Instead of creating brand new cities, India needs to spend more money and effort on its existing cities
Narendra Modi, India’s new prime minister, has made several innovative moves that give hope that the country will be on a new path. Amongst these was his call to the citizens of Varanasi, when they elected him to Parliament, to clean up the city. House proud home-makers take pride in the cleanliness of their homes. Similarly citizens take pride in the cleanliness of their cities. Along with the size of its airport, the height of its skyscrapers and the spread of its metro, cleanliness is an important criterion of a world-class city. Clean cities attract more visitors. They are more pleasant for their habitants. India has a huge urban renewal agenda. The government’s principal thrust to meet this challenge so far, embodied in the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, has been to allocate money for urban infrastructure projects.
The funds available to the government are limited compared with experts’ estimates of how much will be required for India’s urban renewal. Moreover, the money-project orientation of this approach has created a system of rent-seeking. The corruption in the system and the misdirection of funds towards showpiece projects rather than the citizens’ primary needs (the Commonwealth Games’ projects in Delhi were an egregious example), has been breeding anger in citizens. The Aam Aadmi Party tapped into it to topple the Delhi government. Modi swelled it into a national wave for change.
In contrast to the disempowering, top-down approach, a bottom-up movement to make cities clean, as Modi proposed in Varanasi, will engage citizens and empower them. Keeping a city clean is a collective responsibility of its citizens. When they are engaged in movements to make their cities clean, citizens become active participants in the shaping of their own futures. Besides, cleanliness does not require much money.
India needs to renew its approach to urban renewal. Three fundamental changes are required in the architecture of its approach. Firstly, an approach that focuses on metros and large towns—the so-called engines of growth, or worse still, that tries to solve India’s urban problem by concentrating on the building of dozens of new world-class cities, is plain wrong.
Urban growth is happening in thousands of towns across the country along with the growth of India’s economy and population. Building more world-class infrastructure in the metros will not provide any relief to the hundreds of millions in the smaller towns. Nor can they wait for the new green field cities (which infrastructure companies and contractors salivate over) to provide them any relief. Varanasi’s citizens must live where Varanasi is: its location, its history, its cultural heritage, its craft traditions, is why they are there. A new Le Corbusier city (a la Chandigarh) can never recreate this. Cities have to be renewed where they are. Therefore any government-supported process for national urban renewal must focus on old towns and small towns, not just new towns and large towns.
The starting point for the renewal of any town should be a plan for its improvement prepared with the participation of its citizens. This must be the second architectural principle for better urbanization. Planning for Indian cities, if any, has been woeful. Plans have been made by engineers and architects. Such plans do not sufficiently take into account the softer, social and community aspects of a city which make concrete spaces into great places for human beings to live in.
A top down and elitist view of the physical infrastructure of a city often misses the essential infrastructure the poorer citizens on the ground need most of all: sanitation, clean water and housing to live close to where they can work rather than in some rehabilitation colonies on the outskirts to make way for the infrastructure the richer citizens want. The 12th Five-Year Plan has urged the government to insist that plans with citizens’ participation must be a threshold requirement for any town to receive government financial assistance. The spirit of Modi’s appeal to Varanasi’s citizens to take charge of their city gives hope the new government will implement this recommendation.
The third architectural foundation for an effective urban renewal programme must be rapid and widespread building of the capabilities of urban bodies in large towns and small towns too. The pathetic condition of infrastructure and public services in almost all towns in the country is glaring evidence of the widespread deficit in their capabilities to plan and manage. Giving more money to towns without first building requisite capabilities will result in more waste. Therefore a just-in-time and task-aligned process of learning, using technology, and leveraging existing institutions, is required most urgently as the backbone of a new urban renewal mission for India.
A core capability that stakeholders in a city require is the capability to work with each other to shape the city they all want. Returning to Varanasi and Modi: Cleaning up a city together, and holding each other accountable for keeping it clean, is an excellent way to learn to collaborate in the service of a cause that all care about. It has the spirit of India’s freedom movement. It can make better cities, and better citizens too.