“I am convinced that unless one understands the grain of the city at the physical level, the structure of the spaces and buildings, and how to make them seamless and connected – it is very difficult to create cities which are integrated, connected and sustainable for the future.”
“Mumbai’s economy was a textile economy producing a city where its architecture is an agglomeration of human bodies. It is a continuous horizontal network of flexible fabric. I think it is close to a bio-technical environment, closer to the agricultural system. This explains why Mumbai leaped frog over the cranky, mechanical modernity for an era of fuzzy logics, messy entrepreneurship and elastic modernity.”
“The problems with housing are property rights not defined well, stock inflows disjointed in terms of income and wealth, and rigidities in labour land markets.”
“Mayor Anthony Williams once said ‘Vision without action is a daydream, and an action without a vision is a nightmare’.”
“I call it (Mumbai) the maximum city in my book but I’m afraid that the progress we’ve made in the last decade has been minimum.”
“How can we do no harm in urban design? How can we not make inequality worse by the things we design? Hippocratic oath is not a negative formulation. Do no harm inspires the doctor to look closely at the conditions of well-being. What Hypocrates did say is that you are likely to treat a patient better if you investigate the fine grain of his condition rather than generalize about his illness. And that it seems to me is a wonderful guide for us today in thinking about how we too can take the Hippocratic oath in cities to do no harm so as to make our cities at least more resistant to the pressures of inequality.”
“The real conflict for space and funds in cities is between the cars’ infrastructure and social infrastructure such as schools, libraries, hospitals and parks. If we really want to solve the problems of the poor we have to make a very critical political decision and we somehow have to decide that we are not going to make more and more highways every time we have a traffic jam.”
“Are cities planned in India? It would be very easy to bring this discussion to a close and say that cities are not planned, one minute silence in the honour of planning, end of session. That is one way to look at it. Neighbourhoods are planned, buildings are planned, shopping malls are planned, facilities for sports are planned, cities as cities are not planned and they have not been planned for some time. ”
“We cannot jump from our present situation to some ideal condition. The city here is not about grand design but about grand adjustment.”
“We have no planners in the city (Mumbai) any more. The government has dismantled the planning process. We instead have a set of development control regulations, which are laid down by the government.”
“Which are going to be the high intensity pockets and how do we serve those pockets? This is probably the first time that, for the metropolitan region, we started to integrate both the land use as well as the transport. Earlier our entire effort used to be to plan for the land and the transport network came later. Now we are looking at it differently; we are saying that we put the transport network first and then go into the micro details to find out what kind of land development is possible. So that’s something which now is taking place. Transport linkages are becoming almost a precursor to land development today.”
“One of the structural problems of the physical planning process has been that the entire planning has been done essentially with roads as the major source for providing access. So the State Government and the local bodies have largely concentrated on the creation of roads rather than other modes of transport. In a large city like Mumbai, the railways network is probably more effective than roads alone because roads essentially promote private modes of transport. So, the dominant thoughts with the planners have been essentially associated with the roads and therefore you will find that, until very recently, metro systems really never featured. In the local railways, the Government of Maharashtra for the first time about a week back made a huge contribution towards strengthening the railway system. It was never done in the past; we always felt that this is within the purview of the Central Government.”
“There is a dichotomy here. There is a planning agency which actually churns out a plan. But the execution agencies are all different. So what happens is many of these plans are being created. But at the end of the day, unless the implementation agency actually sees of this and has the same sense of urgency in approaching this, and also has the financial resources and managerial resources to take it to fruition, what typically happens is that these remain on paper.”
“So we have a different system which does the planning, and we have a different system which does the execution. So, I think unless there is a sense of merging these into one, unless actually the city owns both the planning process and the implementation of it, we will never get a solution.”
“General to almost any Indian city is the issue of who owns the city, from an infrastructure development perspective. I think there is no real ownership, if we can call it that. There is a multiplicity of agencies…There is a huge multiplicity of governance functions, different kinds of bodies; elected, bureaucratic and service agencies. It makes chaos of what has to be done in the city.”
“But as far as land use is concerned I would still say that there is a reasonably good amount of input going into trying to see what sort of a healthy interaction between transport and land use will be. But the problem is that these are never put into practice.”
“You see, basically, there is resistance. As far as the transport sector is concerned the Indian Railways run both the local services as well as the long-range distances. The separation can be done. It’s not difficult but we have just been talking about it for so many years. The bus services and rail can be integrated under one umbrella organisation rather than a series of different institutions. There has to be coordination between the agencies otherwise its not going to happen at all.”
“If we see historically, there was an attempt in the late 1960s to plan two or three additional rail corridors. You have the north south corridors fairly reasonably built up but not the eastern links. So these new corridors provided the eastern links but that never happened at all. Now what was the problem? Basically it was because you have the State Government exclusively dealing with roads and they look at it from the road perspective. Similarly you have the Ministry of Railways which is a Central Government undertaking. For them historically, the local suburban railway system is very much a part of the national system. But a local system, especially in an urban area has to respond to different demands. You can’t have someone sitting in Delhi responding to the demands in Mumbai in terms of fares, employment, capacities, and so on.”
“There are actually three things that are wrong. The first is that there are clearly violations taking place. One part of the government constantly looks and deals with the political pressures emerging on this violation. As there is no political build up, it ignores it, which means everybody violates – violations are 70% to 90% in all master plans. The second is the plans themselves are not credible. You have a starting point problem which is that the plans are a static crayon exercise which is not credible. Then third is that they are not flexible – 20-year plans in fast changing environments don’t mean anything. So what we are saying is we need to clearly have more credible plans which are designed and brought out at the right level of government which means regional local and so on. The plans need to be flexible, they need to respond to realities of what’s emerging on the ground and then after you have done this is when we look at how we deal with the violations; there is no point in dealing with violations unless you address credibility and flexibility.”
“A city bureaucrat in India would say I have very little authority, very high expectations, huge human resource challenges, too much political interferences, too many agencies, too much jurisdictional schizophrenia, and anyway, I am only here for two years so let me try and do the best that I can.”
“The problem is that nobody bothers about detailing, and fine transportation has a lot to do with how you detail out your curb, how your bus stop is integrated to the surface levels of the roads, and things like that. And nobody is thinking about that. People think about big bridges, people think about roads to the sea, people think about the multiple airports, people think about big things – Metro definitely. But how do you create a system which manages the total infrastructure in a detailed manner so that whatever is there, works at its 100 percent efficiency? That is a challenge.”
“This tie up between mass transport and planning settlements for the lower income groups has not been very close because the railways comes under the central government and bus system under state government and the city actually is not involved with either. So there is a big issue of coordination and planning.”
“Planning is becoming more reactive rather than being proactive and is not being seen by larger sections of society as something that has a very long vision and needs adequate preparation and certain consideration in visualizing things…If you want to be a trendsetter, if the planning exercise tries to set a trend in a proactive manner, it is seen as negative and not going with the flow. So that I see as a major restriction – the way society is looking at it.”
“The debate about land use and transportation as two separate things is very recent in India. It's only because of three or four big cities. It's now the debate in the rest of the country but it was never a debate five years ago. Because land use – one of the languages is transportation; I have never seen transportation as independent of land use. It was always taught to us as an integrated system and the law says that it's an integrated thing. Not only transportation, land use also means controlling the whole city – storm water drainage, it talks of urban renewal as an integrated system. The mechanism says you must do all this; we choose not to do most of them. So it's more self-correction that we need rather than correcting the law.”
