AN
event of immense significance in the history of mankind took place unnoticed
in 2004. Nobody knows precisely when or where this event happened, but
there’s a reasonable chance that it was in India. It may have occurred
when an aspiring penniless migrant fleeing rural poverty in eastern Uttar
Pradesh arrived at the Inter State Bus Terminal in Delhi, or when a young
mother gave birth to an underweight baby in a Mumbai chawl. The
event? Well, it was the moment at which, for the first time in history,
the world’s urban population outnumbered those who live in rural areas.
And, the statisticians tell us, in fifty years more than two-thirds of
the world’s population will live in towns or cities. The future is unmistakably,
irresistibly, perhaps sadly, urban. This generation will be judged on
its ability to transform its teeming cities into habitable places.
India now has more of the world’s megacities than any
other country, with three metropolises – Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi – having
a population larger than 10 million. Each of these cities alone has a
population larger than the majority of countries around the world. There
appears to be no natural limit to their growth. These cities each attract
hundreds of thousands of new migrants each year. Attempts to make a significant
reduction in the population inflow have all failed. And often the true
scale of the urban explosion is hidden. The official population of Delhi,
for instance, excludes contiguous urban areas – so Gurgaon, Faridabad,
Noida, and Ghaziabad are not included. If they were, Delhi, so often seen
as the smaller, parochial sister of Mumbai and Kolkata, would be well
on its way to being the world’s largest city.
Urban decay in Mumbai and Kolkata is the stuff of legend.
Every year, books are published that challenge or reinforce the image
of these two cities as urban cesspits. Delhi, however, is usually treated
less seriously as a city, as if it were somehow not the real thing. It
has been repeatedly described as a collection of villages, as a home for
corrupt or inept bureaucrats, or an open-air museum of Indian history.
Books about Delhi tend to evoke a sadness about a lost
past, a dreamy admiration for previous empires. They don’t deal with it
as it is now – one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the world.
Many of its residents tend to behave as if they are passing through, just
camping in Delhi for a few years, or a few decades. Apart from the tiny
percentage of the population with roots in Old Delhi, the city commands
very little loyalty from its citizens.
As
a migrant to Delhi, I am struck by how little the English-speaking elite
knows of its own city. One city-dweller told me recently that there was
very little poverty in Delhi, and hardly any slums; someone else didn’t
know that the city had a Metro; one other had never, to his knowledge,
crossed the Jamuna, and didn’t know where it was. Is there any explanation
for this ignorance? It is of course true that the Metro does not yet service
the affluent south of the city; that the slums of Delhi are better hidden
than those of Mumbai and Kolkata; and that the Jamuna is a foul-smelling
sewer for much of the year.
But there
is something deeper at work here. Nobody really cares very much about
the city. Some, of course, care intensely, even obsessively, about their
own flats, their building, their street, even their colony. A few others
care about Delhi’s archaeological monuments, or its trees, or its disappearing
wildlife – but no one really seems to care (forgive me if you are an exception)
about the huge, teeming conurbation that has increased its population
more rapidly since independence than any of the other major Indian cities.
Like Los
Angeles or Washington DC, Delhi is becoming a city of ghettos – for the
rich and the poor alike (as well as, of course, a wide range of middle
income groups and an impressive collection of linguistic, religious and
caste groups). Lutyens’ bungalow zone is as much a ghetto as Seemapuri.
Chittaranjan Park is famously Bengali, Punjabi Bagh is – well – Punjabi,
Okhla is largely Muslim, and Delhi has no less than five predominantly
Dalit Ambedkar Nagars and Colonies.
The wealthy
and the impoverished rarely live close to each other. Or when they do
– as I discovered in a brief sojourn in Vasant Vihar – the non-pedestrian
rich don’t know about it. The shacks of the poor that ring the western
side of the colony are not a visible part of the daily lives of the rich.
For the rich, their sketchy knowledge of the lives of the poor usually
comes from their servants. And the poor see the rich sweep by in their
Qualises and Scorpios or living it up royally as two-dimensional characters
in soap operas and movies.
It
is now more than forty years since the publication of Jane Jacobs’ seminal
The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In a book designed
to irritate traditional town planners, Ms Jacobs questioned the fashion
of dividing cities into zones. Cities, she argued, that failed to encourage
diversity, that failed to integrate the rich and the poor, the residential
and the industrial, could not thrive. In Delhi, no one listened.
Look today
at the urban wasteland that Connaught Place has become after seven at
night. It was designed, intelligently, as a mixed residential and commercial
area – the central park intended for family picnics and musical performances.
In the nineteen fifties, there were still significant number of family
homes; gradually many of these became offices. Existing residents were
driven out by higher property taxes, and by businesses that would pay
irresistibly high rents. Today, after dark, Connaught Place has become
the haven of the call-girl and pimp. The Metro may help, as will late
closing hours for shops – but until families move back the area will remain
unfriendly, unnatural.
Even more
desolate is that nameless area north of Deen Dayal Upadhyay Avenue (formerly
Rouse Avenue) and south of GB Pant Hospital, sandwiched in what should
be a prime location between New and Old Delhi. It is an urban wasteland
par excellence – little cared for even by a slum population who
have no title to the land they occupy, and pockmarked by small patches
of undeveloped land used as dumps and latrines.
