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| DOBRIVOJE TOSKOVIC |
Greetings on the 50th anniversary of Salt Lake. Congratulations to all citizens of the town, administrative, professional and political actors who successfully contributed in implementation of the Master Plan. I also feel happy to know that the township has its own weekly newspaper in The Telegraph Salt Lake. At the same time, I am very glad to have this chance to evoke my memories and feelings and reassess the achieved results.
The motive for construction of the new township was solving the housing problem for an increasing population and was necessitated by the lack of space in Calcutta for further constructions. The solution was found in reclamation of the Salt Lake area surrounding the city which had been unevenly developed in length.
The reclamation of the selected area lasted some seven-eight years and was organised by the consortium Ivan Milutinovic-Invest Import from Belgrade, Serbia (then Yugoslavia).
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| Dredging underway for the reclamation of Salt Lake. The activity continued from 1962 to 1970 |
That process was followed by a study to prepare a vision for the new township. In this context, I made critical analyses of a few already established new townships — Chandigarh, Rawalpindi and Brasilia — in order to overview their basic concepts, qualities and mistakes and use the experiences and lessons for the conceptualisation of Salt Lake.
From the research, I derived three key factors for establishment of the characteristics of Salt Lake — first, urban character; second, harmony between the new and the existing towns; and third, city growth in accordance with the aims, interests and commitments of the West Bengal government.
The centralised city core concept was derived as the culmination of this idea, balancing the aims of achieving a coherent and complex structure and securing diversity of the residential neighbourhood.
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From the planner’s sketchbook:
A vision of the Master Plan, showing Central Park and the approach to it from the city. Toskovic’s note reads: “By placing the city centre inside the park the central area has quick and immediate access to green open square which it shares with the surrounding city” |
In such a built environment, physical structure, spatial arrangements and milieu, their functional requirements and possibilities, their aesthetic components and meanings, together with the social and cultural identity are the product of the complex, contextual conditions and influences of the climate.
Viewed through the eyes of the observer, the new township is an exhibition that can be “read” as a literary chronicle that covers a period of four decades, starting from the author’s first intimate sketches of the environment of the future town all the way to the exciting satellite images of the living city, as the long and complex path from idea to reality.
I first laid my eyes on the area designated for Salt Lake at the end of 1962, just after the reclamation started. It looked like a marsh area.
I regularly visited the site in search of a vision of the town. I would reach the area by car, and then walk some way from the Beleghata channel which was already reclaimed.
In my scheme of the township, the basic units are the blocks, visualised as humanly dimensionalised “neighbourhood units”. They are in harmonised and hierarchically arranged relation to each other, with integrative, radial, orthogonal and linear walkways. This striking landscape of the clear urban identity, in the rhythm of fine urban unit weaving, pulsates from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, from park areas to public facilities, from avenues to streets.
Besides, using the positive postulates of modern architecture, Salt Lake affirms traditional values of a town that by its arranged space allows for group life within each neighbourhood unit, thus avoiding the pitfall that such environment is a “sleeping town”. In this way, the vision of the new township went ahead of its time and today it catches up with the broadly accepted imperative of sustainable development.
I visited Calcutta several times — during the making of the Master Plan, then later as a chairman of the International Conference of Architecture of Cities in 1990.
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| Dobrivoje Toskovic explains the plan of Salt Lake to the then chairman Biswajiban Majumdar during his 2008 visit. A Telegraph picture |
But my latest visit in 2008 left unforgettable impressions on me, as the creator of the Master Plan. Through the honours that I received on the occasion from the then mayor of Calcutta Municipal Corporation Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya and the then chairman of Bidhannagar Municipality Biswajiban Majumder and the great help from my colleagues Santosh Ghosh and Debabrata Ghosh, as well as through many other contacts with people who live in this city, I realised that the concept of the new township and its implementation is accepted by the majority of inhabitants that live there, which for me, the author, represents the highest reward.
Travelling through the town, either on foot or by car, I enjoyed the achieved results and effects of the “garden city” that radiates humanity.
In those moments of personal satisfaction, I arrived at an idea to celebrate the birth of Salt Lake in the form of an exhibition, a book and a documentary film, From Idea to Realisation. The first two achievements are accomplished, while the next step of this intention, the documentary movie, is in the process.
Bearing in mind that the process of further development of Salt Lake depends on contextual conditions and influences of the environment, I hope that the achieved character and identity will be preserved, especially if a subway is introduced; that should not destroy the environmental values of this town.
Finally, a piece of advice from me. It would be very valuable that the town gets one central point of orientation besides the local ones, as presented by the Master Plan within the Central Park. Perhaps a monument dedicated to Rabindranath Tagore would be a fitting city centre.
Do you have a question or a comment for Prof Dobrivoje Toskovic?
Write to The Telegraph Salt Lake, 6 Prafulla Sarkar Street, Calcutta 700001;
email: saltlake@abpmail.com
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