This issue of Humanscape takes a broad look at our cities and urban local governance. The subject deserves a whole issue not just because it is an important one, but also because it is not getting the attention and alarm that it deserves.

As we shall see, cities are soon going to account for a high proportion of the world’s population. They already pose stony problems that earn only a kind of wordy neglect, causing the world to lose the treasure to be mined in all cities. Down the length of their history, they have been a hot focus of energy and minds-in-interaction. This has yielded an explosive culture of its own, responsible for virtually all the art, thought and civilisation that the 21^st century enjoys. It is a phenomenon that has something to do with public and private space, and people in productive proximity enjoying a nurturing lifestyle.

“India’s future is in its villages!” is the noisy and familiar cry of politics. It grows in irony and sham, given how pitiful the planning and actions are that follow the rhetoric. Must cities also lose in the bargain, fatally?

Cities lose, who wins?

Nobody would deny the importance to the nation of our villages and their well-being. But the urban sector, in a troubling de-emphasis in the scales of policy and governance, gets demoted too often and too seriously in priority, study and investment.

At the recently concluded World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the executive director of UN-Habitat, the United Nations center on human settlements, Anna Tibaijuka, said that she considers one of her prime roles to be raising the profile of the world’s cities and their crises. “Cities need help to realise their crucial contributions to sustainable development and there is strong evidence that poverty, deprivation and environmental degradation are not necessary consequences of rapid urban growth,” meaning that negative side-effects are avoidable as cities grow.

The Century of the City

Just beneath the conspicuous plight of India’s cities stretches their vast promise and potential.

Architect Charles Correa says of his birthplace, “Bombay is a great city but a terrible place to live in.” This is true, more or less, of all our cities.

It is well accepted that in the 21^st century, “the fate of cities will more than ever determine the well-being of nations.” (OECD-Australia Conference, Melbourne, Cities and the New Global Economy, 1995). David Harvey, the American urban theorist, has said in a lecture to the Megacities Foundation in the Netherlands, “The qualities of urban living in the 21^st century will define the qualities of civilisation.”

So what happens to India will depend on what gets done about the needs and problems of Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, and to a slightly lesser extent, on what happens in Pune, Chandigarh, Lucknow and Patna. How they fare will depend on how they make the grade against the world’s most effective and successful cities. Whatever their output, manufacture or services or knowledge, it must be globally competitive. That is the new measure. It is the relative efficiency of cities that decides how much a country makes of itself and of the opportunities offered by globalisation, the force making every place a potential market or resource and every country a possible competitor.

Cities can no longer be focuses of manufacture or suppliers of services. That’s 19^th and 20^th century. Today, the best cities are knowledge centres. This means that success or failure turns on the quality of mind that a city attracts. But good minds, given the world competition for them, can choose where they will take their enlightenment and genius. If that is so, doom lurks on the foreseeable horizon for India.

The best minds leave!

As things stand, our lawless cities, burdened with filth, encroachment and illegal building, based on law book fiction because so little is enforced, lacking infrastructure and leisure space, vision-less and with less and less character, where good schools and clubs, or space for them, are lacking … these are not places that attract high quality people, and we need them, our own and from elsewhere.

The test is what happens in the case of India’s fine young people, products of our IIMs and IITs. There is an exodus of them to the USA and Canada. This does not happen only because of the job opportunities there. Just as often, it is a result of the poor quality of life that our cities offer them. These young people are, in the main, city folk after all.

Bankrupt governments

The trouble is that today’s governments, whether central, state or local, are caught in various shades of bankruptcy, a consequence of (put nicely) financial imprudence, or (put more brutally and realistically) mismanagement and corruption. This makes for Correa’s “terrible places to live in.”

Civil society, citizen organisations, the voluntary sector and private business, have responded nobly to the plight of our cities and the inadequate response of their mandated institutions. Not only are such groups, for instance, cleaning up streets and pavements, or clearing them of encroachment, they are also assuming the role and duties of administrative bodies. Mobilising citizens and evolving partnerships with local administrations is one of the major challenges that our cities face. It is beginning to be met. (See below).

Mumbai – world’s second most populous city

A worrying estimate unveiled in a Johannesburg Summit background paper suggests that by 2015 Mumbai will be the world’s second most populous city, with 22 million souls, and Kolkata tenth on the list, with 17 million, if current growth rates are not drastically curbed. Dhaka and Karachi come 5^th and 6^th in a race nobody should win, with around 18 million each.

In the last 40 years, the world’s population has doubled, but in urban areas it has increased five-fold, and this growth is accelerating. In five years, well over half the world’s population will be living in cities, according to the United Nations, and by 2030 nearly five billion people will live in urban areas. A striking feature of this growth is rapid urbanisation in poor countries provided with inadequate infrastructure. As world population goes from six billion to nearly eight billion in the next quarter century, virtually all of that increase will come from the urban areas of poor countries. Like India.

