GIS@development December 2001: Demystifying the Science of Planning Citizen's initiatives

Urban flood management is an engineering subject - totally technical. Not quite, says Sushil Bansal, a common resident of Firozabad, who has nothing to do with science. You will get similar responses from some groups in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Rohtak, and Bikaner, where Community Action Planning initiatives have been taken up for urban risk reduction on a pilot basis. Such is the result of participation in planning.

Since the first Delhi Master Plan of 1962, which was also the first Master Plan for any city in the country, the town planning process has followed the standard routine of preparing comprehensive city development plans with twenty year perspectives. The responsibility of plan preparation rests with the town and country planning departments of the states, or with city development authorities. The process does include a component of public participation: it is mandatory for the authorities to announce the preparation of the draft plan, and invite objections from the public, through newspaper advertisements, public notices or beating of drums! However, this approach of public participation has failed to play any significant role in the plan preparation process.

Urban growth continued in the shadow of unimplementable Master Plans, giving rise to increasing trends of risks. These risks usually stem from local and micro level problems, giving a corollary that local knowledge and wisdom have the potential to provide solutions for them. It is on this basis that the Community Action Planning (CAP) methodology was taken up for testing through small interventions.

The Action Planning process
Action Planning features the following characteristics, many of them shared with Participatory Rapid Appraisal (PRA) techniques:

Problem based and opportunity driven
Based on achievable actions
Participatory, encouraging rapport and partnerships
Reliant on local knowledge and traditional wisdom
Non reliant on complete information
Small in scale, community based
Incremental rather than comprehensive plans
Starting points rather than end states
Fast, not rushed
Visible, tangible objectives

Conventional analytical planning has tended to follow a linear routine of survey-analyse-plan. Procedures typically begin with extensive data collection, followed by lengthy data analysis. Options emerge, which will undergo a thorough review involving the respective authorities before a plan is prepared. It is a lengthy process, culminating in inflexible plans that often run into difficulty during implementation, because they assume institutional and administrative resources that are rarely available. In contrast, action planning includes various phases as mentioned in fig 1.

Understanding Floods in Rohtak As part of a community action planning initiative launched in Rohtak with the support of NFI, the following exercise was carried out as an initial step to understand the extent and nature of flooding: People were asked to remember how high the water level had reached in their locality during the last major floods in 1995 (Fig 2.)

Citizen�s Planning Initiative in Bikaner
A similiar community planning endeavour, taken up in the historic town of Bikaner in Rajasthan in parthership with the Friendrich Ebert Stiftung and local NGOs, has amply demonstrated that mapping does not have to be a purely technical process, and that digital maps are not necessarily more effective than sketch maps (Fig 3 & 4).

From Micro Issues to City Plans
The cases cited above refer to addressal of micro issues. Community planning initiatives need to start by addressing small problems in order to get people involved, and for showing immediate results that may help in motivating more people to join the effort. Discussions on problems are easily understood and are more fruitful if carried out on maps, drawings and models rather than simply talking about them. Hence, base maps are used in the city consultation process, wherein participants mark problem areas, prioritize them, trace their root causes, and identify alternate solutions. Consultations initially involve selected prominent citizens and volunteers from the city, but with time are scaled up to include as many stakeholders as possible.

Involvement of city governments is crucial in the initial stages to ensure their participation in the implementation process. This also sets into motion the process of change in the traditional Master Plan approach into a process that is based on a citizen-driven agenda. There is thus a movement from local to city level planning, subject to general development planning, and community to state planning. Once this transition is underway, sustainability and replicability become easier to achieve.

Planning: The Science and the Art of it
The process, at various levels, uses mapping as its primary tool. PRA activities are mainly map based, wherein people easily relate to major landmarks and identify problem issues in a spatial context. A number of such area and subject maps are prepared and proposed solutions are marked on them.

At this stage the digital maps come into play, for interpreting the solutions into technically feasible projects. Information provided by PRA maps that is not evident in the city base maps is transferred onto them. This may include waterlogging areas, informal developments that hamper natural or even planned drainage, garbage collection points, traffic congestion sections, and private landholdings that may be used for project purposes etc. Once all the information has been compiled, a balancing of constraints and aspirations is carried out. Contours, drainage patterns, built areas, land status constraints and minimum land requirements for proposed solutions are some of the things that are ratified and planned as appropriate, using technical maps.

Though the post-implementation stage has not been reached in the projects under discussion, it is felt that the same set of maps will also be useful tools for monitoring and evaluation of the projects. It must be kept in mind that though information provided by participatory processes is very relevant to action plans, it lacks in the level of accuracy and details. However, the basic premise of action planning rules out the need for expensive accuracy, and avoidance of unnecessary additional details in fact helps in keeping the process very objective. PRA maps are thus very useful for community level planning.

This changes as the planning processes is scaled up to city level, or becomes complicated due to a larger number of issues or complicated issues being addressed. That is when technology steps in, and tools such as digital maps find an important role to play. This works in two ways - with people�s information being represented on digital maps, and technical information being simplified for people�s understanding. Mapping, after all, is a tool, and it is upto the user to define the sources of information that are to be mapped. Sources for digital maps need not be only satellite imagery and its likes, but can also be PRA information. That indeed makes the maps truly representative. While people�s maps are realistic and practical in term of usability, and are also very reliable since they are based on long experience, deep understanding, and most importantly, high level of motivation and attachment, digital technology is efficient, accurate and has greater handling capacity. Both, used in tandem, provide a synergetic coverage of spatial information and planning issues, leading to efficient and meaningful plans. Planning is an art that is inherent in individuals and communities. It however needs to be supported by modern science through technical inputs and refinements to ensure practicality and manageability.