BW Communities

Building Cities Of The Future

Gurbir Singh Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[Ugandan businessman Hardip Singh's father did the sensible thing. He had four sons, but just one great asset: a luxury bungalow in south Delhi's posh Friends Colony. He sold it a few years ago to the Jhunjhunwalla family and bought four large 1,000 square-yard plots for each of his sons in Noida's in-demand Sector 15. All the four now own modern, resplendent homes with well-manicured lawns and thank their father for his foresight. Hardip and his brothers are not the only ones wanting to escape the crowded core of India's big cities. The country was initially slow to urbanise, but the early trot is now turning into a gallop. In 1951, there were only five metropolitan cities with a population of over one million. By 2001, there were 35, and their share in the urban population increased from just 19 per cent to 38 per cent. Today, there are 50 big cities with more than a million people, and there will be 87 by 2031. The urban-rural ratio is also changing rapidly with 35 per cent of the country now living in urban sprawls, and the figure is expected to touch 45 per cent by 2031. More importantly, cities will propel the country's future growth. As the 2010 McKinsey's report on India's urbanisation says, over 2010-30, Indian cities will create 70 per cent of all new jobs, and these jobs will be twice as productive as those in the rural sector. But urban governance and infrastructure development in the form of housing, water supply and roads do not match the big demographic shift towards cities. On an average, more than 25 per cent of most Indian cities live in slums. In Mumbai, the latest National Sample Survey data suggest 60 per cent of its populace live in slums. To give a better quality of life and to develop planned 'counter magnets' to over-crowding cities, the concept of satellite towns came into the planning lexicon in the 1970s. Today, there are hundreds of satellite towns that dot the hinterland around big metropolises. Some of them are old transport nodes and habitations that have naturally grown, like Faridabad near Delhi or the Virar-Vasai belt in Mumbai. Others have been specifically planned, such as Noida, Navi Mumbai and Rajarhat in Kolkata. Have they worked? Have they given new inhabitants a better life? Counter Magnets The natural sequel to the growth of capitalism and concentration of manufacturing and services in central hubs is the concentration of people in towns and cities. Urban expansion takes the form of radial growth in concentric rings around existing cities when there is a hinterland available to 'colonise'. Simultaneously, too, small towns and large villages bloom. They abut metropolises as centres of industry or 'dormitory' adjuncts to the mother city. <a href="/businessworld/system/files/branching_out_pu.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="/businessworld/system/files/branching_out_200x153.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 8px;" height="153" width="200"></a>Faridabad and Ghaziabad, once sleepy villages, became important 'satellites' to Delhi as they rapidly expanded as industrial centres. So were Pimpri and Chinchwad to Pune. For Mumbai, the expansion was initially northwards. Villages such as Kashi Mira and Virar became satellite towns as expanding families left their one-room tenements in Dadar and Central Mumbai to relocate to larger flats 60 km away. But this was a town planner's nightmare, as satellite towns sprouted without infrastructure and layouts. "This has been the predominant form of expansion. First build, and then retrofit the town with roads and civic facilities," says Pankaj Joshi, executive director of the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) in Mumbai. To introduce some method to the madness, planners began pushing for planned satellites around big metropolises in the 1970s. The fourth and fifth Five-Year Plans (1969-79) first envisaged planned smaller towns to prevent growth of population of large cities. The concept of 'New Bombay' - now Navi Mumbai - was born in 1964 with architects and planners Charles Correa, Sirish Patel and Pravina Mehta proposing the 'twin city on water' on the eastern mainland as a counter-magnet to the rash and unplanned growth towards the north. More recently, in 2007, the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority (HUDA) put plans in motion to create 22 satellite townships along the proposed 162-km Outer Ring Road. Work on two - Tellapur in Medak district, and Srinagar in Ranga Reddy district - has kicked off. The Karnataka government, in 2006, announced five satellite towns to decongest Bangalore. Spread across 5,000-15,000 acres, these are located at Nandagudi in Hoskote taluka, Kasaba and Bidadi in Ramanagaram and Solapur and Sathnur