Feedbacks And Adjustments Rather Than A 'Master Plan': A Tale Of Two Cities
During a talk at the Thinker's Sandbox in New Delhi, Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance spoke about the importance of feedback and adjustments in policy making, reimagining the economy as a constantly evolving ecosystem rather than a machine. He began by giving an analogy of a dog catching a Frisbee, using feedback and adjustments to properly position itself to catch a Frisbee, rather than relying on a forecast model based on variables about where the Frisbee would land.
Applying this to policy making, particularly urban governance and design, he then stressed on the importance of feedback and adjustments based on the contrasting urban planning of Chandigarh and Singapore. "Now if you ask the average Indian, and asked them for a well-designed city, it's very likely they will say Chandigarh. And if you ask them a little later what is the best planned or designed city in the world, many of you will then stand up and say Singapore. So you get the impression that Chandigarh is some sort of a national champion, and if it only trained harder, if it only worked harder on its design, it would end up as Singapore. But in fact, I assure you they are exactly opposite ways of approaching the Urban Design issue." He further added, "So if you went back to the 1950's, it was very fashionable at that time, to begin to think about new-age cities. So the countries like Brazil, which was Brazilia, and there was India, with a bunch of cities, the most expensive and well-known of which is Chandigarh. We hired a gentleman called Le Corbusier who incidentally used to call old buildings and cities as "machines for living". Like all good machine-designers, what did he do? What he did was he took, what he considered to be a perfect city, with all broad straight roads and designs for buildings, and he gave us a master plan." "The idea was that as with any other planning based system, if the plan was good, and you meticulously implemented that plan, you would end up with a great city.", he said, talking about the master plan which has been kept constant in Chandigarh through the years.
"Now meanwhile Singapore, in 1965, when it became independent, it was a very poor city. It was full of slums. There were communal riots all the time, they had no natural resources at all. In fact, even today it imports a significant amount of its water supply. So it had no economic prospects at all. In fact, its economic prospects were so bad, that it was actually thrown out of the Malaysian federation", he said. "So now, its Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew looked at the situation, what did he do? He saw that he had very limited resources, one of which was these abandoned naval ports the British had left behind and it had location. So he began to get Singapore to try and become a container port and he also began to invest into low end manufacturing", he added, speaking about the evolving urban structure of Singapore. "So not many people remember now, but Singapore started its manufacturing journey as essentially a place for making ready-made garments, very often rip-offs of well-known brands. And this model was so successful that by the 1970s, it was already becoming too expensive a place to do this kind of low-end manufacturing, so they upgraded themselves and became an electronics manufacturing hub", he said, talking about how Singapore constantly updated themselves to be better using feedback and adjustments. "So those of you who remember the late 80's and the early 90's, Indians used to go to Singapore to buy electronics. First thing they did when they got off the flight was go to Mustafa. But even by the late 90's, it became obvious that Singapore was too expensive even for doing this. So they moved up, and overtime became a major financial hub. And more recently they have transformed themselves into an education and entertainment hub. Now nobody in the 1970s would have dreamt that people would be sending their kids to Singapore to study. Now what is going on here? Notice, it's about feedback loops and adjustment", added Sanyal, regarding Singapore's constantly evolving urban trajectory.
Speaking about the stagnant urban condition of Chandigarh, Sanyal added, "And in all this time, what have the managers of Chandigarh done? They have very loyally kept to the plan of Le Corbusier. They are in fact very proud about this. So while Singapore has adjusted up the value chain and become one of the most successful cities in the world, Chandigarh remains a subsidy scheme for civil servants. And even the little bit of buzz you see in Chandigarh comes from Mohali, which is actually outside of the smart city. It has produced nothing of economic or cultural value at all, even that Nek Chand's garden actually started out as being technically illegal. It is built on forest land and was not a part of the plan."
Thus by contrasting the different urban trajectory of Singapore and Chandigarh, where Singapore's success is attributed to its continuously evolving urban restructuring based on feedback and adjustments, as opposed to Chandigarh's stagnant urban modelling based on an age-old 'master plan' of Le Corbusier, Sanyal made a case for the economy too to be a continuously evolving ecosystem, rather than a machine with one design.
Sanjeev Sanyal was speaking at THINKERS Sandbox, an event held by THINKERS & Penguin Random House with YES BANK and the YES Global Institute as the Presenting Alliance Partner
