Urban and Regional Planning and Development: 20th Century Forms and 21st Century Transformations 3030317757, 9783030317751

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Rajiv R. Thakur Ashok K. Dutt Sudhir K. Thakur George M. Pomeroy Editors

Urban and Regional Planning and Development 20th Century Forms and 21st Century Transformations

Urban and Regional Planning and Development

Rajiv R. Thakur Ashok K. Dutt Sudhir K. Thakur George M. Pomeroy •

•

•

Editors

Urban and Regional Planning and Development 20th Century Forms and 21st Century Transformations

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Editors Rajiv R. Thakur Department of Geosciences Missouri State University West Plains, MO, USA Sudhir K. Thakur Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate College of Business Administration, California State University Sacramento, CA, USA

Ashok K. Dutt Department of Geography and Planning The University of Akron Akron, OH, USA George M. Pomeroy Department of Geography-Earth Science Shippensburg University Shippensburg, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-31775-1 ISBN 978-3-030-31776-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The conceptual idea and vision of this volume benefited from the support and comments that came from Professor Allen G. Noble, in the early stages of the project. The editors thank Dr. Patricia Thakur, Missouri State University, West Plains, for having read and re-read several drafts of the chapters and the final manuscript. Rajiv remains indebted to Professor Kathleen B. Morrison, Department of Political Science at Missouri State University, West Plains, and Professor Judith Meyer, Department of Geography, Geology and Planning, Missouri State University, Springfield, for encouragement and support. Rajiv would also like to thank Shanon Conlon at Meyer Library and Neva Parrott and Sophia Skinner at the Garnett Library for diverse assistance and in facilitating many requests. For invaluable editorial and other assistance in the preparation of this volume, we thank the executive editor, Dr. Robert K. Doe. Thanks also go to the production assistants Dr. Nisha S. Keeran, Nishanthi Venkatesan, Amudha Vijayarangan and Mr. Madanagopal Deenadayalan for their patience and editorial support. The editors thank the contributors for producing the draft and revised chapters on time. West Plains, MO, USA Chicago, IL, USA Sacramento, CA, USA Shippensburg, PA, USA

Rajiv R. Thakur Ashok K. Dutt Sudhir K. Thakur George M. Pomeroy

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Contents

Part I 1

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Urban and Regional Planning and Development: Introduction and Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rajiv R. Thakur, Ashok K. Dutt, Sudhir K. Thakur and George M. Pomeroy Frank James Costa: Professional Career and Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rajiv R. Thakur, Ashok K. Dutt, Sudhir K. Thakur and George M. Pomeroy Regional Development and Planning: An Overview . . . . . . . . Ashok K. Dutt, Debnath Mookherjee, Rajiv R. Thakur, Brian Sommers and Jack Benhart

Part II 4

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Introduction

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Planning Perspective

Four Decades of Urban and Regional Development and Planning in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Xueliang Zhang, Yichun Xie and Lixia Li

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Remaking ‘Urban’ in Twenty-first Century Neoliberal India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Swapna Banerjee-Guha

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South African Urban Planning in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries—Continuities between the Apartheid and Democratic eras? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Brij Maharaj

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A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Aloysius Clemence Mosha

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Ecological Regional Planning in Costa Rica: An Approach to Protected Areas and Environmental Services . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Carlos Morera Beita and Luis Fernando Sandoval Murillo

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Contents

Part III 9

Methods Matter

Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Ramiro Canelos Salazar, Montserrat Pallares-Barbera and Ana Vera

10 Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction in Houston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Ling Wu and William Wells 11 What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Xinyue Ye, Bing She, Wenwen Li, Sonali Kudva and Samuel Benya Part IV

Planning Challenges

12 Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes: A Study of Dhaka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Bandhan Dutta Ayon, Md. Tanvir Hossain Shubho, Syed Rezwanul Islam and Ishrat Islam 13 Consequences of Unplanned Growth: A Case Study of Metropolitan Hyderabad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Shah Manzoor Alam and Kalpana Markandey 14 Slum Upgradation, Redevelopment and Relocation Through Slum Vulnerability Assessment in Delhi . . . . . . . . . . 221 Anika Kapoor and Baleshwar Thakur 15 Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety. . . . 243 Rituparna Bhattacharyya and Sanjay Prasad 16 Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India: A Study of Regional Differentials in Northwestern India . . . . 261 Surya Kant Part V

Urban Governance and Politics

17 State-Led Urbanity: Reexamining Modern Movement Servicescapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Marta Alonso 18 Urban Governance under Neoliberalism: Increasing Centralization or Participatory Decentralization . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Bikramaditya K. Choudhary and Diganta Das 19 Participatory Comprehensive Planning of Amphawa District, Thailand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Wannasilpa Peerapun

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20 Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence: Financial Challenges and Participatory Development in Small Cities of West Bengal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 Gopa Samanta 21 Gentrification and Its Implication in the United States . . . . . . 337 Samuel Thompson and Keya Willis 22 Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico: Comprehensive Versus Participative Planning Under a Colonial Estate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 José R. Díaz-Garayúa and Carlos J. Guilbe-López 23 Planning to Segregate: The Case of Bogota, Colombia . . . . . . 361 Luis Sánchez-Ayala 24 Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession in the High Growth Period of Urban Transformation in India . . . . . . . . . 371 Debjani Ghosh, Ajith Kaliyath and Anil Kumar Roy 25 Ethics and Professionalism in Planning Practice: An Experience from Dhaka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389 Shakil Akther and Ishrat Islam Part VI

National and Local Responses to Urban Transformations

26 Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India: Spatial Planning Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 Sudhir K. Thakur 27 Studies in Tourism Geography of India: Definition, Approaches and Prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Rajrani Kalra 28 Leveraging Brewing History: The Case of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453 Neil Reid, Jay D. Gatrell and Matthew Lehnert 29 Returning Migrants as a Force to Urban Transformation—A Case Study from Poznan, Poland . . . . . . 467 Weronika A. Kusek 30 Intermediary Cities of Refuge: From Istanbul to Kolkata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479 Ranu Basu and Pelin Asci Part VII

Future: Sustainable Development

31 Sustainable Cities in the Global South: Lessons from the African Continent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 Christopher Cusack and Julie Elwell

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32 Growing Sustainable Transportation in an Autocentric Community: Current Trends and Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 David H. Kaplan 33 Holy-Heritage City Development and Planning in India: A Study of Ayodhya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515 Rana P. B. Singh and Sarvesh Kumar 34 A Review of Preservation Practices and Attitudes in Historic District Act Municipalities of Pennsylvania . . . . . . 537 Megan McNamee and George M. Pomeroy

Contents

Contributors

Shakil Akther Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh Shah Manzoor Alam Department of Geography, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India Marta Alonso Environmental Governance and Territorial Development Hub (GEDT), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Pelin Asci Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada Bandhan Dutta Ayon Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh Swapna Banerjee-Guha School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India Ranu Basu Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada Carlos Morera Beita Department of Geography, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica Jack Benhart Department of Geography-Earth Science, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA Samuel Benya Computational Social Science Lab & Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA Rituparna Bhattacharyya Journal Space and Culture, India & Alliance for Community Capacity Building in North East India, North Shields, UK Ramiro Canelos Salazar International University of Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador Bikramaditya K. Choudhary Center for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Christopher Cusack Keene State College, Keene, NH, USA Diganta Das Humanities and Social Studies, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

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José R. Díaz-Garayúa Department of Anthropology, Geography & Ethnic Studies, California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA, USA Ashok K. Dutt Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA Julie Elwell Keene State College, Keene, NH, USA Jay D. Gatrell Office of Vice President for Academic Affairs, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA Debjani Ghosh South Asia Urban Knowledge Hub, National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India Carlos J. Guilbe-López Departamento de Geografía, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, USA Md. Tanvir Hossain Shubho Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh Ishrat Islam Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh Syed Rezwanul Islam Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh Ajith Kaliyath South Asia Urban Knowledge Hub, National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India Rajrani Kalra Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA Surya Kant Department of Geography, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India David H. Kaplan Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Anika Kapoor Amity School of Architecture and Planning, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India Sonali Kudva School of Information, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA Sarvesh Kumar Department of Geography, D.D.U. Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India Weronika A. Kusek Earth, Environmental, and Geographical Sciences Department, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA Matthew Lehnert Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA Lixia Li School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, P.R. China

Contributors

Contributors

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Wenwen Li GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation & School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA Brij Maharaj School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Science, College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science, University Of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa Kalpana Markandey Department of Geography, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India Megan McNamee Environmental Planning, Upper Allen Township, PA, USA Debnath Mookherjee Department of Geography and Regional Planning, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA Aloysius Clemence Mosha Department of Architecture and Planning, University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana Luis Fernando Sandoval Murillo Department of Geography, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica Montserrat Pallares-Barbera Department of Geography, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola, Barcelona, Spain Wannasilpa Peerapun Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand George M. Pomeroy Department of Geography-Earth Sciences, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA Sanjay Prasad SAMNE Associates Private Limited Delhi, Provision of GIS Consulting Services under the Institutional Development Program of the JICA Assisted Ganga Action Plan Project, Varanasi, India Neil Reid Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA Anil Kumar Roy Faculty of Planning, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India Gopa Samanta Department of Geography, The University of Burdwan, Badhaman, West Bengal, India Luis Sánchez-Ayala Department of History and Geography, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia Bing She Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Rana P. B. Singh Department of Geography, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India Brian Sommers Department of Geography, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut, USA

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Baleshwar Thakur Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India Rajiv R. Thakur Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, MO, USA Sudhir K. Thakur Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA Samuel Thompson Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Geographic Information Sciences, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, USA Ana Vera Department of Geography, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola, Barcelona, Spain William Wells Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA Keya Willis Department of Economic Development and Planning, DuPage County, IL, USA Ling Wu Urban Informatics & Spatial Computing Lab, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA Yichun Xie Institute for Geospatial Research and Education, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA Xinyue Ye Urban Informatics & Spatial Computing Lab, Department of Informatics, Ying Wu College of Computing, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA Xueliang Zhang School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, P.R. China

Contributors

Part I Introduction

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Urban and Regional Planning and Development: Introduction and Overview Rajiv R. Thakur, Ashok K. Dutt, Sudhir K. Thakur and George M. Pomeroy

Abstract

This book is a festschrift in honor of Frank James Costa, a distinguished urban planner. The volume considers the urban and regional planning and development practice and experience in the twentieth century and ways in which it is being transformed in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. This volume considers the big question—what are some of the factors affecting planning dynamics globally and locally? With the push to adopt market paradigm in land development and infrastructure, the relationship between resource management, sustainable development, and the role of governance has transformed. Centralized planning is giving way to privatization not only in the traditional regions, but also in the newly

R. R. Thakur (&) Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. K. Dutt Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA S. K. Thakur Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. M. Pomeroy Department of Geography-Earth Sciences, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

emerging regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There is an attempt to get planning decision making closer to the people who are most affected by it. This volume engages in this conceptual discussion and intends to be a collection of studies from scholars around the world highlighting recent advances in the field. Keywords




Development Frank James Costa and regional planning


Urban

Urban and regional planning in today’s landscape are useful frameworks for thinking about space and development. It is important to remember that urban and regional planning as a process alongside the rise of global processes such as a shift in global economic power, new forms of global integration, continued dynamism in the development of new technology, and the need to address environmental challenges, has undergone a change as its wider social context and circumstances evolved (Scott 2012; Spencer 2015). Clearly, since the late 1980s, the global and local economy has undergone a major geographical shift. The work of urban and regional planners will no doubt reflect this change. In part this will mean understanding how growth and decline are affecting different places around the world. But it will also mean understanding how production of urban and regional landscapes occurs in new kind of contexts.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_1

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The body of literature known as urban and regional planning and development is first and foremost an outcome of interdisciplinary pursuit of geographers, planners, and regional scientists, who were mainly concerned with space, development, and planning (Friedmann and Alonso 1964; Hall and Tewdwr-Jones 2011). While the relationship between space and planning is as familiar to geographers and planners, as the link between planning and development is to regional economist, it is only in recent decades that the concept of space or spatial planning has been acknowledged in this broader literature. As a result, the notion of spatial planning has invoked a new dimension or perspective which is the inclusion of economic development as a dynamic system of spatial relations. As one might expect, this new dimension of spatial planning has, should, or could be problematic within the community of geographers, planners, and regional scientists alike (Adams, Alden and Harris 2016). While this volume will not aim to address issues of Euclidean space, it will address the question what the changing nature of the spatial relations in today’s globalized world even as we consider urban and regional planning and development practice moving from the late twentieth century to the twenty-first century. It is difficult to grasp the concept that the urban form as we traditionally understood no longer holds good. They have been undermined by the multiplicity of disparate urban formations that are transforming landscapes across the globe (Harrison and Hoyler 2017). These transformations radically challenge not only normative planning methods, but also traditional concepts of the urban, and even our ability to understand the dynamics of change. How can we understand the conditions of change, extreme differentiation, and hybridity that challenge current conceptual models and practices? How might the insights of history and theory inform one another as well as design practices more effectively? In so much, the purpose of this volume is to engage these questions and to explore a range of critical frameworks and research methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban and regional landscape—historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales. An

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outcome of this context is the need to revisit the dynamics of space, development, and planning with new theories and analytical methods. Several books have been published that provide a perspective, most notably Urban and Regional Planning (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones 2011), which is written principally as a classic text for students of urban and regional planning giving a historical overview of the developments and changes in the theory and practice of planning, throughout the entire twentieth century, whereas, for instance, The Urban and Regional Planning Reader (Birch 2008) has a fairly refreshing collection of articles for introductory planning classes from a strictly planning perspective. Yet others, such as Regional Planning in America: Practice and Prospect (Seltzer and Carbonell 2011) and Regional Development and Spatial Planning in an Enlarged European Union (Adams, Alden and Harris 2016) focus on the USA and European Union, respectively, examining implementation and practice of planning in the respective regions by a team of planning practitioners. This volume is unique as its contributors investigate urban forms and their transformations in the last few decades and its relevance in contemporary urban and regional planning and development. Acknowledging the fluctuating conditions of political, economic, and technological context, they interrogate the meaning of changing urban forms and transformations in urban and regional planning and development. Within ongoing urban transformations, across geographies emerging technologies have drastically challenged the idea of urban and its forms ranging in scale from the global to the individual. The unprecedented urban complex prioritizes the urban and regional planning practices and therefore obscures the logic of the urban upon which it operates. The processes of contemporary urbanization produce radical phenomena and urban objects yet prioritizing urban form as an instrument for urbanization remains an elusive notion. It is with this in mind that the volume puts forward a conception of urban form as dynamic and active—that is, as a process of urban formation in which transformation is a continuous condition. In so much, our

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contributors’ research needs to be both site-specific and comparative across cultures and geographies. The contributors to this volume may not have the answers to the questions we raise but, indeed we hope to address them in a more open, explicit, and inclusive manner. Given this overview of urban and regional planning and development, this volume is a festschrift in honor of Professor Frank James Costa for his contributions to research in urban and regional planning and development broadly. Through his research, teaching, and services, Professor Costa, during the past more than four decades, has established his international credentials as a leading exponent of urban and regional planning. He has been recognized for his research contributions by the Association of American Geographers Asian Geography Specialty Group’s Distinguished Scholar Award (1994), besides other recognitions such as the Fulbright Scholarship (1967–68 and 1991–92) and the Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Akron Alumni Association (1992). In this spirit, the editors asked contributors to contextualize their research on issues and topics within urban and regional planning and development as well as related areas of comparative planning and urbanization, housing and neighborhood change, and metropolitan growth issues among others. The contributors examined cutting-edge theories explaining urban and regional planning and development. Topics covered include planning perspectives in Botswana, China, India, and South Africa, ecological regional planning, impact of neoliberal restructuring on urban and regional planning, determinants of land-use change in urban fringes, consequences of unplanned growth, planning policies and gentrification, urban planning education and planning practice, participatory comprehensive planning, impact of public debt on spatial planning, return migration and urban transformation, and sustainable development and heritage and planning preservation. The significance of these topics lies in the methodologies that make it possible to chart continuities and discontinuities, to map relationships between the local and the translocal, and to examine complex and unstable phenomena over time and

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through multiple critical lenses. The volume contains 34 chapters organized under seven parts: (1) Introduction, (2) Planning perspective, (3) Methods matter: transformations through quality and quantity, (4) Planning challenges, (5) Urban governance and politics, (6) National and local responses to urban economic change, (7) Future: sustainable development. Part I Introduction The introductory part consists of three chapters. This chapter is an overview of the theme of urban and regional planning and development while Chap. 2 is a review of Professor Frank James Costa’s academic background and contributions to urban and regional planning by the editors. In Chap. 3, Ashok K. Dutt, Debnath Mookherjee, Rajiv R. Thakur, Brian Sommers, and Jack Benhart provide a detailed overview of regional development and planning. This chapter reviews the changing nature of regional development and planning with an emphasis on research between 1990 and 2017. Part II Planning Perspective The second part of the volume focuses on planning perspective from China, India, South Africa, Botswana, and Costa Rica. In Chap. 4, Xueliang Zhang, Yichun Xie, and Lixia Li provide the systematic review and analysis of regional and urban development and planning in China during the last four decades. The authors shed light on how urban and regional planning in China can be restructured to suit new needs, that is, stimulating sustainable economic growth rather than simple economic target, inspiring multifaceted social and cultural development instead of sole economic growth, transitioning to market-oriented advisory planning from traditionally centralized planning, focusing on multiple-goal planning instead of single goal planning, and accelerating public participation and promoting shared consensus. The authors provide fresh perspective given China’s economic performance and its unique development success story. Swapna Banerjee-Guha adopts a neoliberal framework in Chap. 5, as she examines the urban transformation in India. She argues for a different approach to understand the

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urban planning and related development processes in India and to consider how most people are being dispossessed under the broader framework of neoliberalism characterized by market priorities, capitalist production privatization of basic services, growing exposure to global competitive frameworks, and extensive place-marketing. This chapter is also remarkable in how the author treats the emerging concept of ‘private cities’ in India highlighting that urbanization and globalization are connected world processes. Chapter 6, by Brij Maharaj, analyzes urban planning in South Africa in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. The author claims that notwithstanding progressive policy shifts since 1994, there are also some remarkable continuities between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. The chapter also reviews the various attempts at spatial development planning that have been introduced in South Africa over the last two decades. The author indicates that adverse changes in the external economic environment have slowed South Africa’s rapid growth over the past 15 to 20 years which has also become a challenge. Different from the experience of South Africa, in Chap. 7, A. C. Mosha appraises Botswana’s experience of spatial planning including the challenges imposed by colonial experiences and the aftermath of rapid population growth and urbanization which is putting a significant pressure on the infrastructure of Botswana. The chapter makes for a good reading as the author also focuses on the constraints and opportunities for making Botswana spatial planning competitive. This chapter also highlights Botswana’s urban planning practices, strategies, and solutions reflecting its urban realities as they fail to consider the social, political, economic, and environmental context of urban development. The last chapter in this part of the book is unique for its focus is on ‘ecological regional planning’ in Costa Rica. In other words, this chapter is about processes of land protection, planning, and management. The authors Carlos Morera Beita and Luis Fernando Sandoval Murillo benchmark study highlights how Costa Rica is focusing on biodiversity conservation through the strategy of a national system of protected areas. This approach to planning makes for more inclusive growth policies. This

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chapter squarely addresses enormous potential for sustainable regional planning along with the boost to productivity and inclusive outcomes that doing so can generate. Part III Methods Matter Part three is devoted to advances in methods in urban and regional planning. All the three chapters use large datasets to provide in-depth empirical analysis. In Chap. 9, a structural gap approach is adopted by Ramiro Canelos-Salazar, Montserrat Pallares-Barbera and Ana Vera to identify gaps such as poverty, inequality, and social inclusion, which hinder social and economic development in studying Ecuador’s spatial inequality. Using a comprehensive dataset on 220 cities of Ecuador, the authors also used hierarchical cluster analysis to assess the socio-economic development of cities in Ecuador. This chapter is sure to stimulate a long-overdue reawakening of interest in methodological choice and its consequences for understanding spatial inequality and its implications on planning. This chapter also demonstrates that quantification in practice, that is, selecting appropriate measures is messy, open-ended, and subject to iterative processes which, hopefully, converge on a mutually agreeable set of definitions. Chapter 10 is devoted to an analysis of urban crime in Houston Texas. More specifically, the authors Ling Wu and William Wells examine the relationship between two phenomena, repeat and near-repeat shootings and police firearm arrests, utilizing a set of spatial and temporal-referenced shooting and arrest data from Houston, Texas. Novel space-time analytics facilitate crime investigation and policing strategy. This chapter is a unique example of quantification in urban social planning where problematizing the challenges of bridging the gap between ‘theory’ and ‘data’ provides an opportunity to critically reflect more widely on issues of clarity, rigor, and relevance in urban and metropolitan planning. Chapter 11 deals with the most advanced methods for studying shopping behavior using spatio-temporal data derived from volunteered geographic information. The authors Xinyue Ye, Wenwen Li Sonali Kudva, Bing She, and Samuel Benya in studying Black Friday rely on survey or sales data from case

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Urban and Regional Planning …

studies of specific cities. The chapter is an attention grabber because the authors examine and analyze Black Friday patterns and trends in the USA using a dataset retrieved from Twitter which is significant given the credibility of quantitative methods being seriously questioned. The above chapters are remarkably thorough and systematic in its coverage of geospatial techniques as decision support tools in spatial planning and management. Some of the material is quite advanced, but it is presented in an accessible manner and written with an emphasis on applications. Part IV Planning Challenges Composed of five chapters, the fourth part of the book addresses planning challenges in the South Asian context. In Chap. 12, the authors Bandhan Dutta Ayon, Md. Tanvir Hossain Shubho, Syed Rezwanul Islam, and Ishrat Islam examine land-use change in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. This chapter explores the spatial proponents to this change, and investigates the existing institutional and legal frameworks. Remote sensing and satellite imagery were used to trace land-use change. Besides, different participatory research tools were also employed to explore causes associated with this change. To this end, findings of the study are expected to contribute in formulating physical planning and policy strategies for sustainable development of Dhaka metropolitan region. Chapter 13 engages our attention with the consequences of unplanned growth in Hyderabad metropolitan region. Shah Manzoor Alam and Kalpana Markandey identify the factors which caused Hyderabad’s massive growth and created multifaceted, complicated, and chaotic problems which are now defying solution. The authors highlight that fueled by advances in electronic communication and transportation technology, Hyderabad is becoming more and more urbanized. This chapter is a path breaking contribution to our understanding of this process. Along the lines of previous chapters, Anika Kapoor and Baleshwar Thakur present in Chap. 14, a study of a significant planning challenge to Delhi through its slums. The study reveals that there is an absence of suitable assessment criteria for making policies related

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to slum in situ upgradation, redevelopment, and relocation. The overall conclusion is that slum vulnerability has been neglected as an attribute for making decisions related to slum upgradation. It is, therefore, imperative to assess vulnerability of slums and to identify criteria for slum improvement and upgradation to make effective slum policies. Chapter 15, by Rituparna Bhattacharyya and Sanjay Prasad, is concerned with women’s safety in public spaces. In this chapter the authors’ aim is two-fold, that is, first, it aims to review the spatiality of women’s unsafety using the National Crime Records Bureau database. Second, using these data and in conjunction with the recommendations of the JVC report, Justice Usha Mehra Commission, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, it makes suggestions for improving the geographies of gendered public space in order to make them livable. The authors identify a rich array of policy instruments that are critical to women’s safety in public spaces of India. This chapter assumes significance in the context of increased urbanization and neoliberal economic transformation wherein Indian women’s mobility through the public spaces has increased making them vulnerable. The last chapter in this part of the book by Suryakant examines regional and sub-regional differentials in socio-economic transformation of Dalits, thereby trying to understand the gap if any, in the inter- and intra-regional disparities of Dalits’ socioeconomic well-being but also addressing those inequalities found between ‘Dalit’ and ‘non-Dalit’ castes, on one hand, and ‘creamy’ and ‘noncreamy’ layers within the Dalits. This chapter also highlights the connections between research practice, policy and politics, and how it interfaces with regional planning in the context of northwestern India. Part V Urban Governance and Politics The politics of change is addressed in this part of the book, examining urban governance and the politics of changing urban geographies through nine chapters. Therefore, the emphasis is on the relationship between urbanization and the

