Don`t kill cities with kindness

Subir Roy: Don`t kill cities with kindness
Business Standard

Rapid urbanisation is a feature of rapid economic development. If you like and want the latter, you better learn to live with and make a success of the former.

Otherwise there will be urban disasters, near or total, which is the way most of urban India can be described. What is even more serious, inability to cope with success can lead to decline, as happened to Mumbai and threatens to happen to Bangalore.

There is a natural way in which cities rise and fall. Witness the way perception about Mumbai changed over the years and companies have actively looked for other destinations for expansion.

Bangalore has been a beneficiary but not for long. A whole range of cities have emerged as its challengers.

But history’s great cities have managed to rejuvenate themselves periodically, thus acquiring a unique identity and being able to remain in a continuous state of ferment in which intellectual, cultural and material wealth keeps getting created.

Should Mumbai remain a continuous urban sprawl like, say, New Mexico or even Seoul, or aspire to become a Paris or Shanghai?

The important point here is that Mumbai does not have the luxury which Shanghai’s planners have enjoyed in being able to demolish and rebuild on a grand scale because of the inability of those affected to effectively protest.

Witness the fate of demolitions that Mumbai started and then halted. But Shanghai’s is not the only way. Classical western cities have managed to grow in a reasonably orderly way through the last century even as the democratic content in their governance has grown.

There is also an issue of equity in this. China’s phenomenal growth, of which Shanghai is the symbol, has produced substantial inequality which has a downside and is currently being sought to be rectified.

Huge resources can be expended on Mumbai and Bangalore with the solid support of almost everyone living in those cities. There will be sound economic reason for doing so as both the cities will pay it back through new high-paying jobs created as a result of the strengthened urban infrastructure.

But since resources are finite, should tens of thousands of crores be spent on these cities by the central and the respective state governments, when both Maharashtra and Karnataka have large numbers of extremely poor and drought-prone districts which have very low human development scores.

They can do with investment in basic infrastructure like watershed development which will also create jobs and make a substantial dent in poverty in those areas.

There is a way out of this dilemma. Our great cities can grow and prosper in a truly self-sustaining way with vastly less reliance on public money if some of the following are done.

The first rule is: to help a city survive, don’t help it. The more you spend on widening their roads and building flyovers, the more they will attract people and lay the foundations for more insurmountable problems tomorrow.

Rule two is: help satellites come up around them. That is, do things which will disperse population, reduce its concentration, not accentuate it.

Rule three is: use public money only to build a big, say, six-lane highway, maybe of up to 30 kilometres, or a train line (it can be for double the distance) to connect those satellites to the main city and spend absolutely no public money to develop the infrastructure in those satellites.

Rule four: make sure that each satellite is about 5,000 acres (a bit like south Delhi, new Gurgaon, or Rajarhat near Kolkata) so that its entire infrastructure can be financed by the property developers, who will build the satellites and make good money for themselves by selling the space they develop.

The size holds the key as, if a development is smaller then the infrastructure cost cannot be amortised over sufficient numbers. If there isn’t that much of land within the 30-km radius of a city, then build a railway line.

In the case of Bangalore, don’t build a metro rail within the city but lay a second line to Mysore so that the two can become twin cities accessible to each other within an hour through proper track quality and signalling. In sum, once you’ve got the idea, innovate.

Rule five: listen to the sage advice of the likes of Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, give cities a proper governance structure (like a mayor and his council holding office for, say, five years) where they do not have one and leave the city to govern itself, levy proper property taxes, which will be enough for the cities to finance all the infrastructure they need.

Remember, once satellites of appropriate size come up, not more than a quarter of the population in them will need to come out to either earn a living or for entertainment.

This will reduce the pressure on the old city and lower its infrastructure renewal bill and simultaneously make it more liveable.

Even if the cost of laying the expressway or the road is high, the money is well spent because it will create sustainable growth. The present flyover-metro rail option will not.

Rule six: Don’t take infrastructure decisions by stealth, allow public participation. That makes for better decisions. A citizens’ meeting in Bangalore was told the other day that details about its coming metro rail could not be publicised because the central government approval was not yet in.

Nevertheless, tenders pertaining to the project were being issued!

The meeting also came to know that the comprehensive development plan (CDP) for the city would incorporate the first phase of the metro rail.

If the meeting was not held, this information would not have been available. Lastly, a speaker bemoaned the fact that the CDP seemed to be a closely guarded secret as far as the citizenry was concerned but every builder worth the name seemed to have a copy of it! This is difficult to beat.