Urban planning and the professional protocols of managing the built environment are generally considered the exclusive domain of experts, in which the public, its putative owner, has no significant role. However, many critics believe that their disengagement has resulted in ‘urban illiteracy’ which, in no small measure, has contributed to many of the urban problems that defy the earnest ministration of professionals. In this light, the books being reviewed are of interest because they offer three different lenses to enable both professionals and the public to view the problems of Indian cities and engage in productive dialogue.
The first, Tarmac to Towers: The India Infrastructure Story by Pratap Padode, focuses almost exclusively on economic issues. It highlights the significance of the causal relationship between the country’s political economy and strategies to modernize cities. Since the 1990s, when the country’s economic policies were radically transformed, this perspective has captured the imagination of policymakers, civic authorities and urban planners who have leveraged massive capex and state-of-the-art technology to construct modern infrastructure to make cities ‘world class’.
The second, Charles Correa: Citizen Charles by Mustansir Dalvi, is an elegant biography of a well-known and critically well-regarded architect and urban planner. The book focuses on the social, cultural and environmental issues that define the nature of Indian urbanism and Dalvi cogently explains how Correa’s understanding of its significance was the leitmotif that characterized his works, both as an architect and urban planner. Before the economic reforms turned their gaze, professionals in India had used this perspective to understand and deal with urban problems. Correa’s works demonstrate what was lost in the transition because he translated its imperatives in an exemplary manner to create human-centric and context-specific habitats that imbued both his architecture and urban planning initiatives with a rooted identity and gravitas that is celebrated world-wide.
The third, Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition by Gautam Bhan, Michael Keith, Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse, looks much deeper to uncover a radically different view of the nature of contemporary urban problems and how to engage with them. They highlight the interconnectedness of local urban problems with global political, economic, cultural and environmental processes to convincingly argue that local urban planners are now confronting a new disciplinary paradigm that is upending existing canonical knowledge that underpinned the urban planning strategies discussed in the first two books. What they suggest to address these challenges will require new protocols of professional engagement with cities that will push the discipline in directions yet to be charted.
Each book offers fresh insights that would be useful to both professionals and the public to gain a more authentic understanding of the nature of Indian urbanism and how to deal with its problems. It should also provide sufficient grist to conduct transactional discussions between them and thus, bridge the chasm of urban illiteracy that is currently an impediment to democratically resolving the problems of cities.
Tarmac to Towers: The India Infrastructure Story describes how neo-liberal economic policies are mediating the modernization of Indian cities. Whether it is to alleviate the problems of slums or create ‘world-class’ cities, to provide essential services like water supply and electricity for all, or to construct sophisticated infrastructure like Metros and air terminals, all strategies are now based on the imperatives of neo-liberal economic policies that have become a one-size-fits-all solution to modernize Indian cities. These policies are unselfconsciously driven by what Jane Jacob, the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities called ‘the wistful myth that spending more money could wipe out the problems of cities’. It relies on humongous capex to create spectacular infrastructure, more to fulfil the objectives of political aggrandizement and to glorify aggressive nationalism, than to thoughtfully, prudently and pragmatically meet the contingent needs of cities.
Padode is not an urban scholar or professional, but a financial journalist, co-founder of the equity magazine Dalal Street Journal and currently heads the FIRST Construction Council that focuses on matters related to ‘infrastructure, construction, real estate, sustainable cities, economy and finance’. Not surprisingly, his narrative becomes an uncritical paean to the benefits of infrastructure development not only to modernize cities but also to boost the country’s GDP. It typically elides describing the serious downside of these strategies which have been methodically documented by knowledgeable critics, perhaps because the book was primarily intended to be a public relations exercise for the government to promote its vision for Viksit Bharat by 2047 and as an analytic exercise.
But for better or worse, these strategies are decisively transforming the country’s urbanscape. The process, in fact, was initiated by the UPA government in 2005 with the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM). The present NDA government has vastly expanded its scope with the launching of other more ambitious urban renewal missions, each with catchy acronyms like SMART City, PRASAD, HRIDAY and AMRUT. They are all backed by enormous budgets that are largely used to construct infrastructure projects, often with the covert intent to fulfill the NDA government’s political ambitions. Moreover, to demonstrate their administrative decisiveness and produce quick results, these projects often cynically steamroll over democratic protocols of good civic governance, such as nurturing the objectives of the Master Plan of cities and respecting environmental and heritage protection laws. In fact, Padode disingenuously states that these protection laws and third-party oversight of infrastructure projects are major ‘hurdles’ facing the modernization of cities.
Progressive modernization and construction of new urban infrastructure are, of course, important and even essential components in the planning and developing of any city, but in these Missions, the need for infrastructure is defined more by the imperatives of greater capex and more sophisticated technologies than by understanding the ground realities of the social, cultural and environmental ecology of cities. It is certainly transforming the urbanscape but simultaneously flattening the country’s diverse urban character. What the book does not examine are the grievous consequences of uncritically relying on the potent mix of technology, large budgets and patently self-serving political agendas to modernize Indian cities.
