First semester of Msc Urban Planning

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM SEVEN MODULAR COURSES OF URBAN PLANNING

Urban planning is one of the most emerging streams of the science in these days, particularly in developing countries like Nepal. Urban planning covers a vast and wide sense of giving comfortable and sound infrastructural equipped living lives for people within the urban areas. Urban planning itself encompasses the different subjects which are directly related to the people and their regular routine works and incidental task during the life period of the people who used to live in the urban area. Those subjects might be social aspect, economic activities, environmental considerations, physical needs, cultural and religious believes, individual perceptions, way of living of the peoples etc. I was more privileged to be a student of urban planning for IOE, Pulchowk campus as it provides me a basis for learning those subjects matter with their importance in urban planning sector and entirely in the nation building race. Through the modular course I’m continuously fed with adequate superior knowledge via honorable professors and lecturers. The modular courses with the passage of time of my first semester led to integrate the knowledge of different subjects; planning history, demography, sociology, statistics, survey and information, planning theory and computer applications. And recently I’m engaged with the planning studio where I have to carry out a small project using that knowledge which I have learnt from these modular subjects.

It is quite wise to know about something from its basic roots to gain sufficient knowledge about that object or phenomenon. How a child of that day became an adult of power in this day? This question can be answered only if we have some sorts of information about that boy from his very first day. Once we are able to know how were the days of that boy and how he has managed his days in past to deserve the present status, then we could make others like him by applying the same conditions and ideas what that boy has already faced with certain time based modifications. When I have engaged with “Planning History”, a first modular subject of urban planning, I became more pleased by thinking that I’m going to gather some facts in my head about planning practices from the world history. This was the beginning of the listening about the story of planning. This subject, in my opinion, is a foundation course for planning students as it provides the basis for generating the ideas about the planning and urban in disjoint form and in combined form as “Planning History”. Prof. Dr. Jiba Raj Pokharel has delivered the lectures for planning history through his ocean of knowledge. The lectures were started from the evolution of human settlements in early periods and were lasted at the modern planned cities of the world. During the string of lectures he presented the different scope of the planning history with his endless energy and experience. Once I know that what planning is? It spontaneously leads me to know why history should to know prior to planning. In fact planning is a kind of problem solving activity which needs to perform to run the lives in this universe. This course offers me to familiarize with the different settlement plans of Egypt, Rome, Greece, and Babylon to extract the ideas of historical determinants. The ancient, the medieval, the renaissance and the industrial settlements have been learnt in this module which is in fact aid my knowledge to the planning. The concept of City Beautiful, Garden City along with their peculiar features is dealt during the classes. This course offers to gain facts about the town planning practices in Nepal. After this course the contribution of Howard, Geddes, Mumford etc is came to know which eternally liable impose an inspiration to any planning scholars.

After reading the articles produced about the planning of Islamabad by Constantine Doxdiadis, I came to know which types of elements in planning should incorporate in the plan. ‘The spirit of Islamabad’ is a kind of article to create an enthusiasm among the planners. Based on this article I have made a short presentation along with my friends and this provides me a chance to open the windows of planning. As the modular courses offer the seminar in individual module, we have prepared a seminar about Nyakha Chuka of Patan area from Kathmandu Valley. Through this seminar we made an attempt to reflect the knowledge of planning history. This kind of seminar presentation is really important in the modular course since it permits us to extract some things about the phenomena or objects, which I have learnt after the seminar presentation. Dr. Sudha Shrestha as a course tutor has given greater efforts to make our presentation as good as possible. She was acting as a mediator between the course and students and always tended to share her experience and expertise on the ground of reality. Her thorough guidance to us makes our seminar presentation wonderful and fruitful. She has clearly stated that why history is needed in planning by time and again through countless rationale and examples. At last I would like to express my courteous thanks to Dr. Sudha Shrestha and Prof. Dr. Jibaraj Pokhrel for their valuable lectures and guidance since this module through them provided me a datum for the study of urban planning. In gist I like this module as it provided me a basis of information for planning.

