Urbanisation in the Land of Gandhi
M ost
discussions, studies and reports on urbanisation begin with statistics
and projections of the percentage of population that will be living in
cities in the next one, two or three decades to come. Many of these
focus on the trends that we see unfolding before us and lament the rapid
degradation of the quality of urban life that seems to out-pace our
collective planning and implementation capabilities. The emerging
picture being painted by these discussions is certainly not pretty, and
worse than that, it is as if the painter is helpless about what is
emerging from his/her brush.
In this context, I am reminded of a recent discussion on the Sustainable
Development Goals for India, where one had the opportunity to listen to
two eminent speakers. Both are senior policy makers and both are equally
concerned about the future of India. One, accepting the inevitability of
the shift to a more urbanised future, argued for the need to capture and
leverage the economic growth potential on offer in the form of jobs for
the young and efficiency of quality services for citizens. The other,
asked for happier, healthier, more productive and prosperous future of
human settlements. One would imagine that the two speakers were talking
about the same future. But clearly they were articulating two very
different paradigms of sustainable development. The first was the
helpless painter above, who built a case, with great bravado, that a new
painting technique and technology would iron out all emerging faults in
the urban landscape. The other, equally helpless in the face of pace of
change, questioned the design and structure of the painting itself. He
asked whether this should be the character of our future in the land of
Gandhi.
Gandhi said, ‘India lives in her villages’. India however will, in three
decades or so, live equally in its cities as in its villages. We may not
be in a position to 'go back' to village India of the old. However, let
us reflect on the relevance of this phrase ‘India lives in its villages'
in the context of a growing urbanised future. Does it mean isolated,
disaster prone, unhealthy, unequal and poor human settlements? Does it
mean human economies primarily and only focused on and around
agricultural and allied sectors? Or does it mean populations with poor
and limited access to modern, efficient, reliable and environmentally
sound water supply, sanitation, waste management and energy amenities,
or to knowledge and health facilities? Certainly not. What it does
imply, is that 'people and communities' are at the centre of the human
settlement planning and design process. It indicates that thousands of
economically and socially inter-dependent human communities connected to
each other physically or virtually providing a safe and resilient
nurturing space for human creativity and potential. To me, it indicates
smaller scale, more decentralised, more self-governed, resilient and
humane settlements.
Clearly, we are now talking about a different painting altogether, one
that requires a different paper and palette and a different set of
drawing skills. This requires a systems approach to urbanisation and not
treating it in the silos of urban development for cities, rural
development for villages and town and country planning for everything in
between. While some of our planners and policy makers have seen this
strict operational division as the bane of development planning, they
are still unable to build the meta-picture that can addresses
watersheds, forests, farmlands, wet-lands, residential settlements,
industry, road infrastructure, basic needs, educational, health and
social infrastructure and many other physical structures as parts of a
comprehensive whole in multi-layered and nested systems.
The solution probably lies outside the ‘city – village’ frame. It lies
in the re-design of our economic models that would attach importance to
labour over capital, in the value we ascribe to the health and
resilience of natural eco-systems, in the faith in and investments on
human capacities and community cooperation models for self-governance
and in the harnessing of technology and markets for real value creation
for the people and the planet. The challenge before us is to translate
these principles into policy strategies that provide the guidelines for
city-village-countryside planning, design and action.
Unless we are able to articulate a meta vision that is a whole and not
in parts and unless we build into our framework a mechanism that
continually tracks and adjusts the direction of micro-development plans
and actions in sync with the macro-vision; the pictures that emerge from
our brushes will be more and more ugly and undesirable. Although with
the limited focus on pace and scale, we might just be painting faster
and larger pictures.
■
Zeenat Niazi
zniazi@devalt.org
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