[sustran] Re: IHT news article: Ditching laissez-faire, India plans a city

[Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory]

The air cargo part by itself is a first-class ecological horror. There 
is some talk of green spaces, PT and rainwater harvesting but it really 
sounds like a giant bag of errors. Provides a nice contrast to the city 
planned for Abu Dhabi: Carfree city for rich people vs. a city with a 
few eco-touches for people whom you except to get rich, 
shop-til-they-drop and drive cars.

It is good that something is happening with a plan... but who is doing 
the plan? Sorry, but without knowing more details it sounds like the 
plans need to be torn up.

T


Carlos F. Pardo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Below is something to think about... does anyone know in greater 
> detail how this city is being planned? The article mentions it will be 
> a "metropolis", "hub of India", "malls will be built" etc.  Mumford, 
> Lynch and other authors should be further diffused among policymakers 
> and planners (at least an abridged version!).* *Best regards, Carlos.*
>
>
> Ditching laissez-faire, India plans a city*
> By Anand Giridharadas
> Thursday, May 10, 2007
> original source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/10/news/city.php
>
> *NAGPUR, India:* A year ago, this relatively small, forgettable city 
> in the heart of India did not have an air-conditioned cinema. In the 
> sweltering heat of May, the rich here were known to fly one hour to 
> Mumbai, the financial hub of India, to see a movie. There they stocked 
> up on Levi's jeans and Domino's pizza and other big-city treats that 
> Nagpur failed to provide.
>
> But in a social experiment highly unusual for this most unplanned of 
> countries, the Indian government has handpicked Nagpur to be fattened 
> and primped into an international metropolis.
>
> Lush parks and smooth roads have been lain, and malls and multiplex 
> cinemas have sprouted. A drastically renovated airport is to become 
> the cargo hub of India, with a terminal that is 100 times larger than 
> the existing one and is to handle at least 100 jets at a time instead 
> of the current five. An ecofriendly mass-transit system is being 
> planned to absorb an expected surge in road traffic, years before the 
> average Nagpurian owns a car. The government is building a special 
> economic zone with tax breaks and ready-to-use water, electricity and 
> fiber optic cable, in the hope of attracting 100,000 technology jobs 
> to a city long dominated by coal mining.
>
> Borrowing a chapter from China's playbook, the Indian government has 
> begun working to make metropolises out of smaller, isolated cities, 
> from Jaipur in the north to Vijayawada in the east to Mysore in the 
> south, garnishing them with fresh infrastructure like international 
> airports and financial grants linked to improvements in governance.
>
> "One hundred million people are moving to cities in the next 10 years, 
> and it's important that these 100 million are absorbed into 
> second-tier cities instead of showing up in Delhi or Mumbai," Montek 
> Singh Ahluwalia, the Indian government's chief economic planner, said 
> in a telephone conversation.
>
> Since its independence from Britain in 1947, the city-building 
> philosophy of India has been, to put it tenderly, laissez-faire. 
> Except for the recently developed technology hubs of Bangalore and 
> Hyderabad, India has not added cosmopolitan, globally connected 
> metropolises to its old ones: Calcutta, Delhi, Madras and Mumbai. As 
> the Indian population tripled, the 1.1 billion people living on about 
> 3 million square kilometers, or 1.1 million square miles, were left to 
> scramble for space and opportunity in the few thousand square 
> kilometers that contained well-paid jobs, 24-hour electricity and 
> air-conditioned cinemas.
>
> To take just one measure of the shortage of developed metropolises, 
> there are 65 million Indians for every airport with the 
> three-kilometer, or two-mile, runway required by large jetliners, 
> according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. In the United 
> States, the figure is 1.6 million people; in China, 25 million.
>
> Even as China beefed up second-tier cities like Dalian, Hangzhou and 
> Tianjin and linked them to the world, India waited. And its cities 
> began to break. In Mumbai, a majority of people live in slums, and a 
> sewage river passes through just as the Seine streaks Paris. Delhi is 
> chronically short of water and electricity. Calcutta teems with 
> rickshaw drivers who break their bodies for a few cents a ride, 
> because there are too many people vying for work in so tiny a place.
>
> No one knows if India has the stamina to build Nagpur to completion, 
> and then build 20 more. But many experts regard metropolis-building as 
> a silver bullet for India, slaying many problems with a single shot.
>
> "Much of India's future will undeniably be made in the second-tier 
> cities," said Ashutosh Varshney, a specialist on Indian political 
> economy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The existing 
> metropolises "will reach saturation points before long, or have 
> already reached such points, and re-engineering their capacities for 
