Technologies related to built-forms and city planning reveal as many disjunctures, inconsistencies and contradictions as any other. Some aspects of urban arrangements become increasingly sophisticated, (sometimes only to combat rising costs of labour) while others are grounded in simple formulas that have remained unchanged for centuries. These inconsistencies, as seen in the construction of drainage systems, road building, mass transport, architecture for living and working, are true across a range of urban spaces. Within the different historical layers of a two-century old contemporary city in the United States, an ancient city retro-fitted with modern comforts in Italy or Japan or a swanking new city that has been made by a combination of human energy and modern technology as in India.

The same space can reveal a variety of technological choices related to built-forms and urban planning based on the economic and commercial viability of the parties and specific projects involved. For example, in labour dense countries, in spite of ready availability of the latest technology, a good amount of projects are fuelled by human energy, only to balance costs.

Today, we see buildings being constructed globally in all kinds of ways, with technologically sophisticated material and principles complementing hand-made locally produced goods located in small workshops.

An elaborate network of goods, services and production processes go about producing modern built-forms. While the basic materials – cement and steel – are produced in large-scale furnace factories, themselves fuelled at different points by human and industrial energy, there are a whole lot of activities that arrange themselves in ways that are far from technologically sophisticated in the popular sense of the term.

Pre-industrial artisanal workshops produce a whole lot of goods and services, starting with an architect’s drawings to a whole range of secondary level material from marble, stone slabs, glass frames, tiles to even more specific goods for kitchen and bathroom fittings. At the same time the use of human energy in the construction industry remains high if measured on a global scale.

Interestingly, the nature of built-forms of the spaces in which this pre-(post?) industrial production takes place is also worth paying attention to. Urban landscapes around the world reveal astonishing diversities of built-forms. In them are embedded many kinds of economies and modes of producing, consuming and exchanging. Thus from a glass and steel city center where speculation rules the roost, one can move into middle-range six-storey brick and stone offices and residences that embody more traditional economic practices before walking inside self-made shacks, low-rise high-density structures, squatted spaces and derelict factories where an underground and ‘overground’ economy functions with regular contracts of work with the formal set-up. This disjointed urban landscape, also reveals different modes of technological expression that operate at different levels.

This kind of diversity in locating technological impulses is not new. Large monuments and fortified cities of major pre-industrial civilizations revealed a similar kind of unevenness of arrangement, even though in terms of energy they were fuelled mainly by slave labour. While the buildings themselves had a major impact in showing off levels of technological superiority of the ruling groups, their making was a markedly mixed affair. A combination of primitive and sophisticated (relative to the age) technologies, tools and organizational principles made building possible. Those worlds too reflected a range of different habitats linked to the economic arrangements of those times. Fortified cities, palaces, peasant villages, markets and tribal hamlets may have been more physically dispersed than today, but were part of an inter-connected economy. An economy that produced these built-forms and was complemented and serviced by it.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the decades that were the most direct beneficiaries of the industrial revolution, it was possible for many modern societies to believe that the direction in which technology was moving was liner and one-way. Eventually, machines would replace human exertion (and most certainly human energy) and produce a world of technological sophistication in which humanity would be propelled to move towards higher goals – free from physical exertion.

Those were the years when artisanal works were rendered arcane and economically unviable more due to ideology than through real audits. The huge subsidies that went into producing energy and capital investment to make machine-made goods cheap, were rarely accounted for. This was most vivid in colonized countries where unfair taxation on hand-made goods complemented tax concessions for machine made goods to make the industrial revolution work. According to some anthropologists, when artisans (including tribal ironsmiths) were first exposed to the wonders of the machine age, they wanted to be part of its narrative. It was possible for them to incorporate these technological innovations in an older economy of work and production. It was possible to have a market where machine made and hand made goods could find their own specific places. But of course – those days the narratives of technological progress were more than just narratives. They were moral injunctions. They moved one way and in one direction. Entire histories of technologies, whether linked to food processing, clothes, or construction were rendered arcane. Habitats were seen to mirror this direction as well. Tribal habitats were lowest in the chain with the urban industrial ones as being the most advanced. How this idealized understanding of technology actually matched economic and lived realities was another matter altogether.

