ABSTRACT
The need to move beyond cleavages can also be seen in the way our cities are planned. The first instinct in most cases is to cater to the lowest level of cleavage based on needs, thus giving a wide berth to the imperatives of making cities citizen friendly. Most efforts at town planning in India are aimed towards targeted citizens, but spend practically no time on how important it is to build public spaces first. This is a replay of the other targeted policies we had earlier mentioned. Once we design housing specifically for the poor without linking the inhabitants of these dwellings with the city as citizens, we end up building enclaves and gated communities. The dangers of this are well known, but time and again, this is precisely what our town planners end up doing. A well planned city is one where its residents take a certain amount of pride in living and this goes well beyond base utilitarian satisfaction. This chapter argues that it is this movement from impartial non-space to a connected notion of space that makes all the difference between a good and bad city. For this to happen, public spaces must work in tandem with public aesthetics or else an ugly structure will soon get uglier. At the end, if something is built just to satisfy a certain utility, such as mass housing, without aesthetics and an attention to public space, these units will also decay rapidly. To strengthen this point of view town planning in different parts of the world are contrasted and compared with India.
