So from my perspective, anything can happen. Obviously if certain topics just don't have consensus due to the culture, then it won't, but that's my observation.
This is unfortunately very true. India's states derive power from the Union, and not the other way round. And the dominance of a single political party at the federal and state level during certain phases has made it relatively easy to subvert and amend democratic safeguards in the constitution.
For those curious, India's first amendment to the constitution allowed legislators to make "reasonable" restrictions on free speech after some sections of the media started criticising the newly elected government of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_of_the_Constit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
Strong cities develop organically. Slow evolution of the built environment has a kind of 'antifragile' nature. It prevents you from accidentally doing too much of the wrong thing at the same time, and ensures you are building things that people actually want.
Just look at some of the awful mistakes made by planners in the 20th century.
* Entire neighbourhoods were bulldozed in many American cities to make way for huge road infrastructure projects. These projects mainly displaced socioeconomically disadvantaged people and ethnic minorities, with enormous and long-lasting impacts. Decades later, it is broadly acknowledged that massive road infrastructure is toxic to cities. It causes pollution, is enormously expensive to maintain and destroys the character of a city.
* Many countries built lots of huge Le Corbusier-inspired residential towers. Since then, we have learned that the 'towers in a park' ideal is incredibly destructive to communities and the urban fabric of cities. But the allure of big towers in 3D renders is hard to overcome - China went ahead and built enormous numbers of them in the last 30 years, even though urban planners worldwide already knew how bad they were.
* We covered the countryside in endless sprawl. Houses were built around the idea that everyone must own a car and drive everywhere. Communities are too sparse to support natural urban life - shops, cafes, community spaces and so on. Real, ecologically diverse nature was razed in favour of an endless grassy monoculture.
I believe we should have some humility and stop trying to revolutionise the world's cities, thinking that we know best. Instead, we should stick to improvements that we know definitely work. Transit-oriented development. Dense, walkable neighbourhoods. Quality green space for all. Elimination of private cars from city centres. Reliable electricity and clean water. District heating. Sustainable urban drainage. Strong environmental protection for bodies of water. And so on.
Chinese super/megablock urbanism connects to sufficient public transit and work mostly as planned. Add residence community governance layer (coordination mechanism for managing Wuhan covid lockdown) and you have a fairly functional setup, good civic participation especially in newer blocks with more mix-use at ground floors. It's a working urban model for megacities for massive countries, and one that would apply particularly well with India's density, flat terrain, assuming India can overcome infrastructure / transit deficit. Less proven strategies being explored now are managing internal migration and urbanization to growing tier2/3 cities to balance development.
But for a developing country with poor infra/housing stock, it might be developmentally prudent to just start spamming high density urbanism to get the ball rolling. There's enough cheap excess labour in India for generations to fix things up after the fact. But IMO India's problem is she's not ready to urbanize when huge % of population are farmers. Caste system fucked development priorities, too much focus on information services that employs the privileged few versus low end manufacturing opportunities that employs the masses. $2000 per capita and lack of development causes 700,000 infant mortalities per year, India needs coal plants and factories to alleviate poverty before it can afford sustainable cities. At least transition enough farmers to factory work to reduce stubble burning and justify the excess pollution.
I'd say it worked well, and is not anything "unsustainable." Tell how exactly it is "wrong"
* They eliminate a lot of street life. Towers almost always have completely dead frontages at ground level - and they are unlikely to be directly adjacent to a real street. You will be driving to a mall - private space that has none of the democratic nature of a public street.
* They often reduce the connection between neighbours. Meeting someone in a lift or a corridor isn't the same as stopping to talk to someone in the street.
* The 'parks' are normally poor quality. Humans tend to feel more comfortable in enclosed spaces[1], whereas the parks are open fields that feel overshadowed by the large towers.
* The parks often feel unsafe too. A significant reason for this is that towers eliminate most of the 'eyes on the street'. You are likely to feel much safer walking past a row of terraced houses than between tower blocks at night.
* The buildings are often poorly built/maintained and become eyesores.
* They are often built in conjunction with wide roads and excessive parking.
Most countries have a good example of how housing towers go wrong. France has its Grands Ensembles - many of which are really cool buildings but which have not aged well[2]. Glasgow is now demolishing many of its towers[3]. Here's an in-depth report from Create Streets, a social enterprise that studies this kind of thing in the UK[4].
For balance, there is a more positive example in Vienna's social housing[5].
[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/getting_enclosure_right_creati... [2] https://favelissues.com/2018/01/22/les-grands-ensembles-a-so... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/disappearing-... [4] https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/cre... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE
The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on.
I think these videos convey the idea well:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o
Of course, this is not to say that you _can't_ build other kinds of housing. But many cities are badly balanced.
Rebuilding is important because the major population centers have already been defined. Otherwise you’d need an exodus every time a new city is built.
