What Kind Of City

Urban Planning  | 22 April 2011  | print

Urban planning should be about the engineering of social justice, not the engineering of monuments and icons

Last Tuesday, protesters from Vasai did the unthinkable: marching to South Mumbai from Vasai they diverted onto the Bandra Worli Sealink, otherwise closed to pedestrians, and so stormed a cars-only citadel. The police were unable to stop them. Questions were later raised about this act of “illegality”, but the comment from independent MLA Vijay Pandit, who led the march, provides another perspective. “Why should the Sea Link be only for rich people and their cars?” he asked, calling the Sea Link a rich people’s bastion.

The next day, another article reported that the slums removed not long ago from Chowpatty beach have come back again. The report quotes a slum dweller asking, “Where will poor people like us go? We work here and do odd jobs. We also give regular hafta to the police.”

The two reports and the matters to which they relate are separated by huge gaps in time and purpose. The Sea Link breach was momentary and was soon over; not so the beach slums. The first was purely symbolic; the second is a matter of survival. Both are bound by this: they speak of a city that has become increasingly indifferent to its poor; both are a form of social reclamation of parts of the city by its disenfranchised.

Ten years ago, the Bombay High Court dismissed a batch of Writ Petitions filed against the BWSL. Re-reading that judgement today, it is perhaps difficult to fault such reasoning as there is, given the narrow focus of legal challenges.¹ But at least one petition mentioned that the planner and project proponents (MSRDC/MMRDA) did not heed the warnings of its own consultants, W.S.Atkins/ORG/Kirloskar Consultants, who, in a commissioned report, pointed out that the Sea Link would increase traffic, not reduce it; and that increased congestion would be seen at Haji Ali, Peddar Road, Tardeo, Nana Chowk, Worli Naka and points beyond in each direction. The affidavit filed by the MSRDC rubbished all this, of course; they claimed that congestion, noise and pollution would decrease and travel times would improve. Plus Mumbai would get another ‘landmark’, another ‘icon’.²

Travel times from South Mumbai to the airport may have improved along this stretch (but not necessarily beyond); but the congestion and noise levels at either end of the Sea Link have made life impossible for the local residents. Today, faced with the snarls at Haji Ali and elsewhere, everyone is scrambling to find solutions. Who has benefited from this project? Of Mumbai’s commuters, 88% use public transport; less than 7% use private transport, and taxis account for another 5%.³ So this iconic landmark structure (which MMRDA now wants to ‘patent’) services only about a tenth of the city’s commuters. Vijay Pandit is not completely off the mark.

The thousands of crores spent on this bridge would certainly have been better used in providing better public transport for the majority rather than a small percentage of the city’s commuters; which is what the Atkins-ORG-Kirloskar study recommended.⁴ Building more roads does nothing to decongest a city or ease its traffic woes. As a planner famously said, it’s like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.⁵

The slums-on-open-spaces problem is more complex, but the Chowpatty slum dweller’s voice cannot be silenced like this. They work here. They need to live close by. Granted, this cannot be on the city’s notoriously scarce open spaces. These are needed not for the rich (who have their private estates and club memberships) but even more essentially for the poor. But are the poor not entitled to housing they can afford? Isn’t this what people want?

As the statutorily-mandated revision of Mumbai’s development plan gets under way, a remarkable survey by the Urban Design Research Institute and 200 students of the Rachna Sansad architecture school shows us the real needs, hopes, desires and aspirations of the city’s people. Compiling data from a wide cross-section of over 1000 Mumbaikars, the study addressed issues of health, transport, open spaces, environment, water, housing and education and more. The results counter everything our “planners” claim. 65% said their top priority was affordable housing; 32% had no toilets at home; 27% had no access to public toilets. Translation: a quarter of this city does not have access basic sanitation. The survey also assesses densities and puts figures to what we’ve long known: that some of our wards have the highest densities in the world. And yet, according to our planners, it is in the best interests of the city to increase densities here and add more people by increasing the FSI for “cluster development of cessed buildings”.

Another study by the National Institute of Industrial Engineering and the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, studied environmental amenities in Mumbai in relation to real estate prices. They found that people are willing to pay a premium to be near a park or a lake; do not want to be near slums; want noise-free neighbourhoods.

These studies point to something our city planners have always ignored: the people of this city and their demand for a better civic environment. Nobody in his right mind wants a slum, not even the person who is forced to live in it. Our slum solution — toss them out, hand the land over to developers and hope for the best — is criminal and is social injustice of the worst kind. Our planning norms and laws encourage shiny buildings and mammoth bridges, but make no provision for affordable housing.

The trouble is with the manner of our planning process, which is deeply flawed. In the current model,⁶ a group of planners get to decide what the city wants and needs. Then they ‘invite’ the public ‘to make suggestions and objections’ when the city’s goose is pretty much already cooked. The result is always a plan that is exclusionary: it largely ignores the poor and the weak and makes no effective provision for their housing, health, sanitation and transport. Matters are made worse by the builder-politician nexus and when ultimate planning control, with no system of oversight, is retained in the hands of one minister who owes nothing to the city.

This method of planning is simply wrong. From London to Miami, the process is exactly the reverse: first try and ascertain the needs of citizens, and then develop the plan. Public consultation is the foundation of all planning; but it must precede the planning, not follow it. Post-facto public participation is necessary to correct and fine-tune, but it is no substitute for prior consultation. Whose city is it anyway?

This is what UDRI and the architecture students have attempted, and this is why their initiative deserves greater respect from the government for it restores the city’s people to the planning process. Who we are is defined by the kind of city we make for ourselves. Is Mumbai over the next 20 years to be a city that cares for its own or the private playground of millionaires? Our development plan must attempt the engineering of social justice, not the engineering of monuments and icons.