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Principles of Intelligent Urbanism (PIU) is a set of ten axioms that guide the formulation of city plans and urban designs. They reconcile and integrate diverse urban planning and management concerns. These axioms include environmental sustainability, heritage conservation, appropriate technology, infrastructure efficiency, place making, social access, transport oriented development, regional integration, human scale, and institutional integrity. The PIU is based in the city planning guidelines formulated by the Congresses International Architectura Modern (CIAM), the urban design approaches developed at Harvard's pioneering urban design department under the leadership of Josep Lluis Sert, and the concerns innuciated by Team Ten. It is most prominently seen in plans prepared by Christopher Charles Benninger and his numerous colleagues in the Asian context (Benninger 2001). They form the elements of the planning curriculum at the School of Planning, Ahmedabad, which Benninger founded in 1971. It was the basis for the new capital plan for Thimphu, Bhutan^[1]

Contents 1 Principal One: A Balance with Nature 2 Principle Two: A Balance with Tradition 3 Principle Three: Appropriate Technology 4 Principle Four: Conviviality 4.1 A Place for the Individual 4.2 A Place for Friendship 4.3 A Place for Householders 4.4 A Place for the Neighborhood 4.5 A Place for Communities 4.6 A Place for the City Domain 5 Principle Five: Efficiency 6 Principle Six: Human Scale 7 Principle Seven: Opportunity Matrix 8 Principle Eight: Regional Integration 9 Principle Nine: Balanced Movement 10 Principle Ten: Institutional Integrity 11 References 12 =Links 13 =External Links

[edit] Principal One: A Balance with Nature

Balance with nature emphasizes the distinction between utilizing resources and exploiting them. It focuses on the thresholds beyond which deforestation, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, siltation and flooding reinforce one another in urban development, saving or destroying life support systems. The principle promotes environmental assessments to identify fragile zones, threatened eco-systems and habitats that can be enhanced through conservation, density control, land use planning and open space design (McCarg:1975).

There is a level of human habitation intensity wherein the resources that are consumed will be replaced through the replenishing natural cycles of the seasons, creating environmental equilibrium. So long as nature can resurge each year; so long as the biomass can survive within its own eco-system; so long as the breeding grounds of fauna and avifauna are safe; so long as there is no erosion and the biomass is maintained, we are only utilizing nature.

But there is a fragile line that is crossed when the fauna, which cross-fertilizes the flora, which sustains the soil, which supports the hillsides, is no longer there! When the soil is washed off the land faster than it can be replaced; when the river silts up faster than the natural currents can wash it clean; when the river basin widens and the edges are artificially contained, then we have destroyed the natural balance. There is an imaginary threshold, a kind of line that is crossed over, from where we cannot come back. At that point of no return, utilization of natural resources will outpace the natural ability of the eco-system to replenish itself. From there on degradation accelerates and amplifies. Deforestation, desertification, erosion, floods, and landslides all incessantly increase.

Blatant acts against nature include cutting of hillside trees, quarrying on slopes, dumping sewerage and industrial waste into the natural drainage system, paving and plinthing excessively, and construction on steep slopes. Intelligent urbanism proposes that the balance of nature can be maintained when fragile areas are reserved, conservation of eco-systems is pursued, and low intensity habitation precincts are thoughtfully identified. Intelligent urbanism operates within the balance of nature. Intelligent urbanism aggressively protects and conserves those elements of the ecology that nurture the environment. Therefore, the first principle of intelligent urbanism is that urbanization be in balance with nature.

[edit] Principle Two: A Balance with Tradition

Balance with Tradition integrates plan interventions with existing cultural assets, respecting traditional practices and precedents of style (Spreiregen: 1965). Intelligent urbanism respects the cultural heritage of a place. It seeks out traditional wisdom in the layout of human settlements, in the order of building plans, in the precedents of style, in the symbols and signs that transfer meanings through decoration and motifs. Intelligent urbanism respects the order engendered into building systems through years of adaptation to climate, to social circumstances, to available materials and to technology. It promotes architectural styles and motifs, which communicate cultural values.

Intelligent urbanism orients major roads toward monuments and heritage structures. It leaves space at the ends of such visual axis for future institutional buildings and monuments to rise up, or to “frame” existing views and vistas.

Intelligent urbanism respects natural views and vistas, assuring that buildings do not block major sight lines toward major visual assets.

Every culture and every society has its iconography, its signs and its symbols. Intelligent urbanism promotes their incorporation into the spatial order of urban settings. Intelligent urbanism promotes the use of local knowledge and meaning systems, as expressed through art, urban space and architecture, to orient and structure urban plans.

Intelligent urbanism operates within the balance of tradition, aggressively protecting, promoting and conserving generic components and elements of the urban pattern.

[edit] Principle Three: Appropriate Technology

Appropriate technology emphasis’s the employment of building materials, construction techniques, infrastructural systems and project management consistent with people’s capacities, geo-climatic conditions, locally available resources, and suitable capital investments. Appropriate accountability and transparency are enhanced by overlaying the physical spread of urban utilities and services upon electoral constituent areas, such that people’s representatives are interlinked with the urban technical systems needed for a civil society.

Appropriate Technology promotes building materials, techniques, infrastructural systems and construction management consistent with people’s ability to pay, skills, geo-climatic conditions, local resources, and the suitable employment of capital.

Many urban technologies were developed in regions where overhead and labor costs are very high, and where the rent on capital was comparatively low. Thus, capital intensive, machine oriented processes and methods are more economical in those limited zones, which are also centers of “high technology.” While appropriate to their place of invention, these are inappropriate for areas with significantly lower labor costs, high capital rents and appropriate local building crafts traditions. The use of exogenous technologies displaces employment opportunities, under-utilises surplus local materials, and prematurely outdates innovative traditional processes. At the same time these “innovations” are stretching limited capital into long term hard currency debts. Such transformations are neither beneficial to the users, nor bring in long-term gains. Maintenance costs are high, and these systems often presume high energy air-conditioning, continuous pumping and pressurizing operations. They involve the creation of new maintenance processes, which are often alien to the operational context, which also lacks the critical mass of operations bring economies of scale.

