URBAN INDIA: UNDERSTANDING THE MAXIMUM CITY 2 URBANISATION AND INDIA URBANISATION AND INDIA 3 URBAN AGE INDIA It is appropriate in 2007, the year in which more than half the world’s population is living in cities for the first time in the history of mankind, that the Urban Age project should turn its attention to India and its cities. Today an increasing number of India’s population of over 1.1 billion is fuelling urban centres across the subcontinent, with over 300 million city dwellers making up one tenth of the world’s urban population. India’s status as a developing nation with a growing urban economy, coupled with the sheer magnitude of people and social potential, provides an ideal platform for the analysis and discussion on the future shape of urban society. The Urban Age’s principal aim is to shape the thinking and practice of city leaders and sustainable urban development. Initiated by the London School of Economics and Political Science and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, Urban Age is structured around international and multidisciplinary events and research supporting the creation of a new urban agenda for global cities. Having studied and visited New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin we now focus on the major Indian cities of Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore with a special focus on Mumbai. This conference newspaper, the eighth edition since 2005, follows the sequence of this enquiry. The first section contains essays on the dynamics ISBN 978-0-85328-222-8 of urban India and reflections by Urban Age experts on globalisation, URBAN AGE CONTACT governance and climate change on cities. A central data section presents Cities Programme new research produced on Indian cities, offering a comparative overview The London School of Economics with the six other Urban Age cities. The final section offers a focus on and Political Science Houghton Street Mumbai, with essays and statistical information on one of the world’s London WC2A 2AE largest, most intense and complex conurbations, in Suketu Mehta’s United Kingdom words, ‘the Maximum City’. T +44 (0)20 7955 7706 [email protected] Ricky Burdett www.urban-age.net Director, Urban Age Alfred Herrhausen Society Deutsche Bank Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin Germany T +49 (0)30 3407 4201 [email protected] www.alfred-herrhausen-gesellschaft.de Urban Age is a worldwide investigation into the the future of cities. Organised by the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank. The Urban Age data is drawn from a collection of sources, including: the Census of India 2001, Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India; U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census 2000, 2005; Office for National Statistics, Official Website; Mayor of London, Official Website; National Bureau of Statistics of China, Census 2000; China Statistical Yearbook 2005; Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2006; Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática (INEGI), 2005; Statistics South Africa, 2005; Statistisches Landesamt Berlin, 2006; Senate Department for Urban Development Official Website; and the United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospect, 2006. A complete listing of sources can be found at www.urban-age.net Designed by Wordsearch 2 URBANISATION AND INDIA URBANISATION AND INDIA 3 URBANISATION AND INDIA FOCUS ON MUMBAI India’s Urban Shift 4 Uncovering The Myth of Urban Deyan Sudjic Development in Mumbai 39 Future of Indian Cities 5 S. Parasuraman Amitabh Kundu A Matter of People 41 Democracy in Urban India 7 Darryl D’Monte K.C. Sivaramakrishnan Maximum City 43 Urban Transport in Indian Cities 9 Suketu Mehta Geetam Tiwari The Compact Mega City 45 The Economics of Climate Change 11 Philipp Rode Nicholas Stern Remaking Mumbai 46 Cities and City Regions in Today’s Global Age 12 Rahul Mehrotra Saskia Sassen A ‘Rule of Law’ for Cities 14 Gerald Frug URBAN AGE CITY DATA Urban Age Overview 17 Four Indian Cities 19 Cities and Regions 20 Governance Structures 22 Density 24 Urban Morphology 26 Transport Infrastructure 28 Moving in the City 30 The Economy of Cities 32 Living in the City 34 Housing India’s Urban Poor 36 URBAN AGE INDIA CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 2007 4 URBANISATION AND INDIA URBANISATION AND INDIA 5 slums and hostels geared towards single male migrants and the huge red-light areas INDIA’S URBAN SHIFT that cater for them. In Bangalore, rapid success has brought with it the problems of affluence. Endless As the Urban Age project focuses on Urban India, Deyan Sudjic explores the links between commutes in India’s Silicon Valley are the physical structure of four Indian cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore – and the encouraging its big IT employers to think social, economic