New
Delhi Conference, 14-15 November 2014
A BRIEF COMMENT ON WHAT I OMITTED REVIOUSLY: THE UA CONFEENCES IN CHICAGO, SÃO PAULO, AND RIO
URBAN AGE TOUR OF DELHI – 13 NOVEMBER
THURSDAY
THE CONFERENCE: DAY ONE – 14 NOVEMBER FRIDAY
DEUTSCH BANK URBAN AGE AWARD CEREMONY - 14 NOVEMBER FRIDAY
THE CONFERENCE: DAY TWO – 15 NOVEMBER THURSDAY
This year’s Urban Age
conference, Governing
Urban Futures, which took place in New Delhi, 14-15
November, followed the recent pattern of being issue-centered, rather than
being primarily about a particular city or region. The topic, as described by Philipp Rode (Executive Director of LSE
Cities and the Urban Age) and Priya Shankar (Research Office at the program) in their excellent
introductory article, “Governing Cities,
Steering Futures,” for the conference Newspaper,
was examining
the link between urban
governance and our collective capacities to engage with and shape the future
development of cities. By investigating the way we govern urban futures, we analyse how the decisions that are made (or not made) today
have long-term implications reaching well beyond the boundaries of individual
cities – and aim to achieve a better understanding of the underlying conditions
and processes that allow for participatory, effective, accountable and
future-oriented decision-making in and for cities.
These
enquiries take place against a background of some major changes in urban
governance, above all, the trend towards ‘urbanising’
government, alongside the re-scaling of planning functions, both part of the
considerable decentralization efforts occurring in both developing and
developed countries since the 1990s. We also identify a shift towards a broader
coalition of private and civil society actors – replacing traditional hierarchical
coordination of urban development with more networked forms of governance –
while acknowledging the critiques of these shifts and the questions they raise
around the processes of decision-making and democratic legitimacy. The last two
decades have clearly witnessed an increase in the role of the private sector as
a result of economic globalisation, far-reaching privatisation of former state functions, the increasing
importance of partnerships between public and private sectors as well as
greater levels of private capital flowing into urban development, (due not
least to substantial infrastructure funding gaps, recently exacerbated by
severe public budget constraints in some regions of the world). We also recognise that, (well before recent trends of ‘networked’
governance emerged), there have always been urban areas and aspects of urban
life in several parts of the world that the state has never fully reached or
formally governed.
…four key trends and themes emerge for what will be critical
in shaping our urban futures. [1] Globalisation,
particularly economic globalization through the links of trade and the flows of
capital and investment, is affecting cities throughout the world. [2]Technological
change, especially the revolution in IT, is changing the nature of all
human interactions but also of state-society relations. [3] There is increasing
inequality in most cities and
increasing informality in many. And [4]
all cities are confronting the existential threats presented by climate change. Each of these trends
has significant implications for the governance of cities. At the same time,
urban governments face fundamental choices about how to respond to these
trends, and what is decided now will be critical in steering both urban and
global futures. [numbering
and emphases added]
The
conference Newspaper
is available online, and I recommend it to
you most highly. It is full of extremely
informative articles, written mostly by those who presented at the
Conference. (Wherever I quote something
without specific attribution, it will be from this publication.)
For those
of you who are not familiar with it, the Urban Age
is a program housed within the LSE
Cities Program;
it has mounted a series of world-wide conferences, dedicated to studying the
problems and issues facing cities in the 21st century and creating
dialogues designed to find solutions. (See the UA’s own very informative
website: www.lsecities.net/ua/).
100 years ago, 10% of the world’s population lived in cities, while 90% lived
in rural areas. The Urban Age program began at the moment in history when the
world crossed the point that more than 50% of its population lived in
cities—and the United Nations predicts that by 2050 approximately 75% of the
world will live in cities. This fact means that the nature of cities will have
an incredibly important impact on the nature of life on this planet. The Urban
Age program is centered at the London
School of Economics, and funded by the Alfred Herrhausen
Society (the international forum of Deutsche Bank). These conferences
are designed to form the framework for the development of an ongoing dialogue
between government leaders, academic experts, and urban practitioners—it brings
together a diverse assortment of architects, city planners, civil engineers,
government officials, transportation experts, real estate developers,
academics, and various others who study these areas (some as unlikely as a
psychoanalyst like me), who importantly talk with each other across disciplines
in a way that rarely happens at other times.
At their outset, the Urban Age ran a series of conferences
which explored the urban natures and futures of individual cities. The The Endless City (Phaidon Press, 2008) is a book published by the Urban Age that presents the integration of the
findings from this first group of conferences which began in New York (q.v., my
write up) in
February 2005 and which culminated in Berlin in November 2006 (with Shanghai,
London,
Johannesburg,
and Mexico City
in between). It was co-authored by Ricky
Burdett (one of the Founders of the Urban Age and Director of the LSE
Cities Program) and Deyan Sudjic (member of the Urban Age team and author of The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and
Powerful--and Their Architects--Shape the World, and many other books).
After this initial group, there was a second series of
conferences focused on the broader regional contexts of that began in November
2007: the first was in Mumbai (q.v., my
write up),
followed by São Paulo,
and, in 2009, Istanbul (q.v., my
write up),
which was the final of the three meetings of this second group. Living in the Endless City,
also co-authored by Ricky Burdett
and Deyan Sudjic and
published by Phaidon Press (2011), presents an
in-depth overview of the findings from this series of conferences.
Over
the last four years, the Urban Age conferences
then focused on key thematic areas of urban change: the global shifts of urban
economies (Global Metro Summit in Chicago,
2010, organized by LSE Cities in
conjunction with the Brookings
Institution Metro Policy Program); health and wellbeing (Cities, Helath, and Wellbeing, Hong Kong in
2011 [q.v., my write up]); environmental sustainability and
technology (The Electric
City, London in 2011
[q.v., my write up]; the online version is in need of repair, but the text is mostly
intact, albeit the illustrations are completely missing]); and the physical
transformation of cities (City Transformations, in São
Paulo, 2013).
A BRIEF COMMENT ON
WHAT I OMITTED PREVIOUSLY:
THE UA CONFERENCES IN
CHICAGO, SÃO PAULO, AND RIO
There have been 13 conferences, and I have attended 9 for
them—including the first and the last 8. Of those I have attended, there were
only three that I did not write up; and
in all three cases it was because there were important things that angered me
about them that I did not choose to write about…but I am now moved to mention
them here.
In Chicago, I
was deeply bothered by the line at that time taken by the Brookings Institution people who co-led to conference: they seem
subsequently to have changed their tune, but at that point they were focusing
exclusively on action on the local level and emphasizing the need for focusing
on involving private partners and sources of funding for public programs—which,
albeit arguably needed in the face of the diminished availability of public
funding in the world, was dangerously ignoring the shortcomings of this
approach (viz., the danger of blindly
relying that the interests of the public adequately would be represented and
protected in the process, and the implicit justification of the abdication of
responsibility by government —and particularly at the State and Federal
levels—to fund those areas which simply cannot
be financed in any way other than by
government [e.g., those
infrastructure and other long term projects where the ROI (Return On Capital)
is not immediately capture-able, or is so long range or small as to not provide
adequate incentive for private investment of capital]). I am a great believer in the importance of
action on the local level: in fact, I sometimes am moved to say that the only meaningful action is local; and
that if things are not made meaningful on the local, community level, they will
not be meaningful at all. (And, of
course, remember that I am a psychoanalyst: I am someone who is profoundly
convinced that the very most
meaningful changes take place on the personal, individual level!)
Nevertheless, there are ways that too exclusive a focus on the local can
be used to distort and hide societal problems, and to avoid more official
societal responsibilities. There are
people who rather venally use such an exaggerated emphasis to very selfish and
bad ends; and there are others who are just so naively swept up in such
approaches that they miss the inherent dangers and shortcomings. One way or the other, it is a bad mistake.
In the case of São
Paulo and Rio, my reluctance to
write about the conferences was due to my general discomfort and anger at what
dealing with issues in Brazil is like: I have experienced an enormous tendency
there to operate in a way that seems completely to believe positions that are
desired to be true but simply are blatantly false. I believe this tendency arises from what I
consider to be the underlying falsehood of Brazilian society: “We have a fully
racially integrated society in Brazil.
Race is not a problem here.” This
seems firmly believed, and totally false: Brazilians have 47 distinct words to distinguish different levels of darkness of
skin color, and, in their society, social economic level correlates completely
with level of darkness of skin. If one
is interested, Michael Kimmelman, a wonderful member of the Urban Age
International team (and the best
writer on architecture the Times has had in decades), did an
excellent article in the New York Times on 25
November 2013 after attending the Rio conference about what Brazil was really
up to in how it was dealing with the World Cup and 2016 Olympics: ”A Divided Rio de Janeiro, Overreaching for the World”.
He and I spent a great deal of time together on the tour and at the conference
in Rio discussing some of this; and while I am more extreme in my feelings
about this than he, he obviously shares some of the same perspective. He wrote,
Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, is
saying all the right things about combating sprawl, beefing up mass transit,
constructing new schools, and pacifying and integrating the favelas, where one
in five city residents lives, with the rest of the city.
But as months of street protests illustrate, progressive
ideals run up against age-old, intractable problems in this city where class
difference and corruption are nearly as immovable as the mountains. This is a
city divided on itself.
The
article offers an important critique of
what Brazil is actually doing in these efforts in contrast to what they claim
to be doing, and I highly recommend it to you.
URBAN AGE TOUR OF DELHI – 13 NOVEMBER
THURSDAY
Our tour was led by Jagan Shah (Director, National
Institute of Urban Affairs). [The photographs in this section are my own,
except for the one below, which is from the Conference, and is by Catarina Heeckt.]
Jagan said it was hard to say how many actually live
in Delhi: 13 million, although many say 16 million; but after Partition it was
only 2-3 million. Before the 1962 Delhi
Master Plan (done with the help of the Ford Foundation), refugees were
dealt with only on an ad hoc
basis. Inside the Ring Road, which was one of the first creations of the Master Plan,
one still can see the pre-1950s small shops and small plots of land; outside,
the development of the 60s and later takes on a very different urban form. There has been a decision in Delhi to release
the FSI (Floor Surface Index, used interchangeably in
India with FAR, Floor Area Ratio; essentially the gross floor area of all
buildings on a lot divided by the area of the lot itself) almost completely
along the transit-oriented corridors of the city—and there are now buildings of
22 stories going up (most of Delhi is 4-5 stories). There is a new Metro line
being put in along the Ring Road, and an expansion of the retail area, with
permission being granted to convert residential buildings to commercial along
the arteries. We passed the Defense Colony, said to be the most
expensive real estate in Delhi.
At the Moolchand Clover Leaf we turned right on the road that has the remains of
Delhi’s recent experiment with BRT (Bus Rapid Transit). This initial phased was planned to begin with
a 14 km stretch here; but it was shortened to 5 km. What’s more, it is one of the worst designed BRT attempts I have ever seen: the
“dedicated lanes” and stations are in the middle of a major thoroughfare, and
there is no provision for pedestrian access to the stations, which often
requires the perilous crossing of three or four lanes of uncontrolled traffic
flow to reach them (making the stations all but totally unusable); and, shortly
after the system was built, car and truck traffic was granted access to the
“dedicated lanes” which were supposed to be exclusively for the BRT vehicles
alone (thus rendering the system completely dysfunctional). It was a system
that I believe was planned to fail—and fail it did: “people” (and we can only
imagine what constituency comprised this group) demanded the system be stopped,
and no more of its planned 330 km were ever built. The area also has its share of single lane
flyovers—a piece of road engineering so poorly conceived that I have never seen
it anywhere else—which also confound traffic flow on the overcrowded
thoroughfare. (There is congestion automatically created entering and exiting
these flyovers, so that at the best of times they retard rather than assist
traffic flow; and any disabled car on one brings the flow to an immediate and
total standstill, as there is no way to get past it—or to get to it with an
emergency vehicle.) Along this route are
found some of Delhi’s tony gated communities—and less fancy middle class
communities that have erected unofficial gates, aspiring to being a gated
community without any official standing to do so.
We got off the bus at Nehru Place, a bustling collection of buildings that functions as a
prime commercial space which is the biggest “gray” market for electronic goods
(selling and repairing unauthorized copies of electronics equipment and
media—of “questionable” legality):
In the early 80s, this government sponsored
development was unanimously condemned as being “heartless modernism”; and,
indeed, the architecture itself is actually a rather dreadful replica of a 60s
housing complex. Jose Castillo and Richard
Sennett and I were discussing what the residential/commercial mix was; and
I asked Jagan,
who told me that in fact it was built as a 100% commercial complex—that every
unit housed some form of commercial enterprise. This surprised all of us, and
we continued to feel that area distinctly looked as though there were people
living in some of the units. I asked
again, and was told that in fact there were
people who lived in the offices, stores, and shops; but that they were not the
owners, but rather employees of the owners who were often allowed to live in
the commercial space in return for being paid woefully minimal wages (the
difficulties of lower income people finding housing being what they are here).
This mix actually made sense of the “feel” of the place, which had actually
originally led the three of us to assume incorrectly that this was primarily a
residential, mixed use place. But Nehru Place is a locus of enormous life
and vitality—social as well as commercial:
In many ways, it felt like a combination of a
modern electronics market and a souk—a Middle Eastern bazaar: full of energy
and commercial activity, and very much a place of the people. The first two
levels had intense lines of open shops of varying types, all bustling with
activity,
while the upper stories
were given over to individual stores, workshops, and other business
establishments.
We then got back on the buses and drove to
the “slum” of Gavindpuri
we were going to visit. Ahead of us on the road we saw in the distance, through
the haze of Delhi’s intensely polluted air, a mountain rising in a far-off area
of the city. Jagan informed us that this was
one of the many “mountains” of garbage where the cities piles up it waste. The
sheer magnitude of this single pile was frightening. Garbage is an enormous
problem in Delhi (as it is all over India). Power companies and the government
have acquired parts of the Jahanpanah Forest
(the remains of what was a green belt in Delhi), and areas of it have been
given over to garbage disposal. Apparently, another problem is that this
society which is so traditionally respectful of animal life—and of cows, in
particular—actually allows for rather cruel passive treatment of these animals:
particularly after cows cease to produce milk, they are often abandoned without
care or feeding, and they are actually allowed either to starve or die a
painful death from ingesting the plastic that is contained in the garbage they
forage in for sustenance. (This was an uncomfortably shocking revelation to
many of us.)
We got out of the buses and walked through
the streets of Gavindpuri.
This area is a bustling place, full of
people, businesses, and dwellings:
It is obviously informally constructed, often
of substantial materials—but with some very questionable engineering (one of
the issue in Delhi is that it is estimated that over 50% of its built
environment could not withstand even a moderate earthquake):
Here a photograph of a women selling produce
that I include more for its beautiful resonance of the vibrant colors than for
any other reason:
Our destination was the Katha Lab School, a privately funded school for the children of the
community that is also a center for community activities (healthcare, Women’s
Center, etc.). The underlying philosophy is to create change
through the children—directly via education, but also via family involvement.
It is a mixed community (approximately half Muslim and half Hindu), and the
school population reflects that mix. Many of the families at the schools are
migrants who have come to Delhi largely for
the educational opportunities, which are lacking and dysfunctional in rural
areas.
The school’s building is a very modern,
well-designed structure (note the architecturally interesting and functional ramps
on the roof of the complex, using solar energy (note the solar panels on the
right):
The school is supported totally by
philanthropy: e.g., the modern
computer lab was funded by the Prince Charles Foundation. We were told that all
philanthropy in India is directed solely at education and religious institutions,
and never cultural or scientific ones.
We then divided into groups of 8 people, and
parents (all women) of children at the school led the groups on intimate tours
of their neighborhoods. We were led through the narrow pathways through the
community (below you see Sophie Body-Gendrot n the foreground, and
the back of Enrique Peñalosa
in the background):
The dwellings house multiple families in
each. The women have a much higher rate
of employment than men. The men, when they work, are usually employed in
factories or small workshops; but alcoholism and unemployment is rampant. The women are mostly employed as domestic
help (in some of the slightly more affluent apartments adjoining the slum),
working 27 days/month, and being paid INR500 for each “task” they perform (i.e., they will typically work for about
4 different families, and get paid that amount by each—thus getting
INR2000/month [~$33/month] working full days, all but three days a month). The gender distinctions in the employment
situation reminded me of what I had just learned about life in rural India from
a person who runs an outreach political organizing program on the outskirts of
Indian cities: according to whom, typically it is the woman who is the one who
works in rural India, and the husband often sits around drinking tea (or
alcohol, paid for by his wife) all day—and too often beating his wife at the
end of the day. (As an important aside,
I came away from my experiences of this visit to India—in Delhi, as well as in
Ahmedabad, Udaipur, Ranakpur, and Jodhpur—being
convinced that the positive hope for India’s future lies with heavily its
women: they are the ones in the poorer communities who seem to have the potential
for political organization [and they are successfully being organized and
becoming politically important forces in many areas, especially rurally], and
they are already a clear force for change in India’s cities. The women of India are one of the country’s
most valuable, exciting resources.)
Below you can see (on this rather wider passageway), the open sewage
lines that line many of the streets (much more problematic on the narrower
ones):
Some of the passageways are actually given
over entirely to other functions:
Our guide
told us that these open sewers carried only waste water, although there
seemed to be clear elements of fecal waste mixed in. When we pointed this out
to her, she said that wasn’t true because none of the dwellings in this slum
had toilets—although we actually were able to see evidence of some, including
even some PVC drainage pipes on the exteriors of some of the buildings. Gerry Frug commented that this is one of the problems with
the “interview method” of research: you ask a question, you get an answer; but
then it is not clear what the answer in fact means. (I added that it also makes
one aware that one may, in retrospect, not even understand what one’s question meant.)
We then re-boarded the buses and drove across
the Yamuna River (and its beds of
water hyacinth) to Noida (the city
developed by NOIDA, the New Okhla
Industrial Development Authority), actually in the state of Uttar Pradesh,
which is a second generation piece of urbanization, all high-rise (there is a
planned 60 story tower being built), a community of significant wealth (the
highest per capita income of the entire capital region). It is a center for outsourcing IT, software
companies, power utilities, automobile industry, and film and television
industry. There are also extensive
shopping malls and arcades in the district. Many of its residences are owned as
second or third homes for the wealthy (some simply as investment properties for
the rich), and many are sparsely-occupied.
We got off the buses at the NOIDA Metro
station, a new, modern structure, amidst the bustle of a small local market:
From here we boarded the Metro. This is a rather impressive transportation system, with high
speed, quiet, comfortable cars and efficient, clean stations. The system’s five
current lines have 193km of tracks, some elevated, some underground serving 141
stations (38 of which are underground).
The system was largely financed by Japanese
investment—in return for which Japanese companies (largely Mitsubishi) were
given the contracts for making the equipment and rolling stock. It is
considered to be very successful, with a daily ridership of 2.4 million. Plans for the expansion of the system are in
place, and two new lines and several extensions of existing lines are already
under construction. (Below is a photo taken from the Metro of new construction.)
In minutes, we arrived at Connaught Place. Officially named Rajiv Chowk, Connaught Place (or CP, as it is often called) is
one of the largest financial, commercial, and business centers in New Delhi.
Formerly the headquarters of the British Raj, it was planned and developed by Edwin Lutyens.
At the intersection of several important thoroughfares—and with its
proliferation of shops, trendy bars and restaurants (the Urban Age welcoming reception was held in the rooftop open area of
one such bar/restaurant, immediately following the tour), movie theaters, and
its central park area (a gathering place and location for many events) in the
middle of its concentric encircling roads—Connaught
Place has become one of the hot gathering places for young people in India.
THE CONFERENCE: DAY ONE – 14 NOVEMBER FRIDAY
Morning Session
[N.B.: The presentations and panels from the
conference are all available for you to watch yourself on the Urban Age YouTube Channel at http://delhi2014.lsecities.net/video/;
the slides from each
presentation that had them are available
at the same place. I shall not specifically remind you that
these are available, except in the case of the video that includes our friend Charles Correa, which I suggest you
watch to get a sense of the power and elegance of Charles and his thinking. His brief talk
begins at minute 31:30 of video of his panel available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dloCPkws8i8&t=26m15s.]
{I have set off in these bold curved brackets {} any personal commentary I have
inserted about any of these talks during the conference.}
The
first day’s opening remarks began with a welcome from Anshu Jain (Co-CEO of Deutsche
Bank, pictured below [all conference photographs are by Catarina Heeckt]).
Anshu Jain spoke about Alfred
Herrhausen and the Society founded in honor of his great work. He noted that the
Conference was being co-sponsored by the National
Institute of Urban Affairs in New Delhi, and thanked its Director, Jagan Shah.
He said that he had been fortunate to live in many great cities, and had
found that while each was unique, all great cities had some important things in
common: they were “multicultural, a
crossroads of different nationalities, languages, faiths, traditions, and human
stories.” People from diverse backgrounds, coming together and creating a
collective identity; and he quoted Jane Jacobs, “The metropolis provides what
otherwise could be given only by travel.”
He spoke about the fact that urbanization was one of the defining issues
of modern life, with 4 billion people—54% of the world’s population—currently
living in cities. In the middle of the
last century, 2/3 of the world’s population was rural; by the middle of this
century, 2/3 will live in cities—meaning the urban population will be what the
entire population of the world is today.
He noted that India alone is predicted to have a rise of 400 million
people living in its cities by 2050.
Today cities occupy 2% of the world’s land area, but account for 80% of
global wealth. 1/3 of the increase in
the world’s economy is predicted to occur in its cities—and that today in China
and India, the average income of city dwellers is three times that of its rural
people. He discussed the fact that there
were downsides of urbanization: urban concentrations place a stress on water,
power, sanitation, and transport—all of which need to be managed. He raised the
specter of the effects of outbreaks of infectious diseases in the densely
populated cities in the world.
Urbanization has not brought prosperity for all: worldwide, 1 billion
people (1/7 of the world population) live in slums, and that number will double
by 2030. Urbanization will happen, he said; the question is whether it will be
a force for good. China and the Eurozone
will be generating excess savings of ~$3 trillion; these savings will seek
solid, predictable investment. Simultaneously, successful urbanization will
require huge resources and major long term financial investment—and financial
institutions have a crucial role and an enormous responsibility in converting
these savings into capital that can be utilized for our cities to develop. Governing urban futures and the choices we
make now are going to influence so many lives in the future; and we at Deutsche Bank and the Alfred Herrhausen
Society are delighted to contribute to and to participate in this Urban Age
conference, and the bringing together of so many experts to discuss these
crucial issues.