The long term operating costs are often not considered in the initial evaluation of systems. Accountability and transparency are enhanced by overlaying the physical spread of urban utilities and services upon electoral constituent areas, such that people’s representatives are interlinked with the appropriate technology that serves their voters.

Intelligent Urbanism promotes the application of appropriate technology, so that the creation of cities, towns and villages engages as many local resources as possible, using them in energy efficient and environmentally sustainable ways to enhance the local context.

[edit] Principle Four: Conviviality

The forth principle sponsors social interaction through public domains, in a hierarchy of places, devised for personal solace, companionship, romance, domesticity, neighborliness, community and civic life (Jacobs:1993). Intelligent Urbanism catalyses a convivial society. Vibrant societies are interactive, socially engaging and offer their members numerous opportunities for gathering and meeting one another. The PIU maintains that conviviality can be achieved through design and that society operates within hierarchies of social relations which are space specific. The hierarchies can be conceptualized as a system of social tiers, with each tier having a corresponding physical place in the settlement structure.

[edit] A Place for the Individual

Intelligent Urbanism creates places in urban forests, along urban hills, beside quiet streams, in public gardens and in parks where one can escape to meditate and contemplate. These are the quiet places wherein the individual consciousness dialogues with the rational mind. Idle and random thought sorts out complexities of modern life and allows the obvious to emerge. It is in these natural settings that the wandering mind finds its measure and its balance. Using gates, directional walls and other “silent devices” these spaces are denoted and divined. Places of the individual cultivate meditation. These spaces may also be the forecourts and interior courtyards of public buildings, or even the thoughtful reading rooms of libraries. Meditation focuses thought and sharpens one’s control over the conscious world. Intelligent urbanism creates a domain for the individual to mature through self-analysis and self-realization.

[edit] A Place for Friendship

Intelligent Urbanism states that here must be spaces for “beautiful, intimate friendship” where unfettered dialogue can happen. PIU insists such places will not exist naturally in a modern urban fabric. They must be a part of the conscientious design of the urban core, of the urban hubs, of urban villages and of neighborhoods, where people can meet with friends and talk out life’s issues, sorrows, joys and dilemmas. This second tier is important for the emotional life of the populace. It sponsors strong mental health within the people. Intelligent urbanism creates places where friendship can unfold and grow.

[edit] A Place for Householders

Principles of Intelligent Urbanism states that there must be spaces for householders, which may be in the form of dwellings for families, or homes for intimate companions, and where young workmates can form a common kitchen. Whatever their compositions, there must be a unique domain for social groups, familiar or biological, which have organized themselves into households. These domestic precincts are where families live and carry out their day-to-day functions of life. This third tier of conviviality is where the individual socializes into a personality.

Intelligent urbanism creates a variety of household possibilities, which respond to a range of household structures and situations. It recognizes that households transform through the years, requiring a variety of dwellings types that respond to a complex matrix of needs and abilities, which are provided for in city plans.

[edit] A Place for the Neighborhood

These household domains must cluster into a higher social domain, the neighborhood social group. These are social groups where everyone recognises one another. Festivals are celebrated in neighborhoods, and one may be passively drawn into local functions without any proactive effort.

In rural settings these are clusters of houses in hamlets, formed of large extended families, where everyone knows each other, recognizes all of the good and bad qualities of each person, and where social patterns of behavior are enforced without written codes, or oppressive regimentation. In modern, urban social settings the neighborhood takes on some of the roles for the individual that were once sponsored by hamlets of extended family members.

In an urban neighborhood each individual knows each other’s face, name, special characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The neighborhood space is a domain where women and children are secure, where young girls can relax out-of-doors, fearless of careless glances and thoughtless comments. In an urban village, it is the “eyes of the street” that provide protection and reassurance.

Neighborhoods accommodate play areas for children, small hang-out places for pre-teens and common facilities like post boxes where people can meet casually.

Intelligent urbanism sponsors, through design, such units of social space. It is in this forth tier of social life that public conduct takes on new dimensions and groups learn to live peacefully amongst one another. It is in neighborhoods where intelligent urbanism sponsors the “social contract” amongst diverse households and individuals. This social contract is the basis for rational social relations and negotiations within larger social groups.

[edit] A Place for Communities

The next social tier, or hierarchy, is the community. Historically, communities were tribes who shared social mores and cultural behavioral patterns. In contemporary urban settings communities are formed of diverse people. But these are people who share the common need to negotiate and manage their spatial settings. In plans created through the principles of intelligent urbanism these are called Urban Villages. Like a rural village, social bonds are found in the community management of security, common resources and social places. Urban Villages will have defined social spaces, services and amenities that need to be managed by the community. These Urban Villages optimally become the administrative wards, and therefore the constituencies, of the elected members of the municipal body. Though there are no physical barriers to these communities, they have their unique spatial social domain. Intelligent urbanism creates dense, walkable zones in which the inhabitants recognize each other’s faces, share common facilities and resources, and often see each other at the village centre. This fifth tier of social space is where one needs initiative to join into various activities. It promotes initiative and constructive community participation. There are opportunities for one to be involved in the management of services, and amenities and to meet new people. They accommodate primary education and recreation areas. Intelligent urbanism promotes the creation of community places, where community based organizations can manage common resources and resolve common problems.

[edit] A Place for the City Domain

The Principles of Intelligent Urbanism cites the need for city level domains. These can be plazas, parks, stadia, transport hubs or malls. These are social spaces where everyone can go. Everyone possesses these spaces. Public domains are shrinking. In many countries one has to pay an entrance fee to access “public domains.” Unlike the lower tiers of the social hierarchy, this tier is not defined by any biological, familiar, face-to-face or other exclusive characteristic. One may find people from all continents, from nearby districts and provinces and from all parts of the city in such places. By nature these are accessible and open spaces, with no physical barriers. It is the rules of human conduct that set this domain’s behavior. It is civility, or civilization, which protects and energizes such spaces. At the lower tiers, one meets people through introductions, through family ties, and through neighborhood circumstances. At the city tier makes chance meetings with total strangers, who may become life long friends! City level domains are “serendipity places,” where pleasant, unexpected meetings and events may occur!

