PEDESTRIANISATION AND THE INDIAN CITY

Traffic Calming Pondy Bazaar, Chennai

Indian cities are famous the world over for a host of different reasons. One of them is certainly their unique urban street life. This picture of the quintessential Indian commercial street is changing however before our eyes on many different levels. The adverse effects of growth on the live-ability of city centers with a finely grained urban fabric one can experience in Indian cities every day.

With a building frenzy of elevated roads, fly-overs, foot-over-bridges and skywalks in cities across the country, it’s clear that most city governments are prioritizing a drastic increase of road capacity and the creation of a spatial separation between motorized traffic and pedestrians.  This is being achieved by lifting either the motorized traffic or the pedestrians up into the air. Instead of indiscriminately paving the way for motorized traffic with flyovers and skywalks, the time is right for India’s urban authorities to start adopting alternative planning scenarios with a focus on pedestrianisation and traffic calming along with investment in mass transit systems to reduce car dependency.

A good example is the large scale pedestrianisation project that is being planned in the heart of Chennai, around the overburdened public space within the commercial district of Thyagaraya Nagar (T Nagar). At the core of the interconnected redevelopment proposals lies the desire to create a network of pedestrian friendly streets which keep motorized traffic out as much as possible. Major shopping streets are proposed as a continuous car-free spine through the heart of the pedestrian-friendly zone. Other streets in the pedestrian-friendly zone will be transformed into ‘traffic-calmed streets’, with no on-street parking allowed for non-residents, and with restricted vehicular traffic on a narrow segmented area of the road.

To face the growing competition of suburban malls head-on, it’s important for India’s inner cities to invest in the quality of their Public Space by building upon their ‘Unique Selling Points’. Every suburb and township is capable of building a host of new shopping malls, but they will never attain the set of unique historical, cultural and socio-economic characteristics as evidenced in the urban centres and which have developed organically over many years.




Pedestrianisation Pondy Bazaar, Chennai

        

The text above is a summary of the Article “Pedestrianisation and the Indian City” written by Steven Beunder, Associate Master Planner at Townland Consultants. The full length article will be published in the Indian magazine Architecture + Design in August 2011.

 

 

Usman Road, Chennai

 
 



Photomontage Usman Road, Chennai