Urban Design and Development

Sujeet S. Thakare Urban Design & Planning Walk to the railway fence. The neighbourhood continues on the map. On the ground it stops. Children who share a school catchment in the ward file take a foot-over-bridge that climbs two storeys, or they wait for a gap that never legally arrives. The nullah has been “trained” into an RCC channel; its banks are now blank walls. The elevated metro casts a long pier shadow down the arterial. Each project sheet celebrates connectivity—tracks, trains, drains, flyovers. Each edge quietly deletes the short walk that once stitched two sides of the same city. FACT: Kevin Lynch, in The Image of the City (1960), names edges among five elements of urban imageability—paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Edges are linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, walls, developed edges that may be barriers or seams. FACT: Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, Chapter 14), diagnoses border vacuums —railroad ...

Sujeet S. Thakare Urban Design & Planning Open a masterplan for a new sector, a TOD pocket or a redeveloped housing compound. Arterials are thick. Collectors loop. The legend promises “connectivity.” Then walk the same ground. Mid-block choice is gone. The gali that once cut through has become a boom gate. The podium parking plate has sealed the ground. Desire lines bounce along a compound wall for hundreds of metres. The drawing was connected. The foot was not. FACT: Ian Bentley, Alan Alcock, Paul Murrain, Sue McGlynn and Graham Smith, in Responsive Environments (1985), define permeability as the number of alternative ways through an environment. Only places accessible to people can offer choice; smaller blocks increase both physical route options and visual awareness of those options at junctions. FACT: Jane Jacobs (1961), in the chapter on the need for short blocks, argues that frequent corners multiply cross-use and keep walkers from being trapped on long impermeable fr...

Sujeet S. Thakare Urban Design & Planning Walk from a house courtyard into a shared gali, pause at a neighbourhood chowk, then step onto a city street that still feels like a room. That walk is not nostalgia. It is a spatial hierarchy —a nested gradient of outdoor rooms from private to public. Humane Indian fabric once held that gradient with courts, galis, pols and mohallas, soft thresholds and local nodes. Much contemporary redevelopment deletes the middle. What remains is a sealed private capsule facing leftover open space or a highway-scaled public corridor. Drawings still show “open.” The city no longer inherits a readable sequence of belonging. FACT: Oscar Newman’s defensible-space work defines residential outdoor space as a territorial hierarchy—private, semiprivate, semipublic and public—arguing that clear boundaries and progressive resident responsibility support surveillance and control of near-home ground ( Defensible Space ; restated in Creating Defensible Space , 1...

Sujeet S. Thakare Urban Design & Planning Walk a pol lane that still joins a bazaar spine, then walk a redeveloped mega-plot that meets the same arterial only at a gated mouth. Both may sit inside the same ward colour on a master plan. Only one still behaves as a place where movement and choice are legible: where a walker can read which lines gather life, which intersections demand a pause, and which alleys connect sideways instead of dead-ending into a compound wall. The difference is not merely “traditional versus modern.” It is configurational. Streets are not only channels for traffic counts; they are a graph of accessibility and through-routes. When that graph is intact, shops, shade and stay find their densest homes along the integrated lines. When the graph is severed—by amalgamation, gating, or cul-de-sac trees—the city can still look dense on figure-ground and feel empty of choice. FACT: Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson (1984), in The Social Logic of Space , establishe...

Setbacks Without Life: Diagnosing Dead Front Strips in Indian Plot Rules Sujeet S. Thakare Urban Design & Planning Walk a street that once held a continuous plinth, otla or shopfront—and then walk the same typology after a Development Control rebuild. The newer plot often “complies”: front setback as drawn, side margins clear, parking arithmetic satisfied, compound wall at the property line. Yet the street edge feels thinner. Between kerb and façade sits a residual strip—hard apron, parked cars, blank wall—that is neither a public outdoor room nor a usable soft private forecourt. Drawings still claim open space. The street no longer inherits a living edge. FACT: The Ministry of Urban Development / Town and Country Planning Organisation Model Building Bye-Laws, 2016 (MBBL) treat setbacks as legal instruments: a set-back line beyond which construction toward the plot boundary is restricted, and exterior open spaces scaled with building height for identified multi-storey cases (T...