These public domains include city footpaths; parks and gardens; large shopping areas; and plazzas. These are places where outdoor exhibits are held, sports matches take place, vegetables are sold and goods are on display. These are places where visitors to the city meander amongst the locals. “Newness” is characteristic! The places may stay the same, but the people are always changing. When one is lonely or bored, one drifts toward such spaces…if not to make a new acquaintance, then to play around with the possibility. There is always a tinge of excitement in such public domains. Something new and unexpected may happen. Most important, the city scale public domains foster public interaction; they sponsor unspoken ground rules for unknown people to meet and to interact. They nurture civic understanding of the strength of diversity, variety, a range of cultural groups and ethnic mixes. In fact it is this higher tier of social space which defines truly urban environments.

Intelligent Urbanism emphasizes the creation of public domains, nurturing the possibility of chance meetings, catalyzing human interaction, and promoting communications, friendships and even love! Intelligent Urbanism is focused on conviviality and social interaction!

Every social system has its own hierarchy of social relations and interactions. Intelligent Urbanism sees cyber space as a macro tier of conviviality, but does not discount physical places in forging relationships due to the Internet. These are reflected through a system of ‘places’ that respond to them. Intelligent Urbanism promotes the planning and design of such ‘places’ as elemental components of the urban structure.

[edit] Principle Five: Efficiency

Promotes a balance between the consumption of resources like energy, time and finance, with planned achievements in comfort, safety, security, access, tenure, and hygiene. It encourages optimum sharing of land, roads, facilities, services and infrastructural networks reducing per household costs, while increasing affordability and civic viability.

Intelligent urbanism promotes a balance between performance and consumption. Intelligent urbanism promotes efficiency in carrying out functions in a cost effective manner. It assesses the performance of various systems required by the public and the consumption of energy, funds, administrative time and the maintenance efforts required to perform these functions.

A major concern of intelligent urbanism is transport. While recognizing the convenience of personal vehicles, it attempts to place the costs (energy consumption, large paved areas, parking, accidents, negative balance of trade, and pollution) on the users of private vehicles. Presently the private automobile is subsidized by the Royal Government, even to the extent of lower interest rates for car purchases, than for home purchases.

Road taxes cover a fraction of the costs of roads! The costs of respiratory diseases, cancer, and heart ailments generated by the automobile’s pollution are borne by passive travelers, pedestrians, the public health system and the taxpayers.

Intelligent urbanism promotes alternative choices to dependence on personal vehicles. It promotes affordable public transport. It promotes medium to high-density residential development along with complimentary social amenities, convenience shopping, recreation and public services in compact, mixed-use settlements. These compact communities have shorter pipe lengths, wire lengths, cable lengths and road lengths per capita. More people share gardens, shops and transit stops. This pattern is more cost effective, cheaper and the cost recovery for infrastructure is easier.

These compact urban nodes are spaced along regional urban corridors that integrate the region’s urban nodes, through public transport, into a rational system of growth. Intelligent urbanism promotes clean, comfortable, safe and speedy, public transport, which operates at dependable intervals along major origin and destination paths. Such a system is cheaper, safer, less polluting and consumes less energy. It is more efficient!

The same principle applies to public infrastructure, social facilities and public services. Compact, high-density communities result in more efficient systems. There is an appropriate balance to be found somewhere on the line between wasteful low-density individual systems and over-capitalized mega systems. For example, individual septic tanks and water bores servicing individual households in low-density fragmented layouts, cause pollution of subterranean aquifer systems. The bores dramatically lower the ground water levels. Alternatively, large-scale, citywide sewerage systems and regional water supply systems are capital intensive and prone to management and maintenance dysfunction. Operating costs, user fees and cost recovery expenses are high. There is a balance wherein medium-scale systems, covering compact communities, utilize modern technology, without the pitfalls of large-scale infrastructure systems. Intelligent urbanism promotes the middle path with regard to public infrastructure, facilities, services and amenities.

When these appropriate systems overlap communities with elected representatives the “imagery” between user performance through payments, systems dependability through management, and official response through effective representation, all become transparent. Intelligent urbanism promotes compact settlements along urban corridors, and within networks, such that densities support effective and efficient infrastructure systems. Intelligent Urbanism fosters and dignifies the pedestrian, linking footpaths and walkways with public transport systems at strategic nodes and hubs. Intelligent urbanism promotes medium-scale infrastructural systems whose catchment areas overlap political constituencies and administrative jurisdictions.

[edit] Principle Six: Human Scale

Encourages ground level, pedestrian oriented urban arrangements, based on anthropometric dimensions, as opposed to Amachine-scales.= Walkable, mixed use urban villages are encouraged, over single-functional blocks, linked by motor ways and surrounded by parking lots.

An abiding axiom of urban planning, urban design and city planning has been the promotion of people friendly places, pedestrian walkways and public domains where people can meet. These can be gallerias covered with glass, arcades, cozy courtyards, street side walkways and a variety of gardens and semi-covered spaces. In salubrious climates out-of-doors spaces can be exploited.

The last three decades have seen the loss of such spaces where the public domain has shrunk into privately managed shopping malls, entertainment complexes and gated suburban communities. Development has spread out limited access, public amenities along automobile roads and highways. This has divided society into ability to pay groups and made the automobile essential, not just for every household, but for every person. In some cities, “through grid networks” have been atomized into dead end cul-de-sacs by closing off roads.

In most of the world, where economies are in a transformational stage, this pattern divides already fragmented societies. There are common interests between up-market developers, the energy industry, politicians and investment managers. The interests of the individual are lost in what is often called the “new economy” and a massive infrastructure system is built around this divisive system. The seeds of this deterioration were sown in America when General Motors bought up and then dismantled urban tram systems. The flotsam of this deterioration can be seen in the privatization of Holland’s public transport system. In countries like India and China the automobile is being promoted over the bicycle and the pedestrian, excluding ninety percent of the population. Walkable communities remain an image and not a reality.

