Policymaking remains locked in retrograde theories and negotiations with the moneybags

Nicolas Rainer talks to Ashok Lall, the architect specializing in sustainable buildings, about the need to create a new urbanity ■ You’ve spoken expansively about the need to create a new urbanity. What exactly are you getting at?

A new urbanity aims to create a place where every individual is empowered to exercise and share his or her imagination.

■ What does this translate into in concrete terms?

Being able to share one’s imagination is a gift. Concretely, it’s about translating the immaterial – thoughts, ideas, poetry, music – into something material. It’s about making and providing things for one another.

You add the edge of your imagination to something that would otherwise be mundane.

I see that as being the cornerstone of a sustainable society.

■ How does one encourage people to express themselves in such a manner?

It boils down to the construction of social interactions. The physicality of the city, the built environment has a terrific impact on social relationships. The sharing of social space, confronting each other – not with hostility or contestation – but rather as an act of communion, is what urban planning is all about. If that lever can be activated, I think it’s moving in the right direction.

■ Speaking of social spaces, in Mauritius we see a tragic lack of places where people can express themselves and even simply unwind. What does that tell you about our planning?

It tells me that urban planning has been subsumed under the pursuit of financial wealth. The reason why this has happened is because land has been turned into an economic asset. That is the fundamental flaw of many of the theories being applied today.

■ Hence the notion of spatial equity: allowing people, whatever their social and financial status, the right to space just like everyone else…

That’s right. I’d even go so far as to speak of positive discrimination and that’s the responsibility of an operational democracy, of the political process. In some places, it’s already happening to a certain extent.

Part of the reason slums in India can’t be moved easily, for instance, is because slum-dwellers wield political power. By that token, they are determining the necessity for politicians to look after their needs.

Unfortunately, urban planning remains locked in retrograde theories and negotiations with the moneybags, which are an obstacle to positive discrimination.

■ Does that mean that the political class of tomorrow will be composed of people with certain skill sets, such as engineers and architects, rather than career politicians who haven’t a clue about the most basic tenets of urban planning?

The complexity of life, coupled with the rate of change, means that we need what you might call a political technocracy, an institutional system that brings together knowledge and capability of handling complex issues and is able to communicate them back to society. The political class has to morph into a new animal if it is to respond to new challenges. If we stick to the three-cornered boxing ring like we have now with the people in one corner, technocrats in another and politicians in another one, we will have serious problems.

■ The trouble with having such a benighted political class is that today’s decisions lock us into infrastructures for the next 30 to 40 years. Is that why you advocate decentralized and flexible urban planning?

Look at it this way: you have a transportation corridor, which is serviced by a highly efficient public transport system.

Along this corridor, you have a pattern of development composed of hubs and communities of between 50 000 and 100 000 people. These hubs are developed to densities where there is a fair amount of interspersion of open space and soft ground, but still with a sense of compactness so as to bring people together.

It also allows you to handle waste and to collect and distribute water with low-cost means.

■ But the backbone has to be an efficient mass transit system?

Absolutely.