Varying ideas, facades of cities

Only 32 per cent people in India live in cities today. India’s urban population will cross the half-way mark by 2045, in the next 25 years. If the cities of the future need to become sustainable and inclusive, the preparation has to start now

Urban trends and data tell interesting stories. Sometimes, these stories are different from what we observe and experience. If you move out in cities in India and many other cities in less urbanized nations, we find cities to be very dense. As soon as they become prosperous, they prefer to go vertical. Vertical cities appeared to be accommodating more people in less space. And, this is not a very old phenomenon. It has picked up pace in the last twenty years. A news report suggests, “all of the world’s 73 residential towers over 250 metres high were built after the year 2000. Another 64 are under construction.”
Many public and private redevelopment projects, including that of projects being implemented in New Delhi by the government where low-rise residential quarters of government employees are being razed to build multi-storied apartments, have been designed with this idea in mind that going vertical will ensure optimal utilisation of resources. This is still to be concluded whether going vertical is the solution because many modern cities, including New York, have a mass of wealthy citizens who have moved out of their cramped city residences to sparsely populated suburban areas.
According to a research done by Professor Shlomo Angel of New York University on urban expansion, high-rise cities like Seoul and Tokyo are less densely populated than Dhaka of Bangladesh, where most people live in low-rise residential buildings or slums. He also underlined that cities can become dense in multiple ways. He adds that Hong Kong is pictured in our mind as a city where the cost of living is very high. The city is known for stacking people on top of each other. All of us must have seen the pictures of 5-10 people living in a 10×10 feet studio apartment. Angel’s research on urban expansion tells us that the reason for this is Hong Kong’s built-up area is occupied by roads, pavements, offices, hotels, parks and mandatory spaces between buildings. The footprints of residential buildings account for less than 4 per cent of it. In Dhaka, by contrast, homes cover nearly 20 per cent of the land. In a poor city like Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, population density comes mostly from squeezing more people into each room.

The poor areas in cities are getting cramped up, not the whole city. More people are getting accommodated in less space because low-income colonies of which most are not recognized are low-rise and affordable. Since a majority of these colonies do not come under the jurisdiction of urban local bodies, they remain out of focus hence their problems keep compounding. On the other hand, most of the posh colonies in a prosperous city are either high-rise dense or low-rise sprawl with adequate and efficient civic services

Urban divide
Go out to any middle-income and low-income suburb of Mumbai, you will experience the problem of snarling traffic, crowded market places and business centers, lack of parking spaces, and various other civic service issues. Now, head-out to posh South Mumbai, you will find the difference. The roads are cleaner, pedestrian pathways are not encroached and public amenities are in order. In telling the story of two neighborhoods of Mumbai, I am not singling out Mumbai for having such disparity but just using the city as an example. This story holds true for any big city, especially in the Asia Pacific. Delhi also has Laxmi Nagar and Lutyens Delhi. Other cities would also have their examples.
What does this tell us? This is not just about the equal distribution of municipal resources. It is more than that to me. There is no arguing that the urban population is growing. But the interesting fact is urban areas are expanding faster than the urban population. According to the progress report on Sustainable Development Goal-11, between 2000 and 2014, areas occupied by cities grew 1.28 times faster than their populations. It indicates that urban densities of cities have been declining, creating profound repercussions for environmental sustainability at the local, regional and global scale.
This data presents the overall picture of a city but the story lies in the details. The poor areas in cities are getting cramped up, not the whole city. More people are getting accommodated in less space because low-income colonies, of which most are not recognised, are low-rise and affordable. Since a majority of these colonies do not come under the jurisdiction of urban local bodies, they remain out of focus hence their problems keep compounding. On the other hand, most of the posh colonies in a prosperous city are either high-rise dense or low-rise sprawl with adequate and efficient civic services.
Better management of urban growth is very crucial to plan sustainable urbanisation in countries where fewer people live in cities. 60 per cent of Asia’s population lives in cities. Many countries of the continent, including India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Lao, Thailand, are still predominantly rural but this acts in their favour and gives them a chance to learn from others’ mistakes and not repeat the mistakes committed by other urbanised nations and thus make better plans for adopting sustainable development models.
The estimates suggest that more than 60 per cent of the area projected to be urban in 2030 has yet to be built. And, most of these expansion activities will occur in areas of low economic and human capacity, which will constrain the protection of biodiversity and management of ecosystem services. The urban ecosystem and agriculture land parcels, wetlands, green belts, forest cover, mountainous ranges will be under threat in case of expansion of industrial, business and other urban activities.
This tells that all cities will require better, well-informed urban leadership and bureaucracy that is well-equipped with knowledge and technology to take the challenges head-on. This makes the role of networking, bilateral, and multilateral organisations more important in this decade of action if cities have to achieve all the objectives under Sustainable Development Goal-11 and other goals concerning the needs of urban residents.