Urbanising India
Source: By MG Devasahayam: The Statesman
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is fast-tracking policy decisions. In the sphere of urban development, “the government will build 100 cities focussed on specialised domains and equipped with world-class amenities. Integrated infrastructure will be rolled out in model towns to focus on cleanliness and sanitation. By the time the nation completes 75 years of its Independence, every family will have a pucca house with water connection, toilet facilities, 24x7 electricity supply and access.”
Very ambitious indeed! Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu is working on a road map to take this agenda forward. Sensing big business opportunity, the global networking solutions company, Cisco Systems, wants to partner India in setting up smart cities and industrial corridors.
With the country fast heading towards a 50:50 rural-urban distribution of population slated for the middle of the present century, this ambition cannot be faulted. The question is whether there is required philosophical underpinning because cities are not mere buildings and amenities but meant for people with flesh and blood. With India’s urban population in a few decades exceeding the total of the USA and the European Union, this becomes critical.
Chandigarh was India’s first experience in planed urbanisation and I was the city’s administrator and estate director in the mid-Seventies. The ethos of the city was outlined by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru when he visited the site in 1952 to dedicate the city to the people of India: “Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past, an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.”
The ‘philosophy’ of Chandigarh was spelt out in 1959 by the expatriate architect Le Corbusier ~ “When the following operation has been started in the city; obtaining the money, buying of the necessary land, framing of the first by-laws permitting the beginning of construction, selling of the first plot, arriving of the first inhabitant, etc., etc., a phenomenon is born: it is the appreciation in the value of the piece of land. A game, a play, has begun. One can sell cheaply or at a high price; it depends on the kind of tactics and the strategy employed in the operation. One phrase must be affirmed: good urbanism makes money; bad urbanism loses money”.
Corbusier mixed up ‘urbanism’ with ‘real estate’ development for self-financing purposes. Pursuit of this ‘philosophy’ has made Chandigarh an elitist and exclusive habitat despite mid-course correction done in the mid-Seventies. A similar trend has been seen in the rest of India during the last few decades.
Urbanisation is basically the movement of population from rural to urban areas and the resulting increasing proportion of a population that resides in urban places. Urbanisation is a two-way process because it involves not only movement from village to cities and change from agricultural occupation to business, trade, service and profession but also change in the migrant’s attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviour patterns. Facilities like education, healthcare, employment avenues, civic facilities and social welfare are the reasons that are attracting people to urban areas.
Despite the looming tectonic shift towards urban habitat, this nation does not have an inclusive urban philosophy and political thought. Since urbanisation concerns people, their lives and livelihood, it should have a distinct character, culture and ethos. It was author Jeb Brugmann (2009) who truly defined ‘urbanism’ as “a way that builders, users and residents co-design, co-build, co-govern and combine their activities to support ways of production and living that develops their shared advantage.” India being a low-income economy, ‘urbanism’ should be the guiding philosophy.
‘Urban shared advantages’ are the three basic elements that make cities ‘magnets of productivity and prosperity’ ~ economies of density, scale and association. Density is the concentration of people and their activities that enhances the sheer efficiency by which an economic activity could be pursued. ‘Scale’ is the increase in the volume of any particular opportunity, producing what we call ‘economies of scale’ that makes activities attractive or services profitable. The scale and density of interactions among people with different interests, expertise and objectives then combine to create the third basic element ~ economy of association that exponentially increase the variety of ways and efficiency with which people can organise, work together, invent solutions and launch joint strategies for urban advantage.
Urbanisation in India does not get the leverage of these urban advantages to the full because it does not practise urbanism of inclusive and shared development. When communities self-organise ways of designing buildings, organising space, arranging urban functions, and governing development in wards and zones to make specific kinds of production very efficient, and specific kinds of living very affordable and productive, this is called “community-based urbanism.”
In urbanism, the focus shifts from opportunistic development of individual plots, buildings and gated-settlements to community-disciplined development of wards and zones with specialised strategies to secure social and economic advantage in the city. The informal sector, that contributes over 75/80 per cent of urban employment, which is now in the periphery of urban planning, would be mainstreamed and be at the core of such forms of urbanism.
The advantage of this approach is that its production of many micro and small-scale units and the mixing of units of different sizes to co-locate residential, commercial, and small manufacturing functions makes it accessible to low-income populations, and it creates efficient, productive, and governable units of the growing city. The disadvantage is that the approach tends to be based on incremental, cash-flow based building, and is therefore investment-poor. But this is not irresolvable.
As cities grow, inclusive urbanism gets abandoned giving place to commercial commodification ~ producing, selling and purchasing generic built-units (square-foot) adopting industrial batch production approach. This is the hallmark of today’s technology/globalisation-driven urbanisation which is both exclusive and expansionist, keeping majority of citizens away from the ‘development-stream’ and allocating scarce economic and environmental resources to the select few. This has become a common phenomenon in urban India under UPA rule and it appears that the NDA government is also moving in that direction, only faster.
Urbanisation sans urbanism makes cities ‘brick & mortar real estate’ entities rather than vibrant human settlements. Hence the present disjointed and disoriented urban governance system that has been the bane of sustainable and equitable spatial planning and development. Cities and urban habitats being ‘engines of economic growth’ need vibrancy if democratic and participatory decision-making is to take place. For this to happen, the philosophy of urbanism should be accompanied by political thought that is democratic, decentralised and participatory.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is fast-tracking policy decisions. In the sphere of urban development, “the government will build 100 cities focussed on specialised domains and equipped with world-class amenities. Integrated infrastructure will be rolled out in model towns to focus on cleanliness and sanitation. By the time the nation completes 75 years of its Independence, every family will have a pucca house with water connection, toilet facilities, 24x7 electricity supply and access.”
