For the new Prime Minister, here’s a city-zen’s wish-list

Dear Mr Modi,
Soon you will become the head of the second largest urban population in the world, a number that exceeds 400 million people, and rising rapidly. When you drive in your motorcade to the prime minister’s house, and see the wide expanse of open landscaped road, I am sure you will wonder where these people are, and why they complain so much about civic problems: water supply, electricity, traffic snarls, crime, missing sidewalks, broken roads, deteriorating air… But sir, the truth is that the downward spiral of life in the cities is already visible to most of us.In fact, when my own motorcade of one car gets stuck in traffic it gives me time to think, and I wonder why people in our cities are so unhappy and dissatisfied. Surely it must have something to do with this daily despair of living with overflowing garbage, poor drainage, road rage, water wars, shrinking space and a life filled with uncertainty. Or is there something else?
Why is the Indian city such a despairing ramshackle blemish on the landscape? I ask you sir what in our character accepts such filth and squalor. Nowhere do so many people live with each other in such unimaginable ugliness. In fact, across the world Indian cities are described as wretched and dismal, and are often used as examples of urbanity gone wrong. You may argue that peoples homes are made with due care, and are compositions of great beauty and cleanliness. But isn’t that akin to having a display of beautiful paintings in a garbage dump. Why is public aesthetics such an odd Indian disability? Certainly the quality of city life has a great deal to do with mounting population pressures and the constant migratory shift of the dispossessed, and perhaps little can be done with already established metros; but in the design of new cities and the renewal of the older small towns, three wishes come to mind.
First, the essential: today in our cities, commerce, work, residence and recreation are marked as isolated buildings enclosed by boundaries. Because of their invisibility behind high walls, movement through the city is singularly despairing, disjointed and dispirited. Homes are shut out behind gated communities ; offices are isolated into private blocks. This illegibility of the present city is not an outcome of public indifference, but professional and municipal irresponsibility. The architect’s inability to design for a common purpose, has left a lasting legacy of utter civic remoteness — isolated landmarks, derelict plazas, decaying markets, inaccessible parks and disjointed housing pockets. Any new town must eliminate these failures and ensure a more egalitarian and connected outlook to home, workplace and recreation, with more enduring links to nature.
Secondly, the thoughtful: a belief that urban life is more than just a collection of utilities, roads and infrastructure, leaves every new city hoping for an inclusion of at least that one thoughtful feature that draws people into a shared life. I draw your attention to a pedestrian boardwalk built at the edge of the lake in Nainital a century earlier, along which are located a library, a meeting hall, a boat club — things now considered superfluous to city life. But the generosity of that simple gesture leaves every local resident thanking the British as they walk along the promenade and enjoy the water’s edge. I ask you sir, aren’t these too vital to human development? Wouldn’t the placement of libraries, urban art, meeting grounds, water gardens or public courtyards be an asset to any city?
Thirdly, the generous: the Indian city currently works on a message of greed, where open space is quickly usurped by shops, houses and parking. Private space is created by public encroachment. The real life of cities is however made from generous offerings of precisely the reverse. Private houses in Bologna offer their frontage as arcades to people on the street. An abandoned railway track in the heart of New York is made into an unusual park for local residents. Our future cities too will depend heavily on shared actions and a deeper sense of community life, that won’t come from planning or official actions.
Sir, today India is at the crossroads of some serious choices: to either enter the world market as a shameless imitator of China and the West, competing with them on expanding highways, ports, and racing restlessly to compare GDP figures. Or we choose a different destiny, a path of serious discovery and inventiveness, directing our energies to more imaginative forms of architecture, planning and urban living, that produce altogether different — but relevant — models — ideas that may even do away with inessential and expensive Western-type infrastructure. Whatever their final form, new cities could accommodate a wide swathe of diverse citizens and lifestyles, and give everyone that much-needed uplift that comes with living in a place they love. Surely the choice should not be difficult.
The writer is a Delhi-based architect