Owning a piece of real estate is a strong aspiration for many. Many actively invest in real estate through individual plotted layouts, and many more aspire to own even a small piece of land. As our cities grow, new roads get laid, and in anticipation of the reach of essential services such as water, sewage, and electricity, potential real estate prospects start to prop up. Just driving past any city, we can see how this exuberance is displayed in the many advertisements for the ‘nagars’, ‘cities’, ‘enclaves’, and so on and so forth. One can even say that the city expands without deliberation through these kinds of plotted layouts rather than through any planned vision.
Plotted layouts and the city’s expansion
The most predominant and familiar method by which peri-urban areas are developed and cities expand is through these individual plotted layouts. Often left to the means and devices of enterprising real estate developers, these layouts are typically laid out without proper urban design or without a vision of the kind of built environment they create. But how did this approach become the standard for urban growth?
Plotted layouts – origins
The roots of plotted development trace back to the English Bungalow—a standalone residential structure surrounded by expansive gardens and enclosed by compound walls. These bungalows were often set within acres of greenery. Indeed, remnants of the bungalows can still be found in some of the older parts of the city developed during the colonial era. In recent years, however, many of these bungalows have been demolished to make way for apartment complexes, capitalising on their large plot sizes.
The concept of individual plots with standalone buildings and surrounding setback spaces also stems from colonial notions of health and hygiene. Regulations mandated these designs to ensure adequate light and ventilation throughout the building.
The current problem with the plotted layout approach
The colonial intent of providing light and ventilation was the driving factor to create independent plots and setbacks within them. It’s reasonable logic if the plot sizes were generous and the density manageable. Yet, when plot sizes shrink to as small as 700 sq.ft., as is often the case in many of the current real estate developer layouts, the original intent of these setbacks—ensuring light and ventilation—is lost.
When plot sizes shrink to as small as 700 sq.ft., as is often the case in many of the current real estate developer layouts, the original intent of these setbacks—ensuring light and ventilation—is lost!
Moreover, with minimal oversight beyond basic regulations, setback areas are frequently built over or encroached upon. This results in neighbourhoods lacking characteristic open spaces and narrow roads congested with private vehicles. However, as our cities become denser, it becomes important that the rare and costly resource – serviced urban land – is used judiciously and effectively while improving livability.
The uncontrolled development of these real estate-driven plotted layouts reflects a failure of good urban planning
The setback spaces, originally intended for light and ventilation become the problemWhere can children play? Where do people gather? Could this be a good neighbourhood?
Plotted developments reflect a failure of development authorities to ensure well-designed urban environments. It is also a symptom that highlights the lack of vision we have of our built environments. Instead, it only parcels land, without any thought on the overall output.
Plotteddevelopments reflect a failure of development authorities to ensure well-designed urban environments
Plotted developments reflect a failure of development authorities to ensure well-designed urban environments. It is also a symptom that highlights the lack of vision we have of our built environments. Instead, it only parcels land, without any thought on the overall output.
But what if there are better ways to design our neighborhoods—one that balances density, livability, and open space? What if the unregulated real estate sector could be regulated to create livable and well-managed cities? All that needs a high level of urban planning effort from the development authorities, and above all, a clarity of vision and aspiration from the people on what kind of neighbourhoods they would like to live in.
Can we make our cities humane and livable?
There are several alternatives to plotted development layouts that we see, which would result in well-developed urban neighbourhoods which can be a separate post in itself.
Alternative building volumes to plotted developments
When it comes to assessing the quality of our built environments, children are like a canary in the coal mine. The quality of lives children lead indicates the quality of the neighborhoods and the city.
As adults, some of the fondest memories of our childhoods are of spending the holidays and the entire evenings after school on our neighbourhood streets, freely playing with other children of age groups similar and different from ours. Yet the sight of children playing on the streets is increasingly becoming a rarity. The space children inhabit, especially outdoors, has been constantly shrinking. Simultaneously, compound walls that separate the houses from the street have become taller and opaque; the houses have become more inward-looking, causing a schism between the inside (considered safe) and the outside (considered unsafe).
Why? Is it because they are spending more time indoors, connected to home entertainment and the internet? Is it because we have become more risk-averse as a society? Is it because our outdoor spaces have become less safe and unaccommodating for children to safely and freely inhabit them? The answer is a combination of all the above.