Movements like Smart Growth have recognized the inefficiency in this system, but have as their goals merely the reduction of pollution, the savings in energy and the creation of more efficient infrastructure. They are not focused on the plight of the individual and the divisions in society. Their goal is not conviviality. The New Urbanism focuses on isolated enclaves. These New Urbanism communities are in fact hideaways for alienated elite. One must bring human scale, efficiency and, yes, urbanism back to the city where the majority of people actually live and will congregate over the coming century. There is a sleight of hand in these movements and charters that use sound design and planning axioms to marginalize people, subdue traditional solutions and to exploit the environment. Personal wealth is created at the behest of public poverty.

Intelligent urbanism promotes the human dimension in a hierarchy of public and semi-public social places, as opposed to atomized and isolated private spaces. Elite enclaves are not the case studies for intelligent urbanism!

A good measure of this hollow faddism was promoted by a clique of elitists who propounded that one could ‘Learn from Las Vegas,’ and they fooled a generation of young architects into believing that they could go to the periphery of the city and learn from hoardings, McDonald’s and ‘honky-tonk’ as if they were in Rome or Florence! They were told that their cultural building blocks could be deciphered from visual cacophony and conspicuous consumption. While urbanists were dabbling in the frivolity of suburbia, they could have been learning from the core of the city about interaction, stems, networks and conviviality.

Architecture, campus planning and city planning, over the past half century, have all focused on isolated monuments on their own isolated plots, often enclosed in their own compound walls and behind lockable gates. The emphasis has been on artistic ‘grand-standing’ and institutional self-aggrandizement. Stunts like Potsdam Platz in Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which are over-scaled and grandiose, detract from the human scale. Largeness, grandness and technological feats have been the new trend, where the goal is often to amaze the public, rather than to create humble, walkable human experiences! The end results are tourist destinations and not communities. This anti-people approach to design is anathema to intelligent urbanism.

Intelligent urbanism promotes the scale of the pedestrian moving on the pathway, as opposed to the scale of the automobile on the expressway. Intelligent urbanism promotes the ground plan of imaginable precincts, as opposed to the imagery of façades and the monumentality of the section. It promotes the personal visibility of places moving at eye level, as opposed to vast images, moving in hyper sequence, past one as they move in a high-speed machine.

While city planners talk about mixed land uses they are still merely placing chunks of mono-functional blocks of activity adjacent to one another, on a chessboard like plan. Each institution, corporation and housing block has their own lockable and secure enclave, surrounded by roads!

Intelligent urbanism conceives of mixing a variety of uses within a rich, integrated urban fabric. This brings in to play mechanisms like “the eyes of the street,” round the clock activities and a more compact networking of services and infrastructure. It greatly enhances accessibility. It brings people together.

In the contemporary city, the automobile is the only link between activities; between work, school and house; between individuals and group interaction. Intelligent urbanism removes this artificial barrier and promotes face-to-face contact. The automobile, single use zoning and the construction of public structures in isolated compounds, all deteriorate the human condition and the human scale of the city. The relegation of “good practices” to isolated enclaves of the rich, undermines the very concept of the community!

This trend can be overcome by developing pedestrian circulation networks along streets and open spaces that link local destinations. Shops, amenities, day care, vegetable markets and basic social services should be clustered around public transport stops, and at a walkable distance from work places, public institutions, high and medium density residential areas. Public spaces should be integrated into residential, work, entertainment and commercial areas. Social activities and public buildings should orient onto public open spaces. These should be the interchange sites for people on the move, where they can also revert into the realm of “slowness,” of community life and of human interaction. These should be the interchange nodes at modal split points…where pedestrians, cyclists, taxi passengers, bus passengers and light rail passengers alight, run errands, stop to rejuvenate and sip coffee.

Human scale can be achieved through building masses that “step down” to human scale open spaces; by using arcades and pavilions as buffers to large masses; by intermixing open spaces and built masses sensitively; by using anthropometric proportions and natural materials. Traditional building precedents often carry within them a human scale language, from which a contemporary fabric of build may evolve.

The focus of intelligent urbanism is the ground plain, the plan, human movement and interaction along lines, stems, at crossing nodes, at interactive hubs and within vibrant urban cores. We have a lot to learn from Transit Oriented Development, but our goal is not merely to replace the automobile, nor to balance it. These are but the mundane requirements of planning, which we all are assumed to seek out in every design and urban configuration. These are but the “base-level aims” of all reasonable plans! Our goal is to enrich the human condition and to enhance the realm of human possibilities.

Intelligent Urbanism conceives of urbanity as a process of facilitating human behavior toward more tolerant, more peaceful, more accommodating and more sensitive modalities of interaction and conflict resolution. Intelligent urbanism recognizes that ‘urbanity’ emerges where people mix and interact on a face-to-face basis, on the ground, at high densities and amongst diverse social and economic groups. Intelligent Urbanism nurtures ‘urbanity’ through designs and plans that foster human scale interaction. The city must link together a matrix of human scales and human possibilities. It must create activity nodes, which promote interaction, communication, discussion, and the exchange of ideas, play, fun and romance! This is the essence of intelligent urbanism.

[edit] Principle Seven: Opportunity Matrix

Enriches the city as a vehicle for personal, social, and economic development, through access to a range of organizations, services and facilities, providing a variety of opportunities for education, recreation, employment, business, mobility, shelter, health, safety and basic needs (Sen:2000). The city is an engine of economic growth. This is generally said with regard to GNP and balance of trade. More significantly this is true for the individuals who settle in cities. Moreover, cities are places where individuals can increase their knowledge, skills and sensitivities. Cities provide access to health care and preventive medicine. They provide a great umbrella of services under which the individual can leave aside the struggle for survival, and get on with the finer things of life.

The city provides a range of services and facilities, whose realization in villages are the all-consuming functions of rural life. Potable water; sewerage disposal; energy for cooking, heat and lighting are all piped and wired in; solid waste disposal and storm water drainage are taken for granted. The city offers access through roads, buses, telephones and the internet. The peace and security provided by effective policing systems, and the courts of law, are just assumed to be there in the city. Then there are the schools, the recreation facilities, the health services and a myriad of professional services offered in the city market place. There are snack shops, fast food joints, restaurants, and grocery stores with food substitutes, pre-cooked and processed foods and ready-made meals. Cooking has become a hobby in the city!

