Cities belong to all citizens
INDIA is the densest large country in the world. It has less land per capita than China, whose population India will soon exceed, and is much denser than the US, the third most populous country. The Indian economy must create millions more jobs. Cities are engines of growth and create more jobs per square mile than rural areas. Therefore, more urbanisation is inevitable in India. The country’s urban planners should be the best in the world to facilitate faster and more inclusive growth.
People should have greater voice in urban planning than investors and landowners. Not only is this an ethical imperative, but also a scientific necessity.
What is the purpose of a city? Which is the best city in the world from an economic perspective? It would be the city that has enabled the largest number of persons to increase their incomes and wealth in the shortest time, and with the least support from public finance. This research would guide India’s urban planners towards the forms of cities that provide better, and more cost-effective solutions.
The result of research by Jeb Brugmann to find the best city in the world from an economic perspective is startling. He indicates in his book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World, that Dharavi in Mumbai may be the world’s best city! Large numbers of rural families from many Indian states have migrated to the swampland of Dharavi on the outskirts of Mumbai, where, with their own enterprise, and with hardly any state support, they increased their family’s incomes and wealth. Within two to three generations, a few businesses penetrated foreign markets, and many entrepreneurs even became millionaires.
Dharavi is an eyesore for modern urban planners. In their eyes, it is hardly to be emulated as a ‘world class’ city. For them, it is a slum created by the urban planners’ neglect, one should add. Some ‘world class’ urban planners recommend that Dharavi should be cleared up, and the value of the land on which it lies released for foreign investors to build high. Their plans to attract more investments will force Dharavi’s entrepreneurs to start anew in a sterile environment that those urban planners will design for them.
The science of urban planning is divided into two schools. On one side is the ‘engineering’ school, an icon of which is Le Corbusier, the architect of the planned city of Chandigarh. Chandigarh is considered by some as India’s best-planned city. Corbusier (cited by James C Scott in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed) said, ‘The plan is the dictator’. Chandigarh is a well-ordered city. Corbusier calculated how much space, and in what configuration, people needed to live. He applied different standards depending on their status. He also separated activities of government, education, commerce, etc., into different zones.
On the other side of the urban divide is the ‘organic’ school of development, with its preferences for community management and ‘mixed use’ areas. Jane Jacobs (author of Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life and The Death and Life of Great American Cities) is a champion of this approach. Cities are for people, and they are shaped by people, she said. Corbusier’s city is a complex system put into order by an engineer (the ‘dictator’, he said). Jacobs’ cities are lively democracies. They are also rich in arts, culture, and music even without great museums and opera halls. Chandigarh’s evolution has been stifled by its concrete master plan, whereas lively cities are able to evolve more easily with their citizens’ changing needs.
Good governance creates good cities. Gandhi provided his talisman — Antyodaya — as a compass to all policymakers. ‘When you make any policy or plan, think of how it will benefit the poorest person.’ Urban policymakers must be guided by it. Cities must fulfil the needs of all their citizens — especially the poorest, who have the least resources, and struggle the most to live and earn.
Do cities belong to investors who own the cities’ buildings and lands? Or to the people who live and work in them? For whom should cities be designed and planned? In practice, owners call the shots, even in those cities that have elected councils and mayors. In capitalist economics it is only fair that he who risks more financial capital, and owns more, should have a greater say in the governance of the city than those who cannot afford to risk any financial investments. Thus, the capitalist principle of ‘property rights’ trumps the ethical principle of ‘human rights’. Whereas, in genuinely democratic economies (and cities), human rights must carry equal (or more) weight.
The expert-driven model of city planning and policy change is fraught, ethically, because it imposes an experts’ preferences on the system’s design. It is also epistemically flawed. Policy making for complex self-adaptive systems, as cities are, requires different expertise than for designing engineered systems. In the latter approach, which machine designers as well as macro-economists follow, the expert sits, mentally, outside the system he designs. In his mind he has a model of the system which, he presumes, explains all forces within it. The enables him to design an efficient city. However, the model does not include the creativity and aspirations of its inhabitants.
Citizens must have greater voice in urban planning than investors and landowners. Not only is this an ethical imperative, but also a scientific necessity. A city is a complex, self-adaptive system. It is formed in practice by the conduct of the people who live in it. They make the unwritten rules that make a city run. It is in their ‘rational self-interest’ to make (and break) rules to make their own lives easier. In democracies, cities belong to all their citizens. Therefore, policies must be directed to make it easier for India’s poorest citizens to live and work in cities.
