Shirish Patel's incisive comments on why things are going downhill for Mumbai. https://architecture.live/not-interested-beautifying-cities-shirish-patel/
your CIDCO experiences – what were the planning ideas you helped introduce?
. One was that development should take place in a series of nodes along a high capacity transit line,... And you should have high FSI or high of population near the station (this was not acepted by CIDCO) and then lower and lower FSI as you go further and further away.
The other thing we said and this we implemented at Vashi, was that you must accommodate all income groups if you want no slums, you must provide accommodation for all categories of housing and if necessary, sites and services for the poorest, in proportion to their numbers in the population. That is important.
Then we also said that land for these income groups should be cross subsidized.
[HI]: One aspect of the earlier public housing layouts which was remarkable was that apart from being a mixed-income schemes, they had different building types (G+1 or G+2) for Low Income Group (LIG) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) housing, versus mid-rise apartment blocks for Middle Income Group (MIG) housing. Now the approach has dramatically changed – apart from the fact that resettlement townships are predominantly low-income housing, these schemes try to maximize units on a given land area. Densities in SRA projects, that are now predominantly mid-rise or high-rise – can go as unbelievably high as 1200 tenements per hectare. The assumption seems to be that sites and services schemes are no longer feasible for a city like Mumbai city because they take up too much land, or to put it differently, the densities are not high enough for a so-called land-starved city [although arguably Mumbai is deliberately and artificially “land starved”].
I think planning begins with a declaration of values. You need a written statement of the objectives you’re going to pursue. And I think that should be widely discussed and mandated. It should be like the Constitution of India. If possible, it should be legislated so that it’s justiciable. We declare these values, and then proceed further. Everything else follows, policies, projects…everything else follows.