Master plans of cities and towns that do not respect and follow the natural ecology of the area, but recommend replacing it with more and more concretised spaces, are writing doom scenarios of the cities and towns
During the preparatory work for the Development Plan 2034 for Mumbai, about a decade ago, there were consultative meetings with groups of people and organisations working in different sectors – health, housing, education, gender, environment among others – that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had facilitated with the international consulting firm working on the plan. This had generated a great deal of excitement that, finally, there would be meaningful representation of people and their concerns reflected in the DP.
Alas, when the draft DP was unveiled, it not only contained unpardonable errors but had also ignored the consultations with health professionals, slum dwellers, housing activists, transport analysts, urban planners and so on. The draft was withdrawn and sent for revision by the then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. The bureaucrat tasked with revising it, Ramanand Jha, was willing to listen again to some of the constituents who had been ignored. Among others, gender activists and women’s groups made detailed submissions and, to cut a long story short, it resulted in Mumbai’s revised DP becoming the first urban plan in India to have an entire chapter devoted to a gendered perspective on land use and city planning.
Is this enough? In the past few years, as I can attest from having seen the implementation of this aspect up close, it is not sufficient to have key elements of city making written into a plan; the process of turning them into reality in ways that scores of people can be benefited is a long, tedious and complex one. But it is now difficult to take away the reservations in land use across Mumbai that were made for women’s shelters, skill centres and so on in the DP 2034 -- and will continue to be there. Mumbai’s DP is not a perfect document, it is also limited to land use planning rather than being a master plan for the city in terms of its expansion, ecology, and liveability.
However, there is at least a plan. A flawed plan is better than no plan at all. Are cities across India developing and expanding without plans or master plans? It appears so, going by the report of the Niti Aayog two years ago which re-surfaced after the Supreme Court’s recent observation that “city after city (was) getting into bad shape” with a disturbing level of autonomous expansion. The report stated and it is worth remembering that almost 75 percent of the census towns and cities in India do not have master plans to guide their spatial growth which has led to haphazard development and construction, piecemeal interventions, and environmental pollution in these towns and cities. Nearly half the states in the country and most cities do not have sufficient urban planners, while the smaller towns have none, it was noted.
If there are no master plans to begin with – the comprehensiveness of these plans and their effective implementation are points that come later – then it should not be a surprise that our cities and towns display utter chaos and disorganisation in their spatial growth, besides the ecological degradation which has contributed in a large measure to extreme events such as killer heat waves and intense floods of the sort we have been seeing in the last few years.
In the absence of plans, all development and construction in cities and towns has been piecemeal, plot by plot, on whims and fancies of those in power at a time. This replaces a plan or a structured set of rules and recommendations for spatial growth based on economy and population, and taking into consideration needs of housing, transport, education, health, and recreation of projected populations – all in an ecologically sound and sustainable manner. A comprehensive master plan – beyond a mere land use plan – sets out the template on which the city or town will expand, how its economy will thrive and diversify, how spaces will be defined as public and private, what public amenities will be offered to make it livable and so on.
The basic approach to a master plan and the process of planning are as important as the plan itself – two aspects that are often overlooked in an urban policy and governance environment that is increasingly shaped by multilateral institutions and private consulting firms rather than elected governments and public institutions in India.
The basic approach offers an insight into what elements inform the master plan and what perspectives shape it. Is the city or town seen as the next big destination for global finance and capital, or is it imagined as a multi-sectoral thriving economy with space for large and small enterprises? Is the city or town imagined as a place for few or accommodating various interests and classes all with similar public amenities? Are housing, education and health seen as public goods that any resident in the city or town can access, or are these perceived as private goods? Is the expansion of the city or town at the expense of its natural ecology and green-blue resources or is the development nature-led?
Increasingly, it should be clear that nature-led or nature-based plans are the way forward. Master plans of cities and towns that do not respect and follow the natural ecology of the area, but recommend replacing it with more and more concretised spaces, are writing doom scenarios of the cities and towns. City making cannot mean constructing at the cost of losing green spaces and natural water channels; such cities and towns are bound to suffer the impact in the form of persistent high heat in summers, extreme winters, and intense rainfall resulting in floods. Policymakers and planners in cities and towns are yet to wake up and join the dots from such climatic events to ecological destruction – and work this understanding into city making.
The process of planning is equally important too. Master plans are usually drawn up by bureaucrats in their offices with little to no inputs from the ground and virtually no consultation with or participation of the people who live in that city or town. Ideally, a master plan must pull together a larger and comprehensive vision drawing from many neighbourhoods plans in which all classes of people of those neighbourhoods have taken an active part. Civil society participation, in Mumbai, was largely limited to a handful of NGOs for a long time; though some of their articulation was valid, it was hardly representative. That is why the Mumbai DP process of consultations with a wide range of people was heartening.
Given that the rate of urbanisation is “dramatic” and about 60 percent of the population in the country will live in cities by 2050 going by the union government’s projections, a large number of cities and towns in India developing or expanding without master plans is a road to urban disaster.
Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is also the Founder Editor of ‘Question of Cities’
