Aditya Sinha: Why Mumbai needs to get high

Triumph Of The City
Author: Edward Glaeser
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Pages: 272
Price: Rs399

You don’t need a Harvard economics professor to tell you that Mumbai has some of the world’s worst land-use laws and administrators (both partly due to its apathetic citizenry), which is why Mumbai is still not among the world’s best cities. You also don’t need that same professor to tell you why Bangalore is considered one of the best (even if older citizens grumble about change and decay) — because of its status as a global city of ideas. But it helps if Professor Edward Glaeser writes a book like Triumph of the City in which he uses studies based on data from cities ranging from New York, Houston and Chicago, to Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, to Mumbai and Bangalore, to Paris, London and Milan, to Gaborone in Botswana and Dubai. From it you not only get a convincing argument on how to save a city but also on why it should — or should not — be saved. Also, cities allow philosophical observations about the nature of humankind.

Unlike historical intellectuals like Henry David Thoreau, who famously advocated a return to nature, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said “cities are the abyss of the human species”, Glaeser says the city is one of the most human inventions: “There is little that you own or use or know that wasn’t created by someone else,” he writes. “Just as ant colonies do things that are far beyond the abilities of isolated insects, cities achieve much more than isolated humans… In a big city, people can choose peers who share their interests, just as Monet and Cezanne found each other in nineteenth century Paris… Because the essential characteristic of humanity is our ability to learn from each other, cities make us more human.”

But that does not mean trying to keep a city alive when it is uneconomic to do so; or trying to take heritage preservation to the absurd extent of mummification. For instance, Glaeser decries the Detroit’s metro project, a white elephant futilely undertaken to save a city whose raison d'être is the almost extinct American motor industry. Let the city die, he says; let the market decide where people should live. “Helping poor people is an appropriate task for government, but helping poor places and poorly run businesses is not,” he writes. For example, after Hurricane Katrina, there were calls to give US $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans for the one million affected. Glaeser notes it is a city long in decline; instead, each family should have been given a cheque for US $ 400,000 and asked to buy a house in a more dynamic city.

Glaeser is also unimpressed by over-preservation. In New York City, for instance, heritage restrictions have taken a life of their own, so that building upwards on many structures is scuttled (usually by the rich and powerful); Paris, which was rebuilt with wide boulevards and low structures by Georges-Eugene Haussmann under Napoleon III in the 1860s, is one of the most beautiful cities of the world, but as a result of restrictions, an incredibly expensive city that undermines the artistic and intellectual identity that Paris built over centuries.

At the root is America’s anti-urban laws and society, which encourage building outward rather than up. You may think suburbs are environment-friendly but Glaeser shows the opposite: city folk have a smaller carbon footprint than exurbanites that drive SUVs (rather than walk) for daily chores. He says Chicago is better than either Houston or NYC because it is building up; so it has more affordable apartments and is attracting businesses and professionals.

Glaeser’s aim is to change American attitudes, as India and China are rapidly urbanising. If they allow cities to spread out rather than up, then the planet is in great environmental trouble. Americans cannot preach what they do not practice, so he pleads for smarter urban policies in his own country.

This brings us to Glaeser’s criticism of Mumbai and praise for Bangalore. (One chapter titled “What do they make in Bangalore?” demonstrates how Bangalore has become India’s most important conduit for ideas; a place where Yahoo staffer Ruban Phukan tried and became a successful internet entrepreneur — which he could not have in his native Guwahati.) “Mumbai has had some of the most extreme land-use restrictions in the developing world; for much of Mumbai’s recent history, new buildings in the central city had to average less than one-and-a-third stories,” he writes.

“What insanity!”

Well, we know. We also know that if the port trust’s land was developed realty prices would be less insane. We know that insanity would reduce if old buildings were torn down for taller ones. We know that if Mumbai was led with spine, it could invest in something like Singapore’s $3.65 billion Deep Tunnel Sewerage System (instead of stinking up the Mithi). Glaeser says that any city looking to renew itself has to invest in education. Recently, however, the All India Council of Technical Education reportedly did not receive applications for new institutes in Mumbai — because real estate is too expensive for education.

Mumbai is a city with a lot of character but it ought to step up to being characterised as one of civilisation’s great cities. It will not so long as its citizens treat it like a whore: transact and forget. Triumph of the City tells you why its citizens should treat Mumbai like a goddess instead.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai