20120227 rcs imagining cities prem chandavarkar

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Imagining

Risk, Competiveness & Sustainabilityin the Context of

The Indian City



ImaginingRisk, Competiveness &

Sustainabilityin the Context of

The Indian City



Risk, Competiveness &Sustainability

in the Context of



RISK



ECONOMICS OF LAND IN BANGALOREPER ANNUM INCOME IN BANGALORE

Average per capita (Rs.) 74,709Average household size 4.13Average household income(Rs.) 3,08,548

Q1 (bottom) 5.4%Q2 9.6%Q3 14.5%Q4 21.8%Q5 (top) 48.7%

Source: How India Earns, Spends & Saves – Results of the Max New York Life-NCAER

India Financial Protection Survey (2007)



ECONOMICS OF LAND IN BANGALOREPER ANNUM INCOME IN BANGALORE

Average per capita (Rs.) 85,000Average household size 4.13Average household income(Rs.) 3,51,050

INCOME DISTRIBUTIONQ1 (bottom) 5.4%Q2 9.6%Q3 14.5%Q4 21.8%Q5 (top) 48.7%

Source: How India Earns, Spends & Saves – Results of the Max New York Life-NCAER

India Financial Protection Survey (2007)

Lowest 3

quintiles

Lowest 2

quintiles

41,792 31,875

1,72,600 1,31,644

EXPENDITURE PATTERNFood 45.4%Health 4.6%Transport 11.1%Education 8.7%Clothing 6.8%Durables 5.0%

TOTAL 81.6%

31,758 24,222



•

Smallest site in new BDA Layouts: 54 sq.m.• This is the smallest parcel of land recognised in

the land use plan

• Cost from BDA: Rs. 56,700

• Lock-in period: 10 years

• Time limit for completing construction: 5 years

• Eligibility: Income below Rs. 11,800 per annum

• Assume 225 sq.ft. unit at Rs. 500 per sq.ft.costing Rs. 1,12,500

• Total expense = Rs. 1,69,200

ECONOMICS OF LAND IN BANGALORE




54 sq. m. (581 sq.ft.)

LOCATION LAND RATE

(Rs./sq.ft.)

LAND VALUE

(Rs.)

EMI @ 8%

Over 20 Years

ANNUAL

EXPENDITUR

E

CBD

Inner Ring

Road

Outer Ring

Road

Periphery

10,000

6,000

2,000

700

58,72,560

34,87,536

11,62,512

4,06,879

48,619

29,172

9,724

3,403

5,83,428

3,50,064

1,16,688

40,386



• FAR: 3.25• FAR Area: 18,89,082 sq.ft.• Area per family: 400 sq.ft.• No. of families: 4723

• Land Rate: Rs. 1,350 / sq.ft.• Total Land Value: Rs. 2,55,02,60,700• Land Value per Family: Rs. 5,40,000• Construction Rate: Rs. 800 / sq.ft.• Construction Cost per Family: Rs. 3,20,000• Total Cost per Family: Rs. 8,60,000• EMI: Rs. 7,194• Annual Expenditure: 86,328


54,000 sq. m. (581 sq.ft.) (13.34 acres)



FLATTENING THE SUPPLY CURVE ON LAND

QUANTITYQ2Q1

PRICE

P2P1

D1

D1

S



FLATTENING THE SUPPLY CURVE ON LAND

QUANTITYQ2Q1

PRICE

P2

P1

• Legal complexity and lack of transparencyin land title and building permissions

• Disaggregation of publicly owned and

unutilised land



• History of master planning is recent, and there

are large quantities of building stock that

predate master planning• Penetration and enforcement of master

planning is weak, so there is ample space for

informal systems of tenure to operate

• Advantages of informality: “slums of hope” and

“slums of despair”

SURVIVAL OF THE POOR IN THE INDIAN CITY



• The practice of those in power• Based on “space”

• Postulates a “place” that can be delimited as its own fromwhich relations with an exteriority can be ordered andmanaged

• Such places posited as the natural order of the city• A set of “proper” places, either spatial or institutional, that

represents political, economic and scientific rationalities

SURVIVAL OF THE POOR IN THE INDIAN CITY

STRATEGIES

TACTICS

Michel de Certeau

• The art of the weak• A way of operating without a proper place, and so depend

on time.• Depend on seized opportunities, cleverly chosen

movements and incursions into space, and on the rapidityof movements that can change the organisation of a space.

• Counterpractices to officially sanctioned urbanisms



• Example of gun control in the US: Several opinion polls showthat up to 80% of the public support some form of gun control

• Yet no politician will touch it• Of the 20% who oppose it, 75% of them are so fanatical that

they will make a voting decision based on this one issue• Of the 80% majority, only 5% of them (who may be victims of

violent crime) will base their voting decision solely on thisissue.

• 75% of 20% is 15% of the electorate• 5% of 80% is 4% of the electorate•

This 11% differential will swing any election and the politiciansknow it.• Democracies do not like diffuse majorities, they prefer

fanatical minorities.

THE MATHEMATICS OF DEMOCRACY(John Allen Paolos)



“If you can’t afford to stay inDelhi, go elsewhere!”

Supreme Court Justice Ruma Pal, while passing judgment onthe demolition of Nangla Machi Basti which made way for the Commonwealth Games Village on the banks of theYamuna, after having been there for close to 40 years.



WHY DO WE SO EASILY ACCEPT SUCH

PARTIAL IMAGINATIONS OF THE CITY?



THE CITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS



• While we take human rights for granted, its history is actuallyvery recent.