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changing roles of urban government, and on the changing politics of urban development. In Chap. 17, Marta Alonso examines the relationship between public and private space leading us to a fundamental question: should collective planning integrate reinforcement mechanisms for retail centralities within public realm or retail publicity should remain timidly restricted to private domain? This question is significant as society’s commodification takes shape precisely within the public realm and the urban scene: sprawling analogous drivable retail-only suburbs and turning city centers into bland, soulless, and undefined places displaying homogeneous frontages characterized by the same retail storefronts worldwide. Thorough the case of a modern movement servicescape, the author’s research focuses on what may we learn from the state-led planning model and its associated policies. How could we today foster urbanity in complex projects through retail without succumbing to the prevailing commodification of the public realm? In Chap. 18, Bikramaditya K Choudhary and Diganta Das takes up the issue of urban governance in the Indian context, which has become the buzzword for urban planning under the present trend of liberalization, globalization, and privatization. In doing so, they focus on how governance has resulted in withdrawal of the state from various sectors conspicuously from housing and basic civic amenities. The authors also engage with the questions—Will smart cities serve India’s aspiration or fulfill its urban needs? Can it address the contemporary and future needs of India’s urbanization? How will it ensure the participation of the urban stakeholders? How will it ensure social inclusion and finally, whether India needs smart cities or smart urban solutions for sustainable development? In Chap. 19, Wannasilpa Peerapun takes us to examine comprehensive planning process in Thailand and to discuss community participations in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning for the year 2030. Interestingly, the methodology of Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning incorporates the principles of H.M. King Bhumibol’s “Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy” and

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UNESCO’s “Sustainable Development Model” into Thai common planning process. The spirit of this chapter is maintained in Chap. 20, where Gopa Samanta looks at decentralized governance versus state dependence. The author analyzes the nature of changes at the city level and shows how decentralization and people’s participation are undermined by the omnipresence of the party and the State in controlling the local governments of financially dependent smaller cities in West Bengal. This chapter also traces the changes in the process of urban governance in West Bengal with a special focus on small cities. In doing so, the author’s focus lies on local government finance and urban governance and management. Given the restructuring and reforms in urban governance in the state of West Bengal, there are enormous challenges for those who manage cities include providing adequate urban services and amenities, alleviating urban poverty, designing new infrastructure, and revitalizing slum neighborhoods. In Chap. 21, Samuel Thompson and Keya Willis revisit a contentious issue about gentrification and displacement in the USA. The urban gentrification process shows how hard it can be to formulate housing policies that are devoid of major side effects, while striving to achieve create successful integrated communities with mixed-income. This chapter also traces the process of gentrification during the period of urban renewal and slum clearance. It then discusses the nature of gentrification in major U.S. cities, and identifies overall impact of housing programs and federal housing policies. The chapter concludes by showing both negative and positive impacts of gentrification, and planning policies to address any negative impacts of future gentrification projects. In Chap. 22, José R. Díaz-Garayúa and Carlos J. Guilbe-López focus on the Puerto Rican experience where planning has been serving as a method to construct a sense of democracy in the status quo. Participative planning practices have been used as framework to challenge not only the institutionalized normative planning, but also the existing colonial conditions in the island. The context of this chapter is the ongoing economic

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and colonial crisis in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico which has sharpened an already polarized environment between the government and many sectors of the local society. These conflicts have translated in the implementation of planning practices at different scales. This spirit of planning practice reverberates elsewhere in the Latin American region such as Bogota, Columbia. In Chap. 23, Luis Sánchez-Ayala demonstrates how planning practice have become a strategy of control, influencing not only spatial organizations of the city, but also the social dimensions of its population. As a result, the challenge of Bogota is to enforce the role of urban planning and therefore the intervention of the state in favor of mass and not only the elite. The author investigates the competing interests, the people who make the decisions and the processes they use. It also answers questions such as who makes these decisions, how, and why are some choices made rather than others? The last two chapters in this part of the volume deals with planning profession and practice in the context of India and Bangladesh. In Chap. 24, Debjani Ghosh, Ajith Kaliyath, and Anil Roy, who are professional urban planners, focus on how knowledge communities and professional organizations respond to opportunities in the urban sector. The past pace of urbanization in India now calls for specific skills to address the complexities and demands of rapid growth which has often outpaced the abilities and resources of city administrators to maintain adequate provision of services. Chapter 25, while dealing with ethics and professionalism in planning practice in the context of Dacca, Bangladesh explores the challenges to ethical planning. The authors, Shakil Akther and Ishrat Islam look at ethical issues of planning as was perceived by the professionals, academics, civil society, media, government, and politicians during the preparation, monitoring, and implementation of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka Metropolitan Area. The authors, who are planners, agree that in Dhaka planning practitioners struggle with three priorities, that is, environmental protection, economic development, and social equity in the context of a fast-paced urbanization and limited resources.

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Part VI National and local responses to urban transformations Part six takes us in the domain where adjusting to a new global economy has spatial outcomes at different scales. In this part chapters examine some of the response to the emergence of ever larger and more powerful economic forces resulting in the retreat of capital investment in some places while others experience the impact of capital inflows. Although the global importance of capital in the process of urban restructuring is given, it is important to avoid the fallacy of economic determinism. In Chap. 26, Sudhir Thakur deals with the issue of growth of public debt in India and its spatial planning implications. The author mentions that the uninterrupted and rapid growth of public debt in India in the last few decades is only a manifestation of the deepening fiscal crisis that has overtaken the country in the face of economic slowdown amid political weakness and indecision. Several significant questions are raised such as (1) What insights does the literature on public debt provide in improving the understanding of the relationship between public debt and growth? (2) What are the broad trends of public debt and regional inequality in India at the state level? and (3) What are the characteristics of space-time patterns of public debt in India during 1991–2015? These questions have direct implications for spatial outcomes as the hands-off market-led approach has not strengthened local economies in ways that enable labor and local communities to obtain greater benefit from the process of urban restructuring. Chapter 27 is an elaborate review of studies in Tourism geography in India. The author RajRani Kalra provides an elaborate overview identifying the trends in the existing literature. Drawing on a range of examples from across India, she examines a variety of areas like “the effects of scale”, “spatial distribution of tourist phenomenon”, “tourism impacts”, “planning for tourism”, and “spatial modeling for tourist development”. Chapter 28 by Neil Reid, Jay D. Gatrell, Matthew Lehnert is unique as it demonstrates through Cincinnati’s brewing history how urban economic regeneration happens,

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leading to wider impacts at neighborhood scale such as property development and rehabilitation giving a fillip to underlying competitiveness of local production and investment in infrastructure. This chapter’s uniqueness lies in the bottom-up perspective which leads to local economic development strategies initiated by urban stakeholders and popular grassroots or neighborhoodbased efforts to capture the benefits of urban restructuring. Interestingly some call it ‘local socialism’ and others place marketing. Whatever be the label, the authors make a wonderful case of urban regeneration bottom-up. In Chap. 29, Weronika Kusek brings out the spirit of local economic strategies to combat the negative effects of globalization of capital as she documents how urban landscapes in Poland have been altered by return migrant groups. Kusek focuses on the changes in Poznan precipitated by the return of Polish migrants from extended labor migration in the UK and other countries. Returning migrants diversify the city by introducing or creating a market for new businesses formerly unknown to the population of Poznan. Interestingly, radical local economic initiatives seek to moderate the impact of uneven development on depressed urban neighborhoods by focusing attention on ethnicity inspired cultures and cuisines. Kusek’s chapter is evidence of the reassertion of the local in the age of the global. In Chap. 30, Ranu Basu and Pelin Asci draw our attention toward intermediary cities of refuge. According to them, population mobility results from displacement influencing urban areas being prime destinations for inflows, whereas others have lost population. The authors’ arguments are very compelling in the context of the challenges in a complex world of poverty, violence, and insecurity which make the struggle of survival a complicated process of daily negotiations. The narrative is so true that the urban provides a habitat conducive for displaced populations: the infrastructure necessary for shelter and day to day living; informal economy allowing varying livelihoods; the anonymity of living in largely populated cities provides a safeguard against deportation; and the freedom to live outside a camp environment affords a certain kind of flexibility. There is thus a social justice

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and trans-frontier responsibility that compels us to rethink urban planning. Part VII Future: Sustainable Development Finally, part seven is devoted to building a sustainable future. Topics covered include sustainable cities, sustainable transportation, sacred-heritage planning, and preservation planning. The first chapter of this part (Chap. 31) by Christopher Cusack and Julie Elwell opens the discussion on sustainable cities in the African continent by examining sustainable urban development as rapid population growth and urbanization are putting significant pressure on African cities. Cusack and Elwell mention several key implications of the demographic transition that some countries in Africa are facing—namely sharp increases in the need for job creation and for urban infrastructure. They conclude that the response of the select African cities to the increased demand of jobs, housing, and other urban infrastructure caused by the continents’ demographic transition will be crucial for Africa to be cities of the future. In Chap. 32, David Kaplan deals with sustainable transportation given the lack of capacity of urban built environment to support human life and productive activities. Crisis of physical sustainability is evident particularly in metropolitan areas of both the developed and developing world. In this context, Kaplan examines how initiatives in sustainable transportation can counter some of the environmental distress caused by our current transportation system. The penultimate chapter (Chap. 33) in this part of the volume by Rana P.B. Singh and Sarvesh Kumar is devoted to the historical and cultural development of the heritage-sacred city of Ayodhya and examines the strategies in process for the future development, taking into consideration the National programs of HRIDAY and PRASAD, and development of pilgrimage sites. The development of Ayodhya as a cultural landscape or a sacred site could depend on the conscious and deliberate manipulation of culture to enhance their image and appeal. Ayodhya falls within the narrative of place marketing and urban regeneration from below. In so much, Ayodhya has an ideological context or image which brings with it its

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own socio-economic inequalities. The focus of the last chapter in this part of the volume, that is, Chap. 34 by Megan McNamee and George Pomeroy is preservation planning. McNamee and Pomeroy present a discussion of the significance and evolution of historic preservation in the USA, the role of federal, state, and local governments in historic preservation, outline the historic preservation in Pennsylvania with a focus on the Historic District Act, and finally present findings of a survey of stakeholders conducted to understand what strategies, techniques, and tools are being used under the auspices of the HDA, as well as an assessment of how effective these tools are. Indeed, this chapter serves as yet another example of how preservation planning as a process has motivated, strategized, and implemented preservation success stories. These success stories also demonstrate the importance of dedicated professionals, farsighted elected officials, and responsible citizens who are willing to save rural land while it is still affordable and available. As you read the chapters of this volume, you will agree that the book is centrally concerned with contemporary issues as it relates to urban and regional planning and development. We hope that this festschrift will provide students, scholars, and practitioners with a broad range of

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issues drawing upon relevant case studies and exploratory essays.

References Adams N, Alden J, Harris N (2016) Introduction: regional development and spatial planning in an Enlarged European Union in N Adams. In: Alden J, Harris N (eds) Regional development and spatial planning in an Enlarged European Union. Ashgate, England Birch E (2008) The urban and regional planning reader. Routledge, London (Productivity, and Prosperity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington DC: World Bank) Friedmann J, Alonso W (1964) Regional development and planning; a reader. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Hall P, Tewdwr-Jones M (2011) Urban and regional planning. Routledge, London & New York Harrison J, Hoyler M (2017) Megaregions: globalization’s new urban form?. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK Scott AJ (2012) A world in emergence: cities and regions in the 21st century. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK Seltzer E, Carbonell A (2011) Regional planning in America: practice and prospect. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA Spencer JH (2015) Globalization and urbanization: the global urban ecosystem. Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland

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Frank James Costa: Professional Career and Contributions Rajiv R. Thakur, Ashok K. Dutt, Sudhir K. Thakur and George M. Pomeroy

Abstract

This historical essay is written to celebrate the more than five decades of urban planning and geography career of Dr. Frank James Costa at the University of Akron, describing the challenges and successes along the way. Professor Costa received many distinguished awards, including the Fulbright Scholarship. He was recognized by the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Regional Development and Planning Specialty Groups with the Distinguished Scholar Award. He made important and significant contributions to the planning profession through his many publications. His writings and publications deal with planning theory as well as applied planning practice. More specifically, he has written in the follow-

R. R. Thakur (&) Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. K. Dutt Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA S. K. Thakur Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. M. Pomeroy Department of Geography-Earth Sciences, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

ing areas namely land use and regulatory enforcement, economic development, community development, urban form and landscape design, planning management and finance, and historic preservation. Professor Costa influenced the lives of hundreds of students and colleagues through his research, teaching, and mentoring. Keywords

Frank James Costa planning


Urban and regional

Frank James Costa is a distinguished urban planner notable for both the quality and quantity of his contributions and for a remarkable career in which he provided insights on the intellectual frontiers of urban and regional planning. Costa’s line of original and formative thought over four decades has been distinctive in its breadth, depth, and originality. Frank earned his BS in Geography/Planning from the Kent State University, a master’s in civil engineering and urban planning from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_2

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University) in 1964, and eventually a doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1974. At that time, Wisconsin’s urban and regional planning program was emerging as a seedbed for interdisciplinary training guided by a group of faculties from fields including law, business, political science, economics, rural sociology, engineering, geography, and sociology. Frank’s doctoral degree advisor Leo Jacobson had joined Wisconsin in 1957 as campus planner and member of the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering. The fact that planning should be based in social sciences, was becoming accepted nationally. So, Frank’s conceptual preparation was interdisciplinary learning from such luminaries as Coleman Woodbury and Fred Clarenbach of Political Science and Jacobson himself being a civil engineer. When Frank arrived at Wisconsin, larger events were beginning to impinge on the department. In the field of planning, as well as on the university campus, the late 60s and early 70s was a time of turbulence, excitement, and rejection of the status quo. Riots in major cities linked a sense of crisis to a basic optimism that social and urban problems could be “solved” at least in part through planning. On campuses, the “Age of Aquarius”, the anti-war movement, and the black power movement came together in volatile and often violent events. The University of Wisconsin was at the forefront of this turbulence. Within the department of Urban and Regional Planning, planning curriculum was undergoing experimentation and polarization with Frank’s advisor Leo Jacobson offering a major experiment with the curriculum called the “Omnibus” which was about “experiential learning” in which students took a major responsibility for their own educations, using the faculty as a resource but exploring issues on their own in small groups. The Omnibus was about a generalist curriculum. Against this model, Irving Fox began to lay out the ground work for a specialist curriculum, in which the department would develop close ties with a series of other departments offering considerable depth of coursework in a variety of substantive areas—natural resources or education, for example. While Frank was at Wisconsin, this issue had developed into what became the “Fox-Jacobson debates”. This debate served to increase the polarization that

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already existed among the faculty. While Jacobson defended the generalist position, Fox saw planners as program specialists working to improve the quality of substantive programs in a decentralized, functionally fragmented administrative system. Eventually, the deep divisions created during a preceding period of conflict were slow to heal, but the social activism and the ideas of “doing your own thing” and learning by immersion in experience had peaked. Freedom began to seem like chaos and the pendulum began to swing back to more order, consensus, and structure. It was in this context that Frank worked with Leo Jacobson and Ved Prakash on a doctoral dissertation titled “Urban Spatial Articulation through the Interaction of Elites and Masses”. His study focused upon the development of a hypothesis relating societal elites and masses to the process of city-building. The study was also concerned with the development of a method to measure the differential quality of urban spaces resulting from the interaction of societal elites and masses and finally his research was an attempt to measure the differential quality of urban spaces developed in Rome over the past several hundred years. Rome as a case study was also possible because of a Fulbright Student Scholarship and Italian Government Grant between 1967 and 1968. Frank’s conceptual idea—“interaction of elites and masses” in urban space in his dissertation was a very new concept at the time. It was a pioneering effort to articulate and explain the process of city-building through the interrelationships of values, elites, and masses. It is important to realize that Frank Costa’s mentors were among the first to formally break disciplinary boundaries. This interdisciplinary approach resounds in his life’s work. Frank brought this rich legacy to northeast Ohio and served through professional education, applied research, and service for several decades. 1970s After a brief interlude at the Youngstown State University (1970–72) where he served as the first founding Director, Center for Urban Studies, Frank moved to the University of Akron’s Center for Urban Studies (1972–77) as Associate Director. While at Youngstown State University, Frank founded the Urban Affairs Student Internship

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Program with support from the Ohio Department of Development—prototype for an ongoing state-wide program. During these initial years Frank was focused on a wide variety of applied research which included community development, land use and regulatory enforcement, transportation planning, economic development, housing, and community activism and empowerment. Among his initial applied research included a study done for the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (with Stanley Olson) with the plan to establish a medical college in northeast Ohio. Frank went on to serve the Center for Urban Studies as Director between 1977 and 1985 while his association with the Center itself continued well beyond his formal positions and almost until retirement. It was the department of Geography and Planning at the University of Akron which remained the permanent address of Frank Costa. Following the award of his Ph.D. in 1974, Costa was recruited as faculty at the University of Akron. Hequicklybecameengagedinteachingandresearch with fellow faculty such as Allen G. Noble and Ashok K. Dutt besides continuing to collaborate with planner colleagues at the Center for Urban Studies and those in the neighboring counties of Northeast Ohio as well as engaging graduate students. As for most planners, the trade-off between acting and simply thinking is a true challenge, although they can be happily and appropriately interspersed. Costa accomplished this. In 1976, Costa and Marnie Sweet (graduate student) published an article on ‘Gerontology’ that defined the concept of barrier-free architecture and traced its legislative history both on the national and state levels. This paper also assessed current standards for barrier-free design and how these could be improved to increase the degree of accessibility available for older Americans and handicapped members of our society. In this sense the paper was a true reflection of what planning on the ground is all about, that is, welfare and quality-of-life of people and their communities by creating convenient, equitable, healthy, vibrant, efficient, and attractive places for current residents and future generations. Ideas associated with ‘community activism and empowerment’ were not yet common in those days. Some of the

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suggestions about legislations were then farsighted, and they are still today. We assume that it was the broad view of issues and an understanding of their political, economic, and social contexts that Costa “the generalist planner” identified the need to focus on community activism but also encourage graduate students to see the need for why it was important for planning to be empowering. As Costa settled into his role as an early faculty and in his role as a planner at the Center for Urban Studies in Akron, he initiated several research both applied and theoretical (see Appendix A), casting a wide net which included planning studies in northeast Ohio, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South, southeast and East Asia aiming at an understanding of the changing spatial forms and planning dimensions. Some of the topics that attracted his attention includes the political character of planning itself both in America and elsewhere. As he explored planning in Italy, Saudi Arabia, India, and China, Frank was concerned with the role of values as public policy impacts change and adaptation of existing environments to new demands. When opportunity knocked to serve on the Executive Board (1977–79) of the Ohio Academy of Science, Costa served on the editorial board (1977–83) of the Ohio Journal of Science and organized the Administrative Sciences and Planning section of the Ohio Academy of Science. In April of 1976 at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Academy held at Miami University, the first meeting of the new section on Administrative Sciences and Planning was held with the theme “Public Policy Impacts of Urban Development and Design”. Later in 1979– 80 Frank Costa accepted a Visiting Professor position at the King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia. While in Saudi Arabia, he wrote The Plan for Al Jarudiyah. Through his initiative and leadership, Costa was truly demonstrating that he was a practicing planner who was committed to research, design, and development of programs with the aim to lead public processes, effect social change, perform technical analyses, manage, and educate. 1980s Planning was a subject Frank relished. As years passed at Akron, Frank continued to articulate his research and interest in the wider domain of

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planning and more specifically on housing development. Every scholar is influenced by the context in which they operate. In the early 1980s, as the economies of mid-western states were losing ground to those of the sunbelt, Akron, northeast Ohio, and the State of Ohio began to experience fiscal stringencies. While resources did not keep pace with urban and regional planning needs, the state faced with a budget deficit, resulting in budget cuts, sending counties and institutions scrambling for short and long-term planning. It was in this context that Frank worked with many county agencies and regional development and planning organizations to address issues such as that of management in local government, developing zoning ordinances, understanding and explaining local housing development issues, developing comprehensive plans for counties, as well as responding to other regional development issues. Taking pride in his subject, Frank was never hesitant in collaborating within and outside his discipline. He published in journals outside planning and geography such as the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. He traveled wide, and not only crossed national boundaries in addressing urban and regional planning issues, but also stepped out from the confines of the discipline to address issues of urban development, urbanization, planning, and its public policy impacts. As Frank explored these issues, he also tried understanding the question whether there was any connection between our different methodological approaches, and our, equally different, policy/political stances. Frank applied his expertise in the dynamics of urban and regional planning at various spatial scales. Planners conventionally study places, upon which, from which and within which economic processes operate: the national economy, the regional cluster, the urban housing market, etc. As we review his work in Saudi Arabia, Netherlands, and China, one notices that Frank did, all the above, and explored “multi-local” and “translocal” processes, the latter implying relationships and networks that integrate multiple sites into larger fields. In researching planning, urbanization, and urban development issues during the 80s in places as

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far and wide as Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and China, Frank was grappling with four key themes (a) the framing and scaling of the research process, (b) methodological choices when studying planning and urban development issues, (c) the positionality of the researcher across transnational research sites, and (d) the practice of conducting research at a distance. If anything, Frank Costa’s research during the 1980s displays that his specific historical and geographical origins (northeast Ohio) have critically shaped his identity and worldviews, and these, in turn, underlie the shape and orientation of his research. Costa was very productive during the 80s with 1 special issue for a journal, 4 edited books, 12 book chapters, 8 refereed journal articles, and 17 monographs. He indeed built a prolific academic landscape. Costa also contributed to the Akron’s department of urban studies and geography by establishing overseas studies program (with David Riede) with the American University of Rome/John Cabot College. Research on Asia had become so dominant in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies and with collaborating colleagues that it was the logical next step for Costa and colleagues (Allen G. Noble, Ashok K. Dutt and Lawrence JC Ma) to consider the founding of the Asian Urban Research Association (AURA) in 1985 which continued to be a platform for students and scholars interested in Asian Urbanization to come together biennially. Costa took initiative (with colleagues) in the hosting of Asian Urbanization Conferences for several years, which enabled those interested to continue the engagement. 1990s Adjusting to a new global economy, Frank Costa (along with colleagues) started exploring cities and regions emphasizing the relationships between economic change and the new geopolitics and the spatial consequences of global economic development at local, regional, and national scales. Frank’s interest in Asian urbanization processes and urban development was further consolidated through numerous publications and research engaged in with colleagues and graduate students. With his graduate student Yichun Xie,

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he examined the influence of economic reforms on the urban economy of China and traced the impact of ideological and concomitant change on underlying cultural values on urban form. Urban planning as known in the west was new to China and hence, understanding theory and practice of planning in China became a matter of curiosity. The collaboration with Xie resulted in more research and publications examining urbanization process in China, understanding its urban development policy, and its underlying disparities. Frank (with colleagues) went on to examine urban issues and urbanization characteristics of Asia in a special issue of GeoJournal (1993), as also, co-edited The Asian City: Processes of Development, Characteristics and Planning (1994). During the 1991–92, Frank Costa was also awarded Fulbright Professorship at University of Madras in India, while for his contributions to research on Asian Urbanization, he was given Distinguished Achievement Award by the Asian Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. Frank also had an abiding interest in European urban affairs, particularly in the context of Italy, Spain, Greece, as well as Finland, Belgium, and Netherlands. He engaged with urban and regional questions that involved urban planning and transit systems in a Europe moving forward with the logic of integration. Around the same time, Frank’s interest in Ohio’s urban and regional planning issues also renewed as he revisited past annexation of places such as Akron, Columbus, and Toledo. Elsewhere in the United States, Frank also was examining planning and zoning issues in the context of immigrant population as well as trying to understand urban development tools. Conceptually, Frank (along with Allen G. Noble) also engaged with the notion of sustainability. This concept had emerged as the most discussed and disputed one in the 90s. At the turn of the century, his focus shifted, and he explored other ideas such as urban development and ecotourism within the umbrella concept of sustainability. Preserving the Legacy: Concepts in Support of Sustainability (1999) raised some important questions while Frank continued to make major contributions to the field of urban and regional planning and development.

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Frank Costa (along with Allen G. Noble, Ashok K Dutt, Lawrence JC Ma, and Robert Kent) helped build University of Akron’s planning program into one of the best planning programs in the region. Graduate students from Asia, Africa, and Europe flocked to Akron and were mesmerized by the onslaught of knowledge provided both in Frank’s classes and in the program. The 1980s and 90s was also a time that saw a rich influx of graduate students and scholars engaging in planning and urban issues as well as urbanization characteristics particularly, in the context of Asia with Frank Costa and his colleagues. Through this process, Costa with colleagues not only gave graduate students a special education, but also provided a model for how best to teach graduate students. Even though Costa had formally retired by 1998, he had not with regard to his research and writing and continued to make contributions to the field of planning and development with remarkable persistence and resilience.

