The city is nothing but a dramatic living out of a plan. And urban designer Mriganka Saxena Khanna has grand plans for the capital of India.
The 37-year-old urban planner founded the Delhi-based firm Habitat Tectonics Architecture & Urbanism (HTAU) along with her architect husband Puneet Khanna in 2010. As a senior consultant with the Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure Planning & Engineering Centre (UTTIPEC), she redrafted Delhi’s transportation master plan 2020, with the intention of bringing about mobility transition.
“Essentially, we must try to get Delhi to promote more sustainable modes of transport, because less than 20 per cent of the city uses cars,” she says. In her opinion, there should be equitable distribution of road space and all modes should get an equal right over the roads. “Delhi favours the rich. At the planning level, we try to make the environment humane for each and every mode,” says Khanna.
While Delhi takes pride in its flyovers, Khanna has a different take on them. “Signal-free stretches basically shift the point of contention. They’re not the answer to anything because every five to six years, the roads in any growing city outdo their limit,” says Khanna, who was part of a team that drafted a new policy for transit-oriented development and was responsible for ensuring last-mile connectivity through multi-modal integration at all phase III metro station projects.
Having worked on the Parking Management Plan in Ward 162, which covers Alaknanda and the Khirki village, Khanna says she has realised the need for making every neighbourhood a small self-sustaining community that knows how to manage its water and waste.
“The problem in Delhi is that each policy decision goes through the approval and interference of several governmental bodies. For instance, each street has at least 25 agencies, or more, that are working on it,” says Khanna. But the biggest problem with Delhi is that it doesn’t give its residents a lifestyle choice. “We’re dependent on the limited structures that we have created,” Khanna says.