What is urban life? If we seek liveable cities, we must ask first what urban life is. Is it just a question of ensuring that livelihoods, shelter, mobility, health, and other factors of a good life are available and accessible? Or is there a dimension that is more profound?
It is worth dwelling on this question for even though cities have existed since time immemorial the study of cities as a focused discipline came into being quite recently. Urban Planning emerged as a discipline only in the mid-19th century, and its first acts were attempts to sanitise the health dangers ensuing from overcrowded cities produced by the Industrial Revolution. This quest toward sanitisation has pervaded the discipline since. It is not till the late-19th and early-20th centuries that we find rigorous study and thought on urbanism as a specific form of life, and these early thinkers offered a rich humanist perspective on the subject.
Max Weber wrote about how the density and scale of cities produces a cosmopolitanism that redefines what human interchange can be. Georg Simmel identified cities as possessing a unique capability for creativity thanks to the anonymity that they offer. Freed from the restricting gaze of tradition one is subject to in a village, anonymous people are free to think, act, and interact creatively and innovatively. Robert Park offered us the wonderful formulation that the role of the city is to facilitate the moral range of deviant behaviour.
More recently, Jeb Brugmann, in his book Welcome to the Urban Revolution, writes in the same vein as these early thinkers to assert there is empirical data backing the claim that cities are uniquely creative, for the world over they produce a percentage of GDP that is a multiple of the percentage of the population they constitute. The urban condition offers opportunities to leverage economies of scale (there are more people to connect with), economies of density (they are closer at hand), economies of association (scale and density facilitate collaboration), and economies of extension (scale, density, and association empower connection with economies beyond the city). Brugmann argues that people leverage these economies in a multiplicity of ways, and the goal of urban planning and management should be to facilitate this and iron out clashes between the multiplicities rather than subjecting the city to the one-size-fits-all approach of a detailed master plan.
Richard Sennett, who in his book Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities documented the work of the early pioneers on urban studies, points out that urban planning has largely abandoned anchors in this humanist perspective and “retreated into cocoons of scientific purity.”
Photo by Charu Chaturvedi on Unsplash
We must look beyond the urban public realm as being there solely to offer amenities for movement, consumption, leisure, entertainment, health, and education. This assumes a politically passive citizenry who are there merely to consume the amenities of the city, whereas the creative dynamism of the urban condition not only makes a vibrant urban life possible, but those who live that life remake the urban condition itself. Cities make us and we, in turn, make the city.
We must realise that public space is not necessarily equivalent to civic space, and our urban public realm must be designed as civic in the sense of catalysing the primordial citizen-to-citizen connections that foster creativity and culture.
However, the pursuit of this crucial quest would be derailed if we do not first attend to some fundamental fractures in the Indian urban condition, and I will draw your attention to three of them.
The Systematic Repudiation of Presence in the Indian City
A fundamental tool in urban planning and management is the land use plan. To be recognised as an inhabitant of the city, one must be able to locate oneself on the land use plan through some kind of contract, whether formal or informal, of sale, rental, or employment that recognisably locates you on a parcel of land that corresponds with the land use plan. Land values determine a price threshold for doing this.
In India, land markets are highly inefficient as they are riddled with bureaucracy, opacity, and corruption. We have all studied in Economics 101 that price settles where supply and demand curves intersect. An inefficient market causes supply curves to be closer to the vertical. Consequently, minor increases in demand cause disproportionate increases in price. This has reached a stage over time where land values bear little relationship with average incomes.
Close to half the population of a large Indian city cannot afford to officially locate themselves on the sanctioned master plan, and are forced to seek unauthorised buildings and layouts, urban villages, slums, and other forms of informal construction. This is a percentage that affects more than the urban poor, also impacting a significant percentage of the middle class. One can anecdotally verify this by driving around any Indian metropolis and observing the extent of informality.
This has three significant consequences:
1. It degrades the existence of a substantial percentage of the urban population, rendering them vulnerable to dispossession and exploitation. The extent to which we render so much of our urban population as invisible opens up the provocation for them to see vigilante violence as the only means of asserting their presence, and we are seeing the signs of this today, especially once mainstream politics becomes willing to exploit the presence of this provocation.