Craig Calhoun (President and
Director of the London School of
Economics, pictured above with Anshu Jain) thanked Anshu Jain and the Herrhausen Society, offered his welcome, and noted the
long and important connections between the LSE
and India. Craig noted the 100 Smart
Cities Initiative in India that Anshu had mentioned,
and its relation to the work done at the Urban
Age Electric City conference we had in London two years ago. Here in Delhi we will discuss key questions
of governance: interrelated themes of decentralization, accountability,
partnership, land governance, and infrastructure. There would be many interconnected issues we
would be examining: decentralization, land use, governance, and infrastructure
among them. We will try to compare
different perspectives on agendas of urban change from the experts we have
gathered, not only from India but from over 20 cities on five continents. Craig noted that it had taken London
100 years to grow from 1 to 10 million people, which is
1/10 the rate of growth that is taking place in India. We very much need to know how cities are
parts of larger developing trends; and it is this which will enable us, in the
phrase that guides us in this conference, “to govern our urban futures.”
INAUGURAL ADDRESS:
Greg Clark
(Minister for Universities, Science and Cities for the UK Government) gave the opening keynote
address.
He
mentioned that the LSE mascot was the beaver—an odd choice, save for the fact
that it is an animal known for being an industrious, social creature; and noted
that cities bring people together in collaborative ventures of complexity and
specialization that are profoundly related to economic growth, even at a time
like the present when electronic media actually make it possible for people to
live in isolation from others. There has
been a tendency to centralize in the UK, with London having been the main,
prospering center of growth; but there is now a move to create other centers of
growth—using the two very different cities of Manchester and Liverpool as
examples—and the move towards prosperous networks of cities. Greg
said there were important lessons that need to be learned: we must recognize
the differences between cities (their specific histories, characters, and
feels); we have to respect the past and history, but not be imprisoned by it;
boundaries need to be thought about carefully (cities often outstrip their
municipal borders, which often reflect neither economic reality nor geography);
connectivity and transportation are key issues in successful urbanization;
education is of crucial importance in the process.
Ricky Burdett (one of the Founders
of the Urban
Age and Director of the LSE
Cities Program, and the dear friend who originally brought me
into the Urban Age program; pictured below)
gave an overview in which
he said that we are here to hold up a mirror to what exists—to share
perspectives, not to tell people what the solutions are for their cities. Ricky
summarized some of the research the program had been doing on Delhi (actually
informed by the work of the past 10 years of the Urban Age program), and as
presented in the conference Newspaper: a collection
of essays (one group from a global perspective, one about India, and the third
from the perspective of other parts of the world) plus a data section. The speed of urbanization is staggering, but
uneven across the world: NY is growing
at 9 people/hour, London at 1/hour; and Lagos is growing at 48 people/hour—and
Tokyo, the world’s largest urban population, is predicted to go into a negative
growth rate over the course of the next year, along with some Russian and
American cities. These facts are graphically
presented on the map below. [I am using Ricky’s presentation to make you aware
just how much wonderful information is available in the slides that accompanied
many of the talks. To make the point, I
am showing a large number of his slides, which I shall not do with the other
presentations. But be aware that the slides from other
presentations are available online at http://delhi2014.lsecities.net/video/.]
But
one thing we know, unless we talk about governance, we haven’t done
anything. How a city is governed—and
what the boundaries of that city are—is absolutely fundamental: some areas of
city authority (where they say “mayor” has control; indicated in the darker
colored sections) are relatively small in comparison their much larger functional
regions (e.g., São Paulo and New York
below);
while in a city like Istanbul, the mayor
has a vast area under his control, virtually 100% of the functional region of
Istanbul (q.v., below).
Whereas
London was purposely reinvented to have a closer fit between its city authority
and its real boundaries, cities vary widely on this: in Delhi, 66% of the
population lives within the city’s municipal boundaries, whereas in Paris it is
only 18%, and in London and New York fit is about the same at 39%). The graph below presents some of the data on
Delhi compared to other cities.
Economically,
the predicted growth rate
(2012-2030) in GVA (Gross Value Added)
in Delhi is 7% (compared with 2.8% in London and 1.1% in Tokyo); the GINI
coefficient (a measure of income distribution where the higher number
represents greater inequality) is a whopping .60 in Delhi, whereas in Berlin it
is only .29. The rest of the graph
(presented below) presents other aspects of comparison:
Delhi’s
air pollution is extremely high (289 PM10 levels [pg/m3]),
compared to London at 22. It is also
worth noting that while Delhi’s built environment is essentially 4-6 stories
high, it is nearly twice as dense as Tokyo.
Ricky pointed out that
there are different patterns of built environment (Hong Kong has gone vertical
and Mexico City doesn’t end, q.v.,
below);
different forms of governance
(in London there is no state government to contend with—all city and national;
in Delhi, it is largely a question of state government); and the patterns have
a very significant effect on the environment and on social cohesion. To use London as an example, below is a
representation of the distribution of wealth, showing in dark red are where
people are most deprived (lower levels of education, higher unemployment,
teenaged pregnancies, etc.) and in
green, exactly the opposite (higher education, longer life expectancy lower
levels of unemployment, etc.)
Every
city will have this map. This is an
unequal distribution; it is about inequality.
And here is Ricky’s “analytic, social scientific analysis of London,”
which is actually what London “feels” like:
How do we try to
avoid this inequality happening? Forms
of governance and control matter.
Compare what we were able to institute in recent years in London (where
there had been almost no local representation) with the situation in Delhi:
What you do not see
on the London chart is the orange color between the blue of the central
government and the green of the local authorities, which is the state; in Delhi
there is a lot of orange, a lot of blue, but not very
much green, local control. What is
missing in Delhi is the red of metropolitan governance which was what we were
able to create in a major way in London beginning with Ken Livingston.
The two biggest
issues that cities face are the environment and social cohesion. On the graph below, the vertical axis shows
the ecological footprint (the further up you go the more energy per person you
use), while the horizontal axis shows the UN Human Welfare index (the further
to the right, the better educated, longer life expectancy, etc.):
The relationship
between human development and ecological footprint has different patterns: The
US is extreme in terms of both environmental and consumption patterns—and the
Earth is in terrible trouble if everyone tries to emulate this pattern. If you look at the dotted line, which is 1
Earth’s amount of energy we have, you see that if we all live like Americans,
we would need 5 Earths—which simply
won’t work! India is way down at the
bottom at the moment—and this is a big transition, a fascinating moment; and
the question is which way does it go?; which model do
you choose? And we at the Urban Age and
the LSE are asking how does governance actually help us to understand these
questions?
Shaping
Urban Futures. (Chair: Ricky
Burdett)
Joan Clos (Executive Director,
UN Habitat and Under-Secretary General of the
UN, and former Mayor of Barcelona,
pictured below) gave a presentation entitled, “Towards a Global Agenda for Urban Development,” in which he
discussed how urbanization in the world is going.
In
his important article by the same name in the conference Newspaper, he wrote about the
UN’s New Urban Agenda:
The year
2016 – with the celebration of the third United Nations Conference on Housing
and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) – should represent a turning
point in the debate on the future of our cities. Habitat III is a unique
opportunity for governments and institutions around the world to engage in a
New Urban Agenda that addresses the challenges of rapid urban growth and offers
a new model of urbanisation.
In
tackling the problem of sustainable urbanisation, a
three-pronged approach is needed, covering the areas of urban regulations,
urban planning and urban finance. If the world’s cities are to move from an
unsustainable to a sustainable urban future, it is essential to identify and to
coordinate efficient and implementable measures in each of those three areas.
…Governance
is the enabling environment that requires adequate legal frameworks, efficient
political, managerial and administrative processes, as well as mechanisms,
guidelines and tools to enable the local government to respond to the needs of
the citizen. Local governments have the proximity to translate the principles
of good urban governance into effectively managing, governing and developing a
city, and ensuring equitable access to citizenship…
…Good
governance and the rule of law at the national and subnational levels are
essential for the achievement of those objectives, in order for us to move to a
more sustainable model of urbanisation. If urbanisation is to be truly inclusive and sustainable,
participatory mechanisms and integrated human settlement planning and
management practices are crucial.
He
focused on giving a bit of perspective on where we are and where we are
heading, because we need a new paradigm—if we continue to build cities as we
are now (remember the last slide of Ricky’s), we’re on the wrong track. Joan
said there have been two real revolutions in organizational paradigm: the first being the 19th
century, industrial city, which was transformed by industrialization; because
of the inflow of workers (and immigration) cities demolished and broke through
their Medieval walls and did a huge expansion (he used two cute examples:
Amsterdam in the 1876 and New Amsterdam [Manhattan] in the 1811, which, in the
case of the latter, led to the breaking down the walled city [at Wall Street]
and three surveyors drew the lines of the larger grid which we walk today in
Manhattan); this revolution in paradigm
was driven by the fact that the cities were too crowded: conditions in mid-19th
century London were shocking, with poor people so packed together that it was
the set up for the cholera epidemic of 1851—and the fear which that engendered
led to the walls coming down and the population spreading out. (But Joan pointed out that what made the
change possible was that the rich
people had been packed in with the poor people and were also in danger from
these conditions; and they had the wherewithal to insist that the city spread
out and create room for them to isolate themselves.) Vienna and Barcelona grew similarly at that
time. In this expansion model there was
no zoning, no legal prescription for how to use the land. The
next revolution was 20th century model was the new paradigm
developed by Le Corbusier in the 1971: the utopian city of the future for 3
million people. This model of
towers-in-the-park, superblock, with wide streets, and the car was so
successful that it has been built all over the world—and it is continuing to be
the model for building all over the world, even where it no longer makes sense. From the socialist perspective, it satisfied
the push for every industrial worker to have the same decent apartment, equal
for every worker. And every industrial
worker will have a car—the technology of the moment, which would allow freedom
of movement. Joan showed just the towers-in-the-park
side of a slide we often show in the Urban Age, and asked whether the audience
who do not know it from the Urban Age could identify where the very
generic-looking development might be in the world—Asia, America, Africa? Is it
possible to differentiate?
It
is impossible to tell, because it has been reproduced everywhere. In case you are
not familiar with the whole photograph, it is of Caracas:
It
is an ecologically unsustainable model; it consumes a huge amount of energy.
He
said what is needed is a change of paradigm, a new, 21st century
model. The old model consumes too much
energy and has led to a suburbanization of housing. We need a model using infrastructure needs as
the guide for planning. The UN is trying
to gather people together to work out a new paradigm.
Ricky asked whether Joan
thought a change of government structure could help in the creation of this new
model.
Joan: Of course, because
every one of these changes of paradigm has come with a change of
government. He noted that the 20th
century model had been corrupted by both sides in the Cold War: the Soviet and
capitalistic patterns both follow the same model of Le Corbusier. But we shall have to see what happens with
democracy over the coming years.
Richard Sennett (the other
co-Founder of the Urban Age, and
Professor of Sociology at the LSE
and NYU, pictured below)
gave a talk, “Ungovernable Urban Complexity,” in which he raised the question of
how urban designers can have things that may be useful in Delhi. Richard
began by quoting Erik Erikson in his biography of Gandhi: “Growth means
managing complexity that you don’t simplify.” His premise is that cities
generate complexity, and that the increasing speed of change requires new forms
of thinking and new forms of management: historically there was a more natural
fit between form and function, but that has broken down, and the fit now must
be managed. The speed of growth tends to
produce a tendency to produce an artificially tight fit between form and
function that causes problems and mis-matches.
Technology must be managed and adjusted toward how people actually live; there
is a real question how to use technology democratically. Climate change underscores the need to think
about issues in broader and non-linear terms.
As Richard wrote in his
article, “Coping with Disorder,”
The
perils of climate change cannot be addressed by thinking at the scale of urban
self-shaping, as Max Weber wanted; or that of local, inclusive democracy, such
as Henri Lefebvre believed in. And climate change has rendered Franz Fanon’s
opposition of urban versus rural out of date.
Adapting
to climate change…means that coherence of the city’s form will alter, due to
forces beyond human control.
“Unpredictable”
is the key word – there is certainly a water crisis coming, but we don’t yet
know what form it will take. Almost all models of climate change argue for
non-linear changes, chance combinations, erratic consequences, all occurring in
the coming decades. All this argues that rural and urban must be seen together,
as one disturbed ecology. The political problem is how
to practice governance under these conditions. In part, the needs of the city
have to dictate what happens in the countryside, but the political problem is
complex because the natural system is becoming ever more unstable. How do you
legislate under these conditions?
To adapt,
the city can no longer cohere; we must meet the uncertainty of a physically
unsettled world by thinking of the city itself as a more unstable place.
This is
the logic of what natural scientists call open systems. These are structures
which model chance, or seemingly illogical change, or complex events which de-stabilise an equilibrium condition.
All these
phenomena are erratic in the short term, year-on-year, though the long-term
effects are certain over the course of decades. We should be thinking about the
networks linking big cities in the same way. Specific patterns of migration are
as unstable in the immediate term as changes in the natural environment; for
example, movement across the Mexican-American border is an erratic, convulsive
process year-on-year, though the cumulative effect is clear. So, too, is the
economy of networked cities – financial flows are not smooth and linear, nor
are investments in real estate or primary industry. Open system analysis thinks
about networks as trembling rather than placid connections – because the
connections are complex they are peculiarly open to disruption.
We must
acknowledge the disorder to come and learn to cope with it: the urban challenge
we face now is how to live openly.
Democratic
politics have to find a way to manage the radical unfolding of change—and this
is a problem of governance. It is the Eriksonian idea of coping with rather than trying to defeat
complexity. Governance is about how to manage conditions—the effects of nature,
real world problems.
Joan Clos raised the question
of who it is who is going to be providing it? Will it be the highly skilled
majority, or the majority with low levels of skill and knowledge?
Richard said that in open
systems theory “chaos” does not mean lack of form; it refers rather to the
irregularity of events.
Ed Gaeser (Professor of
Economics at Harvard University,
below) spoke of “City Institutions for
an Urban Age.”
He
began by disagreeing with Gandhi’s statement that, “I regard the growth of
cities as an evil thing, unfortunate for mankind and the world.” While they are capable of breeding evil, Glaeser believes
that they actually are engines of progress:
in fact, “the pathway out of povery is through
urbanization.” He cited the fact that
before 1960, the poor were 0% urbanized; since then there has been a 10% growth
of urbanization and a 50% increase in income.
In rich countries there is little difference in reported happiness
levels between urban and rural dwellers; in poor countries, rural dwellers are
far less happy than their urban counterparts (with the interesting exceptions
of Iraq and Bangkok). People in cities need government, and there is real
impact to the decisions made by government:
before the huge expenditures NYC made for public health (mainly to
provide clean water), life expectancy used to be 7 years shorter in NYC than in
rural areas; after the systems were in place, it was three years longer!
But there also can be very bad, wasteful decisions: the corruption of
NY’s Tammany Hall in the 1860s led to huge fraud around water in NY; and
Detroit’s ill-conceived monorail system ended up being a complete waste of
money, due to the total lack of any prior cost-benefit analysis being
done. Glaeser is an ardent supporter
of public private partnerships (PPPs); and he is a
firm believer in the power of free markets.
He said, “If you build it, they will drive on it”—suggesting that it is
necessary to change people to use the streets differently. We need to be wary of the monumental level of
NIMBY-ism (“Not In My Back
Yard”; something to which my city planning friend Alex Garvin usually adds:
NOTE [“Not Over There, Either”] and BANANA [“Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere
Near Anything”]). As for climate change,
he pointed out that cities are not
the problem; high density living is a good thing ecologically.
Joan Clos summarized his
feelings by saying “I am a politician, not a scientist: I need to do things.”
KEYNOTE: Mohammed-Bagher Ghalibaf (three term Mayor of Teheran, below) gave a keynote
entitled, “Governing Teheran.”
He
said that in 2005, Teheran suffered from high levels of air pollution,
fragmented management style, inadequate infrastructure, and lack of meaningful
public participation in government. What
was missing, he said, was a social approach.
Subsequently, they have expanded their subway system from 2 to 7 lines,
tripling its capacity; they have introduced a BRT system; they have an
integrated, innovative, knowledge-based waste management system; and they have
significantly expanded their green space.
Teheran’s remaining challenges are poverty, child labor, panhandling,
addiction, slums, excessive immigration, and social injustice. As mayor, he is
building a social approach—focusing on decentralization and maximum citizen
participation: urban development should be based on public participation,
public education, and an awareness of the needs of low income people. The municipality must transform from service
provider to a social institution; a neighborhood management approach must lead
to citizen participation; the participation of vulnerable classes needs to be
insured in urban development plans; consumption patterns and social behaviors
need to be reformed to upgrade lifestyles. {Gee…it all sounded great…fabulous,
even. Just as one would want it to be;
and, if the truth be known, something I think might once have been possible to
work toward in that country, which, after all, has always had the largest, best
educated middle class in the Islamic world. (I always think about the fact of
Iran’s extraordinary current film community and realize the level of
sophistication of a major portion of that society, and conclude that it is the
country in that region that had by far the best chance of having a western
style society and government—democracy, even.) But Teheran,
in 2014 Iran... IDK…}
UBANIZING GOVERNMENT: DEVOLVING THE SATE. (Chair: Jagan Shah [Director, National
Institute of Urban Affairs] and Andy
Altman [Senior Visiting Fellow, LSE
Cities], pictured below)
Jagan Shah began by saying we need to understand urban governance
from a historical as well as political perspective.
He
said that Richard Sennett talked of a multiplicity of government, and Ed Glaeser had said the cities need government; it is people who are at the core of the
metropolitan phenomenon.
KC Sivaramakrishnan (Chair, Centre
for Policy Research) spoke on “A
Voice for Urban India: Decentralizing Governance.” He began by saying he
carries the burden of memories, of
the historical perspective—of politicians not wanting to move forward. Urban government is thought of as “lesser,”
and cities are under-represented in parliament.
India’s 74th Amendment has not helped bring about better
representation as it was designed to do; the base has been fragmented. Mayors in India continue to be ceremonial—and
are virtually always “one year wonders”; and moreover they are increasingly not
directly elected. The major loophole in
the 74th Amendment is 243Q: state governments are allowed not to set
up municipal bodies in industrial townships.
Do we want politically appointed officials to run our cities? He is suspicious of the 100 Smart Cities
initiative, supposedly designed to deliver better services; sees it as actually
a way to maximize privatization by creating a way to monetize land—and that is not smart. There must be political accountability. There is a problem of fractured thinking:
government and governance need to go together. Do we really want democracy—and
are we willing to pursue it? There does
not seem to be enough of an outcry on the part of the people—or any real push
for control.
Gerry Frug (Professor of Law,
Harvard University) spoke on “Deciding Who Decides.”
People
think that city governance means government needs to be more responsive to the
governed, The organization of city government is
always in the hands of central government: in the US and India, it is in the
hands of the states; in most of the world, it is in the hands of national
government. It is these central
governments that decide matters of revenue and what cities can do. The result of this central control is the
creation of endless bodies—government fragmented along specific functions. The answer does not lie in local authority;
every issue (land use, transportation, housing, the environment, poverty) is a
local, state, and national
issue. Also, every city is surrounded by
others; cities cannot decide their own futures: incompetence, corruption, etc.
Yet local democracy is vital for human freedom—people need to have
control over their own lives; it cannot be handled nationally. Both arguments are correct, and they conflict
with each other; both bottom-up and top-down control
are necessary. The question is how
cities can participate in the allocation of power. Gerry
discussed the situation in the US (as he did in detail in his most insightful
article by the same name in the conference Newspaper:
People
often think of city governance in terms of local democracy: the goal is to make
city officials more responsive to the local population. In the United States,
this certainly is one of the issues that needs
addressing. But it is not the whole story – indeed, it is less than half the
story. It fails to mention that the design of city governance is not in the
hands of local residents or city officials. It is the product of state law…
This dual
focus of the structure of city government – sometimes responsive to local will,
sometimes responsive to state policy – is a fundamental ingredient of city
governance in the United States. It cannot be overcome – and should not be
overcome – by choosing one perspective over the other. Local responsiveness is
sometimes undesirable, and so is state policy. Instead, the primary task of
city governance reform in the United States is to redesign this dual focus to
better align state policy with the exercise of decentralised
power.
The city
governance problem in the United States is that both positions just outlined –
for state power and for local power – are correct. Yet they contradict each
other. The governance problem, then, is to figure out how to deal with this
contradiction.
…the
better approach in the United States would be to shift the power to allocate
decision-making authority from the state to a new kind of regional institution.
What this
means is that the regional institution should be a forum for collective
decision-making by the region’s cities. Every city in the region should be
represented (with votes weighted by population), and the decisions they
collectively make about the allocation of power should be decisive. One should
note that this is not a call for city autonomy. No city, acting alone, will
have authority over an issue unless the cities collectively agree that it
should. In this way, the regional organisation can
help overcome the parochialism that now undermines efforts to decentralize
power. Neighbouring cities affected by any decentralised decision would be part of the decision-making
process: they can make sure the allocation of power takes their interests into
account. The key difference for city power in this proposal lies in the fact
that cities – if they work together – will be able to design the decentralized
system.
Naturally,
this notion of new regional agglomerations of power appeal to Gerry as the answer elsewhere in the
world, as well—although he is careful to maintain that he knows this directly
only in the US.
Andy asked: so, who
decides? We have to decide what we want—but who decides? KC you were part of crafting of the Amendment,
but you said that the attempt to empower city government has failed. But you also talked about weak demand, a lack
of meaningful desire on the part of the citizenry. So both the legislative attempt from the top
and the push from the bottom seem to be ineffective. Importantly: who is the “we”?
KC said that we have
not come to terms with the reality of urbanization: for a long time, we
accepted the rural; now we live in cities, with the reality of urbanization and
the effects of urbanization—including increased inequality and the feeling of
being a part of a meaningless process of urbanization.
Panel
Discussion.
Charles Correa (Architect, and my dear friend from
early in the Urban Age program) [As I said earlier, I call your attention to
the video of our friend Charles Correa,
which I suggest you watch to get a sense of the power and elegance of Charles
and his thinking. His brief talk begins at minute 31:30
of the panel available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dloCPkws8i8&t=26m15s.]
Charles
said that we have democracy in our country, but not in our cities. In a model left over from the way the British
governed in colonial times, India’s cities are run by chief ministers and
cabinets, not elected by the people
whom they are governing. They make all
the crucial decisions. In his excellent
article, “Accountability and Governance,”
Charles wrote that
There are
two crucial aspects of urban governance that our cities desperately need…:
Accountability…and proactive governance.
Around
the world, more and more cities are being run by political leaders who are
directly elected by the people of that city. So they champion the interests of
the citizens - or they will not get re-elected. That is the essential mechanism
by which Democracy ensures the accountability of our political leaders. It’s as
simple as that.
To
install this system of accountability, we need not convert our cities into
independent city-states. …That is what
democracy is about: confrontation resolved through a process of negotiation.
This
unfortunately is not what happens in our Indian cities. Instead of this system
of tough negotiations, with each side trying to protect the interests of their
respective electorates, our Indian cities are run by a State Chief Minister who
is not elected by the citizens of that city – and who can therefore be
completely oblivious to their wishes. …Our Chief Minister has no accountability
whatsoever to the citizens of this city because we do not vote for his
re-election. In that sense, we have no democracy in our cities! What we have
instead is a carry-over from the British Raj, where the Governor of Bombay
Presidency had complete power over Bombay – as well as all the other cities
along the west coast, right up to Ahmedabad, Karachi and Quetta.
