San Fernando: Planning Urban Growth

“The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.” ― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

San Fernando is striking and distinct in character, bound by the Guaracara River to the north, by the Oropouche River to the south, to the east by the Sir Solomon Hochoy Highway, and the west by the Gulf of Paria, and acknowledged by its significant landmark, the San Fernando Hill.

A fusion of winding and straight streets is spread across the irregular topography of the core and extends to the 21 surrounding communities. As a result of a prosperous economy in the last few decades there has been unorganized growth and sprawl endemic in the peripheral areas of the city.

The establishment of sugar plantations in 1783 on the Naparima Plains surrounding San Fernando fostered growth of the area as a gateway to the activities of sugar cane and cacao cultivation and the petroleum industry.

Driving around on a Saturday morning doing my mother's bidding, I came across this remarkable scene of the southern stretch of San Fernando with the streets and the houses all bustling with life under the hot sun. The structures closer in range were relatively new and residential compared to the older and worn buildings of the core as shown in a previous post. 

“The most significant aspect of land use in Metropolitan San Fernando is the absence of use for most of the former sugar cane growing land.” ― quoted from The San Fernando Spatial Development Plan 2010

Land use planning in Trinidad and Tobago is governed under the Town and Country Planning Division. Their main purpose seems to be finding more prime agricultural land formerly used for sugar cane cultivation to build more and more housing developments. The table below, adapted from The San Fernando Spatial Development Plan 2010, shows a list of residential developments in the vicinity of the city.

These were all constructed on prime agricultural land yet, one of the specific goals of this development plan is to preserve good agricultural land?? Furthermore, a decline of agriculture is listed as a major constraint to the goals of the plan. .. well OBVIOUSLY!

Below are pictures of the Corinth and Tarouba developments respectively, as captured from opposite sides of the Tarouba Link Road.

Of course, these developments undoubtedly increase the population of the city, and as stated by Jane Jacobs, imitates the empirical failure of creating communities, since each development is now troubled by some unforeseen issue which has arisen.

Specifically, residents of the Housing Development Corporation in Tarouba complain of a major housing defect that causes flooding stating that the houses feature a poorly constructed gallery which allows the insides of the houses to become flooded when rain falls. Also, the residents are not allowed to fix the issue as they are forced to undo the repairs by the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) who tells them that they are not allowed to change the design of the building in any way or form. 

The primary focus of urban planning is managing the growth and expansion of cities and mitigating the urban social and environmental problems associated with rapid population growth (Hall and Barrett, 2012). However, in the case if these housing developments, urban planning is creating the particular problems it sought to prevent.

Further reading I thought interesting and pertains to this topic of urban planning:
Wendell Cox's 'The Beauty of Urban Planning from the Ground'

REFERENCES

• Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
• San Fernando Final Draft Spatial Development Plan 2010
• Hall, Tim and Heather Barrett. 2012. Urban Geography. 4th ed. London and New York, Routledge Publishing. 129