Post on 09-Oct-2020
About Centre for Urban Equity (CUE)
CUE was established at CEPT University in 2009, evolving from the Urban Poverty
Alleviation (UPA) Cell established in 2008. CUE advocates a human-centered and equitable
urban development paradigm. CUE undertakes research and advocacy; conducts training and
capacity-building; imparts education; and networks with stakeholders on various aspects of
human settlements with a focus on urban equity.
Contact
Centre for Urban Equity (CUE)
CEPT University
Kasturbhai Lalbhai Campus
University Road, Navrangpura
Ahmedabad - 380009, India
Email: cue@cept.ac.in
Website: www.cept.ac.in/cue
Centre for Urban Equity 2015
ii
Abstract
Urbanization poses enormous challenges including disparities that cause insecurities and
conflicts. Urban policies, planning, design and governance in the interconnected domains of
land and housing, spaces for livelihood, basic services and amenities, transport, public spaces
and streets can play a significant role in reducing insecurities and conflicts and creating safe
and inclusive cities. This course placed its focus on the street from this perspective. Streets in
Indian cities are increasingly being seen as spaces for rapid unrestrained movement rather
than providing access, fostering activities and nurturing sustainable environment. With rising
incomes and vehicular ownership, automobiles have replaced people as the central point of
street design. In fact, „model roads‟ made by the city government in Ahmedabad exclude
street activities like vending which has led to everyday struggles amongst vendors. Bus bays,
segregated cycling lanes and footpaths are usually limited to being shown in computer
generated renderings. Enabling facilities for vulnerable groups like children, elderly and the
differently-abled also seem to have escaped the consideration of planners and designers.
Increasing cases of on-street violence against women like chain-snatching and harassment are
partly linked to land use and street design. The street has become a venue for conflicts
between various stakeholder groups that lay claim to the „right to the street‟. This course,
conceived by the Centre for Urban Equity and jointly developed and offered in collaboration
with the Centre for Green Mobility as part of CEPT University Winter School 2014, aimed to
encourage students to understand such exclusions and conflicts through the study of
Ahmedabad streets, and to propose design, policy, legislation and governance-based
interventions to address them. This report describes the objectives and structure of the course
as well as the larger debates surrounding the use and experience of Indian streets that the
students were exposed to as part of the course. The students‟ output, exhibited at CEPT
University Open House 2014, is also presented in this report.
iii
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Mr. Anuj Malhotra and Ms. Ruchita Shah from the Centre for Green
Mobility (CGM), Ahmedabad, for collaborating with us in developing and offering this
course. Their contributions were crucial towards realizing the objectives of this course.
iv
Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgement ................................................................................................................................. iii
1. Introducing the course ....................................................................................................................... 1
2. Course objectives and structure ......................................................................................................... 3
3. Whose street is it? .............................................................................................................................. 3
4. Legality and legitimacy ..................................................................................................................... 5
5. Design as the solution ........................................................................................................................ 6
6. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 7
Appendix ................................................................................................................................................. 8
Sheets exhibited at CEPT University Open House 2014 ........................................................................ 8
List of readings ..................................................................................................................................... 15
Checklist for street audit ....................................................................................................................... 17
1
1. Introducing the course
The „Planning and Designing Streets for Safe and Inclusive Cities‟ course was offered as part
of the CEPT University‟s Winter School 2014. The course was a result of a collaboration
between the Centre for Urban Equity (CUE) and Centre for Green Mobility (CGM), an
Ahmedabad-based non-profit with interests in promoting Non-Motorized Transport (NMT)
modes. The course had the aim of engaging students with questions around safe and inclusive
streets versus insecure and exclusionary streets, and initiating studio-based learning on the
elements and processes of planning and design that can make streets safe and inclusive.
Streets are important in multiple ways and are central to the city‟s planning and design. The
street plays a central role in providing connectivity between different parts of the city; in
enhancing mobility and providing access to opportunities that the city has to offer; in offering
a public space to be in for leisure, social interaction, livelihood, etc; and in creating a better
relationship of the city and its inhabitants with the environment. Streets also play a role in
creating safe urban environments. Streets are thus central to the daily social and economic
lives of city inhabitants as well as important from the sustainability perspective.
