VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York
Abstract
Architecture and urban design play a key role when assessing the livability of the urban space. The Indian city of Chandigarh illustrates how planning can improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. The Corbusian masterplan of ‘the city beautiful’ counts on a significant contribution from Jane Drew. Indeed, she was credited for the design of the inceptive Sector 22, which was later citywide applied. Drew envisioned it as a “small world”, combining housing, infrastructure, leisure, and green belts with collective equipment, public services, transport, and communications networks. This vicinity of functions, walkable or bikeable through an intelligible hierarchy of roads, promotes environmentally friendly mobility, better air quality, and time efficiency. Overall, the orthogonal grid and the repetition of standard sectorial layouts permit easy navigation, ambitioning well-being, and a smooth daily life for the residents. Furthermore, the sustainability of the city was promoted by prioritizing the architects’ expertise in passively adapting modern architecture to the local climate – the so-called Tropical Architecture. Drew also included in her work innovative participatory planning methodologies. Thus, the design process was driven by rich exchanges between architect, inhabitants’ needs and aspirations, and environments. This strategy decisively contributed to the high livability of her modernist plans and designs, besides their lively preservation seven decades after. Targeting social equity, Drew designed Peon’s Villages for the lowest-income groups. These affordable housing neighborhoods were envisioned as communities or microhabitats, yet served by the macrohabitat systems, available in every sector. Assuming livability can be enhanced through design, it is pertinent to highlight the overlooked contribution of Drew to the (arguable) success of the Chandigarh planning, and how her pioneering socially engaged architecture pursued a more egalitarian society.
Inês Leonor Nunes is an architect and a PhD candidate at the University of Coimbra. Granted by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, her research addresses the role of social concerns in the construction of Tropical Architecture’s framework. Entitled ‘The Social within the Tropical: Jane Drew and Minnette De Silva designing an inclusive Modernism in the tropics’, an article integrated into this investigation was awarded the Lifchez-Berkeley Prize (best paper by a junior scholar) in the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments Conference Singapore 2022