2. The spatial discontinuities it produces are a huge obstacle in implementing efficient systems for delivery of urban services.
3. It limits the reach of urban planning and management thereby opening up space for informality at the upper end of the spectrum where the elite can manipulate the system for their own rent-seeking purposes, establishing an unwillingness to be transparent on data and open to collaboration. Substantive informality at both ends of the spectrum severely limits the capacity of the Indian city to plan and manage itself.
All this, and more, is allowed to happen because we have no imagination of the city in India, and this is the second fracture I feel compelled to mention.
The Imagination of the Indian City
In India, we locate tradition and culture in the village and see the city only as a site of technical modernity. This modernity is assessed aesthetically rather than ethically or politically. We have an image of built environment that represents modernity, and if we see enough of that in our homes, workplaces and means of commuting, we feel anchored in modernity without pausing to consider how equitable it is.
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We therefore have no systematic imagination of the city in India and must construct this imagination along three dimensions:
We must imagine the city as a space of human rights. We only locate rights in our constitution and deal with their violation in our courts, failing to recognise that rights must be claimed and negotiated within the vicissitudes of daily life. We must realise we all suffer if we do not imbue the city with a widespread equity of recognition and participation.
We must imagine the legibility and clarity of urban form that will underpin the vibrancy of urban life. This is not the way our cities are constructed. We have a model of bylaws set up in the National Building Code which have shaped the formulation of bylaws in most cities of India, where what you can build results from a mathematical formula whose primary factors are the land use, area of plot, and width of accessing road. This abstract production of building form does not recognise the specificities and histories of neighbourhoods, the topography and geography of urban districts, the need for urban design interventions, or how urbanism may shape the quality of our lives.
We must imagine the city as an entity that is both built and natural. We tend to equate nature with wilderness, located outside the city. When nature is admitted into the city it is seen as an aesthetic spectacle to be enjoyed rather than an ecological force to be respected. This is an imagination that has become increasingly critical in this era of climate change.
We may construct these imaginations of the city, but we must ultimately also implement them, and this requires institutional capacity. Which brings me to the third fracture I address.
Governance of the Indian City
The Constitution of India, when it was adopted in January 1950, granted no recognition to local government, only recognising central and state government. We consequently developed an ethos of disempowered municipal government that was largely controlled by state government, marginalising local institutions in the process.
In 1992, an attempt was made to correct the situation through an amendment that granted constitutional recognition to local government in both cities and villages. But the drafting of the amendment was inadequate and its implementation was poor, so the early ethos not only continued, but became embedded in our perception as inevitable.
We do not have to look beyond the city where we are, Bengaluru, to affirm this. The continuous duration without an elected municipal government has entered its fifth year, despite the constitution specifying this period cannot exceed six months. The master plan under which we currently operate was released in 2007 and was not meant to be valid beyond 2015. We currently do not know when work on a new master plan will begin and the constitutional proprieties of who should undertake this exercise is still a contested matter.
If the Central Government of India was still unelected over four years after its term had lapsed, and its planning frameworks had lapsed by over nine years, we would have had an uproar that cried about the murder of democracy and the collapse of governance. The fact that this causes little public notice, leave alone concern, at the municipal level is, perhaps, more troubling than the underlying lapses of governance.
India’s Urban Century
These fractures, the limitations of imagination they represent, the obstructions they place in leveraging the creative dynamism of the urban condition, are of immense significance at this moment in our history. We are in India’s urban century where, for the very first time in our history, the number of urban citizens is expected to exceed the number of rural citizens – a threshold we are projected to cross by the middle of the 21st century. This will not happen only in the metropolises; it will impact Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns and the conversion of areas that are currently classified as rural.
In terms of numbers, it represents a huge challenge of urbanisation, entailing about 400 million new urban citizens over the next two to three decades, a time within which we must accomplish what took the West a century and a half. And we cannot replicate the paradigms they used, for they are not sustainable at a planetary scale.
“Liveability” is a far greater imperative than making cities “nice.” How India imagines, plans, and manages her cities in the 21st century could determine whether she sinks or swims in the future.
