Urbanism.

Urbanism has always been an integral part of our development. After the industrial revolution, cities became the primary focus of our urban fabric. Dense settlements (mostly the workers) developed around the industries. Neighborhoods were mostly mixed use and walkable. Public transit was mostly the popular mode of commute. But with the urbanization, the industries grew stronger. Great deal of pollution occurred. Health hazards were overlooked. Communities grew denser, quality of life begin to deturate, and with the invention of a car, the focus then shifted to the suburbs. We began living far away from the polluted and crowded cities and started commuting tremendous stretches between our work and home. Our automobile became an integral part of our life style and our built environment. We thought we found answers to our solutions by keeping our residential developments segregated from our industrial and commercial development.

However, our life was not going to be that easy. Soon we began to learn the cost of suburbanization the hard way. Our new life style and the increased use of automobile (and all of our work and non-work auto commute), gave rise to more grave issues such as urban decay, traffic congestions, monoculture, soaring green house gas emission, global warming etc, which are now posing greatest threat to our own future. I think we have come to a full circle. Today we seem to be reviving old values of urbanism once again. Increased densities, walkable neighborhoods, community open spaces, mixed income housing, mixed uses, transit oriented development, multi-modal transit and increased transit ridership, are the concepts we are trying to imply to reduce our auto dependency and reduce our carbon footprint. This can also help add visual, cultural, social diversity to our urban fabric, and also to bring down our cities to the human scale. This will no doubt help us achieve our goal of reducing our harmful impact on our own habitat. Here we have to walk a fine line to make sure that urbanization does not cause population explosion, environmental pollution, congestion, sanitation hazards etc and that our urbanization does not take over our natural world, destroying our agricultural farm lands, forests and various natural habitats to accommodate its needs. We have to strike the right balance or else we will be stuck in the same vicious circle all over again.

Trying to find out more about how we can strike this balance, I came across a very interesting term – ‘Rur-banism’ .  The term was introduced by the designers of Goa- 2100, a planning project for one of the sprawling Indian city. Rur-banism attempts to address the difficult task of better integration between the thriving urban areas and surrounding rural areas which in fact provide a vital support in terms of food and natural resources. It represents urban area as a symbiotic partner with nature and rural culture, and a net producer of resources and values than a parasitic consumer¹.  In rurbanism along with buildings, neighborhoods, transportation systems, and other vital parts of the urban centers, ‘transition areas’ at the urban and rural boundaries are given utmost importance. The interdependence between the rural and urban form is made visible and celebrated. The natural habitat and green spaces are envisioned to be the both connectors and the separators of the urban area. It is believed that the city will not colonize the world around it, but thrive in a peaceful harmony.

I believe we need to engage ourselves in rebuilding our world. Rur-banism and similar soulful concepts should be examined and applied in the right context to transform the way our future cities will impact our earth.