In recent
years, Delhi has become the one conspicuous exception. But even this is not
exactly true, because the Chief Minister of Delhi does not have jurisdiction
over several of the most important civic bodies and government departments
which constitute that city.
When
Arvind Kejriwal became CM, this conflict came vividly
into focus. He stood up for the city government of Delhi, against the larger
political context, i.e. the Central Government. There is nothing wrong in doing
that. In fact, it is an essential part of his job. And let’s not forget, it was
the confrontation between Ken Livingstone and Margaret Thatcher, with their
conflicting agendas, that re-energised
the city of London.
The other
crucial ingredient missing in our cities and towns is pro-active governance.
…That sense of urgency is totally missing in our urban governance – although
the problems facing Third World cities are among the most fast-changing and
lethal we know, and crucial to our very survival.
This is
of crucial importance when it comes to the staggering problem that lies at the
heart of the crisis that most Third World cities face, viz., the distress
migration from villages to towns and cities - with squatters on pavements and
other crevices all over the cities. This has invoked two diametrically opposed
attitudes. There are those that say: ‘Throw them out!’ and others that say:
‘No, they have the right to stay where they are’. Neither attitude helps.
Letting them stay where they are, living in bestial conditions, insults our own
human values. Throwing them out misses completely the underlying problem, viz: the dehumanising living
conditions and viciously skewed land-holding patterns that prevails
in our rural areas.
Europe
went through much the same process in the 18th and 19th centuries, when
millions of desperate Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, English, decided to leave
– and for much the same reasons. But due to the colonial system operating at
that time, they could re-distribute themselves around the globe – an option not
open to Indians today. So for the rural migrant, arriving in Kolkata or Pune is
a substitute for a visa to Australia. That is the functional role that our
cities are playing in the development of our nation. What we have to do is find
ways to increase the absorptive capacity of this urban system.
[The] National
Commission on Urbanisation’s…Report identified
several strategies through which this could be done… For example, in order to
alleviate the pressure on our larger cities, the Commission identified 325
small urban settlements that are growing faster than the national average –
despite the lack of basic amenities, like sewerage, water supply or transport.
Most of these are mundi towns (i.e., market towns) – for instance, Erode in
Tamil Nadu, a town of 160,000 with no sewage system, but which has evolved into
the most important centre in India for reprocessing
textiles. A bustling town, full of maniacal energy, it has buyers from all over
the world, stepping over open drains. If the right decisions and investments
are made, towns like Erode could form the nucleus of new urban centres that would deflect migration away from our existing
cities – completely changing the dimensions of the daunting problems we face.
And there are more than 300 other towns like Erode. This is why we need
proactive urban governance – instead of the passive attitude which has now
become chronic.
We need a confrontation between who runs
our Bombay and who runs Maharashtra. That is the strength of other places.
We need to harness
the incredible proactive force of India’s cities. Our government is faced with
an enormous challenge—we have never seen such a huge change in human
history: the distressed migration, all
over the third world including India. In
the past, colonial systems allowed for these people to redistribute themselves
around the world; that is not open to us today. When someone shows up today in Bombay or
Kolkata or Pune, it is a substitute for a visa to Australia! Our responsibility is to increase the
absorptive capacity of our system. That
is the real question we should be discussing.
We need to have an
overview: the Indian people have an
incredible energy and drive; but we cannot just sit back and wait for squatters
to appear. I have never seen the kind of
overview of analysis of India’s cities like what Ricky presented today—which are growing at what speed and why. We have cities developing where people are
stepping over open sewers in their streets; this is not acceptable. The cities of India are part of our national
wealth: they generate the skills we need
to develop as a nation (doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers, nurses—all urban
skills); our cities are engines of economic development; and they are places of
hope—and, for the millions of wretched have-nots of India, perhaps their only
road to a better future. What we need is
proactive government.
In the final
analysis, India’s cities will decide the future of the nation.
Hilmar von Lojewski (Councilor for Urban Development, German
Association of Cities)
began by saying how
wonderful it was to hear Charles, an architect, being so politically
interested; he wished architects in Germany—at least some of them—would be so
interested. Self-government is
guaranteed by the German Constitution, but there are still three dimensions we
need to work actively on—the political, the financial, and the people. Long
history (207 years, since the declaration of Riga) of self-governance in German
cities; on the other hand, we know how fast decentralization can come (e.g., Indonesia). He said that the burden of finance follows
the burden of tasks to the local level is a principle of great importance. There is a high interest in local government
performing well, but there is not a well-developed interest in participation in
local elections. We need to mobilize
people to participate in public life and public discussions.
Andy: so, in India’s cities “the fit is not right “; and
Gerry said it was not right in the US, even when there are strong mayors…
Hilmar: ‘Robust concepts’ are needed for urban
democracy and resilience. There is a
misfit: finances and power in cities are not aligned.
Gerry: We have to consider who are the stakeholders? They tend
to be corporations and powerful groups.
It doesn’t do any good for cities to “be responsive” if they have no
power.
Vijai Kapoor (Lieutenant
Governor of Delhi, 1990 to 2004)
spoke about the fact that
there were two Amendments passed at about the same time: the 73rd (which primarily dealt
with rural areas) and 74th (which dealt with urban): why were the
loopholes left in it, and why was such liberal use made of them? Why were
powers not transferred from central government to local government? Delhi, by executive order, was exempted from
the Amendment. The other question is why
was the obvious intention of the Amendment to devolve control to local levels
not carried through to other laws? The desire to be looked after still
overwhelms the other drivers in the process.
In 1957 when Delhi was abolished as a state, there was only the Delhi
Development Act and the Delhi Municipal Corporation (no Delhi Assembly), all
power stayed vested in the central government; but after Delhi was given a
measure of self-governance in the early 90s, why were those powers not
transferred from the central government? Local legislators cannot amend a
pre-existing parliamentary law without the consent of the central
government. The answer is that these
Amendments were merely political posturing: there was no attempt meaningfully
to transfer any power. KC mentioned weak demand on the part of
the people. There is also a weak will on
the local level to levy taxes. Take the
issue of the property tax: why is it non-existent to 90% of the urban
population? Delhi raises only about 1,000 Crores a year that way. If it were strengthened as a tax base, that
would activate the demand for local devolution of control—strengthen the
resource base. If property tax revenues
were transferred to local government, there would be a change; but where will
the active demand for local control come from?
Central government will not let go of power unless something is created
on the demand side. How does one create
that interest? Delhi is metropolitan area—is it a question of Metropolitan
government? Unless some innovative
approaches are created, we are not going to get out of the stranglehold of
central authority.
Wolfgang Schmidt (State
Secretary, City of Hamburg) said that he was “working in
paradise”
Because
Hamburg was a City/State.
Perhaps this can serve as a model?
Hamburg is one of 16 federal states (like Berlin); and each state has
3-6 votes in the parliament. Hamburg,
with a population of 1.3 million, has 3 votes (out of the total 69); three of
the states have a total of 10 votes out of the 69; and the biggest state, with
a population of 8 million, has only 6 votes.
Meenakshi Lekhi (Member of the India Parliament) said
that bureaucracy in India was completely unresponsive. There is a problem with responsibility
without authority, and of accountability.
Delhi has three
municipal corporations: each is not in position to do what is needed. There is a big question of who controls the
funding.
Gerry: If you organize localities so that the finances are
their own, the poor areas without resources will go under; if the control of
finances is central, the central government will have all the authority.
Neither one is working very well; we have a structural problem about organizing
finance, not choosing between the two.
Charles: The whole Chinese miracle was fueled by
Hong Kong; Bombay could function the same way, if we managed things
correctly. The mindset of the government
has to change; there needs to be a sense of urgency. India’s situation is far more urgent than
more developed places like New York.
It’s not just accountability; it’s urgency.
KC: There is a crisis of jobs, growing population,
migration. People and institutions have
to come together. Is the Amendment a policy or a posture? What good is
knowledge if you can’t come together and do something? All the big issues are multi-governmental.
Wolfgang: Hamburg collects € 30 billion, but only
gets to keep € 9 billion. How much can we really control? It’s a crucial
problem.
Gerry: Waiting for people to demand a change in the structure
cannot happen.
Andy: “Growth is managing complexity that you don’t
simplify.” The speed of urbanization
creates an urgency to generate dialogue about proper form and fit.
DAY ONE – 14 NOVEMBER
FRIDAY
Afternoon Session
Inclusive Governance: Agency and Disadvantage. Co-Chairs: Jo Beall, Director, Education
and Society, British Council,
and Mukulika Banerjee, Associate Professor of Anthropology,
LSE.
Abhijit Banerjee (Professor
of Economics, MIT) spoke on “Understanding the Choices of the Urban Poor.”
We have a vibrant democracy in India, why
don’t we get better conditions for the poor?
Several answers are given; but I am going to examine the evidence based
mostly on surveys done on low income neighborhoods in Delhi that provide
answers quite different from the ones commonly proposed. People actually are
not moving about quickly: the average length of residency is 17 years. Complaints about slums: water, sewage, and
garbage are the main ones; electricity is not a problem. Slum dwellers vote at the rate of 86%; they do participate. Politicians get money to spend on projects;
what do they spend it on—roads. Roads are not
a concern in slums. These people attend rallies, they approach public officials—much more than
middle class people do. Political
incentive is broken, but not because people don’t care or are in conflict. People do get faulty information—particularly
about the people who represent them.
Politicians are totally unresponsive to the real concerns of
people. The real problem is that
politicians assume they will not be re-elected, so they do not care. The political parties just move them to
another area the next time.
Sue Parnell (Professor,
African Centre for Cities) spoke on
the topic, “Governance Needs Government:
The Case of African Cities.”
Even back
in 1941, Nairobi was run for a particular constituency, and its governance
regime was basically imported. 70 years
later, we still know a great deal about Nairobi’s government: many aspects of the governance arrangements don’t work very
well: the revenue streams don’t manage to meet everybody; the legal code is
inappropriate both at the top and the bottom; the city is not working; and we
wouldn’t choose these particular forms of governance and government
going forward. We don’t talk about government,
because: 1) neo-liberalism and the reduction of state power relative to
corporate and financial forces; 2) poor state performance, governments lack
legitimacy, particularly locally; and 3) recent push for participatory
inclusion of non-state actors in urban management. In the context of this moment of city
building in the African context, we need to utilize the power of
government. Central governments have
been essentially anti-urban, or just haven’t known what to do about the
problems of cities. Local governments
are weak and lack jurisdiction over the majority of their population; and they
have to compete with powerful institutions like banks, gangs, or central
governments; and municipalities lack revenues.
The question of the state is back on the political agenda, so it makes
this an important moment. There are some things only the state can do. Reinstating the state in the process puts the
focus on the democratic process at the city scale. What are we to do about the things that are
hard to control: traditional power (power of the chiefs); informality (what
essentially lies outside the state. Have
to go back to basics—about how we design, manage, and implement the enforcement
of regulatory regime (building code, tax code, etc.). Compare to her city,
Cape Town. Whether it is the politics of control, or the politics of
ineptitude, designing the governance system is what is crucial for Africa’s
urban future.
Austin Zeiderman (Assistant Professor of Urban Geography, LSE) gave a talk on “Governing
Urban Unceretainty.”
Austin
described the Urban Uncertainty Project at the LSE: how do uncertainties about
the future shape the urban present, and what does it mean for urban
governance. Responding to different
forms of uncertainty (climate change, disasters, disease, financial crises, etc.) has become a prime government
imperative. We study how this imperative
shapes urban cities and contemporary life in six cities (across Asia, Africa,
and Latin America) in each city we studied a different form of uncertainty
(discussed three examples:
In Accra, Ghana,
crises in energy network that supplies the city—causes of uncertainty were
multiple, as were the attempts to deal with them. Residents reshaped the electrical delivery
system and the uncertainty of daily life across the grid; but reacts to crises
followed lines of class, power, and access: in areas of middleclass
development, there was reliance on private power generation, provided by real estate
developers (capitalized on the power uncertainties).
In Karachi there is a
securitized housing complex run by the military; people drawn there to reduce
the uncertainties of everyday life in a conflict-ridden city. But, rather than trust the government to
provide security, many citizens developed their own approaches—from resident
associations to armed gangs and militias—and produced new alliances between
formal and informal governance institutions to manage crisis. But new uncertainties were also generated by
this process. Social media became a
major modality of identifying what was dangerous.
In Buenaventura,
Colombia, vast amounts of private capital from around the world are being
funneled in infrastructure projects to entice commerce passing through the
bay—to become a world class port city, aimed at China; but situation in China
adds uncertainty, and climate change poses a huge threat to the port
development. But the city has also been
ravaged by paramilitary groups fighting over waterfront territory; much of the
city is still controlled by these violent groups.
The
six cities reveal differences, but also parallels: uncertainly not an
evenly-distributed condition; but uncertainty crossed some social divides,
uniting actors around common problems—possible source of political
collaboration; crosses different levels and scales—plans for governing
uncertainty often decrease some forms of it while increasing others. Rarely is there a final resolution: usually
uncertainty is just managed, not ended—which leads to the notion of governing through uncertainty. And government cannot abdicate its
responsibility for managing uncertainty or simply leave it to individual
players. As Austin concluded in his
piece, “Colombia: Fluid Futures,” in
the conference Newspaper:
“Urbanists need to look beyond packaged success
stories from metropolitan centres. Creative responses
to the world’s urban challenges may be found in unexpected places – if only one
dares to look.”
Panel
Discussion.
Dunnu Roy (Director, Hazards
Centre) asked of the speakers, who had spoken about what the city should
be, whether it was possible to change the definition of the city itself.
The city is a “center
of growth,” but center of growth of what?
It is essentially a center of expression.
If, as Susan says, that the city is linked up
with corporate powers and developers, are we not looking at the city as
extractive? It is a certainty that these
cities are going to extract and exploit.
Adam Greenfield (Senior Urban
Fellow, LSE Cities) Another elephant in the room: question of technology; hasn’t
been mentioned except in relation to “smart cities,’ which I am against.
The
point of big data is precisely to manage urban uncertainty—to predict and
prevent events that might be untoward from the perspective of urban
administrators. Big data allows
authorities to break out individuals from the general statistical picture of
populations; and this must be noted in any discussion of the concept of the
smart city. We have to stop inflicting
technologies on the poor and instead leverage those technologies they already
have a grasp of—mobile phones, and, increasingly, the smart phone—to allow them
to institute networks of self-care, and also underwrite demands on the
state. There is a highbred state,
responsible to its citizens via linkages and couplings or horizontal and
distributive technology which produces security on the level of the people
themselves. In his article, “Connected Cities,” in the conference Newspaper,
Adam wrote, “I remain convinced that ordinary city-dwellers can use networked
informatics beneficially, to support them in their aims of group coordination,
collective decision making and deliberative self-determination.” He used two examples:
Occupy
Sandy [which] emerged in response to the unprecedented damage done to New York
City by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012. … this group of amateurs – unequipped with
budgetary resources or any significant prior experience of logistics
management, and assembled at a few hours’ notice – is universally acknowledged
as having outstripped traditional, hierarchical and abundantly-resourced groups
like the US Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross in
delivering relief to the hardest-hit communities.
[and] The La Latina neighbourhood
of Madrid…once home to a thriving market hall… this site, el Campo de Cabada, increasingly began to attract graffiti, illegal
dumping and still less salutary behavior.
… a group of community activists…cut through
the fence and immediately began recuperating the site for citizen use.
Following a cleanup, the activists used salvaged material to build benches,
mobile sunshades and other elements of an ingenious, rapidly reconfigurable
parliament – and the first question they put before this parliament was how to
manage the site itself.
In both
these cases, ordinary people used technologies of connection to help them steer
their own affairs, not merely managing complex domains to a minimal threshold
of competence, but outperforming the official bodies formally entrusted with
their stewardship. This presents us with the intriguing prospect that more of
the circumstances of everyday urban life might be managed this way, on a
participatory basis, by autonomous neighbourhood
groups networked with one another in something amounting to a citywide federation.
Tikender Singh Pandwar (Deputy Mayor of Shimla) said he tried
to explain what his job was to his child, and decided to say he was “the first
garbage man of the city,” because handling garbage is one of the fundamental
roles and problems for government in India.
The question is who runs the city? Who runs the government? I as mayor
am the first person who is contacted; once told by someone complaining about
restoration of electrical services [after he had explained electricity was not
a municipal function],”I did not vote for the electrical department, I voted
for you.” People give their mandate
during an election.
We have a central
government that says, “you will get matching grants,”
which means people have to contribute. There are user charges on toilets, user
charges on water. I am buying water at INR 60 per kL and distributing at INR 8 per kL; it’s a mismatch.
Currently there is a concept of neo-Liberalism that you have to get
expenses back from the people; inclusive growth simply is not possible with
this paradigm.
Jo Beall: I’m not hearing anything very optimistic
about the agency of the urban poor.
Austin:
Inclusive growth as a kind of political imperative hovers over this
conversation. Inclusion can be thought
of in a political sense, and it also can be thought of in an economic sense; question
is in what sense and on what terms we are talking about inclusion—especially
given that where many of us work, jobs in the formal sector are hard to imagine
for a vast number of the urban population.
Hard to imagine inclusion under these conditons.
Then the issue shifts to the right to have a role in the production of
the urban, and perhaps government becomes involved in the distribution of what
people need to live a decent urban life.
Mukulika Banerjee: I wonder whether part of the problem of the
74th Amendment may be that there is a lack of information on the
part of elected officials themselves?
Tikender: Even though mine is
the oldest municipality in the Indian system, we are still in an evolutionary
phase. We have an association of mayors,
and we are making demands for the resources and powers we need; but come what
may, people realize they have an elected councilor. People are demanding; how
do we meet the demands? Experimenting at
the ward level with giving 10% of the moneys collected in the form of taxes in
the ward would go back to the ward committee, and that committee will decide
how it is to be spent.
Jo: asks Abhijit, how does it
compare with your findings?
Abhijit: We tried delivering specific information;
people didn’t want it. Since no
politician delivers, there is no specific sense of responsibility in the
system.
Tikender: That’s what we need: empower the local
government. Let’s do what the 74th
Amendment says.
Jo: You talked about the “tyranny of government”…
Sue: Matters whether
we’re talking about governance or government: what is at the normative base of
governance, what is this thing actually trying to achieve—is it inclusivity? Redistribution? Something other than a
growth agenda? We have to resolve that, and that becomes the expectation
of government. Then a whole set of
intermediate issues, and that’s where technology comes in—what we use to manage
different systems. Not just the
interaction between councilors and citizens.
Dunu: Why don’t
politicians want to fix slums? It has
been suggested it’s because politicians want to line their own pockets; but
only part of it. If people got what
they’re asking for—very specific: water, sanitation, garbage—they will also be
given entitlement to land; and that
is what the system doesn’t want to do.
They want to take it over from the poor and sell it to real estate
developers. Providing these things
legitimizes tenure; the informal system is actually is more extractive.
Tikender: I agree.
Slum dwellers are first in line to pay the taxes we levy, because it
legitimizes them.
Abhijit: Sewage and garbage are the only rights people
have that are recognized (by supreme court decision);
water is not (there is some indirect right to water, but it is via tankers, not
direct water flow). What is being said
is particularly true with regard to water—garbage and sanitation less so.
Dunu: The reason water is
different is because sewage and garbage do not only affect the slums: the middle class people living around them
are frightened that the hygiene issues will affect them.
Enrique Peñalosa: it was said that
the average length of residency in slums was 17 years; that would mean that the
new growth in slums has almost stopped.
Given the enormous growth rate in India, one would expect there to be an
enormous influx from rural areas and a tremendous growth in slums. Is it that the government has some fantastic
housing program that is taking care of this? Or is it that there is a police
control—a way to control land and to keep squatters from taking over land that
is more effective and limiting the growth of these slums. That means the problem may be even worse…
Question: does the panel agree that making inclusion
/ just government issue is too narrow: that the
problem is systemic and requires a systemic answer?
Anna Herrhausen: question to the
panel: heard a lot about government, governance, levels of government; leaving
structure aside, what is the experience as to outcomes for the people who
actually are being governed; on whichever level it may be, what is the
experience as it perhaps relates to the number of functioning toilets, or other
indicators at that granular level?
Mukulika: Three
areas—homelessness, migration; governance and inclusion; accountability and
performance of governments, and how they are assessed.
Austin: Last question goes to an important analytic
and political point: using Sue’s metaphor of that middle level of governing and
state practice, where whatever is happening on the top or the bottom levels,
what one sees on the ground (housing, environmental policy, transportation
plan) is lots of people doing the work, going from house to house, doing the
work—actually producing the infrastructure on which the city is based; a great
deal of political work being done there, regardless of how you think about
government and its structures and institutions, and who decides—even when there
are different forms of decision making, one sees very different kinds of
outcomes because there is a whole set of people doing this work, and we’ve
heard very little about these people who actually produce the urban.
Sue: You will not get
inclusive cities until you have a capable state that can deliver results to all
of its citizenry. But there is a bigger
question of how we would measure the success of inclusive governance in terms
to the sustainable goals and targets being set at the moment; how does our
global system insure that the kind of cities we have
are inclusive.
Abhijit: Every councilor in
Delhi is responsible to 40,000 citizens; we need far smaller units.
Jagan Shah: (to Sue) Is there still scope
for us to recover the area of individual’s rights and liberties? So much is
being rooted in communities, that we are in danger of
losing one of the key products of democracy, which is the individual. We are trying to create a new generation of
leaders, and leaders are individuals. Is
there scope for that?
Question: Why is it that cities
are not making streets with footpaths, and why do we not charge for parking?
Adam: A little wary of the language of inclusion; smacks of
our own benevolence in inviting the poor to table. I believe in direct action; people taking
matters into their own hands. We have
examples of people using available technology to take matters into their own
hands and doing things.
KEYNOTE: Neil Brenner (Professor
of Urban Theory, Harvard University)
gave a talk entitled “Urban
Governance—But at What Scale?”
My
photo, from the Urban Age tour
He said the issue is
at what scale we think about the issue of urban governance. Generally defined at the level of the city;
if you reframe the issue as the governance of urbanization, this changes this
scale to national, international, and planetary. Perhaps our concern with urban government is
a weakness, avoiding the bigger systemic issues: global economic crisis, national state restructuring
in the face of austerity toward market-oriented governance, and explosive
worldwide urbanization and environmental related crisis—since 70s, a
proliferation of local experiments to position in the global issues without
national or regional participation.
Cities are trying to develop new networks (e.g., C40 initiative on the environment) to deal with
issues—particularly climate change. One
of major forms of political strategy could be called global urbanism, an
attempt for cities to position themselves within global flows of capital with
some kind of narrative to deal with these problems: entrepreneurial cities,
global cities, smart cities, sustainable cities. We have to ask to what degree locally scaled
approaches can offer an adequate response for confronting the great problems of
21st century global capitalism.
