Urban Planning India

Defaults in Planning Regime of India – an overview

Roy, A. (2009). Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization. Planning Theory, 76-87

Abstract

The article brings forward the reasons of failure of Indian urban planning by focusing on creating bourgeois cities with lack of adequate infrastructure and stark social divisions. The author has taken examples of two Indian cities and proceeded with the assumption that the entire country is following the same system of planning and policy making. The central concept of the article revolves around the informality in planning practices through the idiom of urbanization. The author has provided substantial evidence in form of varied examples of cities to support

She attributes the failure of the International Airport in Bangalore to the rapid urban growth in India usually overtaking the vision of the Indian planner. The author presents that planners do not seem to plan for ‘future-proofing’ cities; they have time and again underestimated the capacity of city infrastructure and services. I my opinion this claim as Indian cities are becoming more and more congested, planners have not been able to keep up with the demands for housing and other allied infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population of the city and the in-migration. This could be the result of adopting solutions from western models of planning, which are not applicable in the Indian context, leading to eventual failure of the projects. There is a need to create contextual solutions by looking at past examples of city planning in India and countries with similar

She paints a picture of the state being an informalized entity, bending its rules to achieve urban and industrial development. I think the reason that the state has followed this mechanism is to fulfil its own needs of etching the urban poor into the city inhabitants for the reasons of electoral mobilisation. The government has at large extended infrastructure services to the urban poor through schemes of slum redevelopment and urban renewal across the country. But these schemes have taken the slum dwellers as a mere existent population. Populations in terms of categorising people in relation to the social and economic attributes that they possess (Chatterjee, 2004).They are only seen as beneficiaries of the schemes, as a mere numerical figure for electoral politics that gets surveyed in the Census. This attitude of the state has hindered equitable development to a greater extent.

Idiom of urbanization has been presented as a thought by the author, which has played a part in the narrative of the two cities. A new critique has been introduced that Informality in India is a dynamic process for land management practices. Hereby informality, Roy states is the situation of deregulation ‘where the ownership, use, and purpose of land cannot be fixed and mapped according to any prescribed set of regulations or the law’. (Roy,