What is wrong with our land-use plans ?
Well...nothing. Except, perhaps, the fact that they belong to an earlier epoch of technological development - a period when one necessarily had to prepare maps at different spatial scales in order to show greater or lesser detail; and use specific colours to aggregate the primary land uses at different scales - for example, yellow for residential use; red for commercial use (depending on prevalent cartographic rules).
One can also say that the technology of land-use maps, as they continue to be used to urban planning in India, corresponds to the period of map making prior to the advent of computerised cartography and geo-spatial analysis.
Using present technology, we do not need to switch between different maps prepared at different scales to study different degrees of spatial detail. Instead, we can simply zoom in and out within the same map.
In most aspects of our lives we take this for granted - when we are booking an uber; or checking directions to a destination on google maps; or checking how far the swiggy delivery partner is at a particular point of time.
In all such businesses, computerised geo-spatial analysis and decision-making is not just one of the components to be considered - it is the most fundamental science and technology on which the business operations play out.
However, in a vital and complex activity such as urban planning, whose social and economic significance far exceeds that of profit maximisation in the gig economy, such technology is still a sort of a novelty which is far from having been internalised by the rank and file of the profession.
In fact, the inadequacy of technical knowledge becomes amply clear precisely when one takes a look at the manner in which the planning profession attempts to internalise geo-spatial technologies. I discussed this in an earlier blog.
It is perhaps too difficult for our planning professionals and educators - too busy flaunting tech-terms and buzzwords - to come to terms with the simple fact that if your planning maps are made using GIS software then you do not need separate sets of maps at the levels of the city - i.e. the city level, the zone level and the layout level -- they are all part of the same geo-spatial database !
I am not even getting into the travesty of making such "GIS" maps available online in PDF format and then providing the attribute data in separate spreadsheet files and THEN announcing this pointless hotch-potch as Open-data ! A tighter slap on the face of the open-data movement was never landed. This is not open-data...this is an open disdain of the citizen.
From GIS based PDFs to Water soaked Blueprints
Let's have a look at such maps as they are available from the website of the Delhi Development Authority -
a) Here is the "big honcho" - the proposed land-use map of all Delhi. The highest level of the plan and the one with the smallest geographical scale and level of detail. Most of the time lay-persons attempting an analysis of the Delhi Master Plan remain pre-occupied with this level. Of course, it shows nothing more than the most general and most aggregated land-use distribution at the level of the city.
b) The next level of planning detail comes in the form of Zone level land-use maps. Shown below is the map of Zone-F in South Delhi. As per the zonal plan report, already in 2001, this zone had an area of 11958 hectares (i.e. 119.5 square kilometres) and a population of 12,78,000. That basically means that while it is just a part of the city of Delhi, it is still larger than many smaller sized cities of India (it is, in fact, larger than the smart city of Bhubaneswar in terms of population).
The Zone too, therefore, is at a substantially high level of aggregation and can be compared to city level land use plans of one-million plus cities in India.
(NOTE - pay attention to the key-map in the attachment below and marvel at the cartographic genius of whoever prepared this "GIS based" pdf output)
c) And something peculiar happens when we go down to the level of the layout that contains the maximum geographical detail - the layout plans; which are more like a plan for a cluster of neighbourhood blocks.
Here is what the plan of one of the layouts constituting Zone-F looks like...if you can make anything out that is. The keen observer would realise that this is actually a well drafted layout map (at least the key map is correct !), but we have suddenly descended from the world of GIS based PDF map outputs, to the world of water-soaked and worn-out archives of crumpled gateway sheets and blueprints.
This is what gets uploaded as digital layout maps on the website of the premier urban planning agency of the capital of the country.
There is therefore a complete dissonance between what digital and geo-spatial technologies truly are and how they are being utilised.
In this matter the critics and activists of the civil-society and consultants of the private sector are often more technically incompetent than government planners. The government officials may not be familiar with the modern software but they know their cartography well enough (as illustrated by the water-soaked map), while civil society critics and private sector consultants (who often actually prepare the "GIS" outputs) are often poor in both technology and cartography.
In the next part we will see how computerised geo-spatial methods eliminate the problems of aggregation by allowing data to be maintained at as disaggregated a level as allowed by its granularity and aggregating the base-data as per requirement to whatever level necessary processing power of the computer.
In the words of planning expert and theorist Poulicos Prastacos -
"Data should be maintained at the lowest level of disaggregation and then readily aggregated as the need arises."
(Source - 'Integrating GIS technology in urban transportation planning and modeling' - P. Prastacos)
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