Urban Planning in Times of Pandemics

Would we learn anything from the ongoing Covid – 19 pandemic with regards to inclusion of migrants in our cities, public health infrastructure and policies and most importantly with regards to planning our cities? Answer to that is NO. I would focus in this piece on urban planning and pandemics, as many have written about the other issues. Also, urban planning as a practice and profession is a baby of various pandemics. This is too early an issue to discuss. But, discussion is required as it is a very important aspect of preventing pandemics. An article in Wire discussed about how population density in Dharavi slum is 50 times that of Wuhan and hence the question is in such conditions of our cities, which is largely an outcome of our very poor urban planning practice, can even future pandemics be prevented?

When (the cynics would say if) the Covid – 19 virus pandemic would decline in India, a hard look at the model of urbanisation and urban planning would become necessary. The possibility of the pandemic ending too soon and upcoming heat period reducing the possibility of the viruses spreading have been ruled out by many international researches. Thus, if India is aspiring to urbanise fast, believe in the theory that urbanisation is central to economic growth - notwithstanding the fact that the economic growth itself at this moment in India’s history due to many misadventures particularly in last half a decade seems illusionary – the urbanisation and urban planning model of India need to be relooked at.

At the heart of any urbanisation process is migration. Faster the process of migration, faster is the process of urbanisation. Media in the times of the Covid – 19 pandemic has described many aspects of how India has treated her migrants. It is going to take a long time before the migrant workers would come out of the shock induced by this pandemic. The macro-economic misadventures of the last half a decade on top of jobless growth setting in during the UPA regime had led to further employment crises, which is largely borne by the migrant workers. Whether India’s urbanisation is going to happen is a serious issue.

But, more serious is how degraded our Indian cities are, barring a few prestigious locales inhabited by the elites.  Monobina Gupta write in Wire on April 1, 2020 (https://thewire.in/rights/coronavirus-lockdown-inequality-poor-smart-cities) as to how much Indian cities have excluded the poor. The stories of urban dystopias have been reported by numerous researches of Indian cities, including from the writings of this author. But, particularly in the last half a decade, these stories have fallen on deaf ears. In the earlier period (from 2005 to 2014) during the JNNURM times, these stories were heard, but the response was a lip-service, big programmes announced but many of these were designed to be implemented within the ‘neo-liberal’ policy paradigm. For the want of any better term, I have used the term ‘neo-liberal’, given that we were not liberal in political or economic sense nor were we welfarist in particularly urban settings.

Urban Planning History

Charles Dickens descriptions of cities in times of fast pace of urbanisation in the British cities has given us the epithet Dickensian cities. The British cities and then followed by other European cities, moved to improve the living conditions in the cities by putting in underground services such as underground ducts for water supply and drainage. Science and Industry Museum in Manchester City has a section on the expansion of drainage network in the city. Interestingly, they make us walk through these drains (Photo 1). This was what city development was all about, application of technology for public health.

Photo 1: Exhibit of toilets and drains, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK

Realising the cities to be vulnerable to such public health crises, urban planning as a profession came in, with firstly setting up of, what were aptly called, the Improvement Trusts. Indian cities too set up the Improvement Trusts in the period starting from 1915 when Patrick Geddes visited India.

One reaction to the Dickensian cities was a movement ‘anti-urbanism’, starting with Ebenezer Howard, who came up with Garden Cities concept (Figure 1), envisaging a city with a countryside imprint; residential areas that are green, with each house having a front and a backyard, industries located nearby to which workers went to work, and self-sufficient cities. Fredrick Engels called this rural idiocy. Other such ideas that became popular were of well-known architects, Le Corbusier (Radiant City) (Figure 2) and Frank Lloyd Wright (Broadacre City) (Figure 3), all displaying the confidence of an architect who considered himself as Master of the City, creating a Master Vision and then a Master Plan. This fantasising was very much in tune with the arrogance of Modernism, of ability to control the fate of the humanity. The Master architects thought that the people and cities would behave as they had ordered them to. Much like our current rulers thinking that the people would behave and remain under lockdown; but what we saw was sea of people on streets of Delhi and other cities! The cities and the people did not behave as the architects thought. The Garden city did not happen because it meant diversion of large tracts of land for green purposes when the lands were privately owned and purchasing land parcels for a house with a yard was beyond the affordability of the industrial workers. Garden cities did not happen, the Dickensian cities did. The Dickensian cities were improved by putting in drainage and water supply lines, largely through state funding and not through the plans that were prepared by the architects.

