 The future of Indian cities: Barricaded metropolitan republics?

(DIKSHA
SHARMA )

 Urban studies scholar Mike Davis provides a disturbing image of Third

World urban futures. 'Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven,"
he writes, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in
squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay."
 This is an accurate picture of urban and metropolitan India. The rapidly
rising inequalities and uncertainties of globalizing India imply that even if
many urban working and serving class families are monetarily better off
than half a generation ago, inflation, job insecurity, subhuman working
and living conditions and everyday stress take a heavy toll on them.
 the rich and the poor everywhere in Indian cities have lived cheek by
jowl, the lives of the former inextricably dependent on the work
performed by the latter.
 While the core of such dependency remains unchanged, there is
increasingly greater physical distance between the two classes now, as
the former are succeeding in creating spaces where it becomes much
easier to turn one's eyes away from poverty.
 Urban India today offers a rapidly changing spectacle of a somewhat
subtle social layering of the less privileged classes, who have been
professionalized into serving the requirements of the wealthy.
 The only significant difference between the living arrangements of
colonial India and those of globalizing India is that recent economic
growth has generated hopes-real or false-of the possibility of upward
social mobility for all. The claims of the new India are universal. In a
growing, globalizing economy, almost everyone who does not live in a
gated community may come to aspire to live as the gated classes do.
 The other difference between colonial and present-day urban living
arrangements is that the segregation is more along the lines of class
than of race, while in the past the two social categories were coincident
to a significant degree.
 There is a pattern to the visual and social transformation of the
metropolitan cityscape. Utterly modest shelters of the poor-if found in
the midst of otherwise posh areas-are being rapidly cleared to make
way for high-value real estate projects, often with funding from
 multilateral institutions like the World Bank. This is happening across
Indian cities.
 Jeremy Seabrook's term 'Infrastruction’-which in one concise word
encapsulates both the destruction of the urban poor's living habitat as
well as the construction of infrastructure and buildings for the
wealthy--is all too apt to describe what is happening. However, this may
give the benefit of the doubt to the authorities in assuming that land is
always being seized from the poor for public infrastructural
development. Very often it is simply being handed over to private
interests for a song.
 Architecture and architectural exclusion readily betray the secrets of a
society. The physical spaces we create for our living and working
arrangements tell us much about who we are and whom we wish to
associate with and how.
 The fact that Indian metros are being replanned to turn Mumbai into
'Shanghai' and Delhi into 'Paris' should give us intense cause for concern.
Instead, it fails to shock any more.
 This form of nationalism has to be qualified as 'corporate'. The state that
was founded in 1947 made the moral claim of representing all Indians-
irrespective of caste, class or religion. If the duty of a state is to
safeguard not merely a nation's territorial but also its moral integrity.
the state in reforming, globalizing India has obviously failed to do so.
 As globally wealthy private investors get to have more and more of a say
in the arrangement of living and working spaces around urban areas, this
new geography of power and resistance could come into existence. It
would necessarily be unstable because of the enormous tensions and
insecurities it would generate.
 Civil conflict is bound to grow rather fast thereafter, once the fairy tales
of upward mobility have faded from the imagination of the hundreds of
millions left out. It is already happening where newly kindled hopes are
evaporating.
 If corporate cities, inspired by a global dream, become a law unto
themselves and, unrestrained by any prevailing constitutional,
democratic considerations, take root, they are likely to fuel ugly,
destructive forms of civil conflict. P Chidambaram's dream of making
India 85 per cent urban is then more likely to mutate into an unremitting
nightmare.