Appendix A

Frank J. Costa’s list of publications

Edited Books Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (eds) (1989) Urbanization in Asia: spatial dimensions and policy issues. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (eds) (1988) Asian urbanization: problems and processes. Verlag Gebruder Borntraeger, Stuttgart Costa FJ, Moustapha AF (eds) (1987) Al Jarudiyah: a model new town for Saudi Arabia. King Saud University Press, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur SK, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (eds) (2016) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development (vol 1) regional resources. Springer, Dordrecht Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur RR, Thakur SK (eds) (2016) spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development (vol 1) urban development. Springer, Dordrecht

18 Dutt AK, Wadhwa V, Thakur B, Costa FJ (eds) (2012) Facets of social geography: international and indian perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Delhi Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Noble, AG, Aggarwal D (eds) (1994) The Asian city: processes of development, characteristics and planning. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Dutt AK, Costa FJ (eds) (1992) Perspectives on planning and urban development in Belgium. Kluwer Academic Publisher, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Dutt AK, Costa FJ (eds) (1985) Public planning in The Netherlands: perspectives and change since the Second World War. Oxford University Press, Oxford Mukherji AB, Thakur B, Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) (2000) Geographic and planning research themes for the New Millennium. Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., Delhi Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) (1999) Preserving the legacy: concepts in support of sustainability. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD Noble AJ, Costa FJ, Dutt, AK, Kent RB (eds) (1998) Regional development and planning for the 21st century: new priorities. Ashgate Publishing Limited, New Philosophies, Aldershot, UK Sterne RS, Costa FJ (eds) (1978) Public rule or ruling classes: value debates in administration and planning. Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, MA

Journal Guest Editors GeoJournal. Special Issue on ‘Urban Issues and Urbanization Characteristics of Asia’, Volume 29, No. 2 (1993) with S. Aggarwal, AK Dutt and AG Noble GeoJournal. Special Issue on ‘European Urban Development’, Volume 24, No. 3 (1991) with AK Dutt and AG Noble Journal of Urban Affairs. Special Issue on ‘Cities in Transition’ May 1988 Landscape and Urban Planning. Special Issue on ‘European Urbanization’, Volume 22, Nos 2–4, (1992) with J Mulhouser, AG Noble and AK Dutt Ohio Journal of Science. Special Annual Conference Issue - ‘Public Policy Impacts of Urban Development and Design’, November 1977

Book Chapters (Co-Authored) Al-Oteibi S, Noble AG, Costa FJ (1994) Planning in a rapid growth center: the case of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ, NobleAG, Aggarwal S (eds) The Asian city: processes of development,

R. R. Thakur et al. characteristics and planning. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Costa FJ, Dustin JL, Shanahan JL (1987) Akron’s redevelopment plan. In: Gappert Gary (ed) The future of winter cities. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA Costa FJ, Cho Y (1982) Frontierism and civil leadership. In: Gappert G, Knight RV (eds) Cities in the 21st century. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA Costa FJ (1980) Civic morale and urban futures. In: Hanten EW, Kasoff MJ, Redburn FS (eds) New directions for the mature metropolis: policies and strategies for change. Schenkman Publishing Company, Cambridge, MA Costa FJ, Dutt AK (1977a) Ideological orientation of the national planning process in India. In: Noble AG, Dutt AK (eds) Indian urbanization and planning: vehicles of modernization. Delhi, Tata McGraw Hill Costa FJ, Dutt AK (1977b) Necessary inputs for reducing population growth Bangladesh. In: Wakil SP (ed) South Asia: perspectives and dimensions. Canadian Association for South Asian Studies, Ottawa, Canada, pp 153–63 Costa FJ, Noble AG (1999a) Conservation and the emergence of the sustainability concept. In: Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) Preserving the legacy: concepts in support of sustainability. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD Costa FJ, Noble AG (1999b) Sustainable tourism: an overview. In: Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) Preserving the legacy: concepts in support of sustainability. Lexington Books, Lanham,MD Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Mitra C, Ahn K (1995) Population growth in Indian cities and sustainability. In: Proceedings of the conference on sustainable urban development. Anna University, Madras, India Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (1989) Introduction: trends and prospects. In: Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (eds) Urbanization in Asia: spatial dimensions and policy issues. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii Costa FJ (1990) Environmental policy aspects of urban and regional planning in the United States. In: Otok S (ed) Environment in social policy of the state. University of Warsaw Press, Warszawa Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Noble AG (1988a) Social planning: a conceptual overview. In: Otok S (ed) Research approaches in social geography. University of Warsaw Press, Warszawa Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (1988b) Divergent paths and policy responses in Asian urbanization and planning. In: Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (eds) Asian urbanization: problems and processes. Verlag Gebruder Borntraeger, Stuttgart Costa FJ, Noble AG (1988) The gemeinschaft/gesellschaft approach: a conceptual framework for planning and designing Arab Towns. In: Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Ma LJC, Noble AG (eds) Asian urbanization: problems and processes. Verlag Gebruder Borntraeger, Stuttgart

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Frank James Costa: Professional Career …

Costa FJ, Noble AG, Dutt AK, Kent RB (1998) Currents of change: urban planning and regional development. In: Noble AG, Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Kent RB (eds) Regional development and planning for the 21st century: new priorities, New Philosophies. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, UK Colligan W, Nash TL, Costa FJ (1991) Akron: the city between three rivers. In: Peacefull L (ed) A geography of Ohio. The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Tettey C (2016) Socioeconomic correlates of Asian urbanization. In: Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur RR, Thakur SK (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development (Vol 1) urban development. Springer, Dordrecht Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Noble AG, Aggarwal SK (1994) An introduction to the Asian City. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Noble AG, Aggarwal S (eds) The Asian city: processes of development, characteristics and planning. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Dutt AK, Costa FJ (2008) Two phases of China’s national planning. In: Dutt AK, Misra HN, Chatterjee M (eds) Explorations in applied geography. Delhi, Prentice Hall of India Private Limited Dutt AK, Xie Y, Costa FJ, Zhengmao Y (1994) City forms of china and India in global perspective. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Noble AG Aggarwal S (eds) The Asian city: processes of development, characteristics and planning. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Dutt AK, Costa FJ (1992) An introductory framework for planning in Belgium. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ (eds) Perspectives on planning and urban development in Belgium. Kluwer Academic Publisher, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Dutt AK, Costa FJ (1985) Introduction. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ (eds) Public planning in the Netherlands: perspectives and change since the Second World War. Oxford University Press, Oxford Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Wal CVD, Lutz W (1985) Evolution of land uses and settlement policies in Zuiderzee project planning. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ (eds) Public planning in the Netherlands: perspectives and change since the Second World War. Oxford University Press, Oxford Dutt AK, Costa FJ (1985) Dutch planning in the twenty-first century. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ (eds) Public planning in the Netherlands: perspectives and change since the Second World War. Oxford University Press, Oxford Mukerji AB, Thakur B, Noble AG, Costa FJ (2000) Professor Ashok Dutt: a retrospective of career and contributions. In: Mukherji AB, Thakur B, Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) Geographic and planning research themes for the new millennium. Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., Delhi Moustapha AF, Costa FJ, Noble AG (1988) Creating Arab Islamic cities through application of modern building codes. In: Rahman M (ed) Muslim world:

19 geography and development. University Press of America, Lanham, MD Noble AG, Costa FJ (1999) Untapped resources for sustainable tourism in Western India. In: Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) Preserving the legacy: concepts in support of sustainability. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD Peterson TJ, Costa FJ, Noble AG (1999) Sustainability in an urban environment. In: Noble AG, Costa FJ (eds) Preserving the legacy: concepts in support of sustainability. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD Palomaki M, Costa FJ, Noble AG (1998) Finnish and American planning: a comparative analysis. In: Noble AG, Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Kent RB (eds) Regional development and planning for the 21st century: new priorities, new philosophies. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, UK Song N, Dutt AK, Costa FJ (1994) The nature of urbanization in South Korea. In: Dutt AK, Costa FJ, Noble AG, Aggarwal S (eds) The Asian city: processes of development, characteristics and planning. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands Thakur SK, Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (2016) Introduction: regional resources. In: Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur SK, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development (vol 1) regional resources. Springer, Dordrecht Thakur SK, Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (2016) Baleshwar Thakur: professional career and contributions. In: Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur SK, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development (vol 1) regional resources. Springer, Dordrecht Thakur RR, Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur SK (2016) Introduction: urban development. In: Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur RR, Thakur SK (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development (vol 1) urban development. Springer, Dordrecht Xie Y, Costa FJ, Dutt AK (1996) Changing urban forms in Asia. In: Nora Chiang LH, Williams JF, Bednarek HL (eds) Fourth Asian urbanization conference proceedings. Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

Articles in Refereed Journals Aryeetey-Attoh S, Costa FJ, Morrow-Jones HA, Monroe CB, Sommers GG (1998) Central- city distress in Ohio’s elastic cities: regional and local policy responses. Urban Geogr 19(8):735–756 Al-Oteibi S, Noble AG, Costa FJ (1993) The impact of planning on growth and development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1970–1990. GeoJournal 29(2):163–170

20 Breen E, Costa FJ, Hendon WS (1986) Annexation: an economic analysis. Am J Econ Soc 45(2):159–171 Costa FJ (1991) Urban planning in Rome from 1870 to the First World War. GeoJournal 24(3):269–276 Costa FJ, Noble AG, Pendleton G (1991) Evolving planning systems in madrid, Rome, and Athens. GeoJournal 24(3):293–303 Costa FJ, Noble AG (1990) The growth of metro systems in Madrid, Rome and Athens. Cities 7(3):224–229 Costa FJ, Noble AG (1986) Planning Arabic Towns. Geogr Rev 76(2):160–172 Costa FJ, Dutt AK, Roxbury C (1984) Spatial development, density gradients and their planning implications: The Rome case. GeoJournal 9(3):311–318 Costa FJ (1977a) Public policy impacts of urban development and design. Ohio J Sci 77(6):247–248 Costa FJ (1977b) The evolution of planning styles and planned change the example of Rome. J Urban Hist 3 (3):263–294 Costa FJ, Dutt AK (1976) Energy constraints and future spatial patterns of American Cities. The Greek Review of Social Research, July-December, pp 142–146 Costa FJ, Sweet M (1976) Barrier-free environments for older Americans. The Gerontologist 16(5):404–409 Costa FJ, Dutt AK (1975) Framework for evaluating national planning in Southeast Asia. Asian Profile 3 (3):331–341 Dutt AK, Aggarwal S, Costa FJ, Noble AG (1993) Introduction: Urban issues and urbanization characteristics of Asia. GeoJournal 29(2):114 Dutt AK, Costa FJ (1980) An evaluation of national economic planning in the People’s Republic of China. Geoforum 11(1):1–15 Dutt AK, Costa FJ (1977) Spatial patterns and design policies for future American Cities. J Geogr 76(1):24– 27 Hendon WS, Costa FJ, Rosenberg RA (1989) The general public and the art museum: case studies of visitors to several institutions identify characteristics of their publics. Am J Econ Soc 48(2):230–243 Johnson J, Costa FJ (1998) Hindu temple development in the United States: planning and zoning issues. J Cult Geogr 17(2):115–123 Mulhauser JE, Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ (1992) Editorial: introduction. Landscape Urban Plan 22:91– 92 Moustapha AF, Costa FJ, Noble AG (1985) Urban development in Saudi Arabia. Cities 2(2):140–148 Moustapha AF, Costa FJ (1983) Suggested elements of a building code for islamic communities. Ekistics 50 (298):24–29 Moustapha AF, Costa FJ (1981) Al Jarudiyah: a model for low rise/high density development in Saudi Arabia. Ekistics 48(287):100–108 Noble MA, Noble AG, Costa FJ (1993) Floor area ratio (FAR) as an urban development tool: the case of west palm beach. Land Use Policy 10(2):127–139 Noble AG, Costa FJ, Dutt AK (1991) Editorial: old trends and new impulses in Europe’s Urban Affairs. GeoJournal 24(3):235

R. R. Thakur et al. Xie Y, Costa FJ (1991a) The impact of economic reforms on the urban economy of the People’s Republic of China. Prof Geogr 43(3):318–335 Xie Y, Costa FJ (1991b) Urban design practice in socialist China. Third World Plan Rev 13(3):277–296 Xie Y, Costa FJ (1995) City size and socioeconomic development: China as a case study. Asian Profile 23 (3):181–203 Xie Y, Costa FJ (1993) Urban planning in socialist China: theory and practice. Cities 10(2):103–114

Monograph/Technical Reports The Ohio and Erie Canal and its Corridor: Potential Impacts. Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio, Kent State University, April 1997 (with Gail Sommers, Foster Armstrong and Patricia Burgess) A Land Use Strategy and Linkage Plan for Cascade Locks Park and its Adjacent District, Urban University Program, The University of Akron, March 1997 Affordable Housing: What We Can Learn from Focus Groups, Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, June 1996 (with Gail Sommers) The Spatial Dynamics of Choice and Location in the Akron Housing Market, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, June 1994 Survey of Home Buyers in the Akron-Canton Area, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, June 1994 (with Charles Monroe) A Design Strategy for the University Park Area, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, October 1991 Buchtel Common Spatial Utilization Analysis, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, # Report 1, February 1990, # Report 2, June 1990, # Report 3, January 1991 Suburbanization of Ohio Metropolitan Areas: 1980–2000, Ohio Urban University Program, Cleveland (1990) (with T Bier. S Attoh, S Howe, C Monroe and G Peterson) Impact of Suburban New Construction on the Akron Area Housing Market, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, March 1990 (with Charles Monroe and Brian Sommers) Sagamore Hills Planning Study, Department of Geography, The University of Akron, February 1990 (with Claudia James and Thomas Nash) Regional Service Needs as Perceived by the Political and Administrative Leadership of Summit County, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, November 1989 (with Edward Hanten) Perceptions of the Akron Zoning Ordinance, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, September 1989 Orrville Comprehensive Plan, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1989 (with Edward Hanten)

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Frank James Costa: Professional Career …

Racial Change and Housing Patterns for Akron and Summit County: 1960–86, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1989 An Economic Profile of Orrville Ohio, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1988 (with Edward Hanten) Creating an Early Detection System for Housing Abandonment in Akron, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1988 Economics and the Akron Art Museum: An Economic Impact and Benefit Cost Analysis, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1988 (with William Hendon) The Impact of the Growth of the University of Akron, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1987 (with Gail Sommers and Edward Hanten) Zoning Ordinance, Wadsworth, Ohio, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1987 (with Edward Hanten) The Economic Impact of Tourism in Medina County, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1986 (with William Hendon) Zoning Ordinance, Norton, Ohio, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1986 (with Edward Hanten) Housing Abandonment in Akron. Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1985 Wadsworth Housing Code. Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1983 (with Edward Hanten) Wadsworth Comprehensive Plan, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1983 (with Edward Hanten and Gail Sommers) Medina Comprehensive Plan, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1983 (with Edward Hanten and Gail Sommers)

21 Norton Comprehensive Plan, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1982 (with Edward Hanten) Cost-Cut Management in Local Government, A Monograph prepared through the Northeast Ohio Inter-Institutional Urban Research Consortium, 1980 The Plan for Al Jarudiyah: A New Town in the Qatif Oasis (Saudi Arabia), King Faisal University, College of Architecture and Planning, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, 1979 A Traffic Analysis and Development Plan: The University District, Akron, Ohio, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1977 (with Edward Hanten and David Stewart) Spatial Perspectives and Policy Implications for Farmland Conversion, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1977 (with Edward Hanten and Gerald Pyle) The Development of Barrier-Free Environment for the Akron Life Care Center, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1977 Planning and Development Practices Teaching Module, (National Science Foundation funded study to devise an undergraduate planning curriculum), 1976 A Spatial Analysis of Land Development within the Akron SMSA: 1950–70, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron, 1975 (with Edward Hanten and Gerald Pyle) Proceedings of the Conference on Planning and Public Policy in the Regional Setting, Center for Urban Studies, The University of Akron,1975 A Housing Development Plan for Summit County, Summit County Council of Governments, 1974 A Plan for Medical Education, The Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, 1973 (with Stanley Olson MD)

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Regional Development and Planning: An Overview Ashok K. Dutt, Debnath Mookherjee, Rajiv R. Thakur, Brian Sommers and Jack Benhart

Abstract

This chapter reviews the changing nature of regional development and planning, with an emphasis on research between 1990 and 2018. Regional development and planning has emerged as a major interdisciplinary field with active researchers—regional scientists, planners, geographers, and economists at its frontier. The transition from pre-1990s to the early years of the present century has been characterized by a shift in approach from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. This shift also accompanies with a broadening of the traditional focus on the economic to encompass the social and the ecological. Nevertheless, regional development

A. K. Dutt Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA D. Mookherjee Department of Geography and Regional Planning, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, USA

and planning has found its significance renewed as the global scenario comes to be influenced by rising inequality resulting in local economic insecurity compounded by new global threats through unregulated markets and climate change, not to forget the continuing impact of the financial crisis of 2007–08. Influenced by themes such as underdevelopment, uneven development, and globalization, regional development and planning is in the middle of changing and challenging context. The driver of regional development and planning now includes environmental sustainability, technological innovations, and the consequences of spatial restructuring. Regional development and planning is not only alive at multiple scales but remains popular in recent times for as long as economic growth will be unbalanced. Keywords







Planning Regional development Regional policy Regional science Regionalism SDGs Spatial inequality Sustainable development












R. R. Thakur (&) Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, Missouri, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Sommers Department of Geography, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut, USA J. Benhart Department of Geography-Earth Sciences, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_3

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3.1

A. K. Dutt et al.

Introduction

This chapter reviews the emerging research on regional development and planning which the authors define as the body of literature that focuses on the process of regional development, the role of regional planning and policy as a mechanism intended to guide that development. Since development is spatially and temporally uneven because of socioeconomic and physical variations and because past regional policies and strategies have failed to reduce regional disparities significantly at meso and regional levels, regional development continues to assume significance calling for conceptual and applied research as well as policy action (Bromley et al. 1989; Cooke 2013; Faggian and Mack 2015; Gatrell and Spiker 2002; Jackson et al. 2019; Pike et al. 2011; Scott 2012; Thakur 2017). In this context, the chapter assembles seminal contributions of leading intellectuals who have devoted their career to studying the complex dynamics of regional development and planning. The practice of regional development and the conduct of urban and regional planning is not the prerogative of planners and geographers only,

but includes people who come with skills from different background such as architecture, civil engineering, computer technology (geographic information systems), economics, environmental science, management science, political science, public administration, and sociology (Bromley et al. 1989). The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate these contributions and at the same time, examine other significant literature in the fields of regional development and planning. In this task we have primarily referred to transatlantic geographers work over the past seven decades (Fig. 3.1). The rest of this chapter represents a broad exploration of the evolving context, history, key topics, and the research agenda in the twenty-first century.

3.1.1 Early Developments While the concept of urban and regional development has evolved primarily in the early twentieth century, planning, particularly city planning has its roots in ancient cities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with rapid industrialization came attendant issues such

Research Procedure and Pattern of Contribution Inputs: Articles, Books Professional Papers and Reports

Transatlantic Contributions

Publications & Sources: Geography Disciplinary & Interdisciplinary

Focus: Global Patterns

Research Outcome

Planning: National, Regional & Global Regional Science

Research Trends: 1990-2018

Techniques: Planning and Development Comparative Studies

Continuing and Emerging Trends

Agenda: The New Millennium Globalization: A World Region

Interfaces: Planning Approaches Sustainable Development

Regional Development: Eastern Europe Spatial Inequity: Developing Countries

Fig. 3.1 Regional development and planning: broad context

Multidisciplinary Approaches Mega-Event Planning

Environment: Issues & Concerns Feminism & Issues of Women

Post-2015 Development Landscape

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Regional Development and Planning …

as public health and sanitation, crime, poverty, and in the United States immigrant assimilation. Local governments responded with the “city beautiful movement”. Its influence was prominent in Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington DC. This progressive era also witnessed many publications that influenced regional development thinkers and planners alike, such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), Ebenezer Howard’s To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898), W. E. B. Du Bois and Isabel Eaton’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), Charles M. Robinson’s The Improvement of Towns and Cities or the Practical Basis of Civic Aesthetics (1901), Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Benjamin C. Marsh and George B. Ford’s An Introduction to City Planning: Democracy’s Challenge to the American City (1909), and Alfred Weber’s Theory of the Location of Industries (1909) among many others. However, while Howard’s “Garden City” was influenced by a balance between industry and nature, Vaux and Olmsted’s “City Beautiful” movement was a response motivated by focus on physical architecture rather than overall land use (Bromley et al. 1989). Several events in the beginning of the twentieth century marked the institutionalization of planning. In 1909, the First National Conference on City Planning was held in Washington DC, while in the shadow of the First World War, the Panama Canal was opened to world commerce, and shortly thereafter, in the United States the National Park Service was established in 1916 with the sole responsibility for conserving and preserving resources of special value. Planning as a profession became consolidated as part of governance in early twentieth century as the demands of city building and land use in Europe, North America, and other parts of the world required management at federal, state, and municipal scales. Landmark metropolis-based regional development strategies are Howard’s New Town Movement, the New York Regional Plan, Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan

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and Doxiadis’s urbanization corridors. Rationales for regional development policies are found in the Barlow Commission Report, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) experience, growth pole development and area development strategies. Geographers have contributed widely in evaluating concepts of and providing empirical analyses of the different aspects of regional development and planning in Europe, United States, and elsewhere in the world. Patrick Geddes, the social evolutionist and city planner, landmark publication Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the town planning movement and to the study of civics became influential drawing from Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Geddes, a Scottish Regional Planner established that urban growth was based on ideas of evolution, a perspective that assumed acknowledgment of solving social problems through the manipulations of the physical built environment (Batty 2006). Based on human ecology theory, sociologist Ernest Burgess (1925) developed his “concentric zone model” of urban structure and land use also known as the Burgess Model explaining the urban landscapes of Chicago. He was the first to articulate an explanation of social groups within urban areas even though he was heavily criticized by geographers who felt his theory had limited applications even in the United States. Unlike Howard and others in that genre, Le Corbusier, an architect and urban planner, was trying to find a fix to the same problems of urban growth, that is, pollution and overcrowding in Europe and North America, but by envisioning “building up, not out”. His ideas were articulated in the landmark publication The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1925). Le Corbusier’s ideas influenced city planning schemes in Algiers, Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Geneva, Chandigarh, Stockholm, and Antwerp besides a variety of world-famous structures including the United Nations building. Le Corbusier’s ideas later reappeared during the phase of urban renewal both in Europe and the United States (Martin and James 1993). In response to the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) inaugurated the “New

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Deal” in 1933 and a spate of counter-depression measures to provide jobs for the unemployed. FDR established the Civilian Conservation Corps to provide work for unemployed youth and to conserve nation’s natural resources. In the same year a landmark regional planning and economic development activity was inaugurated—the Tennessee Valley Authority which provided for unified and multipurpose rehabilitation and redevelopment of the Tennessee Valley, America’s most famous experiment in river-basin planning (Boyce 2004). Also, in 1933 the famous German geographer Walter Christaller developed his influential idea of “central place theory” and the resulting hierarchical network of cities (Martin and James 1993). During the period of the Second World War, regional development and planning was influenced by the emerging body of literature on location of economic activities. In the tradition of Alfred Weber and Christaller August Losch a German economist who was known for his seminal contributions to regional science and urban economics, explained the location of settlements as markets centers.

3.1.2 Postwar Consumer Society The dislocation and depression created by the Second World War to economic growth primarily in Europe, also led the United States to embark on a massive program of aid under the Marshall Plan. Fordism and regional economic change created a new regime of accumulation on either side of the Atlantic. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) argued for the benefits of decentralized markets and against centralized planning. Therefore, under a context of exceptionally high levels of personal savings, the acquisition of new technology, new means of government supported reconstruction in Europe and Japan, and their combined influence metamorphosed into spectacular growth for countries in Europe and North America. It was in this background that during the 1950s and 60s under a broader influence of sociology and neo-classical economics, emerged a body of

A. K. Dutt et al.

theories which focused on the significance of “location” and on locational analysis not just by geographers but also by economists (Martin and James 1993). Much research in regional development and planning was influenced by the philosophy of positivism, the discipline of geography’s so-called “quantitative revolution” and, the methodology of spatial science, which was mostly about adoption of a system’s approach which concentrates on the patterns and linkages within an assemblage and the use of quantitative procedures to make precise statements (Johnston 2009; Martin and James 1993). The locus of the growth of this approach resided in the geography programs at Iowa, Chicago, Seattle (more pivotal), Michigan, Bristol, Lund, and Toronto. At Washington, both Edward Ullman and William Garrison influenced a generation of geographers including Brian Berry, Michael Dacey, Arthur Getis, Richard Morrill, John Nystuen, and Walter Tobler. At Iowa, Harold McCarty trained Leslie King and Reginald Golledge. In UK, both Peter Haggett and Richard Chorley while in Sweden Torsten Hagerstrand were instrumental in the diffusion of theoretical and quantitative revolution of geography (Martin and James 1993). A significant part in the development of the locational approach was the close interaction and sharing of knowledge between transatlantic geographers. Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett’s two works became instrumental namely (a) Frontiers in Geographical Teaching (1965) and (b) Models in Geography (1967) while a third very significant work published in Britain was Peter Haggett’s Locational Analysis in Human Geography (1965). While the 1965 work codified the paradigm of locational analysis, a more evolved version of this work was published in 1977 along with A. D. Cliff and A. E. Frey. In Sweden at Lund, Hagerstrand’s research was of special value as he began to train planners and to investigate regional planning problems. It also needs to be acknowledged that Hagerstrand’s work on innovations and diffusions was influenced by Edgar Kant of Estonia, von Thunen, J. G. Kohl, Tord Palander, Walter Christaller, and Oitirim Sorokin (Martin and James 1993).

