 "India's urban mess: Why setting up smart cities is going to be a tough task")
In 1957, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) came into existence and became the sole custodian of mass housing needs of the habitants of the city of Delhi. This essentially meant that there were only two ways to get a house in Delhi: either get lucky and get a house in one of the DDA colonies; or buy a plot of land and build a house on it. The purpose, it was hoped, was to ensure the planned development of Delhi.
The journey suggests that the DDA achieved everything but its stated purpose. According to the report by the Tejinder Khanna Committee formed in 2006 to look at urbanisation issues in Delhi, 40 percent of Delhi’s population at that time lived in unauthorised colonies.
In essence, the DDA simply couldn’t keep pace, in terms of the supply of houses. Therefore, urban planners allowed independent home-owners to construct additional housing units on their plots. The subsequent surge in construction activities saw the unfolding of an inefficient, blatant, and crass urbanisation story. The result is that almost all residential areas in Delhi unanimously reflect the philosophy of the matchbox school of architecture enveloped by urban chaos.
It is incomprehensible that certain provisions were not made mandatory from the start, viz. garbage disposal, cross ventilation, parking, common area access, lifts, etc. Take the case of parking. While a plot owner can build up to three new houses, he was not required to allocate any corresponding space for parking. Today, all the colonies (and now even people) in Delhi are choking to death for lack of parking space. New laws now require mandatory parking provisions, but the question remains, why was this scenario not envisaged 40 years ago?
Delhi’s urban planning story is also the story of urban planning in India - makeshift, patchwork, and fire-fighting. Indian cities today resemble an urban mess, a consequence of the manner in which they were imagined and planned decades ago. Every new master plan was either underpinned by an incremental mindset or was an attempt at accommodating vested interests.
Today, land pooling and vertical growth are two significant and much-needed elements added in the master plan of Delhi for 2021. However, this decision has come 40 years late. Why was this need not recognized in the ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s? The ability to be future-ready is the key difference between great and mediocre cities. Indian cities are sadly mediocre. Why is it that we have to first create reams of case studies of wrongdoings for us to take the right decision?
More importantly, who should be held accountable for these grave misadventures? Dirty streets, garbage piles, broken sidewalks, encroachment, inadequate access, under-estimated occupancies, lack of public spaces, and parking chokes are the hallmarks of most cities in India and urban planning has to take a major chunk of the blame for this situation.
Feudal mindset
The moot point is that India has approached the issue of urban planning with rural and feudal mindsets. Rural because, for the most part of the past 60 years, the political discourse has had this ingrained belief that the real India lives in the villages. Therefore, all policies that relate to urban India were approached with a sense of disconnect and severely lacked a sense of purpose. Today, when 50 percent of India lives in urban pockets - the official figure is 30 percent, we have started to talk about smart cities.
Urban planning has also been feudal because most of its framework that seems to work does not touch the majority of a city’s population, including migrants, blue collar workers, and low-income groups, which comprise more than half the population of any Indian city.
Therefore, this group continues to live in an informal environment, whereas urban planners continue to create a greater supply of spaces that increasingly appeals to a very small segment of a city’s habitants. Consequently, there is the increasing trend of units in prime residential areas remaining unoccupied. Some studies estimate that close to 30 percent of homes in cities remain unoccupied.
To my mind, this is a national waste. While on the one hand cites are bursting at the seams, on the other hand we have residential units lying dormant. Why is it that an end-user approach has not been at the centre of urban planners’ imagination?
The same is the case with the way urban planning has approached the development of commercial zones. As much as 90 percent of the 500-odd malls in India can easily be labelled as dead malls. This roughly translates into 22.5 million square feet of land in prime locations locked due to poor design or lack of demand. We are not a developed nation to afford such unproductive luxuries. The productive and efficient utilisation of every inch of urban space should be the cornerstone of urban planning.
The feudal mindset also becomes obvious when we look at the way spaces in cities are designed for pedestrians and cyclists. Citizen safety is another aspect that is grossly ignored. Land allocation for educational institutes on city outskirts is a classic example to make this point. It is really surprising to see educational institutions sitting right beside state or national highways. How were we thinking about addressing the safety of students when doing so? Why can’t design elements like minimum length of access roads from motor highways to these institutes be imagined?
The larger point these instances highlight is that the entire urban planning approach lacks imagination. Therefore it lacks solutions for the inhabitants of a city and takes an exclusionist approach. This approach will continue to push a city’s inhabitants onto the fringes and deepen urban disparities.
The flaw is that we have failed to recognise the extent of the impact of urban planning on the daily life of half the country’s population. Safety, clean environment, convenience, health, and sanitation have been the cornerstones of city design in developed economies.
These are protected trough stringent frameworks within the ambit of which market-driven solutions are developed. In our case, urban planning has allowed market-driven solutions like development of the real estate industry without putting in place a framework that defines the purpose for the city.
On the contrary, we should have been innovative in building a policy framework that could have served as a direction-setting tool for market-driven solutions. For instance, we should have put in place barriers as steep high taxes for second homes. We should have incentivised real estate business models built around rental, affordable housing and community living that can create housing supply in the right mix.
Independent houses or plotted development should have been barred in towns that exceed a certain population threshold. There should be sunset clauses which allow for the rapid redevelopment of areas that have lived past their prime.
To heighten the stature and importance of urban planning in India, it may even be worthwhile to consider the job of urban planners as a coveted cadre akin to that of IAS/IPS officers. This should be supported by cutting edge research through academic institutions. Each state can think about converting its better architecture schools into centres of excellence (CoE) on town planning.
However, for one, India urgently needs a wake-up call on the manner in which urban planning has been approached until now. We have to begin from the realisation that urban planning is an incredibly creative, imaginative, and scientific process. Urban planning needs to be futuristic in order to imagine the construct of urban citizens who will live decades from now.
It has to imagine the profile of the workforce, the nature of commerce, the demographic of households, consumption patterns of the future, and incorporate these trends/shifts into design plans today. It is imperative that the job of town planning is hereon subjected to scrutiny, debate, and accountability. For instance, how does one penalise bad urban design calls?
Town planning sits at the core of India’s urbanisation mess. We urgently need to kick-start a debate based on this realisation. This has to be followed up with institution building approaches for urban planning. While we continue our struggle to correct our past mistakes let us not continue to make the same mistakes which might push our future generations towards an existential threat. One can see that the job of creating a smart city is a far steeper, uphill task than it appears.
The author is senior vice president, Technopak Advisors
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