However, planners, engineers, architects, urban designers often fail to understand the street
from these multiple perspectives and do not have the planning and design tools and skills to
create better streets. This is why recent interventions have often been focused on providing
streets (roads) only for connectivity – additionally, these interventions have been focused on
motorized vehicles, increasingly the private motor vehicle and especially the car (for their
efficient movement and parking), and more recently for public transport. However, only one
in ten Indians owns a motorized vehicle (four-wheelers and two-wheelers)1, although that
figure has grown at a CAGR of 16.4 percent over the period 2001-2011. Such rapid
motorization is bound to have disastrous outcomes in terms of social, economic and
environmental sustainability.
Public transport interventions are desirable, however, in view of the recommendations of the
National Urban Transport Policy, 2006 the BRTS was supposed to also integrate footpaths
and even bicycle tracks (i.e. non-motorized transport) but these spaces remain non-functional
on the ground in cities like Ahmedabad. As a result, pedestrians and cyclists have been
marginalized on many of the newly designed streets. Recent interventions have also failed to
integrate other activities on the street such as leisure and loitering, social interaction, and
livelihood activities. Actually, the two are also often interconnected – the pedestrian‟s
experience of a street can often be enriched and made safer by the use of the street for these
other activities. Instead, we often hear about conflicts between pedestrians and street vendors.
This can be attributed to elite, increasingly sanitized attitudes towards public space as well as
less space given to both and lack of or improper design and governance to accommodate
both.
In light of these recent interventions and ongoing conflicts, planners, engineers, architects
and urban designers, will have to engage with the question of whether and how it might be
1 2013 data retrieved from MoSPI‟s webpage http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/upload/SYB2013/ch20.html.
2
possible to accommodate the different roles that a street plays in the life of a city and its
inhabitants. Is it inevitable that there will be competing claims to street space and some
activities and uses will have to be accommodated more than others? How can planning and
design play a role in facilitating the street‟s use for multiple purposes – and also multiple
groups (class, age, gender, etc)? At a broad level, this exercise was an attempt to introduce
the students to the wider debates on who the streets are for. It provided them an opportunity
to look at the street as a microcosm of the city. This exercise encouraged the students to look
at the street not merely as part of a road network that helps people travel from point A to
point B, but also as a venue for a host of other important activities (discussed before) in the
lives of the people who inhabit the street and beyond. By the end of the exercise, the students
were expected to arrive at a design solution that is inclusive. For the purpose of this exercise,
a stretch of the Kasturba Gandhi Road (http://goo.gl/7mhZDi) was chosen.
Map 1: The Gandhi Bridge-Dilli Darwaza stretch on Kasturba Gandhi Road
The Kasturba Gandhi road is an important arterial road of the city and is an important
connection between areas in West Ahmedabad and Kalupur and beyond. Besides, there is an
interesting mix of land use on its sides. Residential, commercial and industrial (on a relatively
small-scale) land use can be found on its either sides. These activities attract a steady stream
of pedestrians and cyclists all through the day. Not unlike most other streets in the city, it also
provides livelihood opportunities to a variety of street vendors dealing in goods like clothes,
vegetables and eatables at various times of the day. The traffic on this stretch is heavy owing
to its arterial character and poses great risk to all these „other‟ users of the street, especially in
the absence of enabling infrastructure like footpaths and segregated cycleways. Overall, it
was felt that this stretch would be interesting sites for the students to explore the questions
posed by this course and arrive at possible design solutions that recognize the variety of user
groups and respect their right to the street.