Very ambitious indeed! Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu is working on a road map to take this agenda forward. Sensing big business opportunity, the global networking solutions company, Cisco Systems, wants to partner India in setting up smart cities and industrial corridors.
With the country fast heading towards a 50:50 rural-urban distribution of population slated for the middle of the present century, this ambition cannot be faulted. The question is whether there is required philosophical underpinning because cities are not mere buildings and amenities but meant for people with flesh and blood. With India’s urban population in a few decades exceeding the total of the USA and the European Union, this becomes critical.
Chandigarh was India’s first experience in planed urbanisation and I was the city’s administrator and estate director in the mid-Seventies. The ethos of the city was outlined by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru when he visited the site in 1952 to dedicate the city to the people of India: “Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past, an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.”
The ‘philosophy’ of Chandigarh was spelt out in 1959 by the expatriate architect Le Corbusier ~ “When the following operation has been started in the city; obtaining the money, buying of the necessary land, framing of the first by-laws permitting the beginning of construction, selling of the first plot, arriving of the first inhabitant, etc., etc., a phenomenon is born: it is the appreciation in the value of the piece of land. A game, a play, has begun. One can sell cheaply or at a high price; it depends on the kind of tactics and the strategy employed in the operation. One phrase must be affirmed: good urbanism makes money; bad urbanism loses money”.
Corbusier mixed up ‘urbanism’ with ‘real estate’ development for self-financing purposes. Pursuit of this ‘philosophy’ has made Chandigarh an elitist and exclusive habitat despite mid-course correction done in the mid-Seventies. A similar trend has been seen in the rest of India during the last few decades.
Urbanisation is basically the movement of population from rural to urban areas and the resulting increasing proportion of a population that resides in urban places. Urbanisation is a two-way process because it involves not only movement from village to cities and change from agricultural occupation to business, trade, service and profession but also change in the migrant’s attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviour patterns. Facilities like education, healthcare, employment avenues, civic facilities and social welfare are the reasons that are attracting people to urban areas.
Despite the looming tectonic shift towards urban habitat, this nation does not have an inclusive urban philosophy and political thought. Since urbanisation concerns people, their lives and livelihood, it should have a distinct character, culture and ethos. It was author Jeb Brugmann (2009) who truly defined ‘urbanism’ as “a way that builders, users and residents co-design, co-build, co-govern and combine their activities to support ways of production and living that develops their shared advantage.” India being a low-income economy, ‘urbanism’ should be the guiding philosophy.
‘Urban shared advantages’ are the three basic elements that make cities ‘magnets of productivity and prosperity’ ~ economies of density, scale and association. Density is the concentration of people and their activities that enhances the sheer efficiency by which an economic activity could be pursued. ‘Scale’ is the increase in the volume of any particular opportunity, producing what we call ‘economies of scale’ that makes activities attractive or services profitable. The scale and density of interactions among people with different interests, expertise and objectives then combine to create the third basic element ~ economy of association that exponentially increase the variety of ways and efficiency with which people can organise, work together, invent solutions and launch joint strategies for urban advantage.
Urbanisation in India does not get the leverage of these urban advantages to the full because it does not practise urbanism of inclusive and shared development. When communities self-organise ways of designing buildings, organising space, arranging urban functions, and governing development in wards and zones to make specific kinds of production very efficient, and specific kinds of living very affordable and productive, this is called “community-based urbanism.”
In urbanism, the focus shifts from opportunistic development of individual plots, buildings and gated-settlements to community-disciplined development of wards and zones with specialised strategies to secure social and economic advantage in the city. The informal sector, that contributes over 75/80 per cent of urban employment, which is now in the periphery of urban planning, would be mainstreamed and be at the core of such forms of urbanism.
The advantage of this approach is that its production of many micro and small-scale units and the mixing of units of different sizes to co-locate residential, commercial, and small manufacturing functions makes it accessible to low-income populations, and it creates efficient, productive, and governable units of the growing city. The disadvantage is that the approach tends to be based on incremental, cash-flow based building, and is therefore investment-poor. But this is not irresolvable.
As cities grow, inclusive urbanism gets abandoned giving place to commercial commodification ~ producing, selling and purchasing generic built-units (square-foot) adopting industrial batch production approach. This is the hallmark of today’s technology/globalisation-driven urbanisation which is both exclusive and expansionist, keeping majority of citizens away from the ‘development-stream’ and allocating scarce economic and environmental resources to the select few. This has become a common phenomenon in urban India under UPA rule and it appears that the NDA government is also moving in that direction, only faster.
Urbanisation sans urbanism makes cities ‘brick & mortar real estate’ entities rather than vibrant human settlements. Hence the present disjointed and disoriented urban governance system that has been the bane of sustainable and equitable spatial planning and development. Cities and urban habitats being ‘engines of economic growth’ need vibrancy if democratic and participatory decision-making is to take place. For this to happen, the philosophy of urbanism should be accompanied by political thought that is democratic, decentralised and participatory.
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