When I was a child, my father was posted somewhere on the western border of India and every summer we used to travel from there to the Nepalese border to visit my grandparents. The most exciting part of the vacation used to be the train journeys, 18 to 20 hours long, crossing cities interconnected by huge patches of open land. My parents used to algorithmically calculate the food required for the journey, store enough water to last between major cities. The train, crossing a cross-section of India, covered around 1,000 km and crossed two or three cities, so the calculation was done so that food lasted between these major stations where a refill could be made.
Recently I took the same route, this time for the sake of nostalgia. The landscapes that had seemed barren once, almost across Rajasthan, were now built up, and the fringes of the major cities seemed bigger. The distance between major cities also seemed to be less and the big stations which were two or three back in the 1990s now seemed to be almost double in number.
What is behind this change of picture for every 1990s kid like me, is the rise in the millennial Urban India. In Census 2001 there were 35 million-plus cities, which number boomed to 53 in 2011 and is set to rise to around 75 in 2021. The urban which seemed an alien concept in the early planning years of India, understood as a negative spillover of villages, is now a way of life in millennial India, responsible for a major part of the government of India’s expenditure. As in the rest of the world, the millennial urban India speaks the language of efficiency, downsizing, sub-contracting of services, Public Private Partnerships and new models of public management, leading the state to re-scale itself and recreate social and geographical boundaries to participate in the race to match escalating GDP numbers.
Every million-plus city in India boasts of a history that spans 500 years on an average. The forms of the cities have seen more than historians could ever document fully or completely. Indian cities have witnessed social struggles, changing governance systems and powers, disasters, economic booms and recessions for centuries before attaining their current shape and form. What makes them different from one another are the embedded historical struggles, the organic evolution, the vernacular growth, the social sciences that reside within the cities. In scenarios where urban spaces appear cyclical, dynamic, and alterable, informed by technological modifications more than historical changes, setting a prototype definition of ‘global cities’, the cities lose their individuality.
What we get in processes like these are mass-produced, factory-made products where one formula fits all. The millennial urban India aspires for cities made up of repetitive patterns of grids, glazed windows, and the business consultancy a white-collar workforce, existing as an island within the local city, exhibiting the pressures of Indian urbanisation. A denial of the existing urban paradox demonstrated happy, thriving, prosperous spaces blooming in the most unsanitary, inhuman and degrading working and living places.
A city without the narration of its pressures, struggles and essentially its social sciences would be a space but not a place, wherein the beautiful heterogeneity of romanticised urban chaos will get reduced to the homogeneity of urban order.
Even a set of theories remaining relevant only to the social sciences and ignoring other governing aspects such as environment, resources, economics and technological developments would also not be fully justified. If social lenses are required to understand a city or an urbanscape from a humane perspective, then other things such as resources and environment are equally relevant and are required to keep the system going.
Is there then scope for a model where social sciences are formed as a derivative of the scientific process, where both the lenses can act interchangeably rather than challenging the authenticity of one another?
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