The history of street grids apparently dates back to Hippodamus in the fifth century B.C. The Grecian’s legacy is most visible in New York city, that some 2400 years later, in 1811, built a street matrix of 11 avenues and 155 crosstown streets. Even that is now well over 200 years old. And yet it’s evergreen, says urban planning expert Bimal Patel in an interview with BloombergQuint, on the sidelines of the IDFC Institute Dialogues, 2017.
When New York was a tiny bit of a town on the tip of Manhattan Island they planned a grid of streets that stretched out miles into the hinterland. And they hung on to that street grid.
Patel says, “Every city is like this”.
Well, except most Indian cities.
The lack of adequate urban planning in India is not a problem to be shrugged away. Not with the rapid rise in the urban population. According to the government’s most recent Economic Survey, in 1991 there were 220 million Indians living in cities - about a quarter of the country’s population. By 2011, that number rose to 380 million, that’s one third of the population. Urban Indians produce more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
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Patel explains what cities need to do to get their streets in order. Here are edited comments from an interview with him.