Local strategies aspire to do
just this, and we tend to be celebratory about them; but what if this is just a
symptom of our weakness to deal with the big issues. We do need urban
governance, but there are serious operational limits to this: 1) regulatory
capacity of cities is circumscribed by national systems (which may actually
empower suburbs or rural areas and other tiers of government instead), and
devolving/decentralizing may create constraints, as well (particularly in an
age of austerity); 2) even though urbanization involves the growth of cities,
it also involves a variety of transformations of landscape and environment that
occur elsewhere to support those cities (food, water, energy, materials, labor,
waste), so need a concept of “extended urbanization” (broader forms of analysis
on a planetary level) that takes into account the geo-economic, geo-political
issues on the largest scale. Infrastructures that support urbanization, but
which go far beyond cities: crop lands—can’t have big cities without places
that supply them with food; infrastructures of transportation…need to think of
the urban and the rural as dialectically interconnected—“extended
urbanization.” We in the Urban Theory
Lab have been studying hydroelectric infrastructure developments in the
Himalayas designed to support South Asia’s need for power and water,
in areas which, even
though they lack the density of urban centers, become part of the broader urban
fabric. Point is to open up a
discussion: local strategies for the regulation of the early 21st
century are emerging, and they are very important; but their conditions of
possibility, parameters of actualization, and impacts are not simply local, but
rather national, continental, and planetary; and if we fetishize the local, we
fetishize a scale that weakens us, rather than enables us. We should think of
these localisms as a tactical maneuver, under conditions of volatility and
possible retreat; we need to use the local, but use it to open up discussion of
the core issue of governance—not just of cities or of concentrated
urbanization, but of the relationship between concentrated and extended
urbanization. There are governance problems in the way the entire world is
being transformed in order to supply the big cities with their most basic
metabolic functions, and that broader scale needs to be part of our
conversation, along with the local, regional, and metropolitan scales. {I
strongly agree with Neil on this, although I am a major
advocate for studying and working on these problems on the local level. Focusing too exclusively on the local—particularly when motivated by the paucity
of available resources on the state and national levels—is precisely what I was
railing at in our Urban Age 2010 Global
Metro Summit conference in Chicago (q.v.,
supra, “A BRIEF
COMMENT ON WHAT I OMITTED PREVIOUSLY: THE UA CONFERENCES IN CHICAGO, SÃO PAULO,
AND RIO”; it is also the pernicious fallacy in the currently very
popular book by Benjamin Barber, If
Mayors Ruled the World—a book that both Neil and I share a dislike of, due to its dangerous naïveté. Also, the need to see urbanization in its
interactive relationship with the rural and the world at large has been a major
theme in the excellent work of Urban Age regular (and friend of mine from its
beginnings) Dieter Läpple,
who unfortunately was not present at this conference.}
Ricky: An incredibly powerful argument: let’s not just focus
on urban governance, but let’s focus on the governing of urbanization—need to
be cautious about new movements to focus on the local level. Does that mean that the multi-national
organizations that exist—the U.N., for example—are OK? Can we rely on them to
deal with these transnational issues? Or do we need an even more radical, more
complex level of system?
Neil: I don’t have that answer to that, but I welcome the
exploration of it: what would be the appropriate institutional framework to
confront these challenges. Part of the
problem is that the predominant way the issues are currently being framed
actually constrains our ability to think about these questions: if we think
about the problem just in terms of the more than 50% of the world that lives in
cities and exclude consideration of the rural, we can’t even pose these
questions. The advantage of the concept
of extended urbanization is that it allows such an exploration
Ricky: A look at some of the maps in the conference Newspaper
quickly demonstrates how very seriously we at the Urban Age take this extended
view of the problems.
Governing Through Partnerships (Co-Chairs: Andy Altman and Partha Mukhopadhay, Senior research Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, photograph,
below)
Andy: What is the role
of the private sector in all this? What
should be the balance of the privatization of gain and the public assumption of
risk?
Arun Nanda (Chairman, Mahindra Lifespace Developers, Ltd.) “Investment and Infrastructure in Urban
India”
I am not a professor;
I am a practitioner. Public Private
Partnerships (PPPs) are not new in India: go back to
1875 with the development of the railways. India needs to spend $1 trillion on
infrastructure in the next 5 years; we all know what the deficit situation
is—it cannot be done without PPPs. But it needs to be a “PPPC,” the “c” being community;
need the involvement of the community. The previous plan had 1/3 of the funding
from PPPs; the next has 50%, $500billion from PPPs. Land
acquisition is a very big issue in this country; and if land acquisition risk
is not shared, it will not happen. Has to involve community: the community will not bring the money,
but unless you have the community buying into the mutual trust, it won’t work. Of course, it must be financially viable, or
it will not work for the private sector.
The government role is to bring a sharp focus on what they are looking
for. Private sector brings sensible
commitments: has to bring “patient capital,” as projects don’t move quickly as
they do in the private world; also need to “under promise and over deliver,”
rather than the opposite. First project
he did was a water project. Politically
too sensitive a topic; hugely subsidized by the government. It took 7 years to get a financial close.
Government gave the concession to bring water to an industrial town, Tiruppur. What made
it succeed, we brought Tiruppur Exporters Association
as a partner, gave them 5% of the equity, put them on the board of the company;
secondly, we could cross-subsidized the municipal and industrial components (we
could charge INR 40/kL to
the industrial components, and we supplied water to the municipality at INR 5/kL), and we were able to
break even; the third thing involved the problem of the private pumping ground
water, which had been degrading the quality of the ground water supply, and
from private tanker deliverers—and these things could not have been dealt with
without the support of the government.
Project could not have happened publicly, because they needed $200
million, and they did not have the resources; but we could not have done it
without the government, because we needed their support in dealing with the
problems I’ve mentioned. Very proud that our leakage rate is only 5%, whereas the world
average leakage rate is 12%.
Michael Berkowitz (Managing Director, 100 Resilient Cities, Rockefeller
Foundation), spoke on “Governing
Resilience Through Partnerships: 100 Resilient Cities Program.”
He said that his
program, to use Neil’s phrase, involves local experiments in urbanization in
100 cities across 6 continents. It is
the Rockefeller Foundation’s $100 million commitment to fund urban resilience,
which we define very broadly as the capacity of individuals, communities,
institutions, businesses, and systems within cities to survive, adapt, and grow
no matter what kinds of chronic stresses (shortages of water or food,
macroeconomic shifts, levels of crime) and acute shocks (earthquakes, floods,
terrorist attacks) they experience. We
define city not just as municipality, but the larger ecosystem. What makes for resilience is very specific:
the number of toilets; equitable distribution of resources, infrastructure
(both the built and natural environment—Bangalore used to have 1,000 lakes, now
it has 400, so it floods when it rains and has droughts when it doesn’t). We view there to be two main issues: cities
are complex and insufficiently organized; and cities miss or inadequately
leverage market solutions. Our plan: 1)
the hiring of a Chief resiliency Officer (to work across sectors and silos on a
resilience agenda); 2) the development of a resilience strategy (taking 6-9
months to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses and the priorities); 3)
assembling a platform of services to support and implement the strategy; and 4)
membership in the peer-to-peer network where cities can share their successes
and failures. In 2013, we selected 32
cities to participate, and we are about to announce the next 33 in December;
big and small, lots of variation, but also many similarities in what we’ve
observed: 1) around infrastructure, cities need $57 trillion of infrastructure
development through 2030, once in a lifetime opportunity to incorporate
resilient design into cities; 2) Equality and social cohesion will define
resilience agenda going forward—difference between cities that can handle a
shock and those that can’t is whether they have cohesive communities (neighbors
check on neighbors, mutual trust); 3) resilience challenges transcend borders
and jurisdictions—we need to make municipalities stronger, but still have to
work within coalitions and informal power. Surat
example, in Gujarat: had plague in 1994, overhauled the public health system,
did lots of community education; then in 2006, they had a massive flood—but
they kept moving, kept growing, and kept learning from it.
Jim Anderson (Director, Government Innovation Programs, Bloomberg Philanthropies) spoke on “Delivering
Innovation in Urban Governance: The mayors Challenge.”
Cities have to get
better at innovating—policy, governance, and nuts-and-bolts operational
things. Cities struggle to scope out
what they’re trying to accomplish; have a hard time thinking about
problem-solving in new ways; and have difficult time taking risks. Bloomberg Philanthropies is setting out to
boost the capacity of local governments to innovate, focused on a couple of key
ways. First, continuous innovation: the
relentless pursuit of better solutions for citizens (crafting a culture for
generating new solutions; proactive government and city halls); commitment of leaders (bring an urgency to
things); critical importance of data (diagnosis, measuring success,
communicating to public); flat beats vertical (too often organization is in silos,
and funding supports the silos); curiosity v.
creativity (need to be aware of what is already working elsewhere, don’t
reinvent the wheel); plan to act (but don’t plan forever); long distance
sprinting (keeping momentum by planning for quick wins within the long-haul
struggle); don’t go it alone (find effective partners). Some cities doing this extremely well: e.g., Michael Nutter in
Philadelphia. Most governments are just
at the starting point: don’t think about innovation as a process that they can
start and develop. The Mayors Challenge,
an innovation competition for cities that encourages mayors to develop bold new
ideas to improve city life. We have done
it twice. Broadly, encourages hundreds
of cities to think more radically about new approaches and engage in a
different set of conversations, take risks they otherwise would not tale. Going deeply, we invest in the teams we
select from the competition, engaging them in a very deep process over a period
of many months—goal is not only to help with the projects that were submitted, but
also to develop the tools to deal with these sorts of innovative projects. Grand prize winner, Barcelona, used a
human-centered design process, used lean principles for implementation,
utilized a complicated but sophisticated partnership with academics, civil
institutions, and citizens. The second
key factor we call the innovation delivery approach: small teams located within
city hall, reporting directly to the mayor as an in-house innovation
consultancy. Memphis, Mayor Wharton {AC Wharton, by whom I have been deeply
impressed, has also been a member of our friend Dan Rose’s somewhat similar
Rose Center for Public Leadership } has used these procedures to reduce commercial vacancy
rates in some very distressed areas by 30% and generated hundreds of small business starts. In New Orleans, Mayor Landrieu has used our
approach to generate a citywide campaign against murder, resulting in a nearly
20% reduction in murder, 2012 to 2013. We’ll be scaling this up to another 20 citie over the coming 2 years.
Panel:
Narinder Nayar (Chairman, Bombay First)
I want to share the
example of Bombay, where we have developed a very effective PPP between the
state government and the private sector.
At one time, Bombay had been a primary port city; the PPP, following a
McKinsey study which analyzed what the city was lacking and what it needed, set
up a structure of dealing with the problem of lack of implementation—a problem
of inadequate governance: there were 17 agencies responsible for building in
the city (some responsible to the state, some responsible to the municipal
corporation—with a total lack of coordination); also the planning process was
totally inadequate. There are 9
municipal corporations in the metropolitan region, and
no single person responsible for that area.
What we need is a proper mayor.
We need to involve the politicians in the PPP model. I don’t see the
politicians who are critically important in the process here today—they need to
be.
Andy: You talked about the idea of a “PPPC:; who is the “C”? If
government isn’t an elected government, how do we define who the private sector
is going to deal with? How did you do
that—how do you bring the C in, and how are they included?
Arun: We talk about stakeholders—used to mean
employees, now the community at large.
In any PPP, the community had three interests: they are primarily the
users (whether it is electricity, water, roads); there may be resources that
are controlled by the community; and ultimately the community pays for it, in
one form or another. You need to bring the community in right from the outset.
In the most painful example of land acquisition, you can do forcible
acquisition by the government, or you can go to the community and work out what
works for both of you.
Narinder: We could bring in the corporate sector, but
we needed assurances that the government would be there and tell us what they
wanted; wanted to work with the government.
The government has by and large been very responsive; but the system
doesn’t work, won’t move.
Partha: We don’t really
have an urban government in Bombay.
Ashwin Mahesh (Co-Founder, Mapunity) I used to be a climate scientist; climate
models did not used to include the Arctic or Antarctic in their models—would
make predictions about what was going to happen to the whole world, and they
were leaving out about 35-40º of latitude—and the most important ones.
These kinds of
discussions remind me of that: we talk about state government and city
government, and we don’t talk about citizens.
We need to remember that government is the creation of citizens, and not the other way
around; we tend to talk as if government got created in 1774 or 1947, and it is
not really true. Citizens have the
continuous right to rethink government and reset the basis in which government
is done. We know, “Of the people, for
the people, and by the people,” but we treat it as if all three mean the same
thing, and they don’t; “by the people,” in my reading, this means that there
are certain things we expect governments to do that, in fact, citizens
themselves ought to be able and empowered to do themselves. The solution to the challenges facing cities
is increasing the number of problem-solving people; and the largest pool of
such people is the citizenry. We keep mentioning Bangalore; it has 1,000 people
a day coming into it—and the reason is that the people there have much more
traction in the shaping of conditions on the ground than in most parts of the
country. People worry that if we were to trust people to organize the
solutions, it would end up being for the rich and middle classes, and leave out
the poor; but the rich and the middle class do
care about the poor: the public school system was not set up by the poor, the
public health system was not set up by the poor. We have not even begun to talk about what
citizens are capable to do.
Sanjay Sridhar (Regional
Director for South and West Asia, C40)
There are cities
where the mayor changes every six months—where the only position with any
longevity is the junior assistant engineer; a terrible problem of
continuity. Civil society can actually
function as the knowledge partner for the government—as a major part of the
problem-solving. I’m from Bangalore, and
in Bangalore there is a program known as B-CLIP (Bangalore City Incubation Program)
in which civil society is actually training people elected across the many
wards of the city in budget management, in participatory, integrative planning;
never been done before; but also training people aspiring to being
councilors—the next generation, who will stand for municipal office in the
future. B-CLIP invests in the city by
investing in its future. Another example
is the neighborhood improvement district—taking an entire city ward and
figuring out what needs to be done to bring in infrastructure, water, solid
waste management, land use change, etc.,
smallest scale planning on the smallest scale of government. Cities are now
taking the lead, because problem-solving actually takes place on that level,
where outcomes can be related to election cycles. Cities in India are complex, but they are
informally organized. Government needs to re-envision the role that it plays,
from being a service provider to being an enabler of services.
Sanjeev Sanval (Global Strategist, Deutsche Bank, and old Urban Age friend)
said that while cities
are complex adaptive systems, governing them does not have to be an organic
process, expecting vision to emerge from the people upward. My view is that
ultimately it comes down to leadership and vision; and in a democracy, people
vote to choose between visions and different leaders, they don’t formulate
those visions—at best, they choose between visions. Prime Minister Modi,
on the national level, has come up with the vision of 100 Smart Cities; one can
like it or not like it, but we have a PM who says that is what we are going to
build. What we need to debate is what
that is, but not debate where the vision will come from. It is not going to happen in a vacuum: most
of these Smart Cities will be built as extensions of existing cities. How do we create the actual partnerships? We
need to design what actually works in the historical and social context of the
place itself. Partnerships have to exist
in the actual context. 60 years ago, we
actually tried to build some new cities; and when those cities were built—by a
chap named Le Corbusier—we made a real disaster of it: many of India’s cities
today are dysfunctional as a direct result of his influence. All the functional cities in India today were
built before we became independent; since then India has not been able to
create a single, good, functional city, because of the Le Corbusier influence,
outside of India’s historical and social context. But this cannot be about communities to come
up with some wonderful vison; vision is a top-down phenomenon—we choose our
leader to lead. Sanjeev also had much to
say about slums and the role the 100 Smart Cities plan would play in the
movement of people within the country in his pithy essay in the conference Newspaper,
One of
the major mental shifts of recent years, especially among policy-makers, has
been the recognition that urbanisation is an
intrinsic part of economic development. Rather than being seen as a problem to
be denounced and somehow delayed, it is now accepted that urbanisation,
in its various forms, needs to be accommodated.
The
implication of this shift is that 300-350 million additional people have to be
accommodated in urban centres within a generation,
even though Indian cities are already struggling to provide for the existing
population. The Prime Minister clearly appreciates the issue and his plan to
create 100 smart cities should be seen as an attempt to create urban
infrastructure in anticipation of the deluge.
…In
particular, we need to think about how hundreds of millions of people will be
matched to jobs, homes and amenities according to their needs and abilities.
Once one
looks past the squalor, slums are ecosystems buzzing with activity – shops,
mini-factories, people moving in, people moving out. This is where migrants
will first find shelter, get their first job, become connected with social
networks and receive information about opportunities in the wider city. In
other words, slums play a critical role as routers in the migration process.
To
conclude, slums have always played an important role in the urbanization
process. This is where new migrants are absorbed and naturalised
into the urban system. Indian policy-makers need to design for urban spaces
that will play the same role. By anticipating this need, one hopes
that the absorption process can be made more efficient and the worst of the
squalor can be avoided.
Partha: I am reminded of a
story about Le Corbusier returning to Quartier Modernes Fruges, a housing project at Pessac he had done
many years earlier, and the person showing him around said, “Look what the
people have done to it!” Le Corbusier replied, “You know, it is always life
that is right and the architect who is wrong.”
Sanjeev says that this community stuff really doesn’t work; you don’t
know whom to engage with; you can’t find your leadership; how the hell is this
going to work?
Ashwin: This is a complex problem: it’s like
education: there’s a popular saying, “If you think getting an education is
hard, try going through life without it.”
Putting cities together in a way that leverages what people actually
want is difficult; but doing it any other way is even more difficult, and less
likely to get to a good outcome. It is
possible to build coalitions of people who get together and push for good
outcomes, and in the process build political and social capital and things
needed to make the city make certain types of choices.
Sanjay: For far too long,
we’ve avoided working with elected officials, because of the skepticism in the
community that you can’t trust them. The
planning process in Kolkata only requires there be at least one public
consultation before the plan is ratified; so what the agency does is that after
the plan is drafted, it’s put out for public comment, and then they say we met
the legal requirement of putting it up.
Communities have to be involved at all levels of the process—at the
input, at the throughput, and at the output—because that is the fundamental
process of “by the people” that the government has to satisfy.
Partha: We need to get
people back into the city, and we need to get politics back into the city. Is governing a city too complex to be left to
the people? What do people think? Let’s get the room into this…
Henk Ovink: Working in the
Northeastern region after Hurricane Sandy, it was about the inclusive
leadership of government to let go, not to say this is the vision we have; but
also not to step out of the way of the people, of the NGOs, the market,
businesses, science; it was exactly creating together with all those partners a
collaboration—leadership on all sides, not only government, but citizens—having
this inclusive approach, by setting a stage where you all step in—not only
putting in your dollars, but your time, your data, your design and thinking—and
be able not to reach for a middle, but rather to reach for the top. I think what all of you are saying is that if
you give in a little to what your neighbor is trying to enable, you actually
get to a better functioning city. If you
point to the government, or the citizens, or any one group to play the part by
itself, you will fail. So, inclusive leadership is letting go.
Andy: There is this whole question of institutional
change and flexibility: how do you really build in the sense that there is a
possibility to effect long term change that will go beyond the immediate term
of whoever is instituting it—issues of institutional change and time.
Partha: Part of the issue is
about building trust—and trust doesn’t come easy, especially in environments
where people have not always been given what they’ve been promised. How do you build that into your time frame?
Especially in India, as we move into new forms of government, people
wonder, is this form of governance a search for a better future, and a better
future for whom—and am I going to be part of that ride?
Michael: I do believe that
it is a real tension for everyone involved, whatever you are going for takes
real time. Projects like righting wrongs, restoring the wetlands, etc., are
generations-long projects, and that’s what real change is about. How do you combine long range planning with
some sustaining short-term wins?
Ashwin: Who is the person
you can think of who is likely to be in the same position over a long period of
time—that’s the citizen. Who is the
person who experiences the integrated output of all the different departments
rather than just one, again, the citizen. On the
question of trust: if you build a system that assumes that people cannot be
trusted to do what is good for each other by mutual cooperation, you will
actually end up with the problem you are talking about.
Michael: But it’s also the citizens who are throwing
out the leaders who do not show some quick wins year in year and year out. It was the citizens who threw out the BRT
project before it got a chance to function properly.
Andy: We were talking in
the first session about decentralization, and that on the one hand citizens
were indifferent, that there wasn’t really a demand from communities to change
governance—but there’s an urgency, urbanization is happening. How do you get the urgency in people? How do
you get them to demand the kind of change in urban governance that you
envision? What will motivate them?
Anshwin: They actually are
quite motivated. We got the 74th Amendment wrong, too: we should
have put financial devolution at the very end of that pipeline, should have
moved the money down the system first, and all the other things would have
happened subsequently if we had done that first. Telling people that they have a voice, they
have a right, but they don’t get to make any budgetary decisions about how
money should be used; have to bring money to the choices people make around that
money, and then the rest will follow.
Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award Ceremony
The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award is a
travelling prize presented to initiatives within a specific city that
utilize partnerships to improve the quality of life and the quality of the
urban environment. The award celebrates the Urban Age mission that connects
quality of life to the quality of the urban environment, and it is given to projects
that improve the urban conditions of their communities and the lives of their
residents. The winners are
selected by an independent jury following an open call for applications. Since 2007, the award, worth USD
100,000, has been presented to initiatives based in Mumbai, São Paulo,
Istanbul, Mexico City, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro.
The
evening of 14 November Friday, the seventh Deutsche
Bank Urban Age Award was presented at the residency of Germany’s Ambassador to India, Michael
Steiner.
Here
Ambassador Steiner and his wife Eliese
welcome Craig Calhoun.
Anshu Jain (Co-CEO of Deutsche
Bank) presided over the ceremony:
There
were two projects sharing this year’s award: Chintan, Material recovery Facility (MRF), New Delhi Railway Station,
and GOONJ. The
first, Chintan, is
described thusly on the Award’s website:
The MRF project at the New Delhi Railway station manages tons
of unsorted garbage from the numerous trains that arrive at the railway station
everyday. The garbage which would otherwise end up in
landfill dumps outside the city is sorted into organic and non-organic waste by
trained workers at the center. The organic waste is then composted into manure
through micro- composting and the non-organic waste is systematically sorted
into various recyclable components of which only 20% ends up in landfills.
Proper management and systematization of the process leads to more dignified
livelihoods for the otherwise marginalized rag-picking community. The sorted
waste is passed on to various corporate producers, such as TetraPack,
for recycling. The project emerged from a partnership between Chintan, Safai Sena (an association of waste-pickers) and the New Delhi
railway station. The profits generated through the project are utilized to
improve social awareness among the rag-picking community and to create
educational facilities for children of the waste-pickers. The facility stands
on a former garbage dump, which has been transformed into a dignified and clean
working space where the trained rag-pickers come and carry out their
livelihoods. The facility is a part of six MRF
facilities that the organization operates around the city, which collectively
divert about 21 tons of waste from 3 landfills in the city. The project
demonstrates that with process innovation and courageous partnership-building
with corporates, residents and institutions, a just, ecological and inclusive
approach to urban waste management in a mega-city like Delhi is both possible
and urgent.
