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Town planning, parking vs property development
2008-05-11 11:06:59
By Correspondent Nimi Mweta
One among unseen conflicts in economic change is the manner in which old blueprints resist new practices, and how in the end it is practice, not blueprints, that wins.
This feature has a long history, with plenty of notice taken about it at the time of the industrial revolution, where hand mill technicians and other old crafts ferociously resisted the rise of industrial manufacturing.
Everyone knows who won that round of historical contentions, and that applies to religion, politics, business.
Modernity is therefore something that continually runs foul of traditional wisdom and teaching, and one way of expressing this conflict is witch-hunting about who benefits, that owing to history, immigrant people usually stir tendencies of being dormant among local populations.
In many cases they have been conquered and ruled, or in other instances they have to imitate foreigners in a conflictual way. In seeking to replace foreigners, locals learn to do things the way foreigners do them.
Karl Marx noted somewhere that ``a single need in industry gives a greater impetus to science than ten universities,`` which now comes up in our case.
There is a huge outcry among experts about the rise of multiple storey buildings in what is called the `central business district,` though strictly speaking this is the city centre, where the banks are found.
The reference is to the commercial zone of Kariakoo, home to a major city market and plenty of wholesale, retail and spare parts shops, as well as plenty of specialized commerce of various kinds, but not really `central` as such.
Experts in various quarters, and especially town planners and a breadth of related professionals have been up in arms about merging plots to put up the buildings, without provision for parking space, playing grounds, and some even say air passage is limited.
There are factually correct and errors in these assertions. For instance, parking space is limited outside but inside there is quite often room for residents, though not many slots.
The air aspect is the converse; it is the six room houses which didn`t allow air to pass, while high rise structures have wide room for currents of air to pass even at ground level, plus freer air passage at upper levels.
The point Dr Marx was making comes back in the sense that parking shall now start taking its place among coveted business outlets in the city, where some areas will be allocated for the business alone.
So long as this doesn`t appear to be the case it means that the problem isn`t as big as some people wish to believe, tending also to confuse daytime traffic and residential parking as such.
Unavoidably, much of the daytime movement is slightly curtailed, that one has to be rather assured of parking before going with a car to certain premises.
Otherwise taxis get new business to do, that they take executives to various places and come back later to pick them, for the latter would no longer find parking space if they go to meetings with own vehicles.
What is unclear is whether the congestion will be touching only private cars or at some point even passenger commuting will be affected, in the sense of curtailing movement to outside points, easier to access.
So far the rapid bus transit project puts Gerezani as the meeting point, which is located somewhere between Mnazi Mmoja and Kariakoo, meaning some connection to city centre (banking district) will be necessary.
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