It’s in you—to make the change

In the last edition, we front-paged a matrix on the size of cities. It couldn’t have skipped your eye that there lurked drama in the figures: It helps recounting that Bangalore has emerged to be larger than Mumbai, in geographic spread—at 447 sq. km against 440 sq. km of that old coastal town. That doesn’t, mercifully, make Bangalore a larger city. The silicon city’s population density is one-half of that commercial capital.
Cities known in our times to be some of the most important, like Paris, are no more than a quarter [105 sq. km] of the size of Bangalore or Mumbai, with a population [2 million] that is just a third of Bangalore’s [6.4 million], or one-sixth of Mumbai’s [upward of 13 million].
So why do people continue to degrade their quality of lives by continuing to inhabit these growing shanties? So why don’t governments and people work toward bringing some dramatic change that is so sorely needed in cities?
Observes Pankaj Mishra, in a celebrated book of recent times, “To emerge onto the broken pavement with the limbless beggars; to push and elbow one’s way into the sweat, dirt and noise of a packed bus; then to watch with a foolish little twinge of privilege the stranded men at the bus stops, was to be robbed of the new sensations. It was to have yet again a sense of the hollowness of the city’s promise and the mean anonymity of the lives it contained; it was to know the city as a setting not of pleasure but of work and struggle.”
Why has urban governance, particularly in the poorer countries of what is usually dismissed as the backwaters of the third world, not risen to levels of competence that is so direly needed?
The pretexts are many: ‘We can’t change anything by ourselves.‘ ‘If others don’t change, too, our effort will make no difference.‘ ‘Solutions will be found sooner or later – you have to trust in technology and innovation.‘
What we pretend not to know is that the solutions are well known. As are the ways of reinventing an efficient and sustainable system, both locally and at the level of the world‘s major regions. This edition features some insights into how the future is slowly being hijacked by a small coterie of large companies that is buying up the rights to every natural resource, specially water. With IBM twisting the French government‘s arms to exploit a rare aquifer [page 07], and Coca Cola making quiet but serious forays into selling water [not Coke] in more than 30 countries [page 06], the portents are ominous for the far future.
Look at the destructive growth of our big cities – particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Between 1950 and 1990, the number of cities with more than a million inhabitants rose from 78 to 290; it will reach 650 by 2025. The great majority of these cities [about 250 of them] are in Asia, South America and Africa—all in the infested, poverty-ridden parts of the third world.
There are solutions, if only we are willing to work despite the government. Companies like ITC are showing, for good or for worse, the way to reach our 500,000 villages with market instruments that respect the individual, the farmer.
We need such paradigms in the urban context, too.
— Editor