Raipur, India, 17th November

I’m in India with French Urbanism NGO Les Ateliers, running a workshop on the new city of Naya Raipur.  Professionals from around the world have been selected to bring alternative points of view to the emerging masterplan over the next two weeks.  This morning we had a tour of the existing city of Raipur (its my second visit) and the participants are clearly engaged and fascinated by the vibrancy and immediacy of the streetlife.  After visiting inside an old courtyard house and a temple in the city centre, in the afternoon we visit some new developments on the periphery. 

Raipur is a city of ponds that provide spiritual, practical and social resources

‘Fortwall City’ is aptly named: accessed via a kind of causeway across the fields, we enter a heavily-secured perimeter gate into an oasis of calm.  The Italianate villas are huge and very well-built especially by Indian standards.  A pool and terrace and immaculate gardens complete the surreal picture.  The experience is literally that of leaving India: ‘offshore urbanism’ as somebody described it.  Clearly aimed at the urban elite, it is roughly half occupied; apparently people are reluctant to move so far from the city centre. 

'Fortwall City' provides a sanitised version for urban elites

In later discussions we talk about how the new city has to attract development by providing what people want.  There is clearly an appetite for these elite enclaves, which are a relatively new phenomenon in India.  But, there is also a resistance to them.  Indian society is so inextricably interconnected that the isolation offered by these developments runs against the grain of people’s daily lives.  The services provided by informal workers to the middle classes are not easily replaced by Western-style living.  As we drive back out along the causeway, we see the cinder-block shacks, presumably erected by the construction workers for their families; the seeds of a new slum, which is not antagonistic to the new development, but symbiotic with it.  This segregation is not what the new city of Naya Raipur is aiming for, but the combination of market forces and weakness of development control in India makes the outcome difficult to predict.  This will be the subject of the workshop.  www.ateliers.org/en