It was the beginning of another calendar year and the world stepped into 2020 with a new energy and great aspirations for the upcoming year. The celebrations and exchange of good wishes were in the last leg by the end of January when our country confirmed the first case of a rare and unheard of epidemic: Covid-19. In just a few days, the wrath of this merciless virus took the whole globe into its grasp. Public places, metro stations, bazaars and streets were engulfed in a never-seen-before gloominess. Nearly one-third of the world’s population went under lockdown and that’s when we realised how unequipped we were to face this crisis. While the country observes a standstill in many sectors like manufacturing, entertainment, construction, food and beverages and all non-essential services, the biggest discourse is on the economic growth rate. The country’s GDP has dropped substantially and every day new speculations are surfacing from various organisations hinting at future projections.
In the wake of all this we – the landscape professionals – have been trying to appreciate the bright side of the pandemic. We have been asking for a sustainable means of living for the last two decades. History tells us we had a symbiotic relationship with our environment. But as we started to evolve as a developing community, this relationship changed from utilitarian to exploitative.
We took a lot from the earth but gave back very little. The rivers and lakes began to shrink considerably, the sky rarely looked as blue as it used to and the Air Quality Index (AQI) indices had reached their worst in the last decade.
While we were confined to our households, due to the virus, nature that had long been abused got a chance to thrive and surprised mankind with some incredible sights of clear water in rivers and canals, blue skies and unimaginable AQI readings. People in the densest urban locations saw wild animals strolling through the streets. The hard-hitting question today is whether our association with nature needs to be investigated and revisited in the light of the message these events convey. Should we not address this issue of sustainability as an urgent need of the hour? Today, when we are faced with a global threat, I believe it is the most appropriate time to assess where we have gone wrong and how best we can rectify this imbalance.
All the Member States of the United Nations had adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a universal call to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. SDG 11 to 15 predominantly focussed on protecting and replenishing the earth’s resources, creating sustainable communities, ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns, combatting climate change, conserving and restoring life above and below land (UN TSDG Report, 2019).
India is a vast nation with 1.3 billion people coming from various socio-economic strata, religious backgrounds and cultural beliefs. In 2011, 377.2 million people in India lived in urban areas, which is close to 32% of the total and 46 cities had a population in excess of one million. Hence, the importance of creating sustainable urban communities in the given circumstances becomes manifold.
The word ‘urban landscape’ brings vibrant images to one’s mind comprising multiple colours, exciting outdoors, gardens, water channels and bustling public places. Landscape plays a vital role in our lives, the benefits being physical, visual, ecological and productive.
But today, as we face the pandemic, a thought that emerges is whether this is enough, or whether the meaning of landscape development needs to be re-imagined in the given situation of the pandemic and social distancing. The effect of Covid-19 seems to be long lasting, enforcing us to accept and adapt new lifestyle changes for living.
The coming years may witness life as we’ve never seen it before. People may not visit and populate public destinations as they did before, the gardens, parks and playgrounds may remain under-utilised for a long time and the bazaars and streets may be devoid of the throngs of people due to the pandemic. The regional greens and city level open spaces and parks will continue to bestow on us their ecosystem services and their intangible use-value, but the recreation coefficient of these resources might drop drastically in the light of the new norms of social distancing.
It is an interesting fact that the countries with the happiest cities aren’t rated so highly simply because of their GDP alone. There are many other factors, which actually give happiness to the citizens of any nation. Some of these may even be intangible yet they play a vital role in improving the psychological health of the residents. In the current situation of this outbreak, the cities with rich natural heritage and more open to built-up ratios stand a better chance to contain the pandemic in multiple ways. The ill-effects of this specific virus have been found to be much more devastating where humans fail to maintain physical distance from one another. Open greens like Central Park in the US have been used as an outdoor medical facility for multiple operations during this unforeseen situation. In India, many schools, trains, sports clubs and office buildings are being put to similar use in the present time.
It is time to adopt certain sustainability lessons from places like Singapore and China. Newer dimensions of biophilic cities, eco-cities and green cities need due exploration to find sustainable and appropriate solutions. The principles of strengthening blue and green corridors with healthy ecosystems ensuring well-being of native flora and fauna promise sustainable living in urban situations. Efficient watershed development ensuring maximum recharge and public participation can prove extremely useful in developing a sustainable model.