In this context, Charles Correa: Citizen Charles by Mustansir Dalvi is like a breath of fresh air. It is a comprehensive but succinct monograph that introduces a towering figure of post-Independence architecture and urban planning in India to a wider audience. His humanistic and context-specific ideas of architecture and urban planning provide a credible model to question the infrastructure-led strategies of urban development which Padode celebrates. As a professional practitioner Correa also engaged with the ‘wicked’ problems of Indian cities, but the range of his solutions varied according to the nature of the problems he dealt with, varying from his sensitive approach to design a simple house for the urban poor, to his bold and pragmatic proposals to address the complex problems of cities. But he is better known as an architect because he designed many iconic buildings that are admired both nationally and internationally. A retrospective exhibition organized in 2013 by the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, for instance, called him India’s greatest architect.
But it is unfortunate that in public imagination, his influence as an urban planner has not received the same attention or kudos as his architecture, because he was an equally protean thinker in that discipline. He was one of the key authors of the proposal for creating Navi Mumbai and as the Chairman of the first National Urbanization Commission of India, the Report the Commission prepared presciently anticipated many of the urban development policies that the government later adopted, albeit in part and spurred by other economic and political motives. Dalvi’s well-researched monograph is well worth reading because it provides an accessible record of Correa’s prolific professional career and, inter alia, puts in perspective the narrative of post-Independence Indian architecture and urbanism. His contributions are particularly important today because they throw light on the significance of culture of human-centric architecture and urban planning that is sadly missing in the current infrastructure-led urban development strategies that Padode describes.
Dalvi points out that he elaborated upon this theme in his book, The New Landscape which was published in 1985. He had stressed the need to pursue holistic urban development policies instead of the piecemeal and reactive measures to deal with the problems of cities. Instead of relying on imported solutions, he explained that a traditionally rooted and resource-constrained nation should sensitively and authentically define its own needs for a better and modern habitat for all and thus fulfil the true meaning of the redemptive promises of political independence. In retrospect, his visionary ideas to develop contemporary ‘Indian’ architecture and urbanism met with only partial success because they were pitted, on the one hand, against the stronger aspirations of professionals and the elite to adopt the principles of universal modernism, and on the other, resistance from a variety of murky vested interests who preferred business-as-usual. What resulted can only be described as a modern form of colonially rooted ideology of elitist architecture and urban development.
Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition is therefore an important book because it digs deep to expose these and other fault lines to construct an alternative way to engage with urban problems, not only in India but worldwide. It is the outcome of a self-conscious collective exercise undertaken by four well-regarded scholars, with very different biographical trajectories, who had been independently teaching and researching the problems of cities in China, India, South Africa and the United Kingdom at different academic institutions, but got the opportunity to work together on a well-funded, innovative, multi-country research project. A collateral outcome of their collaboration was that it enabled them to examine the deep structure of the discipline of urban planning, which they cogently present in this very thought-provoking book.
However, the rarified nature of the origins of their ideas elides some obvious professional expectations, which they blunt at the outset by stating that they do not offer ‘empirics, new urban theory, or…a survey of existing and emerging literature…(but) something else: a way to finding a sensibility rather than an argument, an approach rather than a methodology, a disposition rather than an ideological position…to (enable) a lay reader, a young professional, a more experienced practitioner and a curious scholar’ to engage with the ‘wicked’ problems of contemporary cities. In this manner, they expect diverse interlocutors to become agents to re-define the objectives of their discipline.
They argue that this shift in perspective becomes necessary because the problems of cities are no longer the purview of conventionally trained urban scholars or specialists planning practitioners alone, but rather a strategic site where numerous professional domains and disciplines—from ‘epidemiologists to coders, engineers to ecologists, agronomists to designers—are excavating their own patch with an eye on what is going on down the lane. They are increasingly doing so from and in a wider set of cities, across the global north and south, treating all locations as both critical and foundational to generating knowledge.’ Each situation requires interlocutors from different disciplines to engage with local problems with a common urban disposition, so that together they could push the envelope and build a different professional imagination to engage with the problems of cities.
It is as much for understanding the problems of cities as for resolving them. It is for those who are looking to cross disciplinary aisles: ‘an engineer who realises that a well-built bridge does not automatically translate into mobility and wonders then what all building infrastructure must entail; a sociologist who wants to grasp the materiality, design and legibility of housing as much as understanding it as social infrastructure; a hydrologist who wants to think about how to govern and distribute water whose natural geographies they intimately understand. (It offers)…scholars, students and researchers a way to scratch this itch, to move slowly and incrementally to keep expanding disciplinary boundaries of knowledge even as they continue to do the necessary and vital work of focused and deep enquiry within their own field.’
The book offers many valuable insights which could be easily dismissed by professionals overwhelmed by the day-to-day problems they have to deal with. But suffice to say that like all visionary propositions, it is too early to critically evaluate its relevance because, over a hundred years ago, Patrick Geddes too offered visionary advice to engage with the problems of Indian cities and found little traction in the professional mainstream then, but today they are generating great interest.
The collective message that can be drawn from the three books is that challenges of urban planning in India today are now a whole new ballgame, but the objectives, strategies and protocols of dealing with it are mired in the legacies of disciplinary ideologies of the past. One of those legacies is ‘urban illiteracy’ I referred to earlier. While each book offers a different narrative of how these challenges should be addressed, it has been presented in a manner that both professionals and the interested interlocutor can understand. Such an understanding can facilitate a dialogue in the public domain, which is an important prerequisite to deal with the complexities of Indian cities.
AG Krishna Menon is an Architect and Urban Planner.