Here Anshu Jain presents
the award to the leaders of Chintan:
The
second winner, GOONJ, is
described thusly on the Award’s website:
GOONJ is an NGO formed in the year 1999 working on issues
of urban waste and social distribution. It believes in utilizing vast
quantities of untapped old and waste material in middle class households and
re-using material to create second-hand products. The material left at GOONJ drop- in centers is sorted at a facility run by the
group at Madanpur- Khadarpur
village in Delhi's south-east, a conservative- marginalized neighborhood, that
has seen positive changes in attitude after the facility was set up there. The
nesting of the facility inside the community ensures local employment
opportunities for women in the area. The sorted material is then utilized as a
parallel currency for development programs in rural areas like ‘Cloth for
work’, whereby hundreds of grassroots programs, such as digging wells,
sanitation drives and making bamboo bridges are undertaken through partnerships
with local NGO’s. GOONJ deals with about 1000 tons of
solid waste annually, allowing nothing to end up in landfills, the otherwise
unusable materials like torn clothes, used books and notebooks etc. are
transformed into various usable products through the imagination of their
workers. Some products are also sold through various channels to generate funds
that help sustain the organization. The last bits of otherwise torn and
unusable cloth material are also transformed into sanitary pads produced for
rural women under the ‘My Pad’ program. The project forms a creative and
locally embedded workplace in Delhi and demonstrates the importance of more
sustainable forms of production and consumption.
Here
Anshu Jain presents the award to the leader
of GOONJ, Anshu Gupta:
THE CONFERENCE:
DAY TWO – 15 NOVEMBER
THURSDAY
Morning Session
Introduction: From Governance to Planning
Philipp Rode
(Executive Director of the Urban Age
and LSE
Cities) gave a wonderfully informative talk on “Shaping Urban Futures: The Divergent Roles
of Urban Governments.”
Philipp began by
reviewing some of the key themes from the day before: they were dominated by the key relationship
between government and governance, with the provocative perspective of Sue Parnell on “the tyranny of
governance, “which we need to overcome; also the pairing of people and mayors,
and the tension between direct and representative democracy, about which Sanjeev and Ashwin had a bit of a go at each
other in that regard. He presented some
of the research he and his team has been doing (all of which you should look at
online in the conference Newspaper),
especially the survey of city government that is part of the larger work they
are doing at LSE Cities in
collaboration with the Herrhausen
Foundation, UN Habitat, the McArthur
Foundation and others—the goal of
which is to unpack the formalized institutionalized aspect of urban governance
across the world. He presented their
data on 50 cities across the globe, across different wealth levels—an
interesting snapshot that will be of help to our discussions, in that it helps
us know what is going on on the ground in these diverse contexts.
Two extreme examples: Andosol 3 (one of the world’s largest solar thermal power
plants in Southern Spain producing renewable electricity for ~100,000 people),
which is an urban project, a project by a city government—the city of Munich,
located more than 1,700 kilometers away—but, due to its public ownership of its
local utility company, it is a major player in the international renewable
energy market; another scalar surprise of urban government relates to a bike
path in Santiago, the capital of Chile, where quite a lot of the cycling
program and infrastructure is managed by Chile’s national government. The question of autonomy of cities came up
strongly yesterday; and one of the issues is the extent to which city
governments rely on transfers of funds from national governments. Here are two extremes: in La Paz, 85% of the
city’s annual budget comes from Bolivia’s national government; by contrast,
Stockholm only relies 5% on national funding.
But there are many things cities share:
first, in what capacities can citizens actually influence local policies
(out of 50)—for the most part, still most by voting in elections (44), public
hearings and consultations (42), petitions and complaint forms (32 each in
online and old style), but interestingly, 18 through participatory budgeting
(and this is increasing as a modality; what are the major governance
disruptions (out of 45)—not surprisingly, given recent events, economic
recession was #1 (23), followed by changes in national policies (21), but with
natural disasters a distant last (2); what are the major governance constraints
(out of 47)—#1 was the predictability of resources (it is not the absolute lack
of funding, but rather the unpredictability of funding that presents the
greatest difficulties), and they are least constrained by lack of public and
private sector support (which were at the bottom). Next, who is leading what is
being done in urban policy sectors (the things city governments actually do): spatial planning, culture,
utilities and urban transport, and housing are primarily led on the
metropolitan level, city level, or below; in contrast, health education, and
economic development are highly centralized and led on the state or national
levels or higher. Ovet
the period 2000-2030, it is predicted that urban land will increase threefold;
managing or limiting that increase will inevitably involve urban
governance. Urban transport, a sector
viewed as overwhelmingly urban, looks different if you examine closely enough:
actually the more strategic and capital intensive the sub-sections of this area
(the infrastructure and operations of highway, suburban rail, and metro
underground v. walking, local
streets, cycling, taxis and buses operations), the more the national or state
level is involved as opposed to city and metropolitan. It is impossible to overestimate the
strategic importance of spatial planning and urban infrastructure, and the
interrelationship between them—among the few areas where we can proactively
design futures. In Atlanta and Berlin,
cities with relatively similar wealth levels, similar population size, and
probably similar levels of life style, the former does only 8% of its commuting
by public transportation, cycling or walking, whereas Berlin the number is 68%;
once you’re locked into this, you are not easily going to get away from it. LSE
Cities worked with the UN’s Commission on the Economy and Climate
Change to produce the Better
Growth/Better Climate report; and it was the material about cities that resonated the most with national leaders, who felt this was something
they needed and wanted to know more about.
Found that the external cost of sprawl in the US was more than $400
billion/year; and then the good news related to the massive opportunity for
reducing urban infrastructure capital requirements --$300 trillion over 50
years. Our engagement at this conference
with the relationship of institutions and governance—the how of the city—on the
one hand, and on the other the spatial configurations, the planning—the what—is
not an abstract conversation; it is a very real engagement with the concrete
world and understanding how we are building what we are seeing out there.
Governing Land: Managing Urban Expansion (Co-Chairs: Reuben Abraham, Chief Executive Officer
and Senior Fellow, IDFC
Institute, and Michael Cohen, Professor of
International Affairs, The New School)
Michael Cohen began by raising the question of what are the
criteria for evaluating good performance; those of us who started working on
the city level have come to realize that the criteria we use have become
global—a question of global survival.
How we think about land involves recognizing that urban form is a public
good, with important implications for equity; how these forms contribute to
urban value. We are talking about
something very serious, on various levels from the global to the local.
Karen C. Seto (Professor of Geography and Urbanization,
Yale University) spoke on “The Exponential Growth in Urban Land.”
Global land use in
the context of the global climate discussion has left out the role of human
settlements and spatial planning. The
current IPCC report includes a chapter on this for the
first time this year; ten key messages:
1)
Urban
land use is expanding much faster than urban population on every continent: we
know the demographic statistics, but didn’t know about the land statistics;
population densities are declining, urban sprawl is occurring on all economic
levels; more granularly, African cities are building primarily out, India
similarly; Chinese cities are growing both up and out
2)
There
is a window of opportunity over the next 15 or 20 years to shape the built
environment
3)
What drives urban expansion is different in
different parts of the world: in India, primarily driven by migration and
population growth, whereas in N. America, Europe, and increasingly China,
driven by economic activity
4)
Urban
areas are a focal point for energy use and emissions, but offer opportunities
to shape mitigation strategies; in Annex I countries (principally N. America
and Europe), urban per capita energy use is lower than national averages, but
in Non-Annex I, developing countries, energy use is higher than national
averages (because a lot of manufacturing is occurring in these areas)
5)
Accessibility
rather than density is the key factor for lowering emissions and making for
more livability
6)
Density
is a necessary but not sufficient condition for lowering urban emissions (have
to look at configuration of density)
7)
Governance
paradox: greatest opportunities for GHG improvements
may be in places where institutional and governance capacities are the
weakest—need to think about multi-level governance for this
8)
Different
spatial planning tools (at different spatial scales) have different ability to
raise revenue or require expenditure; different cities have to figure out what
is most appropriate to their context
9)
Our
forecasts only show this very narrow window going out 20 years forward; in
places like India, the urban population is only expected to exceed the rural
population sometime in the middle of the 21st century, which is a
different time frame of ramp-up
10)
What cities are actually doing: many have climate
change mitigation strategies, but very few focus on urban land use—which is the
low-hanging fruit, or the gorilla in the room
The cities that are
low carbon, also tend to be the most livable.
Spatial issues also have a great impact on resilience.
Arvind Panagarivya (Professor of Economics, Columbia University) spoke on “Land Markets in India.”
Urbanization is all
about land, and we need to think about efficient use of existing land—more
space for the existing population, businesses, and to accommodate
migration. India has an ambitious plan,
Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), to link
Delhi and Bombay, which involves acquiring a great deal of land. PM Modi plans to build dozens of new cities. In the past, government would simply grab the
land, which was cheap; but, under the very complicated Land Acquisition Act
(2013), things are going to the other extreme: there has to be a minimum of 5
years from start to finish (even without bureaucratic delays); the cost of land
in India is higher than anywhere in the world; and in the first 11 months of
its existence, there has been no new land acquisition at all. As for existing
land and cities under the Land Ceiling Act of 1976—it imposes a ceiling on
empty horizontal spaces (can’t hold onto any empty land, government gets to buy
it for a song); if you try to sell it, government can exercise the same
option); there is the vertical problem of low FSI,
built up spaces are restricted and taken up by Rent Control laws. People hang on to old buildings (renters
won’t leave; owners won’t tear down and rebuild for fear of lowered FSI). We need to change acquisition rules back so they are
more balanced so it is more balanced. Reforms are necessary at the city level,
but most of the power resides elsewhere.
Delhi is a little better, because it is a city and a state.
Ananya Roy (Professor of
City and Regional Planning, University
of California, Berkeley) spoke on “The
Land Question.”
I have three themes
and three propositions. Theme One: Chief Minister of Singapore declared, “Land
is not a problem,” saying large parcels of undisputed land were available.
Theme two, at the suburban edges of Chicago, amidst foreclosed homes in
impoverished neighborhoods, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign undertakes
occupation group foreclosed homes, with the simple motto: “Homeless people mean
people need homes.” Theme Three: Small
town in Tunisia, a young street vendor harassed by the police for selling
without a license, sets himself on fire, and his self-immolation catalyzes the
street protests that have come to be called the Arab Spring. Proposition one:
the urban question is increasingly the land question; state intervention in the
ownership, use, and redistribution of land are key; one form is the land grab,
which has been common in India, but another is how the state undertakes the
settlement of land, by which is meant how land is transformed into private
property (The Rajiv Awas Yojana
program—the “slum-free cities policy—that was launched in India a few years ago
to grant legal title to slum dwellers—in doing so it transforms the complex
multiple regimes of ownership and residence called “slums” into the neat little
parcels of transactional property, and more ambitiously into assets with global
legibility—“the poor man will have his value represented on paper”—but really a
way to monetize the property of the poor.
Proposition two: The land question is precisely the problem of land—land
cannot so easily be transferred (e.g.,
from an executive in one country to one in another)—and uninhabited, undisputed
land is a fantasy; in what capacity does the state have the right and capacity
to assemble, acquire, and manage land?
We have to pay close attention to the peripheries of metropolitan
regions, where urban and rural systems collide, and where informality makes
possible the territorial accessibility by the state (Urban informality in China
is manifested in “urban villages,” is created by the disjunction of the urban
and rural land management systems—rural land is collectively owned, while urban
land is state owned; rapid land development in China at the rural-urban
interface has been actively pursued by local governments capitalizing on the
land use rights acquired from rural collectives and conveyed at high fees to
urban investors—not only “speculative urbanism,” but also “speculative
governance”.) This is what Neil Brenner has described as the global condition
of urban transformation. And these landscapes are highly uneven—and things take
place within the informalized production of space;
distinction of “elite informality (which is supported by the state) and
“subaltern informality” (which is marginalized and criminalized by the
state). Third proposition is that we
must be sensitive to the movements that are coalescing around the struggles
over land. Poor people’s movements in the global south are becoming models for
movements in the global north: the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign was modeled
on the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa, but whereas the
motto there was, “No house, No land, No vote,” in Chicago they used an obscure
aspect of a law to occupy properties by homesteading—but is this a movement
toward “the right not to be
excluded”? The self-immolation of that
street vendor in Tunisia I mentioned—and indeed the Arab Spring—must be
understood as a cry for property rights.
What if the cry on the world’s streets is for more than the right to buy
and sell? What if it is the refusal of the extraordinary inequality of land
ownership, state power, and social surplus?
Solomon Benjamin (Associate
Professor, IIT,
Madras)
spoke on “Governing Urban Expansion in
India and China.”
The question is who
uses land and for what: the materializing of tenure—legitimizing the spaces that make up bulk of the city, but
also the politics of land grab and gain (or tenure grab and gain) as occupancy
urbanism. Globally connected (e.g.,
India and China: interconnected small sub-areas like urban India’s “China
Bazaars” [and Delhi’s “Urban Villages”] and Hua Qiang
Bei Road, Guangzhou)—often in the form of repair or
duplication without respect to copyright or patent (“brand opacity,” in which
it’s impossible to know who and where something is made—co-production across
national borders, sometimes illegal or “porously legality” in a way not
permitted nationally, but works locally).
These small businesses sit on land legally, but this situation gives
tenure in places that would have been attractive to global capital. Land ownership in complex
legal form in high density urban areas make for a situation of enormous
political intensity. Two forms of
development and tenure: single land use, large scale ownership where real
estate surpluses are consolidated and go into corporate, often global hands;
and mixed land use, multiple tenure, more fluid forms
of ownership, where surpluses are widely distributed in primarily local
ways. India and China have complex ways
of dealing with land, but we can talk about how in complex local bureaucratic
ways these issues effect things—and these
bureaucracies transcend the democratic/non-democratic differences of the two
countries.
Reuben Abraham asked the speakers what they thought was
feasible to do in the context of the political economy, on the FSI issue , how do you break the
nexus of the developers and the politicians (particularly since the scarcity
benefits the politicians)?
Arvind: As
for the land acquisition, I’d work on it on the national level, and if that didn’t
work on the state level—both, actually.
Reuben: Are you suggesting it’s a rule of law
issue, or are you suggesting that the entire social contract needs
re-evaluating?
Ananya: The idea that the
slum is an illegal space that needs to be demolished, while the areas on the
edge of Delhi or in the new towns are not is deeply problematic: whether there
needs to be a whole changing of the social contract or not, there needs at
least to be a recognition that the various kinds of elite informality (which produce
urban and suburban sprawl) are affecting things, and need to shift away from
the emphasis on the illegality of the land held by the urban poor—and think
more about their role in the urban economy.
Michael Cohen: There are things in the ICCP
report on the impact of future city building on emissions; can Karen share what
she’s heard about that.
Karen: The report concluded that the issue of the energy
required to construct the built environment was actually half that of what it
takes to operate buildings—and that it is forecast to exceed that amount. What
are the alternative scenarios of urban development that take this into account.
Michael: Which is to say that when
we talk about the 100 new cities in India, merely the energy for construction of
100 new cities would contribute significantly to emissions and climate change. We have to think inside out: what is the
impact of the city on the global, if we are to think about cities in the
future.
Karen: Have to think about the role of adaptation and
mitigation—the development of urban form will have serious impact in
adaptability of these places—and the effects of climate change.
Solomon: We already have in India 4-5 story,
high-density, mixed land use; but we have urban development that uses FAR to
demolish those and build up new towers, which consume open space and use the
energy embedded in the costs Karen is describing. Issues of FAR have to be
considered in the context of their impact on inequality and urban form. In situ
redevelopment has come to mean something very different from what it had meant:
now means you displace people on the assumption you’re going to have this
14,15, 16 floor high block which gets one into the problem—dangerous direction
to completely rework without understanding what you already have.
Arvind: Has been built and rebuilt seven
times. Maybe something that Indians
don’t like…
Karen: Cities are constantly undergoing change, but we can’t
focus only on density; IN THE Chinese context what they’re focused on—cities
are incredibly dense, but little co-location of employment and housing,
resulting in very low accessibility, which is key: how
does one access the services one needs to get to.
Ananya: Do we think about
land as a concrete entity on a map, or as a series of social
relationships? Examples of Manhattan and
Singapore are interesting, but in India we are looking at cities that are
largely made up of the urban poor, with informal claims to the city—but are
they the key constituency? In Singapore, the pain is shifted to a large foreign
work force that can be quarantined on the edge of the city. Have to think how
not just to shift the pain onto the urban poor.
Reuben: Is that a rule of law question? Manhattan
also started with a majority of urban poor.
Ananya: It’s a power
question.
Reuben: But isn’t it a power question because the
rule of law isn’t holding for everyone equally?
Ananya: Who has the power
to exercise the law in order to dispossess? It is the rule of law in Singapore
that keeps foreign workers consigned to the outskirts of the city and deprived
of the benefits of the city. In India we
have a new regime in place; and the new emphasis on intensive urban planning
and programs to legalize rights to title—and this would be a challenge to the
status quo (which will not be instituted under this new regime); but has come
about from various movements which have challenged land rights and the way land
rights have come about.
Solomon: This status quo issue is a red herring: in
Delhi you had farm land which grew up over time to be Asia’s biggest center for
making cables and conductors, through a process of land development where
complex tenure forms allowed those industries to put resources into
manufacturing—none of that was status quo.
Creates a kind of dynamism; but not recognized, because it’s located
within the category of the illegal, non-conforming. Question is who makes the law.
Arvind: I understand that change is always
happening; what I see as happening is that Singapore transforms itself from
something to something. Transformation
is far, far slower in most places in India
KEYNOTE: Saskia Sassen (Professor
of Sociology, Columbia University),
“Who Owns the City”
New research she’s
doing on the growing number of cities that are increasingly the destination of
huge amounts of real estate investment: question is at what point the buying of
buildings is actually the buying of urban land.
Much of the investment produces mega-buildings; when mega-projects,
there is a privatizing of a bit of the city—and a de-urbanizing of a bit of
that city. NY, London, of course have
long histories of being destinations for investment; but all kinds of other
cities.
Displacement
of people. Land grabs: since 2006, over 200 million
hectares have been acquired by foreign investors in a variety of countries: a
little in Europe; but vast amounts in Africa, by contrast. Foreclosures: 13 million households (30
million individuals) in the US since ’03; in Europe, high foreclosure rates in
Germany, Spain, UK, Hungary; low in Netherlands, Denmark, Finland) —how can
things not be connected with the buying of land by others? Destinations for
major investors—a whole array of patterns, led by NY ($55 billion in one year!)
and London:
If just looking at
foreign, cross-border investors, London leads, followed by Paris, and then
NY. What does this massive de-urbanizing
of urban space mean for governance?
City is not just a
matter of density: and office park is dense, but not a city. A city is a complex but incomplete system—and
in that mix lies the capacity for cities continually
to reinvent themselves across time. Also, city is a place where those without
power get to make history, economy (think of immigrant communities), and
culture. The mega-projects developers
are introducing into cities produce density, but they also de-urbanize. One of the biggest companies in China just
bought the vast swath of partly industrial land in NY known as Atlantic Yards.
They are going to build 14 mega-apartment buildings: it will bring density, but
not a city—endless rows of housing, that is not urban.
Usually urban land is
purchased by buying buildings; at this mega-scale, one is directly buying urban
land. When you add to that the
foreclosures, what are we seeing? Why
the interest? Same with rural and, BTW: the biggest buyers of rural land in
2006 when the economic crisis was brewing were hedge funds. We are really dealing with the fact of the
shrinking supply of land and of water (“dead land/dead water”), and the
scarcity of good investments—which means this process will only grow. What does it mean to develop urban governance
mechanism to deal with the large scale purchasing of urban land? What does that
do to cities?
As Saskia pointed out in her article, “Who Owns the City,” in the conference Newspaper:
…at the current
scale of acquisitions, we are actually seeing a systematic transformation in
the pattern of land ownership in cities which has deep and significant
implications for equity, democracy and rights. This is particularly so because
what was small and/or public is becoming large and private, though often with
local government support. Some of the most noxious developments of “site
assembly” happen when one or two city blocks are
bought by one owner, whether local or foreign, and the city authorities cave in
to their requirements for street closures, and more, often in the name of
enhanced security.
The
overall effect has been a reduction in public buildings and an escalation in
the amount of private ownership. This brings with it a reduction in the texture
and scale of spaces previously accessible to the public – a space that was more
than just public buildings. Where before
there was a government office building handling the regulations and oversight
of this or that public economic sector, now there might be a corporate
headquarters, a luxury apartment building, or a mall.
…The key
issue is not the fact of foreign ownership, but the shifts in ownership mode –
from modest or small to large and expensive, and from modest public properties
to expensive private ones. Examples of scale-ups in private ownership are
Gurgaon in Delhi, Santa Fe in Mexico City or Sandton
in Johannesburg.
Gerald Frug’s argument in A Rule of Law for Cities comes to mind,
that “...we need to open up the contestability of economic development
policy...to a democratically organised institution
[which] should represent people city-wide. The participants should be empowered
to establish the city’s strategy for economic growth, with the experts advising
the decision-makers rather than being the decision- makers. The goal is to
include the very people left out in the reigning economic development
strategy.”
Having a
robust urban public space is critical at a time when national political space
is increasingly dominated by powerful actors, both private and public, only
minimally accountable to a city’s people. There is a kind of “public-making”
work that can happen in urban space, and that helps us see the local and the silenced.
Our (still) large complex global cities are one key space for this making: they
are today a strategic frontier zone for those who lack power, those who are
disadvantaged, outsiders, minorities who are discriminated against. The
disadvantaged and excluded can gain presence in such cities, presence vis-à-vis
power and presence vis-à-vis each other. This signals the possibility of a new
type of politics, centred on new types of political
actors. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. These are new
hybrid bases from which to act, spaces where the powerless can make history
even when they are not empowered.
Strategic Infrastructure: Futures by Design. (Co-Chairs: Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age,
and Jose Castillo, Principal, Arquitectura 911 sc, Mexico
City, and old Urban Age friend)
Jose introduced the session by noting that Peter Hall (who recently passed away)
wrote, in his book, Great Planning
Disasters, that it was in the infrastructure that we fail the most—used
examples of failed infrastructures that were planning disasters. What is
strategic about “strategic infrastructure”? Are we using it for economic
development (the kind of “build it and they will come” that Ed Glaeser
alluded to yesterday)? Strategic because it produces social
equity or sustainability? Or as a symbolic tool?
Second question has to do with governance—who decides about infrastructure:
what are the roles for politicians, bureaucrats, activists, experts, or
citizens in deciding about those things? Third is about allocation of
resources—what is the strategic understanding of resources: is it a
“schizophrenic” model (cities all over developing bike-share programs at the
same time as elevated highways); is it a question of large v. small; or hard v. soft
(smart or dumb cities)—invest in the hard infrastructure of the 19th
century re-envisioned for the 21st, or should we be thinking about
data and other technological approaches revamping out approach to thinking
about infrastructure?
Philipp announced that this section would begin with
three sets of pairs of short presentations, getting to discussion after each
pair. The first pair will be about
larger scale issues. Second will be about
how collective decision-making can be used in various types of urban infrastructures. The final part will discuss the volume, size
and purpose of road infrastructure in cities.
Thomas K. Wright (Executive Director, Regional Plan Association, NY) spoke on “New
York’s Regional Rail: Overcoming the Metropolitan Dilemma?”
