We know what’s going wrong, and we ask the right questions; questions which crop up while our car drives down narrow roads with broken street lights, landfills spilling over with waste we have created from nothing, and slums we cannot really imagine the insides of. Our city is stretched, thinned and beaten down every day, and it needs heroes.
Thankfully, a recent initiative to identify these very heroes proved that in a city grappling with too many problems, there also seem to be a gratifyingly high number of people who are ready to take on the work no one else will. These are people who willing to get their hands dirty, immersing themselves in projects that promise almost no glamorous paybacks, and it is these people that the seventh edition of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award was looking to find.
Not surprisingly, its open call brought forth a list that was 135 deserving applicants long. A difficult cull by an independent jury still churned out an impressively long list on 9 candidates, and each name on this list was an example of selfless work and dedicated service. While the prize went to two projects — Chintan, Material Recovery Facility (MRF), New Delhi Railway Station and Goonj— both dedicated to solving one of Delhi’s biggest issues of waste disposal, management and recycling, the jury maintained that the process of selecting these winners had been a difficult and daunting one. Renana Jhabvala, jury member and National Coordinator for the Self-Employed Womens’ Association said, “It was a very difficult decision, because there were a wide variety of projects, ranging from very big to very small, and dealing with many different aspects of the city and life in the city. In a way, you felt like giving the award to them all.” The award, associated with the Urban Age project, a worldwide investigation into the future of cities jointly initiated by Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, and LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and Political Science, comes with the considerably large sum of price money, USD 100,000, which was split equally between the two winners. For non-profit organisations that depend on funding and grants, it is easy to imagine the difference this money will make.
The award itself is a travelling prize that aims to recognise and honour projects that work towards improving the quality of life in urban cities. It now travelled to six cities, arriving at a different destination each year. Its first stop was Mumbai, and then the Urban Age Awards travelled to Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cape Town and Rio De Janerio before reaching India’s capital. And so far, the jury is of the opinion that the projects working in Delhi have been the most impressive so far. Anthony Williams, jury member and former Mayor of Washington DC says, “I’ve been on all the juries now, and I really believe that of all the cities we’ve visited and all the projects we’ve reviewed, I actually think that we’ve seen the best set here in Delhi.”
This set included projects like DDA’s Yamuna Biodiversity Park, Delhi Haat, Khoj International artists association and Katha. Each name specialises in a certain area, but at the same time, each is working towards benefitting communities and local residents, by both improving their urban environment and encouraging them to work towards a future unfettered by the issues of today. This idea was especially underlined in the work of the two winners whose projects strives to makes a real difference in a city that generates almost 9000 tonnes of solid waste daily. “The winning projects are both about the questions of waste, questions of recycling, resources, questions of employment, of income generation for poorer sections of society. But each project represents a different set of issues which are critical for the city,” said Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Jury and Professor of Urban Design and Planning at Harvard University.
With landfills filling fast and the wider Delhi area running out of space, both projects try to harness the issue of waste and use it to generate employment and opportunities. This itself speaks of both creative thought and environmental awareness. While Goonj, an NGO formed in 1999 works with the mission of re-using waste material generated in middle class households to create products, thus introducing a social distribution channel, Chintan’s New Delhi Railway Station Facility manages tonnes of unsorted garbage from the numerous trains that arrive at the railway station every day. This garbage is then sorted into organic and non-organic waste by trained workers are the facility and then either composted into manure or separated for recycling. As a result, only 20 percent of it ends up in the landfills we are rapidly running out of. Both Chintan and Goonj have provided livelihood for the communities they work with.
While the list of entries and finalists already seems like a large enough number, there are even more people out there, working towards ushering in an Urban age that will not be so grim, or so challenging. Perhaps, the fact that there are awards that do recognise and assist their work will only encourage even more to join them.