in Kanakpura. They will be connected with an Outer Ring Road beyond the Peripheral Ring Road. "It is perpetually the never-ending last mile," urban planner Keller Easterling once said on the radial expansion of satellite cities as nodes on a multiplying number of ring roads. Satellite Wars As satellite cities proliferate and become unmanageable, there is a raging debate on whether planned 'satellites' should be the way forward or should development take the 'natural' course of nudging along developing villages and towns on metropolises' periphery with plans and funds. Joshi says Navi Mumbai was a set of dead enclaves in the early 1990s, and grew only after the railway corridor came into existence. "The planning perspective should have been to develop old towns such as Bassein and Virar. It is an inversion of values. You should conceive a planning environment for these areas, which have a marked potential for growth," says Joshi. Echoing him is P.K. Das, an architect who is planning the Adani Port City near Jamnagar. He says planned satellite cities such as Navi Mumbai have taken away funds and planning focus from 'natural' nodes such as Panvel and Pen. "Rather than the mother city engulfing the outer hinterland, you should allow existing nodes around the metropolis to grow with decentralised plans, and the state providing transport links and budgetary support." Satellite towns are successful if they provide quality services that equal the mother city and have good transport corridors. Gurgaon was 30 years in the making, notes Anshuman Magazine, CMD of property consultant CB Richard Ellis. It has been seen as a success only in the past six years as it offered the middle class everything from malls to massages, he says. "It started with the DLF Corporate Park promoting the concept of 'walking to work'." But then, Maraimalai Nagar near Chennai lay dormant for decades as it had no schools or hospitals of high standards, while Kalyani, the last stop on Kolkata's Sealdah corridor, did not succeed as it had no quality schools though it boasts a university. Planned townships often have not been able to take off as they have run into farmers' agitations against acquiring cultivable land. Like the protests on the Agra Expressway, Chennai too faced protests against its 'Thunai Nagaram' (satellite city), and the DMK government had to drop its 'de-congestion plans in 2006. Three satellite towns reappeared in Chennai's second draft master plan along the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR), currently a thriving commercial and residential hub, the Outer Ring Road and the Poonamallee Road. But the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority made it clear it would only be providing the infrastructure, and it left the land acquisition to the private sector. break-page-break Kolkata's Rajarhat, too, had its share of controversies as it was also built on farm lands. The media was splashed with charges that CPI (M) operatives in the know of the acquisition bought land from unsuspecting farmers at Rs 1.2-1.8 lakh an acre, and sold it at a five-fold profit for Rs 6 to 7.2 lakh an acre. "The problem is satellite development is seen as a real estate opportunity. Planning becomes a tool for that, and not as a matrix for human development," notes Das. From NoidaVillage To NoidaVille Most urban think tanks are cool to the idea of satellite cities. Chetan Vaidya, director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), says they have not been successful as demographic tools. They have not been able to stop migration into mother cities. But Vaidya admits "Gurgaon, Noida and Navi Mumbai are partially successful as real estate developers of Delhi and Mumbai did not allow access to affordable housing." He, however, says that PPP models such as the town planning scheme in Gujarat are more successful than the model of large-scale land acquisition and development in Navi Mumbai or Noida. In Ahmedabad and Surat, landowners became willing partners in town-planning as they knew land prices would shoot up the moment an urban layout was notified. Government investment has been, therefore, limited to roads and infrastructure development. Vaidya also says that instead of looking for counter magnets, governments should promote medium-sized cities and focus on governance in metropolises. But Magazine says satellites such as Gurgaon and Navi Mumbai have stemmed migration, kept real estate prices in check in metropolitan centres and reshaped the lives of the urban middle class for the better. "A couple in Gurgaon can go to work together, and in the evening enjoy a round at the bowling alley. You might see a cow on the road, or a few potholes, but the lifestyle is no different from Dubai or London." <a href="/businessworld/system/files/backwoods_pu.