social life wherein department directors,
ministry secretaries and seniors in the
military all played archery each afternoon
with their drivers, office attendants and
maintenance staff. They all laughed and danced
and drank chhaang! Everyone was a part of o
ne social group, and there were no divisions.
They were bonded together out of compassion
for their community.
Over the years I watched Thimphu grow
from 5,000 to 8,000 and then to 37,000 people,
when in 2001 I won a competition to prepare
the capital plan of Bhutan. The Bhutanese
Prime Minister, Jigme Thinley, who was
initiating the concept of Gross National
Happiness, took special interest in this activity.
We struggled together with a small team
of young Bhutanese architects to discover
pathways to make our capital plan more inclusive,
resulting in the Principles of Intelligent
Urbanism. These principles acted as a charter
through which to filter decisions in all our
discussions, regardless of whether in a village
meeting or a cabinet meeting. We immediately
set out to involve villagers in planning their own
watersheds, transforming them into what
they called Urban Villages, through land pooling.
This charter of working guidelines grew out
of our concepts of gross national happiness, and
from my earlier work preparing plans for
provincial capitals in Sri Lanka; housing
communities in India; development plans for
cities like Thane and Kalyan; and for other
human settlements in South Asia.
Lyonpo Jigme Thinley used the fate of
Bhutanese archery matches as a backdrop to
our planning work. He rekindled memories of
my first visit, when the working day was from
eight in the morning until two in the afternoon,
and the free time was used to meditate, and to
play archery with traditional bows and arrows,
bonding people into close-knit communities.
One day a foreign consultant arrived carrying
a ‘power bow’, made of fiberglass, with
slick arrows, shooting twice as far as any
traditional bow! That day changed Bhutan
forever, dividing every archery range into two
parts: one part for the power bows and the
other for traditional bows and arrows; one for
the rich and one for the poor!
A class based society was born on Thimphu’s
archery grounds! Soon all senior officials
were returning from foreign tours with power
bows, costing the annual salary of their drivers
and office attendants.Thus, the archery matches
evaporated as a binding social force, globalising
the entire city into a divisive, competitive society.
This parable taught me that defining
factors in traditional societies emerged from
within diverse societal components, expressing
themselves to society as an inclusive collage of
plural forms, from the inside outwards. On the
contrary, in our contemporary institutionalised
global cultures, the uniforms are imposed from
the outside inwards, suppressing down from the
top, on down into the parts. Our vernacular
dress and built forms are ‘expressions’, while
our institutional uniforms are ‘suppressions’!
This system of articulated stratification lives
with us as urban planners, tempering the way
we think, how we deal with ‘others’, and even our
self-images. Inclusiveness is essential for the
evolution of civilisation, yet we seem to be moving
backwards! Inclusiveness is the catalyst of
urban planning imagination, and the creator of
civility. It gifts communities self-knowledge and
raises inner awareness of ‘the right to the city’!Story Five:The Story of Reflection
Collecting memories, attaching subjective
meanings to these recollections, and arranging
these past events that have faded from reality
into virtual concepts, are unique feats of the
human brain, driving our strongest emotional
compulsions. Yet, this subconscious archival
project leads us to something I call the
human conclusion, wherein almost all humanThis page: ‘Karuna’ by
Piraji Sagara, Center for
Development Studies
and Activities, Pune,
1986-1994 ©Deepak Kaw
Opposite page: a sketch
on the Principles of
Intelligent Urbanism
by Benninger
Next spread, left:
‘Search’ by ChristopherBenninger — concrete
ceiling mural reflecting
a man in the cosmos
seeking meaning,
CDSA, Pune,
© Ramprasad Akkisetti
Right: a planometric
drawing of India House,
Pune, made by Vignesh
Premkumar