Communities: Urban order, hierarchy and streets in neighbourhoods.

Above: Enables the understanding of the area that is going to be detailed further to study the phenomenon of the urban-rural hybrid

Halasuru is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city (demarcated by the British as the quarantine and dispensary area during the plaque). Sections through the neighbourhood elaborate the many processes that are apparent in the ‘urban revolution’ of emerging India - plurality, inequality and hybridity of urban-rural.

We prefer not to use the planning terminology ‘Urban Village’ in this context, though it superficially appears to have the same nature. Here, hybridity sprouts up because of the lack of planning decisions and infrastructure and is created, maintained and regulated through the dual processes of authority intervention and self organisation.

Mapping Ulsoor focuses on one such hybridity to elaborate, understand and analyse the ecology of the community. The mapping focuses on urban order and hierarchy that is creates communities in urban space. Through mapping we would like to situate the learning to create prospective planning scenarios to reinforce the identity and diversity of the neighbourhood, allowing it to retain its individuality and economic growth within the growing homogenising planning methodology of the metropolis.

In its current form, this hybridity forms a relevant piece of real estate within the city centre with the creation of the Metro along one of its borders, this makes it an urgent study to perform to ensure that gentrification and banal urban renewal is avoided as the only strategy of urban planning.

The hybridity displays a strong specificity in its limited connectivity to the rest of the neighbourhood, creating boundaries and limits strongly against the almost seamless movement in the rest of the area. The limited connectivity and intuitive navigation system that presents itself is caused by a series of transformations along the borders of the hybridity, some designed by the inhabitants (dead ends created by piled stone barricades or buildings surreptitiously built across streets with time) and some planned in a Bangalore before its explosive growth (orienting the neighbourhood towards Old Madras Road rather than Bhaskaran Road).

Connectivity forms the first clue that we map with to understand the urban order and hierarchy within this ecology.

Above: Connective isolation and specificity of the site studied

Methodology:

The hybridity is well represented in google maps and this forms the base of our mapping study. By mapping we identify key elements, objects, spaces, activities and locate them on the google map the neighbourhood to understand the impact and relationship that they have in creating different scales and boundaries of communities within this larger hybridity. The aim is to understand urban order and hierarchy and its role in forming and binding communities.

Ordering devices that are mapped to understand the interaction, movement and culture within the neighbourhood:1. Public and private gradation maps: Understanding of the planning of the neighbourhood as designed by public authorities and

identifying public roads, parks, health centres and schools. This creates the first level of understanding the public boundaries of the neighbourhood.

2. Street density: This is a map that is created with two criteria. The first is the direct analysis of the connectivity of the street - its links and dead ends and the second is a more experiential understanding while being in the space and observing the movement of traffic through the streets. This elaborates the hierarchy of street use intensity and provides clues on community boundaries across streets. High traffic changes the character of the streets from private to public, making it suitable for commerce and business. It would be appropriate here to explain that in this urban-rural context streets are considered private-public spaces, and extensions of the domestic rather than purely public infrastructural elements.

3. Drying clothes: Internal intuition dictates that clothes are dried across streets that are considered more pedestrian because of the lack of linear or obvious connectivity, lack of economic activity and reduced width. Through time this navigation path has been reinforced within the neighbourhood. This map provides a fine grain scaling to the hierarchies of streets within the neighbourhood.

4. Water points: One of the key elements that we observed in our initial interactions of the space was that many of the houses did not have running water and they relied on public water points (storage tanks and street faucets) to collect water. These water points become centers for interaction, communication and knowledge dispersion. Public water supply is a limited timed resource and the distance of transporting the water from the supply to the home is a crucial factor that forms ‘water communities’ that is temporal communities formed because of proximity to water supply sources. Water points order movement across the neighbourhood. The streets are also used to perform domestic activities that require the use of extensive water like washing dishes and clothes and brushing teeth. Showers are taken in the privacy of the house. Water is also an important factor in the understanding the typology and transformation of the domestic space.