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Regional Development and Planning …

Meanwhile, the rise of regional economics (influenced by the Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin who published Interregional and International Trade (1933) which displayed how trade and specialization lead to regional equality) and the subsequent growth of regional growth theory with the work of Albert Hirschman in his The Strategy of Economic Development (1958) also benefited regional development and planning discourse. There was a general recognition that space is neither non-existent nor neutral in economic processes. In 1956, an American economist Walter Isard, published his foundational text Location and Space Economy which heralded a hybrid discipline “Regional Science” combining neoclassical economics and quantitative methods to analyze spatial issues in economics, regional development and planning.

3.1.2.1 Key Contributors on Regional Development and Planning This section presents some key thinkers and practitioners on Regional Development and Planning whose contributions could not be excluded. This applied for instance to Rexford Tugwell who was a trained economist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the members of Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust.” While his voluminous writings influenced national economic change, political circumstances, and regional development policies, Tugwell served as planning practitioner during the New Deal period as the Under Secretary of Agriculture, Director of the Resettlement Administration, and then as Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. He also served as Governor of Puerto Rico from 1941 to 1946 (Bromley et al. 1989). Similarly, Harvey Perloff, the intellectual heir of Tugwell, is a good fit in this group as he shared the same missionary spirit for planning and the belief that regional planning for economic development and resource management was far more important than urban planning. Perloff’s contribution through his time at the University of Chicago and at the Resources for the Future, a Washington research foundation

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where he worked till 1968, both lead to significant contributions to city planning and metropolitan-development issues, and eventually contributing to the emergence of a national urban policy later in the 60s and 70s (Bromley et al. 1989). Walter Isard, an economist by training found economics as a discipline very limiting in understanding and explaining spatial issues in economics, human geography, and planning. His seminal publication titled Location and Space Economy (1956) heralded a hybrid discipline— Regional Science in the early 1950s which combined neoclassical economics and quantitative methods to explain the American regional and urban growth. Isard’s other significant works include Industrial Complex Analysis and Regional Development (1959), Methods of Regional Analysis (1960), General Theory: Social, Political, Economic, and Regional (1969), and Introduction to Regional Science (1975). He founded the Regional Science Association in 1954 which soon became popular worldwide. Isard collaborated with many including Tony Smith, Gerald Carruthers, John Cumberland, and Michael Dacey. Together Isard and his followers used location theory, economic analysis, and operations research to understand and explain regional issues. During the 1970s and 80s, in the backdrop of protest movements against the wave of neoliberalism and because of a climate of disenchantment with mainstream agenda of development, Regional Science as a discipline came under attack by economic geographers and social scientists generally which led to the relegation of the discipline into the margins (Bromley et al. 1989). Despite the turbulence experienced by Regional Science as a discipline in the later part of the last century, the Regional Science Association International is doing well through several journals and active gatherings of its members at international, national, and regional meetings. A very significant contributor to regional planning from Sweden was Torsten Hagerstrand who became prominent through his work on migration, innovations, and diffusions (Martin and James 1993). His dissertation titled Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process (1953) was a

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signature work of quantification in geography of his time which was later translated by Allan Pred in 1967. Hagerstrand’s contribution to regional planning was using regions as analytical units for studying social change. While he along with Sven Godlund in Lund prepared a generation of regional planners, Hagerstrand’s conceptual contributions through geocoding of statistical primary data, development of models (simulated Monte Carlo models), and statistical techniques such as the space-time cube and time-space prism all became very influential in the growth and development of geographic information systems which are so embedded in regional development and planning of today. John Friedmann (1926–2017) an Austrian native, regarded as “father of urban planning” for his many contributions such as the core-periphery four-stage model of regional development, and later his “world city” hypothesis produced some influential writings such as Regional Planning and Development: A Reader (1964) co-edited with William Alonso, Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela (1966), and Regional Policy: Readings in Theory and Applications (1975) also co-edited with William Alonso. His work with William Alonso (1964 and 1975) was both collaborative, seminal, and defined a new field called regional development and planning. In his own admission in early twenty-first century, Friedmann accepted that while regional development and planning was in good business from 1950s to 70s, however, with the shift from fordism to post-fordism, the primordial significance of “national” shifted to such areas as metropolitan regions and with questions such as environmental sustainability, technological innovations, and the consequences of spatial restructuring in advanced economies (Friedmann 2001). According to Gary Gaile (2006), John made the regional important to development even though his own research concerns shifted in the last few decades of his career to issues of justice and planning (such as displacement), decentralized planning, advocating a planning paradigm that is normative, innovative, political, transactive, and based on a social learning approach to knowledge and

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policy as is evident from his many publications such as Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (1987), Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development (1992), The Prospect of Cities (2002), China’s Urban Transition (2005), and Insurgencies: Essays in Planning Theory (2011). Both his early and later work display characteristics such as that he understood the inherent tensions within free-market, as such he acknowledged the limitations of national planning and was a proponent of local and regional planning. Friedmann’s contribution to regional development and planning was original and formative and had its own breadth and depth (Gaile 2006). Along with others, Brian Berry qualifies as one of the foremost regional development and planning specialists for a range of contributions including his 1967 classic publication Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution. Berry’s urban and regional research was part of the quantitative revolution that occurred in the 1960s and he became one of the most cited geographers at the time. His other publications such as The Human Consequences of Urbanization: Divergent Paths in the Urban Experience of the Twentieth Century (1973), Longwave Rhythms in Economic Development and Political Behavior (1991), along with his move from University of Chicago to Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and eventually University of Texas, Dallas was indicative of how his career has been concerned with bridging theory and practice, as also his involvement in urban and regional planning not just in the United States but also in developing regions such as India and Indonesia among others. His role as consultant, advisor, and expert took him to such diverse locations as Kolkata, India, Jakarta, and Melbourne where he was sought for his regional development expertise (Bromley et al. 1989).

3.2

Regional Development

The term “development” is variously used in the literature to denote the process of change in human and natural resources, presumably in a

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positive direction. However, due to inherent complexities, the definition of what is positive may vary according to ideologies, outlooks, or cultural perspectives. Moreover, efforts to bring about “development” in one component of the human environment—geographic, social, political, or economic—bring with it changes that may or may not have been desirable or intended. However, for decades, “region” has been accepted by geographers and planners as an ambiguous term for it involves overlapping and interconnected characteristics (Grigg 1965; Kelbaugh 1996). Further, regional development conceptually, not only reflects differences in prosperity, but it also reflects different forms of economic organization, resource base, demographic characteristics, political systems, and different roles in the system of international specialization and trade. Although the term “regional development” evokes subnational geographical units, it does not clarify size and location of the same, thereby meaning that regions can range from units below a state or province in a country to (South Central Ozark Region) several counties in different states (such as the Appalachia Region) to different nations coming together (European Union, NAFTA, ASEAN, etc.) (Faggian and Mack 2015). Therefore, it is not surprising that the literature perceives regional development and planning in a diverse manner as it is seen both as a product and process. Product, meaning measured jobs, wealth, standard of living and working conditions, etc., while process refers to industry support, infrastructure, market development among others. Since the Barlow Commission Report was published in 1940, there has been an emphasis on balanced development of regions and growth stimulation for less developed areas. Decentralization of industries, balancing industrial development, diversification of industries in each region, and limitation of continued migration to London were its recommendations (Dutt 1969). The idea of regional development received a greater boost when Francois Perroux introduced the concept of “growth pole” into the economic literature in 1949 (Darwent 1969). The Growth

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Pole Concept was widely applied in developing countries to counteract urban-biased policies which fostered development in a few cities, while smaller cities and distant regions stagnated. Growth pole policy was widely introduced into Southeast Asian countries and it has remained a functional model characterized by a top-down decision-making process. An alternative to growth pole strategy, thought to be more desirable by many—a region-based development strategy or the territorial approach—has also been introduced into regional planning. Decision-making, utilizing this strategy, is at the grassroots and is considered a bottom-up approach (Dutt and Song 1996). Illeris (1993) believes that an inductive theory of regional development applies to the “post-fordist” or post-industrial economy, where there is a domination by the service sector, information technology, and knowledge; where unevenness in regional development occurs without displaying any core-periphery pattern; where possibilities are more open, and when local economic development largely depends on local conditions (p. 132). It is within this broader thought process that there is a major incentive to cluster. Such clusters represent a major pattern of post-1990s evolving world economy. They are the concentrations of innovative, knowledge-based, and high-value producing industries (both manufacturing and services) that are increasingly driving the world economy. This is what Scott (1996) refers to as the “regional motors” of world economy. The top-down approach still plays a strong role in urban development planning under the economic reform initiatives and socialist China during the post-Mao era in “retaining control and ownership of property and in holding for the state the means of production.” Development efforts under the reform may not succeed unless there is a clear understanding of the “forces of supply and demand” in an open market system (Wong and Han 1998). Also, as political decentralization is now an established pattern all over the world, its repercussions are felt in planning decision-making and allocation activities (Noble et al. 1994). Official

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efforts to foster economic development may accelerate development as planned or result sometimes in regional inequality and in other settings may accelerate development. In Yugoslavia where federal funds were used for “equalization” starting from 1966, more developed areas received substantial redistribution of economic resources and thus, economic conditions among the republics and nations of the unified Yugoslavia were more equal prior to that year (Kaiser 1990). A case study of Ghana suggests that “redistribution with growth” has a better potential for redirecting extra income produced by the core region’s growth to the less developed peripheral regions (Aryeetey-Attoh and Chatterjee 1988). Between 1969 and 1991, the Appalachian counties in the United States, which were considered a depressed region, demonstrated faster economic growth than control group twin countries; possibly a result of $13 billion in governmental expenditure since 1965 (Isserman and Rephann 1995). For almost 25 years, the Appalachian Regional Conference has been attempting to provide educational and vocational training, health care, commercial development, and enhanced infrastructure to residents and communities within the Appalachian Region. Few major roads penetrate the Appalachian region (divided into three parts—north, central, and south) and examination of the core-periphery model shows that each periphery has responded quite differently to developmental efforts (Moore 1994). In the planning and development literature, the Tumen River Project, in the Northeast Asia, was one of the hot topics in the first half of the 1990s. The prospects for bringing the countries of this region together in an economically advantageous and political intriguing development efforts within the Tumen river basin excited researchers and the professional economic development community alike. As things have turned out, however, the Tumen River Project has become a case study of how national interests and national politics can derail locally championed projects with a great deal of promise (Sommers et al. 1995). The Tumen River Project

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presents a unique case of a regional development program whose time came and then, unfortunately, went. Not surprisingly, the evolution of regional development policy and planning strategy has varied significantly between and within nations. Until the mid-1970s, the focus of planning policy was on comparative advantage. Planning policies were primarily directed toward achieving lowest production costs (labor, material, energy, taxes, and infrastructure) relative to competitors. Comparative advantage was heavily entrenched in supply side economics, where goods and services were produced, and surpluses sold in international and domestic markets. During the 1980s, the focus of regional planning strategy began to move toward competitive advantage. Both comparative and competitive advantage strategies tend to be heavily entrenched in a win/lose scenario. Both in developed and developing economic landscapes, the focus of planning shifted from master planning infrastructure oriented to strategic planning (Stimson, Stough and Roberts 2006). The net result on regional economies, particularly, non-metropolitan centers being catastrophic with the withdrawal of government through interventionist and protectionist policies and an expanded globalization and structural adjustment allowing corporations to exploit regional differences. By the early 1990s, the impact of globalization also changed the nature and location of production, resulting in a shift away from the traditional “growth poles” in North America and Europe to new ones in Latin America and Asia (Scott 2012, 2006). Much innovative work was carried out by Scott (1996, 2000, 2006, 2012), Cooke (2013), and Bathelt and Gluckler (2011) in reconceiving global and regional economies even though their approaches differed. They all contributed to the contemporary regional planning practice through an explanation of our world and the realities of contemporary daily life. Reflecting on the emergence of greater specialization and clustering, Scott (1996) referred to clusters as “regional motors” of the world economy. He argued that clusters as they emerged in post-1990s in metropolitan and neighboring regions were concentrations of innovative, knowledge-based, and

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high-value producing industries accentuating globalization and increasing marginalization of large parts of the world. Scott refers to the emergence of such clusters in relation to competitions and collaborations as “cognitivecultural economy.” In contrast, Cooke (2013) and Bathelt and Gluckler (2011) and Hassink and Klaerding (2011) used complementary theoretical approaches of institutionalism and evolutionary economics to understand emerging differences from place to place, the need to create, access, and share knowledge and sustain competitiveness in the evolving economic landscape of post-1990s. In the past two decades, regional development and planning has been influenced with the rise of the post-industrial orientation of economies across the world and has seen the emergence of both leading and peripheral regions in terms of technology and entrepreneurial activities. There are many scholars who have paid attention to the theme of competitiveness emerging from knowledge, creativity, and entrepreneurialism (Audretsch and Aldridge 2009; Audretsch and Walshok 2013; Boschma 2008, 1999; Chen 2012; Fischer and Nijkamp 2009; Johansson and Karlsson 2009; Muller 2016; Rocco 2012; Scott 2006, 2012; Yaro 2011; Yigitcanlar, Metaxiotis and Carrillo 2012). In the backdrop of Asian economic crisis of 1997, the evolution of monetarism into economic rationalism and the resultant absolute need to focus on the eradication of unequal distribution of welfare among regions and/or cities became the source of influence for many researchers to put regions at the core places of policy action (Capello and Nijkamp 2009; Fischer and Nijkamp 2009). In a review of literature (based on 170 peer-reviewed articles from leading journals) on entrepreneurship and regional development, Muller (2016) found that while major debates were occurring within disciplines such as regional economics, sociology, and economic geography, however what was lacking was interdisciplinary discussions, as a result the role of spatial and proximate contextual conditions were overlooked in the entrepreneurial process. However, others such as Scott (2006, 2012) recognized the phenomenon

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of competition and collaboration as the focus of regional planning strategy and hence argued that the emergence of the creative field within a new cognitive-cultural capitalism is largely due to a web of interacting social and economic phenomena at different locations with a powerful stimulus of entrepreneurship and innovation. Many others continue to explore and research procedural aspects of knowledge-based urban and regional planning, development, and assessment (Thakur 2009, 2010; Yigitcanlar et al. 2012). Thus, this literature review recognizes that competitiveness remains the watchword through the evolution of regional economic development policy and planning strategy in many city-regions all over the contemporary world.

3.3

National, Regional, and Local Planning

National and local planning activities address issues relating to physical setting, economy, and culture. Planning, regional or otherwise, is a basic human activity (Seltzer and Carbonell (2011). In reality, of course, planning at different scales rise, fall, and compete with one another along the way. The role of national planning has changed significantly in recent times as a result of globalization and structural adjustment. Many economic geographers and planners have talked about the porous nature of national boundaries and how the world has gone global (Friedmann 2001). In developed nations, a primary driver of regional planning has been the focus on value addition, investment, effective governance, asset utilization, consumption, and population growth through immigration. Given the importance of changes in the world economy as determinants of regional performance, it is useful to consider the links between national and regional economies. Bryden (2007) argues that in a country of the size of Canada, with its uneven distribution of population, resources, and fiscal capacity, there are limits to national policy and a fervent need for integrated regional development planning. In the

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context of Western Canada, Ray et al. (2013) argue how regional policy, through its impact on regions, has wider economic effects, and that macroeconomic policies, through economic outcomes and their spatial expression, have implications for regional performance. In the United States, the challenge now facing planners is how to formulate economic development policy that will respond to global dynamics and sometimes a national vacuum in macro policy toward regions. There is a strong case for regional planning in the United States with multiple challenges such as climate change, sustainability, and enormous global competition (Yaro 2011). As with several other countries, Belgian planning has been impacted by linguistic regionalism with the emergence of Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels as distinct regional entities and separate planning authorities. Since 1980s, a shift in Dutch planning system has become apparent, that is, from government to governance in spatial planning. Overall, a regional level is now emerging, and development planning is no longer patently local (Altes 2006; Spaans 2006). A case study in the context of Amsterdam displays how metropolitan regional planning system of unexpected complexity and attributes reveal the role of consultation and the proliferation of coordination (Alexander 2002). In UK and Ireland too, the role of the city region has moved from the academic circles to policy-making communities. Regional planning has found its revival given the challenges of Greater London region. As a result, many civil service functions have been relocated away from London and the southeast. In Ireland the planning community is looking at the role of the second-tier cities in national economic performance (Brady 2016; Jefferson and Trainor 1996; Simmons 1999). Now as ever, power politics have influenced events and planning process in the realm of national, regional, and local planning. Brexit will impact the prosperity of local economy in Britain and impact policies for regional development in Europe. While we know that Brexit will impact planning process in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, we do not know how since we do not have a precedent (Bachtler and Begg 2018; McCann 2018).

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In developing nations and peripheral or non-core regions, the response to planning strategies and practices beyond growth logic as a result of globalization and structural change is the concern with “marginalization” and the increased differences between core or metropolitan regions and localities. A study of Southeast Asian countries suggests that adherence to an “open door” policy, economic liberalization, adoption of new technology, and growths of native entrepreneurship are fundamental to “economic take off’ of the developing countries (Dutt et al. 1996). Regional development in Central and Eastern Europe in post-1990s era has been influenced by the need for containing regional polarization in peripheral regions through regional policy and reform. With the end of communist central planning in Hungary and Romania, physical planning, location policy, spatial priorities generally, greater equality between regions, and a commitment to backward areas have generally suffered in planning regional development (Csuka 2008; Nagy and Turnock 2000; Vofkori 2004). Like central and eastern European countries, regional planning in southern Europe (Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal) too has suffered since the magic formula of agglomeration, export orientation, and growth did not bring the desired results. In the last few years, the peripheral regions of Europe have also experienced economic downturn, high unemployment rates, and low investment in the aftermath of a global financial crisis. In a world of shrinking national, state, and local government support, non-core or peripheral regions are forced to depart from conceptualizations on traditional notions of “growth” and rethink alternative ideas of growth, development, and sustainability (Leick and Lang 2018; Scott 2012). From the standpoint of policy, one of the primary points of concern in the literature is in the importance of coordinating effective local planning and the ability to translate national and European strategic planning into effective physical development at the regional level (Dutt 1993; Dutt and Breen 1990 for examples from the Dutch perspective). Without that, planning’s

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pre-occupation with national issues could undermine regional successes as well as the support systems for regional planning which exist at the national and European scales (Bachtler and Clemant 1992; Minns and Tomaney 1995; Murphy 1993). Development strategies tied to regional contexts which work with regional strengths, provide freedom for local planners and politicians to adopt policies and initiate inter-regional programs. Such strategies can also take advantage of those things which are unique and valuable in both local planning and the local resource base for use regionally (Dutt 1993). The changing form and function of Hong Kong after the transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997 has been analyzed by Lo (1997). The city’s strategic location as a gateway to southern China and its resources as a centre for high technology-oriented industries and service components offer potentialities for Hong Kong to become a Mega City in the twenty-first century. To achieve its future potential, Lo’s research shows that “decentralized growth, with new towns assuming more and more important roles in commerce and service functions” will be “the best spatial development pattern” for the city (1997: 277). Effectiveness of European Union’s (EU) program for development, success of the newly composed super-regional apparatus—high speed train lines and Channel Tunnel—have been studied from the points of view of planning, regional development, core periphery relationships, and issues of regional inequality. At the European scale, these include studies of unification and its impact on the central axis of Western Europe versus the Atlantic coastline and on the southern and eastern Mediterranean (Bachtler and Michie 1997; Dunsford and Perrons 1994; Tommel 1997). Success in regional development in a unified Europe is seen as a product of local context including the political and economic environments, infrastructure, the regional resource base, and the dynamism of the players in the planning/development process (Illeris 1993). They are also seen in the ability of regions to utilize EU structural funds in reducing regional disparities in promoting rural development, and

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in workforce improvement (Glasson 1992). For proponents of core investment, the costs of peripheral development, both direct and indirect, are of key concerns (Karkazis and Thanssoulis 1998). Though literature on regional development and planning relating to the Channel Tunnel have been dealt with extensively in British, French, and EU government documents as well as in the rail and tourism literature, there are a few in Geographic sources on policy, planning, and regional development. Those that do appear predate the tunnel’s opening, or deal with specific issues concerning the impact of rail linkages on the spread of development (Gibb 1992), the differing development needs on either side of the English Channel (Holiday and Vickerman 1990), or sector-specific impacts (Sinclair and Page 1993). Given the potential impacts of the tunnel, this may very well be a subject matter worthy of further study by planners and geographers.

3.4

Interfaces of Planning Approaches

3.4.1 Comprehensive Planning Physical-based design planning or master planning with its traditions in architecture and design continued to form the basis of city and metropolitan planning until the 1950s. A comprehensive rational planning approach gradually replaced it after 1960. Under the classical rational model, described by Meyerson and Banfield (1955), planning is viewed as a course of action to achieve ends. Since a rational course is chosen to achieve ends, it is likely to maximize achievement of those ends. Rational and efficient planning becomes the same thing. National planning, thus, involves a set of procedures in which decision makers attempt to engage in the following column: identify and define major problems; analyze environmental and strategic conditions; project trends, needs, opportunities, and constraints; transform goals into operational

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targets; identify alternative courses of action for achieving goals and targets; calculate costs and benefits of each alternative; estimate the probabilities of future events and projected trends occurring; determine the potential gains, losses, and consequences of each alternative; choose the optimal alternative of set of actions; and integrate chosen courses of action into a comprehensive long range plan (Dror 1963; Rondinelli 1976). The plans are then transformed into operational programs and schedules for implementation. The ideal rational planning process is multidisciplinary and has an aerial dimension (Dutt 1970). It requires an understanding of all societal values, information about all alternative policies, predictive capacity to foresee consequences that alternative policies will have, and above all, a decision-making process that supports and facilitates rationality in planning formulation. Because of the obvious difficulties inherent in such an ambitious approach, the classical comprehensive planning model increasingly has come under attack (Lindblom 1979; Etzioni 1986).

3.4.2 Strategic Planning Planning knowledge, like most knowledge in other related fields, is currently in crisis. Traditional models and explanations that have supported the field in the past are no longer acceptable (Etzioni 1986). Emergence and development of American social planning involved social assistance programs for the poor and handicapped, establishment of large parks and playgrounds in order to provide space for wholesome and socially permissible forms of recreation, launching of Great Society Programs of the 1960s and housing for the poor (Costa et al. 1988). New knowledge must be found to answer new challenges. The need to understand new conditions has led researchers to examine past and current theories in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of current planning

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theory and practice. One of the several models in planning to support decision-making is strategic planning, a concept which originated in the private sector where it has been in use for several years (Bryson and Einsweiler 1988). It is defined as a disciplined effort designed to help leaders and decision makers think and act strategically. Good strategic planning must demonstrate effective, focused information gathering; extensive communication among and participation by key decision makers and opinion leaders; the accommodation of divergent interests and values; the development and analysis of alternatives; an emphasis on the future implications of present decisions and actions; focused, reasonably analytic, and orderly decision making; and successful implementation (Bryson and Einsweiler 1988: 1).

Strategic planning has been modified to suit the public sector’s needs. As the concept matured, it took on a variety of names. All the different names are linked by the main features of strategic planning such as the systematic assessments of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats or SWOT (Bryson and Einsweiler 1987; Tomazinis 1985). The Harvard (Bryson and Roering 1987), Stakeholder (Checkoway 1986; Pflaum and Timothy 1987), and Strategic Negotiation (Bryson and Roering 1987; Reed and Blair 1993) models are some of several models of strategic planning.

