City Planning in India, 1947–2017

Ashok Kumar, Sanjeev Vidyarthi, Poonam Prakash

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000091212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book is a comprehensive history of city planning in post-independence India. It explores how the nature and orientation of city planning have evolved in India's changing sociopolitical context over the past hundred or so years.

The book situates India's experience within a historical framework in order to illustrate continuities and disjunctions between the pre- and post-independent Indian laws, policies, and programs for city planning and development. It focuses on the development, scope, and significance of professional planning work in the midst of rapid economic transition, migration, social disparity, and environmental degradation. The volume also highlights the need for inclusive planning processes that can provide clean air, water, and community spaces to large, diverse, and fast growing communities.

Detailed and insightful, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students of public administration, civil engineering, architecture, geography, economics, and sociology. It will also be useful for policy makers and professionals working in the areas of town and country planning.

1
INTRODUCTION

City planning in India

Introduction

The advent of modern urban planning in this part of the world is relatively new, even as South Asians have consistently designed and built cities since ancient times. For example, the majestic text of Arthashastra describes in detail the arrangement of houses, activities, and urban spaces during the reign of great king Ashoka, who ruled India about 300 years before Christ. Similarly, later kings, including the mighty Mughals, built a number of impressive cities across the length and breadth of South Asia (Heitzman, 2008a). The subsequent British colonists not only planned several brand-new cities (like New Delhi) employing modern planning ideas but also introduced new spatial typologies like Civil Lines and cantonments into the fabric of many existing cities (King, 1976; Spodek, 2013). But all these efforts did not result in a great urban expansion with India remaining a “late urbanizer” (Tiwari et al., 2015). In more recent times, however, cities have begun to gain importance in public and policy arenas, serving as a key pivot of India’s ongoing economic growth and generating nearly a two-thirds share of its steadily expanding GDP (Nayyar, 2017; Ahluwalia, 2019).

As cities become the dominant nodes of India’s economic rise, residents experience negative externalities such as environmental pollution, congestion on roads, and lack of open spaces, making urban India an increasingly hard place to live. Simultaneously, the urban poor face regular displacements and relocations to peripheries without much access to basic services. In sharp contrast to this, negotiating the ever busy (and often nerve-racking) traffic, a steady stream of cars carrying young families routinely head out of large Indian cities every weekend. Often organized opportunistically, the outbound trips increase manifold during school breaks and long weekends. Seeking to escape the increasingly polluted urban environments and some of the highest densities of buildings, peoples and human activity anywhere in the world, many of these mostly middle-class folks, leave their well planned neighborhoods, tastefully decorated air-conditioned homes and domestic help behind, searching for quiet, scenic places and quaint settlements instead. Little wonder, India’s tourism economy has boomed with domestic tourist visits increasing dramatically from 140.12 million trips to a staggering 1,642.49 million trips between 1996 and 2017. Even relatively obscure destinations, like Alsisar in Delhi’s vicinity, Bakkhali close to Kolkata, and Kamshet near Mumbai, now attract many visitors and new hotel developments.¹

Infusion of regular cash in local economies, coupled with the state’s development efforts and public welfare programs, has brought some jobs and basic infrastructure to these long ignored regional places dotting India’s vast countryside. The complementary mix of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, with growing concerns and conversations around the country’s progressively hard city life and the increasingly available opportunities for family recreation and discretionary spending, combined with the simple pleasure of driving newly acquired cars on a recently upgraded nationwide road network, supports a countrywide emergent urban landscape planned by many actors working at different spatial scales. Exemplifying India’s ongoing urbanization, flashes of city life appear unexpectedly across the large hinterland, as if the newly built places and roving bands of vacationers, bikers, and pilgrims are heralding an urban revolution. How did this remarkable shift occur in the short time of a few decades?

India’s remarkable urban moment happened on the back of growing prosperity in one of the poorest parts of the world as many people combined new expectations with growing economic means to make plans for improving their future. Many not only migrated to seek the urban opportunity but also took the initiative to build and inhabit their own places, like the new hotels in remote locations and spontaneous settlements built on the ever expanding edges of urban India. Government played a prominent role providing infrastructure and services. But how these public plans are made and the work they do remain largely invisible and misunderstood. The complexity and scope of modern urbanization generate demands and problems that defy resolution by a single state institution no matter how powerful. People often demand simple solutions that overlook the reality of unforeseen yet inevitable interaction effects among the many urban phenomena.

