes. But the concern for resources, climate, location and, most importantly, human responses to it become redundant and nature, once conceived in both sacred and profane terms is made into a commodity like everything else.⁶

 

While current urban development practices have much to learn from the ways in which historic urban settlements responded to nature, urban conservation practices should have the ability to recover opportunities and environments to reconnect with nature, where nature and natural heritage can be brought into the everyday lives of the people by visualizing and planning both as integral to the open space systems of the city. In this day and age there is also a need to shift to a socialist ecology perspective which encourages a different way of engaging with nature and celebrating it.

In the socialist framework and in a secular world, the urban conservation approach should be one that encourages valuing nature for a better quality of life and where the attempt to save local cultures and local ecosystems in the face of onslaught of globalization are two sides of the same endeavour.

 

Footnotes:

1. Chanderi Conservation Plan. INTACH, 1985, unpublished report.

2. Community-led Heritage Conservation Plan. AHRC and ICHR funded research project, 2016, unpublished report.

3. Ekamra Kshetra Heritage Zone, Conservation Plan. INTACH, 1990, unpublished report.

4. Conservation Plan for Gardens of Taj Mahal. TMCC and ASI research project, 2001, unpublished report.

5. Chanderi Conservation Plan. INTACH, 1985, unpublished report.

6. Priyaleen Singh, ‘Changing Attitudes to Design With Nature in the Urban Indian Context’. D.Phil, University of York, U.K., 1998, unpublished.