Citizens of urban places are free from the tyrannies of disease, crime, harassment, exploitation, isolation, hunger, ignorance, and drudgery! While the rural woman is fetching firewood, fetching water, growing vegetables and nurturing back-yard poultry, washing clothes, boiling water and cooking, her urban sister may be doing a Ph.D. on gender in rural development! All of this leaves free time to develop one’s own human resources, to pursue business, or gainful employment. One can pursue the arts, community work, politics and social work. This is all a result of the surety and security provided by the city. The city is an opportunity system! It offers a matrix of opportunities.

From the above it is self-evident that by urbanism we mean a process of personal transcendence over the constraints of life dictated by survival…. into a life of dreams and expectations. Urbanization is not just a movement of people from villages to cities; it is the transcendence of individual self-images from “involuntary, dependent conscripts” to self-defined, creative individuals. Contrary to common wisdom, urbanism is a move away from the mundane objective of consumption, toward goals of self-redefinition, social contribution, and spiritual realization through creation. Hyper consumption and blatant opportunism are but the ugly shadows of oppressive, subsistence, rural economies…or, even the insecure yuppidom of the New Economy. The expansive mansions illustrated in The Charter for the New Urbanism are anathema to Intelligent Urbanism. These excesses are visitors from an insecure and dangerous past into the present! Just as rational utilization of resources can grow into environmental exploitation, so opportunities can expand into crass opportunism. There is both a promise and a danger in urbanization. Intelligent Urbanism sees much of the New Economy and the New Urbanism as a retrogressive diversion into exploitation and opportunism. Intelligent Urbanism sponsors opportunities to achieve the finer thoughts, finer things and more sensitive realizations. Life’s journey in well conceived urban places is a pilgrimage to find the ‘good,’ is a seeking for ideals, and not a postmodern accumulation of grandiose possessions.

Yet these opportunities are not equally distributed. Security, health care, education, shelter, hygiene, and most of all employment, are not equally accessible.

Intelligent urbanism views the city as an opportunity system. It sees the city as playing an equalizing role allowing citizens to grow according to their own essential capabilities and efforts. If the city is an institution, which generates opportunities, intelligent urbanism promotes the concept of equal access to opportunities within the urban system.

Intelligent urbanism promotes a guaranteed access to education, health care, police protection, and justice before the law, potable water, and a range of basic services. Perhaps this principle, more than any other, distinguishes intelligent urbanism from other elitist, efficiency oriented urban charters and regimes.

Intelligent urbanism does not say every household will stay in an equivalent house, or travel in the same vehicle, or consume the same amount of electricity. It says every citizen will have an opportunity and an access to shelter, to transport, to electricity, to potable water, to sanitation, to waste disposal, to the public domain, to knowledge, education, and to basic health care.

Intelligent urbanism recognizes the existence of poverty, of ignorance, of ill health, of malnutrition, of low skills, of gender bias and ignorance of the urban system itself. Intelligent urbanism is courageous in confronting these forms of inequality, and backlogs in social and economic development. Intelligent urbanism sees an urban plan, not only as a physical plan, but also as a social plan and as an economic plan!

The ramifications of this understanding are that the people living in cities will not experience urban development in “standard doses”. People may be born equal, but they grow inequitably! An important role of the city is to provide a variety of paths and channels for each individual to set right their own future, against the inequity of the past. This is a more salient aspect of a free society, than even voting rights. Access to opportunity is the essence of self-liberation and human development.

There will be a variety of problems faced by urbanites and they need a variety of opportunity channels for resolution. If there are ten problem areas where people are facing stresses, like health, shelter, food, education, recreation, transport, etc., there must be a variety of opportunities through which individuals and households can resolve each of these stresses. There must be ten channels to resolve each of ten stresses! If this opportunity matrix is understood and responded to, the city is truly functioning as an opportunity matrix. For example, opportunities for shelter could be through the channels of lodges, rented rooms, studio apartments, bedroom apartments and houses. It could be through the channels of ownership, through a variety of rentals. It could be through opportunities for self-help, or incremental housing. It could be through the up-gradation of “bagos” and slums.

Intelligent urbanism promotes a wide range of solutions, where any stress is felt. It therefore promotes a range of problem statements, options, and variable solutions to urban stresses.

Intelligent urbanism sees cities as processes and not as objects. Good urban plans facilitate those processes and do not place barriers before them. For example, it does not judge a “slum” as blight on society. It sees the possibility that such a settlement may be an opportunity channel for entry into the city! Such a settlement may be the only affordable shelter, within easy access to employment and education, for a new immigrant household in the city. If the plan ignores, or destroys such settlements, it is creating a city of barriers and despair wherein a poor family, offering a good service to the city, is deigned a modicum of basic needs for survival. Alternatively, if the urban plan recognizes that the “slum” is a mechanism for self development, a spring-board from which children have access to education, a place which can be up-graded with potable water, basic sanitary facilities, street lights and paving…then it is a plan for opportunity. Intelligent urbanism believes that there are slums of hope and slums of despair. It promotes slums of hope, which contribute, not only to individual opportunities, but also to nation building.

The opportunity matrix must also respond to young professionals, to skilled, well-paid day laborers, to the upper middle class and to well-to-do entrepreneurs. If a range of needs, of abilities to pay, of locational requirements, and of levels of development of shelter, is addressed, then opportunities are being created.

Intelligent urbanism believes that private enterprise is the logical provider of opportunities, but that alone it will not be just or effective. The regime of land, left to market forces, will create an exclusive, dysfunctional society. Intelligent urbanism believes that there is an essential role for the civil society to intervene in the opportunity matrix of the city.