Case study of NY
metropolitan mass transit infrastructure system, making larger points based on
this one example. Trends changing dramatically in last 10-15 years, improving
dramatically: gains in population (up 2.3 million residents) and employment,
but opportunities limited for far too many people (only ¼ of the population has
seen a rise in income, ¾ have seen a decline in real wages; costs have risen;
industries where employment is growing tend to pay less, and those that pay
more are losing jobs); geographically, the suburbanization trend has reversed
(NYC has rebounded quickly from the recession of 2008-9, recovering all of the
lost jobs within two years, whereas Northern New Jersey and Long Island are
still trying to recover to where they were 9 years ago. People are happier and more optimistic than
they were 10 years ago; at the same time, institutions are failing people. MTA and Port Authority are the two
quasi-private entities that do the long-term planning; the institutions that
are supposed to be thinking long-term, increasingly have CEOs whose experience
and tenure are short-term (in place for an average of only two years), at the
same time as projects are taking longer and longer, and costing more. Transit has been growing due to investments
in the 70s and 80s in the transit system; Penn Station sees about twice the
daily ridership coming into it as it did in the 1970s—almost all that growth
coming from west of the Hudson River, on the NJ Transit side; and subways
carrying more people than at any time since WWII. Commuter rail is what extends NYC to the
region around it—~½ million crossing the Hudson River most via mass transit;
the following image is scary to me:
It is the fragmented
ownership of these systems: Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road are both
subsidiaries of the same agency (the MTA, created 45 years ago), supposedly
working together (both respond to the same boss),]. Yet these two agencies are so unable to
collaborate that the LIRR, which has been trying for
30 years to create a connection to Grand Central Terminal, was not able to get
Metro-North (who owns the terminal) to give any track space, and instead the LIRR is being forced to build an enormous sub-basement to
the tune of $12 billion underneath Grand Central, just because of the
institutional failure of the two agencies to work together. Amtrak, which runs the Northeast corridor, is
bankrupt—mostly because congress makes it subsidize ridership around the rest
of the country; and it owns the tunnel under the Hudson River, which is the
life-blood for NJ Transit—90% of new commuters into the City are coming under
the Hudson River from NJ, but there is no capacity other than that tunnel…and
what we have learned is that due to damage from Hurricane Sandy, this tunnel
will have to be shut down for over a year for repairs. If we don’t get a new tunnel under that
river, it will destroy the economy on NJ; and none of these things are being
fixed right now.
Philipp: one question—what makes you more optimistic
about how you can sort out that situation?
Tom: I didn’t mean to
end on that note. In the NY region, the planning is essentially not done by the
city, it is not done by the state or the public authorities; actually my own
organization, the RPA,
has been a civic group that has done the planning for these entities—and puts
it on the table for the public and the politicians to discuss. This governance structure is a cause for
optimism.
Amitabh Kant (Secretary
for Industrial Policy, India, and Chairman, Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation) spoke on
“The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor:
Creating Location.”
The dedicated freight
corridor which by 2018 will link up Delhi and ports on the western coast of
India will only carry containers; at the moment it takes 14 days for things to
be transported on this route (80% by truck via roads, and therefore highly
polluting); when the train link is complete, goods will make the journey in 14
hours. This connectivity provides India
with the opportunity to create new urbanization. Originally an industrial
project to drive India’s manufacturing, along the way we realized we do
urbanization not for manufacturing, but for the people in that area. New urbanization requires an economic driver;
but manufacturing leads to young workers, their wives and children, coming into
new cities—so when you plan for the urbanization, you plan for the people who
are going to live in that area. We
realized that in the US, cities were planned when land was cheaply available;
but in India, where land is scarce, you can’t have cities the way the Americans
did (where you live in NJ and travel to NY, guzzling gas; you can’t create
cities like Atlanta, where 85% drive to work in cars); you need to create
cities embedded with public transportation systems—cities with good infrastructure
up front. Created another set of
challenges: in Delhi you have cities like Gurgaon (where urbanization had been
done by the private sector, and even four years later you don’t have a sewage
system), on one side of it and Noida (where the quality of the infrastructure
has been poor) on the other; whereas urbanization has already occurred in other
parts of the world, in India it has only begun, so it’s important we figure out
how to do sustainable urbanization—and the key thing is how do we do monetization
of land values back into the cities again.
Given that you’re working in a federal structure, how do you work with
the states to create a model where the states turn the moneys back into the
special purpose vehicle that is building the new cities. Seven cities we’re linking; broken them down
into smaller cities; and in the cities, we have broken them down into smaller
phases; treating the Smart Cities infrastructure just like any other layer. Example of Dholera: laying down the trunk
infrastructure, which will enable us to monetize the land values later; need to
create affordable housing; but need to create the mechanism for capturing value
as the prices rise and put it back into the city.
Philipp: one doesn’t have to know India to know this
is a project that could not have been bigger—a quintessential, top-down,
big-vision program—almost designing futures; requires a great level of
confidence that the planning will be resilient enough to adjust to all kinds of
shocks.
Amitabh: You weren’t involved in it—there were over
900 town meetings in the Dholera project. The people’s participation was a
major part of it.
Ricky: That may be the case, but from the few images you
show—of the plans of those cities—I cannot recognize them as being an Indian city:
they look to me photo-copied, cookie-cutter copies of architecture from
everywhere, what Richard Sennett was
talking about yesterday. While the infrastructure planning that has gone into
this is admirable, the same thing has not gone into the design: it is what Joan
Clos was so critical of yesterday as a model.
Amitabh: This is only the master plan, which is
about transportation, nothing else. I
showed one visual; you people have a biased mindset. You people have not even
gone into the details at all and you are making very subjective comments.
Philipp tries valiantly to take control of the
discussion; Amitabh talks over him:
You come one day in a conference and you start making comments without even
studying the master plan.
Philipp [talking over him]: I’d like to take three
questions from the audience—and I’d like to hear Indian voices:
Dunu Roy from the Hazards
Centre: power point presentations often remind me of ads for male
underwear: they reveal everything but disclose nothing. My question is if there had been 900 meetings
to propose this corridor, why is it that in Dholera there is a people’s
movement that is opposing the whole project?
[someone]
from Transportation Research: I’d like you to comment on monetization of land
to develop cities v. affordability of
housing in the cities being developed.
[someone]:
I’m curious about the integrated water management policies. Could you elucidate how you have gone about
thinking about it—how the water is going to be procured and distributed in
these places?
Amitabh: I hadn’t wanted to make a presentation; I
had said a discussion would be better; but you wanted a presentation, so I ran
through some slides in one minute. There
is a train which runs through the corridors; the train runs through 6 states of
India; each city does local planning—requires local interaction with the
community living in that area. In the case of Dholera, detailed interaction has
been done; after that interaction, the plan was approved by the state and land
was taken in phases; the first phase of that has been taken, and the work is in
execution, and, to my mind, in Dholera there has not been any objection by
anyone—this is the first time I’m hearing from someone taking a mike in a
conference and saying there’s objection from the people of Dholera. I have not come across it. I have been to 100-odd meetings there, and
it’s the first time I’m hearing from someone who has not even been in Dholera
that people are rising in revolt: absolutely absurd from people in this
conference, I request you kindly go to
Dholera, and if people say something, please get back to me, I’ll try to solve
that problem. I’m against large projects, but if 700 million in India are going
to get into urbanization, without large-scale projects, every single city in
India will be a slum; if you go from here to Rajasthan, you will see slums
being created all along the way—and none of you people will say that this is
good planning for urbanization…and what India needs is good, planned
urbanization on the back of good transportation. [Philipp tries to stop him; but he continues] And then we welcome
your input. We need to…
[Philipp finally manages to stop him] Can we take one more round of
people in the audience:
[question]
There is already a lot of mistrust between people and government in India on
all levels; but I’d like to suggest it’s not just master plans; but it’s also
about networks, and you have to show in these visuals how these cities are
connected to the ground—you see no networks, no context, where it’s connected.
I know these plans very well, because one of the companies involved is from
Holland where I studied, and I wish those of you at the top of this planning
would realize the importance of these visualizations.
[question]
You’ve presented a macro plan, and you’ve said that the micro plan will be done
locally. What planning and designing capacity are you installing in these
cities to do the planning as it should be—so it doesn’t destroy the
environment?
[question] throughout
the DMIC we’re seeing people in jail and not given
bail because giving them bail will discourage private investors in this area.
Do a search and you’ll see what the resistance to these projects actually is.
[question]
Two points from cases studies I actually worked on: one is a water management
project where the data that was provided by you to the state was inadequate and
outdated; and the other, I saw oil spills in a port…
Amitabh: this is totally irrelevant!
Philipp: Let’s stop there, and, Amitabh, pick the
ones you’d like to respond to. I think we should keep in mind we’re going to
keep talking about these issues in different contexts. So, Amitabh, if you can
respond briefly…
Amitabh: I am suggesting that all the master plans that
have been prepared be opened out for you—you can organize a conference of two
days—you can study them, give me your input, and I’ll absorb it in the master
plan. India needs planned, new
urbanizing; it doesn’t need to follow the American and European model. India
needs to create its own sustainable cities, and we don’t need American and
European experts to come and lecture us on this.
Philipp [struggling to stop him]: on this last point
everyone in the room agrees; but it is time to move on.
Amitabh: No. One more point: it’s about public
transportation, it’s about drainage, sewage, solid waste, and about involving
the community—ALL THAT we are doing in this project.
Philipp: Clearly time to move on,
and I’ll pass over to Jose.
Jose: Amitabh, I have to tell you: I always do what Philipp
tells me to, as well. But it’s been a great discussion: the idea that
infrastructure should come before development.
But we haven’t talked yet about the idea of retrofitting, and in what
roles redevelopment makes a dent. So I’ll turn to Henk
Ovink:
Henk Ovink [Senior Advisor, Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force,
and another Urban Age friend) spoke
on ”Post-Sandy Rebuilding: Connecting
Infrastructures and Re-Design.”
Sandy created $65
billion in damage when it hit the Northeast of the US, damaging 650,000 homes;
but it was not the worst storm ever—yet it created a focus on climate change
because it hit NY, and NY is the “city of the world.” World Economic Forum Global Risk Report shows
the impact of future risks (water problems, environmental catastrophes) is
increasing—both frequency and magnitude; but the good side is there are
interactions on the regional and urban scale—which creates a mess, but the
opportunity to interact and adapt. Sandy
showed that across the region: 75% of the power supply in the flood zone was
affected, and it demonstrated the connection between physical and social
vulnerability in the region. Raised questions of resilience on all scales. The response by the federal government was to
create the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, chaired by Shaun Donovan, and
of which I was a part; and Congress appropriated $60 billion to help in this
region. But, as Tom has shown, this is a
totally fragmentedly run region, with a dysfunctional
transportation structure of the MTA and the Port Authority—and a real local,
cultural need that is not addressed by this balkanized governance
structure. We created a process that was
aimed at getting a better understanding of the region’s vulnerabilities and
interdependencies and opportunities.
Started by getting the best talent—250 professionals from more than 20
countries—who worked together with talent from the region—designers, mayors,
but also people who lost their homes—to develop a cultural understanding of the
needs of the people on the ground, and to an understanding on the level of the
scale of the region. It worked because
the process was adaptable and flexible and changed over time. We had behind us $1 billion in federal
funding, $500 million private funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to guide
the process; ten teams to jury local projects. The project was created right on
the edge of government, science, civil society, design, corporations,
investors—and it stayed there: owned by nobody, but, at the same time, owned by
everybody. Hundreds of
organizations, thousands of people.
One group was tasked to safeguard lower Manhattan: the marriage we’ve
talked about between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs—their love child, one could
say: it’s screaming for attention, we’re trying to feed it with $350
million—creating in the low-income community of the Lower East Side a berm that
becomes a park, that becomes access to the river, and also the opportunity to
cover the FDR Drive in the long term. It is a sandwich vision of the scale of
Manhattan and very local design solutions developed with the community. This is not about presenting a design and
getting approval; the community was at the table before the designs were
made—informing the design process, and even the research process, by a community collaboration. This should also result in
government reform as well as changing the culture of the region.
Jose: You talk about planning and communication—how you
design a process rather than a project. I’m curious whether in 20 years we will
perhaps be talking about this as a great planning disaster, good intentions
gone awry, or a success?
Henk: A success! This is
very delicate: success is not because we delivered these designs in a
collaborative, open process. Success is because we never let go, and at the
same time we totally let go; and we have to continue that. The tension now in
the region is how do you continue this open process and at the same time know
you want to create this fact on the ground to show you can do things
differently. The community is calling to continue this collaborative process;
NY State is holding meetings with the community. There’s no guarantee, but I hope we can prove
that in this balkanized region you can do things collectively.
Jose: This is a project that has been going on for two years,
but now we’ll hear from Ricky about one that has been ongoing for 30 years.
Ricky Burdett spoke on “London’s Strategic Infrastructure: What’s Best for London?” Starts with 30 years of hell in London—a terrible planning system. We don’t come with a solution: we come to
share how we tried to get over some problems. We had a total absence of
municipal voice. I showed yesterday a
map of deprivation in London; and you can see there’s a lot of deprivation
concentrated on the east side of the city and on the west side. (Every city
will have its map like this, and each will be different.) There is a social
issue which lies behind the investment of infrastructure. There is also the issue of deprivation of
transport—on the map below, the bluer the color, the less public transportation
(obviously bluer at the periphery)”
In the red and
purple, you can get anywhere in London in under 45 minutes; note that its not only at the center, but some bits at the top and
the bottom, but notice particularly the parts of the right. As of 1 January 2000, the power of all the decision making about public transport was given to
the mayor of London. London is going to
grow by a 1-1.5 million, and that growth is going to be to the east—this is
where the billions of dollars at the top of Saskia’s charts are being
invested, probably not very well. What is involved is The London Plan: in 1943,
the Green Belt was created to contain development in the city (and it’s still
there); two mayors (Livingstone and Johnson) said, 1) keep the boundary despite
growth (went against many people’s interests), and 2) where there’s spare land,
allow development, but require that it increase the density, increase the mix
of uses (don’t zone them), and privilege those areas which are deprived and
have good public transport. What happened is a series of “opportunity areas”
(where Saskia’s
investments have come in)—some right in the middle of the city; the biggest
investments have been made to solve the social question and the lack of public
transport possibilities on the east side with a number of centrally funded schemes:
first, a few years back, connecting the poorer east to the center; the second,
a circular system (backed by the great planner Peter Hall) which connects a lot
of other communities; the third, Cross-Rail, under construction now, is cutting
across the whole of London (this will make Tom
jealous—but, you know, we pay 40% taxes, and maybe this is what we get). If we
did not have a directly elected mayor, there’s no way we would have been able
to get £ 23 billion from central government to be able to do this. Canary Wharf
was not a very good example of planning (zoned, only offices, worst thing you
could do—and had planning permission to do only more offices), but with the
arrival of Cross-Rail the plan was changed in a way that the new development
was going to be 80% housing (and 40% affordable housing), so a mixed
community. This development which has
been owned by the Chinese, this week has been trying to be bought by the
Qataris—so who knows which international investor will own it. Another big
debate is where we go with our airports: whether just to add a new airport (as
would be done in China or India)—but we don’t have the guts to just do that, so
we said no to “Boris Island.” So it’s not necessary to make the mayor happy all
the time.
Jose: Baron Rothschild used to say that making wine is easy, it’s just the first two hundred years that are
difficult. Maybe infrastructure is like
that. The day that it was announced that
Norman Foster was building the Mexico City airport, it was announced that he was
losing the London airport.
Adam Greenfield: Henk, Occupy
Sandy was an informal agency that actually outperformed the government and the
Red Cross in the immediate efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. My
question, having been involved with the distribution hubs that were set up by
the untrained volunteers, how were they able effectively to bring relief
directly out to the Rockaways and other areas—and yet, when the official
recovery networks were set up, very few of those people were contacted; Occupy
Sandy as an institution wasn’t integrated into this plan. Why was this existing, effective, bottom-up
organization, available as a resource, not incorporated into the plan in a more
direct way?
[question
for Henk]: Imagine a disaster scenario in which a
transit corridor between two major cities is disrupted by a disaster; and
imagine that along that corridor a series of big cities would be planned,
heavy-handed scenario, mono-functional grid; how would your approach be
effective in such a scenario?
[question]
My question involves the capitalization of land areas for funding
infrastructure. What is the downside of
these investments in London?
Henk: Occupy Sandy was a
partner of Rebuild by Design, we worked closely with them—why?
Because they were already on the ground, close to hundreds of organizations
that were locally driven by needs before the federal government stepped
up. That is why I said Rebuild by Design
was an Initiative by the Hurricane Sandy Task Force, but
not owned by it, but owned by all,
which made it very easy to work with groups like Occupy Sandy. Another group we
worked with was the Harbor School (a school now located on Governor’s Island)
that teaches kids how to work with water and the culture of water, and these
kids went to schools all over the region—often accompanied by people from
Occupy Sandy—to get the message across to do things differently. We were actually very close, but we also had
disagreements. As for the disaster
scenario: I will not answer your question, because I do not know—I don’t know
the situation. This is exactly what I was opposed to when Secretary Donovan
asked me to join the Task Force: he said do a competition—which is say, here’s the problem, throw it at society. But it’s a failing strategy: you first have
to invest in a process of engagement to really understand what’s going on. Ours is a very abstract question; I’d have to
bring in a lot of talent and engage with a lot of talent in the region to find
out what the real issues are before I would come up with any process. There’s no blueprint in Rebuild by Design,
except, “think first, act later”; but also shorten the implementation process
by connecting evaluation dollars with implementation dollars.
Ricky: On the question of capturing value around the
buildings, there have been two different models in London: most of the major
investments that were made on the over ground, on the high speed rail, for
example, are all effectively centrally funded (even though the mayor is responsible
for transport, it is really a lobbying operation to the central government);
the new experiment is the Cross-Rail line—you saw the figure that comes from
central government, a small percentage (~£2 billion, or ~10%) has been raised
from the private sector, by allowing greater volume of development in certain
of the stations. How do you avoid that
new development giving extra volume in a way that kills that piece of city?
That’s where the plan—the vision—that comes from the City Plan is so important:
remember, it required mixed development (even where there is a deployment of
private capital), insuring that one of the London-wide requirements (and it is
not a new one) insuring the upwards of 30% up to 40% of all new housing have to
be affordable. Where you have a high value situation as you have in London
today, any developer, any investor, is happy to do that, because the return
they’re going to get on any investment is enormous.
Jose: seem to be two paradigms: one in which the legitimacy
of the process produces the positive effect; the other is the idea of strong
leadership. Ricky,
before 2000 and the centralization of this would it have been possible?
Ricky: No.
Henk: The leadership
issue was also the case in the NY situation: the leadership of Secretary
Donovan was apparent: he made federal government let go and invest in a process
without knowing the outcome. I remember
my first conversation with the White house: So, you want a billion dollars to
work on projects, you don’t know what they are, you don’t know who in the
region, you have blue eyes, and you promise it won’t fail in the end? It was
only Secretary Donovan’s ability to push the White House that made it possible.
[question]
How did you determine who would be in the process? And how did you insure that
those who have difficulty speaking participated. Also, usually when there is crisis,
communities come together; how do we insure that it continues after the crisis.
[question]
This session, with a lot of planners, has had a lot of conflict; the ones
primarily with academics seemed to have a lot less. The best cities grow
organically; to the extent we can reduce planning to a residue function, bare
minimum function, just perhaps protecting property rights. But what I hear is a
lot of faith in planning to solve the future, although the only thing we know
is that planning has failed.
[question]
The generation of something specific seems to require something from designers
more active and trial-and-error than you talked about. How do you suppose this can be accommodated
by governments?
[question]
Simple question: lot of investment, lot of infrastructure in London, and need a
lot in NY; we did a study and found that in Delhi the cost of living is at
least three times that of a small town.
So, with all this infrastructure, we are
building in a higher cost of living, conspicuous consumption, and less
sustainability.
Henk: We didn’t start
with a design process; started with a collaborative research effort. That built an understanding on both sides of
the table—which became one side. When we
got to the solution phase, we still didn’t start with design. We expanded the teams: included some experts,
but included as many as 70 people from businesses and communities and then
started the design process. Because the
community was part of the coalition, it was never a top-down process. In Hunts
Point, a lower income community, we began by building a coalition with the
businesses and the community groups, and together in the end presenting the
design; in the end we had the jury meetings, where the teams brought all their
coalition partners and—perhaps to the surprise of the jury, which had not been
part of the whole process—these community groups or individuals who had lost a
house, started to answer the questions of the jury; they made clear they knew
what the design was about. Sometimes frustrating to jury
members: one said “I want to hear from the designer”; and one of the
businessmen from Hunts Point stepped up and said, “No. I know why we are doing this.”
Ricky: Political and planning point: in a lot of the analysis
we have been trying to do at the LSE on what works and what doesn’t, the cities
that show greater resilience are the ones that are able to grow through
accretion as opposed to rupture—and that’s not just a spatial thing, it is also
a political thing, it’s inclusive as opposed to top-down. The bigger point is whether one can plan new
cities in such a way that they themselves over the next 100 years can deal with
their own form of growth—not through what Richard
refers to as brittle systems, but through a much more fragile system that
accepts change and growth through accretion.
Philipp: For the last 30 minutes we shall return to
where the energy is, to India. We have
been talking about strategic infrastructure, and I think we can all agree that
it is difficult to conceive of infrastructure that occurs organically—have you
ever seen an organically grown rail station, sewage system, or airport? We
can’t get by this question of decision-making by going back to the neighborhood
scale: there needs to be something governed, but perhaps in a more inclusive
way. We’re going to turn to the issue of
road building. I stress that while we’re
using India as an example, it is a universal thing we’re discussing. I assume there will be a great consensus on
what we’re getting wrong; but why is that? Is there a will to get it wrong, or
is it that institutional arrangements are not capable of what we need in order
to build better cities; or is it both, the coming together of an agenda and how
it informs institutions.
Madhav Pai (Director, EMBARQ India) spoke on “Mumbai’s Flyovers, Sealinks
and Freeways: Mobility or Mayhem?”
Urban roads in
Mumbai: State Road Development Corporation has made ~55 flyovers in the last 15
years; built Sealink; built a lot of freeways; spent
$3.5 billion—has it created more mobility? What was the demand in the first
place? This investment in the climate of what people want doesn’t make
sense. More roads create more demand (e.g., I-405 in LA: $1 billion spent over
5 years to widen it, but now traffic is slower than before); but still need to
build roads. Here’s the Urban Roads
Agenda: complete our networks—a lot of missing links; multiply its capacity
(like BRT); design for universal access (30:30 principal: urban roads should be
less than 30 km/hr and less than 30 m wide)—if you
build 100m wide roads in India, it won’t be for the people and won’t be safe.
Have to urbanize governance in India; 74th Amendment did not make
sense when India was only 30% urban—does now and will more in the future, and
needs to be accelerated. New paradigm:
on regional scale, national government should seek a vision+plan
and monitor; on city scale, municipal government should execute mass transit,
housing, water (with national capital investment); on community scale, people’s
participation with local politicians and private sector should deliver
sustainable services (water tankers and purifiers, diesel generators,
motorcycles)
Geetam Tiwari (Professor
of Transport Planning, IIT, Delhi)
spoke on “The Delhi BRT Experience:
1994-2014.”
