Entering the 75th
year of independence and expecting the future to be urban, the dismal state of
our cities requires a critical review of urban planning. The reference to the
dismal state of the cities is not to the cities that are dug-up due to ongoing
infrastructure projects, but to the everyday dystopias that the city dwellers
negotiate. Urban planning was expected to lead us to liveable cities. There are
high hopes on urban planning to be able to meet the global agendas of healthy
cities (realized as important during the COVID-19 pandemic), the inclusive
cities of the New Urban Agenda and climate change resilient and low-carbon
cities meeting the Paris agreement commitments. There is an increasing sense
that the urban planning as envisaged and practiced will not be able to achieve
not just these agendas but also the aspirations and needs of the current and
future urban residents. Urban planning contents as well as practiced has to
change for a successful urban future.
We are currently in a
surrealist urban development situation. In the 73rd year of national
independence, the Delhi Master Plan was unilaterally changed by the central
government to include the imperialist Central Vista project. Much has been
written about this project in this paper as well and hence not repeated. But,
the timing of or the chronology of the gazette notification to change the land
use from recreational to government has to be noted; it was issued on March 20,
2020, two days before the one day lockdown of March 22, 2020 and four days
before the unplanned nationwide stringent lockdown. This change in the Delhi
Master Plan was made while it was being revised. The draft Master Plan of Delhi
– 2041 is now available and a commentary on it is available (for example here).
Essentially, the
Central Vista project has been inserted in Delhi without going through the plan
process. In fact, this project has been presented to the draft Master Plan of
Delhi (MPD) – 2041 as a fait accompali.
The paradox is clear, the Master Plan of Delhi did not decide what happens to
the central part of the Lutyen’s Delhi but an extraneous decision forces the
Master Plan to include it! To understand this paradox it would be necessary to
look at what urban planning and its tool called the Master Plan was expected to
do.
This one tool of urban
planning, the Master Plan, alternatively called the Development Plan in some
states, is not the only one. This is a statutory
tool that has a backing of Town and Country Planning laws, such as Delhi
Development Authority Act, the Gujarat Town Planning and Urban Development Act,
and so on. The other non-statutory plans also exist, for example, the City
Development Plan (CDP) prepared for the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission
(JNNURM), Comprehensive Mobility Plan (CMP) for transport project funding,
Smart City Mission Plans and Housing for All Plan of Action for the PMAY-Urban.
Lets come back to the purpose and contents of the Master/ Development Plans.
There are plethora of plans and whether they talk to each other is a matter of
investigation. However, the plans other than the Master Plan are made to
implement projects, which is discussed later causing fragmentation of planning
effort itself.
Early Planning
Efforts
The Master Plans (term henceforth used to
represent all the city level spatial plans) during the British colonial rule
were for extractive purposes. In a book City Planning in India[1],
the authors write that British were predominantly interested in revenues from
land and hence paid attention to land survey data and planning. The plans also
ensured to maintain segregation by statutorily maintaining British enclaves
through plans. A new segregation can be seen in the contemporary cities through
planning process, but of another form, the legal city occupied by the citizens
holding valid identity proofs and the ‘illegal’ or the ‘informal’ city wherein
some hold and some do not hold the valid identity proofs. Urban plans were used
as a tool to sanitise the non-elite areas of the city; the working class
neighbourhoods were evicted these under the pretext of not meeting the planning
standards.
In independent India, the first effort at
urban planning was to build industrial cities to meet the aspiration of
‘industries as temples of modern India’. The urban planning was seen as a
technocratic activity, which continues till date and its education is regulated
by the AICTE. Urban Planning became the domain of the technocrats, the
engineers, architects and the bureaucrats. New towns were build using such a
planning activity. The land in the new towns was owned by the government
entity, were mainly on greenfield sites, and hence the planned proposals could
be implemented.
The planning challenge was for the existing
towns and cities where the living conditions were deteriorating. Refugee influx in some of these created
congestion, infrastructure and housing deficits, and a sense of deteriorating
quality of life. Public health became the concern in urban planning during the
decade of the 1950s and 1960s. The Ministry of Health, Government of India,
dealt with town planning. Under its aegis the first Master Plan of Delhi was
prepared with a focus on health. In a Town and Country Planning (TCPO) document
of 1962 the Ministry of Health stated: “The improvement of our villages, towns
and cities will provide this healthy environment to the rural and urban people
alike”. The first Basic Development Plan (BDP) for Calcutta (now Kolkata) prepared
for 1966-86 period has origin in public health concern, prepared in wake of
cholera epidemic of 1958. The early efforts at town planning was urban health.
For example the setting up of the Urban Improvement Trust in Bombay was a
response to the plague epidemic. The idea of Improvement Trusts spread across
in India. The Improvement Trusts then became Development Authorities in many
cities; for example, the Delhi Improvement Trust, set up in 1936 became the
Delhi Development Authority.
Comprehensive Planning - A Statist Effort
Soon after the first Master Plan of Delhi, the
approach to Master Plan comes from what was called ‘comprehensive planning’,
alternatively also called ‘rational planning’. The rationality was defined by the
state, located in the large ‘welfare’ framework. The urban planning as a
discipline has roots in the ‘social-democratic’ polity of the immediate
post-world war period. Urban planning’s rationality was delivery of public
goods through allocating land spaces for public goods and redistributing land
to reduce inequalities. Land reforms in India, that is, land to the tiller in
the rural areas and land to the houseless in the urban areas comes from the
same framework. The comprehensiveness came from the idea that all urban
activities would require land and other resources allocation and hence all
aspects of urban development have to be looked in their entirety. Hence the
Master Plan documents have existing situation analysis about all aspects of the
city. For example, the MPD 2041 has seven baseline study reports. The purpose
of plans is to then project the activities that would come up in the future,
make land allocations for the same, envision as to where these activities would
and should come up, and provide necessary infrastructure for the same. Some
plans also have provisions related to financing the plans. This aspect requires
another discussion however.