Intelligent urbanism promotes opportunities through access to:

• Basic and primary education, skill development and knowledge about the urban world;
• Basic health care, potable water and hygiene;
• Urban facilities like storm drainage, street lights, roads and footpaths;
• Recreation and entertainment;
• Transport, energy, communications;
• Public participation and debate;
• Finance and investment instruments;
• Land and/or built-up space where goods and services can be produced;
• Rudimentary economic infrastructure;
• Intelligent urbanism provides a wide range of zones, districts and precincts where activities and functions can occur without detracting from one another.

Intelligent urbanism believes that enterprise can only flourish where a public framework provides opportunities for enterprise. This system of opportunities operates through public investments in economic and social infrastructure; through incentives in the form of appropriate finance, tax inducements, subsidized skill development for workers, and: regulations which protect the environment, safety, hygiene and health. It is through government regulations that private investment can be protected from fraud. It is through government regulation that an equitable “playing field” for free enterprise can be made to function!

Intelligent urbanism understands that the city is not just a thing, or group of objects, that support human endeavors. The city is an institution, which promotes development processes and opportunities. Intelligent Urbanism facilitates a wide variety of channels and paths through which individuals can solve their problems, liberating them to redefine themselves.

[edit] Principle Eight: Regional Integration

Envisions the city as an organic part of a larger environmental, socio-economic and cultural-geographic system, essential for its sustainability.

Intelligent urbanism sees the city as part of a larger social, economic and geographical organism…the region. Likewise, it sees the region as an integral part of the city. Planning of the city and its hinterland is a single holistic process. Intelligent urbanism respects the fact that a city exerts an influence over its immediate surrounds. It can catalyze upliftment, or deteriorate the hinterland that supplies its raw materials, food, workers, recreation areas and environmental cushion. City growth and development is an organic part of a much larger organism. If one does not recognize growth as a regional phenomenon, then development will play a hop-scotch game of moving just a little down the valley, or up the hills, keeping beyond the path of the city boundary, development regulations and of the urban tax regime. If one does not recognize the wholeness of the city and its region, the city will ruthlessly exploit its surrounds, denuding the hills of trees, quarrying out hillsides for stone, grassing off the biomass for milk and meat.

Socially the region may be defined as the catchment area from which employees and students commute into the city on a daily basis. It is the catchment area from which people choose to visit one city, as opposed to another, for retail shopping and entertainment. Economically it may be seen as the zone from which perishable foods, firewood and building materials supply the city. The economic region can also be defined as the area managed by exchanges in the city. Telephone calls to the region go through the city exchange; post goes through the city post office; money transfers go through the city’s financial institutions and internet data passes electronically through the city’s servers. The area over which “city exchanges” disperse matter can well be called the city’s economic hinterland or region. Usually the region includes dormitory communities, airports, water reservoirs, perishable food farms, hydro facilities, out-of-doors recreation and other infrastructure that serves the city. Intelligent urbanism sees the integrated planning of these services and facilities as part of the city planning process.

Intelligent urbanism understands that the social and economic region linked to a city also has a physical form, or a geographic character. This character may be the plain that connects mountains to the sea, or a river valley and the hill forms framing it. A hierarchy of watersheds usually patterns the geographic character. Forest ranges, fauna and avifauna habitats are set within such regions and are connected by natural corridors for movement and cross-fertilization. Within this larger, environmental scenario, one must conceptualize urbanism in terms of watersheds, subterranean aquifer systems, and other natural systems that operate across the entire region. Economic infrastructure, such as roads, hydro basins, irrigation channels, water reservoirs and related distribution networks usually follow the terrain of the regional geography. The region’s geographic portals, and lines of control, may also define defense and security systems deployment.

Intelligent urbanism recognizes that there is always a spillover of population from the city into the region, and that population in the region moves into the city for work, shopping, entertainment, health care and education. With thoughtful planning the region can take pressure off of the city. Traditional and new settlements within the urban region can be enhanced and densified to accommodate additional urban households. There are many activities within the city, which are growing and are incompatible with urban habitat. Large, noisy and polluting workshops and manufacturing units are amongst these. Large wholesale markets, storage sheds, vehicular maintenance garages, and wood working mills need to be housed outside of the city’s limits in their own satellite enclaves.

Intelligent urbanism is not just planning for the present; it is also planning for subsequent decades, centuries and forever. Intelligent urbanism is not utopian, but it is futuristic, in that it must forecast the scenarios to come, within its own boundaries, and within the boundaries of the distant future. Intelligent Urbanism nurtures the potential complimentary relations between nodes of activity and the more distant areas that feed and support them.

[edit] Principle Nine: Balanced Movement

PromoteIntelligent urbanism sees the city as part of a larger social, economic and geographical organism…the region. Likewise, it sees the region as an integral part of the city. Planning of the city and its hinterland is a single holistic process. Intelligent urbanism respects the fact that a city exerts an influence over its immediate surrounds. It can catalyze upliftment, or deteriorate the hinterland that supplies its raw materials, food, workers, recreation areas and environmental cushion. City growth and development is an organic part of a much larger organism. If one does not recognize growth as a regional phenomenon, then development will play a hop-scotch game of moving just a little down the valley, or up the hills, keeping beyond the path of the city boundary, development regulations and of the urban tax regime. If one does not recognize the wholeness of the city and its region, the city will ruthlessly exploit its surrounds, denuding the hills of trees, quarrying out hillsides for stone, grassing off the biomass for milk and meat.

Socially the region may be defined as the catchment area from which employees and students commute into the city on a daily basis. It is the catchment area from which people choose to visit one city, as opposed to another, for retail shopping and entertainment. Economically it may be seen as the zone from which perishable foods, firewood and building materials supply the city. The economic region can also be defined as the area managed by exchanges in the city. Telephone calls to the region go through the city exchange; post goes through the city post office; money transfers go through the city’s financial institutions and internet data passes electronically through the city’s servers. The area over which “city exchanges” disperse matter can well be called the city’s economic hinterland or region. Usually the region includes dormitory communities, airports, water reservoirs, perishable food farms, hydro facilities, out-of-doors recreation and other infrastructure that serves the city. Intelligent urbanism sees the integrated planning of these services and facilities as part of the city planning process.