Our neighbourhood streets are completely taken over by vehicles leaving little or no place for any other activities. Source
There is growing evidence that the quality of the built environment has a strong influence on the growth and development of children in early childhood, which in turn influences them as adults later. Research has shown that when children play and spend time outdoors, it improves their physical health and well-being; when children develop friendships among peer groups, it helps them develop a sense of social cohesion, self-identity, and autonomy. Children need to be allowed more opportunities to roam free and play outside without interference from adults, a behaviour that can be facilitated by good neighbourhood design.
“If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.”
-Enrique Peñalosa, Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia (1998‑2001, 2016‑present), a specialist in urban and transportation policy
An alternative vision for neighbourhoods:
Which is a lively and better neighbourhood and where would you like to live?
Jane Jacobs, the visionary American activist, championed humane and vibrant neighbourhoods as a means to nurture well-being, a sense of community and social interconnectedness, and economic vitality. According to her, good neighbourhoods are made of the following characteristics:
Density
Density can be crudely defined as the number of people within a given area. A good neighbourhood maintains a healthy balance in density, avoiding both overcrowding and sparsity. A good density of low-rise buildings ensures that neighbours are relatively closer to each other.
Converging Paths:
A good neighbourhood creates opportunities for people to cross each other as they go about their everyday lives, indirectly creating opportunities for them to interact. In our traditional neighbourhoods, the daily vegetable vendors, the roadside temples, or the open verandahs of older houses provided those opportunities.
Mixed Use Developments:
A good neighbourhood will serve more than one primary use and therefore more than one set of people. A mixture of residences, workplaces, and places of leisure such as restaurants etc., will ensure that there is a constant presence of people at different times of the day and night. Furthermore, our buildings should look out onto the streets and the neighbourhood. All of these contribute to what Jane Jacobs terms as ‘Eyes on the Street’ – a sort of community security. Most of our traditional settlements had these – verandahs and thinnais as the outward-looking spaces, gossiping adults in these spaces provide the Eyes on the Street where children often play. We need to reinvent and integrate these into the buildings that we design today.
Safe Streets:
Streets, for many of us, are the only kind of public space that we have immediate access to. Streets are, therefore, places for social encounters. Children, pedestrians, and residents of various age groups draw equal if not more ownership rights over streets than motor vehicles and traffic. On-street parking and speeding traffic are a poor use of neighbourhood streets! Encouraging pedestrians and children to use neighbourhood streets through traffic reduction, traffic calming measures, and dedicated footpaths allows them to take up ownership and responsibility.
Small Steps, Big Impact: What Can You Do?
Neighborhoods are made of individual buildings. As clients and as architects, through several individual projects, we can influence the kind of neighbourhoods we create. Some of them include:
Rethink those compound walls: We can start by thinking beyond what happens within our plot boundaries. Reduce the height of your compound walls and make them porous. If you can, eliminate them and replace them with hedge plants or mesh to show the division.
Create neighbourhood-facing transition spaces: Have a front verandah or portico that acts as a transition space between the private house and the public street. This kind of space also allows you to keep track of your neighbourhood from the safety of the house. In the case of apartments, wide, generous balconies can serve as outdoor rooms.
Encourage some mixed-use magic: Imagine mixed-use neighbourhoods with local grocery and repair shops, small community halls, workplaces etc.
Reclaim Streets: Imagine streets not merely for vehicles but as primary public spaces where people meet, gossip, relax or go for a stroll, children play, celebrate etc. Accordingly design streets with minimal vehicular movements, and with lots of adjunct spaces such as pocket parks, plazas, shade, places to sit etc.
Architects are trained to think of the larger picture!
Architects, by their training and disposition, are inclined to think of larger issues that go beyond individual projects. If not all, most architects share their deep concerns about the built environment, be it of sustainability, community, etc. and see each project as a step to nurture overall good-built environments.
Your building isn’t just a structure; it’s a seed for a thriving neighbourhood. It is therefore imperative to pause and ask: What makes a good neighborhood for us and the generations to come? While buildings may have a physical lifespan of decades, their influence on a community can last much longer. To create truly successful neighbourhoods, we need to focus on building for both present and future generations.
