Cities have evolved into magnets of society, drawing ever greater numbers of people who come looking for prosperity and the good life. This is possible because these unique sites have a vast pool of aggregated talent and resources. Urbanisation is the dominant trend. The traditional resource banks — people, geography and culture — have entered a new dimension today, as newer information technology applications generate massive data about cities, and algorithms provide deep insights into the activities of residents. Significantly, three out of four people will live in cities by mid-century. There has never been a better time to study the transformation of our living spaces. These are two notable works that trace specific examples of urban evolution:
l The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century by Janaki Nair: The book walks the reader through the social and geographical history of the city that launched the Indian software miracle. As the author contends, “no other contemporary Indian city allows us to track the passage from small town to metropolitan status within a few decades as well as does Bangalore.” What this reflective book traces well is the spatial and cultural transformation with the many phases of the city’s development, beginning as two separate sections — one of which housed the general population, and the other, the Cantonment — and the merger of the two post-independence. If the economy was driven by a robust public sector first, the rise of IT as a driver of ‘clean growth’ brought wealth — but not without problems in the allocation of space between the affluent and those with a smaller share of the prosperity. We see that urban democracy is often not equitable. This is something to consider, as the focus of policy turns to smart cities.
l Paris, Capital of Modernity by David Harvey: Among the world’s historic cities that fascinate millions of people even in faraway lands with their famed beauty, Paris is iconic. It is a city that presents its vistas as living works of art. In this book, the author, an acclaimed anthropologist and geographer, reviews the economic and social compulsions that produced the new Paris of the 19th century. It should interest the urban planner of today, for instance, that Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who was given the task of expanding Paris by Napoleon III, sanctioned massive debt-funded public works like extra wide boulevards, parks and stately buildings that, however, contributed to a harsh gentrification of a city suffering from disease and poverty. Of course, Paris ultimately suffered from speculative economics of the era, and Haussmann was dismissed. This is a fascinating work of scholarship.
ananthakrishnan.g@thehindu.co.in