In 1995, the idea of what
we call “high capacity bus systems” was introduced; 2001 there was an
international workshop (which included Enrique
Peñalosa) which encouraged Delhi to move forward
with this concept; construction of the project began in 2006: original plan was
for 19 km, but only 5.8 was built. In media 2002-2006,
repeated calls for the project and questions why it wasn’t being implemented;
something happens in 2007-2008 and there’s a shift in media to fears about the
loss of car lanes to buses and bicycles, and says BRT=“Big Road Trauma”—claim
was that it was copied from Bogotá, we are Indians so won’t work here (not
true, only central lane concept copied, and NOT from Bogotá, rather from
Curitiba; but at the same time accused of not making use of foreign models enough. System actually worked (this newspaper photo
shows three times the number of people [those in the buses] are moving
efficiently) although pitched as a disruption for people [viz., the ~100 in the cars]:
Surveys showed the
drivers and riders were very pleased.
But issue is what benefits whom—it was
working for those for whom it was designed, but not for the car drivers. In
2011, High Court task force recommended 659 km of BRT for Delhi, and in Court
case in 2012 came out in favor of BRT and; but corridor has not been extended. She doesn’t know what
the lessons are; we followed all the right principles, had all the right
results, but she doesn’t whether it’s poor governance, IDK.
But it is an example of democracy on the roads.
{As I mention in my write-up of the Urban Age Tour of
Delhi, I believe the problem here runs much deeper: I believe this BRT system
was designed to fail. I am not impugning the motives of Geetam, whom I know (as a long-term
participant in the Urban Age program) and who is a completely well-meaning
professional; but in addition to the change in the “public” attitudes toward
the project she described, there was also the issue that the section that was built has some extremely bad,
deleterious design flaws which actually do
make it undesirable. The worst example
is that the “dedicated lanes” and stations are built in the middle of a major
thoroughfare—which, while understandable, means there are anywhere from 2-4
lanes of heavy, uncontrolled vehicular traffic that was must cross to get to
and from the buses—and there is no provision for safe pedestrian access to the
stations, which would have required the installation of pedestrian overpasses
(or at least traffic light controls on the general vehicular lanes at those
points). This means that accessing the
BRT system requires the perilous crossing of uncontrolled traffic flow to reach
them—rendering the process so undesirable as to be all but totally
unusable. The BRT in Delhi is actually
the worst-designed version I or the others touring it had ever seen; and it was
impossible not to speculate that this, in fact, was some kind of setup, which
eventually made it easier to organize public opinion against the whole idea of
BRT. The discussions never got to this issue, but it is one that requires deep
consideration: in the hostile atmosphere against the democratic allocation of
road space in cites (of the sort Enrique
Peñalosa so eloquently describes, below and
elsewhere), it seems quite possible that the forces that push against
directions that impinge on road space for private cars (as BRT clearly does, of
course; one of the reasons it has so many staunch advocates is that it directly
competes with private cars for space, and there is a widespread conviction that
cities depending on private cars for transportations are an environmentally
unsustainable nightmare for the world) are quite capable of nefariously
contriving to make good design impossible—or insisting on restrictions that
would result in bad design. I wish the question had been raised to Geetam about how the particular design
problem I have just focused on came to be; it might have been very enlightening
about the deep aspects of this political process.}
[question]
you said you were part of the process for 20 years, and still don’t know what
lessons to draw. About the same time,
the Metro project happened, and it is very successful for the people who use
it. If the Metro succeeded, why did the BRT not.
[question]
can you comment on the issue of how long people stay in a certain position?
Ed Glaeser: for Madhav: what’s stopping people from raising tolls on the
new roads in a way that both funds them and keeps traffic down and uses the
money for buses?
Madhav: Urban roads need to
be for everyone; if you have big toll roads, no one is going to be able to
cross. The Sealink
has tolls, and there is not much objection to raising tolls; but should you be
placing those kinds of roads in a city, where 40% of the people are walking and
another 45% are taking public transport—or why would you build elevated roads,
cutting the urban fabric? Do you want this kind of thing in your cities?
Geetam: I think the Metro is fascinating: today,
after 200km of Metro in the city, 2% of trips are carried by Metro, and we
still want to extend it—even though studies show even 400km will not carry more
than 10% of the trips in the city. The
system which is actually carrying the majority of trips in the city will
continue to do so; but space for buses actually conflicts with space for car
users, while elevated or underground Metro has no impact on them. We have done
a “successful” BRT project in Ahmedabad; but the message is to do it where it
is not needed, where there is ample
room for traffic movement—not where it’s really necessary to take people out of
congestion.
[question]
she says she doesn’t know what went wrong with BRT corridor. I live there: the concept is good; the
problem was nothing was done to encourage car users to use buses; and given the
short length, the car user probably still needs a car at the end of the
run—doesn’t work.
[question] why the
Metro looks more successful is that a lot of people could move from the car to the
Metro, which was not true with the bus. Of course strategic infrastructure,
where there’s a big divide in socioeconomic stratas,
it’s not just economic benefits one needs to look at, but there’s the social
aspect, where there’s a wider group that get benefitted—how can architects and
planners live up to that social responsibility?
Geetam: people are saying that what is wrong is
that it’s inconveniencing car drivers. Delhi has the highest percentage of car
users in the country, but still the great majority use public
transportation. But BRT becomes a failed
corridor because it inconvenienced the cars; design is wrong because it’s wrong
for cars.
Jose: we have to stop here; but it’s a crucial question
because infrastructure is never neutral: it poses winners and losers, and these
are real questions. Good discussions,
good polemics, good antagonisms. I want to lay out two questions: 1) best
practice v. exceptionality—are we to
create a possible grammar of success, of good strategic infrastructures, or are
we trying to imagine how we resolve problems ourselves?; 2) should we get
beyond engineering and economics, and assume that infrastructure is actually a
political act? And finally the question of infrastructure beyond
infrastructure—should we assume we don’t equate talking about infrastructure
with talking about road building, and get to the level where infrastructure can
leverage social, educational, and other environmental access?
THE CONFERENCE: DAY
TWO – 15 NOVEMBER THURSDAY
Afternoon Session
Urban Leaders Round Table. (Co-Chairs: Ricky Burdett and Sue Parnell)
Ricky: Two African leaders, plus the former Chief Minister of
Delhi, and the former mayor of Bogotá.
Sue: Excitement in the room, because
the people we have here are the people who actually make a difference at the
point where things really happen.
Prefers the term “translational research” to coproduction or impact that
many academics look for; idea of translational research is moving from looking
at what problems are to what the implementation is, working out new knowledge
together at every step of the way—seamless interaction in the process of
defining the problem, getting the evidence, and starting to implement—requiring
a two-way dialogue. Interconnectedness of our relative urbanization—not just
what happens in each individual city, but implications for all of us. Not all those
here are at the city level, but that is appropriate, because what happens in
cities is not just controlled by city hall—a lot of other dimensions to it.
Ricky: Represented at this table are people in charge of 85
million people. Based on the work we’ve done, two or three statistics to set
the stage: we talked about how much of a metropolitan area people are in
control of, and we worked out that for Sheila it was 66%, Bogotá 82%, but
Babatunde wins with 100%, a big area and the whole population within it; Lagos
and Delhi, roughly the same growth in the next 10-15 years in GVA, 6.6/6.4; GINI index (inequality worse the higher the
number), Delhi has become more unequal as it grows (typical phenomenon, of
course, in rapidly growing cities), Lagos comes out at 0.64, Delhi slightly
below that, Bogotá has had a very bad period, but is flattening out; another
specific social measure is the murder rate, in Bogotá it has come down (we know
Latin American cities have had their difficulties), but still high at
16/100,000, but in Lagos it’s tiny at 1.3/100,000, Delhi 2.7. Just to give a
sense of what we’re dealing with.
Babaunde Fashola (Governor of Lagos)
How do we get human
beings to actualize their need for shelter, sustenance, movement, protection,
and prosperity.
He has been governor for almost 8 years, and term ends next year. Difficult time to be a leader: world more
complex; used to be able to hide, now more reachable (gets 6-700 texts a day;
Nigeria insists that officials publish their telephone numbers and email
addresses). Came into government when people were losing
faith in the ability of governments to do things. Lagos is a city and a state; I am the mayor
and the governor. It used to be the
capital of Nigeria, but no longer; but still commercial capital; small land
area (0.1% of the country), but 22 million people live there. Realized we must
re-plan and reorganize; the urban planner and the economic planner are crucial.
We have moved toward decentralization and devolution: down the chain of command, it is possible to
hold people responsible, and people can identify who does what and who provides
what. We had lost control because of
political instability: national government in flux, military interventions,
population growing, but not the infrastructure.
But today, by providing services that were long in demand, people happy
and willing to pay taxes (out 10.2 million people in the tax base, in 2007
420,000 were paying taxes; currently, over 4 million are paying taxes). The
economy has grown, and Lagos contribute ~5% of
country’s GDP; but also seeing challenges of poverty and inequality. Government
has defined four key area to focus on expansion of
opportunities for economic growth in a way that includes people: power,
agriculture, transportation, and housing (PATH). Much of the food that Lagos
consumes comes from other parts of the country. We acquired land in other
states, and used our transport ability to move needed food. Citizens who pay taxes continuously for 5
years participate in an open draw and win housing units that the government has
created for them (they get a minimum of a 10 year mortgage). Haven’t solved the
problems, but there is a lot of hope and belief that things are possible and
progress is being made: they see a metro coming in, ferry services
expanding. Hope has been the primary
parameter.
Pravin Gordham (Minister of Cooperative Governance, South
Africa)
20 years after
democracy has to some extent overcome the legacy of racial capitalism and political
repression, it’s time to rebuild a nation that was founded on the basis of race
and tribalism. We have to recreate a democratic state at all levels of
governance and insure that we deal with the legacies of colonialism and
Apartheid. The miracle was that we
avoided the ultimate disaster and live in a relatively peaceful country. Under the old regime, homelands were created
under the 1913 Native Land Act: 87% of the land was appropriated for the White
population (which is 20% of the population) and that 80% of the population will
have the remaining 13% of the land. This
is part of the fragmentation we had to deal with post 1994. A map of Cape Town (below) shows this legacy
(the pink is White owned, the orange Colored, the blue
Black African):
And this is the same
all over South Africa. Our agenda is captured by Nelson Mandel’s statement,
“Freedom…must be understood as the transformation of the lives ordinary people
in the hostels and the ghettos; in the squatter camps; on the farms and in the
mine compounds.” Even today, 20 years later, we still have the migrant labor
system that has served South Africa’s mining industry for 120-130 years; came
to the fore recently in the mining towns. Our Constitution (adopted in 1996)
provided for three spheres (as opposed to levels; say “distinctive” [not
“autonomous”]), and interrelated : national,
provincial, and local—probably the first to have a section on local government,
but it allows for intervention in the local if things go wrong. 1998 white
paper serves as the basis for democratic institution of local government; but
the existence of democratic local government only in place since 2000. Have a
fiscal commission—like India; municipalities receive only 8% (but it is with
the understanding that they have access to property tax revenues, too), and
there are also specific conditional economic grants that are made to
municipalities. Over a 15 year period,
GDP has grown; unemployment has been stubborn at 25%; electricity, water,
sanitation have seen growth. Have to
improve the quality of what we provide, and the participation of citizens. We
are still dealing with the legacy of Apartheid; thought when we took over in
1994 things would be radically different, but patterns of spatial distribution
remain very similar. The way housing has developed has also replicated the
Apartheid pattern, because of land availability and the cost of land:
Going forward we need
to limit sprawl, capture greater density, keep people closer to services, while
instituting political changes; 90% of the economy is still in the hands of a
small part of the White population; poverty and inequality are still huge
challenges. We have a National
Development Plan: we will have “wall-to-wall municipalities, all to have
locally elected governments; but we have the challenges of weak governance,
corruption, lack of spatial integration, lack of responsiveness, poor financial
management, institutional weaknesses. We need to build just cities. Problems going forward: inclusive growth and social
justice; balancing the needs of the middle class and the urban poor; need to
deal with the issue of bureaucrats—we need a democratic bureaucracy;
short-termism of markets and political offices; collaborative planning. End
with a Mandela 2005 quote:
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an
act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to
dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.
After all the
technical stuff and research talked about, have to remember that everything we
do is about people, and giving them life experience and life prospects.
Enrique Peñalosa (Mayor of Bogotá, 1998-2001, and long an
Urban Age regular and friend; pictured below with
Babatunde)
Bogotá is a city and
a state, and many decisions that governments have to make are unpopular: no one
will ask you for them, and no one will thank you for them. A Bogotá mayor has
almost complete power, and nearly complete freedom from national government
(but not national laws or regulations). To be democratic and inclusive, we have
to confront many interest groups—particularly, powerful, upper income
citizens. The poor are too absorbed in
daily concerns and don’t supply much support for
difficult to understand projects like BRT or privately-managed schools; but
officials need to make decisions on their behalf of their interests, even if
they are not aware of it. Constitution
in Colombia allows for referenda, and we asked people two questions: whether
they wanted two car-free hours in the morning and afternoon; and whether they
wanted a totally car-free day once a year.
We narrowly lost the first one, but won the second; so at least one day
a week, everyone is reliant on public transportation. 85% of people in Delhi would be better off if
cars were completely banned during peak hours every day; but our societies are
so dominate by higher income groups that we never even raise these kinds of
possibilities. We did some quality, luxury schools in poorest neighborhoods;
had huge conflicts with unions, but success is amazing. Imagine that Central
Park was a private golf course (which can only be used by
~120 people/day); that’s what we had in Bogotá, a golf course accessible
to only the wealthiest individuals:
We tried to make it a
park using eminent domain; failed, but were able to take 10% out (the polo
fields) which is now a public park. When we were doing it, no one was
supporting us—not even the neighbors; but now tens of
thousands of people use the park. One of the most important political and
ideological issues of our time is how do we distribute
road space: not a transportation engineering problem, it is a political
decision. There are no sidewalks in
developing countries: the most important transport infrastructure that makes a
difference between advanced and backward cities is quality footpaths—not
highways or subways. Upper income people
want all roads made for them; have to remind them that parking is not a
constitutional right. We can get rid of cars parked on streets and make bigger
sidewalks; my hair used to be black before these fights, but I was able to get
cars off the sidewalks. If I’d been an
appointed mayor, I would have been dismissed—all the powerful people in the
city had cars and were against me; as an elected mayor who did not need money
from the national government, I was able to do it—100s of km of sidewalks.
Buses represent another battle for road space; easy to build subways—everybody
wants them, including the rich (who don’t use them)—but while it means that
poor people will have less money for schools and other service due to the
enormous capital requirements of building subways (10-20 times more cost/km
than BRT), they do not realize this. Sometimes flagrant inequality and
injustice are right before our noses and we don’t see them: in England and the
US, not so long ago women did not have the right to vote; I’d say today a bus
with 100 people in traffic is as undemocratic as women not voting—if all people
are equal, basic democracy says that a bus with 100 passengers has the right to
100 times more road space than a car with one.
It does not take an IIT PhD: a committee of 12
year-old children would conclude that the most efficient way to use scarce road
space is an exclusive bus lane. BRT is
the only possibility if we want to
move people all over our cities. The
Delhi BRT had design and political problems.
We were told that after it was built, cars were allowed into the bus
lanes due to “public opinion”—what does that mean? “Public opinion” means the
15% richest part of the population. The owners of the
newspapers and TV stations. Delhi
has better science and technology than Colombia; it is a political problem, not
a technical one. Bogotá’s TransMilenio moves 47,000 people/hour daily—more than
most of the world’s subways, and twice as much as
Delhi’s Metro (which move the same number of people over twice the distance:
12,500 people/km v. 20,700 in
Bogotá). Buses zooming by expensive cars stuck in traffic is
almost a symbol of democracy. Half of Bogotá has grown illegally; all over the
world slums grow up in the wrong places; we bought land (forcefully, when
necessary) in the right places, and built communities using high quality urban
design. Biggest issue for government in
India: for it to truly control the use of land in and around its cities; and
one of the tools that is needed is eminent domain.
Sheila Dikshit (Chief Minister of Delhi, 1998-2013)
Most of you know
Delhi; it is a unique city—it is a heritage city, and it is also a modern city,
and, it is the capital of this very large country called India. There was too
much migration, so the national capital region was created so as to absorb
those who come to Delhi’s limited area; good step, but hasn’t met the needs of
this growing capital. Central government
sits here; it has local government; and it has its municipalities. Central government naturally has a stake in
the governing of its capital; but local government therefore has very little
power—it has no hold over power, land, or police. Because it doesn’t have control of land, it
has to apply for land, and that is
why it hasn’t grown as fast as it should have.
People keep on migrating here, because of the economic boom, health,
transport, etc.; but since it can’t
keep up with that, we have slums—which is not acceptable for a city like
Delhi. We should allow slums to turn
into reasonable housing, and we should allow all unauthorized communities to
have all the legal rights that authorized colonies have—including the right and
duty to pay a tax. But doesn’t happen. Some success: 10-12 years ago, the Metro
started; and now there are 270km of service that carries 27 lakhs of people
(2.7 million) every day. Several years
ago Enrique came to Delhi, and gave
us the idea of BRT; we took what was given to us; but the people of Delhi just
did not accept it. At rush hours, there
are 26 different kinds of vehicles that traverse that route; a more difficult
situation to solve than you think.
People not only migrate here, they come as much as 100km away to work
here each day; also people from all over the country come because of the best
health facilities, schools, and colleges here.
Ever city needs a different kind of treatment. We started a participatory movement, inviting
different local organizations; but we have a very dynamic democracy, and the
locally elected MOAs and MPs are not willing to share
their power over what they consider their domains; but over a long period of
time, we have succeeded in getting more local control of projects. Delhi was
not a green city (15 years ago green cover was ~3-4%); today green cover is
24%. We are also at the effect of other places: if it’s cold in the Himalayas,
it is cold here; it is rains somewhere, we get water.
Sue: I have a series
of questions (or prompts): all spoke about tension of addressing the legacy of
the past, fixing what was broken, and thinking about new challenges. Your
thoughts on which is the more important?
Babatunde: It is a question of momentum: if something
is already flawed, it affects the psyche of people; and whether they want to go
forward depends on whether they believe the future is achievable. It is the
Catch-22 of change: even as broken as the structures are, there’s a vested
interest in them: when you try to clean out slums—even with dreadful
conditions—I didn’t understand why people insisted that you should leave them
there. I couldn’t take them on forcibly;
we ended up going to places where they themselves had abandoned, and started to
build from there. And in the end there was trust. There is a danger in assuming we know what’s
good for them; so we have to stay in close contact with what people want and
are thinking.
Sue: You make the point that you can use the past, to
acknowledge the past and build trust going forward—fantastic. Very different
from the Bogotá experience: we’ve got to push forward, we have to modernize;
same sense coming from Delhi, we have to take people with us Am I misreading
this tension?
Sheila: I don’t think people live in the past. Our city has a lot of heritage past; but
people don’t want to live in the past—they want to be well-educated, they want
to grow, become modern. City of Gurgaon, next to Delhi, is an IT-oriented city;
a lot of our youngsters go there. Same
is true on the other side of the city in NOIDA.
It is now a vibrant city; wasn’t 30 years ago—people would come, but
found Kolkata or Chennai much more exciting, with many more opportunities than
in Delhi; but today this is different.
Enrique: I think you have to resolve the problems
that exist, such as slums; that’s why we legalized
more than 400 slums, brought water, schools, parks. Different in different
places, but always the question is toward what future? Government has to have the power to decide
where the city grows and how. Citiesd need to use
eminent domain, along with other means.
Ricky explains: “eminent domain” means compulsory purchase.
Sue: And what we have is the tension of whether you want a
top-down or a bottom-up, more inclusive process. Pravin, what is
more important for you as a leader: to address the inequities of the past or
deal with this rapidly changing urban context and deal with the aspirations of
the future?
Pravin: In our case, the
past has given us this spatial dispersion, and the future needs to be seen in a
different kind of relation: stop the sprawl, make sure you don’t have
developer-led development taking place; and, at the same time, take care of the
aspirations of the poor and lower-middle class people. We have the good fortune
of dealing with legacies and still doing new things—to create the “next
normal,” and keep our vision clear—a window of opportunity that urbanization
provides.
Sue: You spoke about the development of the middle
classes—sometimes as a problem that blocks progress, their cars are literally
in the way; and yet the way you have to get them on board as a constituency. How
do you handle the unruly middle classes? (most of whom
are in the room, so be careful)
Babatunde: We all understand that, as similar as they
look, cities all are extremely diverse cultural and lifestyle centers. The Western center is clearly different from
the Asian or the African. In Africa, even if a city invests in all the
technology and planning of a European city, it will always remain
an African city, where people don't live in immediate nuclear families, but
also with relatives—which is very different moving forward in managing the
clusters in developing affordable housing.
From country to country, the capacity to control law enforcement is as
important for achieving, planning, all of that.
Slums arise simply because people take over planning by themselves—and
perhaps because government is not doing what they need to plan ahead. It’s an
unending battle. We have our own BRT
experience, and we’re doing more. If you
don’t have your own police, it’s difficult: I have had to arrest
people—soldiers, motorists—to make it work; public persuasion is not enough,
you sometimes need coercion.
Ricky: do you control the police?
Babatunde: I don’t: the national government controls
the police.
Pravin: We need to get the
right balance between control and freedom: you don’t want not to control
sprawl. We have 4 or 5 major cities that
have BRT working or about to work—and quite successfully. On the middle
classes, we as leaders need to understand their aspirations and their needs
better; but perhaps we also need from the middle classes a greater social
consciousness: they are not the only ones in town—there are other stakeholders
in the city whom they need to respect. But it’s an
issue that requires political agility.
Sue: All of you mentioned opposition groups—in the middle
classes that’s what we would expect—but you also
mentioned having to fight with labor; is that a common experience? Who is more difficult, unions or business?
Enrique: Democracy is trying to get public good to
prevail, the good of the majority. How
do we define middle class? If we define as those who have
cars and upward, that has implications… We have to fight against cars
parking on sidewalks; we have to fight against vandals in some areas; we have
to fight against teachers unions who don’t want any change; have to fight
against country club members who don’t want to give up their polo fields. Can
go through being in government avoiding all fights…but then what?
Sheila: We were not able to convert BRT into
something the people of Delhi accepted.
Perhaps we should have had more than one BRT; that might have made a
difference, since that one experiment became an eyesore.
Ricky: Going back to a bigger point Babatunde made: the
importance of linking urban planning to economic planning; we should reflect on
this, because it’s not a given—in the previous discussion we had, some of the
most advanced cities in the world, Tom Wright said the two are not connected
and they should be; in many ways London is trying to grapple with that. If Joan
Clos were here, he might observe from the UN Habitat angle, the greatest amount
of urbanization is happening in cities or countries with low income; and a lot
of the growth in sub-Saharan Africa is happening in scenarios effectively
without industrialization. That poses
enormous problems of trying to link economic planning and urban planning
together. How do you deal with that in
Lagos?