Intelligent urbanism understands that the social and economic region linked to a city also has a physical form, or a geographic character. This character may be the plain that connects mountains to the sea, or a river valley and the hill forms framing it. A hierarchy of watersheds usually patterns the geographic character. Forest ranges, fauna and avifauna habitats are set within such regions and are connected by natural corridors for movement and cross-fertilization. Within this larger, environmental scenario, one must conceptualize urbanism in terms of watersheds, subterranean aquifer systems, and other natural systems that operate across the entire region. Economic infrastructure, such as roads, hydro basins, irrigation channels, water reservoirs and related distribution networks usually follow the terrain of the regional geography. The region’s geographic portals, and lines of control, may also define defense and security systems deployment.

Intelligent urbanism recognizes that there is always a spillover of population from the city into the region, and that population in the region moves into the city for work, shopping, entertainment, health care and education. With thoughtful planning the region can take pressure off of the city. Traditional and new settlements within the urban region can be enhanced and densified to accommodate additional urban households. There are many activities within the city, which are growing and are incompatible with urban habitat. Large, noisy and polluting workshops and manufacturing units are amongst these. Large wholesale markets, storage sheds, vehicular maintenance garages, and wood working mills need to be housed outside of the city’s limits in their own satellite enclaves.

Intelligent urbanism is not just planning for the present; it is also planning for subsequent decades, centuries and forever. Intelligent urbanism is not utopian, but it is futuristic, in that it must forecast the scenarios to come, within its own boundaries, and within the boundaries of the distant future. Intelligent Urbanism nurtures the potential complimentary relations between nodes of activity and the more distant areas that feed and support them.

s integrated transport systems comprising walkways, bus lanes, light rail corridors and automobile channels. The modal split nodes between these become the public domains around which cluster high density, urban hubs and pedestrian, mixed-use urban villages (Taniguchi:2001).Intelligent urbanism sees the city as part of a larger social, economic and geographical organism…the region. Likewise, it sees the region as an integral part of the city. Planning of the city and its hinterland is a single holistic process. Intelligent urbanism respects the fact that a city exerts an influence over its immediate surrounds. It can catalyze upliftment, or deteriorate the hinterland that supplies its raw materials, food, workers, recreation areas and environmental cushion. City growth and development is an organic part of a much larger organism. If one does not recognize growth as a regional phenomenon, then development will play a hop-scotch game of moving just a little down the valley, or up the hills, keeping beyond the path of the city boundary, development regulations and of the urban tax regime. If one does not recognize the wholeness of the city and its region, the city will ruthlessly exploit its surrounds, denuding the hills of trees, quarrying out hillsides for stone, grassing off the biomass for milk and meat.

Socially the region may be defined as the catchment area from which employees and students commute into the city on a daily basis. It is the catchment area from which people choose to visit one city, as opposed to another, for retail shopping and entertainment. Economically it may be seen as the zone from which perishable foods, firewood and building materials supply the city. The economic region can also be defined as the area managed by exchanges in the city. Telephone calls to the region go through the city exchange; post goes through the city post office; money transfers go through the city’s financial institutions and internet data passes electronically through the city’s servers. The area over which “city exchanges” disperse matter can well be called the city’s economic hinterland or region. Usually the region includes dormitory communities, airports, water reservoirs, perishable food farms, hydro facilities, out-of-doors recreation and other infrastructure that serves the city. Intelligent urbanism sees the integrated planning of these services and facilities as part of the city planning process.

Intelligent urbanism understands that the social and economic region linked to a city also has a physical form, or a geographic character. This character may be the plain that connects mountains to the sea, or a river valley and the hill forms framing it. A hierarchy of watersheds usually patterns the geographic character. Forest ranges, fauna and avifauna habitats are set within such regions and are connected by natural corridors for movement and cross-fertilization. Within this larger, environmental scenario, one must conceptualize urbanism in terms of watersheds, subterranean aquifer systems, and other natural systems that operate across the entire region. Economic infrastructure, such as roads, hydro basins, irrigation channels, water reservoirs and related distribution networks usually follow the terrain of the regional geography. The region’s geographic portals, and lines of control, may also define defense and security systems deployment.

Intelligent urbanism recognizes that there is always a spillover of population from the city into the region, and that population in the region moves into the city for work, shopping, entertainment, health care and education. With thoughtful planning the region can take pressure off of the city. Traditional and new settlements within the urban region can be enhanced and densified to accommodate additional urban households. There are many activities within the city, which are growing and are incompatible with urban habitat. Large, noisy and polluting workshops and manufacturing units are amongst these. Large wholesale markets, storage sheds, vehicular maintenance garages, and wood working mills need to be housed outside of the city’s limits in their own satellite enclaves.

Intelligent urbanism is not just planning for the present; it is also planning for subsequent decades, centuries and forever. Intelligent urbanism is not utopian, but it is futuristic, in that it must forecast the scenarios to come, within its own boundaries, and within the boundaries of the distant future. Intelligent Urbanism nurtures the potential complimentary relations between nodes of activity and the more distant areas that feed and support them.

[edit] Principle Ten: Institutional Integrity

Recognizes that good practices inherent in considered principles can only be realized through accountable, transparent, competent and participatory local governance, founded on appropriate data bases, due entitlements, civic responsibilities and duties. The PIU promotes a range of facilitative and promotive urban development management tools to achieve appropriate urban practices, systems and forms(Islam:2000).

Interest in the concept of Intelligent Urbanism has spread to other contexts and its application is being widely discussed. Intelligent urbanism recognizes that none of the principles, or good practices, it promotes can be implemented unless there is a strong and rational institutional framework to define, channel and legalize urban development, in all of its aspects.

Intelligent urbanism envisions the institutional framework as being very clear about the rules and regulations it sponsors and that those using discretion in implementing these measures must do so in a totally open, recorded and transparent manner.

Intelligent urbanism proposes that a Development Management System must temper each city and each urban region. This would lie out all of the procedures, through which all proposals would be submitted and assessed. It would clearly define all of the parameters that are being considered and provide the reasons and the conditions on which proposals will be assessed.