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="/businessworld/system/files/backwoods_150x222.jpg" style="margin: 8px; float: right;" height="222" width="150"></a>This excerpt from a post by 'Aparna' on noidascoop.com sums up the middle class sentiment: "When I dated my husband, I liked everything about him except that he lived in Noida. In 1994, when I came to Noida nothing was available. We had to go cross the Nizamuddin bridge and shop at South Ex (in Delhi). I felt isolated, lonely. But slowly I started going for Atta (market) and (Sector) 18. Every week, there was a new shop, an eatery, hospitals, movie halls, hotels… Now, the latest malls are just icing on the cake. Life has become so comfortable that I don't want to move out. Our lovely city is converting from NoidaVillage to NoidaVille!" On the real estate front, property pundits point out that had satellite town, not been there to ease the pressure of short supply, prices in the inner core of the city would have risen astronomically. According to CB Richard Ellis, Gurgaon and Noida in 2010 contributed 9 million units to the housing market while Navi Mumbai, Thane and Mumbai's northern satellites supplied an additional 9-10 million units. In Bangalore's Whitefield and Electronic City, new supply was about 7 million homes. Again, relative prices in satellite towns are cheaper than in similarly positioned locations in the mother city, giving consumers a viable budgetary option. For instance, in Navi Mumbai's Panvel or Khargar, prices average around Rs 4,500-6,000 a sq. ft. In comparison, at crowded Borivali and Kandivili in north Mumbai, new bookings cost Rs 8,000-12,000 per sq. ft when the rail travel time is about the same. But that is just the problem some planners are critical about. Successful satellites have become plush suburbia for the middle class with little space or affordability for the poor. Pointing to gated communities such as the NRI Complex in Navi Mumbai and ATS village, Parsvnath and Eldeco colonies in Greater Noida, Das says: "Leave it to the market, and the builders will only build gated communities for the rich." Engines Of Growth Despite these doubts, satellite development has become an integral part of urban planning. HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh in his 2009-10 company report said: "Satellite cities have to be built as connected cities, having sophisticated transport networks like trans-harbour links, bridges and underground links." Guidelines by the Union Ministry of Urban Development for urban infrastructure development in satellite towns note: "There is an imperative to plan for development of new townships/satellite towns around million-plus large cities. The satellite towns/ counter magnets should be spatially separated from the mother city." The guidelines name 35 key cities for 'satellite development' and propose initial funding from the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) for creating 300,000-500,000 (populace) towns as satellites for million-plus cities and towns in case of mega cities with population exceeding 4 million. As part of the planning for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) that encompasses a humongous 4,355 sq. km. of hinterland around the island city spread over four districts, nine municipalities and over 900 villages, a crucial project on the anvil is the Virar-Alibaug transport corridor. Proposed by Surbana Consultants, who have anchored Singapore's urban planning, the corridor will run 140 km and will aim to develop 5-6 satellite towns as nodes along the corridor. The new towns proposed are around the existing towns of Bhiwandi, Kalyan, north and south of Panvel. India is better positioned than other developing economies with much of its urbanisation still to come in the future. Just 30 per cent of Indians are living in towns and cities, compared to China (45 per cent), Indonesia (54 per cent), Mexico (78 per cent), and Brazil (87 per cent). But time is obviously catching up. By 2031, the urban population will be touching 40 per cent or around 600 million. The United Nations projects that urban India will be larger than its rural cousin by 2045. Talking of creating economically vibrant, inclusive and efficient cities, Union Urban Development Minister Kamal Nath said he saw them as "engines of economic growth". Hopefully, this will not remain just another pithy statement for intellectual gatherings. gurbir(dot)singh(at)abp(dot)in (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 20-06-2011)

Gurbir Singh

BW Reporters Gurbir Singh is an award-winning senior journalist with over 30 years experience. He has worked for BW Businessworld since 2008, and is currently its Executive Editor. His experience ranges from covering 'Operation Bluestar' in 1984 to pioneering coverage of the business of Media & Entertainment and Real Estate for The Economic Times.