The Potential City

In his classic book ' A System's View of Planning ', George Chadwick wrote: "Not only can the whole of mathematics be developed from the concept of a set, but, as foreshadowed, the idea of a system stems naturally from that of a set." (p-28) While we all studied set theory in high school mathematics, its usefulness in making sense of the structure and behaviour of complex systems encountered regularly in urban planning, was never discussed adequately in planning school. The consequence is the absence of yet another powerful tool from the contemporary planners' toolkit and the state of confoundedness that naturally follows. Created by the German mathematician Georg Cantor in 1874, set theory "stems from the simple idea of a number of things which have a common property or properties and thus can be represented as elements of a set." (ibid) The relationship of set theory with the systems view of planning is made amply clear when we consider that, "

In his last book 'Disintegration' , geo-political expert Andrei Martyanov described an interesting conversation. He wrote:   "Few years ago, when having a conversation with one of the former combat pilots from Russian Air Force - RuAF Officer Schools are 5 years, 6 days a week academies, same as Russian naval academies - he complained that throughout his career he never for once needed the course in Differential Equations he had to take while in the academy.    The response from the group was unanimous -- they did not teach you to use Differential Equations everyday, they taught you to develop complex synaptic connections which are applicable for everyday life, including combat flying ." These lines made a strong impression on me, because they matched exactly my own experience when I first started writing scripts for solving planning tasks and then explored the applications of mathematical methods in urban planning. It is not that I particularly wanted to. My interes

The fine art of problem articulation  The important thing about mathematical urban models is not the mathematics itself but its application to simulate urban phenomena that we are trying to understand. Therefore, even a failed attempt at creating a model may help an urban planner understand and articulate a phenomenon with greater clarity. Trying to explain an urban phenomenon in the form of an equation compels us to cut through the fog of vagueness and confusion in our minds and seek clarity. Try to imagine what we expressed by the equation --> A=f(B, C, 1/D) in the previous blog and then try to explain it in words instead of the equation. We would have to say something like - "When we consider shopping or any such pattern in a city...it depends on how many people are shopping....where they are shopping...it depends also on which shopping areas are large or attractive...also we must consider which are far away or close by...its a pretty complex process....but also very basic

A vital contradiction in our education system The former chief scientist of Airbus, Jean Francois Geneste said in a brilliant talk delivered at Skoltech, that when it comes to large and complex systems,  "We can only master, what we can measure and mathematics is a discipline for measurement -- it is measurement theory." What he said has great implications for our own field of urban and regional planning too. It is important to measure and to measure correctly, before planning decisions affecting millions of people, thousands of businesses and hundreds of hectares of land-uses of different kinds can be taken.  Yet, precisely when there is a growing fascination with data and digital technologies, there seems to be a relatively low understanding of the role of mathematics in planning. A substantial part of the problem lies in the fear of the subject itself and the inability to apply it effectively in real situations. We are all aware, that due to the peculiar limitations of the

In the first part of this blog we had discussed how the various steps of a particular planning problem (in this case the slum-proofing problem of Jaga Mission) can be articulated, algorithmised and then automated. In the second part we shall see how the specific commands in the computer program work. The technical steps necessary for achieving the goal (given the capabilities and constraints of government organisations executing the mission) were identified and are listed below - (a) Identify the location of existing slums  (b) identify vacant government land parcels near the existing slums  (c) check them for suitability  (d) generate map outputs for further visual analysis and verification.  It is clear that the problem solution involves spatial analysis tasks to be performed on a Geographic Information System (GIS) software.  While QGIS is the more familiar and user-friendly option, my preferred software for tasks like this is GRASS, which stands for Geographic Resources Analysi

Tackling the dynamic with the static One of the primary challenges facing the management and governance of our cities is the fact that they are extremely complex and dynamic systems. At any point of time, the decision-maker has to juggle multiple unknown and possibly unknowable variables. Dealing with our cities, therefore, must be seen as a fascinating challenge of having to deal with uncertainty. But how does one achieve it ? How does one master the uncertain and the unknown? There are many ways of doing it, which, unfortunately remain unused and abandoned by our city planners and decision-makers. Our planners, obsessed with the preparation of voluminous master plans, often ignore something very fundamental - you cannot tackle something extremely dynamic with something extremely static. As the renowned architect-planner Otto Koennisberger had already observed six decades ago when he was preparing the master plan of Karachi, that by the time such master plans are ready they are alread