3.4.3 Communication Action Theoretical concepts in action planning have evolved in since the 1980s. The emergent paradigm within planning stems from the Habermasian concept of methods of knowing. This action plan process allows for the inclusion of all parties or stakeholders in order to reach and amicable or consensual decision. Participants discover shared interests through persuasion and common argument or strategy. Politically, the parties agree on specific policy for implementation of plans. Consensus building, in a planner determining the public interest, remains the main basis of the process. Participants foster a

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discussion for a common strategy of action and shared frameworks for tackling problems. The role of the planner shifts from that of technician to participant in the community planning process. The reward for planners is that they gain respect from participants for their contribution and expertise (Innes 1996). Like any scientific method, communicative rationality can never be perfect. Decisions are made considering important knowledge and perspectives (Innes 1998). In order to develop a theory of collaborative planning, communicative planning needs to be elaborated, so that role-play simulation as a method of interaction and “bricolage” as a mode of collective reasoning may evolve (Innes 1999). Planners use language as communication to make sense of the world. This communication needs to be characterized by the ideals of comprehensibility and the related concepts of truth, sincerity, and legitimacy (Forester 1989). While arguing that, “criticism is a requisite for objectivity; detachment is not,” Forester (1989: 16) advocated that knowing comes through self-reflection, discourse/dialectic, and praxis, and fails the way for mediation and discursive action in Planning. Healey (1992) suggests that the communication planning process approach embraces rationality and she develops the Habermasian concepts of the shift from the current subject–object approach to planning and planning research, to that of an inter-subjectivity approach in order to allow a greater plurality of interests to be represented.

3.4.4 New Towns Policy The year 1998 marked the hundred-year anniversary of Sir Ebenezer Howard’s publication of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path of Real Reform, which was republished in 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Beevers (1988) considers Howard to be an originator of modern town planning. Howard’s book also marks the beginning of the era of city/regional planning, thus casting influence over the entire twentieth

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century. When Howard wrote his book, “the countryside was emptying into ever more concentrated, congested and unhealthy cities. The main concern was the wellbeing and housing of an impoverished urban working class. Howard’s solution was decentralization into compact urban groupings - each confined by an agricultural greenbelt of five thousand acres” (Richert and Lapping 1998: 125–126). Such compact groupings were called Garden Cities or New Towns. The idea of living in the self-sufficient, planned Garden Cities or New Towns, not too far from the metropolis and where the quality of life was valued, also had a direct bearing on regional planning. Howard’s policies consisted of (a) planned decongestion of existing cities, (b) limiting the size of the new towns so that services and workplace may remain close to the residences, and (c) providing a green belt of agricultural land, so that, in future the built-up areas of the new town and the metropolis would never coalesce (Parai and Dutt 1994: 373). Batchelor (1969) and Hall (1988, 1992) described with detail how Howard’s New Town could (or should) be developed and what it would involve. Howard’s idea stirred town and regional planners all over the world. In many cases his ideas were modified. In the United States, Radburn in New Jersey and Chatham Village in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania were new towns like subdivisions of the 1930s; Greenbelt in Maryland in the 1930s was a cooperative endeavor; Columbia, Maryland and Reston, Virginia established in the 1960s initiating the process of privately funded, profit-making communities (Dutt 1992). In Europe, the new town concept was revolutionized by Patrick Abercrombie and Britain’s Labor Government with the New Towns Act of 1947. At first, medium size new towns were built around London. This was followed by more dispersed large new towns of the 1960s. In Belgium, a unique new town— Louvain-la Nueve—was established in 1972, 30 km south of Brussels in a rural surrounding and where intra-city movement of the people has

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been designed for the pedestrians and bicycle riders (Dutt 1992). Israel in the short span from 1948 to 1963 established 30 new towns, which in 1991 contained 675, 900 people. They have changed the urban system of Israel and its hierarchy of urban places (Efrat 1994: 237). Taiwan’s attempt to develop new towns on the British model was unimpressive because they could not attain economic self-sufficiency (Williams 1999). Dutt (1997a, b) points out that the concept of new towns is becoming obsolete because of prohibitive costs in building new settlements.

3.5

Regional Science

Both regional development and planning studies are components of multi-disciplinary regional science field. Economists and geographers constitute the main bulk of the regional scientists. Basically, regional science consists of two main perspectives, that of the body of literature and that of actual practice. The first of these is theoretical and is involved with the value of regional economic techniques and models for regional policy, while the latter is practical and consists of topics of geographical and economic diversity, all of which are compounded by marked differences in government structures, in social objectives, and in cultural values and traditions. (Atalik and Levent 1998: 330)

Geographers have made significant contributions in the field of regional science by studying and describing phenomena relating to linkages, networks, agglomeration, service demand, investment patterns, and application and through their critique of spatial models. Getis (1993), while introducing a special issue of the Papers in Regional Science devoted to mathematical models in geography, pointed out that it was “not unusual for an econometrician, policy analyst, geographer, civil engineer and computer systems analyst to be represented in a single issue of a journal” (p. 201). Though they are not all trained in Isard’s regional analysis methods, they are all interested in regional analysis. Odland and Shumway (1993) while investigating the timing of migration in an individual’s

life have constructed models in order to examine the “frequency of migration,” “duration of residence,” “duration of time,” and “timing of transitions.” They found that migration decisions were affected by both marital and employment status changes. Thomas (1993) constructed a multi-region disease model based on stimulated pathways of an influenza pandemic so that a “system may be applied” to estimate “epidemic warning times” and forecast an “incompletely unfolded HIV pandemic” (p. 278). Griffith and Csillag (1993) sought to build a common foundation for spatial statistics and geostatistics. They constructed equations from conditional autoregressive model of spatial statistics and found that “the theoretical spectral density function for simultaneous autoregressive model is a direct extension of that for conditional autoregressive model” (p. 283). The input–output model has been a subject of regional science analysis for the last four decades. In a debate concerning “Closure in Cole’s Leontief Model,” Jackson et al. (1997) note that Cole’s approach has conceptual and definitional deficiencies, while Cole castigates such criticism to be the result of “restrictive definition of input-output analysis in relation to other types of model”. Based on the application of matrix decomposition techniques, Jackson et al. (1989) recognized that from “the standpoint of gross measures of change, entropy decomposition is informationally superior to whole-system, unpartitioned methods” (p. 229). Aspects of economic geography have also been topics of regional science. There is a need for specialized knowledge to analyze producer services demand; “a myriad of other non-cost, quasi-cost, and cost-driven factors” are also important for the assessment of such demand (Beyers and Lindahl 1996: 372). Esparza and Krmenec (1996) refute the central place theory by empirical evidence with an examination of 547 establishments and “conclude that the ownership of establishments modifies both market structure and interaction in hierarchical markets” (p. 392). Some scholars assert that regional science is in a state of crisis as there is a lack of relevance,

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and excessive emphasis on elegance. Yet this science, which originated in the United States in the 1950s and pioneered by Walter Isard, has diffused all over the world. The Journal of Regional Science, one of many regional science journals had been a subject of a citation-based analysis published between 1968 and 1980 (Strathman 1992). Similarly, the contents of the Indian Journal of Regional Science have been analyzed for a three-decade period (1968–97) by Thakur and Dutt (2006). They found that economics and geography disciplines dominate regional science study in India. They noted several characteristics of Indian regional science including greater use of secondary data, lack of field work, a high proportion of descriptive analysis, bi-model concentration of research in Delhi and West Bengal in the early decades of the study which later diffused to other states, greater use of micro-regional data and elementary use of statistical and mathematical techniques. Many scholars and practitioners in the last two decades have resurrected the framework of regional economics, spatial economic analysis, and new economic geography within the overarching language and arguments of mainstream economics analyzing economic growth and development, structural change integrating spatial strategies for local and regional economic development policy and planning (Capello and Nijkamp 2009; Fingleton 2007.

3.6

Sustainable Development

Regional sustainability involves inter and intergenerational equity, meeting fundamental human needs and protecting and living within the natural carrying capacity of the environment (Krizek and Power 1996). Its goals also include social equity, economic prosperity, and ecological integrity of the region. A consensus must be built in the population in order to generate public acceptability to attain these goals and then steps can be taken to make the society sustainable (Fig. 3.2). The intellectual and philosophical origins of sustainable development are rooted in the

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Social Equity

Economic Prosperity

Ecological Integrity

Public Acceptability

Fig. 3.2 The new concept of sustainability

concepts derived from environmentalism, utopian thought, and political theory, emphasizing small-scale setting for decision-making and discouraging the use of advanced technology. As the assault on the natural environment increased, so did the concerns for environmental preservation. Sustainable development can be viewed as the most recent and most global of the humanistic responses to economically driven development (Costa and Noble 1999a, b). The first challenging effort to question the effects of continued economic growth was made by a group of MIT-based international researchers in 1970, which resulted in the publication of a 1972 Club of Rome Report—The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972; Krizek and Power 1996). The report pointed out that in the next hundred years, there will be a sudden decline of population and industrial output because of resource depletion and environment damage. Such a warning has been taken seriously by many. The President’s Council on Sustainable Development, launched by Clinton in 1993, produced a report—Sustainable America: A New Consensus in 1996. Clean air, clean water, and healthy environment were among its principal goals. Community-driven strategic planning and collaborative regional planning were recommended for achieving its

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goals (President’s Council on Sustainable Development 1996). Straussfogel (1997) used a non-ethnocentric approach to develop an alternative system of measuring development in a country that can then be used to make comparisons between countries. Her system measures institutional, ecological, human, and manufacture capital rather solely depending upon economic indicators such as per capita GNP as has been commonly used in the past. Incorporation of Strassfoglian indicators of capital may lead to more accurate indications of development, and therefore, to the creation of more effective and appropriate sustainable development programs. Sustainable development has been studied at both the micro- and macro-levels and in the theoretical and pragmatic contexts. Nijkamp et al. (1996), while analyzing planning issues for sustainable spatial development of the western part of the Netherlands (with Randstad as a core), used a causal path model for spatial mobility and sustainability. Their model, a blend of comprehensiveness and simplicity, showed that quality of life is lower in those regions where higher levels of private and public transport facilities occur and therefore, they recommended spatial concentration of the Randstad to avoid spilling over the growth-related problems in the adjacent green areas. Peet and Watts (1993) argue that the study of environment and development in the context of sustainability—should start with unraveling contradictions between society and the natural environment. Wilbanks (1994) correctly concludes that efforts toward sustainable development are destined to fail unless the over-population problem is addressed. Universal economic development, environmental stability, and freedom to make decisions cannot be achieved without curbs on population growth (Wilbanks 1994). Karan’s suggestions for a comprehensive approach to plan Bhutan’s mountain environment and the development of strategies for maintaining the stability of environment and cultural systems, especially in Asia, are essential to achieve the goals of sustainable development (Karan 1987, 1999). Harrill (1999) cautions that there is a need

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for a social ecological approach to urbanization because “sustainability becomes watered down under a system of trade-offs associated with international urban economics and politics” (p. 48). Sommers (1999) argues that urban sustainability requires a different approach to planning as environmental protection is required at the urban–rural fringe while there is also a need for nourishment of socio-economic fabric of the urban area. As our current urban growth patterns continue, much of our prime agricultural land will be irreversibly altered (Mookerjee and Pomeroy 1995), commuting times will become unbearable long, and the health of human populations and ecosystems will continue to be impacted. To alleviate this problem, effort to curb urban sprawl must be made as a part of regional planning. Starkie and Yosick (1996) advocated what they call Smart development in the United States. Smart development is a planned development strategy that is effective in curbing urban sprawl. The primary goal is to decrease automobile dependence. This is done through clustered development, provisions for convenient services within walking distance, decreased commute times for residents, and the allocation for alternative modes of transportation to decrease congestion. Smart development protects environmentally sensitive areas and limits sprawling development while preserving farmland, curbing suburban sprawl, and encouraging investment in distressed cities. Protection of wetlands and their related environment is an important aspect of sustainable ecology. In the United States, the Chesapeake Bay is a fragile environment that extends nearly 200 miles from Norfolk, Virginia at its mouth almost to the Pennsylvania line, near Havre de Grace, Maryland. The natural communities of the bay are being protected for future generations by exploring regional development and planning programs such as the Maryland Bay Critical Protection Act (Benhart 1995). Wetlands are protected and incorporated into the environmental program to arrest erosion and to promote flood control, groundwater recharge, improved water quality, and water treatment facilities.

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Wetlands have also been used to treat leachate from landfills and to mitigate and mine drainage (Benhart and Benhart 1998). Water pollution is largely the result of the negative impact of man on land and results from the destruction of wetlands, urbanization, poor infrastructure, industrialization, and overpopulation. Storm water management, wetland mitigation, vegetative shoreline buffers, shoreline stabilization, and reduced pollutant discharge are important regional development and land use planning preventive measures (Benhart 1995). Mass tourism, which developed widely after the introduction of jet aircraft in passenger transport, can and has caused environmental damage. The warm climate of the beautiful Caribbean islands has attracted thousands of tourists. This influx has brought the islands to the verge of an economic and environmental impasse and therefore, there is a need for a regional tourism development plan for the Caribbean (Humphreys 1999). Similarly, a unique cultural form—Shekhawati Painted Walls of Western India—has a potential for sizeable tourist attraction and in association with other attractions of this region, a guiding mechanism needs to be developed in order to prepare an appropriate strategy to ensure sustainable tourism development (Noble and Costa 1999). In the planning literature, recent studies at the interface of planning and sustainable development have addressed challenges and problems in implementation of sustainability principles in the realm of policy and planning on either side of the Atlantic since the greatest obstacle to sustainable development, according to many experts is the inadequacy of institutional frameworks. Sustainable development requires economic, financial, and fiscal decisions to be fully integrated with environmental and ecological decisions. Many researchers have addressed specific issues such as challenges in integration of planning, sustainable development and economic development strategies (Counsell and Haughton 2003), and problems of policy and implementation in UK (Batty 2006); problems in implementation and practice of sustainability in

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American planning (Staley 2006) as well as the interpretation of sustainable development in a regional planning arena in Western Sweden (Polk 2010). Supranational organizations, while better placed to integrate policy across sectors and better able to address economic and environmental “spillovers” from one country to another, have never acquired enough power to promote integrated, harmonized policies. The issue of operationalization of sustainable development that have prevailed in planning policy in recent years was visited by Carr (2015) who provides a valuable overview on “sustainability” through a special review issue in Planning, Theory and Practice journal. Becker (2015) points out the difficulties in translating European Union sustainability objectives in subnational contexts. In this special issue, McDonough’s (2015) case study turns to projects of urban transformation which addresses problems in the spatial planning practices of the rapid peripheral development of Madrid Airport, displaying concerns co-produced by a complex variety of public and private actors at the local, regional, national, and global scales. In the same issue, Hesse (2015) addresses the contradictions in density planning a paradigm of so-called good neighborhood and city planning that not only has deep roots in Europe, but is also continually taken up without reflection. In their entirety, the issue focuses on new fissures and caveats opened by current operationalizations of sustainable development. These issues and debates are common to human geography as well as urban and regional studies. Geographers, more recently, have also contributed through applied research to sustainable development broadly and urban sustainability in specific regions of the United States. Krueger and Buckingham (2012) examine three interrelated contemporary themes in the urban and regional development literature: economic regeneration, urban sustainability, and creative city planning. Concern for the environment, economy and socio-political dynamics has heightened through an examination of sustainability practices on the ground and in places. In this context, Gatrell, Jensen, Patterson and Hoalst-Pullen (2016)

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assemble a collection of work that presents alternate approaches or views to understanding urban environments and sustainable initiatives across the three domains of sustainable development at the local and regional scales. Gatrell et al’s (2016) diverse collection of work also provides an overview of a range of geospatial applications associated with environmental change and examples of local economic development in cities. Geographers and planners have also dealt with an increasing amount of research at the interface of sustainable communities and urban and regional development and planning (Amdam 2010; Batabyal and Nijkamp 2009; Grunewald et al. 2018). Specifically, the focus has been on a bottom-up approach through focus on “green metropolis” (Knaap and Lewis 2011), “green regionalism” (Beatley 2011), green cities (Grunewald et al. 2018), as well as landscape and open space planning and preservation (Pruetz 2012; Selman 2010). These researches have common denominators, that is, they capture, describe, and convey the current significance, values, and potentials of future research on regional planning practice and prospect within the context of sustainable development. While Selman (2010) focuses on landscapes planning practices in Europe, Pruetz’s Lasting Value (2012) uses a planner’s perspective to explore preservation planning practices in different parts of the United States (Thakur 2012). But both are concerned with the core of spatial planning—preservation, conservation, and sustainable development. Using the vantage point of bottom-up approach, Amdam (2010) builds up the conceptual notion of empowerment planning through extensive action research in regional development practice. As part of the post-2015 world, where the 17 sustainable development goals were adopted by world leaders, now this new vision of sustainable living environment for all has become the new baseline for integrated regional development and planning as well as sustainable urban management (Klopp and Petretta 2017).

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3.7

Regional Development in Eastern Europe

While in Western Europe the literature has focused on issues of integration, in Eastern Europe it has focused, at least in part, on issues of disintegration and economic transition. Concerns over regional inequality (covered earlier) and the difficulties of economic transition are in some areas coupled with nationality problems. In such cases, the economic environment has exacerbated problems in the political, and environmental realm, leading to the disintegration of states.

3.7.1 Disintegration of States A case in point involves the disintegration of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. To a degree, this change was a result of nearly a century of regional disparities which could not be overcome by a centralized political and planning bureaucracy (Pavlinek 1995; Smith 1996). It is interesting that, despite the breakup, regional disparities still exist. The difference is that such disparities are now primarily along urban and rural lines. The problem has lost the ready link to nationality and a new political breed of planners must not only figure out how their work has been transformed by the demise of socialism, but also how to deal with persistent issues of regional development (Hoffman 1994; Smith 1996). Tragically, the study of regional inequalities in, and planning responses to, such disparities in Yugoslavia has become a moot point. For Kaiser (1990) and Bogetic (1990), concerns over regional inequalities in Yugoslavia have been lost to the disintegration of the state. Even in Western Europe, regional issues of development which exist in conjunction with nationalist movements create an additional level of concern for public policymakers (Hitchens et al. 1992; Murphy 1993).

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3.7.2 Economic Transition In the wake of centralized planning and socialism in Eastern Europe, there is now capitalism and a mandate (directed or merely implied) for the decentralization of development authority. Within the countries of Eastern Europe, there is a need for the regionalization and restructuring not only of economies, but also of government. This is especially true in planning and regional development. With the demise of centralized planning and socialism, regional and local governments are working to establish a local presence which has previously been absent (Hoffman 1994; Pchelintsev 1992; Pleskovic 1992; Popov 1992; Popov and Trumbull 1992). These changes are made necessary by regional disparities which have intensified in the transition to capitalism (Smith 1996). There is urgency in this task due to the need to re-focus development in a manner in keeping with the demands of a capitalist economy. Key to this is the development of regional specializations and of cross-border linkages, which were downplayed under the socialist system (Pleskovic 1992). The problems facing these economies have been the subject of several books and special journal issues. ln 1992, Tijdschrift published a special issue on the problems of regions and regional planning in Central and Eastern Europe. The economies of the region are faced with problems of implementing regional/local planning and decentralizing government authority at a time when the need for such decentralization due to the demands of capitalism is most pressing. Berentsen (1992) points out that positive changes were already evident in East Germany. This is also dealt with in significant detail Tykkylainen’s Local and Regional Development During the 1990s Transition in Eastern Europe and Vasko’s Problems of Economic Transition. Although all three are becoming dated due to the rapidity of change in the region, they all point to profound changes not just in national politics and economics, but in the demands these changes place on planning and its practitioners.

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3.7.3 New Directions for Eastern Europe An international conference held at Warsaw in 2007 discussed major concerns with regional development in Eastern European countries. Some ongoing challenges included lack of competitiveness, regional polarization, peripheral regions and regional policy, and the reform of the European Union’s cohesion policy (Csuka 2008). Also, while certain challenges were internal (such as current levels of development, regional differentiation, etc.), others were external such as integration with the process of globalization and the EU. Concerns of innovation and growth were agreed upon by many geographers such as Philip Cooke, Andres Rodriguez-Pose, and Riccardo Crescenzi as still open issues. In countries such as the Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania, post-communist politics continues to influence regional development outcomes (Ferry 2003; McMaster 2006; Myant and Smith 2006; Nagy and Turnock 2000; Vofkori 2004). As a result, regional development disparities have been increasing moving regional policy and regionalization to the national agenda. Regional development agencies and institutions in Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic have found it difficult to keep up with the institutional changes required to grow through transition from conventional central planning process to the need for cross-border cooperation, development of rural and peripheral regions (Buzogany and Korkut 2013; Csomos 2012; Gajsek 2003; Krievina et al. 2015; Staniuliene and Dickute 2017). The future of regional development and planning in Eastern Europe is not so much about the shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism but more of an issue of how countries and regions navigate through the reversal of the wave of democratization and its replacement with new forms of authoritarianism. As a result, the new landscape of conflict associated with successive debt crisis, the refuge crisis, and Brexit is opening issues for regional development and planning calling the future of the EU itself into question (Waite 2018).

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3.8

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Spatial Inequality in Developing Countries

Regional inequality remains highly pronounced in developing countries, while the planning strategies continue to change due to several intra-national and global forces. Successful integration of “the external transfer” and the “internal marshaling” of resources (Jones 1998: 1) is likely to alter the pattern of development in spatial contexts. The literature reflects how geographers have analyzed spatial inequalities in the context of specific national or regional boundaries from the standpoint of an array of issues, conflicts, and the consequential debates on development and planning. However, what emerges in this recurring theme of research is the variability in the processes and patterns of development in concurrence with the dynamics of societal change in the individual countries or regions. Neither a universal theory of development, nor one specific to the developing countries has emerged. Most of the studies are either empirical or contextual in nature, analyzing the variations in development in specific countries or regions primarily from the perspective of national planning, fiscal policies, and foreign and domestic investment.

3.8.1 Regional Inequalities The Asian Scene: In the context of regional development and planning in Asia, the emerging importance of China during the last decade is underscored by the volume of studies focusing on disparities in regional development and associated factors in this country. Wei (1999) reviewed the current and emergent literature on the inequality in China. In general, literature on regional development in Socialist China reveals much disagreement among scholars on the temporal and spatial effects of government policies as well as the nature and patterns of developmental disparities in the country. Methodological problems, including differences in the geographic scales of observation, as well as the use of “diverse and incompatible

indicators” used in these studies are among the reasons for such disagreement (Wei and Ma 1996: 177–179; Wei 1998). Two studies on the inter-regional and inter-provincial inequality over the past decades, with per capita national income (NIP) (Wei and Ma 1996) and industrial output (Wei 1998) as the respective indicators, revealed that “Inequality may decline at one geographic scale but rise at another” (Wei and Ma 1996: 189). Whereas the inter-provincial inequality declined, the inter-regional inequality increased for both indicators, and the degree and patterns of the changes varied according to the scales and the indicators used. Spatial urban disparities in socio-economic factors also grew (Xie and Dutt 1991). During the 1980s, the eastern region of the country witnessed the greatest sectoral (occupational) shifts because of reforms, with significant decline in primary labor force and increased secondary sector (Wei and Dutt 1995). Along with the role of the national fiscal system in shaping regional equality issues, investment—both domestic and foreign—has also come under scrutiny as an important component in the assessment of regional patterns of growth and development. Several studies have acknowledged the crucial link between investment and regional development and have attempted to explore the determinants and the effects of foreign and domestic investment on development and spatial inequality (Leung 1996), focusing on the relationship between investment efficiency and development by different regions (Wei 1995; Xie and Dutt 1990). The spatial distribution of joint venture investments reflects one major locational consideration, convenience, leading to east coast locations (Xie and Dutt 1993). A micro-scale analysis of the geographical and sectoral characteristics of foreign manufacturing investment in the context of one coastal province, Guangdong (Leung 1996), also affirmed previous findings “that central locations [within the coastal region] are attractive to foreign ventures and that government policies and local capabilities are important to secure the benefits of foreign investment” (Leung 1996: 533).