Figure 1: Garden City

Figure 2: Radiant City

Figure 3: Broadacre City

But, at independence, we in India, while continuing with the activities of the Improvement Trusts, by then set up in most large cities, decided to take this Utopian leap, by inviting Le Corbusier and Otto Königsberger to plan Indian cities. Prior to that, Lutyen’s Delhi was planning by the British Colonialists in a grand manner, with wide roads, utopian style houses with yards, and large many green spaces to house the colonial rulers. The Lutyen’s Delhi was very much an imprint of the paradigm of urban planning existing then. But, this Lutyen’s Delhi or Corbusier’s Chandigarh did not get replicated anywhere else in India, although attempts were made. But, there was always another city outside such planned city to accommodate the working class.

The idea of utopian plans changed to Master Planning that came with heavy regulatory framework. These are statutory plans, which each city has made. More often than not, the Indian urban reality is missed out in these plans, creating the dystopian reality, of the poor, the migrants and the invisible. 

The Neo-liberal City Planning
The regulatory framework not having worked, its critics from the right, at global and the national level, started campaigning for ‘market-based planning’ whatever it meant. In simple terms, it meant, allocation of use of a land as per the market principle, that is the best land available to the highest bidder, in our case the commercial uses and high-end residences, and creating a class of speculative real developers and thus speculative capital. 

The poor have been pushed to the ghettos on the periphery (Figure 4 showing peripheralization of low-income housing through Affordable Housing Zone), with the precarious living conditions that the migrants are escaping now from – no security in rental housing, employers throwing them out in case of employee housing in the industries and on construction site, and so on. After all, these workers living in cheek-by-jowl conditions would create ‘hot-spot’ of virus! (Photos 2 & 3, Madanpur Khadar). There will be no way out of the impacts of this and future pandemics if such living conditions of the urban working class, the migrants and the non-migrants, is not going to change. Rightly, the finding of cases in Dharavi is a matter of grave concern. Dharavi, housing somewhere between 700,000 to a million population has estimated population density of 270,000 people per square km. There is no chance if Covid – 19 spreads here. There is no chance for population living here to be not affected but even the city of Mumbai would be spared as Dharavi is also a place of production of many everyday use food items, even healthcare items such as IV fluid bottles and sutures, etc.  The urban planning has to address improving these living conditions, the existing urban dystopias.

Figure 4: Peripheralisation of Affordable Housing

Photo 2: Cramped Living, Madanpur Khadar Resettlement Site, Delhi

Photo 3: Water Shortage, Madanpur Khadar, Delhi

Instead, the urban planning, proceeding on the market-based route for the common people, is continuing to create these dystopias. Ironically, these market-based solutions is not for the rulers. The current ruling king of India, intending to create a cult following, is now wanting to alter the spaces of colonial power. The project to redevelop Central Vista in Delhi has been approved by the Council of Ministers in the times of Covid – 19 outbreak, one day before the Janata curfew imposed on March 22, 2020 that then resulted in 21 day lockdown two days later. It is indeed urban planning amidst a pandemic! This project has proceeded with violating the principles of transparent bidding in a market economy (https://thewire.in/rights/central-vista-redevelopment-seminar). Neo-liberalism has been selling the idea of fair practices of bidding, but, not put in place in the case of Central Vista. So, we have a system of neo-liberalism in urban development for common people with autocratic and non-transparent decision-making by the rulers when it comes to creation of their personal legacy.

Low allocations in Union Budget for Urban Programmes
The Central Vista project has been allocated Rs. 20,000 crores. The allocations in the Budget of 2020-21 for other central government urban development projects is as in Table 1. The total budgetary provision of Rs. 50,000 crores has about Rs. 21,000 crores for capital projects across India for about 500 million people, while Rs. 20,000 crores for personal legacy and to house about 70,000 employees of the central government ((https://thewire.in/rights/central-vista-redevelopment-seminar). Of the Rs. 21,000 crores, about 80% is for metros. Claims on the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) site about investments in these programmes is way higher than these numbers because it is wishful thinking of contributing funds coming from the state governments. A clever ploy of claiming credit while forcing the state government to pay for the programmes, much as the relief package that has come to deal with fallout of Covid – 19.


Table: Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Budget 2020-21

Item	Rs. crores
Total Budget of MoHUA	50,040
-  Revenue side	28,891
-  Capital side	21,149
All Metro Projects (capital side)	17,482
PMAY (Revenue side)	8,000
Ajeevika Mission	795
AMRUT	7,300
Smart Cities Mission	6,450
Swachh Bharat Mission	2,300
HRIDAY	0

Source: https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/expenditure_budget.php

Thus, it is neo-liberalism for the urban residents including the poor and the migrants creating dystopias and utopian planning for the ruler. Do we think, in such an urban planning and policy regime will help in preventive measures against pandemics in the future? The answer is clear no.