Intelligent urbanism facilitates the public in carrying out their honest objectives. It does not regulate and control the public. It attempts to reduce the requirements, steps and documentation required for citizens to process their proposals.

Intelligent urbanism is also promotive in furthering the interests of the public in their genuine utilization of opportunities. It promotes site and services schemes for households who can construct their own houses. It promotes up gradation of settlements with inadequate basic services. It promotes innovative financing to a range of actors who can contribute to the city’s development. Intelligent urbanism promotes a limited role for government, for example in “packaging” large-scale urban development schemes, so that the private sector is promoted to actually build and market urban projects, which were previously built by the government.

Intelligent urbanism is not naïve! It recognizes that there are developers and promoters who have no long term commitment to their own constructions, and their only concern is to hand over a dwelling, gain their profit and move on. For these players it is essential to have Development Control Regulations, which assure the public that the products they invest inare safe, hygienic, orderly, durable and efficient. For the discerning citizen, such rules also lay out the civil understanding by which a complex society agrees to live together.

There must be a Cadastral System wherein all of the land in the jurisdiction of cities is demarcated, surveyed, characterized and archived, registering its legal owner, its legal uses, and the tax defaults against it.

The institutional framework can only operate where there is a Structure Plan, or other document that defines how the land will be used, serviced, and accessed. The Structure Plan tells landowners and promoters what the parameters of development are, which assures that their immediate investments are secure, and that the returns and use of such efforts are predictable. A Structure Plan provides owners and investors, alike, with predictable future scenarios. This is essential for an economy to grow and for investors to become active. Cities require efficient patterns for their main infrastructure systems and utilities. Land needs to be used in a judicious manner, organizing complimentary functions and activities into compact, mixed use precincts and separating out non-compatible uses into their own precincts. In a similar manner, it is only through a plan that heritage sites and the environment can be legally protected. Public assets in the form of nature, religious places, heritage sites and open space systems must be designated in a legal plan.

Intelligent urbanism proposes that the city and its surrounding region be regulated by a Structure Plan, or equivalent mechanism, which acts as a legal instrument to rationally guide the growth, development and enhancement of the city.

There must be a system of participation by the “Stake Holders” in the preparation of plans. Public meetings, hearings of objections and transparent processes of addressing objections, must be institutionalized. Intelligent urbanism promotes Public Participation.

Local Area Plans must be prepared which address local issues and take into account local views and sentiments regarding plan objectives, configurations, standards and patterns. Such plans layout the sites of plots showing the roads, public open spaces, amenities areas and conservation sites. Land Pooling assures that all of those who benefit from the provision of public infrastructure and amenities equally contribute and that a few individuals do not suffer form reservations in the plan.

There must be a system of Floor Area Ratios to assure that the land and the services are not over pressured. No single plot owner should grab more than their fair share of utilization of the access roads, amenities and utilities that services all of the sites. Floor Area Rations temper this relationship as equalize the manner in which public services are consumed. Transfer of Development Rights benefits land owners whose properties have been reserved under the plan. It benefits the local authorities that lack the financial resources to purchase lands to implement the Structure Plans. It benefits concentrated, city center project promoters who have to amortize expensive land purchases, by allowing them to purchase the development rights from the owners of reserved lands and to hand over those properties to the plan implementing authority. This allows the local authority to widen roads and to implement the Structure Plan, with a minimum expenditure of funds. The local authority then transfers the needed development right to the city center promoter. Intelligent urbanism favors such innovative mechanism.

Intelligent urbanism supports the use of Architectural Guidelines where there is a tradition to preserve and where precedents can re used to specify architectural elements, motifs and language, in a manner, which reinforces a cultural tradition, which is meaningful. Building designs must respect traditional elements, even though the components may vary greatly to integrate contemporary functions. Architectural Guidelines are required to assure harmony and continuity of building proportions, scale, color, patterns, motifs, materials and facades.

Intelligent urbanism insists on safety, hygiene, durability and utility in the design and construction of buildings. Where large numbers of people gather, in schools and hospitals, which may become emergency shelter in disasters, special care must be exercised. A National Building Code is the reasonable instrument to achieve these aims, in the public’s interest.

Those who design buildings must be professionally qualified architects; those who design the structures (especially of structures more than ground plus two levels) must be professionally qualified structural engineers; those who build buildings must be qualified civil engineers; and, those who supervise and control construction must be qualified construction managers. Intelligent urbanism promotes the professionalization of the city making process. While promoting professionalism, intelligent urbanism proposes that this not become a barrier in the development process. Small structures, short structures, humble structures that do not house many people can be self designed and constructed by the inhabitants themselves. There must be recognized Professional Accrediting Boards, or Professional Bodies, to see that urban development employs adequate technical competence.

Finally, there must be legislation creating Statutory Local Authorities, and empowering them to act, to manage, to invest, service, to protect, to promote and to facilitate urban development and all of the opportunities, which a modern city must sponsor.

Intelligent urbanism insists that cities, local authorities, regional development commissions and planning agencies be professionally managed. City Managers can be hired to manage the delivery of services, the planning and management of planned development, the maintenance of utilities and the creation of amenities. As is the present case, the Thrompon (mayor) of Thimphu has professional training and management capability. This must be institutionalized.

Intelligent urbanism insists that appropriate institutions be established and that these clearly separate the roles and the powers of government from those of administrators. Elected officials are all ultimately responsible to their Council of Ministers and Head of Government. Competent administrative officials are ultimately responsible to the Head of State. This distinction assures that implementation remains in a professional arena, and that policy is in the sphere of elected representatives. This is an evolutionary process wherein a clear distinction between the chain of command down from the Head of State and the Head of Government separate and become distinct.

Intelligent Urbanism views plans and urban designs and housing configurations as expressions of the people for whom they are planned. The processes of planning must therefore be a participatory one between a range of stakeholders. The process must be a transparent one, which makes those privileged to act, as guardians of the people’s will, accountable for their decisions and choices. Intelligent Urbanism sees urban planning and city governance as the most salient expressions of civility. Intelligent Urbanism fosters the evolution of institutional systems that enhance transparency, accountability and rational public decision making.

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