E-Governance for Public Realm: Around Panniyankara Monorail Station, Kozhikode, Kerala

Abstract

Public Realm of city of Calicut in Kerala has a great role in enriching the quality of life of people. A well designed and maintained public realm with the full participation of citizen, business and various governmental agencies can have a great role in making Calicut more liveable. Most public realms of Calicut are totally neglected, characterized by encroachment, not designed properly and are faced with the danger of total disappearance by unauthorized uses. Having a Master plan or Zonal plan alone cannot create dynamic public realm. End of Plan period review of past Master Plans of Calicut shows disappearance of open spaces in the previous Master plan provision. Yet, no action is taken. The answer is E-Government for public realm which is a website design where all aspects of Governance are executed 24 h and 7 days a week. This is illustrated by an exploratory study of one public realm identified near a monorail station in Calicut, Kerala. Kerala state level policy of Spatial Governance is presented in Kerala State Urbanisation Report and Vision Kerala 2030 document Chap. 13 and is used to guide the Governance of public realm in Calicut. This website allows all stakeholders to participate in all aspect of planning, design and development, and management of public realm and administration connected with that. This web design is analogous to e-commerce, which allows businesses to transact with each other more efficiently (B2B) and brings customers closer to businesses (B2C). E-government aims to make the interaction between government and citizens (G2C), government and business enterprises (G2B), and inter-agency relationships (G2G) more friendly, convenient, transparent, and inexpensive in designing, managing and administering public realm in Calicut. One of the goals of 74th Constitutional Amendment of India is participatory governance and above models effectively provide for it. First, public realms are identified and potential and constraints are analysed and comments are asked from general public through website. Then, zonal plans of nodes near monorail station in Calicut are prepared, comments elicited from the web, followed by designing of hybrid Form-Based Codes. New Urbanism principles and transect analysis were conducted, followed by formulation of regulation plan, built form standards, public space standards, architectural standards, landscape standards, environmental resource standards and administration for the study area and are presented in the web for responses from public and to seek alternative design from citizen or friends of the city living world over. Interactive website allows active discussion on potentials and problems of public realm, SWOT analysis, participation of interested citizen, and also issue of building permits around public realm.