GOOGLE-EARTHING OUR URBAN CHAOS
GOOGLE-EARTHING OUR URBAN CHAOS
I got stuck for two hours getting out of Bangalore airport, at midnight. The immigrations and customs processes were very efficient, but I was trapped in the parking area outside, locked in by an incomprehensible mix of cars, baggage, trolleys, oil tankers and consignment trucks all heading in different directions – or at least attempting to do so.
Just another moment in the mad melee of urban India, with thousands of such situations increasing at an accelerating rate. It’s not just our GDP that is growing.
But rather than exchange frustrated horror-stories of urban nightmares, what if we could take a big step back and see the patterns. What if we could do a Google-Earth on these problems? Zoom out from the local level that we are caught in, from “seeing” our cities only at the ground level of our traffic jams and power cuts, and discern the patterns at a much higher level, to ask more fundamental questions about why things are the way they are, so that we can then begin the process of finding solutions to them.
Rakesh Mohan and Shubhagato Dasgupta wrote, “The trajectory for a country moving from a level of about 30 per cent urban to about 70 per cent urban is steep, and it has usually been traversed over a period of fifty to seventy years. During this period most cities grow at unprecedented rates. It is understandable if observers and administrators are driven to despair during this period of seemingly unending rapid change. The task of meeting all the demands for jobs, shelter, water, roads, transport and other urban infrastructure is daunting. India is about to enter this phase of urbanisation so the task for policy makers is cut out.”
Urban governance is a multi-dimensional problem. Business leaders would say, “This is also true for many industries in the private sector.” But unlike the market, where complex multi-dimensional problems often result in unexpected winners and dramatic losers, cities cannot afford these stakes – the human consequences are too large, with millions of people – often the poor - getting trapped in miserable lives, not only for themselves but also for successive generations.
We need to recognise the importance of the “upstream” structures for our cities: how they need to be organised, built and governed, and how these impact us in our day-to-day lives in incredibly powerful and yet invisible ways: how our roads are built, what kinds of public spaces we have, what our public transport options are, what spaces are available for art and culture to thrive, how the middle-class and the poor interact, what kinds of new jobs are created, what kind of entertainment and leisure activities we pursue, and so on.
And so, a large portion of the answers lie in the right urban governance structures getting established. But there is a difference between the structures for urban decisions, and the decisions themselves: the first needs policy reform, while the second needs greater participation and transparency. While we need a lot more from our political and administrative leadership for the reforms, it would be dangerous to remain caught in our feudal trap, and hope for city saviours who will miraculously rescue us from all our urban nightmares.
In a work titled, “Urban leadership for the 21st century”, Janice Perlman and Elwood Hokins wrote, “The most innovative approaches – those that find creative ways to better utilize human, natural and financial resources in the service of cities – tend to come from those local leaders and community organizations closest to coping with the problems on a daily basis. Without mobilizing the energy and creativity at the neighborhood level there is virtually no hope of revitalizing communities, creating jobs, reducing crime, improving schools, or cleaning up the streets.” They went on to say, “The fate of our cities and the level of leadership is inextricably linked.”
This is leadership at all levels – from the politician to the pedestrian, from the bureaucrat to the businessman, from the councillor to the common woman.
Getting these urban governance processes right is also important for another reason, somewhat removed from what could be argued are ultimately more tactical issues of getting better quality of life. It has to do with our values: as urban residents, the onslaught that we are being confronted with on a daily basis has a corrosive effect on our value systems; whether it is caught in traffic jams and screaming at fellow travellers, or tipping the metre reader for the power bill, there is a price to pay. Mike Cohen wrote, “The Greeks believed that our conscience resides in our eye. Only when we are visually stimulated is our conscience provoked. It is unlikely that the computer screen will provide this stimulus. Rather, when we touch our reality in physical terms, on the street, in the neighborhood, at the human scale, we can really appreciate the value of the many dimensions of local reality. The meaning of virtue, therefore, is locally defined, and the values that should motivate urban governance need to be established and affirmed at the local level.”
So if we do a Google-Earth on the particular urban difficulty that each of gets caught in every day, we realise that the answer is not just about getting more traffic lights -or whatever solution is racing through our minds - but about deeper issues with which we have to engage ourselves. Ultimately, it is about how we as a society make collective choices; and this is not going to happen by accident, by some series of pre-ordained events. We all have to take action and play different roles - big and small - in shaping our urban neighbourhoods. Our story will eventually be about our own leadership, at many levels.
For myself, I live in hope and fear: hope that our remarkable society will find an answer to our urban chaos, but accompanied by a gnawing fear that we may never really get it right in India.
The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org