Since we know about, along with the time everything will be changed. At glance planning is for people for letting them to kiss the peak of welfare and prosperity within the society. On the other hand the population of such society will no longer to stay in constant position due to which demographic factors must be accounted for planning. From this view point we are provided second module with ‘Demography’. In this module we tried to gather such demographic factors which are most in planning. Mr. Trilochan Pokharel as a course coordinator delivered his lectures on demography. In the very first lectures he creates an environment about ‘why demography is essential to planner?’ Then he tried to indicate the different demographic fundamentals like population- growth and their interrelation, development and urbanization, theory of demographic transition. This course offers to have an idea about the sources of the demographic data. After dealing with these fundamental parts of demography we were jumped to the analytical parts of demographic data for spatial planning which is our subject of interest. In this analytical part we are successfully learnt how we could measure the; population change, population structure, composition and spatial distribution, vital rates-fertility and mortality, standard birth and death rates. One of the most memorable things which we have learnt from this module is life table construction.

The present trend of urbanization of Nepal had shown that most of the populations in the urban area especially in case of Kathmandu are migrated from rural areas. The migrated peoples in urban areas seeks for better lives due to which they uses the available resources consequentially it resulted in the shortage of these resources as planning is not made for such migrated populations. By keeping this view we learnt in this module about the migration and urban growth. We are fed with the theory of knowledge about internal migration, laws of migration, measurement of migration and trends and patterns of urban growth, which I thought is very important aspect of planning. For the valuable lectures and kind cooperation during the seminar, I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Trilochan Pokharel. At last I like to sum up this module as a subject of collection, analysis of demographic factors.

After identifying the ‘Sociology’ is an important subjects in every field our course has been designed in such a way that it tended to give the knowledge about the society through sociology. Mr. Sanjaya Uprety was assigned as course coordinator for this module where he has delivered the conceptual knowledge of culture, environment, society, groups, social structure and institutions in Nepal. As the different cultured people have their own style of living within the society to conserve their cultures and religion and these task acquire different resources and values. For planning in multicultural society and different social values society we have to know a cultural continuity and changes, urbanism and urbanization, patterns and trends in urbanization and its role in socio-economic transformation. This knowledge is generated through this module. Any planning project requires a social aspect where the public participation is expected. In this module we learnt why public participation is?, how public participation can? And what is the basis for participation? This module seems to be quite fruitful in regard of this knowledge based facts. Another importance of this module was it led us to know about the social dimensions in rural and urban poverty in Nepal. I would like to reflect my delight thanks to Mr. Uprety for his valuable lectures and guidance during the seminar presentation where I have learnt why sociology is?, what are the social aspects?, what are the social institutions and how these help in planning? etc. At last thank to Mr. Uprety. In a single sentence this module taught me about the importance of sociology and humanist philosophy.

To ascertain the information regarding planning project, there might be some cumbersome to take all the population into consideration thus it is necessary to have a concept of statistics. The statistics helps decision making about the population through sampling. Thus by assuming the vitality of the statistics we have studied ‘Statistics’ in our forth module. Frequency distribution, probability and sampling distributions, estimation of population parameters, testing of hypothesis etc are the common issues which we have studied in this module. Outstanding presentation during lectures with practical based problems assessed by Mr. Nagendra Bahadur Amatya was a kind of appreciable learning approach made on this module. How statistics helps particularly in urban planning were learnt through this module and how the tools of statistics can be handle are the key interest of this module and we are able to grab those things due to which this module I supposed to be a essentials to urban planners. Proper guidance during seminar was censured by Mr. Amatya was really an appreciating task. I would like to heartily thank to Mr. Amatya for his kind activities during this module. I want to conclude the gist of this module is sampling techniques, familiarization with statistical tools and their relevancies.

