It?s a revolution that is catching states unawares, especially India. Still a predominantly rural country, India is slated to add 485 million urban residents in next 35 years. The prospect is mindboggling, and unless it?s already creaking cities can find solutions fast. Urbanist Jeb Brugmann goes into the nitty-gritties of the challenges that lie ahead not just for India but for a planet where the cities, for the first time, are home to a majority of the global population. With results that do not bode well for the planet. Suman Tarafdar tries to understand whether the city he resides in can move from being a Crisis City to a StrategicCity!
What are the implications of a global urban revolution? What are its biggest challenges, potential failures and dangers?
At its most basic level, the Urban Revolution is the reorganisation of human society into a globally-connected system of cities. In 1950, only 29% of the world?s people lived in cities. By 2050, that number will rise to 70%. As city populations grow, individual cities are linking together in every imaginable way. Much of what happens in an individual city originates in the other cities to which it is connected through infrastructure, financing, commerce etc. In other words, we are building an entirely new habitat as a species, abandoning our rural character of 200,000+ years. This new habitat ? I call it the global City ? now dominates the planet. The resource demands, energy production, species and material flows of the City are becoming the new Nature.
The biggest challenge is to make the Urban Revolution a less chaotic process ? by changing the ways we build our cities locally, making urban development more responsive to local culture, needs, and markets and therefore making the city more economically and politically stable and resilient.
The danger is that we try to address the challenge of rapid urban population growth by only giving priority to quantity, leaving no room for tailored, quality responses to unique local conditions. Today, most urban growth is delivered through a mass production of standardised city spaces by a globalised development industry. This approach is serving only a small, middle class segment of urban populations. It is consuming all the resources, marginalising or destroying the city spaces of the poor ? we call them slums ? and it is not ecologically sustainable. It is producing a future of urban social and political crisis.
What would make for a renewal of Indian forms of urbanism, especially for an increasingly urbanising country?
India faces a unique challenge and opportunity. By population, it is the world?s largest rural nation, with only 30% living in cities today. But it is fast becoming the world?s largest urban nation. The UN predicts an increase in India?s urban population by 485 million over the next 35 years. So the pressure to increase the quantity of urban construction is very high. At the same time, India has a very weak sense ? at least low confidence ? of what Indian urbanism looks like. India still sees itself as a nation of villages. Government, business leaders and int- ellectuals still describe India?s quality ? its ?soul? ? as being village life. When it comes to city ? building the country seems to have been mimicking Anglo-American development models ? stacked-up high rises, western shopping malls, corporate districts, American-style highways designed for only automobiles ? is at the root of the financial meltdown in those countries.
India can gain by not mimicking everyone else?s flawed approaches, but by creating uniquely robust, responsive forms of city building that are designed to satisfy India?s unique needs. In other words, it makes a massive investment today in creating a local development industry that specialises in Indian quality. It makes the urban equivalent of home-cooked chapattis and naan, and doesn?t give itself over wholesale to sliced, manufactured white bread.
To approach Indian urban growth through the quality lens, one has to ascertain the many different needs in an Indian city that the country needs to serve, for which different development products and business models need to be established. In other words, it should recognise that India?s diversity also exists in its cities, not just in its villages.
Second, India can start finding solutions to serve the diversity of its needs in the country?s traditions of city building, from times before the young nation became uncritically fixated on European modernism. These traditions have served populations for a long time and are demonstrably robust; they are just abandoned and need to be updated. India?s elites need to shed their preconceptions about ?slums? and understand the potential for user ? built communities as a solution to the problem of 485 million new urban residents. If government can support and invest with low-income populations to build what I call their ?urban villages?, then I think a large part of the problem can be addressed.
Everywhere in the OECD world, cities are abandoning cookie-cutter approaches to city building. They are turning back to their traditional urbanisms to find their solutions. If India has to follow any foreign trend, I propose it is best to follow this one.
Given its challenges, which are the principles of urban revolution India could learn from?