In the next few years at least 23 cities will count more than ten million people and several – including Bombay, Lagos, Dhaka, Sao Paulo and Karachi – will be at Tokyo’s heels for the dubious honour of winning the mega-city stakes.

“Hell holes of despair”

Urbanisation and its massive migrations have been so swift that there is still no proper conceptual apparatus to manage the process. Judging by the present state of cities, the migrants may not love what they find: a deadly mixture of concentrated poverty, social strife, violence, wasteful consumerism and crumbling infrastructure, true “hell-holes of despair,” as the Chicago Herald Tribune sees the future in some cities.

To return to the Indian scene, the sheer politics of numbers aggravates matters through populist urban policies. Hence our dreadful and spreading “hell holes,” our slums, the world’s worst, fostered and protected in all their squalor as vote banks. Beyond ballot box numbers, neither politicians nor administrators are greatly concerned with living conditions in the shantytowns, or basic human needs and rights there.

Beyond resources and capacity

Such settlements apart, there are other problems in our cities: infrastructure, maintenance of civic assets, finance and civil security, to name a few. They seem to have spun out of government’s control. Over and over do we hear these days from governments themselves that they cannot cope alone with this or that challenge, from garbage to traffic and health to crime prevention.

Citizens and citizen groups are being warmly invited to join in with their effort, material, even funds, and this from people who may already be contributing through tax payments. To think just of Mumbai as an example:

• Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centre (SPARC) assists the Maharashtra government in a scheme, supported by the World Bank, to improve city transport. Encroachment on railway property had to be cleared and the displaced communities rehabilitated. Government trusted SPARC’s capabilities and efficiency in the task.

• Citizens’ Forum for Protection of Public Spaces (CitiSpace) formed to deal with the take-over of Mumbai’s streets and pavements by illegal hawking. Favourable court orders were obtained. CitiSpace now also looks at recreation grounds, playgrounds and other public space that is vanishing, as also the repeated “regularisation” of illegal constructions to serve vote-bank politics.

• The Bombay Environment Action Group (BEAG) has done landmark work in helping to fashion and install legislation for Mumbai’s heritage buildings and precincts. BEAG has saved large tracts of Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar, hill resorts near Mumbai, from marauding builders.

• The Oval Cooperage Residents’ Association (Shirin Bharucha), The Nariman Pont Churchgate Citizens’ Association (Swarn Kohli) and the H-West Federation, again all in Mumbai, have preserved the Oval, a Grade I heritage precinct, Marine Drive, the sea-front promenade that symbolises the city, and the Carter Road development that is today the pride of Bandra, a city suburb.

• Residents’ associations led by individuals like Navin Mittal and R Haridas have, each in their own way, defended large city acreages against slumlords and builders, implemented partnership with the municipality e.g. ALM (Advanced Locality Management), the brainchild of Viren Merchant of Ghatkopar, an eastern suburb, and Ratnakar Gaikwad, a senior civic official.

• The Clean Mumbai Foundation and its prime mover Kunti Oza have long provided a forum in which concerned citizens could meet and pool ideas for a cleaner city, better city management and local self help.

• Action for good Governance and Networking for India (AGNI) mobilises citizens and citizen groups to amplify the voice of civil society, dialogue with local administration and elected representatives and work for electoral reform.

The present issue of Humanscape presents a sampling of urban analysis and citizen solutions. Yasmin Tavadia and the Medico Friend Centre deal with health, medical care and the new Maharashtra Clinical Establishments Act. In the same general area, Sandhya Srinivasan reports on citizens’ initiatives for health and the work done by the Forum Against Sex Selection and Sex Pre-selection.

Dr Shankar Vishwanath, of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, looks at the transport problems of a metropolis and directions for their solution. Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based citizens group, works in the short term for a cleaner more beautiful city and, in the longer term, for making democracy a reality there. In the same vein, Julian Tellis covers the Swachha Mumbai Abhiyan, a municipal initiative to start the enormous task of cleaning up Mumbai. A key manager of the project, Additional Municipal Commissioner, Gautam Chatterjee, talks of “Know-Your-Bin” and the principles used for citizen involvement in the project: participation, partnership and ownership. Taking the same principles to education, Farida Lambay talks about the Pratham initiative, which brings together the local self-government, corporate sector and voluntary sector to work for the cause of universalisation of primary education. 

Police are a crucial element in city life. Aruna Chakravorty balances the pluses against the minuses of the Mumbai city police and sees the force as, on the whole, citizen-unfriendly. No one knows the real incidence of crime in the city. But the human beings in the police are badly housed and managed. Police stations need to be reorganised. CitiSpace tells of its work, its successes and the need for citizen solidarity.         

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