[Reader-list] Third Posting:Kalyan:The Idea of Jamshedpur

[kalyan nayan]

 	This posting would refer to the planning processes envisaged by J. N.
Tata and others in Jamshedpur. It would also try to weave in it, the
planning mechanisms that have been initiated by them.

"Be sure to lay out wide streets planted with shady trees, every other
one of a quick growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of space
for lawns and gardens. Reserve large areas for football, hockey and
parks. Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques and
Christian churches".
Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata 

Above remarks unmistakably advocates planning as a medium to initiate
harmony in the physical as well as social resource complex of an urban
phenomenon. The founder was contemplating a vision of an industrial
city where maladies of urban growth can be done away with through
pre-emptive planning. It was the acceptance of the responsibility on
the part of the Tatas, the responsibility to plan Jamshedpur’s future.
Unlike Bombay and other cities it had genuinely started with a dream to
build a modern and efficient industrial city in the backdrop of Indian
diversity. Moreover urban planning was also a pretext to deliberate
upon the constitution of a modern nation.
	The successors of J. N. Tata might have thought that initiating plans
every twenty years or so would give them a grasp over the impending
future of the city but one could easily see, through these plans, that
this was not the case. The texture of these plan documents compels one
to break free from the constraint of looking at them merely as plan
documents. It might be the case that the planners would have probably
resisted the characterization of their careful marshalling of maps,
graphs, and statistics as dreams, but there was something enormously
suggestive about the way they looked at town plans and planning as a
process. 
In the backdrop of these, we would look at different plans and planners
of Jamshedpur. Detailed discussion would be initiated on the text and
the context of both - the plans and the planners historically. In the
second part there would be an attempt to see the legacy of these plans
on the Jamshedpur city and the changes instituted by them. 
The idea of using town plans in the study of urban history is not new.
In Europe, it goes back to seventeenth century when some publications
combined historical information with town plans to look at the growth
of the city space.  Frequent compositeness of town plans can give a
clue to distinct stages in town growth of which a historical record may
give no hint. It could be said without doubt that the town plans can
shed much light on the size and structure of different communities, the
different phases of their growth, their institutions and the relation
between them and the urban community, which they serve. 
It is imperative on us first of all to describe what a town plan is?
Conzen has attempted to describe the term town plan as ‘the
cartographic representation of a town’s physical layout reduced to a
predetermined scale’.  But more than this town plans are a complicated
category because they represent changing functional requirements of the
urban community. It would be our folly to regard these plans at their
face value and dispense with them. When looked at their face value they
represent themselves as a dry document of prospective physical lay out
of town. However reading these plans in the backdrop of technological
innovation, changes in industrial production, developments in the
social structure and aspects such as public health and housing, it will
provide us a comprehensive data on the evolution of physical and social
scale of the town. 
Apart from the plans, planners are no less significant in the making of
a landscape. Their worldview and their ideas creep into the plans even
if they consciously attempt to be objective to the situation provided
to them. One obvious question that comes to the mind before going any
further is the primary concern of the planner regarding the objectives
of the development of a plan. For Harvey the planner is concerned with
‘for the most part, to the task of defining and attempting to achieve a
successful ordering of the built environment’.   Similarly Planners are
concerned with the ‘proper location’  i.e. the appropriate mix of
activities in space of all the diverse elements that make up the
totality of physical structures and constitute the built environment.
These physical structures could be of a variety of mix, consisting of
the houses, roads, factories, offices, water and sewage disposal
facilities, hospitals and schools. Accordingly all the planners strive
to attain this ideal. And their ideology, aesthetics and politics needs
to be re-examined vis-à-vis the plans that they produce. 
In the case of Jamshedpur we would see that the first of the two plans
by Kennedy and Temple are more in the nature of street plans rather
than an elaborative attempt to affect an integrative analysis of
population and spatial forms. With the increase in population and load
over the town these plans had been introduced for a fuller and
comprehensive account of the problems affecting Jamshedpur and
attempted to suggest remedies accordingly.



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