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Also, in the context of Socialist China, the effect of government policies on broader demographic phenomena such as migration has also been investigated. The relaxed migration control policy during the post-Mao era, for example, was found to have exerted a profound effect on the developed and urbanized regions in the coastal locations for residential locational choices (Schmidt and Lee 1987). In addition, foreign investment and state investment variables were also revealed as significant determinants of inter-regional migration in China (Wei 1997). Thus, in Taiwan, the impact of government policies on regional disparity and the developmental projects and programs designed to create spatial parity have met with mixed success (Selya 1993; Williams 1988). In the South Asian region, the efficacy of the top down approach adopted by Pakistan has also met with mixed success. It has been suggested that community level programs emphasizing availability of information at the local level, communication, and involvement of local community in the planning process, are more likely to succeed in the socio-economic and resource development of the country (Siddiqi 1992; 1990). It is evident that the Green Revolution generated disparity in India between the more prosperous; Punjab and Haryana in the northwest and the poor east-Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Middle Ganges plain in the east (Dutt and Gieb 1999). The role of international cooperation and coordination of activities in stimulating economic growth and social progress frequently appear in the development literature. Hussey’s research (1991) on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) established in 1967, offers significant insight into the problems and prospects for development of interregional economic development and socio-cultural progress for the six nations of South East Asia, established in 1967. Also, much attention has been focused on the developmental pattern of the newly industrialized economies (NIEs) of Asia which tend to be accepted in some quarters as depicting a model of the “development state.” Douglass (1994) in a provocative essay, critically analyzes

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the strategic role played by the government in each country in “harnessing national and international forces” (1994: 544) to enhance development to a single privilege concern: economic growth (1994: 544). Given the political reality in most of the developing economies today, especially the values that are attached to the concept of development which implies both human and material achievements, it is doubtful that the NIE model can be emulated or even considered as a model for development. Globalization has impacted the Asian landscape with growth, but also with widening disparities in income, wealth, and opportunities and these have become the top concerns of policymakers in Asia. Bridging the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” is essential. Geographers, economists, and sociologists all agree that policymakers need sound advice on the detailed nature of the increase in spatial inequality. In recent decades several conceptual and empirical analysis on spatial inequality at different scales have been conducted (Ezcurra and Rodriguez-Pose 2013; Lessmann 2014; Li and Wei 2010; Liao and Wei 2015; Lobao and Saenz 2002; Spencer 2010; Sridharan 2011; Wei 2015, 2017; Zhuang et al. 2014). Spatial inequality has grave implications for urban and regional planning and hence is a matter of concern. Wei (2015) led a special issue on “spatial inequality” for the journal Applied Geography, where it was clearly demonstrated that inequality had gathered renewed focus among geographers. It was also clear that existing theories disagreed over temporal trends and underlying forces of regional inequality and spatiotemporal models have been favored by economic geographers. Overall, recent trends of rising inequality in developing Asia in the context of growth and globalization have raised questions of why inequality matters. In terms of policy implications, the question poses some common concerns which include that globalization through technological change and market-oriented reform have driven Asia’s rapid growth but have also had significant distributional consequences calling for the need for equalizing opportunities and thereby reducing inequality.

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The African and Latin American Patterns: Along with studies on the Asian nations, the patterns of regional development and regional disparities in the African and Latin American countries have also claimed a fair share in the geographic literature on regional development in recent years. Obudho’s (1988) edited volume, Regional Development Policies and Planning in Africa, a special issue of the Regional Development Dialogue, published by the United Nations Center for Regional Development, is a collection of eight provocative papers. His lucid discussion of the “Paradigm of top-down versus bottom-up planning,” although noted in the context of Africa, has significant implications for development across the developing world. In an analysis of Kenya’s national development planning and policy (Obudho 1988), a shift from centralized sectoral and project planning approach to a district-based planning unit shows clear trends toward a reduction of “inequalities and inefficient deployment of scarce resources” (1988). One outcome of this spatial strategy focusing on district-wise policy for rural development (DFPRD) is evidenced in rapid growth of smaller and intermediate size settlements away from the larger urban centers of Kenya. In the context of a study by Young (1988) on the “subnational regions of sub-Saharan Africa,” Mackenzie (1988) comments that “…the analysis of spatial dimension of processes of change must be grounded in theory,” and also underscores the importance of “a more profound understanding of social relations of production and reproduction as these intersect at scales ranging from local to the international” (1988: 25). Commenting on a study (El-Shakhs and Amirahmadi 1988), on “the urban system and its integrative potential in the Arab nations,” Mookherjee (1994) echoes similar concerns regarding theories and scales for better understanding of the development patterns. The planning strategies toward development during the post-independence period have, in fact, widened regional disparities as evidenced in household poverty in Ghana, a developing country with a colonial legacy of deprivation (Aryeetey-Attoh and Chatterjee 1988: 31).

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During the first two decades of this century, many geographers and planners displayed renewed interest with issues of spatial inequality and development in the context of Africa. In Ghana, Owusu (2005) studied the role of district capitals in regional development. In Tanzania, Mongula (2006) examined and analyzed the country’s shift from a comprehensive development planning to a decentralized planning in the wake of the surge of neoliberalism and concluded that the shift resulted in a simplified and more interactive planning, and lesser dependency on foreign aid than before, however, while growth happened under the new planning regime, this was not without serious trade-offs, particularly in terms of reduced priority to industrialization and economic nationalism. Other works have focused on Nigeria, where Madu (2006) studies regional inequality in socio-economic standards and confirms that geography is a significant determinant of socio-economic conditions. Aristide and Moundigbaye (2017), for example, demonstrate the impact of the Doba Oil Project on poverty displaying correlations between oil and regional development in Chad. These studies clearly indicate that embracing neoliberal ideologies blindly, without concern for balanced regional development, can present its own challenges. South Africa holds a unique position in the continent of Africa for bulk of the work on inequality and regional development emerge from this country for scholars tend to explore transformations through the apartheid years which needs unpacking. South Africa is the most unequal country in the world and its poverty is the enduring legacy of apartheid. This dominant thought is shared by many scholars (Maharaj 2011, 2015; Maharaj and Ramballi 1998; Rogerson and Nel 2016). While political transformation in South Africa has brought some growth, uneven geographical development is deeply entrenched with attendant challenges such as the presence of undocumented migrants. Thus, there is a continued need for spatial economic interventions in South Africa (Maharaj 2002; Naude and Krugell 2004; Nel and Rogerson 2009; Rogerson and Nel 2016). Overall, Africa

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needs rethinking of its spatial economic intervention issues given the recent unprecedented economic growth in some places and rising urbanization leading to continue the challenges of inequality and poverty. In the context of Latin America, Bromley’s thoughtful essay (1990) in reference to Hernando De Soto’s book, The Other Path, has considerable relevance to Latin America and many other developing economies. In addition, Wall’s (1993) analysis of the “trickle up models,” pursued by Sandanista post-Somoza Nicaragua, revealed that the endeavors had limited success: the policies “followed fairly typical socialist strategies” of economic development based on large-scale projects (1993: 11). This approach turned out to be a “trickle down” model for developmental planning. When Bolivia enacted legislation enabling decentralization and popular participation, dramatic positive changes occurred in the process of regional planning and development (Kent et al. 1998). When a planned country like Cuba makes a transition to a post-socialist economy, it not only faces structural barriers, impeding market mechanism, but the process also brings about “a great deal of demoralization of the workers” (Scarpaci 1998: 235–236). In recent years the literature on regional development and planning in Latin America (which includes the Caribbean region) demonstrates a renewed theoretical and empirical rigor in their analyses of the region and several very promising strands of research have emerged. Some researchers have responded to the forces of globalization and its impact on housing policy and markets taking a very composite view (Esfahani, Hewings and Facchini 2010; IADB 2012; Ward et al. 2014) while others explore urban transformations in the wake of unprecedented expansion of urban areas (Rodgers, Beall and Kanbur 2011). The influence of neoliberal reforms and policy have impacted not only urban development and transformations broadly, but also increased inequalities and led to change in the process of governance (Angotti 2017; Bishop 2013; Boano and Vergara-Perucich 2017; Lindert and Verkoren 2010; Ribeiro 2017; Suzuki

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et al. 2013). Some of the literature also focuses on macro and meso-level policy response reflecting on participative planning in regional development as a process while others examine issues of integration and economic development (Cardenas and Moreno 2004; Pugh and Potter 2003; Ramon-Berjano 2010; Saavedra-Rivano et al. 2001).

3.8.2 Urban–Rural Development Most countries in the developing world display a low level of urbanization in consonance with their low level of industrialization and economic development. However, over the past quarter of a century, urbanization trends in the developing world have begun to sound some alarming notes. According to the United Nations report, the level of urbanization in the less developed countries of the world is estimated to increase from 27 percent in 1975 to 41 percent in 2000 and is projected to rise to 57 percent by the year 2025 (An Urbanizing World: Global Report on Human Settlement 1996: 447). Regional variations notwithstanding, the role of two basic factors of growth, natural increase, and rural to urban migration, have been well-established in the literature (see, e.g., Harris et al. 1984). Stewart’s (1996) excellent analysis of the dominant features of African urbanization points to the continual development of primate cities and rural–urban imbalance, a significant indicator of “Bias in economic development and planning during post-colonial phases…” (1996: 256). Africa’s share of world’s poor is expected to rise because the effects upon it of globalization of the world economy will remain at a minimal level (Stewart 1996). Developmental planning issues in the context of rural areas have been addressed by researchers in various contexts, usually within the broader developmental framework or in course of discussion on urban policy issues. In Southeast Asia, Dutt’s study (1997a, b) of the development of Vietnamese agriculture in the national planning framework, and Leinbach and Watkins’ (1998) research on Indonesia’s transmigration

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program in strengthening rural development, are noteworthy. A case study of the unique characteristics of development and planning of Sri Lanka (Corey 1987) reveals that while the low and stable urbanization of the island country has much to do with its low level of economic development, the government policies of rural development—experimental, sectoral, and project planningoriented— albeit somewhat serendipitously, have also helped urban deconcentration in Sri Lanka. Historically, apartheid had important consequences in spatial development in Africa. Weiner (1988) noted that “Zimbabwe’s agricultural strategy has stimulated growth but increased inequality” during the post-apartheid era. Rural planning for the longer-term goal of “sustainable growth with equity” would require reorganization of the current farming system, instituting “scale down” white farming, and facilitating access to better quality land for the African farmer (1988: 493). Samatar’s research (1993) on the banana industry in Somalia refutes the basic thesis of structural adjustment programs as a “macroeconomic” tool promoting development. He contends that the liberalization of economy and structural adjustment stimulated economic growth deepened inequality and poverty. Scholarship addressing issues of urban–rural development continue within the context of a world where over 4 billion people, that is, more than half of the global population now lives in cities. Cities continue to generate productivity and can contribute to sustainable growth if the same is managed well, allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge (Dudwick et al. 2011; Tacoli 2006; World Bank 2018). In China, this has meant an investigation and examination of urban–rural transformation (Liu et al. 2016; Wang et al. 2016). Cutting edge investigation of interrelationships between rural landscapes and the linkages between nature, technology, and production and consumption of rural resources is a major highlight of the literature (Akgun et al. 2015; Mayer et al. 2018; Piro and Ganser 2012). In the post-2015 development landscape

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geographic studies at the intersection of the urban and rural will continue to grow as the concern for the environment has heightened particularly through the lens of sustainable development.

3.9

Research Agenda in the New Millennium

The regional development research forum is multifaceted, and thus it offers scholars a variety of research opportunities. We have recorded some of our significant contributions in an earlier publication (Bromley et al. 1989). As evident from the preceding review, the contributions by scholars during the last three decades have been extensive and significant. The combined effects of many forces, both internal and external—such as global economic restructuring, regional cooperation, and co-ordination of developmental activities—all reveal a variety of paths for achieving developmental objectives. “If development means anything in this new context, it is the analysis of alternate modes of adaptation by nations and other collective actors to broader structures which condition and constrain their options” for forces “tend to reproduce similar structures at quite different levels of industrialization [and urbanization]” (Portes 1989: 500– 501 as cited in Peattie: 1995: 399). To foster our understanding of the complex process of urban and regional planning and development, we offer the following research agenda.

3.9.1 Comparative Studies Detailed comparative studies on a variety of scales would enable us to identify the developmental and planning elements and the nature of their linkages. The outcome of such research endeavors would provide fresh insights on complementary and analytical perspectives, both within the regions of the developing countries and between the developed and developing countries (Lawson and Klak 1993: 1073). Several recent studies have laid the foundation for

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such research. Browder et al. (1995), based on their household surveys of Bangkok, Jakarta, and Santiago, recommended that planners must develop unique approaches to development planning to metropolitan fringe areas. Pomeroy and Dutt (1998) demonstrate how, despite their differences in institutional structures and developmental philosophies, China and India, the two most populous countries of the world, can lower their respective fertility rates. Public planning approaches in the United States and Finland have been scrutinized in order to unravel the differences between the highly centralized Finnish system and the de-prohibited centralized system in the United States (Palomaki et al. 1998). Also, the historical pattern of evolution of city structures and locational features in India and China is the subject of research by Dutt et al. (1994). As countries and regions emerge from one form of governance to another whether in Eastern Europe or western, they face profound challenges for the integration of planning, sustainable development, and economic development strategies at different scales. Nagy and Turnock (2000) provide a comparative overview by studying Hungary and Romania’s shift from conventional regional planning to cross-border cooperation. In a similar vein, Counsell and Haughton (2003) examine how tensions are emerging in respect of efforts to provide employment sites for large-scale inward investments, using the contrasting experiences of the South East and North East England during the period 1997–2001. Spatial transformations have been witnessed in the global north and south as a result of dramatic changes in the economic landscape. Almandoz (2016) was encouraged to review the framework of regional and national planning in Brazil and Venezuela. Similarly, planning strategies and practices in the non-core regions of Europe (Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal) have been examined beyond the growth paradigm (Leick and Lang 2018). High-technology-led spatial planning is a feature in places as diverse as Taiwan and Netherlands. Huang and Fernandez-Maldonado (2016) address the relationship between spatial planning system

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and high-tech development, searching to explain the spatial implications resulting from this relationship. There is growing and continuous scope in comparative studies for regional development and planning in terms of geographical scale, sectoral composition, and causal dynamics.

3.9.2 Feminism and Women’s Issues Women’s studies and feminism are important social issues today, and thus an important aspect of development and planning studies. Hendler (1994) argues that feminist ethics intersect non-native planning theory, the use of value neutral techniques, administration, plan components, and everyday decisions and dilemmas. Women not only can affect their future through participation in planning mechanism, but also by participating in drafting legislation for comprehensive plans (Marston and SaintGermain 1991). The scarcity of gender studies in the developmental planning subfield, especially in the context of developing countries, is evident in the literature. As a result, our understanding of women’s role has largely remained unexplored. The traditional role of women in society has shifted, and geographers face new challenges in their assessment of women’s participation and activism in the socio-political arena and their influence in shaping different dimensions of development, such as socio-spatial equity. Indeed, such research studies are urgently needed to foster our understanding features of both developed and less developed societies. Marjoram (1997) aptly noted: The integration of women’s …. knowledge [in research and studies] into development planning is important as development projects involving modern science and technology need to build upon traditional knowledge and skills to promote compatibility and sustainability (1997: 7).

It is crucial that “Women’s voices…enter the definition of development and the making of policy choices” (Sen and Grown 1987: 82, as cited in Moser and Peake 1995: 281).

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3.9.3 Environment: Issues and Concerns The adverse impacts of development, from pollution, sewage, and solid waste disposal problems to industrial and natural hazards, are too frequently witnessed both in the natural and built environments. Yet, these research concerns have received limited attention from geographers. A few studies, Zurick’s (1995) regional analysis of environmental problems of the South Pacific, Ridgley’s (1989) evaluation of water supply and sanitation options of Cali, Columbia, Karan’s (1994) research on environmental movements in India, and Mookherjee and Hoerauf’s (1999) study of urban hazard perception of Bhopal, India, illustrate such research efforts. Since a high pace of urbanization is inevitable (McGee 1994) and “irreversible” in the developing regions, it is crucial to add an environment component to our research agenda. Concerns such as environmental management and education, citizen participation and perception must be integrated into research in the development planning and policy arenas.

3.9.4 Emerging Planning Techniques By the 1990s with the widespread use of computers in planning, large-scale urban land use/transportation models are being applied to project the future. Increasingly planning agencies are also using Geographic Information Services (GIS) for management tasks, maintaining land-related information and preparation of maps (Klosterman 1999). In addition to its use as a visualization tool for census tract-based population maps and peak traffic loads for roads, GIS can show existing and proposed land use patterns. Planners have also developed Planning Support Systems (PSS) in order to combine GIS with other computer-based software. This process has also made use of the Internet. Such a combination has created (1) an array of spatially-referenced GIS, textual, graphic and visual information with (2) a broad range

of computer-based models and methods for determining the implications of alternative policy choices and assumptions about the present and the future, and (3) different visualization tools for displaying the model results with charts, maps, and interactive video and sound displays (Klosterman 1999).

PSS, largely concerned with design and simulation of strategic planning, not only can generate different maps in conjunction with GIS, but the overlay capability of the latter can be used to portray relevant variables attained by the work of the former (Harris and Batty 1993). Images obtained from satellites (known as remote sensing) have been combined with GIS to produce the most up-to-date land use maps for regional and metropolitan planning purposes. Remote sense has also been used for regional analysis and to ascertain comparative temporal changes. Using a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), it has been found that the humid Lower Ganges Plain region in India remains green with vegetation about eight months of a year in contrast to only five months in the dry Upper Ganges plain (Venugopal and Dutt 1997). Thus, with additional sophistication of techniques, planners and regional development analysts will continue to benefit from these advances in technology. A further increase of research in these fields is expected in the new millennium.

3.9.5 Mega-Event Planning While, recreation, tourism, and sports are multidisciplinary areas of study and geographers have been at the forefront of research in these arenas, specific focus for some geographers has shifted, however, into the theme of ‘mega-event planning’ (Andersen and Matthiessen 1995; Essex and Chalkley 2004; Gaffney 2010; Leonardsen 2007; Maharaj 2011, 2015; Nobre 2017; Oliver and Lauermann 2017; Poynter et al. 2015; Stewart and Rayner 2016). For cities and regions to compete for mega-events is a matter of superior economic performance, while their less competitive counterparts experience poorer economic growth. Many of the studies focused on planning mega-event legacies, others conceptualized and

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developed frameworks of understanding within urban development agendas (Kassens-Noor et al. 2015; Leonardsen 2007; Stewart and Rayner 2016). To summarize research on “mega-event planning,” that is, whether the event is in South Africa, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, or a question of hosting winter Olympics or for that matter International Olympics, the discourse of urban and regional planning is wrapped around infrastructure development projects, its strategic planning, justification of redevelopment and enhancement, attraction and promotion of tourism, and creation of new images of host cities. Research on the development and planning of mega-events has been fragmented rather than integrative. However, given that consumption, place and identity are interrelated, the commodification of mega-events will continue to lure places and regions calling for research which is more rigorous in methodologies and approaches.

3.9.6 Post-2015 Landscape of Urban and Regional Development Sustainable development and resilience have re-emerged as one of the central issues of the new millennium, especially as it has become apparent from the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda (United Nations 2018), Paris Agreement of 2016, and the New Urban Agenda (NUA) emerging from The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development held in Quito, Ecuador that it is imperative to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all (UN-Habitat 2016). This is also significant as we have understood that human activities are transforming nature at a global scale in both systemic and cumulative ways. The conference and its deliberations have signaled a renewed interest among policymakers worldwide to address social, economic, and environmental issues at the urban scale. Intellectually, geographers and planners are well positioned to contribute to sustainable development research contributing through strategies, economic development plans,

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developing tools (monitoring and evaluation), as well as policy formation (Alibasic 2018; Asgary 2018; Fabbro 2015). The ability of geographers to translate across disciplines and scales and to work with a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods can allow them to provide intellectual leadership.

3.9.7 Multidisciplinary Approaches There remains a need for an agenda for multidisciplinary approaches in regional development and planning studies. A multidisciplinary approach would facilitate our understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of development in spatial contexts. Both regional development and planning need to be looked upon not only from a spatial point of view, but as well as from an economic, political, sociological, historical, and legal points of view. The wisdom of this approach has been advocated by many scholars from a variety of disciplines (Tait 1986: 441; Pugh 1995: 395; Peattie 1995; Apthorpe 1983). It is generally agreed that a “multi-focal” research approach in the case study framework would yield valuable insights. Geographers’ time-tested skills in utilizing a multidisciplinary approach would provide fresh input to the enrichment of the literature in the fields of regional development and planning.

3.9.8 Globalization: A World Region New patterns of economic development, exchange of information, and many cultural features are being homogenized at such a great pace that a single world-region is in the process of making. The topic of globalization has been an active field of study for scholars interested in business and economics. Recently, geographers have also started to make contributions in this field. And as the millennium begins, more will join. Since the early 1970s, there has been a progressive relaxation of barriers in capital mobility on an international scale (Cusak 1999; Knox

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1997). This has resulted in a remarkable shift in the amount of global economic activity, which has become transnational in scope (Knox 1997; Sykora 1994). This trend further points out that the globalization phenomenon has given rise to two distinct patterns of regionalism, formation of multinational and subnational regions (Cusak 1999). In order to meet the challenge of globalization, a scheme for development of a subnational region has been devised by Cusak (1999) based on analysis, strategy, and action. Knowledge and knowledge-based institutions form the core of regions that constitute the most competitive at the global level. These regions affect as well as are affected by globalization processes. (We designate them as Regional Globalization.) Such regions stimulate innovation and provide the most reliable source of skilled workers (Rondinelli 1999). Thus, these regions evolve with “agile manufacturing” which can compete in the global environment and to adjust to both anticipated and unanticipated changes (Kasada and Rondinelli 1998). To meet the challenge of globalization, an internationally competitive development strategy needs to be devised for the American cities. The components of the strategy include (a) improvement and leverage of education to increase work-force productivity and attract investment, (b) improvement of quality of living conditions, (c) development of strong entrepreneurial and technological capacities, (d) enhancement of civic leadership and community action, (e) creation of new forms of metropolitan cooperation, and (f) integration of inter-city poor into the urban economy (Rondinelli et al. 1998).

3.10

Conclusion

Geographers have adopted a multi-scale approach in their effort to study the complexities of the multi-dimensional field of regional development, making the research scope rather elastic and portraying the divergent interests of the researchers. Such an approach has provided us with ample opportunities to sort out the nature of not only the individual elements, but also the commonalties and differences among the interlinked elements,

related to development planning sets of social, institutional, and/or natural environment. Though geographer’s contributions in development and planning theories are limited, they have formulated models and concepts in the field of regional science. Geographers’ repertoire of integrative skills and strategies enables them to explore the many intricacies inherent in the development and planning phenomena as manifested in spatial contexts. We believe that the same integrative focus will serve us well in targeting the important themes that have emerged and those that will evolve in our research agenda in the new millennium. Acknowledgements This chapter represents significant re-writing of an earlier version by Dutt, Mookherjee, Sommers, and Benhart in 1999. The authors reviewed an enormous amount of published literature from geography and related spatial sciences. Substantial editing occurred, and new material has been added to reflect recent developments in the last few decades. Even though every care was taken to do justice in including relevant new publications, we apologize if we missed what may be considered more relevant by readers.

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Part II Planning Perspective

4

Four Decades of Urban and Regional Development and Planning in China Xueliang Zhang, Yichun Xie and Lixia Li

Abstract

In the last 40 years, China has made significant achievements in economic development and in urbanization as well. During 1978–2013, China witnessed an average annual economic growth (9.8%) and grew into the second largest economy in the world. Along with the rapid economic growth, China experienced a fast urbanization process though it started with a very low urbanization level. Urban population increased from 170 million to 730 million, while the rate of urbanization increased from 17.9% to 53.7%. Through these dramatic transformations, the governments at all levels played an important role, altering their function from centralized planning and direct intervention to a market dominant infrastructure. China was a giant laboratory, where various economic, social, and cultural reforms and policies were implemented at many spatial scales (the nation, region, and city). At the city level, in addition to the national economic and social development planning, town and village planning, land-use planning, eco-environmental

X. Zhang
L. Li School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, P.R. China Y. Xie (&) Institute for Geospatial Research and Education, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

protection planning, and many other local planning policies coexisted. In general, urban and regional planning in China aimed at the growth expansion plans. However, during the past forty years, local governments often used planning as “a competition apparatus for growth”, and adjusted planning to target economic growth sought by governments. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review and analysis of urban and regional development in China over the past 40 years, assessing the impact and effectiveness of various urban and regional planning policies at three scales: the nation, region, and city. Based on the aforementioned analysis and assessment, we hope to shed light on how urban and regional planning in China can be restructured to suit changing needs, that is, stimulating sustainable economic growth rather than simple economic target, inspiring multifaceted social and cultural development instead of sole economic growth, transitioning to market oriented advisory planning from traditionally centralized planning, focusing on multiple-goal planning instead of single goal planning, and accelerating public participation and promoting shared consensus. Keywords










Big data China Control planning Five-Year plan Growth planning Regional economic development Shanghai master plan Urban and regional development and planning Urbanization in china
















© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_4

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4.1

X. Zhang et al.

Introduction

In the recent 40 years, China has made significant achievements in economic development and in urbanization as well. During 1978–2013, China witnessed an average annual economic growth 9.8% and grew into the second largest economy in the world. Along with the rapid economic growth, China experienced a fast urbanization process though it started with a very low urbanization level. Urban population increased from 170 million to 730 million while the urbanization rate from 17.9% to 53.7%. In these dramatic transformations, the Governments at all levels played an important role. They also altered their functions from the centralized planning and direct intervention to a market dominant infrastructure. During this unprecedented transition period, the 9.6 million square kilometers of China was a giant laboratory, where various economic, social, and cultural reforms and policies were tested. These experiments took place at many spatial scales (the nation, region, and city). Take urban and regional planning as an example. At the city level, in addition to the national economic and social development planning, town and village planning, land-use planning, eco-environmental protection planning, and many other local planning policies coexisted. In general, urban and regional planning in China aimed at the growth expansion plans. However, during the past forty years, local governments often used the planning as “a competition apparatus for growth”, and adjusted the planning to target economic growth sought by local and regional governments. As a result, many cities were continuingly expanding the urban boundaries, annexing adjacent towns and villages, and even leading to vicious competitions among them. Consequently, this disorderly urban growth impaired urban comprehensive carrying capacity and sustainable development. In this chapter, we will introduce the progress of regional development and urban growth in Sect. 4.1; describe the development and composition of China’s urban and regional planning in Sect. 4.2; analyze the characteristics and methods of China’s urban and regional planning in

Sect. 4.3; and present a case study: urban development and planning in Shanghai and summarize our findings in the final section.

4.2

The Progress of Regional Development and Urban Growth in China

4.2.1 Regional Pattern and Regional Economic Development in China Since the reform and opening-up, China’s regional pattern of economic development has evolved from “belts” into “blocks” along with the constant adjustment of the country’s focus and strategy for regional development. At the same time, city clusters with geographical proximity, cultural affinity, and closely interconnected transportation system are emerging as the major form of regional economic agglomeration as the spatial scale of economic growth gradually breaks the traditional boundary of provincedominated administrative spatial unit.

4.2.1.1 The Transition of China’s Regional Pattern from “Belts” to “Blocks” At the beginning of the reform and opening-up, China implemented the Strategy of Actively Supporting the Eastern Region in Taking the Lead in Development in order that the eastern region with its location advantage would take the lead in economic development. This strategy did bring about rapid economic development in the eastern region, but widened the gap between the eastern and other regions. To narrow the gap between the regions, the central government of China, since the 9th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development released in 1996, has enacted a series of new policies, including the Strategy for the Large-scale Development of the Western Region that was initiated in 1999, the Strategy of Comprehensively Revitalizing Old Industrial Centers such as the Northeast in 2003, and the Strategy of Promoting the Rise of the Central Region in 2006

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(Zhang 2012). The three policies together with the Strategy of Actively Supporting the Eastern Region in Taking the Lead in Development have formed the “four pillars” of China’s regional development (Fig. 4.1 illustrates the spatial pattern of China’s regional economic development since the reform and opening-up). Since the 11th Five-Year Plan, the focus of China’s regional development has been constantly adjusted. Chinese planners changed the traditional idea of regional development by the “three belts” of the eastern region, the central region, and the western region. “We no longer limited our policy framework to the simple four strategies of the Eastern Region Taking Lead in Development, the Rise of the Central Region, the Large-scale Development of the Western Region, and the Revitalization of the Old Industrial Bases such as the Northeast. Instead, we started promoting a national strategy to make planning by the “blocks” of areas or the “clusters” of cities. We will promote city clusters as the major form of urbanization and gradually develop an efficient, balanced, and sustainable spatial pattern of urbanization which comprises several major city

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clusters and other cities and small towns which are spottily distributed, separated by permanent basic farmlands and ecological function areas, with the coastal regions and the Beijing– Guangzhou–Harbin railway as vertical axis and the Yangtze River and Longhai railway as the horizontal axis,” the 11th Five-Year Plan of China stated explicitly. “We will carry out urbanization actively yet prudently and continue to pursue a path of urbanization with Chinese characteristics; we will abide by the objective law of urban development, gradually create city clusters with a radiation effect anchored by large cities and with small and medium sized cities as their focus, and promote the balanced development of large, medium, and small sized cities and towns,” the 12th Five-Year Plan went further. According to the different regional conditions, the central Chinese government ratified many key development areas, including the Tianjin Binhai New Area, the Beibu Gulf Economic Zone, and the Chengdu-Chongqing Economic Zone, followed by the Western Taiwan Straits Economic Zone, the Jiangsu Coastal Economic Zone, the Guanzhong-Tianshui Economic Zone,

Rise of the Central Region From East to West

West

Strategy& Policy

From Imbalanced Development to Relatively Coordinated Development

Time& Sequence

Revitalization of the Old Industrial Bases such as the Northeast

From Central to Marginal and to Peripheral

Large-Scale development of the Western Region

Open up Riverine and Borderline Provincial Capitals

Open up Coastal Cities

Pudong New Area

Shenzhen Special Economic Zone

Central Areas as First Mover

Pearl River Delta

Marginal Areas as Follower

Yangtze River Delta

Pan-Pearl

River

Peripheral Areas as Cooperator

Circum-BohaiSea Region

Pan-Yangtze River Delta

From South to North

The Eastern Region Takes Lead in Development

Jing-Jin-Tang Area

Binhai New Area

Geography& Location

Fig. 4.1 Spatial pattern of china’s regional economic development since the reform and opening-up (Zhang 2013)

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Fig. 4.2 Distribution of national city clusters in China (Li et al. 2017)

and the Industrial Transfer Demonstration Zone of the Wanjiang City Belt which were ratified since 2009. China has so far released over 50 guidance planning documents and related plans on the balanced regional development. This new urban growth strategy led to the transition of economic regions from “belts” to “blocks” and the formation of several large city clusters based on central cities, as Fig. 4.2 shows (Zhang 2013).

4.2.1.2 The Transition of China’s Regional Economy from Province-Based to City Cluster-Based For the convenience of administration and management, the spatial form of China’s regional economy has remained province-based, which is, however, highly imbalanced. Take the developed provinces, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, as example. Comparatively, the southern Jiangsu province and the northern Zhejiang province are developed. However, the northern Jiangsu province and the southwestern Zhejiang province are less developed (Zhang 2013). Moreover, in terms of economic agglomeration, certain city clusters

have boasted with the characteristic of similar natural environment, convenient transportation system, and long-term economic linkage. In this case, the long established urban hierarchical bond has been much apparent than the administrative structure of a province in the context of the spatial unit for economic aggregation. The economic interaction between cities in a city cluster can sometimes be much stronger than that between cities within the same province. The city clusters in the Yangtze River Delta and the Circum-Bohai-Sea Region, for example, have transcended municipal and provincial boundaries. In 2013, the output of the top 10 largest city clusters in China, with a land area of 14.68% of the national land area and a population of 46.93% of the national population, accounted for 69.60% of the gross regional product, making city clusters the major centers of population, industrial and economic activities (Zhang 2013). Obviously, city cluster has emerged as the major spatial unit of competition in China, promoting the transition of China’s regional economy from a province-based one into a city cluster-based one. Table 4.1 is a list of indicators such as

40667.97

37113.24

25342.55

24035.6

21600.43

21209.21

19981.49

Chengdu-Chongqing

Shandong Peninsula

Central-and-southern Liaoning

Western Taiwan straits

Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan

Harbin-Changchun

Central Henan

60689.42

57650.02

Pearl river delta

130853.61

Yangtze river delta

Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei

GDP (100 million yuan)

Name (City cluster)

4218.5

3896.65

4077.7

3774

3345.5

4451.2

9704

5715.3

8824.5

15852.5

Permanent resident population (10,000)

72.37

97.37

72.97

79.4

86.64

93.63

84.21

128.46

184.7

115.53

Tertiary industry/ seconhary industry (by total output)

45.79

55.92

48.12

57.09

67.87

57.77

45.35

82.72

59.95

65

Urban (%)

23187.91

24440.28

24019.37

30709.34

26854.51

32125.07

23992.23

39106.82

28587.79

35400.55

Urban disposable income per capita (yuan)

Table 4.1 Basic statistics on top 10 largest city clusters in China (Source China City Statistical Yearbook 2015)

39800.97

25128.59

28388.94

38405.32

43061.83

83295.89

51901.14

98026.2

84504.01

239295.5

Total output value of over scale industry (100 million yuan)

529.53

454.72

200.28

1688.84

1084.55

2252.97

1324.73

10474.31

6031.54

13279.70

Total import and export volume (100 million dollar)

4 Four Decades of Urban and Regional Development … 65

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permanent resident population, GDP and industrial structure of the top 10 largest city clusters in China in 2014 (by GDP).

4.2.2 The Process of Urbanization in China Since the reform and opening-up in 1978, the central government of China has lifted the limit on the development of large cities, which resulted in China’s rapid urbanization. The process of urbanization in China in this period fell into two phases: the first phase lasting from the beginning of the reform and opening-up (1978) to the late 1990s, and the second one from the late 1990s to the present day. It was in the second phase that China created an economic growth miracle through urbanization. Specifically, it only took China three decades starting from 1985, three times faster than the developed counties, to raise its rate of urbanization by 27%.

4.2.2.1 The First Phase: From the Beginning of the Reform and Opening-up (1978) to the Late 1990s The first phase of China’s urbanization was between the beginning of the reform and opening-up (1978) and the late 1990s. The strategy for urbanization carried out by Chinese government during this phase was to “strictly control the size of large cities, rationally develop small and medium-sized cities, and actively develop small towns” as well as gradually lift the limit on rural–urban migration. In this phase, the average annual growth rate of urbanization in China hit 0.7%, which marked the rapid growth period of China’s urbanization. The main features of China’s urbanization in this phase were as follows. Firstly, the development of large cities was limited. Although the number of large cities (defined by a population of or over 500,000) doubled, with their population two-and-one-half times as large as it had been (Wang 2010), the growth of these cities in number and population was however much

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slower than those of small and medium-sized cities (defined as those with a population below 500,000). Consequently, cities around China were scaled-down, with average urban population reducing from 400,000 to 300,000. Secondly, small and medium-sized cities as well as small towns rapidly increased in number. The number of small and medium-sized cities rose from 153 in 1978 to 583 in 1998 because of the policy incentives that supported the development of these cities as well as small towns, opened China’s market to the outside world, and gradually relaxed the rural–urban migration. Moreover, the number of small towns jumped from 2,000 in 1979 to 18,000 in 1996 because of the policy incentive of upgrading villages into small towns. As a result, the total town population grew from an approximate 100 million to up to 160 million. China’s small towns, nevertheless, witnessed a significant decrease in average size, with the average town population down from 40,000 to below 9,000 (Wang 2010). Thirdly, a pattern of the eastern coastal cities and areas taking the lead in development was formed. In 1984, the State Council approved 14 coastal cities, including Dalian, Qinhuangdao, Tianjin, Yantai, Qingdao, Lianyungang, Nantong, Shanghai, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Zhanjiang, and Beihai, as the first batch of cites open to the outside world. In the following year of 1985, the State Council approved three coastal areas—the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Xiamen-ZhangzhouQuanzhou as the first batch of coastal areas open to the outside world. The boom of small and medium-sized cities as well as small towns, in the two decades in question, raised China’s urbanization rate by 15% and up to 33.3% by 1998.

4.2.2.2 The Second Phase: From the Late 1990s to the Present Day The second phase of China’s urbanization lasts from the late 1990s to the present day. The major features of China’s strategy for urbanization in this phase include the lift of limit on the development of large cities, the implementation of a

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new policy for the balanced development of large, medium-sized, and small cities as well as small towns in 2001, and the emergence of city clusters as the main carrier of urbanization. It has been collectively made clear by the 11th Five-Year Plan, the 12th Five-Year Plan, and the 13th Five-Year Plan as well as the National Plan on New Urbanization that city clusters will be promoted as the major form of urbanization. City clusters, furthermore, have been identified as the key and optimal areas for development in the Plan on Main National Functional Areas. In this phase, the average annual growth rate of China’s urbanization has remained above one percentage point, which marks the accelerated growth period of China’s urbanization. One of the major features of China’s urbanization in this phase is the accelerated development of large and medium-sized cities. China’s urbanization has entered a phase of more balanced development when the number of cities at and above county level has risen to 660 or so. From 1996 to 2015, town population has increased from 373 million to 771 million, with the rate of urbanization rising from 30.5% to 56.1%. The rapid urbanization has made China’s economy into the top gear and turned the uncontrolled expansion of the number and size of cities into the substantial growth of urban population and economic development.

4.3

The Development and Composition of China’s Urban and Regional Planning

Over the course of more than 40 years since the reform and opening-up, multiple plans released by the Chinese government have played an important role, both as the guidance for national economy and social development and as the prevention of imbalanced development of national land, extensive utilization of resources, and disruption of ecological environment. China’s planning system comprises both development planning and spatial planning and has gone through many years of experiment and improvement. Consequently, China’s

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administrative structure encourages interaction and cooperation between the development planning and the spatial planning so that a spatial planning mechanism is adaptable to the market economy, for the best coordination of different plans, and for the adherence to the philosophy, formulation, method, and practice of China’s urban and regional planning. Therefore, China’s administrative structure has greatly contributed to a planning system that is scientific, democratic, and legal. Figure 4.3 shows the relation between the development planning and spatial planning in China.

4.3.1 The Development Planning System in China 4.3.1.1 The Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development The Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (hereinafter referred to as The Plan), formulated by the National Reform and Development Commission (hereinafter referred to as NRDC) every five year, is the most official China’s plan for national economy concerning major national construction projects, the distribution layout of productive forces and the proportion of national economy as well as the target and direction of long-term national economic development. Starting with the first Plan formulated in 1953, there are thirteen Five-Year Plans in total. The early five Five-Year Plans formulated before 1980 mainly aimed at setting the targets for economic development and arranging the tasks for industrial and agricultural production. Those plans, carried out mainly through the executive orders from the government, were a product of planned economy. China made a major adjustment of the nature and function of its Five-Year Plan starting with the 6th Five-Year Plan in 1981 to support the economic reform and opening-up. The Five-Year Plans since then served as a macroeconomic regulation and control with the purpose of creating a fair environment for market competition and making up for the shortcomings of social

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X. Zhang et al. Implementation in Particular Fields Implementation in Particular Fields Plan for major national construction projects, distribution of productive forces and proportions of national economy, and set targets and direction for the long-term development of national economy

Five-Year Plan for National Economy and Social Developm ent

Development Planning System

Guide Spatial Planning

Implement Developme nt Planning on the Basis of Spatial Planning

Spatial Planning System

Guide the development of key fields so as to optimize the spatial arrangement for economic and social activities

Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development

Regional Planning for National Economy and Social Development

Development and Reform Commission

Urban Planning

Orient urban development and the pattern of land utilization; serve as a basis for the detailed arrangement in specific urban plans

Ministry of Land and Resources

National Land Planning

Guide and control activities concerning the development, protection and renovation of national space

Specification of the overall plan for economic and social development in particular fields

Function

Specialized Planning for National Planning and Social Development

The State Council and People's Governme at and above Prefecture level

Departments in Charge

Land Utilization Plannning

Adjust or arrange the structure and pattern of different types of lands

Function

Control

Fig. 4.3 The relation between development planning and spatial planning in China (made by author)

development and ecological construction. The name of the Five-Year program was changed into “guideline” instead of “plan” (in Mandarin Chinese) starting with the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010). Besides that, the Plan was further oriented to promote comprehensive, balanced, and sustainable economic and social development. The 11th Plan expounded on the strategic intent of social and economic development, guided the market behavior, and underlay the duties of government to regulate the economy, supervise the market, manage the society, and serve the public. The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) attached more importance to the leading role of development philosophy and strategy by proposing the five development ideas

of “innovation, coordination, green, open, and shared” and the three regional development strategies of the Belt and Road, Beijing-TianjinHebei Coordinated Development and the Yangtze Economic Belt. Generally, the Plans formulated for national economic and social development since the reform and opening-up in 1978 were effective and adaptable to the development of a socialist market economy.

4.3.1.2 The Regional Planning In terms of the planning system, regional plans and horizontal specialized plans began to appear at different administrative levels in addition to the overall national plans. Regional planning is an important instrument through which the

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Four Decades of Urban and Regional Development …

Chinese government orients the development of key areas, optimizes the spatial arrangement for economic and social activities, and improves its regional administration. With the implementation of the overall strategy for regional development and the increasingly strict requirements for coordinated regional development, China has released a series of regional plans since the reform and opening-up. During the period of the 10th Five-Year Plan (2001–2006), the central government of China proposed to launch regional pilot projects in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei City Cluster and the Yangtze River Delta Region. It was in the following 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) that regional planning was formally made part of China’s planning system. Since the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010), a series of major plans and documents about regional policy have formed through the “Three Steps”1 in accordance with the strengths of different regions. Regional plans and policy documents were released about 120 important regions and areas; a series of major plans concerning the development of national marine industry and economy were proposed; and a series of major plans expanding the cooperation with the Northeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations were put forward. In addition, specialized poverty alleviation plans were drawn up to address the constraints on the development of old revolutionary base areas, ethnic minority areas,2 border areas, and poverty-stricken areas. Furthermore, plans and guidance on the reform, development, and expanded cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta Region, the Pearl River Delta Region, and Circum-BohaiSea Region were proposed to promote coordinated regional cooperation (Fan 2017). Since the Eighteenth National Deputy Congress of the Communist Party of China (2012), The first step is to realize that all the key land areas receive policy guidance; the second step is to promote policy-making for sea area and airspace; the third step is to promote the transition of regional policy guidance from an introvert one into an extrovert one. 2 The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and the Tibet Autonomous Region. 1

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the Chinese government has formulated the overall plan and a series of specialized plans, including the Planning Outline of the Belt and Road Initiative and related specialized plans, the Development and Planning Outline of BeijingTianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development and associated specialized plans, and the Development and Planning Outline of the Yangtze Economic Belt to vigorously carry out the “Three Major Strategies” (Belt and Road, BeijingTianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development and the Yangtze Economic Belt). In order to continue improving the overall strategy for regional development, which compasses the priority of the large-scale development, the implementation of the guidance and the 12th Five-Year Plan for the large-scale development of the western region, and the revitalization of the old industrial bases such as the northeast, a series of important plans and policy documents have been released and implemented to address the problems that emerged recently and to promote medium-term and long-term development. Besides that, the 13th Five-Year National Plan for Poverty Alleviation together with a series of specialized plans and supporting policies have been compiled to vigorously carry out the strategy for poverty alleviation. Furthermore, multiple plans for city clusters, including the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster, the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River City Cluster, ChengduChongqing City Cluster and Harbin-Changchun City Cluster, with the aim to vigorously promote the development of new urbanization (Fan 2017).

4.3.2 The Spatial Planning System in China 4.3.2.1 The National Land Planning China’s national land-use plan, formulated by the Ministry of Land Resources of China, is the guideline for the reform and development of national land resources and the principle for the government to follow in practicing the duties of managing national land resources. After the reform and opening-up, a decision was made on the 97th Conference of the Secretariat of the

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Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on April 2, 1981 to formally raise the issue of national land-use planning on its agenda, with the purpose of effectively guiding and orderly promoting the large-scale development and exploitation of national land. The conference marked the gradual establishment of China’s national land planning system and the gradual implementation of relevant research work. This was followed by the implementation of many plans including the National Land-Use Planning Outline (Draft Version), several cross-provincial regional national land-use plans, and a series of specialized plans for land utilization, environmental renovation, urban distribution, and territorial development. At the same time, provincial and municipal governments also formulated their own national land-use plans ranging from provincial level to municipal level, prefectural level, and county level. As most of the plans for national land-use formulated in this period belonged to the type of plans for natural resources development, they tend to be general and comprehensive despite the similarity of their contents (Qiang et al. 2012). In 1998, the function of national land-use planning was transferred from the National Development and Reform Commission or NDRC (the former State Planning Commission) to the Ministry of Land and Resources. The Ministry of Land and Resources deployed and implemented pilot national land-use planning projects in the city of Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Tianjin and the provinces of Liaoning, Henan, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Xinjiang, during the period from 2001 to 2008. The Ministry of Land and Resources and the National Reform and Development Commission worked with 28 departments including the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction in September of 2009 to draw up the National Land-Use Planning Outline (2011– 2030) (Hao et al. 2012). One March 1st, 2017, the State Council, under the approval of Premier Li Keqiang, issued the first ever strategic, comprehensive, and fundamental plan for the development and protection of national land and

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space, the National Land-Use Planning Outline (2011–2030) (hereinafter referred to as The Outline), as a guideline for and a control over the activities concerning the development, protection, and administration of national land and space. The Outline specified the guiding ideology, fundamental principles, and major targets of the development, protection, and administration of national land, established a “three into one” general guideline of intensive development, and classified protection and comprehensive administration of national land. Furthermore, it improved the system for the development and protection of national land and space with the control over purpose as one of the major means, and deployed the key tasks concerning intensive development, classified protection, comprehensive administration, coordinated development, and the establishment of a support system with the purpose of building a beautiful national land.

4.3.2.2 The Urban Planning Established by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the urban planning system of China is a legal planning system that includes both the overall urban planning and the specific urban planning. The several important time points during the development of China’s urban planning were as follows. In March 1978, the State Council convened the third National City Work Conference, with an emphasis on “carefully and effectively carrying out the work of city planning.” By the end of 1986, most of the cities in China completed their urban master plans. Starting in the year of 1987, municipal governments began to work on the amendment of their master plans, and to explore to draw up specific plans for control. The City Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China was enacted in 1990. Through the reform and opening-up in 1990s and the transition of development in early twenty-first century, the theory and practice of China’s city planning, with its standard increasingly in line with the advanced international standard, has broken away from the planned economy. Two landmark events during the development of China’s spatial planning were the enactment of the Property Law and the

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Four Decades of Urban and Regional Development …

substitution of The City Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China with the Urban and Rural Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2007. The former event pushed planners to pay more attention to the legal protection of citizens’ property rights, and the latter enabled the transition of planning from urban–rural divided one to urban–rural integrated one. The Central City Work Conference convened in December 2015 emphasized that people must be given priority to urbanization and improve the work of urban planning; the focus of urban planning must be shifted from the service and support for economic development to the service and support for urban administration and provision of a comfortable living space for citizens.

4.3.2.3 The Land Utilization Planning Different from the western tradition of integrating urban planning with land utilization planning under private ownership, China’s land utilization planning, formulated by the Ministry of National Land and Resources in accordance with the Land Administration Law of the People’s Republic of China has been one of the fundamental types of planning which is independent of urban planning. This is because of China’s national condition of a large population with relatively little land, the reality of decentralized operation of rural land, and the essential requirements of socialist public ownership of land. In addition to that, rapid economic development and excessive expansion of city following the reform and opening-up intensified the tension between the large population and the little land because of the loss of good quality arable land, which seriously threatened national food security and sustainable development. Objectively, there was a need to strengthen the authority of the land utilization planning so that it would effectively control the excessive urban expansion driven by local governments. As a result, the first Land Administration Law, passed in June 1986, put the formulation of an overall plan for land utilization on the top of priority of governments at all levels. Overall plans for land

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utilization at national and local levels were formulated and implemented in the following decade. The Land Administration Law amended in 1998 stipulated that “the national government formulates the plan for land utilization,” establishing the plan for land utilization as a national plan in the form of law. According to the law, the volume of the inventory of arable land and the acreage of protected basic farmland stipulated by the plan of lower level should not be less than the index stipulated by the plan of higher level. Besides that, the scale of the land for construction in urban master plan should not be higher than the scale approved by the plan for land utilization. Afterwards, China completed two rounds of formulation and amendment of overall land utilization plans at all levels and strengthened the supervision on the implementation of plans through remote administration and the national land supervision system.

4.4

Characteristics and Methods of China’s Regional and Urban Planning

China’s planning driven by the government normally serves as a method for the government to allocate resources. Over the years, China has developed a practice of multiple plans working together in one planning system, which promoted China’s economic growth, instead of hindering it. The planning system, which became increasingly complicated with the development of economy and society, nevertheless, began to show its negative side. However, one thing deserving a merit is the fact that China’s planning always keeps adjusting with time and improves itself through exploration. In recent years, Chinese government has begun to downsize its planning structure and include “control plans” into its planning system. Apart from that, the progress of information technology has provided new techniques and methods for the planning work of the departments concerned.