By the early twenty-first century, the reality of environmental issues, the economic and commercial limits of technological choices and the paradoxical awareness that globalization brought – of an increasingly diverse world in terms of knowledge, skills and technological expertise – managed to change a lot of these conceptions.

People and nations have now become more resigned to and have understood the intricacies of a large variety of technological expressions. It is easier to distinguish technological change from significant shifts in organizational principles. In the past, the moments of these shifts as they happened were blurred. However, today it is possible to look back and mark out the industrial revolution from a textile industrial revolution (which is what some historians say it essentially was). It is possible not to co-opt the earliest technological wonders as ‘fruit’ of that revolution but recognize them to be what they were; innovations of human-scale artisanal tools that artisans were already using. It is possible to accept the fact that the first factory revolution was an organizational one. The factory was, for one brief but extraordinary moment not a warehouse for gigantic machinery to match gigantic production but an organizational revolution in itself. A space where artisans, workers and administrators worked together to produce goods that were quickly transported to the market. It was this shift in organizational principle that ultimately harnessed the simultaneous fervent in knowledge practices to produce advances in modern technologies.

Today, given the more informed understanding we have of the way in which modern technology has to be contextualized at various levels it is easier to accept its co-existence with pre-modern technological histories and to see it as wired to knowledge practices that are complex. It easier to accept that certain kinds of technological innovations take place outside laboratories or in contexts that are constantly connected to the lived world. Many technological solutions are linked to traditional knowledge systems. It is possible to understand these complexities without belittling any of the advances and moves that science has made over the last two centuries.

The world of information, communication and imagination technology are another matter altogether – and its revolutionary and reactionary tendencies have been much documented, debated and analyzed.

Yet – if there is one space where dated thoughts and concepts linked to technology still operate in full force it is in the world of urbanism and urban planning.

Like the modernist agrarian nightmare– of producing food for all by reducing food to the unit of energy and then translating the production of units of energy as a means of doing away with hunger – urban planning and architecture are another stunted story. And just as the agrarian ideals never solved the problem of hunger – but only increased it – urbanists have a similar cross to bear with regard to housing and homelessness – those self-made problems that are more to do with our inability of recognizing the conceptual confusions in which we frame them than actual issues of ‘lessness’.

Old-fashioned urbanists believe it is possible to produce houses for all and they reduce the concept and practice of urban technology to the technology practiced by the organized construction industry.

They refuse to see that technology is embedded in economic and political equations and that organization of space, human energy and technical solutions have to work together in making technology workable in the first place. Since their thought processes are so strongly linked to modernist and dated ideas of technological emancipation they refuse to see the obvious.

That the first and foremost way in which we can solve the issue of housing is by acknowledging that humans have a history of technological practice, knowledge and skill base of producing homes that expresses an enormous diversity of styles and experiences – and more importantly are workable and relevant even today. They may need some modifications, but like cooking, are still tied down to certain essential practices that are ubiquitous, universal and practical. They may have to adapt to transport and communication issues, but that in no way means that the ability, skill and knowledge of building homes has to be questioned whatsoever. These are specific issues that can be addressed specifically – without blurring ideas of habitats, housing and urbanism as a whole.

Today it makes better sense to say that the job of the urban planner and the urban technologist is to create conditions where more and more people can build legitimate homes according to their capabilities and choices and diverse technological skills.

Since today, we are less dependent on the idea of using a single modernist technological spectrum to create urban landscapes, our task is to legitimatize the variety that is bound to emerge from the different histories and economies that characterize our lives.

Technology in the sphere of information, communication and imagination has opened up possibilities of expanding its capabilities by using the growing skills of users. This is thanks to the design of those technologies itself in the first place. Similarly it is important for us to recognize the capability of people who live in homes and cities to produce their own environments and create what we like to call user-lead urban environments.

Of course – what will many cities around the world look like when this actually happens? How will they function? We suspect they will look more like large parts of Tokyo, late nineteenth century Bombay, or something quite unlike anything we have seen before. And yet they will be more familiar to most city dwellers than the urban environments that many of us take for granted today.

But that’s another story altogether…coming soon.