N
3
2. Course objectives and structure
CUE and CGM structured the three week long course around three significant learning
outcomes. These included appreciation of the street as a significant part of the public realm
vis-a-vis its importance in the lives of the various people using it as a venue for various
activities such as vending, seeking work, shopping and loitering / recreation. For this
purpose, discussions were organized with advocacy groups and people working with various
stakeholders. A discussion was also organized with the traffic police administration to
introduce students to their perspective as well. The second objective was to make the students
aware of the legal provisions that encourage the use of streets for purposes other than
vehicular movement. This was achieved through review of relevant literature followed by
classroom-based discussion. Finally, a third objective was to sensitize the students to various
user groups and their requirements as part of the street re-design exercise. For this purpose, a
classroom-based envisioning exercise was undertaken with students being encouraged to play
the role of various street stakeholders. This was followed by negotiations between various
stakeholder groups in order to arrive at a street cross-section. Table 1 shows the course
structure created to achieve these learning outcomes.
Table 1: Course structure
Week 1 (December 1-7) Week 2(December 8-14) Week 3(December 15-21)
Introducing the course and logistics Studio work - analysis Studio work - design proposals
Site visits Table-top review Review of work
Readings and discussion: Readings and discussion: Open house
a) National Urban Transport Policy,
2006
a) Non-motorised Transport related
literature
b) Other relevant literature b) Street Vending Act, 2014
Interaction with: c) Other relevant literature
a) Street vendors Envisioning exercise
b) Construction naka workers Review of strategies and concepts
c) Planner and researcher on urban
mobility
d) Traffic police
The course was taken by a mixed group of undergraduate and postgraduate students of
architecture, planning and technology at CEPT University. It was expected that their varied
skill sets would positively contribute to the success of the course.
3. Whose street is it?
A significant argument presented as part of the course was that the street belongs to all user
groups as against only the motorized traffic that has come to dominate Indian streets. This
domination has come at the expense of other vulnerable users such as the young, elderly,
women and differently-abled. The students were encouraged to undertake an exploratory site
visit on the first and second days and record – through photographs and videos – how these
4
users went around doing their business on the streets and the role of different elements of the
street in facilitating / discouraging this. The students brought back their first experiences with
the street and discussed them amongst themselves and with the instructors.After the two
exploratory visits, the students were encouraged to undertake more site-visits to do
systematic mapping, interviews, and street audits (refer to the checklist in the appendix), to
understand the street comprehensively.These visits were planned at various times of the day
to capture the temporal nature of the use of streets by various user groups. Some of the details
that were captured as part of the exercise were footpath obstructions (like pot holes,
discontinuity, building entry, light poles, electric power transformer etc), vending spaces,
parking, carriage way, pedestrian movement, cyclist movement, traffic volume(counts), land
use, building heights, signage, trees, public toilets, street infrastructure (seating, dustbins,
street lights), safe and unsafe locations, accident spots etc. This exercise was followed by
classroom discussion on the students‟ first impressions about their experience with the street.
They were encouraged to reflect on what worked and what did not as also the reasons behind
the observed behavior.
Image 1: Discussion with construction naka workers facilitated by Ms.Preeti Oza of
Prayas CLRA
Writings by academics (Anjaria, Edensor) and activists (Narain, Vishwanath) were given to
students to present them with different perspectives on the street (see appendix for the course
readings). Interactions were organized with a few women street-vendor members of the
labour union Self Employed Women‟s Association (SEWA), a representative of Prayas Centre
for Labour Research and Action (CLRA) and a few construction naka workers2 (Image 1), a
planner and researcher on urban mobility and Assistant Commissioner of Police (Traffic)
Ahmedabad.Students also raised questions to the guests, and we found that these interactions
often unsettled their beliefs about the legitimate uses of the street, opening a space for them
2 Construction naka workers refer to construction workers who gather at selected nakas, that is,
streets/crossroads which serve as informal labour markets.
5
to start reflecting on whose street is it and the role of planning and design in shaping this.
These discussions also helped orient the students to the requirements and views of various
users of the street.
4. Legality and legitimacy
A common feature with regard to any discussion on the use of the street in India is the
legality of use. Legality is often used to exclude certain user groups – vendors being the most
prominent – from carrying out their activities on the street. At the same time, other users such
as cars and two-wheelers have consolidated themselves as the major users of the streets.
