Thursday, November 25, 2004

Bangalore under seige

City Under Siege
By Swati Ramanathan in Business Today

One morning, a village on the periphery of a city wakes up to find itself bifurcated by the construction of a National Highway. Soon, the State Industrial Development Board acquires several hundred acres of the village for a new it corridor. And the City Development Authority procures land for housing development in anticipation of the growing needs of the city.

These acts set off a chain reaction. The village is now geographically divided, making administration cumbersome. Right-to-property is invalidated; locals displaced and existing economic activity thrown off balance with few employment opportunities, retraining programmes or guaranteed jobs for locals. Everything is driven by swirling political interests seeking to capitalise on land prices, largesse and loopholes.

It is easy to predict what will happen 10 years down the road: rampant land use and zoning violations, a comprehensive failure of everything from infrastructure delivery to waste and traffic management, disenfranchised residents and mushrooming urban poor, living in far worse conditions in urban slums than they were in their rural homes.

This, repeated across the country, is the melee that is urban India, circa 2004.

At a city level, managing the resulting chaos is a nightmare. Take the example of hi-tech Bangalore. Behind the polished facade of glass and steel lies a city of traffic jams; an ambitious skyline crowds menacingly over pot-holed roads and filthy drains. Choked lakes and parks that have seen better days pass for public spaces and few heritage sites are being preserved or promoted.
Spatial Planning is an imperative for cities

The future of the city is far more scary. Things are underway in Bangalore that will have significant spatial consequences for the city and its residents: the 10-year Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP), the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) Act, the international airport to the north of the city, the Metro Rail, and the Greater Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Project. Unfortunately, there are critical areas of concern in each:

Lack of inter-agency coordination: The Metro Rail does not extend into the municipalities surrounding Bangalore, nor is it connected to the new international airport. And the CDP does not anticipate the impact of the Metro and regulate land use and zoning accordingly. This is illustrative of the absence of an integrated multi-modal public transport plan. Planning is made even more cumbersome due to the tenuousness of jurisdictional boundaries between service providers (read: departments) such as public works, water-supply, police and waste-management.

Inadequate public consultation: The inputs of citizens are invited after the planning process is all but complete, often through inconspicuous advertisements in obscure newspapers. Then, the government is under no obligation to incorporate citizen feedback.

Poor planning regulations: An archaic, static set of zoning and land use policies are being applied to a dynamic, organic city.

Absence of a spatial data centre: Ultimately, any planning document is only as good as its implementation and monitoring. Unless all plans of all service providers are brought into a common spatial data platform and managed constantly, gaping chasms between the paper-plans process and ground reality will remain.

The developed world went through a phase of rapid urbanisation in the mid-1950s. The governments there had had the luxury of time to carefully and continually evolve robust planning frameworks with participation from all segments of society. This resulted in the creation of some of the world's most vibrant cities: New York, London and Barcelona. In today's world, we, in India, have neither the same luxury of time nor the inclination for rigorous planning.

While there is much talk of poverty alleviation, administrative reform, economic growth, infrastructure development and the like, the critical issue of spatial planning is absent from these discussions. The reality is that the ramifications of poor spatial planning impact almost every urban issue from governance to economic development.

How can this story be different?

By enforcing the centrality of spatial planning, and using the entire range of spatial tools such as guaranteed land title systems, transfer of development rights, comprehensive plans and district plans, in a coherent manner.

However, in order for this spatial layer to be effective, it must sit atop a supporting troika of robust financial systems for transparency, institutionalised citizen-participation in local planning, and integrated institutional arrangements across all service providers. This requires the political and administrative will to implement necessary urban reforms.

Only if we do this, can India's heaving cities become vibrant urban habitats. Only then can we include a healthy concern for the environment and natural resources in our planning. Only then can we make each urban centre unique in its physical character, and representative of its cultural history and economic activity.

With 600 million Indians expected to reside in urban India by 2030, empowering a spatial planning vision that can work on the ground is not a luxury. It is an imperative.

The author is the co-founder of Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based citizen's movement,
and a trained urban planner.

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