This is practically impossible in a democracy like India. Tearing down a city and rebuilding it will take longer than the term of any elected representative/official. The displaced people will vote him out before the plan comes to fruition.
The only way forward for us is to do things gradually. Every step must preserve citizens' liberty and rights, and remove government regulations so the people can create wealth.
If infrastructure is the problem then you must at some point face the music and pay the infrastructure debt. Otherwise you are basically not serious about moving forward. If one city gets rebuilt and becomes an economic magnet, then that should provide enough political/social capital to roll out more new cities.
I think tier 2 cities like Pune and Bangalore are good candidates. They are both expanding like crazy. It will be easy (not really, but easier) to build out the new developments with next-gen infrastructure. Once the new areas are built up and show their superiority over a few years, the older ones will be upgraded due to public pressure.
For starters I honestly believe to have genuine upgrade of infrastructure and living standards, you need to increase people's income levels. While there's steady upwards income mobility in Bangalore, it's still no where near to cause leap frog progress.
The remainder of reasons go beyond the scope of discussion of a small HN comment. They have lots to do with insane levels of corruption, and socio-economic attitudes of people. Enough money already exists, is sanctioned and spent to leap frog infrastructure to DisneyLand levels. But nearly negligible actually gets spent, needless to say the dishonesty in quality of work done.
Beyond this we just need to acknowledge nearly everyone here(including the common man walking on the street) is corrupt and just wants to loot and scoot at the expense of destroying things for everyone.
The other part just continues. Bangalore is not even a city, its really more like a mix of at-least 4 districts, gradually absorbed in to the original 'Bangalore' city. People will keep coming into the city, and jobs keep arriving. Since the already dismal state of spending, and progress. No new cities can be built in other places, so people continue to arrive. Real estate prices go up, there is no where near Sanitation infrastructure, or Electricity or even roads. But investors keep buying out lands a decade in advance. And people with no discipline or inclination to play this game just have to pay up high rents or pay 2 - 5 times the cost of a home. All this for access to schools, hospitals, career etc.
I agree with most of your comment, but I refuse to believe this is true. Almost everyone I have personally met in the city (from the auto drivers to shopkeepers to policemen to businessmen) was well-meaning and well-behaved, with an intelligent, nuanced outlook and understanding of common problems we all face.
The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
For example, a common conundrum I've heard about is that in any restaurant that serves alcohol, the customs/excise dept requires there to be only one exit/entry. However, fire safety code calls for multiple exits. So what is the restaurant owner to do?? He has to bribe the safety inspector, or the customs inspector, or more commonly both. The owner is not a bad, corrupt person. The inspectors are not bad, corrupt persons. The people who drafted the various codes did not draft them with an aim to encourage corruption. But combined together, all this causes the problems we see.
>>The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
No. Actually people are bad. Parents line up their kids for civil services exam cram schools, because civil services have ...err... bribe income potential
You know people are genuinely evil when they want their kids to grow up and become corrupt, cheat and steal.
Basically people don't want their kids to be pick pockets in a bus. They want them to dress up well, sit on a table and pick pockets in a sub registrar office or while approving a road tarring contract.
But they aspire their kids to become thieves nevertheless.
Further, I was brought up in a public sector township. All the families were having one Govt job. Still only a few (1 or 2) wanted to join a govt service.
I don't want to generalize anything. Because the sample set is too small. But just want to bring a perspective. If you have seen something like 15 out of 40 wanting to become an IAS officer just to get bribed then please put the figures. This is specifically for @Kamaal.
It is very common all around the world, and especially worst part of it for robber dynasties of civil officials to exists. Even rather bad places, people don't realize how shockingly common it is.
It is exceptionally hard to root out once you got few generations of those corrupt babus in power.
Very common too in Russia, where a KGB official comes to a high school to recruit kids into their "academy," and openly state the income potentials from bribes, and that with full knowledge of parents, with some even facilitating that... That's even more common with all kinds of "elite education" facilities there, whose only point is to be a gatekeepers to recruitment into government jobs. Call it a modern caste system.
Busting it means busting a double digit percentage of population who participated in such system.
Can you imagine tearing down Detroit and rebuilding it from scratch? What about Seattle?
Impossible, isn't it?
India is even more democratic than USA, so it's never going to happen.
Not according to these folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
USA is 25, India is 53.
As such, while the US has the veneer of being democratic, it really isn't.
And I haven't even gotten into gerrymandering, which makes a complete mockery of democracy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Lol what? We warn against big-bang software rewrites because shit always goes wrong. But you're confident rebuilding a city perfectly is no big deal?
India must have one world class city, right? If they want to compete with China, they need to kind of do something China is willing to do. Tear down an existing city and just rebuild it perfectly with infrastructure and city planning.