A short and elaborate Book Review on: "The New Landscape-Urbanization In The Third World" by Charles Correa from students of 7th Semester Architecture at VNIT, Nagpur (August- December 2016)

2. THE NEW
LANDSCAPE
URBANIZATION IN THE THIRD WORLD
The New Landscape is an impassioned plea to abandon grandiose concepts of planning
based on preconceptions of what cities ought to look like, which are borrowed from the
industrialized countries of the "North", and to design not just cities but homes that meet the
needs and suit the pockets of the people who will live in them. The message of the book is
thus intensely human, in fact, this lucidly-written and brilliantly illustrated book is suffused
with a concern for human beings and the quality of their lives.

3. CONTENTS
ABOUT THE BOOK…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..………… ..1
THE NAME…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1
TARGETTED READERS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……….2
THE LAYOUT OF THE BOOK…………………………………………………………………………………………………….…….2
THE CONTENT……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….2
ABOUT THE AUTHOR……………………………………………………………………………………………………….……………3
DESCRIPTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………….4
SUMMARY/ SELF
UNDERSTANDING………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……………..7

4. THENEWLANDSCAPE
1
THE NEW
LANDSCAPE
URBANIZATION IN THE THIRD WORLD
ABOUT THE BOOK
NAME: The New Landscape: Urbanization In The Third World
AUTHOR: Late Ar. Charles Correa
EDITED BY:
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1985
NO. OF PAGES: 115
PUBLISHED BY: Mimar Books/ Buttersworth Architecture
ISBN: 9971-84-868-6 (Mimar Books)
0-408-50071-9 (Buttersworth Architecture)
PRICE: $115 (Approx. ₹ 3000)
THE NAME:
The term “Landscape” takes a new meaning in this book. It refers to as an arrangement of
natural and urban features in wide-ranging scales, from the scale of neighborhood to that of
cities, regions and the world. The forces that continuously alter the landscape in the Third
World are the forces of Urbanization. Correa takes a formidable task of suggesting ways for
channeling and ordering urbanization rather than stemming it. And thus, goes on to
connotes how Urbanization has become an agent of change in the “landscape” of the Third
World, through a broad range of suggestions.

5. THENEWLANDSCAPE
2
TARGETTED READERS:
The New Landscape with its bold, provocative, and confrontational arguments, is a
remarkable revelation on the inner workings of Ar. Correa’s mind that has guided him
throughout his successful career. That in itself, makes this book a required reading for urban
designers, planners, architects, aspiring students as well as the policy makers of all ages and
in all the parts of the world.
THE LAYOUT OF THE BOOK:
The cover of the book portrays a jig-saw puzzle which depicts.various elements of an urban
area, surfacing more and more frequently, beginning to generate a new landscape which is an
outcome of the advent of the urbanization.
The presence of various graphical methods to present the proposals make it less
monotonous and keeps one interested as he flips through the pages of the book. Although
many of the pictures are in monochrome due to the restraints of the time the book was
written in, the book with all the hand-drawn sketches by the Great Maestro himself make it
up for it and presents the ideas in a very interactive way.
THE CONTENT
The book really lays emphasis on Urbanization, and how it plays a vital role in creating the
existential scenario of the Third World Cities. The books also talks about Space as a
Resource- taking about the concept of Urban Poverty and usability coefficients of various
spaces as used. Equity and Mobility are also the contents that have been given prominence in
the proper- governing and stability of any urban region. Towards the end, the author talks about
how the Great City has become a Terrible Place to live in for its own inhabitants, defying the
notion tha the city is like a machine to live in. Correa suggests that the emotional and
metaphysical factors are what governs the people to stay there. And lastly, he succeeds in trying
to explain on how Political Will can govern the situation. Although, much insight has not been
provided for it, but it gives on a clear idea on how all the factors are intervened in each other
due to the advent of urbanization, ultimately deciding the fate of the Urban Land.

