City Lights

Cities have been the cradles of modernity, the incubators of human progress and growth, the anvil of human prosperity and creativity. On the flip side, they have been sites of poverty and disease, crime and violence. UNFPA8217;s State of World Population 2007 has just reminded us that the future is urban: by 2030, half the world8217;s population will be urban. India may be slightly behind the world8217;s urban curve but within the next quarter of a century, an estimated 40 per cent of this country8217;s population would also be living in its cities and towns.

Exercises in number crunching of this kind would be rendered futile if they do not inform the way we think, the way we live and, most important, the way we strategise. So what do these figures say about the future of the world, and more specifically of India? Will it be Maximum City or Future Shock? Can slums 8212; half of India8217;s urbanites are slum-dwellers 8212; be transformed in ways that transform its residents? How can urban chaos be managed before it turns explosive? Can a humongous sprawl like Mumbai, well on its way to become the second most populated on the planet with 25 million inhabitants, be better managed? How does one ensure improved infrastructure and basic services to large urban agglomerations? One of the clearer trends emerging from the report is that the great transformations of the future will take place not in the megapolises of the past, but in the smaller cities and towns. Non-metro India has already forged ahead. Chandigarh has the highest per capita income among Indian cities; 77 per cent of Panaji8217;s households have monthly incomes over Rs 10,000; in Vadodara there are 40 cars to 1000 people.

Urban planning in India then must necessarily be broader and more long-term in scope to embrace not just big cities but small towns and think both in terms of optimising land use and enabling people. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, when it was launched in 2005, was promoted as an idea whose time had come. But the administrative traction that the idea required was clearly missing. And nothing symbolises this more than Mumbai. The city the prime minister had once promised to turn into a Shanghai has to sometimes do battle with the darkness of the night because it is starved of power.