New direction for New Bombay

In massive Ghonsoli project, new urban planning principles mesh with Indian cultural traditions. The Ghonsoli Neighborhood plan is one of a series of satellite communities for the expanding city of Bombay, India. These communities, collectively called New Bombay, were originally envisioned in 1970 to relieve development pressure and congestion. Those that have been built have taken the form of monotonous housing projects on superblocks, with little sense of place. New Bombay is already home to a million people. New urbanists Dhiru Thadani and Peter Hetzel of Washington, DC, were hired by a government development agency to redesign the 1,320-acre Ghonsoli node as a demonstration project. The project has more housing units than any US new urban (NU) community built or planned, and at a gross density of 55 dwelling units/acre, is one of the most intense NU developments conceived. The plan calls for 30,000 units, 1.5 million square feet of offices, 1 million square feet of neighborhood and regional retail, and 6 hotels. Ghonsoli also is a case study in affordable housing and the cross-cultural potential of the New Urbanism. The plan has been approved but is not yet under construction. Original modernist plan The original plan for the node, like those already built, envisioned superblocks 700 feet by 1,700 feet on a side, served by automobile-oriented arterial roads and transit stations 1.2 miles apart. No public spaces were identified. A belt of light manufacturing has been built on the eastern edge of the community. The new Ghonsoli plan is a radical transformation, yet the architects were able to use 95 percent of the proposed streets from the original plan, which helped gain the support of local planners who were invested in the prior proposal. The original streets were redesigned as three urban types — a boulevard, an avenue, and a “shopping street” with room for street vendors. Fine grain of blocks Inside the superblocks, the architects overlaid a much finer grain of streets and blocks. Block lengths in the revised plan have walkable dimensions, ranging from 250 to 500 feet. “We were constantly looking back to the original Fort District in old Bombay for the size of spaces, streets, and blocks,” explains Thadani. The land to be developed, 720 acres, was organized into five neighborhoods (535 acres), and seven districts (185 acres). “We were just applying the principles of the New Urbanism to create neighborhoods,” Thadani explains. Districts include a community college, a clock merchants district, a medical center, a botanical garden and nursery, a “sites and services area” where the very poor are given land to build a house, and a crematorium — an integral part of religious and cultural life for Hindus. Next to the latter will be a sizable park for contemplation. The clock merchants district will be a warehouse and distribution center, part of a government attempt to reduce truck traffic in old Bombay. Forty-five percent of the land, or 600 acres, was kept as open space. This represents an improvement over old Bombay, which has only 12 percent open space — although this open space is often of high quality. Built parts of New Bombay have 40 percent open space — “but you can’t find it,” Thadani says. “It’s all residual space. There are no memorable spaces.” In Ghonsoli, the open space will be “programmed” as greens, squares, and other parks in important, easy-to-find locations — thus both quantity and quality of open space will be high. Each neighborhood will include mixed-use areas with ground floor retail. One neighborhood will include a centrally located “ shopping street,” terminating at a transit station, with shops and a 40-foot-wide paved median to accommodate street vendors, an important commercial activity in India. Vendors often set up near transit stations, creating very crowded conditions. The station will not only have the site for vendors, but also a large plaza for community activities. Serving the poor The needs of the poor are a far more important consideration than in most US developments. The smallest housing type — consisting of three rooms totaling 440 square feet — is expected to sell for $6,000, Thadani says. This low cost is achieved not only by the size of the unit, but also by the low cost of construction, estimated at $15/square foot. The buildings will be four-story walkups. These highly affordable buildings will have a range of unit sizes, and will be restricted to certain income groups. “We tried to integrate low-income buildings throughout the entire fabric,” he adds. On the exterior, low-income buildings will not look much different from more expensive, market-rate buildings. The difference is that the affordable buildings will have more units, Thadani says. Depending on what the market demands, taller buildings with elevators may be built in Ghonsoli. But even these will likely use cage-type elevators to keep costs low. All buildings are based on typical Bombay multifamily types. In India, streets are shared not only by crowds of pedestrians, but also by significant numbers of cows and dogs. This did not necessarily change the design of streets, but it certainly was incorporated into renderings, which focus on the interplay of pedestrians, traffic, cows, and dogs. They deliberately sought to show that local culture could thrive in a new urban environment.