A generation ago, Gurgaon, now Gurugram, was a calm agricultural area on the outskirts of Delhi. Today, it is a notorious urban jungle where start-ups compete for office space with multinationals. One of the busiest start-ups out there is none other than the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) — a public body created in 2017 to sort out the planning and development mess that the city has become.
Like any other start-up, the team first operated from multiple locations before settling into a one-year lease they could afford. But finding a more permanent office space is the least urgent task. Last week, GMDA was in the news as it struggled to solve severe flooding caused by construction work. The week before, it took on Google India, which it accused of being responsible for building a road connecting its office to the highway without due clearance.
Some wonder whether GMDA’s attempt at managing urban development is a boon or a curse for this city that developers and landowners used to rule freely. While most urbanists believe in the primacy of public interest and control, the corporate world and a large part of the public doesn’t seem to agree.
From Gurugram, where urban growth is driven solely by private interests, to Seattle, which has been totally reshaped to suit Amazon’s ambitions, the public sector seems to exist only to service economic growth and mitigate its externalities.
Feeling the heat
As highly qualified and well-paid white-collar workers flock into boomtowns, those who rely on affordable rent, cheap breakfast joints and social services are feeling the heat. A recent attempt by Seattle city council to raise taxes from corporate groups to finance affordable housing and services for the homeless was successfully fought against by Amazon, which argued that it would rather give this amount (pocket change for the giant) to charity than the government.
The subtext, of course, is that a non-governmental organisation would do a better job at spending the money than a governmental one. Such thinking is symptomatic of a tendency that has an enormous impact on the way we conceive of cities. Privatisation in urban services has been on the rise.
In Gurugram, urban growth is driven solely by private interests
It is difficult to refute that public administration, even in the wealthiest of cities, is often wasteful and inefficient. Sometimes, it is downright corrupt and manipulative. In India, it is particularly easy to feel frustrated with shabby, even life-threatening, infrastructure. Even loyal supporters of the public sector can’t repress occasional fantasies about privatisation as a saviour.
In this context, it is not hard to understand the enthusiasm of the middle-class for privately-run resorts, residential colonies and malls where one feels safe and protected from the mess outside.
But then, we have the case of India’s much publicised first private city, Lavasa, now largely acknowledged as just another billion dollar urban failure. While some still wonder whether “Lavasa will ever turn into the Italian hill town that its proponents had promised,” most accept its depressed fate. The project is so deeply mired in bad loans and poor management that it finds no buyer. The best we can hope now is that migrant workers move in, fix it, and turn it into a busy town. Gurugram may be an infrastructural disaster but at least it is filled with life.
In a recently published paper, Harvard law professor Gerry Frug argues that privately-run cities are terrible at redistributing resources. Business parks and gated communities charge their patrons for infrastructure and services, but once out of the compound, people are on their own, left to navigate the penniless public realm, which lacks everything. This explains the mess in Gurugram. It also explains how cities, which can’t raise tax revenue from wealthy corporate and individual residents, land up totally segregated and exclusive.
“The choice between exclusion and no exclusion cannot be resolved by saying that everyone should get what they want,” Frug argues. “The choice is political: what kind of society should we be creating.” That is the real question.
The writers are co-founders of urbz.net, an urban network that’s active in Mumbai, Goa and beyond.
