Of the Best Laid Plans
Modern sanitation engineering and urban planning were borne out of the strategies adopted by many of Europe’s great cities to manage their urban crises of the 1800s. Creaking, as they were, under the pressures of overpopulation, epidemics, squalor and riots, most cities underwent a drastic spatial and infrastructure overhaul.
The Great Stink of London in the summer of 1858 led to the creation of its sewer network by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and by 1870 the duo of Baron Hausmann and Eugène Belgrand delivered Paris from its perpetual battle against coups, cholera, and congestion. Primarily involving retrofitting centralised sewerage and piped water supply to existing quarters, it also involved decongesting precincts and clearing built mass in order to improve light and ventilation and mitigate social unrest.
Worldwide, new urban developments of the 20th century followed similar principles of functionalism and rationalised engineering in their planning. The invention of the modern flush toilet and automobile converged the realms of sewage and traffic management. Roads and sewer lines were laid concurrently in rational networks for efficient flow and control of large volumes of water and traffic. India’s colonial masters applied these principles to her cities as well. City improvement urban bodies and legislations were established in most major cities by the early 1900s.
Post-Independence, the need for new state capital cities offered a huge opportunity to modernist urban planners to build greenfield road and sewage networks. The authorship of Bhubaneswar’s masterplan is credited to the German-born architect Otto Königsberger. Drafted into the job personally by Prime Minister Nehru, he eventually served in his cabinet as Director (Housing) in the Union Ministry of Health and went on to become a senior Advisor to UNESCO leading their Habitat International journal. His “Manual for Tropical Housing and Building – Climatic Design” continues to be the most referenced text on climatology in the Indian architectural curriculum.
His plan for Bhubaneswar epitomizes modernist precision and rationale. Like it’s more celebrated contemporary, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Masterplan, Königsberger’s Bhubaneswar was envisaged as city of a limited population, essentially employed in government service, with correspondingly optimised infrastructural capacities. However, India’s tryst with its urban destiny has been a tumultuous one.
The greatest tragedy of India’s urbanisation has been the dysfunctional relationship urban master-plans have with sanitation. Their lethargy in letting go of concepts of centralised controls and management have resulted in the most deplorable living conditions for the urban poor. Today, most Indian urban master-plans not only fail to serve the needs of a majority of their populace but do them the grave injustice of disenfranchising their access to basic civic services.
Eventually his experiences in city making in Asia, Africa and Latin America made Königsberger radically revise his perceptions of modernist master-planning methodologies for low income cities. He critiqued them as being static conceptualisations for land-rich finite populations incapable of catering to the burgeoning populations, soaring aspirations, and rapidly reducing resources. He became an advocate of a more responsive community-based approach he called “Action Planning”.
In his obituary to Otto Königsberger, published in the Guardian on 26th January 1999 under the title “Cities of Light from Slums of Darkness”, Paul Wakely quotes Königsberger’s letter to a colleague: “The longer I did planning work in India, the firmer became my conviction that master-plans and reports are not enough. It is necessary to create a live organisation, preferably, anchored in the structure of local government, which constantly deals with planning problems and keeps the basic conception of the plan alive.”
Perhaps Project Samman may eventually play a small role in redeeming Königsberger’s city for its inhabitants.