Of People and Numbers: Why Indian urban development needs to learn from humanities

The pandemic revealed that cities are essentially networks of social, political, and economic interactions; that infrastructure is just a canvas on which the story of the city is painted by these interactions – moulding these interactions and getting moulded by them; and that if we want to plan cities that live up to the promises of modernity, we will have to understand the socio-political and economic networks of cities, and the nature of human interactions therein. Planners and all other professionals involved in the project of urbanisation in India, therefore, need to learn from humanities

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the early 2020, all metropolises that were otherwise brimming with life came to a standstill. As people were locked inside their homes and social, political, and economic interactions halted, the city ceased to exist. Vast landscapes of road networks, flyovers, parks, public transport systems, and other infrastructure lay bare and lifeless – incapable of producing and sustaining structures that fulfill the promises of urbanity.
On the socio-political front, unlike the West, South-Asian nations have inherited a colonial form of modernity and colonial modernity comes with its own baggage and complexities.
Firstly, colonial modernity comes with unresolved histories of conflicts that existed as a result of medieval and ancient polity. The conflicts around sites of worship across the Indian sub-continent are an explicit example of historic conflicts that survived despite the avante garde conception of a secular republic. Secondly, colonial modernity comes with anxieties of identity. Systems of caste, religious hierarchies that appeal to ethno-nationalistic politics, and the tensions between gendered roles and the promise of the modern individualism reflect these anxieties. And thirdly, colonial modernity comes with a colonial polity – a citizen-state relationship that has politico-legal continuities from the time of its imperial conception. To conclude, socio-political systems of post-colonial nations are inherently opposed to the values of freedom, liberty, and equality that anchor the ideological project of urbanisation. A planner without the knowledge of the disciplines of history and politics fails to address this unique nature of South-Asian cities.
On the economic front, South-Asian cities are rapidly growing economies. They are dynamic and exist in a state of ephemerality. Rapid transition from primary economic activities to secondary and tertiary ones is reflected in the high pace of urbanisation in such cities. While this brings economic prosperity and opportunity for an upward socio-economic mobility, it also makes urban growth very unpredictable.
Contemporary views on the economics of developing countries acknowledge their unpredictable nature. Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, for example, have argued for policies that do not assume determinism in the discipline but allow for unpredictable scenarios within economic policy frameworks. Scholars of Urban Planning such as Bimal Patel and Alain Bertaud have argued the same in the case of cities. Planners without a sound knowledge of economics are ill-equipped to deal with this peculiarity of South-Asian urbanism.
Contrast these gaps with existing attitudes and discourses. The Indian Urban Planner aims and yearns for socio-political neutrality and follows deterministic processes. This is ingrained in the very process of urban planning in India. The bedrock of the urban planning process in India, for example, is statistics – population projections, to be specific. These population projections are distributed over the spatial urban terrain according to presupposed aims and objectives. Hidden in this process are two fallacious assumptions.
Firstly, it treats people as numbers and therefore, as homogeneous entities that will behave in mathematical ways that can be accommodated by translating numbers into spatial configurations. Our cities are glaring examples that this is far from the truth.
Indian cities are divided and have polarised environments. Along with the obvious and more explicit segregation of class, they are segregated over caste, religion, and food habits. Gender identity plays a massive role in how inclusive or exclusionary an urban space is, and a confluence of such identities decide accessibility to housing and social life in Indian cities. The Indian urban space is produced by the socio-political identity. Statistical distribution over space is guided by the socio-political and does not precede it.
Secondly, it assumes a deterministic model of growth. Planners assume that their population projections will match the reality over two or three decades and their planning will achieve presupposed objectives. A dynamic economy does not behave in this manner. Four decades ago, for example, it was impossible to predict the IT industry-led growth of Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Several experiments in satellite towns have also failed as a result of population projections being wrong and markets growing in complete dissonance with urban planning. Noida is a textbook example of this phenomenon.
Several studies have confirmed the growing socio-political and economic tensions in the cities of South Asia. The Fragile Cities Project undertaken by the IGRAPE Institute created an index to study the ‘fragility’ of the major cities of the world. The project studies cities against the parameters of socio-political stability, crime, and income inequalities. Unsurprisingly, the cities of South Asia, while being better off than the war-torn regions of Africa and the Middle East, lie in the high-risk zones of fragility.
Another peculiarity of Indian urban planning is its supercilious nature. Post-colonial governments – with their colonial continuities – do not consider public participation as a virtue. It is a common experience of Indian urban life to find out about an urban development project only when it has started being executed. Rarely do we see public exhibitions or websites that make drawings and other data of upcoming urban projects widely available to the people. While the practice does exist in its infancy in the case of town planning, urban design is devoid of public participation.
To make matters worse, Indian municipal corporations that are the last resort of effective local self-governance, have a stark imbalance of power away from the elected mayor and towards appointed bureaucrats. The higher hierarchy that Municipal Commissioners enjoy is an unwritten rule of our local bodies. I argue that the aforementioned phenomena is reflective of the rampant socio-political and economic illiteracy in the disciplines that guide urbanisation and urban projects in India. There is, however, a wealth of knowledge about cities in the disciplines of humanities. Urban studies departments publish a lot of valuable material on the socio-politics of urbanity. Scholars of economics study the networks of markets in cities in great depths. Such scholarship, however, is limited to post-execution scenarios. Scholars of humanities are mostly seen as critics of projects that have been implemented. While that criticism is immensely valuable and gives insight into our cities, it rarely reaches the urban planner’s desk.
The way forward, therefore, is to actively engage the scholars of humanities in urban development projects. Such scholars can work as consultants on urban projects and help realise a more nuanced and flexible form of urban development that can manifest the promises of urban life. Scholars of ethnography, journalism, and anthropology, for example, can create effective channels of communication and participation between the people and the government.
It is not for nothing that social reformers such as Dr BR Ambedkar urged the oppressed caste communities to move to the cities. Cities harbour the dreams of modernity. They promise to, and they must, break the shackles of identities that governed pre-modern societies and are assigned at birth. But to realise the ideological project of urbanisation, we need to learn from the disciplines of humanities. The discipline of statistics is grossly inadequate and provides too reductionist a view of urbanisation – especially in South-Asia. Our urbanisation policies, if we want to strike the right balance, need to align themselves towards humanities, and away from statistics.

Contemporary views on the economics of developing countries acknowledge their unpredictable nature. Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have argued for policies that do not assume determinism in the discipline but allow for unpredictable scenarios within economic policy frameworks. Planners without a sound knowledge of economics are ill-equipped to deal with this peculiarity of South-Asian urbanism