State agencies expand authority seeking to tame these ripple effects using the powers of a centralized jurisdiction. Ironically, these rational schemes often carve out secure, serene places for few that enhance public expectations even while shifting more residential insecurity onto the many. Clever officials, recognizing this dilemma, use insider knowledge and access to anticipate and mediate the relationships locating and organizing place-based development. Cynical corruption accompanies an expert-oriented authority that does not grasp the limits of what a central power can do well. However, other urban actors resist, seeking ways to tap and leverage the plans that thousands of local groups have made, carving out functional places for work, life, and play in India’s fast growing metropolitan regions. Finding common cause with all sorts of purposeful planning efforts pursuing security and prosperity in a historically ancient and complex part of the world, many young professionals, budding activists, civic-minded citizens, and progressive commoners seek to live a better life than in the past.

It is important to note that India’s intricate urban geography combines three broad phases of historical urbanization, explained in detail a little later: emergence of city-states governed by ruling elites; later empires that collected these local kingdoms into shifting combinations of place; and, finally, the confluence of modern capitalist economies, democratic nation-states, and scientific inquiry fueling colonial expansion, urbanization, and social revolutions. While people made and followed locally contextual place-based plans building the infrastructure and dwellings in the two first phases, the modern phase introduced new forms of social and economic complexity generated by the very success of the particular plans of the people inhabiting and using urban places. Modern professional planning emerged as a response to these human-generated problems. In this crucial sense, the dynamic interplay between the more recent formal efforts sponsored by institutional actors and the much older traditions of people- and community-led planning – comprising the two major constituents of the country’s planning practice – has shaped urban India in vital ways.

However, even with all the prosperity and predictability that modern urban living makes possible, the unbridled pursuit of individual plans generates unexpected complex interactions that threaten the long-run security of everyone. Professional spatial planning offers a crucial alternative that does not substitute for these existing and ongoing plans but seeks to complement, coordinate, and collaborate with the multitude of plans communities and individuals make. The neoliberals go too far embracing the initiative of individuals because they are unwilling and unable to comprehend the necessity of big plans offering purposeful responses to curb the undesirable consequences of unchecked competition. In contrast, progressive planning efforts explore how to make plans for long-term sustainability rather than for unsustainable growth.

This insight is especially relevant for contemporary India because the combination of sustained economic growth and rapidly deteriorating quality of urban life has fueled a nationwide interest in cities and their planning. Institutes offering urban planning degrees have grown steadily from the original two in 1956 to twenty-six in 2016. Students need access to knowledge that will meet the challenge of educational competence and relevance (Kumar et al., 2016). This book offers a broad overview of city planning in India, focusing on policies, programs, and projects pursued during the post-independence period in particular. We draw out key lessons from a robust body of planning literature (plan documents, policy reports, academic commentary) helpful to make and pursue better plans for the country’s many fast growing places, whose prospective trajectory and cumulative impact have crucial implications for our collective future on this rapidly urbanizing planet. Figure 1.1 shows the magnitude and spread of India’s human settlements.

Figure 1.1 State-wise level of urbanization and growth of population of major metropolitan cities

Source: Prepared from Census of India (1961 and 2011).

Along similar lines, our conceptual approach involves drawing pertinent insights from a variety of intellectual perspectives and positions and pointing out further readings in a wide range of literatures that the curious reader can (and should) pursue freely and liberally. Paying attention to the curricular guidelines and model syllabi published by the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Institute of Town Planners India (ITPI), and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), we conceive this text as a response to three key questions: Which major influences, actors, and forces shaped city planning work (institutions, routines, and practices) in urban India and why? What goals and purposes motivated these efforts? And what does this knowledge mean for our understanding of how to create better cities?

This book answers the three critical questions for those seeking to anticipate and prepare for the future of an urban India by situating the country’s city planning experience in the larger trajectory of post-independence development, starting from the bequeathed legacies of colonial rule to turn-of-the-twentieth-century shifts in national polity illustrating the development of the urban planning field over time. This approach is predicated on the crucial insight that the meaning and purpose of planning change frequently with shifts in societal priorities and typically follow the overall climate of opinion prevalent at the time, generating distinct planning cultures in particular places (Sanyal, 2005). In other words, planning is an intrinsically contextual activity that never takes place in a social vacuum. Larger political and economic concerns always shape the nature and scope of planning work in critical ways, influencing how people and communities conceive and pursue innovative compromises in search of safety, security, and prosperity. This insight also underlies the book’s chronologically organized content; illustrating how broader sociopolitical influences shaped the major episodes of Indian city planning in specific ways during the pre-independence, post-independence, and post-liberalization periods.

