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| Barun Roy: The urban reality | |
| ASIA FILE | | Barun Roy / New Delhi November 20, 2008, 0:14 IST | |
Three million people are migrating to cities in developing countries every week - a third of which are slums already.
An event of profound significance to humanity happened as UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum met early this month in the Chinese city of Nanjing for its 4th biannual session. For the first time in history, the global urban population crossed the halfway mark and reached a point of no return. From now on, we’ll be living in an increasingly urban world as more and more people leave their farms and fields and move into cities. We have 3.3 billion urban dwellers now and will have 5 billion by 2030.
If this doesn’t give you a sense of the growing urban pressure, probably this will: China had 223 cities in 1980, has 668 now, will have over 1,000 by 2015. It’s a virtual Niagara. By comparison, India may still be a Jog Fall, but don’t forget that, behind the 40 or so bigger cities that we mostly talk about, there are hundreds of smaller towns that are sucking up rural populations without having even rudimentary civic services in place. That’s where India’s urban nightmare will break.
By 2030, the World Urban Forum has warned, 80 per cent of urban humanity will be from the developing countries. Three million people are being added every week to cities of these countries and one in every three city-dwellers now lives in a slum. With a billion human beings living in subhuman conditions, can we even hope to tackle urban poverty and all social problems, like crime, that are associated with it?
In the UN-Habitat’s State of the World Cities report for 2008-09 that was launched at the Nanjing forum, South Asia fared the worst: 43 per cent of all urban residents in this region lived in slums. But other sub-regions weren’t doing that well either. eastern Asia had a 37 per cent count, south east Asia had 28 per cent, and western Asia 24 per cent. Singapore is the only country where there are no slums. It’s also the only city in the world that absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits.
The forum called on nations to launch policies to develop harmonious cities — socially, economically, environmentally, spatially, historically, and, not the least, demographically speaking — cities that recognise tolerance, diversity, social justice, and good governance. While some nations have begun serious initiatives to transform their cities, India isn’t one of them.
Our cities are angry places, teeming with hostilities, injustices, and inequalities of all kinds, and we can’t call them safe, sane, or healthy. But we seem happy to be the way we are. Our idea of urban change is a flyover here, a road there, a park somewhere else, built but never maintained. What do we care about cities as harmonious entities contributing not only to our own national wealth but to that of the world as well?
For an answer, let’s look at two interesting global surveys that came out about the same time as the Nanjing forum. One was a new ranking of top business cities that Mercer Human Resources Consulting undertook for the Business Week. I extracted a list of Asia’s top 20 out of it and got this result: Singapore was at the top, followed by Tokyo. Hong Kong was there, of course, and Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, even Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru. There were two mainland-China cities, Shanghai and Beijing. But there was not a single Indian city.
The other was the 2008 Global Cities Index published by the US magazine Foreign Policy in its November-December 2008 issue. The survey focused on “60 cities that shape our lives the most, cities that continue to forge global links despite intensely complex economic environments,” based on business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement.
New York came out on top as the closest approximation to a perfect global city, followed by London, Paris, and Tokyo. Hong Kong came out as the fifth, Singapore as the seventh, and Seoul as the ninth. More significantly, Beijing took the twelfth position and Shanghai the twentieth, two cities that have emerged from a formerly closed society to be embraced by the world. Thus, six of the top 20 global cities were from Asia, but India, an open society, didn’t figure in that band at all. On the full list, Mumbai was 49 and Kolkata 60.
When it came to categories, the picture was even more revealing. Among the best cities in the world to get a degree were Tokyo (3), Singapore (5), Bangkok (12), and Beijing (17); the best cities to get some culture included Tokyo (2), Hong Kong (5), Singapore (6), Seoul (7), Shanghai (8), Beijing (9), Bangkok (17), and Taipei (19); the best cities for diplomatic assignment were Tokyo (6), Beijing (7), Bangkok (13), Taipei (15), Singapore (16), Shanghai (18), and Seoul (19); and the best regional gateways in the world were Hong Kong (5) and Singapore (7). India is nowhere to be found in this list.
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