> further growth will not be easy."
>
> New metropolises could erode poverty, easing the load on cramped, 
> Dickensian cities and creating more hubs where rural migrants can go 
> for jobs in textile mills or the retail sector. More international 
> airports could help raise incomes for the 700 million rural Indians by 
> making it easier for their produce to reach export markets.
>
> The Indian metropolis-building might also be an environmental boon. 
> Upstart cities like Nagpur, on which millions have yet to descend, can 
> grow on an ecofriendly model, with green spaces, mass transit and 
> rainwater harvesting, in a way that old cities, with entrenched 
> infrastructure, cannot.
>
> "There's a whole lot of leapfrogging possibilities when you're 
> creating new capitals," said Ahluwalia, the government planner.
>
> New cities are also craved by industry, which is struggling to pay 
> soaring land prices and wages in the traditional metropolises.
>
> Investors have long known this. What is new is the enthusiasm of the 
> government, which has pledged in the last two years to spend $29 
> billion over seven years to upgrade 63 cities. Grants are given only 
> to cities that tighten governance and enact business-friendly policies 
> like scaling back rent control. More than half the funds are reserved 
> for 56 cities with populations below four million.
>
> One fact separates Nagpur, with an estimated 2.5 million people, from 
> the other 55: When the Indian government selected it as the air cargo 
> hub for the country, it guaranteed skeptical investors that this 
> obscure city would eventually rank with the busiest airports in the 
> world, with all the attendant job creation and prosperity. Nagpur was 
> chosen because it lies near the geographic center of India and is a 
> crossroads of road and rail traffic.
>
> "It has the potential to be the growth nucleus of central India," 
> Lokesh Chandra, the fresh-faced Nagpur municipal commissioner, said in 
> an interview.
>
> Any city chief might make such a claim. But in Nagpur, the blueprints 
> of the new airport suggest that here, at least, India has genuinely 
> broken with its old build-it-only-after-a-catastrophic-shortage 
> approach to infrastructure, adopting something closer to the Chinese 
> if-you-build-it-they-will-come philosophy.
>
> Today, the Nagpur airport is an airstrip. Visitors deplane and cross 
> the tarmac on foot to enter the terminal. It takes 30 seconds to 
> traverse the entire terminal from arrival gate to taxi stand.
>
> The blueprints foreshadow radical change. Nagpur got its first 
> international flight just 18 months ago, but it is already planning a 
> second runway long enough for jets like the Airbus A380 superjumbo. A 
> new terminal, already being built, will occupy 300,000 square meters, 
> or 3.2 million square feet, up from 3,000 square meters. It is 
> designed to accommodate 14 million passengers a year, a 20-fold 
> increase. Consultants from Changi Airport in Singapore have been hired 
> to spruce up the duty-free shopping.
>
> Next to the airport is a vast special economic zone, an enclave of 
> relative economic freedom designed to attract investors. Boeing, the 
> plane maker, is setting up a maintenance hub there, and in an 
> adjoining technology park Indian outsourcing vendors like Satyam 
> Computer Services and HCL Technologies have signed up for land.
>
> Together, the airport, cargo operation and park are expected to employ 
> more than 100,000 people.
>
> The project has made Nagpur's renaissance a fait accompli for many 
> investors, and their enthusiasm has bid up real estate prices.
>
> A decade ago, an acre, or 0.4 hectare, of land on the main street, 
> Wardha Road, sold for 100,000 rupees, or about $2,400 at current 
> exchange rates. Today it costs 20 to 40 times more, property 
> developers say. Even in less lucrative areas, prices have at least 
> doubled in five years.
>
> To some, it feels like a bubble. Alok Tiwari, executive editor of The 
> Hitawada, the local newspaper, said investors were anticipating a 
> boom, but that the underlying fuel of a boom - more jobs and buying 
> power - had yet to arrive. "We've got to create opportunity, not just 
> take land and build a mall there," he said.
>
> Some entrepreneurs accuse the government of building the special 
> economic zones at the expense of clearing the thicket of taxes and 
> regulations that hinders growth outside those rarified enclaves.
>
> "Government is not trying to help," said Vijaykumar, a developer who 
> goes by one name and whose family-run company built Nagpur's first 
> shopping mall.
>
> Yet the boom is real enough that Vijaykumar is investing heavily in 
> new office towers, houses and malls in the city.
>
> That may be enough. Nagpurians marvel at how, with every new mall, the 
> young discover wants they never had before. They work harder to afford 
> those wants. More malls are built to satisfy them. And after a time, 
> the cycle acquires its own momentum.
>
> Vishwas Chaknalwar, a builder, put it this way. "Once you wear Pyramid 
> clothes," he said, referring to a new mall here, "you cannot wear 
> anything else."
>
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