Our Cities are More Fixable Than You Think.

Sri City: How would you go about designing a city? Imagine that you have the best urban planners in the country, a wealth of resources at your disposal, and your location boasts a great climate with a long coastline. Would you build superhighways to accommodate traffic or build a metro rail system for efficient transport? How would you plan for sustainable growth, natural disasters, and create a thriving community of millions of people who will eventually call this place home? These difficult questions had to be answered by the planners of Los Angeles and Barcelona when they set out to transform themselves into prosperous cities.

Both cities share similar geography, climate, economic importance, and cultural influence; however, the choices made by their planners led to completely different outcomes. Los Angeles prioritised cars over humans by building freeways and zoning laws that separated people’s homes and workplaces several kilometers apart, reducing walkability. Automobile companies lobbied against public transport to ensure everyone had to be forced to use a vehicle. Barcelona took a different approach. It prioritized walkable areas, boulevards, and mixed-use blocks where shops, homes, and schools co-exist. The dense clusters of neighborhoods restrict car movement while providing safety for pedestrians and cyclists. When we compare the two cities, we observe that the residents of Barcelona are better off with lower living costs, lower road fatalities, lower commute times, better air quality, and an overall better quality of life. This is how much of a difference urban planning creates in our lives.

We are all aware that Indian cities are urban planning disasters. Unlike Spain or the US, India never had the luxury of building its cities from scratch. Let’s look at urban India’s brief history to have a better understanding of our problem. Indian urban development was deeply influenced by colonial rule. For the British, the sole purpose of a city was to handle administration. Cities that were important for the Raj were planned for efficient extraction of resources, not for their residents. After Independence, India’s urban areas were largely deserted as the government focused heavily on rural growth and agriculture in the first soviet style five-year plan. This trend continued till the 1990s, when liberalization put cities back into the spotlight, but by this time, around 25% of the entire population was living in urban areas. People in villages moved to cities for better opportunities and economic growth post-liberalization. The rate of urbanization soon outpaced the government’s ability to plan. This led to the concept of informal growth. Overcrowding, slums, lack of sanitation and water supply, zero disaster management, waste management challenges, endless traffic jams, and horrible air pollution are some of its symptoms. The question is, how do we solve such deep-rooted problems in a country like India, where land, capital, and resources are scarce? The solution lies in our weakness, informality.

I saw this firsthand when I travelled from Krea University to Kolkata. Multiple auto-rickshaws at our front gate were ready to drop me off at the railway station as early as 6 in the morning. I boarded a local train and reached the first station of Chennai Metro. This route dropped me off at the airport in 45 minutes. After landing in Kolkata, I could choose between the metro, a cab, and a bus to drop me near my location. After reaching the metro station closest to my destination, I took an auto rickshaw to finish the last leg of my journey. 

I observed that there’s a remarkable level of efficiency that lies deep inside the chaos of the average Indian city. When the government failed to build reliable public transport, we built our informal modes of transportation like auto-rickshaws, shared tempos, and e-rickshaws. Our tightly jammed houses are a result of planning failures, but they unintentionally provide a basic outline for walkable spaces where schools, shops, and businesses are clustered in proximity. Hyper-local markets have erupted beside every populated part of the city, ensuring the daily needs like groceries, tailoring, and medical care are minutes away. This dense, mixed-use structure allows people to live, work, and socialize within the same few kilometers. Some countries have spent billions in an attempt to recreate this organic proximity, while we take it for granted. What this proves is that our cities have tremendous potential to grow into sustainable, walkable places that foster community and economic growth. Instead of bulldozing slums or building more highways, cities can build upon what already works. This needs to be done with instrumental policy changes and the cooperation of people.

The first step is to deal with the non-negotiables like sanitation, cleanliness, and drainage. Indore has done a remarkable job in this regard by introducing door-to-door garbage pickup, segregation at source, and e-waste composting by the community. Once this issue is over, we can focus on simple solutions like clearly marked road signs and pedestrian-only areas. We need to build brick-paved footpaths and walkways that run throughout neighbourhoods, markets, and city centres. Motor vehicles need to be banned from dense residential and commercial areas. The only way we can remove the need for cars is by creating end-to-end public transport systems. Informal modes need to be formalized by the government, and the routes need to be revamped for optimum last-mile connectivity. Existing infrastructure, like suburban railways, bus networks, and metro rail systems, needs to be compatible with newer informal modes of transportation. Once we have achieved this, we can work on full-blown pedestrian-only areas complete with a brick-paved floor, shops, restaurants, parks, and social areas. MG Road in Gangtok is a successful example of this model. While these solutions might seem far-fetched, it is very possible to implement these changes in India with the help of our organic urban landscape.