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 1948• International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights; International

Covenant on Economic, Social, Cultural Rights: 1976• Rights by themselves remain abstract without a spatial entity

that enforces them•

The nation state as the primary spatial entity for theenforcement of rights• The nation state must imagine itself as a non-

hierarchical, inclusive and ethical community (this is a choicethat must be taken)

•

The nation state is too broad and heterogeneous a level forrights to be integrated into daily routine. It can only deal withrights once they are violated

• For integrating rights into daily routine the city (and thevillage) must imagine itself as a non-hierarchical, inclusive andethical community

THE CITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Spaces devoid of time



RETHINKING “SPACE”

Spaces devoid of time

Spaces differentiated by time

Spaces fixed in time

AS ALWAYS IN TIME



COMPETITIVENESS

WHAT KIND OF A PROBLEM IS A CITY?



• While cities have existed since time immemorial,they have received specific attention only sincethe late 19th century.

• First writings on the city: The German School(Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler),

The Chicago School (Robert Park, Louis Wirth,Robert Redfield)

• The cosmopolitan character of the city: freedomfrom the stifling gaze of tradition

• Simmel: The urban monk• Park: The role of the city is to “foreground the

moral range of deviant behavior”





Jane Jacobs

Warren Weaver: Three Kinds of Scientific Problems• Organised Simplicity: Newtonian Mechanics

• Disorganised Complexity: Quantum Mechanics

• Self-Organising Complexity: Biological Systems




THE TERMITE’S NEST:

DESIGN THROUGH EMERGENCE



THE CONDITIONS OF EMERGENCE

• High-synchrony frequent interaction

• Always leave traces of actions

• Impulse toward pattern recognition in the

traces• High levels of information symmetry

• All information is public domain

•

Low preoccupation with granddesigns, focus is on immediate experience

• Iterative evolutionary spirals



Anna Lee Saxenian: Limits of Autarky

SILICON VALLEY, CA ROUTE 128, MA

1975 - 1990

150,000 new tech jobs 50,000 new tech jobs

$ 11 billion in tech exports $ 4.8 billion in tech exports

39 of nation’s 100 fastest

growing electronics

companies

4 of nation’s 100 fastest

growing electronics

companies



Rethinking Civic Space



CIVIC SPACE PUBLIC SPACE(The Bazaar) (The Mall)

• Engagement

• Integrated

• Open

• Slowness

• Spectacle

• Introverted

• Gated

• Speed



THIRD PLACE (Ray Oldenburg)

First Place: Home, Family

Second Place: Work

Third Place: Community(Coffee House, Tavern, Club, Park,

Piazza, Chowk, Street, Church,

Mosque)



SCALES OF GOVERNANCE

• Initially no constitutional recognition of

local government

• 73rd and 74th amendments to the

constitution (1992)• Poor implementation of

amendments, particularly in

municipalities• The Gram Sabha in rural areas

• The Ward Committee and the Area Sabha



ALIGN STRATEGIES

People come to cities to

strategically leverage

economies of:

• Scale

• Density

• Association

• Extension



SUSTAINABILITY



THE PROBLEM IN INITIATING SUSTAINABILITY•

Rational persuasion is difficult• Science of climate and nature is emergent and

non-linear

• Cause-effect relationships between macro

level system behaviour and individual

behaviour are difficult to establish

• Connections can only be inferred

statistically, which requires sophisticatedunderstanding

• The “first mile problem”

•Shift from rational understanding to “network



NATURE AS

WILDERNESS

THE CITY AS “FALLEN

AWAY” FROM NATURE



THE CITY AS

FORTIFIED TERRITORY

THE CITY AS

A SPONGE



AUTOPOEISIS



HAVANA, CUBA

• 1995: 26,600 garden parcels• Size range: 10 sq.m. to 3 hectares

• Organic fertiliser based: cow manure, food/leaf compost, vermiculture

• Multilayer crops: for example cassava (providing shade), sweet potato (ground

cover) and beans (fixating soil with nitrogen)

•

Porches and balconies also brought into food production• Facilitated by “green” networks

• 50% of food produced within the city’s boundaries

• Ratio of energy inputs into the food system, relative to calories ingested is in the

region of 12:1 in the developing world. In subsistence economies where food is

grown close to where it is ingested, the ratio is closer to 1:1



WATER IN THE SPONGE CITY

Take as an example a 60’ by 40’ (223 sq.m.) plot

in Bangalore housing a family of five.

• Average rainfall per year: 978 mm

• Rain falling on plot in a year: 223 x 0.978 =

2,18,094 litres• NBC 2005 consumption standard: 135 lpcd

• Yearly consumption for family: 135 x 5 x 365 =

2,46,375 litres



STUDIES BY URBAN MORPHOLOGY LABORATORY, CSTB, PARIS, FRANCE



SUSTAINABLE (EMERGENT) SYSTEMS

• “Experience” based rather than “Intellect”

based

• Multi-scalar, working from the bottom up

• The Principle of Subsidiarity: The bottom level

does the maximum it can, and whatever itcannot do it delegates upwards



“It is not enough to be sustainable. If you

were to ask someone about how theirrelationship with their spouse was and theyanswered ‘sustainable’ it is not veryhopeful!”

William McDonough

Quoted by Hasan-Udin Khan (from a conversation with McDonough) in

Life, the Universe and Everything: Stewardship, Change and the Built Environment , Keynote address, 4th International Conference on VernacularSettlements, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India, February 2008



CONCLUSION



RETHINKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT



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THE PANCHASHILA OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Cities should be:

• Economically Dynamic

• Culturally Vibrant

• Socially Just

• Environmentally Sustainable

• Politically Inclusive & Participatory

20120227 rcs imagining cities prem chandavarkar

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