The 2011 census shows the population of Bengaluru a few quid short of a crore. And it grew nearly four per cent every year for the last 10 years. Will the City Beautiful grow into another Maximum City? Mumbai incidentally grew just over one per cent yearly in the last decade.
Interestingly, Chennai grew just seven per cent in that period, perhaps helped by the cultural reluctance to respond to other vernaculars. The City of Joy, Kolkata, actually contracted 1.7 per cent in that period, maybe with droves of aspirational bhadralok taking their ration cards elsewhere.
Maybe, to be happier, you have to be a bit less happening. The reasons for population growth range from the ebb and tide of economic opportunity to the opportunistic redrawing of city boundaries to consolidate political power.
Quiz anyone who has lived in any of the six most populated cities in India for the last 20 years, about what has changed. Chances are that most of the comments will be about how the city's look has changed. More often for the worse.
The steroid factor
India's largest cities are on steroids, growing muscle faster than developing skin to cover them. Indian government whether at the state or centre is typically big, omnipresent and constantly seeking ways to assimilate power and dispense patronage. The sheer economic velocity of a large city generates humongous tax revenue, a fraction of which is actually available to make it liveable.
While it is true that our cities are steeped in centuries of history and sense of lore, unbridled development sans a sense of the aesthetic is giving rise to all manner of undesirables — from the crass commercial complexes (the ones with the unfinished steel girders projecting up and out) to the run-down and over-weeded once elegant residential gems caught in legal tangles.
Awareness needed
We can do with a more enlightened bureaucracy open to growth-centric design and a keen awareness of the value of preserving historical continuity. We can do with a more benevolent legislature which truly lives in and loves the everyday city and crusades against marginalisation of its many voices.
What we have today are fast burgeoning cities planned ad hoc by those who have little imagination and, worse, even less love for the city or its citizens. And who by omission and commission silence the voices from civil society that seek to have any say in the way the city evolves and supports their dreams.
Myopic political calculations
In the last 200 years, the modern city has emerged as the most impactful social idea of life and livelihood. In India, the city has gone from being scorned as an effete island in myopic political calculations to being vibrant social microcosms that tightly pack polar opposites in relatively seething proximity.
To contain the social fractures within this lattice and productively channel the energy, both the functional and the aesthetic halves of urban planning need to yin-yang. Modern urban planning has its roots in an American movement called City Beautiful that was born in the last gasps of the 19th century.
Its central philosophy was to promote urban beauty to strengthen natural harmony and civic virtue to bolster social order.
The City Beautiful movement was a spirited American response to the ugliness perpetrated by overcrowding in their cities and the aspiration to approximate the classical beauty of the great European cities. A City Beautiful movement in India, while possible, will always be contentious — between modernism and tradition, innovation and continuity, privileged and the dispossessed.
Visible and sustained effort from civil society to evolve a local and sustainable city master plan for the next 50 years needs to be the imperative. They have to create their own platform for cross pollination as the governments have been found to be so woefully inadequate.
Professionals and enthusiasts from every walk of life need to contribute time and expertise pro bono to evolve an execution-worthy blueprint. One that will compel its adoption by its breathtaking vision and participative promise.
Just like it is better to develop love for the sea in someone rather than teach him to build a boat, citizens and leaders alike need to develop higher ownership of their cities. Ownership that is driven by recognition of the wonderful achievements of its past and the myriad possibilities in its sparkling future.
(The author is VP-Strategic Markets, CoreLogic Global Services Pvt. Ltd. The views expressed in this article are personal)