Once we know how statistics’ tools are helpful to planner then we were tended to know how the related information could be collected in real field through the fifth module of ‘Survey and Information’. This module is fully devoted on different approaches of information collection through appropriate survey tools under the fundamentals rules of surveying. Mr. Shova Kant Dev was assigned as our course coordinator for this module where he made some lectures to us and some of the lectures are given through tutors by Prof. Vidhya Bir Singh Kanshakar and Mr. Kedar Nath Chhatkuli. Some of the subject matter of this module was seem to be more interesting and essential to urban planners. Some of abstracts of this course are information collection by traditional methods with its drawbacks, needs for alternative technology such as remote sensing, aerial photography techniques, GIS, GPS etc. In my opinion I found this module was quite devoted to collection of spatial information only rather emphasizes in non spatial information which I assuming a fact of unfortunate. Whatever we have learnt is not a worthless but it was really an interesting to anyone. I would like to express my sincere thank to Prof. Kanshakar and Mr. Chhatkuli for their valuable informative lectures. Mr. Dev and Mr. Kanshakar are liable to earn the credit for their valuable guidance during seminar preparation. Nevertheless this module teaches us how information can be collected with higher accuracy which is the positive aspect of this module for us. Lastly I would like to give many thanks to Mr. Dev for his courteous cooperation during lecture periods.

Upto these five modules we have learnt the previous planning process with their social aspects and method of data and information collections along with different statistical tools. In sixth module we were engaged with the planning theory. This module is so designed that we came to know the aims and objectives of urban planning and the models of urban structures with the concept of urban land uses. We found that there is no theory of planning but there are theories in planning after completion of this module. Different planning theories like, rational planning approach, choice theory, advocacy planning, mixed planning, transactive planning, strategic planning and others issues regarding these theories are the chief content of his module. This module helps to be familiar with the land use planning information system, activity system and choices of the space qualities. The role of course coordinator has been played by Mr. Sanjay Uprety with his dynamicity and versatility for this module. Prof. Dr. Sudershan Raj Tiwari as a course tutor delivered the lectures about the western settlements in prehistoric time. Prof. Tiwari has also depicted about the planned towns of Nepal in the present date. He talks his experience of planning with some relevant facts regarding the planning approaches. Mr. Arun Dev Pant and Dr. Sagar Prasain have delivered some interesting matters of planning theory which are in fact an essential part of planning theories. I love to thank Dr. Prasain and Mr. Pant for their energetic performance on their subject matters and they mirrored the factual planning perspective in real world. Mr. Uprety spent his valuable time to deliver his ideas and matter of planning theory and fully guided in our seminar works. One of the new tastes in this module was practice of writing essay. Mr. Uprety gave an opportunity to learn how essay could be composed. Based on his valuable guidance and knowledge based lectures I was able to produce an article entitled “Planning Theory in the Context of Disaster Management’. This was a practice based task from which I believed on easiness to write an article effectively.

At the end of the semester we are provided with seventh module of ‘Computer Application’ which is coordinated by Mr. Anish Joshi. This module is one of the special modules for urban planner where how the collected data and information are presented in pictorial view through the computer system is learnt. Mr. Joshi has delivered the lectures on Geographic Information System (GIS) in this whole module with replacing the course initially designed by IOE. It was some appreciable work done by our department and Mr. Joshi to modify the course for providing the time based computer knowledge. As our course are designed for introduction of computers and concept of data management, flow charts, MS DOS and application of computers in planning, Mr. Joshi was seems to be more reluctant to deliver those common practices in computer and he made an appreciable change for the content of this modules. Finally we are able to get the knowledge about the GIS where we have learnt about the Basic of GIS, introduction to spatial and no spatial information, data acquisition procedure, data analysis procedure, spatial analysis by overlay operation and neighborhood analysis, map projection system and cartography techniques. These contents help us to represent the collected information and data into pictorial representation through some processes in GIS environment. Some of the issues like remote sensing techniques, GIS itself, GPS etc which were not clear in survey and information modules are greatly dealt in this modules. This is the reason I depict this module is one of the fruitful module among others of this semester. My especial thank always goes to Mr. Anish Joshi for his valuable guidance during lecture time and seminar works. This module can be concluded as the provider of knowledge about the digital technology for information collection, representation and more reliable means of data processing for particular purpose.

These are the story of the modular courses of first semester of Master of Science of Urban Planning in IOE, Pulchowk. Through these modules I found the combination of such modules are so pretty that its integrated form will definitely produced a better result in planning. I have supposed that, the overall effectiveness of these modules are so equipped, if one is able to grab such knowledge he/ she will liable to produced a better result in planning process. Before end of my writing I would like to thank once again to Dr. Sudha Shrestha for his proper guidance, cooperation and countless efforts over us. Finally I’m privileged to be a student of Msc Urban Planning in Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus.