ByNarayani Gupta, Narayan Moorthy
Jul 13, 2024 09:14 PM IST
Citizens have to be made integral to urban planning, by recognising them as stakeholder communities and as co-owners of public projects
June comes every year. And, with it in recent years, so do the floods in Delhi. Earlier, the Yamuna overflowed across the floodplains. Now, pounding rain causes choked stormwater drains to overflow across neighbourhoods, not distinguishing the VIPs from the VOPs (the “very ordinary people”).
In monsoonal India, water has always been a boon — and a challenge. Over 3,000 years ago, in Dholavira, systems had been worked out to store precious rainwater for months. Around 200 years ago, the training needed to manage the distribution of water was institutionalised in British India. Now, hydrological engineers turn away from employment in poorly paid government jobs and move to careers hinging on MBAs. Poorly paid, oppressed local planners agree to support venal proposals for gross densification or hard paving. So, what do we see? Impecunious engineers and urban planners, bored or voiceless archaeologists, ignored environmentalists and architects — in a land with a 5,000-year history of technology and construction, where the “panchala” smiths, confident of their skills and sense of aesthetics, were buoyed up by appreciation, even if the lesser mortals who admired the beauty often could not appreciate the skill — just as the world knows Leonardo da Vinci the painter, but few know da Vinci the engineer.
Can we look for systemic solutions to bring back the sense of vocation, respect and reward for professionals like government engineers and planners — so that they attract our best talent? Their actions have such multiplicative effects on the lives of all citizens, so much more than political representatives.
Annual floods have been occurring in south Delhi since the 1990s because of the neglect of our historic canals. Once our nahars were labelled naallahs, the rupture was total. Even more violence is being done since 2010 — 600 year-old nahars are being covered to serve as car parks, and virtual dams are being built, in the form of underground metros, underpasses, and multiple basements. All these are yet more examples of the “expedient” ignoring the city, when an “event” is glamourised at the cost of the long-term. But acronyms, speeches and bouquets cannot by themselves make a functioning city. Not gimmicks, but well-run cities are the best testimonial to a healthy nation. A well-run city is a beautiful city.
Beauty has nothing to do with cosmetic flourishes or with monumentality. The charm of old cities is from attitudes — the respect for the small space as much as for the monumental, for forces of nature as much as the inhabitants’ regular needs, among other things. The “city beautiful” was one of the features of the European Enlightenment, and there are echoes of Shah Jahan’s Lahore and Delhi in Frederick II’s Potsdam and Paris. But the industrial towns — Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow — retained their vitality even as they made industrial slums a thing of the past. Our own Surat and Indore have in recent years achieved miracles. And they allow the rest of us to hope.
Could we not link the spirit of the past to present challenges, equipped with all that the sciences can teach us? Can’t we dream of a happy city?
Delhi’s climatic crises of the last 50 years are easily explained by its top-heavy governance, with officials taking shelter behind obfuscation. The urban (rich) minority see the majority much as did the bourgeois of Paris in the 19th century as “les classes laboureuses et dangereuses”, wanting their labour but not their presence! A privileged fraction of urban inhabitants living in gated ghettoes does not translate into civic improvements.
From the mid-20th century, India’s homegrown cadre of engineers and architects became part of an international fraternity. Delhi’s Master Plan of 1962 incorporated best practices from other countries, if not from India’s own history. It emulated London — a “green belt” around the city, large city level/scale areas reserved for city forests, every locality planned around big and small parks like the squares of central London, and even the establishment of the Delhi Development Authority to create affordable housing including for the poor.
What is worrying is that cities like Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune and Bangalore, which were good examples of urban living, changed course in the 1980s. They chose to favour densification, narrow roads in tortuous organic networks, the filling up of both natural and medieval man-made water bodies to maximise profit, and handing over whole precincts to developers.
All citizens need to be recognised as stakeholder communities and made co-owners in public projects — whether a public road or an auditorium — and given some degree of say over “public land” and “public funds”. We need to learn from the practice in local councils in Britain, where the local residents, the local school principal, the head of a local institution (a museum within the precinct, for example) are mandatory members of the local council — thus reflecting local needs, realities and aspirations — instead of just the politician, cautious bureaucrat or hapless government planner. These are not client-patron situations — the work should be necessarily collaborative to involve the last stakeholder citizen and the officials who will be able to formalise it. Those who toil in the heat and the rain should know too that they are contributing to a worthwhile project.
What a price we pay otherwise, we who navigate (literally) the flooded new technicolour tunnels and potholed roads! Slipshod work, papered over for immediate effect, public funds squandered on shoddily built projects with no thought to long-term environmental impact, or to the harried pedestrian, the street hawker, the domestic help. The disdain for regular upkeep and maintenance, of never looking at appropriate micro-interventions but only at grand massive scale developments. The health problems will surface later; the sense of alienation, insidiously.
All may not be lost if we learn from our own history as much as by observing other nations. We need to eschew the showcasing and valorisation of a false notion of “heritage” — making it a pleasant leisure activity for many, a viable source of income for a few. The past is a foreign country. We live in today. Delhi can’t be pushed back, and the agenda for all of us beckons, to work for a happy equitable city that can hold up its head with pride.
Narayani Gupta is a historian of Delhi and Narayan Moorthy is an architect.The views expressed are personal
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