[Swati Ramanathan]

JAIPUR METROPOLITAN DISTRICT MASTER DEVELOPMENT PLAN, 2025
Swati Ramanathan

Applying the Planning Paradigm in  Jaipur MMDP 2025
Applying the planning principles of economy, equity, and environment requires the master plan to look beyond the footprint of the city alone. Development of the city's economic energy is co-dependent on the region. Similarly the environmental impact of the city is most significant on the immediate area surrounding the city and hence addressing the environmental challenges in a comprehensive way requires taking a regional view. Finally the equity principle in the planning paradigm also requires that planning is not confined to the city alone and addresses the needs of the residents in the larger region. Therefore the first planning imperative that emerges out of the principles of the planning paradigm is that the master planning process must take a regional perspective.

Plans are produced through institutional structures, the regional planning footprint must have a credible institutional logic. The JDA regional footprint of 3000 sq km is an arbitrary boundary without sound political and institutional coherence. The administrative unit of the district or the Metropolitan Area (as required by the Constitution of India) provides the appropriate regional planning footprint. For the city of Jaipur the appropriate region is therefore Jaipur District. This is the first plan imperative that emerges from the planning principles "taking a planning footprint of Jaipur District

Having chosen the district as the regional plan footprint, the question that remains is where urban growth should be planned for. The three choices in this instance are:

1. that Jaipur remain the single dominant economic engine and urban magnet in the district, with its continued growth over-shadowing all other urban areas
   
2. that Jaipur would grow but so would other existing towns in the district that would act as counter magnets to Jaipur
   
3. that rather than focusing on existing satellite towns, brand new towns would be created in the district.
   

Each choice would result in distinctly different directions of development of the master plan. The first would result in an almost exclusively Jaipur-centric plan, the second in a more distributed urbanization plan, and the third in a somewhat experimental plan with a higher degree of political negotiation required for competing claims.
The distributed urbanization plan was decided upon at the visioning exercise with the state and city government leadership. The choice that emerged was to develop other strategic urban nodes in the district. A hub and spoke model was to be explored that could be a blend of choices 2 and 3. This is the second central planning imperative of the MMDP 2025-hub-and-spoke distributed urbanization
These two planning imperatives guide the overall strategy of the Jaipur Master Plan 2025: creating a plan for the district development, and encouraging distributed urban growth in a hub-and-spoke manner.
The application of these planning imperative creates a plan output that has positive political, social and economic impact, and begins to bridge the rural-urban divide