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Writer's pictureVinay Payyapilly

Rethinking our cities

We must rethink our cities. The current FSI rules have forced our cities to grow horizontally. They are like an ever-growing organism with an insatiable appetite. They creep outwards, gobbling up all the surrounding areas. Along the way, they eat into the green cover, and lakes and rivers.


Have we ever stopped to put a price on how we design and build our cities?


Let's start with the houses we build. A place to call home is an inherent human need. Long before we learned to build homes, we took shelter in caves. We chose caves based on space required, proximity to our friends, food and water, and how difficult it was for predators to reach us. Come to think of it, we haven't changed much, have we? We still choose our homes on pretty much similar lines today. But unlike our ancestors, we need to destroy natural formations to make the land conducive to build our homes. It is a fine line to manage the need to house people with the need to not destroy nature.


Migration into towns and cities cannot be stopped. In fact, it should be encouraged. India has over 50% of its population engaged in agriculture. This is way above what it is in comparable economies or in the economies that we aspire to emulate. This is not the best utilization of our population. But I digress.

Towns and cities are centers of economic activity and it is desirable that people move from villages to urban spaces. But this migration increases demand on resources - specifically, housing resources.


Migration into towns and cities cannot be stopped. In fact, it should be encouraged.


Apart from the space required to house all these people, we must also think about getting necessary utilities and services to them. As the urban centers spread out horizontally, so do the network of water pipes, sewage pipes, electricity lines, road networks, and so on. For instance, according to the Central Pollution Control Board, Class I cities and Class II towns generate 29129 MLD of sewage. In comparison, the installed sewage treatment capacity is just 6190 MLD. High-rise urban spaces will lead to better waste management since the point of generation is concentrated and not spread out. If planned properly, elevators could very well become our primary mass-transit system. Our dependence on fossil fuels can drop drastically. Concentrated urban settlements will mean less wastage of electricity in transportation.


As urban centers get expand, the center of the amoeba becomes expensive. Big builders move in, buy up land on which they build swanky homes for the affluent. As you move away from the center, the affluence wanes. The poorest among us get pushed to the margins, quite literally. This has multiple knock-on effects. For one, access to decent schools reduces. It stands to reason that no well-off person wants to travel to the outskirts of town to teach a bunch of the toughest-to-teach students. Then there is the availability of jobs. As the commute time and cost increases, the less access the poorest have to jobs in the more affluent areas. Furthermore, as the distance grows, the power of the law decreases. These areas become havens for unsavory characters who leech off the poorer, weaker people who live there.


The price of a house is much more than the value you pay for the land and the building.


There are challenges to allowing our cities to grow vertically. For instance, people congregate where there is work and there is no way to predict where this will happen. But if we are looking for it, we can preempt large horizontal growth by quickly addressing the need for tall buildings. It is to our benefit that we constrict the widening area of our cities on almost every parameter.

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