New Town Planning, Informality and the Geography of Disaster in Kolkata, India
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THE CITY VULNERABLE: NEW TOWN PLANNING, INFORMALITY AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF DISASTER IN KOLKATA, INDIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Andrew Joseph Rumbach August 2011 © 2011 Andrew Joseph Rumbach THE CITY VULNERABLE: NEW TOWN PLANNING, INFORMALITY AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF DISASTER IN KOLKATA, INDIA Andrew Joseph Rumbach, Ph.D. Cornell University 2011 Cities in the global South are increasingly at-risk from environmental hazards, but frameworks for understanding disaster vulnerability do not adequately explain urbanization or the role played by urban governance institutions in shaping disaster outcomes. Drawing on interview, archival, geospatial, and survey data, I argue that urbanization and the geographies of risk it produces are historically rooted and structured by political, economic, social, and institutional norms embedded in city environments. Disaster risk exists not just at multiple scales but also differentially across the city. As this dissertation demonstrates, individual and household vulnerabilities, and the norms and structural conditions that help shape them, are connected to a pattern of fractured urban development. My study is based in Kolkata and centers on new town developments, one of the most significant spatial components of urban growth in India post- Independence. In such contexts, planning is one of the central urban governance institutions and sets of practices that shape the growth of Indian cities. While planning may be spatially or temporally distant from disaster events, the trajectory of urban development that planning lays out and the settlement logic it employs are foundational in shaping future disaster events. As such, I argue that planning should be considered a root cause of vulnerability or resilience. My work suggests a substantive shift in the conceptualization of urbanization in one major and widely used model of vulnerability within the hazards literature. I use the case of Salt Lake, a mature new town project in Kolkata’s eastern periphery, to analyze the likely outcomes of similar developments in the years and decades to come. One of my key areas of focus is how planning understands and engages with informality, a dominant characteristic of cities in the South. Salt Lake was planned and developed in the flood plain in Kolkata’s eastern periphery. While Salt Lake residents and businesses are largely resilient to environmental hazards, they rely on thousands of low-income and informal workers who live in unsafe slums and squatter camps surrounding the township. As my research shows, informality does not arise independent of the formal economy or planned developments; the formal and the informal are deeply intertwined, and are co- constitutive of the broader urban fabric. My study highlights these relationships and argues that we must recognize the co-locational and co-evolutionary nature of informality in order to plan for disaster resilient cities. My findings are relevant for planning and disaster management officials whose policies and practice today will help shape future geographies of risk. By failing to address the root causes of risk in cities, policies that focus exclusively on vulnerability in-place will fail to anticipate and mitigate the future growth of unsafe settlements. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Andrew Rumbach grew up in Jasper, Indiana and received his Bachelors of Arts in Political Science from Reed College in 2002. He joined the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University in 2005, where he earned a Master in Regional Planning in 2007 and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning in 2011. During the course of his doctoral studies he was awarded several fellowships to support his research including a J. William Fulbright Research Fellowship, a PERIship award from the Natural Hazards Center, the Public Entity Risk Institute, and Swiss Re, and a research fellowship from the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies. While in India for fieldwork, Andrew was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Studies of Social Science, Calcutta. He also worked closely with two community- based organizations in West Bengal: Prantik Jana Vikash Samity in Bidhannagar and Save the Hills in Kalimpong. Andrew will join the faculty at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in the fall of 2011 as an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Reflecting on my time as a graduate student, I cannot imagine a better home than Cornell University and the Department of City and Regional Planning. First and foremost, I would like to thank Neema Kudva, my chair and mentor, as well as my other committee members, Kieran Donaghy and Bill Philpot. The faculty in CRP has been incredibly supportive during my time as a doctoral student, most especially Susan Christopherson, Michael Tomlan, Mildred Warner, and Stephan Schmidt. I am also grateful for the wonderful community of graduate students in CRP, including my fellow travelers Kate Lowe, Lesli Hoey, Xiaoling Li and Doug Appler. Outside of Cornell, Gavin Shatkin, Ben Wisner, Abe Froman and Rob Olshansky provided invaluable feedback on my research proposals and earlier drafts of this work. In Kolkata, I was fortunate to be affiliated with the Centre for Studies of Social Science Calcutta, under the supervision of Professor Keya Dasgupta. I benefited from conversations with several of the faculty at CSSSC, including Sohel Firdos and Dhrubajyoti Ghosh. Prantik Jana Vikash Samity was a wonderful research partner; I would like to especially thank Dr. Satyajit Das Gupta for his leadership and critical feedback during the course of our household survey efforts. I would also to thank Santosh Ghosh at the Centre for Built Environment, who gave me an invaluable perspective on the history of planning in the Kolkata metropolitan area. Poulami, Brandon, Noah and Matt were the finest companions an American in Kolkata could hope for. One of the most unexpected outcomes of my field research was meeting Praful Rao, founder of Save the Hills (STH) in Kalimpong. Praful’s work is an inspiration and reminds me of the enormous challenges we face in trying to reduce iv the impacts of environmental hazards. I look forward to a long and productive friendship with Praful and other members of STH. I would also like to acknowledge the organizations that provided material support for my dissertation work, without which my time in the field would not have been possible. They include the U.S.-India Educational Foundation, the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, the Public Entity Risk Institute and Swiss Re, the U.S. State Department, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program, and the GeoEye Foundation. Finally, and most important, I would like to thank my family, friends, and loved ones, for their support, encouragement, and senses of humor. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................................viii PREFACE ....................................................................................................................................xi CHAPTER 1: DISASTER AND THE INDIAN CITY..............................................................1 India’s Urban CEntury & thE GEography of DisastEr............................................................. 5 ThE CasE: Kolkata, QuEEn of thE East ......................................................................................... 7 ThE DissErtation’s StructurE.......................................................................................................17 CHAPTER 2: URBANIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISK.................................... 22 ThE GEnEsis of DisastEr StudiEs.................................................................................................25 ThrEE FramEworks of DisastEr VulnErability.......................................................................32 ThE PAR ModEl ................................................................................................................................36 VulnErability in thE Urban ContExt Across thE Global South...........................................43 Unpacking Urbanization: ThE Accumulation of DisastEr Risk ........................................46 A Typology of Urban Hazards: ThE EvEryday, Episodic, and Catastrophic .................55 CHAPTER 3: COLONIAL DEVELOPMENT, PLANNING AND THE ROOTS OF DISASTER RISK ...................................................................................................................... 70 A City in thE Swamp: Charnock’s Landing ..............................................................................71 ThE Early Colonial PEriod ............................................................................................................74 FevEr Hospital CommittEE ...........................................................................................................83 ThE Calcutta ImprovEmEnt Trust..............................................................................................85 Planning in Post-IndEpEndEncE Kolkata ................................................................................86 Planning as a Root CausE of DisastEr Risk........................................................................... 101 CHAPTER 4: URBANIZATION AND NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT THE