Invisible is the city

This absence of an urban discourse is at odds with its importance. India’s prospects for inclusive growth will depend crucially upon the capacity of its towns and cities to absorb migration from rural areas. The higher the formal and informal entry barriers for new migrants to participate in an urban life and economy, the less likely we are to succeed in sustaining inclusive growth. Thinking in spatial terms, those regions that do not have livable towns and cities will find it more difficult it to expand opportunities for their populations. There are all kinds of explanations given for the differences between regions that are doing well and those that are stagnant. But one striking difference is the availability of livable cities. Cities drive both growth and an expansion of opportunities for inclusion. It is truly odd that we think of inclusive growth as a rural versus urban issue rather than understanding that the road to inclusion at some point passes through the urban.

It is convenient for us to insist on our unfettered right to development. But the blunt truth is that sustainability is an important issue. Rather than simply worry about the costs of dealing with sustainability issues, we can also look at the opportunities. India is at the threshold of rapid urbanisation. A little regulatory smartness up front on a range of things, like building codes, transport systems, assessments of the ecological footprint of cities, can entail huge savings down the line. Part of the reason we are intimidated by this issue is that much of the attention of the little urban discourse there is focuses on the cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, rather than on the real areas of growth and targets of opportunity: tier two towns and cities. As with growth and inclusion the question of sustainability cannot by pass the cities.

Cities historically are, for good or for ill, the sites of new forms of sociability and new kinds of politics. As so much research has shown, the patters of violence in a society are profoundly shaped by forms of urbanisation in so many different ways. Crime rates are a function of many things. But they are crucially influenced by the spatial architecture of the city. Cities that are conducive to more people being out on the streets, where populations are not starkly separated in spatial terms by class, where use of space mixes different kinds of activities like residential and commercial are, other things being equal likely to have less crime than cities segregated by gated communities and stark segregations of populations by class. Adam Smith had noticed a profound truth as early as the eighteenth century, when he was trying to explain the differences in crime rates between London and Paris: the poor do not commit crimes because they are poor. They are driven to commit crimes only if the city excludes them spatially and socially, if they find no space in the city. Kolkata was a striking example of a city with low crime and an astonishing degree of urbanity in the best sense of the term, despite its great poverty. Cities whose regulatory regimes spatially segregate the classes starkly are setting themselves up for trouble.

Urbanisation is profoundly going to shape our politics. Again we know historically that forms of communal violence are shaped, to a certain degree, by the characteristics of cities. If the delimitation of constituencies is notified our politics is going to be transformed. Though precisely how remains to be determined. And finally, there has always been a deep connection between aesthetics and politics. How citizens feel is in many ways a function of the way the aesthetics of their built environment. In his own way Lutyens understood that truth.

The list could go on. But the simple proposition is that there is no significant policy challenge that can be met without confronting the challenge of urbanisation: growth, sustainability, governance, patters of violence, the relations between classes, and even the possibilities of aesthetic and social expression. Yet the shape of our cities does not fire up our imaginations. This is so for a variety of reasons: collective action around cities seems difficult; cities marked by social inequality find it hard to hold onto the idea of cities as a shared space; the governance architecture of most cities is not conducive to the city acquiring an identity as a city; the influential middle class is seceding from the idea of the “public” with great rapidity. But there has also been a spectacular failure of our intellectual, moral, social and artistic imagination. In this field, as in so many others, we are paying the price of a decrepit academic system, which simply has no capacity for a rigorous, yet imaginative engagement with these issues. Our citizens often creatively compensate for the follies of the state. But it is an uphill task. No wonder what passes for urban discourse in India is a series of land scams, ill thought projects, and idiotic attempts like Raj Thackeray’s to give cities an identity in a perverse kind of way.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research

pratapbmehta@yahoo.co.in