ABSTRACT
The beginnings of modern planning and Patrick Geddes With the decision to shift the capital of colonial India from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, urban planning became a prominent area of debate and discussion in planning societies and journals throughout the western world. Because of this project, other urban centres in colonial India – willingly or not – came under the radar of urban planners, and the discourse of modern planning expanded to accommodate many Indian towns and cities. The colonies had always attracted and provided opportunities for all kinds of technical experts from Britain. Consequently a whole band of architects, engineers and town planners (their work usually overlapped) were to make a name for themselves throughout the British empire by laying down a common thread of concerns and attitudes towards urban problems in the colonies. In the words of historian R.K. Home, town planning became part of the ‘currency of progressive paternalistic ideas circulating in the British Empire in the 20th century’ (Home 1990: 27). Examples include E.P. Richards, who worked in Calcutta and Singapore, A.E. Mirams in Bombay and Uganda, Herbert Baker in Delhi and Johannesburg, and Patrick Geddes all over India and in Colombo and Palestine. Western planning models, indeed the western experience of urbanisation, was seen by some of these planners as the only available model for modernisation. It was because of these itinerant individuals that western urbanism was extended to the colonies and in some cases gained a new lease of life. The work of Geddes is particularly important because he represented a considered and very articulate dissent from this conventional planning wisdom. By the early twentieth century colonial metropolises presented a picture of great urban squalor which needed urgent attention. The rapid growth of factorybased industry (particularly in Bombay and Calcutta) had given a fillip to migration into the cities, and the concomitant problems of overcrowding and lack of sanitation became particularly acute during epidemics such as the plague (1896). The colonial governments were particularly concerned with shielding cantonments and towns with significant European populations from disease, and responded by intervening decisively in built-up areas, demolishing old buildings and slums, quarantining the sick and setting up vigilance operations to discipline
and regulate the population. Thus modern planning in India had its roots in nineteenth-century pandemics.1 One outcome of this was that the relationship between bodies and spaces came to be intensely investigated and the management of spaces in the city became an important part of urban policy. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the town planning movement gathered momentum with the emergence of the professional town planner, the publication of journals and the proliferation of professional associations, pressure groups and lobbyists for town planning. In India the marriage of extant urban policy to town planning ideas soon took concrete form with the setting up of Improvement Trusts after the plague, most prominently in Bombay (1898) and Calcutta (1911), as well as in numerous other cities in later decades. The importance of these Trusts lay in the normative standards for ‘improvement’ that they developed. Planning, as Christian Topalov has perceptively pointed out, had a larger reformist agenda: changing cities meant changing people, and this in turn meant changing society itself (Topalov 1990). By and large, in the hands of bureaucratic practitioners ‘improvement’ was often procrustean in nature. One objective was sanitising public places in the city, but with epidemics showing no signs of abatement, the colonial state forcibly entered the Indian home, making a bid to set sanitary standards for private and domestic spaces too. Not surprisingly, the sanitary reach and goals of the state often clashed with communitarian norms: sanitation and hygiene did not dovetail easily with traditional Indian notions of purity and pollution. Regulation of domestic practices thus remained a contentious issue, and the populace refused to follow modern sanitary standards in daily life or practise them in public spaces. In colonial India, the initiatives of the state in this sphere were complicated by its alien status, its inherent racism and class inhibitions. Even Indian nationalists who supported planning as a progressive move were quick to point out that the colonial state openly favoured European neighbourhoods at the cost of Indian localities. With the people reluctant to assent, spatial planning and restructuring in the city took on the character of violent coercion. Commercial and business imperatives often justified these measures as inevitable, which in effect meant unleashing class violence on the poor living in slums. The slum populace was easy to attack since they were squatters with no legal title to land and at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords. Colonial town planners, irrespective of needs, mechanically implemented the Haussmannian model of restructuring, which meant cutting broad swathes of roads, usually rectilinears and diagonals, on the face of the city for efficient traffic circulation. The influence of nineteenth-century English sanitary and bye-law regulations also played a decisive part. Not all practitioners of town planning were mechanical and unthinking in their approach. Haussmann’s model of city improvement provoked contrary views. His work was criticised by contemporaries such as Camillo Sitte (1889), whose championing of non-geometric forms challenged mechanical conceptions of design and the tyranny of the straight line (Goodfriend 1982; Schroske 1981), and by Ebenezer Howard (1898), whose garden cities brought into question the
very usefulness of sustaining expanding conglomerations with improved utilities. Similarly, the influential architect Raymond Unwin (early 1900s; he had previously designed Hampstead Garden Suburb in London) campaigned against the mechanical implementation of bye-law streets (Evenson 1979: 22-23, 265, 1989: 124). These thinkers were responsible for pointing out the perils of unabashed industrialism. In India, too, there were rumblings of discontent with official policy. J.M. Linton Bogle, who wrote a pioneering book on town planning, made an implicit criticism of colonialism and how political power determined space when he wrote the following, about Allahabad: ‘is there any good reason why the occupants of Civil Lines should have enormous compounds of six to eight bighas – far more than they want – while the houses in the city are packed together like sheep in a pen?’ (Linton Bogle 1929: 8). Similarly, another contemporary planner, H.V. Lanchester, wrote retrospectively on the problems of ‘cutting straight roads through the more congested areas, regardless of the groupings of those displaced’ (Lanchester 1942: 119).2