While the book’s main text traces the field’s development along a temporal dimension, we illustrate pertinent planning concepts and relevant theoretical ideas and frameworks in a separate Appendix at the end of the book. It is important to note that such a layout seeks to portray the field’s history and theory not as distinct bodies of knowledge but as serving two practical purposes. First, this arrangement facilitates, and does not impede, the flow of chronologically organized narrative. Second, readers can easily locate the many ideas and concepts scholars have employed to comprehend and explain the literature and practice of city planning from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in one convenient place. In the envisaged scheme, readers can (and should) look up the Appendix when encountering an unfamiliar planning term or theoretical reference in the main text. Along similar lines, major policy measures, key development programs, and significant urban projects in different regional contexts constituting a crucial part of India’s overall city planning experience are explained separately in boxes. Interspersed throughout the book, these boxes not only help highlight the important features and significant outcomes of prevalent planning thought but also help illustrate major influences that have shaped contemporary urban India.

Next we explain the book’s central notions of ‘city’ and ‘planning’ before summarizing current scholarship exploring India’s urban experience. Clear comprehension of these key terms and cutting-edge literatures will help in understanding both the adopted conceptual approach as well as the materials covered in the following chapters. It is important, however, to keep in mind that when the two words are used together, those maintaining many positions and perspectives tend to conflate the phrase ‘city-planning’ with the domain of governments, overlooking the meaningful, collective work of diverse urban actors (residents, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, real estate developers, and others) in planning and building human settlements over long periods of time. In this vital sense, the promise of paying attention to their collaborative planning efforts to cope with common urban problems and conventional state planning (rigid, bureaucratic, and corrupt) cannot be overstated.

Take the simple case of building and maintaining public toilets in Indian cities, for instance. Not so long ago, urban India suffered from a massive shortage of this vital common good generating both personal hardship and public nuisance. Whatever few toilets the government agencies built proved difficult to maintain and thus created more problems of public hygiene than the amenity provided. The complexity of the issue escaped the solutions that ended up contributing to the very problem they were supposed to solve. A diverse range of progressive, well-intentioned individuals and institutions, including nonprofit ones like the Sulabh international, then began collaborating with local governments, state agencies, and progressive donors to plan, build, and maintain public toilets across many Indian cities. Practical collaborative learning, coping and innovating with shared facility design and inclusive planning processes, eventually interrupted the cynical cycle even as the proponents needed to compromise with the limits of the situation they faced.

In this respect, contextual adaptations, collaborative learning, and societal resilience are not abstract ideas but important markers of widespread, even if dormant willingness among many community members to anticipate and prepare for specific uncertainties – lack of public facilities, urban congestion, floods, and the like. However, in addition to the unrivaled promise of prosperity, modern urbanization generates unprecedented forms of collective uncertainty spawned by the many interactions among millions of consumers, firms and households located in dense settings of human settlements. Progressive urban planning movement in this sense is a continuing search for alternatives to the juggernaut of modern urban expansion.

What is a city?

Cities are relatively new and little understood human-made entities. While anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around on planet earth for more than 500,000 years, archaeological evidence suggests the emergence of first human settlements (i.e., people living in close proximity) only about 40,000 years ago and the building of earliest cities less than 10,000 years ago. The modern metropolis (i.e., as we think of cities today) appears only around 150 years ago, mainly due to a combination of powerful socioeconomic factors like the expansion of colonialism, the rise of global capitalism, and the advent of the industrial age (Mumford, 1961). London, Paris, New York, and Mumbai, for example, are some of the most well-known modern metropolises that either expanded dramatically out of smaller, older settlements or grew rapidly as colonial entrepôts. Perhaps not surprisingly, these places continue to cast a major influence on how people imagine modern cities even today.

While cities in different shapes and sizes have been around for only several millennia, their formal study is an even more recent phenomenon, compared to, say, the disciplines of philosophy and history that represent some of the earliest endeavors in modern university settings. The first ever courses in city planning, for example, were initiated only in the opening decades of the twentieth century at the university of Liverpool in the UK and Harvard University in the United States. Similarly, formal academic research and city planning education in India commenced only during the mid-1950s at SPA, New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.

However, despite the lack of formal training in the modern sense, humans have consistently designed and built cities across space and time in different parts of the world. Why? Because cities are central both to the basic functioning and to the overall development of human societies. They not only facilitate a wide variety of primary functions like trading and commerce but also enable the creative development of cutting-edge innovations and meaningful cultural forms by providing central foci. Lewis Mumford, one of the most renowned scholars of cities, describes the profound relationship between cities and collective human creativity in the following words: “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity” (1961: 571). Not surprisingly, cities have served as the main stage of the drama of civilization since time immemorial because a wholesome ensemble and supporting props representing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: city planning in India
• 2 Shifts and transitions: legacies of pre-independence planning
• 3 Efforts to build a modern nation: planning from 1947 to the late 1960s
• 4 Paper plans meet the actual ground: 1960s–1980s
• 5 Post-liberalization planning: 1985–2005
• 6 Recent planning efforts: 2005–2017
• Appendix
• References
• Index