and political forces that are driving urban change. about mixing housing with industry to achieve a more decentralised city that could help them run their businesses more If the Urban Age is an investigation that efficiently. But the experience of privatised marks the transformation of the world from new towns here, as in Delhi, has not been a predominantly rural to a predominantly encouraging. Privatised house building, urban one, it’s a transition that has not based on a mirage of Southern California yet fully occurred in India. In time it will that is so attractive to India’s affluent classes, happen in India too. India today still has a has too often stopped at the apartment complex rural majority, even as the world as a whole gate, and offered no pavement, and no has shifted in the other direction. But, transport links that can allow surrounding like China, India has a profound interest settlements the access that they need to in maintaining its rural hinterland. Both provide service jobs. countries are vast, and their populations In Mumbai, a city in which water and account for a third of humanity. They power are erratic, in which the suburban railway network is so overcrowded that have both, in their own ways, started to commuters who fall off the trains are killed emerge from underdevelopment and have every day, the private sector has been asked been forced to question with more or less to create alternative forms of settlements enthusiasm some of the fundamentals of that can provide solutions. All this is the political creeds on which their societies occurring in a highly centralised political are based. Indian democracy and its legal context where, even though the councillors system are always spoken of as the country’s of Mumbai’s Municipal Corporation are two key advantages in its increasingly overt Chirodeep Chaudhuri locally elected, the state still holds competition with China. But these can be Although only ten per cent of Mumbai’s surface is covered by roads, construction of new high-rise towers and flyovers is creating a rapid transformation of the city’s historical grain. ultimate control. seen as handicaps as well as advantages. Other liberal attempts to deal with Ambassador cars built with production lines systems of state, city and federal power, China does not want to see its cities Mumbai’s chronic overcrowding, its shipped from Britain. Liberalisation has mean for example that Mumbai’s city overwhelmed, and forbids free internal constrained site and continuing attraction ushered in an Indian middle class, attracting government found it impossible to introduce movement. India’s constitution guarantees to rural migrants have also been questioned, back the non-resident Indians, the educated the plan of vaccinations for all newcomers. it, even if the Gandhian ideology on which including the issue of the city’s 300,000 street diaspora, who have made their money in It planned to set up reception centres at their Indian independence was founded displayed vendors, of whom just a few thousand Silicon Valley and the Gulf, creating a point of entry: the railway stations in the a profound antipathy towards the idea of the are licensed. potential economic superpower. Establishing city. But it could not do it. The city was city. India was to be rooted instead in the Yet of the 12 million residents of fast food outlets and shopping malls – with simply unable to conclude a legally binding self-sufficiency of village life. It was an Greater Mumbai, almost 6.5 million live in attempts to introduce supermarkets resisted agreement with India’s nationally-owned antipathy which easily merged with the slums. Mumbai’s slums are of two kinds: the in some states by violent protests – India has railway administration about the level of English horror at the industrial city. The authorised, for which the municipal authority begun to explore liberal market approaches rent to be paid for the use of railway land. attitudes that India’s Oxbridge-educated elite has a responsibility to provide basic services, to city infrastructure. And with these first It’s a nicety that is hard to conceive of in the picked up, at first hand in some cases from and the unauthorised, which are subject to results now visible, it is questioning context of China’s ruthless subjugation of all Ruskin and Morris, about cities could be demolition, and for which there is no duty their effectiveness. other interests to state power. When it comes represented as alien creations that left for the city to provide power or water. There The new India is impatient with the to something like vaccination in stations, incomers reduced to squalor. are impossible densities, 80,000 people per things that don’t work in its cities: the traffic what the party wants, the party ensures 2 Many of India’s big cities indeed have km in Dharavi, the largest of the slums.