There have been well-meaning initiatives from the state in the form of the National Urban
Transport Policy (NUTP), 2006 and Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation
of Street Vending) Act, 2014. The NUTP, 2006 among other things encourages the provision
of infrastructure for NMT modes with a view to arrest the high rates of motorization. It
recognizes the multiplicity of transport modes on the streets and calls for a more equitable
distribution of street space amongst them. Similarly, the Street Vendors Act, 2014 imparts
legal status to street vending activities, albeit in pre-designated vending zones. It also talks
about issuing vending licenses to street vendors so that they are spared from unnecessary
harassment from the executive wing of the government. The students were introduced to the
debates surrounding legality and illegality through discussions (Image 2).They were
encouraged to understand and discuss the arguments presented in the writings of scholars and
activists to engage with the debates around legality and societal control surrounding the use
of streets by vendors, women and other groups.
Image 2: Discussion on the importance of provision of infrastructure for NMT
The discussions helped the students come face-to-face with their conceptions of who the
legitimate user of the street is. It also gave them a chance to reflect on their own experiences
of using the street as a pedestrian or a cyclist. This was evident in the manner in which
6
students came to argue over issues of accessibility to local parks, children‟s ability to reach
their school across the streets as well as illegal parking as a menace that needs to be tamed.
5. Design as the solution
Given the inequitable distribution of road space between various user groups, the instructors
facilitated an envisioning exercise where the students were asked to re-imagine the street and
frame a suitable vision statement. The students were to imagine themselves as representatives
of various user groups and propose what amount of the street‟s cross section they would
ideally like to consume. Given that the four major user groups had their obvious
disagreements, the faculty stepped in and facilitated a negotiation between them while
ultimately arriving at a final design. The street cross-sections proposed by various user
groups and the negotiated final design are captured in Table 2 below. These were to be
realized using a combination of physical design and policy.
Table 2: A summary of the street design exercise undertaken as part of the course
Elements of the
street
Space demanded by stakeholders (m)
Bus Vendors Traffic NMT Negotiated
final
Footpath 2.5 5.0 2.0 6.0 2.5
Carriageway 7.0 10.0 9.5 9.0 7.0
Median 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
Bus lane 3.5 - 3.5 - -
Multi-utility lane 2.0 - - - 3.0
Cyclists - - - 2.5 2.5
Total 15.5 15.5 15.5 15.5 15.5
Once the street section was finalized, students went on to prepare a master plan for the street
and junction redesign for the conflict-ridden Delhi Darwaza junction. The Delhi Darwaza
junction redesign exercise made use of new, shorter signal cycles and better segregation of
traffic to resolve congestion at the junction, especially during peak hours. With regards to the
street design over the selected stretch, the students decided that they would not provide a
dedicated bus lane but would provide dedicated footpaths and cycle-tracks of 2.5 metre width
as also a multi-utility lane of 3 metre width that would accommodate vending, loitering and
recreational activities. Some of the existing - yet discontinuous and isolated - recreational
infrastructure like parks was proposed to be combined with the pedestrian spaces so as to
make them appear inviting, functional and safer. These proposals were presented to the
Assistant Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Shri Rajdeepsinh Jhala on the day of the final
jury. The entire exercise was exhibited at the CEPT University Open House which marks the
end of the Winter School (Image 3).
7
Image 3: Sheets displayed at the CEPT University Open House
6. Conclusion
This course was offered with the aim of achieving three objectives. These included
appreciation of the multiple-use characteristics of the Indian street, awareness on the legal
provisions that facilitate or hinder such use and sensitizing the students to various user groups
and their requirements .It appears that as a result of exposure to various user groups and
literature followed by classroom discussions, the students were able to realize that the streets
were meant for more than vehicular movement. However, this realization may not have been
reflected adequately in their design proposals. This was partly due to the background of the
student group in terms of their diverse yet limited skill-sets. We also realized that making
students truly imbibe radically expansive notions about the legitimate and desirable users and
activities on the street and then approaching planning and design from this perspective is
quite a challenge, especially in a short course like this. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the
students will be able to use this experience and positively intervene in their respective areas
of work.
