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
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
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.
