Instant Cities -1

Then:
Instant Cities- a phrase coined by Gunther Paul Barth- is a type of urban organization which he cites to have first appeared in ancient Greek colonization. Barth’s emphasis here is on the city as an institution of empire. His American variants on the theme include San Francisco as an emporium, Denver as a mining camp, Santa Fe, the economic town; Monterey, the colonial outpost; Salt Lake City, the temple city; and Champoeg, Oregon, the market place. San Francisco and Denver, his principal examples, were different from the smaller cities, as they emerged through a catalyst- the discovery of gold.
Barth, Gunther Paul: Instant Cities. Oxford University Press (1975)

Now:

“Often in the recent past, (these) urban extensions, large though they are, have grown piecemeal as a series of development episodes. With one thing not quite fitting with the next, and the all inclusive tracery of transport infrastructure overlaid as an unrelated engineering event, unexploited as an element of urban form.
The role of landscape planning for public open space is recognized as vital to the comprehensive structuring of these new forms of the city. It is the one element that can creatively bring together social, environmental and infrastructural components with some degree of aesthetic and functional consistency and at the same time also make a significant contribution to issues of energy, environment and urban form”.

The above citation is a part of the prologue to "Instant Cities: Landscape, Infrastructure and Urban Form"- the Annual Conference of the Indian Society of Landscape Architects (ISOLA) held on 20-21st February, India Habitat Centre, Delhi.

Given the theme of the conference, the choice of venue is interesting due to its urban layers. India Habitat Centre- Joseph Allen Stein’s signature building on his ‘Lodhi estate’ woven into the magnum opus of ‘New Delhi’ by Edwin Lutyens, stands opposite to the Lodhi Garden, which in turn stands on an axis which signifies the beginning and the end of the Mughal rule in India, marked by the Humayun’s tomb on the West and Safdarjung’s Tomb on the West.

The Lodhi garden itself is the site of a pre-mughal necropolis which became the erstwhile Willingdon Park- a Victorian garden till it got a Picturesque makeover by Garrett Eckbo and Stein, while the Nizamuddin basti across the road from Humayun’s tomb is one of the older settlements of the Delhi region.

What links these remnants of ages gone by, is the presence of “green”, in the form of the leafy Lodhi road, the untapped Nizamuddin nallah, the golf club and of course Lodhi estate’s generous setbacks with lawns et al. encircling Lodhi Garden.

Lutyens’ Delhi deliberately segregated itself with respect to the older Delhis (notably, Shahjahanabad) and established a new urban pattern on the ground- a Garden City structured on a Neo Classical sense of Grandeur- maturing within approximately 20 years – in comparison to the time it took to build the Taj Mahal (16 years) . With its heroic scale, exclusive bungalows, wide avenues and motorcar-destined roads, Lutyens Delhi was (is) a far cry from the inclusiveness and energetic Purani Dilli (Shahjahanabad)

In that sense, Lutyens’ opus was an “Instant City”.

(Image courtesy ISOLA Delhi brochure)