But
arguably, Delhi’s most influential and most symbolically damaging bit
of zoning is in the heart of the new city built by the British. It bears
the unapologetic official name of the Lutyens’ Bungalow Zone and, in my
view, is a testament to authoritarian rule. Before I seek to justify that
view, I need to make some points clear, because critics of the LBZ have
been unfairly vilified in the past. I do not believe that the bungalows
should all be pulled down. I do not believe that high-rise buildings should
be constructed there. I do not believe that trees should be chopped down
or that grass should be concreted over. However, I do believe that the
way the LBZ is currently used, as a home for the most powerful
politicians and bureaucrats in the land, is hard to defend in a modern
democratic state.
The LBZ
is one of most obvious vestiges of a dying British empire in India, a
place which was deliberately designed to include the rulers and exclude
the ruled. The British are long gone. However, the trappings of those
last days of authoritarian rule have survived in a VVIP culture which
is deeply divisive. And the LBZ is the epicentre of that culture, where
democratically elected politicians can retreat into their rent-free or
low-rent compounds, where they can intrigue to get an even better bungalow,
where they can escape their constituents and the real world, where they
are not reminded of the lives of the poor (from amongst whom many of them
have risen). It encourages the powerful to somehow think they belong to
a different species from their fellow Indians.
The
solutions are relatively simple. The LBZ could be transformed into a mixed-use
public space without destroying the architecture or landscape of the existing
area. Those ugly, excluding boundary walls could be removed, and most
of the LBZ transformed into a kind of bungalow-filled public park (with
maybe a few private or government residences) but with an emphasis on
the educational, entertainment, and nourishment needs of a diverse range
of Delhiites and visitors – children and adults, rich and poor. I would
not go as far as Mahatma Gandhi and suggest that Rashtrapati Bhavan be
turned into a hospital – but I do think there needs to be a radical review
of land use in New Delhi.
Urban planning
in Delhi, as elsewhere, needs to place a premium on encouraging diversity
and variety, and not uniformity. There is still a lot of utopian talk
about urban planning in Delhi, as if it were still a city of a few million,
and that human behaviour could be changed by more steadfastly enforcing
some archaic zoning laws. Delhi is beyond that. It is now a megalopolis.
The failure,
for instance, to convert more unauthorised settlements into proper colonies
has been the biggest planning disaster of them all. It has bred contempt
for Delhi among many of its less affluent new arrivals – who have no prospect
of feeling any stake in the city. Not only must they be given the right
to occupy the land on which they live, but they must be encouraged to
feel the city is theirs.
Industry,
vital to the life of the city, must not be driven out. Instead of relocating
industries according to decades-old zoning laws, the not-in-my-backyard
activists need to turn their campaigning attention to reducing industrial
pollution and increasing industrial safety. The rich need to allow the
construction in their areas of a share of the less salubrious essential
services of a city. So sorry, South Delhiites – a new sewage treatment
plant, a lunatic asylum, a slaughterhouse, a jail, a homeless persons
hostel may have to be built in your neighbourhood. They need to be built
somewhere. Why should they only be situated in poor areas? To do so will
continue the downwards spiral of poverty and urban decay suffered by large
tracts of the city.
Political
scientists like Ashutosh Varshney have in recent years argued forcefully
that social cohesion and tolerance are increased by greater interdependence
and diversity; that communal riots are more likely to happen when communities
no longer interact because of ghettoisation. Diversity of another kind,
Jane Jacobs argued, is critical for the building of a thriving, improving
city. If we deny diversity, we will be unable to avoid that chilling science-fiction
vision of gated communities for the rich, cut off from but surrounded
by the increasingly desperate and militant poor.
Remember
the poor are the people whose labour ensures the functioning of your city.
Delhi already has many gated communities into which its frightened inhabitants
retire each evening, terrified of the hoi polloi, and even of their own
servants. The pavements become empty, a public invitation to antisocial
behaviour and crime. Your Arcadian colony will begin to seem like a prison,
and life in your three air-conditioned boxes (home, car, office) will
begin to pall.
Ask
not, then, what your city can do for you, but what you can do for your
city. You (yes, you, the English-reading elite) need to rediscover your
cities and help to make them more habitable for everyone. Look around,
take a walk, go by bicycle, take a bus, a rickshaw, use the Metro (very
impressive in both Delhi and Kolkata, for anyone who hasn’t been), even
an air-conditioned car if you must, and explore your city. (If you are
female, don’t go on your own; but we must aspire to building a city where
women can walk around alone). Engage with your city’s problems; don’t
cut yourself off from them. We can all agree the practical problems of
urban growth are immense. The needs can seem endless, the situation, at
times, hopeless. But then remember how swiftly Delhi’s air pollution problems
were improved by the introduction of CNG.
India’s
urban future does pose an enormous multifaceted challenge to its policy-makers
and its citizens. Its great cities can’t get enough water and are in danger
of drowning in their own effluence. Their new flyovers cannot keep pace
with the growth of urban traffic and car ownership. The schools and hospitals
cannot multiply fast enough for a population that doubles every ten to
fifteen years. It’s essential then that civic authorities and citizens
plan together for these challenges. In the end, we will all get the cities
we deserve.
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