Fix our broken cities, don’t create new ones!

(The first version was published in Hindustan Times, 13/09/2022, Page 14)

In the last 75 years, our relationship status with our cities has been complicated. We continue to live and prosper in cities. Yet, policymakers have resisted the idea of cities. The initial policy approach was to strengthen villages or develop satellite towns so that too many people do not come to cities. However, resisting the idea of cities does not necessarily succeed in resisting urbanization; cities continue to grow and thrive, and a vast population continues to choose to come and live in cities.

Since we cannot resist urbanization anymore, there is growing chatter on how we need new, greenfield cities because it is impossible to fix the existing ones. This approach is an extension of the old system of resisting the idea of cities.

Cities are labor markets, to begin with. The idea of cities dwells on how people choose to come to them for a better life and make them hubs of technological innovations, social progress, and diverse lifestyles. This agglomeration of economies creates a force that sustains urban activities that are impossible to have in a small town or a village. Starting from Mohammad bin Tughlaq, history teaches us that no government or corporation can create this force, no matter how powerful they are. They can surely make large townships where the land and real estate markets are under tight control, but cities are something else. Cities are not made by building infrastructure alone.

Since Independence, the new city-making projects have been the state capitals — Chandigarh, Gandhinagar, Naya Raipur, and a few company townships. While people flock to cities such as Bengaluru, Pune, or Surat, very few will make the first choice to be in those grand state capitals. Barring a few examples, making cities from scratch is never achieved in the past; there is no guarantee that it will work in the future. Yet, we keep falling into this trap of repeatedly making new, greenfield cities or creating utopian fantasies.

Building a new city is like inventing a new growth center with a diversified base. No country can do that without the consequences of grand, failed experiments like some of China’s greenfield ghost towns. It is difficult to predict the future or to manipulate the choices that hundreds of thousands of people make about where to live. People trade off living in thriving cities with insufficient housing or inadequate infrastructure rather than in a village or a small town. Policymakers must understand and respect their choices.

Our existing cities have sheltered us and helped us live better lives than other alternatives. We owe it to our existing cities to fix the broken planning system in them with increased investments in urban infrastructure.

The current urban planning model, built around land acquisition and normative planning, has failed our cities. Our cities are a patchwork of planned and unplanned areas. The city still thrives and lives in the gaps created between the officially planned layouts through bazaars and bastis with a range of informal or formal adjustments with the authorities. The master plans are high on fashionable jargon and low on implementation strategies. However, the failure of urban planning is not the city’s failure. The city thrives, and planning fails — not as an exception but as a rule.

Many planning authorities, including the Delhi Development Authority, intend to move away from the land acquisition planning model to the land pooling or land readjustment models. They cannot continue to imagine and design a city like they did when they had all the land in the city. This would require them to treat landowners or developers as partners in development and not merely as beneficiaries of their grand plans. This would require putting aside an institutional culture in planning authorities where they were the biggest player in the game. Now they are only setting the rules for the planning game, which must be fair.

There are two-fold minimum expectations for existing cities from our broken urban planning system. One is the systematic recycling of land through redevelopment in inner-city areas, and two a steady supply of serviced land parcels in the peripheries. This is a crucial precondition to every other urban concern, like affordable housing, better public transport, or sustainability. Moreover, unless the planning system delivers a complete network of roads with organized land parcels, nothing else can be achieved.

In India, many state governments will need a statutory mechanism for systematic urban redevelopment, like local area plans in Gujarat. This planning mechanism retrieves some part of private land in the public realm instead of more floor space or a higher floor area ratio in the inner-city areas. More land under roads and public spaces could make the high-density area more liveable. Many lessons can be learned from more successful Indian or Southeast Asian cities for implementing some of these mechanisms.

Urbanization in India is not just a challenge but an opportunity. People are already making their choices around this opportunity. The planning system and decision-makers should decide whether to plan and invest around people’s choices of living in existing cities or indulge in the new fantasy of greenfield cities. If they do the latter, history will wonder why they resisted the idea of cities when India was at its urbanization peak.

Rutul Joshi teaches urban planning at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. The views expressed are personal.