The key to successful implementation of a
Master Plan is availability of land. The
broad vision of MPD-62 (the first Master Plan of Delhi) was realised with a
large scale acquisition and development of land to ensure the development of
infrastructure and services as per the plan proposals. This vision also
envisaged that the public sector would lead the process of development of the
city with very little private participation in housing and infrastructure
service. In essence, the land was to be publicly held and then allocated for
various purposes as defined in the Plan. If any use that came up other than
what was defined in the plan then it became an illegal use. All the land uses
had to be regulated and hence controlled. But, the real world, even in Delhi,
did not confirm to the requirements of the Master Plans and hence the large
unauthorised colonies in Delhi.
In cities where the land was under private
ownership, these plans did not work at all. The cities struggled to acquire
lands for the public purposes. None whatsoever were able to acquire lands for
the public purposes at a scale required and hence most Master Plans failed to
perform.
Only in a limited cities, for example of that
in Gujarat, wherein a mechanism called Town Planning Scheme (TPS) or now what
is being popularised as ‘land pooling mechanism’ used widely in the MPD-2041,
lands could be acquired for public purposes. The principle is that a part of
the private land is appropriated at the time of giving approval of development
or redevelopment of a parcel of land. The appropriated land is then used for
public purposes. The experience of the TPS is glass half
full and half empty.
The Master Plan being a statutory document,
came to be also appropriated by the state. Thus, this capture of the Delhi
Master Plan to change the land use of the central area of Lutyen’s Delhi for
the construction of Central Vista project. In authoritarian regimes this
powerful instrument of land allocation can then be used for the purposes that
the power consider to be ‘rational’.
The Market Capture of Planning
While, the rulers prefer a statist approach,
for the rest of the city residents, urban planning has shifted to what is
called ‘Market-based approach’. When the state moved from being a welfare or
redistributive state to one promoting economic growth, the Master Plans too
shifted to this goal stating that land uses would be allocated as per the bids
that the uses can make on the land. The general argument has been that excessive
state intervention and land regulations have led to inefficient ‘bureaucratic’
decision-making that stifled private enterprise, competitiveness and efficiency.
It has also been argued that the historic cities had evolved through the role
of market in a successful way, and the land market imperfections were corrected
through some tools of taxation, such as the betterment charges.
instruments have been introduced through the Development
Control Regulations (DCRs) in the Master Plan documents for market-based land
use allocation. These are using the Floor Space Index (FSI)/ Floor Area Ratios
(FARs) and Transfer of Development Rights (TDRs) as instruments for allocation
of uses. For example, in locations that have high demand, more FSI/ FAR can be
allowed. But, these can be allowed in such a way that the local government can
charge premium for higher than the base FSI/ FAR. MPD-2041, Mumbai Development
Plan – 2034, and Master Plans of many cities have used this mechanism. These
DCRs essentially leverage high land prices for not just land use allocation but
also raising financial resources for infrastructure provision through charging
premium FSI/ FAR and selling appropriated lands. Special zones for certain high
FSI/ FAR potential can be identified; these could be around transit/ transport
lines, also called Transit Oriented Zones (TODs), special development zones and
so on. But, the increase in land prices also push out the low-income groups
from the land and housing markets. Hence, the so called ‘affordable housing’ in
many cities are priced at Rs. 20 lakhs and above and not just workable for
those households with monthly incomes of Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 25,000. The
affordable housing then are in the urban periphery. In essence, the market
mechanism pushes out the low-income households to urban periphery creating a
new form of ghettoization and marginalisation.
This is also a phase wherein the urban
development is pursued through projects. Funding is for projects whereas
planning is a hotchpotch of statist and market instruments. The decisions often
appear as matters of interest to some, for example the Central Vista project is
of personal interest. Large projects such as the Metro rail projects receiving
massive central government funding, are of commercial interests. The projects
are decided through other plans as already mentioned; for example CMP for
transport. Ironically, we may not find the metro projects in the city’s CMP or
Master Plans. Thus, the decision making on projects is fragmented, often
appearing as influenced by special interest groups, while overall Master Plan,
statist or market-based appears to be not working.
Stuck between the two extremes
The question in planning is not about whether
the state or the market would deliver the urban development agendas. Between
the devil of the statist planning that was captured by the elites and made the
common residents client of the politicians and now the deep sea of the market
that has no place for the low-income populations or even non-market land uses,
the cities are doomed. Paradoxically, the state wants the power to allocate
spaces for its purpose but wants the residents to be supplied their spaces
through the market. The cities have to be rescued from both these co-existing
extremes. The state is ruthless when it wants spaces for itself, evicting
informal developments if required. The state has also been ruthless to clear
out prime lands for large real estate projects. Hence, there is very little
difference remaining now between the state and the market.
[1] Kumar, A. K; S. Vidyarthi and P. Prakash
(2021). City Planning in India, 1947-2017.
London and New York: Routledge for Taylor and Francis Group.
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