Panel Discussion - Then & Now: Stimulating Urban Life

Considering the long history of urban life on earth, the private car is a relatively new mode of transport. It shapes and changes urban life and urban design dramatically. It enables us to separate various functions within urban agglomerations from each other. Examples show that this extreme specialization of single uses within a city/region leads often to mono functional patterns such as residential, industrial, business cities and others. All those highly specialized elements mostly serve only one main use. Mono functional structures destroy the overall inclusive idea of cities. They cause a huge amount of traffic and high costs for infrastructure and segregate the citizens. Ancient cities in India and elsewhere displayed a high mix of uses. The place of residence was likely to be close to the place of work. And even today's vernacular urbanism mostly in non-authorized urban settlements within Indian cities is showcasing this positive aspect of urban design. The NUA promotes the very same idea of a city that is easy accessible by all citizens and that offers a high quality standard of public spaces for human beings. Various modern urban design approaches promote a similar mind set: 'The walkable City', 'The 20-minute-City' or 'The Slow City' are only some examples. In India we observe that often a sectoral or thematic divide fosters segregating tendencies in urban development. An overall cross-sectoral spatial planning is often weak. This causes mono functional structures or conflicts of uses. Nevertheless, urban life in India is still a huge engine for human interaction, innovation and experiments.

FOCUS

-Importance of cross sectoral coordination for urban planning.

-Showing the concrete and visible positive effects of a robust multiscale spatial governance system.

-Formulating the demand for possible future interventions in this context of improved spatial governance.