Principle eight: regional integration

Intelligent Urbanism envisions the city as an organic part of a larger environmental, socio-economic and cultural-geographic system, essential for its sustainability. This zone of influence is the region. Likewise, it sees the region as integrally connected to the city. Intelligent Urbanism sees the planning of the city and its hinterland is a single holistic process.

Intelligent Urbanism recognizes that there is always a spillover of population from the city into the region, and that population in the region moves into the city for work, shopping, entertainment, health care and education. With thoughtful planning the region can take pressure off of the city. Traditional and new settlements within the urban region can be enhanced to accommodate additional urban households. Large, noisy and polluting manufacturing units, large wholesale markets, vehicular maintenance garages, and waste management facilities need to be housed outside of the city’s limits in their own satellite enclaves. In larger urban agglomerations a number of towns are clustered around a major urban center forming a metropolitan region.

Usually the region includes dormitory communities, airports, water reservoirs, perishable food farms, hydro facilities, out-of-doors recreation and other infrastructure that serves the city. Intelligent urbanism sees the integrated planning of these services and facilities as part of the city planning process.

I ntelligent Urbanism understands that the social and economic region linked to a city also has a physical form, or a geographic character. Forest ranges, fauna and avifauna habitats are set within such regions and are connected by natural corridors for movement and cross-fertilization. Within this larger, environmental scenario, one must conceptualize urbanism in terms of natural systems that operate across the entire region. Economic infrastructure, such as roads, hydro basins, irrigation channels, and related distribution networks usually follow the terrain of the regional geography. Overpasses such as this one allow wildlife to

pass unharmed beneath from place to place.

Principle nine: balanced movement

Intelligent Urbanism advocates integrated transport systems comprising walkways, cycle paths, bus lanes, light rail corridors, under-ground metros and automobile channels. A balance between appropriate modes of movement is proposed. More capital intensive transport systems should move between high density nodes and hubs, which interchange with lower technology movement options. These modal split nodes become the public domains around which cluster high density, pedestrian, mixed-use urban villages.

The PIU accepts that the automobile is here to stay, but that it should not be made essential by design. A well planned metropolis would densify along mass transit corridors and around major urban hubs. Smaller, yet dense, urban nodes are seen as micro-zones of medium level density, public amenities and pedestrian access. At these points lower level nodal split will occur, such as between bus loops and cycle tracts. The PIU views nodal split points as places of urban conviviality and access to services and facilities. Nodal split can be between walking, cycling, driving, and mass transit. Bus loops may feed larger rail based rapid movement corridors. Social and economic infrastructure becomes more intensive as movement corridors become more intense.