As Ramchandra Guha says, India is one of the most complex and interesting nation in the world right now. I say this because India is undergoing five major transformation: economic, democratic, industrial, urban and religious. Unlike other nations which underwent this transformation over a long period of time, India is undergoing all these simultaneously. Of the above five transformation I will talk about the urban transformation in India.
India is an ancient civilisation which has seen multiple waves of urbanisation in the past. This urban transformation driven through urban planning is not unprecedented in India history. However the current urban planning is completely removed from its history. The urbanisation that we plan today is completely imperial in nature and devoid of indigenous theories and principles. This imperial nature of our urban planning was described by AGK in his article on, ‘poverty of imagination in urban planning in India’ in The Wire. He points out at the conundrums that urban planners faces between the western origin theories taught in Indian institutes and realities on ground which renders those theories irrelevant. This irrelevance of planning and its instruments to the realties of urban Indian society forces India planner to adopt a destroy and recreate philosophy. Under this philosophy all local content inconsistent with western planning theories (which is practically everything) is to be destroyed and a new urban in close resemblance with western urban is to be created. Use of force (legally backed, police) is the only way such philosophy can be converted to reality but no free people submit to force. Thus what we see is dispute, enmity and violence across the entire urban space; both physical and power space.
This situation brings us to a very important question of what is the role of urban planning in India and how the local content can be integrated into this planning? Fortunately we don’t need to look very far away for answers but only look what is right in front of us, that is we should first understand what this new urban India truly is. What is this informality and illegality? Is this truly informal and illegal or have we created this because we don’t have an indigenous definition that would accommodate the local informal fabric into formal. Hence the first task that our urban planners needs to take on is to understand the nature of urbanisation in India and develop new planning theories that are inclusive of the local content.
I would like to present some starting points on what this new planning theory could contain. Culturally we are a rural society driven by the economics of commons. Poor people across India depend on the use of commons for their livelihood and living standards. But this new urban is in continuous fight against commons and is driven by the privatisation and commodification of all resources. Thus the new urban planning theories must bring back the concept of commons in urban space. Two very good examples of local innovation in urban commons are Dharamshalas (very cheap accommodation) and Langars (free food). Right now these two innovations lie in the realm of private philanthropy, urban planning can shift these two to state responsibility. There are many more innovations running across this diverse nation that we must understand and include in our planning.
The next major task of urban planning would be to tackle the challenge of housing. Informal settlements is a consistent feature of contemporary urban India. This informal places the biggest challenge to urban planners who wish to follow western theories of urbanisation. We might not look too far away for this challenge either, Indian history and culture provides a sufficient answer to this challenge. Housing in India like in many other culture was always self constructed using local materials. Self labour with community help, local materials and indigenous understanding of local conditions were sufficient factors of production for decent housing. While the rural India still follows this principle to some extent the new urban seems drifting away from this wonderful concept. The urban depends on developers and builders to build housing and sell it as a commodity. The agency of self creation of housing has been taken away from the people by creating a complex web of legislations and guidelines, use of expensive materials and speculative land prices driven by privatisation and commodification. The new urban planning theories must step in and give back this agency of creation of housing back to people. The presence of informal settlements is the proof of the knowledge that people posses in creation of housing for themselves. Planning must take in this knowledge and assist it by adding to it the new knowledge of modern science. The new philosophy of assisting rather than destroying and recreating should be adopted in housing. Along with this the web of legislation that declares all individual efforts illegal should be aligned with this new philosophy.
The last major change that would become the keystone to all other changes is the break of imperialism that persist even after freedom. While we are no more governed by the imperial interests of the United Kingdom but we are still governed by their imperial ideology. The habit of exclusion of masses from the power structure, the complete disregard of individual and his capacity and a complete ignorance of history still persists. Decentralisation is the buzzword here. But what does this decentralisation mean? Where should we apply this decentralisation? To me decentralisation means giving power to the last individual such that his dependence on local government is minimised to a level where he has sufficient control to govern his life and the decision of those who govern the societal life. Thus when we say decentralisation of planning process we must look at decentralisation with this definition which is a means and ends in itself. Two very important steps for planning in this direction would be to move towards mass participation in urban planning process and mass knowledge decentralisation of planning process itself. Every individual must understand this process of planning (and not some few planning graduates) and meaningfully contribute to it. While some may call my hopes utopian, the success of Kerala’s, people’s campaign for decentralised planning has showed us the possibility of such arguments.
These suggestions are no silver bullet to all the problems of urban planning. Neither will these succeed if we are unable to transform our increasing individualistic nature and selfish motives. These are social reforms of which planning is only a part, and all such social transformation require collective actions and community solidarity.
References
- AGK Menon, Article in The Wire, https://thewire.in/urban/dashrath-patel-india-architecture
- Ramchandra Guha, Introduction to makers of Modern India
- D. Bandyopadhyay: People’s Participation in Planning: Kerala Experiment. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 32, No. 39 (Sep. 27 – Oct. 3, 1997), pp. 2450-2454, Published by: Economic and Political Weekly.
समाज समाचार 