No planning in urban planning
There’s a penguin near LUMS in Lahore. Well, it’s a statue of a penguin, a full sized one, on a patch of grass between two busy roads.
So why does a penguin live between two busy roads in a country that has nothing to do with penguins?
You might also ask why those two penguin roads have been designed the way they have, without any access breaks between them, and little convenient access to LUMS. Those living close behind LUMS are forced to drive the distance to Wateen Chawk before turning around again, when for LUMS they cannot take a simple right to its entrance. They must perform a complicated manoeuvre around the penguin and a couple of houses that moonlight as a roundabout, and then cut immediately across a road that leads to the main gate. Before that point they are in danger of taking an unmarked fork that would take them right back to Wateen Chawk once again.
As a consequence, many drivers, mainly cyclists and motorcyclists, drive along the wrong side into a blind corner, all to avoid the long trek in the opposite direction. It’s shorter, but exceedingly perilous, both to themselves and to the cars turning the corner from the other, the correct side.
I’m told on good authority that these roads are laid out like this, following accidents on that stretch of road, but this solution is no solution, without any consideration for convenience, safety, or the Pakistani psyche.
Similarly, the ‘backside’ of LUMS has a burgeoning population, and many schools. Almost no one stops at the traffic lights there, not even in front of the Lahore Grammar School, and they drive on the wrong side again, because once more, to get to the other side is too long a detour. Obviously the new colonies were not planned for, and once they mushroomed into existence no one bothered to accommodate them, or enforce any safety rules, here or anywhere else.
Alas Pakistan and its lack of planning and enforcement. These examples but illustrate that point. In today’s expensive times with current prices of fuel, to expect commuters to drive so far out of their way is unrealistic, yet it happens with monotonous regularity throughout the country that anyone who can make life difficult for anyone else, does so. But we’ll come back to that later.
The lack of planning extends to almost every sphere of life, but since we’re speaking of construction the other obvious example is buildings. The recent heartrending tragedies in Karachi and Lahore where so many lives were lost were apparently a direct consequence of a lack of planning and a singular lack of enforcement of safety regulations: a single access point into a congested building with dubious electrical wiring and most of electrical equipment is that well worn cliché: a recipe for disaster, and a disaster it was.
Seeing that the Pakistani public observes rules only to break them, the solution lies in the three Es: Engineering, Education, and Enforcement, properly implemented.
Roads and buildings designed by civil engineers and architects are not just about walkways, flyovers, walls and windows. They are also about people, their mentality, and their interaction with civic amenities. Designs must reflect this aspect too.
If the public does not understand safety, it must be educated. Until then, there’s enforcement. In the case of roads, the sharp metal spikes in Karachi’s Khadda Markets streets have forced people to use the one way system, proving that money is better spent on enforcement rather than on penguins and kalmas at chowks.
So about making life more difficult for everyone, I have a theory which you may call the Obstruction Theory. It says that people have such an unfailingly miserable time getting the most mundane work done here that they’ve come to think of it as the norm. To acquire legitimacy, a thing must be hazardous and obtainable only after overcoming many obstacles. That, according to popular perception, is how life is meant to be, and therefore, they make things difficult and hazardous on purpose. Which in a sense means that all this haphazard planning; it’s really people working very hard in the only way they know best, to do what they think is right. And we thought we never planned, worked hard, or did what is right. It just goes on to show how wrong one can be.
Also, you know that penguin I mentioned earlier? Well I forgot to tell you, it wears a hat. It’s only a bowler hat, but never mind.
The writer is a freelance columnist. Read more by her at http://rabia-ahmed.blogspot.com/