HOPE IN A CRIPPLED METROPOLIS Christopher Benninger* * * * * * Pune ranks as one of the largest and fastest growing metropolis in India, with proportionately the least considered vision, articulate planning and empirical programming! Despite these lacunae, the municipal entities within this vast metropolis seem to flourish economically, and develop along certain vectors of social development, like education and health care for upper middle class households. This “visible” development belies a crippled and broken urban system incapable of planning for a better future. “Ability-to-Pay” creates an immense barrier blocking the vast majority of city dwellers from adequate housing, hygiene, health care, education, skill development, transport and creative pursuits. When I worked with the UNO and the World Bank we were sure that economic infrastructure was needed as a precursor to spur economic growth, which in turn would fire job creation; and, finally create social infrastructure out of the new tax revenue mobilized. To activate this strategy it is necessary to have in place a basic statutory structure for enabling financial, judicial and administrative institutions to be put into place, through which a policy framework can be built employing these facilitative tools. Within such a framework, policies of enabling incentives and facilitative investments would be conceived. Regulations would then be formulated for reasons of health, safety and sustainability. These three mechanisms of incentives, investments and regulations would drive desired patterns of urban growth and create an array of infrastructure and amenities that characterize a civilized society. It is currently fashionable to speak of smart cities; to imagine hundreds of new towns; to mouth Western clichés like transport-oriented development, and to propose high density, walkable urban clusters, and vast urban corridors, without a thought for the institutional precursors required to take such concepts out of the realm of fantasy, and bring them onto the policy, planning and programmatic table. Posturing a policy, without the concomitant lattice of institutions will end in disappointment. From a crippled and “challenged city” Pune will become a declining and deteriorating city. Pune has thrived like a Wild West boomtown on all of the legal loopholes, administrative exceptions, political connections, and corruption and, yes, even crime, which can make for Hollywood epic sagas. Like the “Island City” of Mumbai, Pune will reach a saturation level of excess real estate values; unrealistically inflated prices and fleeing enterprise, and then enter into a steady decline. Our youth and our enterprises will flee to greener pastures! This syndrome was compounded in “Calcutta” in the 1960’s and 1970’s by poor governance and the radicalization of youth and labor. We must learn from Kolkata and Mumbai. With no functioning Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority, and no local area participatory planning mechanisms, the metropolis has spread out in a perverted, inefficient and inequitable manner. The land market has determined the locations of new, isolated and gated enclaves primarily addressing the aspirations of the rising upper-middle class. This has resulted in cancerous urban sprawl with spread out nodes of high-rise development, unconnected by mass transport, arterial roads or urban infrastructure, growing out in all corners and peripheral areas of the city. Pune now suffers from mid-rift bulge, with middle class suburbs flung out in all directions. Inadequate transport corridors, lack of open spaces, and pubic domains exasperate this unsustainable growth pattern. There is no system of well-located health care and educational facilities, not to mention the complete lack of public libraries, museums and places for art galleries. Access to opportunity is thus a complicated issue, when the opportunities themselves do not exist! This kind of unplanned, disjointed and incremental growth has skewed development into channels that function only where privately owned and operated development is sponsored by a small class of upper middle class and wealthy citizens. We need these professionals, entrepreneurs and management leaders. The issue is not that “goodies” are going to the rich! The issue is balanced development that addresses the needs of everyone! Transport is dependent on private vehicles; housing is accessible only to the upper third of families in the high-end bracket; acceptable levels of education are within reach of only the financially better-off families; and world-class health care (and the medical insurance to pay for it) are restricted to a modicum of the elite population. The involvement of our youth in music, art, literature, poetry and sadly even sports, is a class-filtered system. We have created a dual society with two societies operating within one urban and social space, and living symbiotically off of one another. An underclass of “servant households” is servicing and supporting an aspiring, upwardly mobile middle class whose “ability to pay” is expanding at about five times the rate of the forgotten underclass! If Pune is to have the kind of inclusive, efficient and transport oriented development required for equitable, just and sustainable development, it must have the underpinning institutional framework, which only considered reforms and statutory measures can create. Here is where the key strategy area lies! Talk of a hundred smart cities is diverting us from tackling the real and extremely difficult policy, programmatic, administrative and implementation issues. In the meantime we must “walk on two feet” and have a short-term “urban first aid” tactic that ameliorates the sub-optimal living conditions of the city, particularly of those in the least educated, lowest income and poorly serviced segments of our fair city. Tactics as mundane as banning hoardings; providing safe under- and over- passages to bus stands stupidly placed in the center of main thoroughfares; making real sidewalks; rationally placing street lights that actually work; putting up international standard signage; putting police jeeps and motorcycles on the roads to implement the most basic civic driving habits; getting encroachments out of small parks and off of the roads; cleaning storm drains; extending potable water supply and sewerage disposal systems; cleaning our rivers and greening our hills; and most obviously getting our power grid working within this great city, would all be things that we should expect from our bureaucrats and elected officials over the coming year! Such actions would give us hope within this troubled and crippled metropolis! • Christopher Benninger is on the Government of India Committee to recommend the strategy for development of the Mumbai Trust Dock Lands, which make up ten percent of the area of the “Island City.” He has prepared the Development Plans for Kalyan and Thane cities for the MMRDA. He has prepared the Capital City Plan of Thimphu, Bhutan, the Eastern Administrative City plan for Denchi in Eastern Bhutan; and urban plans across India and Sri Lanka. He has advised the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the UNO on planning policies and programs. He also does architecture! • 13:00 9th January 2015
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 09:28:50 +0000
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