Babatunde: Speaking from the Lagos/Nigerian
experience, as highly populated as we seem to be, a lot of the land mass is
still largely unused. In Lagos, which is the most densely populated, people are huddled around
infrastructure; so there’s still scope for new towns, new settlements,
re-planning the imminent expansion in a way that is more sustainable than what
has happened in the past. There is some
struggle between good governance and democracy: good governance does not come
just because there’s democracy—democracy just says the one with the most votes
wins; doesn’t say it’s the best one, or most attuned to issues of the day. In democracy
you need people on your side to stay in office, but there are also times you
have to take a stand. One of my
colleagues lost his seat because he asked teachers to submit themselves to a
competency test. This was a governor to whom there had been complaints that
students had not been doing well; so the governor goes in, fixes the schools,
provides learning tools, and still the students were not doing well; the last
thing he tried was to ask the teachers how good are you, and he was told, no,
you can’t ask that.
Sheila: Just want to make one point: more people
from villages are shifting to urban areas, because there is very little
opportunity of any kind in the villages.
Future is not only to have the 20 big cities we already have, but
increasingly we need a series of smaller cities.
Pravin: Where you have
organization, you have the potential for conflict and confrontation; but all of
us have to learn how to negotiate, how to maintain a progressive vision, how to
maintain a socially just basis. There is
something about teachers unions that all of us are saying the same thing about.
Ricky, you’ll have to have your colleagues at the LSE look into this question.
As for urban and economic planning: there are times when economic issues and
developments lead to urbanization and planning—you have a new huge coal mine
operating, thousands of people move there for work opportunity, you plan it
quickly or else you have chaos there; and then you have the reverse (coming
from our situation, which we’re not handling well at the moment), how do cities
plan not just for big businesses and industry, but for micro-businesses,
informal businesses, and small businesses. And what kind of infrastructure
enables people to feel included and get opportunities and the kind of facilitation
that are required in their own localities; and that’s something where social
justice requires a kind of rebalancing, since the inclination is to satisfy the
big guys and get donations when the next election comes up—and in that sense
democracy has a certain weakness. I don’t think there’s going to be one
paradigm that satisfies all situations, but there may be a continuum of
paradigms of values and visons and best practices.
Ricky: Unfortunately we need to wrap up; but I thought I’d be
very unfair and ask each of you what’s the one thing you
would change in terms of your ability to govern better. Sheila, what
would you change?
Sheila: People in Delhi tend to be inward looking,
what is right for me; it doesn’t matter whether others are suffering. We need
to build that kind of a culture where people do care about one anothe, which is difficult because you have to stand for
re-election; but we need that.
Enrique: The most brilliant thing ever to happen in
Bogota was that 7 municipalities were fused in 1954, which allowed stronger
institutions, and more effective planning, and the ability to collect taxes in
the richer areas and invest in the poorer areas. What we needed to have is some kind of
regional government that would be broader.
Babatunde: This is all about people, and therefore
what I would have learned better is how to communicate with them.
Madhav: It’s about
complexity: we have to learn to get the balance right between planning and
acting and learning.
Ricky: I think we’ve been exposed to four very serious and
productive perspectives on governing urban futures, reflecting on real
experiences.
Governing India’s Future: Are Cities Getting Smarter? (Co-Chairs: Darryl D’Monte,
Journalist, and Ananya Roy)
Ananya: We want to consider
how governing India’s future ties up with the idea of urban future, and we want
to think not only about cities getting smarter, but also about whether cities
are getting more just.
Isher Ahluwalia (Chair, Indian
Council for Research on International Economic Relations) spoke on “Better Growth, Better Climate, Better Cities.”
We need better
cities—cleaner, smarter, greener, more inclusive, just cities—because 2/3 of
our GDP comes from urban areas. Are our
cities acting as centers of growth? Are they the kinds of places investor and
innovators would want to come to create wealth? We have a very long way to go;
and if we don’t get better cities (with better air, better water, better
connectivity) we won’t get any growth. Urbanization is necessary for
sustainable economic growth. States are
the principal actors in development today; but they are not ready to
decentralize and devolve funds and functions so that municipal governments will
be able to deliver the services for which the Constitution has made them
accountable. More funds need to be made
available to city government. Most important challenge today is governance and
capacity to plan. We must engage society and engage the people to demand good
governance. If a city wants to do a
drinking water project, they need the approval of the state before they can do
it: 50% of the revenue of city government comes from state and national
transfers. If, come election time, a state decides to give exemption from
paying property taxes to below 10 lakhs, a city simply
loses half of its revenue. City is responsible for drinking water, sewage, and
solid waste management; but the finances come through the setting up of a state
finance commission which tells the state how to disburse funds—and those
commissions are not devolving funds, so cities have no resources. We need smart, clean cities, but we have
cities in India in which on average only 30% of the sewage is treated. We need scientific, effective processing of
garbage and sewage so that we don’t end up poisoning our air and our drinking
water. What we need in health is clean cities and villages with clean drinking
water. If we don’t treat waste water, we
are polluting ground water and river water.
But we must start with working on clean water and air.
Harsh Mander (Director, Centre for Equity Studies) spoke on “Addressing the Many Exclusions of the Urban
Poor.”
A drunk driver in Delhi
ran over eleven homeless people, yards from where we run a homeless
shelter. They were working men who came
into the city for a few days at a time for employment. People sleep close to
highways because of the mosquitos: the automobile fumes drive away the
mosquitos, and if they sleep even a little farther away from the highways, the
mosquitos make it impossible to sleep.
So we are living in a city in which in order to have a few hours of
sleep, you risk the health of your lungs, and you risk your neck every night.
Noam Chomsky came to Delhi recently, and he said he’d never seen a place where
poverty was so dramatically manifest on the streets. He also had never seen a
people who had an absence of outrage in the face of such poverty. For me, a smart city is not one that hides
its poor; it’s one that includes its most disadvantaged citizens. In Delhi, 40-50% live
in slum, many unauthorized. This 50% of
the population occupies 3% of the land.
There is a bemoaning the fact that so many migrants come to the city;
but we must recognize that our entire financial model is driving people away
from the countryside into the cities. Agriculture still employs 60% of the
population, but only produces 15% of the GDP, and receives 5% of public
investment. There is an implied hierarchy of citizenship in cities: the poorer
you are, the less legitimate a citizen you are. The poor have rights, and we
have a responsibility towards them. Most urban policy toward the poor is about
block, demolish, restrict. The city is not
planned or designed to include the poor as an equal, which puts me at war with
the state. We could have a more
inclusive city: we could do things to
help street kids in open schools and hostels (would need 500 in Delhi)—is that
an investment we’re willing to make? Could we open our day schools at night for
homeless children? The Urban Health Commission is doing almost nothing for the
urban poor; about the only one the poor consult about medical issues is the boy
at the pharmacy; there are virtually no public hospitals or free clinics. This city belongs to you, it belongs to me;
but it also belongs to millions of people who have come into the city to earn a
living, to keep their families alive, to have an
better future—and a smart city is one that cares.
Ireena Vital (Strategic
Consultant, Delhi) spoke on “A Five-Step Plan for Improving Urban
Governance in India.”
India is a reluctant urbanizer; but people don’t know this, so they continue to
come. 70% of new jobs will be created in cities—a lot in services; and, like
every country in the world, Indian cities will be the important engines of
growth. Good that we’re talking about
100 Smart Cities; but the real issue will be the rejuvenation of the other
7,000 existing cities in India. 5 states will have their population more than
50% urban, and India will have 68 cities of more than 1 million in population,
compared to Europe with only 35. When
you look at Kolkata, or Delhi, or Bombay, by 2030 the GDP of these cities are going to be the size of Malaysia—these are more
countries-in-the-making than cities. But cities are usually run by someone who
will only be there for two years, doesn’t understand the running of a city, and
has only 2 or 3 permanent staff members to work with him (If you look at
Bangalore, with roughly the same population as NY, it has 20,000 people working
for the city, while NY has 200,000; and 18,000 of the 22,000 are
sweepers). Are cities are huge, and they
have complex problems: only 30% of sewage is treated, 24% live in slums, and
things will get worse, because services are going to require a 4-7x increase,
just to keep pace—in affordable housing, we need 44 million units. We really
need rental stock, and we don’t have it.
We need a new operating model, and it is about funding: we need $1
trillion for capital expenditures, another trillion for operating
expenses. It all could be funded: cities
could monetize their valuable land, they could raise taxes, and, what’s more,
they don’t have a balance sheet—they carry no debt; we just haven’t done
it. Without governance, this won’t
happen My definition of smart (and I’m
trying to be cute here), and it’s about governance: we need Structure (to define what is the job for
cities); we need Mayors (one day
elected, but at least empowered); Accountability
(idea of accounting standards is a new idea; balance sheets are not published;
all pricing becomes political); Reliable
Agencies (service delivery systems that work); Talent (to build complex systems; roaming pool of experts,
outsourcing of some functions). Urban
votes are now material. What is stopping
things is the lack of political will, not technological solutions.
Shankar Aggarwal (Secretary
for Urban Development, India)
spoke on “Policies for India’s Urban
Future: The 100 Smart Cities Program.”
For 65 years, India
has been focused on its rural areas, and for good reason: they were extremely
poor, and it was a question of survival. Aslo, in
1947, we were importing a large portion of our food, so we paid a lot of
attention to developing agriculture; we are now a food exporter. For years the
country grew at 3%; then it started rising to 5%, 6%, to 9%, or even 10%.
Growth won’t be sustainable, however, without dealing with the
disadvantaged—almost 400 million below the poverty line. One plan is to keep the country clean. One
plan is to look at cities and fill in the gaps in urban infrastructure. But a
very important new plan is the development of 100 Smart Cities, because it is
only technology that can bring in the big change. All over the world, India is
a world leader in IT, creating wealth for everyone; but we have not been able
to take advantage of that for the common man within this country. Idea is use
what is available in the country to make our cities smarter, but also to take
care of the urban infrastructure as well.
Four points, the first governance: 1) all information should be
delivered in an electronic mode (no one should have to go to a public office to
get or give information); 2) all information has to be in the public domain
(resources of a public body, accounting system—all available publically); 3)
engagement (citizens have to be participating in the governing process). The
second is a robust cyber-connectivity (not yet reliably available even in the
biggest cities; can be easily achieved, and that by the private sector). Next,
hyper-mobility (can we cut down the unacceptably long time it takes to get from
point A to point B in our cities—that is achievable, have to cooperate with
everyone, including the public and private
and communal sectors.
Darryl D’Amante: We now have almost
an hour to have a panel discussion.
My first question is
to Mr. Aggarwal: Although we have been talking about informing citizens about
projects, we heard this morning about the DMIC, and I
don’t think most citizens are aware how much land and in which states land is
going to be earmarked for this project, and it’s of some concern how the land
will be acquired. And is it of concern that we are going to have a major
industrial corridor cutting from north to west, and this seems to ignore the
east of India.
Shankar: I cannot comment on the Industrial
Corridor, because that is not a subject of my ministry. My agency is charged to develop 100 Smart
Cities, and we are talking about existing cities, so it is a brownfield development,
and not a greenfield development; and in all cities
you can always find some land at the periphery, or you can go into the
redevelopment.
Ananya: Using the issues
raised by our speakers, I am going to place a series of questions to all of the
panelist on the table, so if you don’t like the question I am posing to you,
you can pick someone else’s. Jagan Shah: Isher Ahluwalia said that we must demand and create better cities; who is the “we” who will articulate and
implement this vision of better cities? For Richard Sennett: Harsh Mander started
with a very pointed image of the homeless bodies seeking sleep; in what way can
we imagine urban futures in that context of stark inequality? Gerald Frug:
hearing a lot today about smart cities as well as Ireena
Vittal’s concept of re-inscribing of the idea of what
a smart city might look like; so what are smart cities? And, finally, for Anumita Roychowdhury:
again going back to Harsh’s presentation, he provoked
us to think about the way there’s an absence of outrage, despite the terrible
inequalities and bodies on our streets; how do we imagine and enact social
change if there’s an absence of outrage? I’ll go in the order I posed the
questions, but you don’t have to answer the question I posed to you.
Jagan: I think I’ll link the who is the “we,” with the question of smart cities,
because the process of making smart cities might be how we come to grips with
the question of who the we is. In a city like Delhi,
this we is made up of a very diverse set of interests.
There is a large segment of youths
(because Delhi is an educational hub for the region) who actually don’t have
much of a voice, and don’t participate much except in student politics; another
huge block we label and homogenize as the urban poor—very problematic label; if
we say “disadvantaged,” as we sometimes do, it includes lower middleclass
working people as well (not really poor, but deprived in many ways [long
commutes for them and their children, lack of schools or the inability to get
their kids into a school, etc.]—millions
who are deprived of basic infrastructure or goods); and then there is a very
large elite, powerful and strong, with a lot of capital at their disposal, and
they influence a lot of decisions. Just
taking these three, the smart city, using big data and evidence that can be
laid on the table, we’ll be able to set up more informed debates and dialogues
between these multiple constituencies that make up this very fractured
city. That is the hope this new
technology offers us: we’ll be able to harness the information about processes
of government, processes of city operations which then can be shared. We’re looking at some data about the Rajiv Awas program, and the questionnaire used to examine the
targeting of this scheme had some 200 questions—and a lot of those questions
are very problematic, and the answers to those questions are evasive; now if we
use that sort of information to set up a scheme like that, let alone the land
tenure that was mentioned earlier, you’re bound to get it wrong. Mistakes are
becoming more expensive, if not disastrous.
Justice is in the interface between the stuff we can build and the goods
we can deliver to these citizens.
Richard talked about the “thrilling experience” of
seeing Nehru Plaza (on the Urban Age tour): in
this huge illegal—and even legal—electronic commodities market— it embodies
everything that an urbanist might desire density, a mix of poor and less-poor
people, living, productive environment; what it isn’t is an equal environment.
Our discussions of inequality are predicated on a false assumption, in that we
assume inequality is by definition bad; society has lived with inequality since
the beginnings—it is the conditions under which people live in inequality that
really matter. In a place like Nerhu
Place, people don’t live in a condition of despair; they are not oppressed by
the inequality. One of the main tasks of
urban planning is to create that kind of open, porous space in which unequal
people can interact positively.
Neo-Liberal capitalism makes inequality a source of raw suffering by
isolating very poor people, creating monochrome places like shopping centers
which ghettoize the poor. Challenge of
governance is to prevent that “simplification” that makes inequality stand out
as a humiliation—that makes people feel that their inequality is
disabling. Same thing in creating public
housing that only houses the poor. We can
govern these things through urban design and public policy. We need more complex, informalized
places; all can be destroyed by unregulated, uncontrolled development which
leads to brutal, stark environments.
Smart City technology needs to be democratized; and we have to avoid the
over complicating of technology which leads to levels of expenditures that are
highly profitable corporately, but bad for the people it’s supposed to
serve. The technology we need is much more simple.
Gerry: Problem of cities is first and foremost a problem of
central government. States in India and the US have the power to create cities
that have the power to deal with inequality and the problems of governance; so
the first thing we need for Smart Cities are smart states. States need to give cities a “brain”: the
ability to think about what the problems are and deal with them, and to allow
for citizens to participate in the process.
There’s a lot of fake participation and fake popular consent; to be
smart requires an enormous amount of intelligence that the states need to
enable cities to do. Far worse in
creating a new city: need to consult with people when the people are not there
yet; the only people there will probably be displaced when the new city comes.
The new city will have people who don’t know they are even going to be there
yet. How do you organize a city to be responsive to that? Cities will make many
mistakes; you have to create the ability going forward to adjust, to listen to
their citizens and change. Smart is not a technology; it is the ability to
think and to do.
Anumita: The question is
outrage by whom. There is outrage in the people who are
affected by this; but there is no political expression of the outrage strong
enough to make equality. It is because
of exclusion policies—not only in economic areas, but also in how we are organizing
the urban space. We are moving away from
the design solution we had found earlier; we have mixed income living in the
older parts of our cities, but the new development is moving away from
that—losing that legacy. Need to understand the little bit of positive change
that is happening: we have to include self-construction and how the poor use
microfinance and self-direction along with professional advice. Today we are
trying to create a platform of public participation; but that process does not
actually represent the people who are actually most affected. How to build discourse and discussion into our future development. Need to understand that public transport for
the poor—the informal systems that have developed, small,
medium level public transport—is different from and in competition with
public transport for the rich. The
temptation is to get rid of the transport for the poor—the auto rickshaw, etc.—because it’s taking away from the
public transport used by the rich—the Metro and the buses.
Isher: We do have to
integrate the solutions of the poor in planning cities. We should not have two ministries, one for
housing and poverty and one for urban development, because you can’t plan for
the poor without integrating these; and it was good that the new administration
merged the two. Whenever governance is used intelligently (actually having
backend integration of different departments; e.g., in Hyderabad, Bangalore), it has generated a response I
wouldn’t have thought possible: governance significantly improved, and not only
for the rich; that part of smartness leads to inclusion. But in Hyderabad, they hired people to take
real-time pictures of garbage collection using cellphones; worker absenteeism
went down, cleanliness increased; but the program was actually later withdrawn
under pressure from the unions—had to give back “the right to lie.” I believe in the power of technology; but we
still need the political will and leadership.
Harsh: Inequality is
a problem; especially inequality with illegitimacy (urban poor that come into
cities not legitimate citizens; we all are migrants—who has grandparents are
from Delhi?), with a sense of illegality (where you live, defecate, earn your
livelihood is illegal. How can you express outrage when you are considered
illegal? You need to get away from notice by authorities; you can’t protest.),
and the third is inequality with indifference (biggest problem: we don’t care
how desperate the lives of these people are; subhuman living where people die,
no real medical care, and especially aftercare without a home).
Richard: that is moving; but you are talking about
degradation, and we cannot conflate that with inequality. Degradation is problem in itself. How do we find a basic minimum for human
existence; and this has to be separate from class structure.
Harsh: The problem is not just the ones who lead the most
degraded lives (although they are the ones who need my services the most), but
the view that there is a significant segment of people who don’t deserve
legitimacy: we look at slums simply as places we’d like to clean up. It is a
much larger sector of the population that is affected by being viewed as not
being legitimate members of society.
Jagan: A lot of us do little
acts of kindness that serve some needs; but not sure we can transform that into
a governance structure without “the compassionate princes.” We face a huge backlog of what hasn’t been
done in dealing with our cities; there is the possibility with technology to
speed up that process—the digitalization of land records can be a complete
game-changer in the question of access to land, which is now mired in an
opacity and lack of information. There
is also the problem that speaking of community participation may overlook the
participation of individuals: the issue of “who speaks”—community can help
represent interests, but doesn’t mean that this is adequate to the expression
of individual aspirations and needs.
Ireena: I look at it from
the perspective of a citizen and a business person for 25 years. What we’re fighting for is the soul of Indian
cities. We had an identity after Independence, and then that identity got
depleted. At the end of the day, we’re going to have inequality of various
kinds; but we also have opportunities of various kinds. How are we going to make a space for all the
different elements (the different religious, ethnic, cultural diversity of the
country; the rich and the poor), all these different facets of India, without
judging them as good/bad, rich/poor. The consultation process may give you a yes
or a no; but the choices are really made by enlightened leaders and
bureaucrats. We need to define an Indian
city that creates spaces for this richness and letting it evolve.
Ananya: Using moderator
privilege, I’m going to invite Joan Clos
to reflect on a paradox which runs through all this: we are placing a lot of
faith in better planning, at a time when many of the problems have been
produced by planning. You started the
conference by asking us to think about a new paradigm of how we plan; do we
also need a new paradigm of who plans?
Joan: Very much to the point: I talk about new paradigms in
plural, because society requires a diversity of solutions. In India you are in
the growing world, going to produce new cities—in the West we don’t do that. It
is up to you, now; it’s your turn to
produce the new paradigm of urbanization. We are going to look at what you do;
we know how our cities were built—it was a time that the relationship between
capital and urbanization was established by the dialogue between capital and
unions—and unions were asking, and fighting, and dying for good, decent housing; and capital produced decent
housing, not because the ones controlling the captial
thought it was intelligent, nice…, but because it was a fight and they were forced to. The debate here, though, raises the question
of who is talking in the name of whom—who is now representing the rights of the
poor in the dialogue between the elite and the majority. Who has the power to
fight for the rights of the majority? I hope the new urban model will come out
of this fight. What is going to provide the livelihoods of the majority? It
won’t be manufacturing. How are they
going to win these rights? The rights won’t be given out of generosity. The new
model of urbanization—which I hope will replace the modernist one we are
suffering from around the world, and which I hope you can avoid—will have to
come from you. But who will represent
the majority; if they do not organize themselves, they will not obtain what
they are dreaming of. The government will try to do what it can; but where is
the fight for the good city going to
come from? And this is the lesson I take out of this fabulous Urban Age
Conference in Delhi.
Ananya: My closing thought
is that we need to think about how the world’s great democracies reproduce
spatialized inequality. How to move from
thinking about the deprived to how we tackle wealth, power, and privilege—and how
urban planning has repeatedly reproduced those forms of wealth, power, and
privilege. Thinking about social change may require that we step outside the
safe boundaries of both government and governance.
Darryl: I’m a journalist, so I raise questions; and
I’m bothered by constant emphasis on infrastructure, Smart Cities, corridors,
highways. This emphasis in the absence of who it’s going to benefit; Smart
Cities looked at in the context of our country, where 1 in 4 people don’t even
have electricity—not to mention the lack of drinking water, sanitation—creates
a danger of building-led development, and the resultant exclusion of vast
masses of India. India will have one of the biggest transformations the world
has ever seen; and what that transformation will be is something we all need to
join in the debate about—such as the Urban Age is providing.
Thomas Matussek (Managing Director, Alfred
Herrhausen Society) gave the Closing Remarks.
This brings us to the end of two days full of thought provoking, passionate debate—so full of good ideas. This has been the most interesting and challenging Urban Age debate we’ve had over recent years. Here it all boils down to governance—governance, leadership, trust are exactly at the heart of the matter. Deciding who decides; managing chaos. Land is the problem that really gets the sparks flying here. Devolution and decentralization: in a time when megacities are taking over in a globalized world, without globalized institutional frameworks, we need multi-level governance. The Urban Age family has been deepened and been enlarged—for instance, Teheran, Lagos—and that is very important to us in deciding where we go in the future. Thanks to Jagan Shah, and the National Institute of Urban Affairs who co-organized the conference: we always knew you were a class act, but now we know you’re a world-class act. And two wonderful young ladies, Priya Shankar and Puja Tewary, who for months worked to make this a success; and Linda Radau, to whom we owe tremendous gratitude. And from the LSE team, Madeleine Lee, Alexandra Gomes, and Savvis Verdis, who behind the scenes made sure everything worked. Thank you all, very much. I don’, “goodbye,” but I say, “Auf Wiedersehen”—“next year in…” that will be a surprise!