5. Private Water Tanks: many houses are fitted with private water tanks. This denotes an autonomy from the street and a sense of ownership of the property. Mainly they co-relate to higher rising domestic spaces (multiple levels of domestic spaces). There is a distinct change in character between the streets that have a greater number of private water tanks and streets that do not identifying private water tanks as an ordering principle in the way that public and private is established along the streets.

6. Housing typology: The houses in the neighbourhood are constantly transforming but there is a sense of a series of mutations and types that are scattered around the area especially with vertical growth and intrusion beyond street line. A change in house typology changes the relationship between inside/outside, private/public, community/individual and when one type dominates a street it defines the character of the street. This study is about the transformations across a street of housing typologies and their effects in creating typology of streets.

7. House Numbers: Expression of a house name and number proves legitimisation by law and marks space that can be invested into.

8. Symbolism (colours, graphics and icons): Through an understanding of symbolism in the space we can try to understand how navigation and interaction is ordered on the streets.

9. Garbage: The streets are free of rubbish compared to most developed and planned neighbourhoods in the city, this is a rather obvious understanding on walking through the neighbourhoods as many of the streets are treated as an extension of the domestic space. Garbage can be analysed to understand two scales of urban order - at one level the visual experience of garbage can determine the level of interaction on the street, more garbage implying less association with the street as private space and at another level of data collection, garbage collection points create an urban ordering device.

10.General stores: ‘General stores’ proliferate across the neighbourhood as valid commercial activities. There are a few typologies of the ‘general store’ ranging from basic to advanced depending on the extensiveness of stocks. Each has its own range of influence and forms centers within their proximity.

11.Economic activity: The nature of economic activity and its location allows for an understanding of the economic role the neighbourhood plays internally and within the city.

12.Temporal obstacles: Through the day, especially in the morning (the main time for activity in the neighbourhood due to the availability of water) some streets are seen as ‘restricted access’. This is not universally seen across the neighbourhood so when they are identified they are mapped to understand the role that they play in creating boundaries and order.

13.Illumination and electricity: Night illumination provides clues on movement through streets in the dark and safety along these areas.

14.Street furniture: Benches, stoops, plants and graffiti: most street furniture that is observed in this neighbourhood is created by the inhabitants. They provide clues on spaces that are used for interaction.

15.Sensorial: smell, and audio: rather than smell and sound landscapes we map spaces that are extraordinarily loud, glaring or different.

Mapping is not an exact science, a lot is based on observation and sometimes intuition, logic and peer knowledge. Understanding that the process of understanding and ordering the space is constantly going to evolve and change as we participate in the research ourselves. To begin the study we detached a fragment of the neighbourhood to create the methodology for the project that can then be applied to the rest of the neighbourhood. Each mapping trips across the fragment takes one hour per item that is to be mapped with the researcher walking 3.66 km through the street.

Above: detailing the location and extent of the site for methodology development

Perceptions of public and private: The meaning suggested by the words public and private in a city are assumed to be understood multilaterally across the city and across the discipline of urban planning. In reality these words are not so black and white. Ownership, access, and architectural language give ambiguous meanings to similar typology of building and city spaces. More osten than not public spaces tend towards privatization on the pretext of maintenance and security.

Houses and offices are unequivocally perceived as private spaces. The property is bought or leased to and maintained by an individual or a group of individuals and they hold all rights of admission and decide on the rules that are to be followed while within their premises. Restaurants, malls, shops on the street are also private spaces in the sense that they are privately owned, but they are osten sensed as private-public or public-private spaces; the gradation from private to public changes with the size of the establishment, the programme suggested and the language of architecture used. The larger the structure, holding complex programme the more public it is perceived because some part of the complex programme adopts the language of streets to unify and order the activities within it and it relies on critical mass from the streets to inhabit it temporally.

Above: The reinterpreted Nolli ((link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Nolli)map for the neighbourhood. The Nolli map is an interesting method to understand how planners perceive the distribution of public and private programme within the neighbourhood and the ideal programmatic connection of one neighbourhood to the larger city. Use, ownership, boundaries suggest a completely different public and private map on the ground.