8
Appendix
Sheets exhibited at CEPT University Open House 2014
9
Sheet 1: The Street and its location in the context of the city
10
Sheet 2: Focus on the street as experienced by various stakeholders
11
Sheet 3: Focus on the street as experienced by various stakeholders (contd.)
12
Sheet 4: Focus on the state of infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists
13
Sheet 5: Vision statement and master plan for the street
14
Sheet 6: Junction design and traffic management proposals
15
List of readings
1. Edensor, T. (1998). The Culture of the Indian Street. In N. R. Fyfe, ed. Pictures of the
street: Planning, identity and control in public space. Routledge: London, pp. 205–221.
2. Anjaria, J.S. (2012). Is there a culture of Indian streets? Seminar, 636(August).
3. Viswanath, K. and Mehrotra, S.T. (2007). “Shall We Go Out?.” Economic and Political
Weekly. [online]. Available from: http://www.epw.in/review-womens-studies/shall-we-
go-out.html [Accessed November 24, 2014].
4. Narain, S. (2013). Come out and claim the road | Business Standard. [online]. Available
from: http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/sunita-narain-come-out-and-
claim-the-road-113111000632_1.html [Accessed January 31, 2014].
5. Narain, S. (2013). Pedestrian questions. Down To Earth. [online]. Available
from: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/pedestrian-questions [Accessed January 27,
2014].
6. Badami, M.G. (2009). Urban Transport Policy as if People and the Environment
Mattered. Economic and Political Weekly, xliv(33), pp.43–51. [online]. Available
from: http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2009_44/33/Urban_Transport_Policy_as_if_Pe
ople_and_the_Environment_Mattered_Pedestrian_Accessibility_the_First_Step.pdf.
7. Viswanath, K. (2013). Planning cities as if women matter. Seminar. [online]. Available
from: http://www.india-seminar.com/2013/648/648_kalpana_viswanath.htm [Accessed
November 24, 2014].
8. Litman, T.A. (2011). Economic Value of Walkability. , 10(1), pp.3–11. [online]. Available
from: http://www.vtpi.org/walkability.pdf.
9. Leather, J. et al. (2011). Walkability and Pedestrian Facilities in Asian Cities. [online].
Available
from: http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Walkability_Final_Report_15Oct2010.pd
f.
10. Bhowmik, S.K. (2005). Street Vendors in Asia: A Review. In Economic and Political
Weekly. [online]. Available from: http://www.epw.in/review-labour/street-vendors-asia-
review.html [Accessed November 24, 2014].
11. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act,
2014
12. Ahmedabad Street Vending Scheme, 2010
13. Ranade, S. (2007). The Way She Moves. Economic and Political Weekly, XLII(17),
pp.1519–1526. [online]. Available from: http://www.epw.in/review-womens-studies/way-
she-moves.html [Accessed November 22, 2014].
16
14. Jagori. (2007). Is This Our City: Mapping Safety for Women in Delhi. New Delhi.
[online]. Available from: http://jagori.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/is-this-our-
city.pdf.
15. CAI-Asia Center, Shakti Foundation and Samarthyam. (2012). WalkAbility Audit
Reports. Pasig City, Philippines. [online]. Available
from: http://www.transport.wa.gov.au/mediaFiles/active-
transport/AT_WALK_P_Walkability_Audit_Tool.pdf.
16. MoUD. (2006). National Urban Transport Policy. New Delhi.
17. ITDP and EPC. (2011). Better streets, better cities: A guide to street design in urban
India. Ahmedabad.
18. UTTIPEC. (2009). Street Design Guidelines. New Delhi.
19. MoUD and ADB. (2008). Module 5: Guidelines for Non-Motorised Transport Measures.
New Delhi.
17
Checklist for street audit
18
19