6. THENEWLANDSCAPE
3
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Architect, Planner, Activist and Theoretician- Charles
Correa was a major figure in contemporary
architecture. After studying architecture at the
University of Michigan and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, he returned to Mumbai in
1958 and started his practice. Apart from his various
architectural works built over the Indian
Subcontinent, Correa has become one of the
celebrated pioneers in developing low cost shelters in the Third World.
In 1964, with two of his colleagues, he proposed the restructuring of Bombay- a proposal
that was subsequently accepted by the then State government. In 1970, 55000 acres of land
was set aside for acquisition and CIDCO (City and Industrial Development Corporation) was
set up to design and develop the city of New Bombay across the harbor. From 1970–75, he
was Chief Architect for New Bombay (Navi Mumbai) where he was involved in extensive
urban planning of the new city.
In 1984, he founded the Urban Design Research Institute in Bombay. And in 1985, Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi appointed him Chairman of the National Commission on Urbanization.
Correa has served on a number of international architectural juries and was one of the
members of the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s Steering Committee from
1977-1986. He has lectured at universities all over including Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge
University.
Also a recipient of various awards, he received an honorary Doctorate from the University of
Michigan; in 1984, the RIBA awarded him the Royal Gold Medal. He was awarded the Padma
Shri in 1972 and the Padma Vibhushan given by Government of India in 2006.
From 2005 until his 2008 resignation Correa was the Chairman of the Delhi Urban Arts
Commission. In 2013, the Royal Institute of British Architects held a retrospective exhibition,
"Charles Correa – India's Greatest Architect", about the influences his work on modern
urban Indian architecture.
He passed away on 16 June 2015 in Mumbai following a brief illness.

7. THENEWLANDSCAPE
4
DESCIRPTION
At the core of the author's thesis lies the conviction that each civilization, each society, has
already evolved not only the architecture, but also the patterns of urban development that
most closely suit its climate, topography, economic activity, family relations and social
habits. Thus the first necessary requirement in a town planner is humility. He must not only
discard most of his "western" preconceptions (and this means most of what he has studied
in schools of planning and architecture), but must study how people actually lived and still
live in the traditional parts of his society. Above all, he must study how they designed their
houses, how they built them, with what they built them, and how closely they grouped
them. He talks about how everyone’s view of Third World is limited as well as egocentric.
From the outset, Correa and his collaborators adopted an approach that was modern but
highly conscious of the deficiencies of modernist planning in the context of independent
India. Correa describes this comprehensive approach as “finding the new landscape.” As he
writes,
“To find the new landscape, we must start with an overview; we must examine the entire
system we call city and try to identify those living patterns, those lifestyles, which are
optimal in their totality—including roads, services, schools, transportation systems, social
facilities and, of course, the housing units themselves. Only then will we be able to perceive
how one can, in Buckminster Fuller’s ineffable phrase, rearrange the scenery.”
For Correa, “the landscape” included specific, localized information at multiple scales, from
extant sociopolitical regimes to socioeconomic characteristics, and from sewage
infrastructure and transportation to the particularities of the individual dwelling unit. All of
this data would be examined and considered to produce a viable course of action.
Landscape to Correa was all-encompassing, containing within it the totality of human
inhabitation and all that it implied—physical as well as intangible, permanent as well as
temporal.
Correa’s approach can be thought of as two-sided. On the one hand, it borrows from, and
builds upon the all-encompassing techno-utopian ideals of Fuller. On the other, it
purposefully addresses the political machinery of urbanization and the bureaucratic
impediments of the planning process.

8. THENEWLANDSCAPE
5
Correa’s radicalism was tempered by his use of common-sense arguments and his incisive
appropriation of cultural habits and situated techniques. For Correa, for example, the
courtyard typology was not a signifier of local knowledge and vernacular “goodness,” but a
robust operating platform that could be used as a formwork for invention by virtue of its
performativity and social functionality.
Correa was steadfast in his refusal to submit to the false dichotomy of the modern and non-
modern. For him, elements of both the situated and the foreign could be combined in
infinite variations, creating hybrids that would serve as tools to facilitate desired
outcomes. For instance, his repeated and sustained championing of the horizontal, high-
density, low-rise model of development for India, a typology that he once described as “a
new style of community—quasi-rural/quasi-urban,” was not so much an instantiation of the
“vernacular” as much as it was the appropriation of an incredibly viable typology that could
accommodate the variegated patterns of newly urban lifestyles. In this respect, Correa for
the most part eschewed essentialism for pragmatism, a quality often overlooked by
prevalent narratives of “vernacularism” and “sensitivity” concerning his work.
The author's views on this subject bear the strong impress of the thinking of the late
Constantinos Doxiadis, founder of the Institute of Ekistics in Athens, and perhaps the
greatest town planner of 1980s. Like him, Correa believes that cities cannot, in the final
analysis, be planned. They grow organically out of the needs of the people, and of those
who are drawn to them. Since these needs are social - inasmuch as they are born of man's
relationship with other men - cities become the personification of the societies that have
built them.
From this there emerges a profoundly different concept of the function of the town planner.
This is not to police the growth of a city but to guide it, not to deny people the right to build
a home, open a shop or set up a factory, but to suggest when they may do so to their own
greater advantage. Such a town planner will plan for small decentralized communities, not
vast centralized cities; he will seek to shift employment where people live, and not
concentrate it in specified "business" or industrial locations, forcing people to travel to
them. In sum, wherever possible, he will allow natural growth to proceed unhindered.
The author concedes, albeit implicitly, that the modern city cannot be a carbon copy of the
cities of antiquity. Three major changes have upset the delicate balances between town and
country which existed before: the industrial revolution, the revolution in transport and the
revolution in health. Each of these has put limits to natural, unplanned growth, that must be