Streets, parks and squares, markets, clinics and community centres are public spaces within a city, with free access and use by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and the city. Religious institutions are ambiguous and in this case we categorise them as private-public space because they are owned by an institution where rights to access are decided by the institution but they are classified as public programme.

In Ulsoor, while retaining the three basic categories private, public-private (private-public) and public we find that that what we would disciplinarily consider public spaces are not perceived strictly as such.

Streets take on the role of private-public and public depending on the time of the day. This role is not stated but osten sensed by the programme enacted on the streets. The ownership of a part of the street constantly transfers between the inhabitants living (insiders) on either side of the street and public (outsiders) moving through the street. There is never an obvious prohibition to access but there are suggestions; narrowing the width of the street with objects, physically restricting connectivity and patterns of interaction and movement..

Inhabitants sense parks, squares, markets, community centre as private spaces owned by the government. The spaces are perceived to have strict programmatic guidelines, time and activity restrictions and boundaries hence are never used beyond their stipulated reason of being. Streets osten play the role that these spaces cannot accommodate or adapt to.

Above: Density as a function of built and unbuilt (L); Density as a function of public and private (R)

The perception of public or private within the neighbourhood changes the perception of density of the neighbourhood. If density is understood to be a ratio of built and unbuilt space the neighbourhood would not be described as densely populated. A google map provides ample evidence of unbuilt area to justify the availability of adequate light and air. In a map where density is the ratio of public and private programme the neighbourhood could be considered to be highly dense where the streets provide the only relief from ‘pure’ private space within the neighbourhood.

Hierarchy of streets: Planners since the mid 20th century have been concerned with vehicular and pedestrian movement on the same plane, suggesting various alternatives to segregate and choreograph one or the other. Within this neighbourhood there appears to be a four level hierarchical system to the streets. Level 1 shows faster and greater moving traffic while level 4, slower and less motorised traffic.

The first level of hierarchy forms the main connections with the rest of the city and these streets tend towards becoming roads. Commercial activity is transforming to activity that does not need pedestrian movement and are specific.

At the second level we see the neighbourhood transformed into a grid like system ensuring direct connectivity across its landscape, forming vehicular pathways. It should be noted that between level 2 and level 4 there is no perceptible difference in road width, there are disconnected pavements and the maximum speed a vehicle can travel on these roads is 25Km/hr constantly negotiating with pedestrians.

The third level is rather ambiguous, it parallels the streets of the second level cartographically but because of patterns of use and activity the second level of hierarchy is used more by vehicles than the third. The streets in level 3 could have replaced the streets on level 2 at any time in the history of the neighbourhood. The similarity between the connectivity seen in level 2 and level 3 allows the understanding of the role that programme along the street, patterns of use and street activity play in determining the types of movement across landscapes by creating subtle navigation signs for inhabitants and outsiders. They are dynamically interrelated. The fourth level is the level of interaction and of community.

Hierarchy of streets seen here appear to be formed by a bottom up non verbal organisation system. It is a negotiated strategy to accommodate community privacy, economic sensibility and efficient connectivity. Being a negotiated strategy it is variable to change and transformations.

The economic activity along the streets provides valuable clues on the hierarchy of the streets. It is difficult to say for sure which came first, the patterns of vehicular movements or commerce along the streets but they both reinforce each other fossilising patterns to a certain degree.

The distribution of economic activity gives the neighbourhood a directional quality within the city. The streets appear in a map as an equal network connecting Bhaskaran Road to Old Madras Road but the neighbourhood tenuously links with Bhaskaran road physically and economically forming stronger memory associations with Old Madras Road.

Economic activity patterns show that level 1 and level 2 streets are suitable for a variety of economic activities, while level 3 is preferred for activity that is targeted towards the neighbourhood or is independent from walk in clients. Most of the economic activity is self owned, with few employees. Trading and vocational services is the predominate type of economic activity with a sparse distribution of professional and industrial activity.