The landscape has to act as the larger canvas on which the social layer of human life and activity should proliferate.
Smaller urban conurbations well-surrounded by efficient and thick green belts to provide better living conditions are needed. The dependence of nature and development has to be symbiotic and not lop-sided, as it has become today. The efficient working of all ecological cycles and processes will ensure a healthy urban living. Appropriate land-uses to ensure necessary food production, ecological benefits and happy sustenance of all forms of life need to be implemented holistically.
A very crucial aspect regarding creating and providing spaces for situations like pandemics, which occur once in many years, is that large areas cannot solely be dedicated for use in such times. Instead, retrofitting the existing spaces and creating flexible-use spaces may be the solution. The contemporary cities and towns are overcrowded with high-density, high-rise fabric where practicing social distancing seems impossible. We need to decongest them to suit any such calamity or outbreak; the practicality of this is debatable though. The designers will have to build-back-better or rather build-back-different to cater to such situations.
At the community level, mixed use developments with activated ‘parochial realm’ can be a solution worth-considering. This development typology ensures work, stay and relaxation spaces close to one another dotted with other recreational, cultural, health care, local shopping and religious centres. These nodes may then be connected through well-designed and optimally-sized pedestrian walkways, vehicular connections and green corridors. As defined by Lofland (1998): “The parochial realm is characterised by a sense of commonality among acquaintances and neighbours who are involved in interpersonal networks that are located within the communities”. This environment is neither as closed as the private realm nor as loose as the public domain. In times of a disease outbreak, these flexible-use open spaces may be converted to triage facilities temporarily. This may become a possible green and flexible model for use during unforeseen circumstances. Inward-looking development with controlled entry-exit points and vehicular circulation restricted to the outer periphery may add value as screening of cars and people coming in can be effectively streamlined. A well-designed buffer between the street and the living spaces of the houses will be considered worthwhile.
The future development models may advocate independent houses instead of apartment culture. Today, the meaning of a residential unit has been redefined as a closed environment that can effectively provide social isolation. More than an escape from routine and urban chaos, the house, now, has to offer a retreat from viruses and infections. Urbanisation takes a step back as we relocate to the suburbs. Considering long stay durations at homes and situations like work-from-home for households, there needs to be a strategy where these outdoor spaces act as extensions of the indoors. Interacting with outdoor greens will not only have a positive psychological and therapeutic impact but shall also help increase efficiency of work-from-home.
There is ample research to ratify the impact of plants and the outdoors on mental health and happiness. Studies show that tasks performed under the calming influence of nature yield greater accuracy. Berman, Jonides and Kaplan, psychologists at the University of Michigan, found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20% after people spent an hour interacting with nature. Patients who physically interact with plants experience a significantly reduced recovery time after medical procedures (Ulrich, 1984).
Self-reliance in terms of food productivity may be considered an important need during long isolation periods. City level and neighbourhood public greens may need to be present, but the need of the future may be to shift to ‘Productive Landscapes’. Small house gardens, terraces and balconies may turn into productive mini-farms to satisfy the local needs of the community.
Covid-19 impacts the respiratory system of the infected person. In such situations, clean air becomes extremely important around the residential clusters. It may require our walls turning green in the form of vertical gardens and phytowalls with plants for air purification and improved microclimate.
The concepts of smart and sustainable eco-cities with green buildings and intelligent infrastructure systems may be the need of futuristic landscapes. The buildings and communities may need to become self-sufficient in producing their own food, recharging water and managing their water and solid waste. This seems to be a situation worthy of serious response in terms of innovative thinking, capacity building and sustainable development.
Aarti Grover is an Assistant Professor in the Post-Graduate Course of Landscape Architecture at School of Planning & Architecture (SPA), Delhi. She has a Doctorate Degree in Architecture and a specialisation in Landscape Architecture. With almost 20 years’ experience, she has worked on many prestigious projects in the field of Landscape Architecture and Habitat Design.
References
-Lofland, L. (1998). The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.
-United Nations .(2019).The Sustainable Development Goals Report. Available: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019
-Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery. Science, New Series, Volume 224, Issue 4647.
Comments (0)