APSA conference and Gandhinagar presentation

CEPT just hosted the biennial Asian Planning Schools Association (APSA) conference from Nov. 24th-26th. Nihal had suggested I present something, so I submitted an abstract about my research thus far on Gandhinagar.

I didn't realize how big of a conference it was going to be; there were a lot of international planners there. CEPT actually extended its semester to allow students to take time off to help with the conference. They set up several big tents in the cricket fields next to CEPT's campus and put down big mats on the ground for the whole event.

For the break-out sessions in the conference, there were several panel themes - sustainability was a big topic, also housing, infrastructure, planning education, and maintaining modern and traditional (which I presented under).

One of the most interesting presentations for me was Tridib Banerjee's keynote; he teaches at University of Southern California. He spoke about politics of space, spoke briefly on gender on space, and on how to define public/private space. His presentation noted some of the interesting uses of space that I have been noticing in India like the many informal, small temples on the road side. He also brought up an interesting point on how public space can become private and vice versa because of technology. People can be in a public plaza but having very private conversations through the internet on their laptops. At the same time, private spaces like your house, can become public when speaking on online forums or doing teleconferencing.

There was also an interesting discussion on a UNESCO presentation. We were questioning how to define what to preserve and whose heritage they were preserving. Is it only the heritage of the upper class and only monuments, and is this relevant? Are they upper class interested in preserving their 'heritage' which happens to be the old city where people are still living, often poorer people and how will the preservation affect them? Should they only be preserving monuments or are there other ways/things to preserve. Is there a way to preserve a living heritage? I brought up the example of Konark Sun temple. It is a UNESCO site, but it is not a living heritage because the temple is no longer used. There are no longer idols in the temple, and it is no longer used for its original purpose. Is there a way to preserve these places and also allow people to still use these spaces more spontaneously rather than just as a museum and to acknowledge that the use of a space can change over time? But by gating them and charging an admission, you omit lower classes being able to use these spaces. So it was a very interesting discussion.

The conference was a really good opportunity to meet a lot of other planners, so I really enjoyed meeting a lot of people. I wasn't so happy with the way my presentation went, however. I was the last presenter in a panel of 5, so we each were supposed to have 15 minutes to present. However a sixth presenter was added at the last minute, and the earlier presenters took up more time than they were supposed to, so I had maybe 10 minutes to present. I presented under the Modern and traditional theme. Most moderators of panels simply helped engage discussion at the end of the presentations. However our moderator decided it was his duty to say which presentations were relevant or not which I don't think was his role at all. Apparently mine was not relevant to the theme... and because I said at the beginning that mine was a work in progress, the moderator thought it wasn't yet worth commenting on. He also chewed out a masters thesis student who presented his work who had unfortunately presented on an area that the moderator was quite familiar with.

But anyway in my presentation, I talked about the similarities and differences between the two cities. Both cities were planned as purely administrative, post independence capital cities and both separated land use functions into zones. The neighborhood unit was the central building block for the plans of both, and both had and 4 level hierarchy of commercial development. Some of the differences are the locations of different land uses in each city; the location of the capital complexes and industrial areas are especially different. Also the size of the neighborhood unit was reduced in Gandhinagar; the large size of the unit had been criticized a lot in Chandigarh. Also the layout of the capital complex - while Ravi Kalia, the author of the main book on Gandhinagar, says its capital complex is a complete failure, I completely disagree. I think it is much more successful than Chandigarh's because it is better incorporated into the city. It is highly visible and all the roads draw vehicles in towards it. The design creates a vista and entry with a wide street separated by a nicely maintained linear park while Chandigarh's capital complex is difficult to locate, is very out-of-the-way, and its famous Corbusier buildings are not even visible from the street. One of the biggest differences is citizens' perceptions of the cities. While people are proud of Chandigarh, people don't want to live in Gandhinagar.