ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the planning and long-term development of Jawahar Nagar, a neighborhood built in the city of Jaipur during the 1970s. Like many planned neighborhoods in Indian cities, the plan of Jawahar Nagar follows the tenets of the “neighborhood unit” concept. New York planner Clarence Perry conceived of the neighborhood unit in the 1920s as a comprehensive physical planning tool for designing self-contained residential neighborhoods. It specifies four basic design elements: civic institutions (especially a school and a community center), parks and playgrounds, convenience stores, and a hierarchal configuration of streets providing safe pedestrian access to all public facilities. Perry (1929) also outlined six principles that describe and clarify the relationship between design elements and details such as the size of unit, organization of open spaces, shops, and institutions. Originally conceived of as a remedy for the perceived ills in American cities, the concept became a stock planning item in the post-war United States and traveled to many countries including China, Britain, and India (Silver 1985; Lu 2006; Vidyarthi 2010a).
