Planned cities

Moving about in any American city is an interesting exercise, particularly for a student of architecture. Most of the cities have the typical grid iron plan, oriented along cardinal directions. The arrangement is uniform all over the place, and the nomenclature is standardised: roads running east-west are called streets & those which run north-south are called avenues.

The development along the roads, however, varies depending on whether you are in the downtown or in the outskirts of the city. However, the detailing & the extent of planning in both cases is remarkable. A lot of attention is given to matters like watering of plants, retention of the border of pathways and prevention of dust. In my entire trip I did not see a single square inch left unattended, either in the downtown or on the outskirts.

In the downtown area, buildings directly abut the streets without any margins. The roadside footpaths are paved, but a part of the area between the roads & the buildings is left entirely for lawns & trees and all this is taken care of systematically. A large area around each tree is covered with a metal grid to allow rainwater to seep through in addition to the water sprinklers. The footpaths are planned for the pedestrians & the wheelchair, so that at each junction, the footpath has a section of ramp leading to the pedestrian crossing. The crossings are demarketed on the road, and the motorists are kind enough to allow you to cross the road. Coming from Pune, where every person walking on the street is the enemy of people who drive and who are determined not to allow the pedestrains any space on the road, I felt the contrast overwhelming.
The street signage is also uniform: name of the street is posted at each crossing, and if you can read, there is no question of getting lost. Except for some very large cities like New York, there are no vendors on the streets, and you see very few people walking about. For a person like me accustomed to the chaos of the hoardings and street shops and the crowds of the Indian cities, the streets looks virtually empty.

The street scape is continuous, and most of the buildings are multi-storied, sometimes disproportionately tall with reference to the street width, so much so that you keep wondering whether they have any FSI regulations at all. I have heard that in places like Manhattan, New York City, the FSI 40.00 No wonder they go for 100 storied buildings without any setbacks at the ground. As if this covering of the ground is not enough, the buildings also span across the streets in many places. We were once travelling in Washington, where one of the main street ran for quite a distance under a huge building. This combination of the street and the buildings is unthinkable in India, with our orthodox ideas about setbacks in a city.

The picture changes dramatically once you come out of the downtown. It is all open countryside, dominated by nature. The buildings are mostly single storied, set well away from the road, so much so that if are moving about in a car, all you see is a continuous strip of well planned landscape with trees and hedges dominating the view, with just a glimpse of buildings behind. It is all picturesque. It is only when you get out of the car, and start walking, then you see the problem - there are very few people about, and the distances are overwhelming: a set-up that virtually prohibits any casual social contact. The picture is good, being part of the scenery may be frustrating at times!