9. THENEWLANDSCAPE
6
reorganized. The first has created hazardous processes, materials and wastes that make it
necessary to separate the living areas from the factories. The second has made it possible to
travel 50 km by a suburban train in the same time as it took people of ancient Athens to
walk or ride 3 km to work. This has expanded the physical limits of the city and laid the
foundations of the megapolis of 15 and 20 million inhabitants that are springing up
everywhere. And the third has created a rate of urban population growth that was never
known before.
There is little doubt that the decision to implement the New Bombay plan was an outcome
of the political valences of that time. In the decades that followed, the development was
plagued by many of the problems that were to become symptoms of urban development in
post-independence India. It was a combination of bureaucratic indifference, political
prevarication, and financial mismanagement. In 2015 New Bombay is occupied by just over
1.2 million people, far below the projected two million that Correa and his collaborators had
in mind. However, the importance of the New Bombay plan lies not in the success (or
failure) of its present-day manifestation, but in the attitudes of architectural practice that it
has come to represent. The 1964 plan marked the beginning of Correa’s lifelong
engagement with the state of Indian cities and his relentless assertion of equity as the
primary function of spatial practice. More importantly, it situated architecture as a
discursive yet material practice in a vastly expanded field, one that built upon Fuller’s
universal principles to develop an admixture of spatial thinking and sociopolitical ingenuity
to address pressing questions related to habitation and territory. In the current climate of
neoliberal urbanization, which operates in virulent form in the contemporary Indian State,
this method remains as valid as it was in the 1960s.
Despite this, the author argues, the essence of the planners' task has not changed because
the needs and aspirations of the people who live in, and move to, cities have not changed.
The challenge before him is to understand these and to ensure their fulfilment in the
changed circumstances in which city growth is taking place today.

10. THENEWLANDSCAPE
7
SUMMARY/ SELF UNDERSTANDING
The New Landscape offers a hope that urban architecture, indeed can become an agent of
change, as he once stated eloquently in his essay “Transfer and Transformations”. This
change will not occur without the active involvement of architects practicing in the Third
World who are currently preoccupied with projects for the middle and the upper income
groups, and are merely watching physical degradation due to rapid urbanization around
them. Architect Correa feels that they need to enlarge their role and use their special skills
as generalist to participate in the restructuring of cities in order to accommodate the
migrating population.
While there is a conceptual framework underlying Correa's book, it is evident that the
author’s chief concern is not to elaborate on this. Instead, he has chosen to give a host of
specific examples, leaving the reader to draw the general lessons implicit in them.
The New Landscape does not try to tackle the central problem that third world governments
face - which is how to make shelter affordable to the poor. Roughly half the cost of a home
is accounted for by land. Another half of the balance is attributable to the provision of
services. Bringing these within the reach of the poor is possible but not easy. In fact, in
scores of projects throughout the world, these costs have been brought down or are being
brought down through the use of new technologies, simple materials and new methods of
financing. I think the book offers a valuable insight into how the problem of urbanization
and shelter can be tackled, but it does not provide a complete answer.
Moreover, what I think seems to be missing is a discussion on ways of implementing
urbanization policies, which are beyond the rhetoric of creating a political will to implement.
It is also not clear whether Correa’s broad-stroke approach would be widely acceptable in
the Third World that are characterized by diverse cultures and geographies.