It is folly to wish the phenomenon of slums away and try to substitute them with the poorest quality of development in the poorest locations. Both the problems and genius of slum building need to be understood. From the US to Brazil to South Africa and France, countries have tried to marginalise their poor in institutionalised ghettos. They?ve failed and inadvertently created civil unrest and political upheaval. The cities of Brazil and Indonesia have been learning how to invest in slums, bring them up to standards, and evolve them into middle class communities.
What are the most positive aspects of Dharavi? How crucial are migrants to the health of a city?
Migration is an unavoidable aspect of the urbanisation process. India will see tens of millions of new first generation migrants to its cities over the next decades. These people tend to be the most entrepreneurial, risk-taking people of their villages. They will find their place in the city, whether the powers-that-be support them or not. The ?health? of the city, broadly defined, is quite influenced by a city?s preparedness to receive new migrants and give them pathways into the formal political and economic life of the city. Dharavi is a very problematic place, because it has had to build itself against tremendous neglect and harassments. But its success as a centre of economic vitality in spite of such conditions highlights the genius of the place.
The poor settlers of Dharavi have used unique forms of urban design to create competitive advantages through co-location of activities and reduced logistics and living costs. I have argued that these city-building innovations need to be studied and understood, for two reasons. First, so that any plans to redevelop Dharavi incorporate these innovations into their designs. Second, so that robust Indian practices for the development of new districts for low-income segments can be generated from Dharavi?s lessons.
Which are the best examples of city sy stems that possibly have led to ?strategic cities??
What I call ?strategic cities? are cities that have demonstrated the capacity to steer their development according to very ambitious plans for economic vitality, social equity, or environmental sustainability. The cities I?ve highlighted in this regard ? Curitiba, Chicago, Barcelona, Kitakyushu, Vancouver ? have been mastering forms of city building that are very locally responsive. In other words, they build with quality, customisation, unique solutions for unique problems, rather than with generic ?world class? solutions. To do this they have created local institutions to generate hundreds of innovations in city building design and practice. And then they use finance, policy, and business model innovation to foster a local development industry that specialises in their kind of city building. Strategic cities don?t find themselves turning to uninformed outsiders to deliver development product and solutions for them. They have truly taken city building into their own hands, from both a government and private sector perspective.
Currently, are there examples of crisis cities, where the decline seems irreversible? Do governments and urban planners really learn from follies elsewhere, or is there a greater tendency to emulate from the first world?
Today the uncritical notion of ?world class? is being used to define the city-building agenda. What is this ?world class?? In practice, it appears to be the importation of urban designs, infrastructures, and products from the first world through first world corporations. In practice, ?world class? is just a marketing gimmick.
What does being the same as everyone else achieve? As business strategist Michael Porter has long pointed out, in a globalised world where the playing field is being levelled, the unique advantages of unique locations matters more and more. So my argument is that Mumbai needs to figure out how to be ?Mumbai class? and stop wanting to be something generic or something it isn?t. This is the key to success of the Strategic City. Barcelona is Barcelona class, Chicago is Chicago class, Vancouver is Vancouver class. The upshot of their uniqueness is quite interesting. First, they compete in the world economy on their own terms. Second, because they build, govern, manage and live in their cities on local terms, these are very governable and resilient places. They can align the different forces within them to achieve their goals in the world.
What I have called the ?City of Crisis,? is a place where such alignment is impossible. Different interests have entrenched very different approaches to city building that work at cross purposes. Once sees this writ large in Mumbai in the low-intensity war between the informal, criminal, and formal cities.
A classic example of the City of Crisis end game is Detroit. One third of the land in Detroit has been abandoned and is now owned by the public sector. People have fled Detroit?s low-intensity war for decades and the fiscal crisis arising from it. You can buy a lot in the central city for $500-$1000. The land is reverting to prairie. No one knows how to re-establish a city in such a place. Another example is Beirut, where different districts are controlled by different sectarian militias. These crisis cities all arise from very local histories, but their general characteristic is that the competition between interests for city spaces has become institutionalised and violent, whereas in the Strategic City innovative ways of aligning interests through local forms of urban design and development have become institutionalised.