The Hindu Business Line : If cities are not renewed they will die!

ONE OF the `Saat Sutras' that the Prime Minister reverted to in his Independence Day speech was urban renewal, the other six being agriculture, irrigation, education, health, employment and infrastructure. And there was noticeable urgency in tackling the urban problems because the Prime Minister spoke about giving importance to `the economic conditions in urban areas', immediately after talking about `Bharat Nirman' to improve basic infrastructure in rural areas, participation of the common man in the village, and panchayats. Significantly, concerns on youth, literacy, research, health, roads, electricity, SC/ST, women, religion, rivers, environment, calamities, terrorism, human rights, foreign affairs, and so on, only followed. It may be worthwhile, therefore, to understand urbanisation from scratch.

Urban means `of or in a city or town', as in urban development and urban decay, informs Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. To urbanise is "to build houses, offices, and so on in an area of countryside so that it becomes a town" and urbanisation is "the process by which more and more people leave the countryside to live in cities".

Today, a third of our population lives in urban areas, said the Prime Minister and forecast the ratio as tending fast towards 50 per cent, "keeping in mind the speed at which urbanisation is taking place".

The rate of urbanisation over time is distinct from the rate of urban growth, which is the rate at which the urban population or area increases in a given period relative to its own size at the start of that period, states Wikipedia. Urbanisation means increased spatial scale, a.k.a. urban sprawl. Normal sprawl is land development that occurs at the outer edges of a community, linear sprawl occurs along important transportation routes away from a community, while leapfrogging sprawl occurs well away from an existing community, according to www.netcore.ca.

Suburbs are where you find low density housing, usually on the outer edges of a city, and the shift of people outward is called suburbanisation. "A number of researchers and writers suggest that suburbanisation has gone so far to form new points of concentration outside the downtown," notes http://en.wikipedia.org, and cites alternative names for this "networked, poly-centric form of concentration", such as exurbia, edge city, network city and post-modern city.

The site provides a link to Claude Fischer's sub-cultural theory of urbanism, and also discusses the economic, ecological and psychological impacts of urbanisation.

Urbanisation is "the clustering of large numbers of people into cities, though there is no clear-cut line between large towns and cities, both being characterised by very high population densities," explains www.reference-wordsmith.com. "Massive growth of cities and the urban proportion of the population is a characteristic of the modern era, particularly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it has resulted from the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions," notes a sociology glossary on www.webref.org.

But urbanisation is not a new phenomenon. "In southeast Europe, urbanisation seems to have begun by 4000 BC, in Greece leading eventually to growth of Mycenaean civilisation, in Italy (early 1st millennium BC) to Etruscan civilisation and so on," notes WordSmith. "The foundations of our culture and society were laid thousands of years ago in the cities on the banks of Indus River. We taught the world the basic concepts of urban planning," the Prime Minister said in his speech.

The Indus Valley civilisation, the largest of the four ancient urban civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, flourished around 2,500 BC in what today is Pakistan and western India, and is often referred to as Harappan Civilisation after its first discovered city, Harappa, states www.harappa.com. "Most of its ruins, including major cities, remain to be excavated." Massive granaries were built at each city, and there, most certainly, was an elaborate bureaucracy to distribute this wealth of food, one learns from www.ancientworlds.net.

In 2005 a controversial amusement park scheme at the site was abandoned when builders encountered large quantities of artefacts during initial construction work, informs www.nationmaster.com.

You can catch up with `Origin and History of Cities: 4000 BC to 1750 AD' on www.faculty.fairfield.edu. Gordon Childe's theories of `Neolithic Revolution' may fascinate you, because he explains "how humans in prehistory broke beyond hunting and gathering into settled farming communities, which then developed into new types of social organisation, and resulted in the spawning of cities and civilisations," as www.bbc.co.uk puts it.

Chide proposed the term `urban revolution'. Archaeology Wordsmith lists the criteria for such a revolution: 1) cities, or large, dense settlements; 2) the differentiation of the population into specialised occupational groups; 3) social classes, including a ruling stratum exempt from primary subsistence tasks; 4) mechanisms for extracting a `social surplus,' such as taxes or tribute; 5) monumental public buildings and other enterprises; and 6) writing. On http://faculty.washington.edu, you will find George Modelski's inventory of `Cities of the Ancient World'.

"Life in the Harappan cities was apparently quite good. Although living quarters were cramped, which is typical of ancient cities, the residents nevertheless had drains, sewers, and even latrines," explains AncientWorld. In contrast, "Today our cities are often unable to meet the basic needs of their residents on many counts," which the Prime Minister acknowledged, promising to invest in urban areas.

"For this, a National Urban Renewal Mission (NURM) has been launched," he said. There was a discussion of the topic in the 2005 Budget speech (paragraphs 79 and 80), and Finance Minister said that PURA or Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas has "possible solutions to a number of problems that afflict rural India such as unemployment, isolation from markets, lack of connectivity and migration to cities".

"The demographic trends in the country indicate a rapid increase in urbanisation. India needs urban facilities of satisfactory standards to cope with the challenge. If our cities are not renewed, they will die," the Finance Minister had said ominously.

NURM, the Mission, is designed to meet this challenge in seven mega cities, with populations of over a million, and some other towns, we were told.

He proposed an outlay of Rs 5,500 crore in 2005-06, "including a grant component of Rs 1,650 crore for the Mission", though the amount may appear meagre in comparison to the heavy losses that big cities such as Mumbai and Chennai have borne as a result of the floods and the tsunami, respectively.

Coordinating the Tsunami Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Programme, the Planning Commission had drawn up a programme at an estimated cost of Rs 10,216 crore. And on the Mumbai front www.khaleejtimes.com declared, "Maharashtra floods loss estimated at Rs 50 billion".

Urban focus may overlap with other infrastructure development too. For instance, the 2005 Budget had mentioned the Mumbai Metro Rail Project, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, the Mumbai Western Expressway Sealink and the Bangalore Metro Rail Project as examples of projects that could be supported through NURM.

Similarly, the Prime Minister in his speech spoke about a dedicated freight corridor... between Delhi-Kolkata and Delhi-Mumbai at an investment of over Rs 25,000 crore.

The site www.ssrn.com lists recent research in urbanisation. Such as Sukkoo Kim's study of relationship between industrialisation and urbanisation, Martin Ravallion's work on the urbanisation of poverty, and a paper by Marianne Fay and Charlotte Opal about why urbanisation without growth is a not-so-uncommon phenomenon.

There are `several preconditions are necessary for the revitalisation of any city', one learns from http://urbanparadoxes.blogspot.com that cites Philip Langdon's talk. These include, a willingness to listen to create a shared vision, a strong economy to get the funds needed, a strong visual connection (that is, "buildings, streets, and vistas need to connect to humans without overwhelming... People need to have vistas that open up before them, rather than enclose them"), broad-based amenities such as "an up-scale restaurant building in a decaying neighbourhood, a grocery store that raises the bar, or a downtown school", and "most importantly, an open and honest government" that also ensures public safety.

"Everyone's looking to the urban scene for inspiration now," said Robin Gibb of the musical group, the Bee Gees.

That may happen only when urban centres are revitalised. For, as Lewis Mumford, an American historian known for his study of cities, said, a city a conscious work of art, holding within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art.

ZeroBase@TheHindu.co.in

D. Murali

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