‘Civic health of cities is the 21st century challenge’

It’s time to unpick the mistakes we did in town planning in the last century, says Lucy Musgrave, Founding Director of Publica, a London-based public realm and urban design company. In her view, there has to be a radical cultural shift in urban planning in the new century that promotes public transportation, high-density medium rise buildings and spaces for social interaction for the public. On the sidelines of the Moscow Urban Forum in the Russian capital recently, she spoke with BusinessLine about the challenges urban planning faces and the new trends in the realm.

What are, in your view, the key challenges of urban planning today?

Well, we have been building on a financial model that’s really around speculation in terms of the commodification of land and buildings that isn’t necessarily providing for societies what we actually need in terms of flexibility, housing and commercial needs and the civic identity of the city. Look at what’s happened to London. It was very much tied up with the global financial crisis of 2008-09. The reason that we have a team of 25 urban designers driving a very busy business is because the private sector has realised that what they were building was not going to be the places where their occupiers want to be in.

We have to stop building for the long term. Even if the private investor has huge interest in the development side, I see there’s a radical cultural shift in thinking about how you can create value. The value isn’t just about putting up something very fast and very cheap. I think we need to be thinking a bit more carefully about the integration of the new development with the existing ones. Also, we really need to think about the quality of the product that’s being introduced.

Is that what’s happening in London?

London is a very peculiar place. During the financial crisis, a lot of people’s money came from around the world to London because it was seen as a safe place for savings and investments, and most of it went into properties. So the development sector in London has never been busier. There’s a huge building boom happening in London. But the developers have realised that what they were building before was not worth anything. And secondly, our planners felt much more important in setting standards about quality and about issues of integration with the city. It’s been a really interesting time, particularly in London.

If you look at the cities in India, big cities are just getting bigger with more and more people migrating. But cities lack in terms of infrastructure and other basic amenities. How these issues can be tackled?

I was very privileged and lucky to come to Mumbai last year. I found in Mumbai the most extraordinary sensitivity culturally and politically.

And it’s a very accommodating, sensitised place for conversations, debates, etc. But in the actual physical buildings, I couldn’t see that dynamism. The manifestation of buildings spoke about very different culture. As the great Danish urbanist Jan Gelh has noted, the new century’s planning is not going to look like the 20th century model. (Gelh has studied human behaviour in cities through 40 years, and has argued that modern cities repel human interaction).

The new model is going to have high density, medium rise buildings, going to be based upon social interaction in terms of walking and cycling and civic space, which is what the West is now choosing.

So in Mumbai, we were saying to the planners that we made so many mistakes. We are unpicking our mistakes now. Everything is being planned to remove the private car. This is the 21st century project. We should reset, rethink repurpose our streets and spaces. Civic health of cities is the 21st century challenge.

It’s very expensive to buy a car in Singapore, as taxes are exorbitantly high and the government is actually promoting public transportation. London does the same. Do you think India should follow suit?

Definitely. It’s a smart approach to urban planning. But there has to be investments in the public spaces. Even in London, people were not choosing public transport because it’s overcrowded, dirty.

Now with a huge amount of investment going into tubes, new rail lines, cycling, making city green and beautiful, everybody wants to be on a train, think about walking or cycling.

The writer was in Moscow at the invitation of the Moscow Urban Forum.