Whether it is the green, shady canopies of large trees lining the wide roads in Lutyens’ Delhi or the spectacular sight of flowering Gulmohar, Jacaranda, Palash and Amaltas across the city in spring, trees are as much a part of the Capital’s identity as its historical monuments.
The exemplary urban planning undertaken by British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens in New Delhi stands out in stark contrast to the concrete jungles that define the ever-burgeoning National Capital Region. At a time when all major Indian cities are struggling to absorb an ever-increasing populace, maintaining a green cover that complements urbanization is crucial. The importance of tree plantation in urban planning has been largely overlooked by city planners here with the focus mostly being on providing infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and so on.
Trees in Urban Habitat makes a strong case for taking up “tree plantation programme at the national level” by examining in great detail tree plantation in Lutyens’ Delhi and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, where the notable architects used trees to transform the cityscape.
The book’s authors—renowned landscapist Hardial Singh Johl, who designed Chandigarh’s famous Rose Garden, and Sarbjit Singh Bahga, a Chandigarh-based architect and urbanist—explain the fundamental concepts of tree plantation in a city while offering suggestions for better planning and development of cities in the future.
Divided into eleven short chapters, the book makes for an engaging read despite its niche subject. The basic fundamentals of tree plantation, the hits and misses of urban planning in Chandigarh, trees varieties suited for buildings, roadsides and planning a city as a park—all these concepts and supporting arguments made by the authors are illustrated and accompanied by ample photographs and diagrams.
Johl and Bahga hold Lutyens’ masterwork in Delhi against that done in Chandigarh, which was developed almost four decades later. They point out how better choice of trees could have resulted in an ideal utilization of public space in a city that is among the “most thoughtfully planned” in India. The structurally large trees planted along the roads of New Delhi create a calming, green roof with their high branches and spreading crown. However, the small-sized flowering trees used as embellishment at many places in Chandigarh have prevented a similar effect. They have not been planted close to the kerb as done in New Delhi to separate vehicular and pedestrian pathways. The wrong placement of electric power lines at many places in the Garden City has also crippled tree crowns.
For those interested in flowering trees, there is an entire chapter on the 14 different varieties of colourful trees, which also details their origin and blooming periods. This is an ideal book not just for “town planners, architects, horticulturalists” but for anyone interested in the flora around them.