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4.4.1 Characteristics of China’s Regional and Urban Planning 4.4.1.1 From Growth Planning to Control Planning Because the planning system in China is in fact, a “growth type” rather than a “control type”, with planning being regarded by local governments as a means for economic growth competition, control plans such as land utilization plans and ecological environment protection plans are often being adjusted to economic growth (Zhang 2015). The planning system is indeed a method by which Chinese government allocates resources, particularly as urban planning will increase land fiancée and tax income and boost economy with land-transferring fees as the benefit brought by planning constituting an important source of government’s fiscal revenue. That is the reason why fiscal revenue in the form of planning benefit tends to be a land value-added investment, which contributes to economic growth to a certain degree. The fact that the public lacks such kind of knowledge and shows relatively less interest in taking part in politics is one of the reasons that planning does not control the economic growth in China. China’s planning department is increasingly aware of the importance of control plan with the development of economy and the progress of society. The increasingly prominent big city problems in the process of rapid urbanization make the government departments in charge of planning realize that, in addition to economic growth, they should highlight a much longer-term, more balanced, and sustainable control plan. 4.4.1.2 From Multiple Plans to One Integrated The planning system in China with a pattern of multiple plans working together is sometimes metaphorically referred to as the “forest of plans”. This phenomenon has both advantages and disadvantages, and the latter appears to outweigh the former with the development of the planning system. The advantages lie in that multiple plans work and compete to contain the

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increasing trend of imbalanced national land development, extensive utilization of resources, and disruption of ecological environment, which creates a need for safe, harmonious, and stable development environment for China’s modernization. Nevertheless, the shortcomings and problems of such a situation also manifest themselves. Firstly, various types of plans have caused dispersion of spatial administration orders and low efficiency of execution that recurrent conflict and impediment between different plans have become a norm. Secondly, the mismatch between obligation and right and the mismatch between responsibilities and rights affect the unity and effectiveness of spatial policy. Moreover, the excessive intervention of local government leaders and the excessive influence of the departments in charge of planning affect the authority and seriousness of plans. Lastly, the legalization and standardization of planning goals, and the process of planning are not yet transparent, which prevents the plans from being open and scientific. Against such a background, the China’s government has realized the necessity and urgency of “integrating multiple plans into one” since the present excessively complicated planning system can be safely simplified through integration of the overlapping or conflicting parts. China has carried out pilot tests of integrating multiple plans into one in many cities and counties so far.

4.4.2 The Method, Instrument, and Problem of Regional and Urban Planning in China 4.4.2.1 Planning Serving as an Instrument for Government Resources Allocation Planning, by resource allocation, serves as a managerial instrument for the government administration. Meanwhile, governments fulfill their duty based on planning. In China, governments participate in the whole process of

4

Four Decades of Urban and Regional Development …

planning, from formulating, to reviewing and implementing. And the Chinese governmental departments take the lead in drawing up most of the plans. For example, it is the State Council that organizes the Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and national-level specialized plan. Indeed, with the reform deepening in ministries of governments, organizations like associations and guilds in China begin to depreciate national planning. Seen from the present situation, however, national planning in China is still worked out in a government-led way. Reviewing and approving a plan in China is relatively complicated. Though governments oversee the work in general, different plans go to different departments of government for review and approval. For example, the Plan for national economic and social development is reviewed by National People’s Congress; many national-level special plans are reviewed by the state council or the authorized department; national-level regional plans are reviewed by state council; a few national-level special plans self-reviewed by the department that made them; provincial main functional areas are established and reviewed by people’s government at the provincial level. When implementing those plans, governments of different functions in planning play different roles. To make it clearer, for directed planning, governments not only take the lead in the process of implement, but more importantly create a positive atmosphere for enterprises to participate. While in public service planning, the government will take full charge. Besides, planning is also the basis for government to fulfill its duty. Making and implementing plans on a legal base will, to some degree, guarantee the proper intervention of government. In turn, planning is also an instrument to confine government actions to some extent.

4.4.2.2 The Rising of New Urban Planning Based on Big Data The age of “Big Data” has brought great changes to traditional urban planning. While the basic

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data used in traditional urban planning were usually time-lagged, planners always worked on stale data when making decisions. The emergence of “Big Data” makes it possible for planners to get live update of data and make use of them, therefore enhancing the timeliness of planning (Mao 2014). In the meantime, big data also provide a new method and technique for planning. Using the analytical model of urban planning built on big data greatly improves the practical problem-solving ability in works, which will further benefit the construction of smart cities and promote new urbanization. Big data have been widely used in real-life urban planning. For example, when formulating major plan, the officials in Wuxi, Jiangsu province have considerably made the planning more sound by using the cellular signaling data offered by mobile company. At present, copious data collection is still needed in the popularization of big data utilization in urban planning. But we are looking forward to seeing the fact that by applying the method of big data to innovate new technology and establish new model in urban planning, the overall standard of urban planning will surely be elevated. In that way, the city will be upgraded to develop in a much healthier way.

4.4.2.3 Problems and Improvements of Regional and Urban Planning in China In China, regional and urban planning, to some extent, boosts the economy and improves the administrative system of governments. However, it also manifests plenty of problems after decades of development. Under this circumstance, it is still a long way to go for the planning system before it could fully support and adjust to national economic and social development. Firstly, planning system in China is rather complicated, and the type of planning varies. In general, the planning system in China consists of development plan and spatial plan. And various specific plans branch out from those two major types. Nevertheless, because different governments’ departments oversee different plans, they often regard planning as competitive instruments

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to obtain resources. As a result, once coordinated system of planning management is now fragmented (Wang and Liu 2012). It further causes decentralization in decision-making in planning management and low efficiency in implementation. Therefore, the planning system needs to be simplified in future. Governments need to push forward with the prospect of “Integrate Multiple Plans into One” and build a planning system that is unified nationwide and cohesively coordinated to ensure the planning efficiently operated. Secondly, overlaps and conflicts are intermingled among assorted plans. To be specific, because the administrative powers go to different departments regarding plans of different levels and types, when formulating a plan, departments just make decisions on their own. The plans they work out overlap with each other due to the lack of necessary communication and coordination. Moreover, among the departments, such problems as mismatch of obligation and rights, mismatch of responsibilities and rights also arise. For example, the plan for national economic and social development often involves the land utilization planning and urban planning. Though the Departments of Land and Resources should be responsible for land use, some of the responsibilities of land-use planning go to the National Development and Reform Commission. In addition, there are also problems like the similarity among urban planning and the confrontation of land utilization in different plans. In future, duty and authority of different planning departments should be reasonably identified to avoid power conflicts between departments. Thirdly, due to a developing legal system, planning in China is not standard enough. Owing to the problems existing in the overall legal environment and planning system, legal construction concerning planning still lags. Apart from a few items in Urban and Rural Planning Law of People’s Republic of China, Land Administration Law of the People’s Republic of China, and the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, no comprehensive legal rules exist to support planning, including the content, establishment, review and approval or

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implementation of planning. In the future, we need to strengthen the building of legalization of planning in China, work out, and enact laws concerning planning particularly. We should also make special effort to improve planning system and the process to make and review a plan, as well as to clarify the responsibility and power of departments related to planning (Sun 2010).

4.5

IV Case Study: Development and Urban Planning of Shanghai

Among all the cities in China, Shanghai boasts the most powerful economic momentum. The aggregate economic output of Shanghai reached 2.7466 trillion from 78.2 billion, increasing nearly by 35 times during the period from 1990 to 2016. The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster, which Shanghai relies on, the most developed region of China, is rising to be the sixth largest city cluster in the world. The GDP of the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster, reached 1 trillion yuan in 2016, not only the highest in China, but also exceeded that of Korea, Taiwan, and South Africa and almost matched that of India and Russia, contributing even more than a country does.

4.5.1 The “Five-Year Plan” and “The Master Plan” of Shanghai Since the Reform and Opening-up 4.5.1.1 The Five-Year Plans and City Development of Shanghai After the 11th Outline “The Outline of Shanghai’s 11th Five-year Plan for National Economy and Social Development” (hereinafter referred to as the 11th Outline) brought up the basic framework to build Shanghai into an international economic, financial, trade and shipping center, and a socialist metropolitan city. Considering that city cluster has more advantage in international competition,

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“The Outline of Shanghai’s 12th Five-year Plan for National Economy and Social Development” (hereinafter referred to as the 12th Outline) went further “to build Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster to an international standard.” To better implement the strategy of innovation-driven development, “The Outline of Shanghai’s 13th Five-year Plan for National Economy and Social Development” (hereinafter referred to as the 13th Outline) proposed to build Shanghai into a global R&D center and to finally turn Shanghai into a “Five Centers” and a socialist international metropolitan city.

4.5.1.2 (a) The 11th Outline The 11th Outline set goals to realize a better and faster development of economy and society in Shanghai. The governments would strive to host a successful, wonderful, and impressive expo, to form the basic structure of international economy, finance, trade and shipping center, to achieve periodical progress in the construction of a socialist international metropolitan city and in the end, to provide Shanghai a solid foundation for the sustainable development during 2011 to 2020. As for space planning, the 11th Outline was set to make major headway in constructing new socialist suburbs. The government would, on request of achieving reasonable planning, boosting economy strength, making residential environment inhabitable, improving humanistic quality, and strengthening democracy and legal system, work hard to build a socialist suburb that well matches the standard of an international metropolitan city. In the meantime, the government would enhance the modern level of the city’s construction and administration in all fields, and concentrate not only on construction but also, even more, on administration. It would strengthen the construction of major infrastructure of network hubs and establish a convenient and efficient transport system to better connect urban and suburban area. 4.5.1.3 (b) The 12th Outline The goal of the 12th Outline was, based on the strategic orientation and requirement the Central

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Government made for Shanghai, to build an international economic, financial, trading and shipping center well matching China’s economic strength and international influence, and qualified for global resources allocation by 2020. Moreover, Shanghai would basically develop into an economically prosperous, socially harmonious, and environmentally desirable socialist international metropolitan city and contribute to the construction of Yangtze River Delta to be an internationally competitive city cluster. In terms of space planning, the 12th Outline abode by the principle of integrated urban–rural development in a balanced way. The suburb should be emphasized more in modernization construction, and the focus of city construction should also shift to the suburb. Related department should implement national strategy for functional zoning system and make full use of the leading role of urban functional zone. By focusing on the new town construction, Shanghai should deepen improvement of the urban system, moving faster to promote new types of urbanization and new countryside construction and take the lead in achieving integrated urban–rural development. To realize this, first the government need to improve the layouts of city space. The government should highlight the leading function of certain regions, give direction according to their specialty and make the key areas better play their role in driving the development of their surrounding areas therefore finally form a landscape of clear development orientation, balanced factor allocation, and agglomerated and intensive utilization of space. Second, the government should improve the central city function, increase the ability of high-end factor in agglomeration and facilitating the development of surrounding areas, and improve the comprehensive service function and environmental quality to fully demonstrate the image and charm of the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. Third, the government should endeavor to promote new town construction. The 12th Outline required new town to take active part in optimizing space, agglomerating population and promoting development. The related departments should innovate and make progress, build new

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town into an essential component of Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster with the feature of fully functional, eco-friendly, integrating the development of both city and industry and making intensive utilization of land. Forth, the government should improve the facility and administrative level of small towns. It should better plan small towns and optimize the layout planning of small towns meanwhile take focused, step by step strategy for small town development. Fifth, the government should take solid step to pursue new countryside construction. Relying on the comprehensive advantages of megacity, the small town should strengthen the practice of industry nurturing agriculture, urban area supporting rural areas to consolidate the developmental foundation of rural areas. Moreover, the government should also deepen the reform and renovation of rural areas and take comprehensive steps to increase the developmental level of rural areas.

4.5.1.4 (c) The 13th Outline The 13th Outline aimed to form the basic framework of a globally influential technology innovation center by 2020, to find the new path of innovation-driven development and to lay a solid foundation for promoting and implementing the strategy of technological innovation for Shanghai to rank one of the top cities in the world. It also proposed that Shanghai should basically be transformed into an international economic, financial, trading and shipping center, and moreover, become a moderately prosperous society, and make all citizens live more happily by becoming more adaptable to the growth of socialist market economy, setting up more mature, norms that are internationalized, market-based, and law-based. In terms of space planning, the 13th Outline required Shanghai to promote harmonious development and enhance overall coordination. Shanghai should also change its development mode, strengthen the bottom-line resilience, and improve the planning of space, population, resource, environment, and industry in a coordinated way. Besides, the government should encourage the city to achieve smart growth rather

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than scale expansion, and promote city layouts to transform from the administrative circle to the “networked, multi-centered, grouped, and intensified” pattern. Meanwhile, it should also concentrate on strengthening points of weakness and promote urban–rural integration, and increase the administrative level of megacity construction as well as the soft power of the city. The concept of people-oriented, intensiveness and high efficiency, green and low carbon and culture inheriting cannot be emphasized enough. To improve the spatial layouts of urban area, the government should integrate the idea into city development, improving the quality of urban designing and planning. It should move faster to elevate the function of main urban areas, new towns, and the countryside, and make the land utilization more intensive, compact, and multifunctional, finally transform the city into a place more adaptable to live, work, and travel in. Moreover, the related departments should try to upgrade the developmental ability of the main urban areas, make big move to promote the construction of new town, and the developments of countryside step by step. In the meantime, the 13th Outline demanded to push ahead the high-quality designing and planning of key areas. The key area would be regarded as the vital spatial carrier to enhance urban function and development and will be promoted to be more attractive, better-functional, and more beneficial. It would accelerate the restructuring of industry and overall transformation of areas and push ahead the orderly development of strategic areas. To conclude, it sets the goal to advance construction of key areas, accelerates the restructure of industry and overall transformation of area, and endeavors to make progress in strategic areas.

4.5.1.5 Three Previous Versions of Shanghai Master Plans in History Since the reform and opening-up, to satisfy the development needs in different times, Shanghai has made 3 master plans. The 1986 version laid solid foundation for Shanghai revitalization; the 2001 version brought about the concept “internationalization” as Shanghai’s future developmental

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focus. Also, it clarified Shanghai’s strategic position as international economic, financial, trading, shipping center, and guided Shanghai to develop in a rapid way in recent years. The 2016 version put forward that Shanghai would be constructed into a superior global city, an international economic, financial, trading, shipping, technological innovation center, and a cultural metropolis by 2040. Overall, all previous versions of Shanghai master plans insisted on the basic idea of improving urban function and ease the pressure of central city. They basically followed the regional developmental axes and regional nodes to improve urban space and functional layouts, meanwhile the concept of planning would keep abreast with the times.

4.5.1.6 (a) Shanghai Master Plan (1986) Entering the 1980s, the economy of Shanghai developed around “restructuring and boosting Shanghai economy” to achieve recovery increase was promoted to achieve. Shanghai had gradually got rid of the image of mono-functional introvert production-based city that relied solely on industry and progressed into a multifunctional overt economy-based city. The new situation urged the government to make new urban master plans to match the needs of new times. Under this circumstance, in 1984, led and organized by the Shanghai government, and planned by the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute (now renamed as Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute), The Shanghai Master Plan (hereinafter referred to as The Plan) came out and was officially signed by the State Council on October 19, 1986. The Plan was the very first one in the history of Shanghai urban development as it is the first urban master plan that has been approved by the central government. The Plan attached importance to constructing suburban small town and proposed to build Shanghai into a socialist modern city that developed around the central city while the suburban towns of which were relatively independent, but interconnected and group-combined with the central city. Therein, with its layout restructuring, the central city sought to form a community portfolio, which functioned

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separately, and was relatively balanced, orderly and multi-leveled between work and life, and a multi-polar and multi-centered public activity center, based on the “multi-centered, open” design and the “central city-subarea-arearesidential area” structure. As for city layouts, the related departments should, based on the principles of “coordination between the structure of physical planning and road construction”, take the axial development alongside the Huangpu River into account, planned a north–south expressway and connected the city with national highways applying to the “tangential” transportation method to better control the traffics in downtown areas.

4.5.1.7 (b) Shanghai Master Plan (1999–2020) Shanghai had entered the new phase of city progressing by leaps and bounds symbolized by the development and opening-up of Pudong since 1990. The establishment of Pudong Development Area in 1990 brought Shanghai into a new period of booming development. The central city expanded to Pudong, Baoshan, and Minhang. Meanwhile the industry zone construction in the suburban area had promoted the suburbanization. The city layouts took on the characteristic of circle-type sprawl of central city concurring with the suburbanization. Large numbers of industries located in the central city moved outside the city and the “1 + 3+9”3 industry construction got into full swing in suburban area to satisfying the land demand of foreign investment in Shanghai. To adapt to the construction demand of the development and opening-up of Pudong and the social and economic development of Shanghai, the government had drawn up the Shanghai Master Plan The “1” stands for Pudong district; “3” represents three national-level development zones—Caohejing High Technology Park,Minhang Economic and Technological Development Zone, and Shanghai Songjiang Export Processing Zone; “9” refers to nine municipal-level industrial parks—Xinzhuang, Baoshan, Jiading, Kangqiao, Songjiang, Fengpu (Shanghai comprehensive industrial development zone), Jinshanzui, Qingpu, and Chongming.

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(1999–2020) (hereinafter referred to as The Plan) and was approved by the State Council in 2001. The Plan pointed out that the urban development space of Shanghai had moved from “the age of Huangpu River” to “the Age of the Yangtze River”. Besides the traditional developmental axes of Shanghai/Ningbo and Shanghai/Hangzhou, Shanghai should further develop the developmental alongside the Huangpu River and the East Sea; make more endeavors to promote the function development and image establishment; concentrate their efforts on constructing new towns and hub towns; and treat Chongming as the strategic region for sustainable development of Shanghai in twenty-first century. Moreover, Shanghai should form a multileveled town system consisting of “central city—new town (including the counties)—hub town—town”. Furthermore, it should create both a coastal developmental axis and Shanghai/ Ningbo and Shanghai/Hangzhou developmental axes, a municipal spatial structure featuring as “multi-cores and multi-axis” and embracing towns of various levels and a “multi-centered and open” central city spatial structure. Therein, the central city is the political, economic, and cultural center of Shanghai, also the main part of the town system of Shanghai. New town, the government planned to develop about 11 of this kind, is a medium-sized town in the place where the government of the district (county) is located, or developing around major industry or important infrastructure. Hub town is a smaller town, which distributes appropriately in the city, boasting great location conditions and economic development potentials, developing around industries. There are about 22 hub towns like Zhujiajiao, Sijing, Zhoupu (Kangqiao), Fengcheng, Fengjing, Baozhen, Nanxiang, and Luodian in the plan and the population of each town ranges from 50,000 to 100,000. The town is consolidated from the existing town based on the location, transportation, and resources. The central village is, reasonably consolidated from common village, a new type of community in modern rural areas that has local specialty, beautiful scenery, reasonable layouts, complete infrastructures and facilities.

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4.5.1.8 (c) Shanghai Master Plan (2015– 2040) Nowadays, cities around the world are entering the developmental phase featuring globalization, humanization, ecologization, automation. Shanghai, as the “the pioneer of the reform and openingup, the forerunner of innovation and development,” also faces multiple challenges like resource and environment constraints, urban function transformation, the city life quality improvement need, etc. It is of urgent need to review and work out another city master plan to promote Shanghai to develop under the guidance of the idea “innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development” and the new mode of innovation-driven, cultureconnotated, and ecology-protected. Shanghai Master Plan (2015–2040) (hereinafter referred to as The Plan) proposes to build Shanghai into an excellent global city, an international economic, financial, trading, shipping and technology innovation center, and a cultured metropolis. Shanghai is supposed to impress people with the image of a glamorous innovation city, a humanistic city, and an eco-friendly city. The Plan would further constraint the quantity of land available, be it for population’s use or constructions’ use. The Plan maintains that the government should keep the bottom line of land, population, environment, and security and keep the population size around 25 million by 2040. In addition, The Plan proposes that Shanghai should give positive response to national strategy like the Belt and Road Initiative, the coordinated development of the Yangtze Economic Belt and the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster. Seen from a wider horizon and a higher vision, it requires the government to design Shanghai’s future developmental strategic framework by establishing an open and harmonious spatial system and controlling the overexpansion of the surrounding areas of the central city. In terms of new growth, the new towns, new counties should be built to absorb population and influence surrounding areas, forming a networked, multi-centered, grouped, and intensified spatial system. All in all, as a city, Shanghai should also intensify its leading role in the growth of Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster. And as metropolitan areas,

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Shanghai should carry more responsibility in fulfilling national strategy and requirement. As for urban spatial structure, The Plan mentions that the future development of Shanghai would, based on the function enhancement and structural optimization, carry on strategic adjustment and improve structure of urban function and spatial layouts from the municipal level. Priority is given to improve urban–rural system; establish multi-centered public life system, and create a municipal overall spatial structure characterized as “one center, two axes, four wings, multi-corridor, multi-core, and multi-circle.” However, all these achievements must be made within the ecological constraint and the structure of important transportation corridors, relying on town clusters to promote urban–rural coordination and living circles to build social network. Therein, for “one center, two axes, four wings”, “one center” refers to putting the development of new town in central place. “Two axes” aims to lead the core function to agglomerate alongside the two developmental axes: Huangpu River and Yan’an Road-Century Avenue, whereas “four wings” is targeted at improving the capability of four main districts: Baoshan, Hongqiao, Minhang, and Chuansha. The goal was to let them work together to build the core area of the global city. For “multi-corridor, multi-core, and multi-circle”, “multi-corridor” refers to strengthening the major developmental corridors along the Yangtze River, the bays, Shanghai-Ningbo and ShanghaiHuzhou based on the spatial opening layouts to create co-urbanization of metropolitan areas. “Multi-core” is based on function agglomeration to ensure the major town and community for development meanwhile “multi-circle” is based about sharing public service infrastructure to build town clusters and community life circles. To sum up, the three “multi-s” are set up to realize regional integration, space spatial optimization, and urban–rural coordination.

4.5.1.9 The Future Development of Shanghai The Development Research Center of Shanghai Municipal Government took the lead in the

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research of Shanghai’s Strategic Vision for 2050 in 2014. Three basic goals of the future development of Shanghai, the initial achievements have been set up: first, to build Shanghai into a “comprehensive and world-class global city” (Xiao 2015) by the midtwenty-first century, that is, to build a global resource allocation center, technology innovation center, wealth management center, information interaction center, and advanced manufacturing center, etc., to agglomerate and impact on the high-end group, logistics and information flow and to gather big enterprise headquarters and market centers at home and abroad. This would develop Shanghai into a headquarter, a market center, and a convergence place for domestic and foreign high-level companies. Second, the goal is aimed to build Shanghai into the first global city among world’s biggest city clusters. The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster is the most economically developed region in China as well as the sixth largest city cluster in the world. Meanwhile, the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster has provided Shanghai, the major city in the cluster, a wide hinterland for economic growth. Therefore, in the future development, Shanghai would connect closer with the other cities in the cluster and better play its role in driving the development of their surrounding areas and finally work together with them to improve overall global influence. Third, the goal is aimed to establish Shanghai into a global cultural city. By striving for knowledge-based and learning-oriented society, it targets at transforming Shanghai into the international cultural exchange center, communication center, convention & exhibition center, and the gathering place for international organization and think tank to “enhance the Shanghai’s ability to lead global civilization and its contribution to urban civilization of the world” (Xiao 2015). Fourth, the goal plans to make Shanghai a livable city by continuing to implement the “people first” city construction guideline to maintain a balanced urban eco-environment and meet citizens’ need for development.

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4.5.2 The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster Plan4 and Shanghai’s Development The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster boasts the most dynamic economic power. The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster Development Plan, issued in June 2016, proposed that the Yangtze River Delta’s should cultivate the economic growth pole to a higher degree. Specifically, the cluster should transform itself into a globally influential world-class city cluster in all-round way by 2030, wherein it particularly mentions that “Shanghai should improve its function as a global city.” To become a global city, Shanghai needs not only to strengthen its function construction as a global city and enrich its soft power, but also gain stronger support from the region it is located in. Therefore, the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster was needed for Shanghai to play its coral function as a global city. Meanwhile, Shanghai should press ahead with coordinated development with surrounding cities and play

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The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster embraces Shanghai, Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang Province. With Shanghai being the center, it consists of several closely related cities which distribute in the landscape of national strategy “Three-horizontal and Two-longitudinal” for improvement of urbanization layouts and being the major developmental region within the strategy. The Shanghai-based Yangtze River Delta City Cluster, stretching across the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, consists of a number of closely related cities that occupy the key areas of the national urbanization pattern of the “Three-horizontal & Two-longitudinal”. It includes 26 cities: Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuxi, Changzhou, Suzhou, Nantong, Yancheng, Yahngzhou, Zhenjiang, Taizhou in Jiangsu province and Hangzhou, Ningbo, Jiaxing, Huzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Zhoushan, Taizhou from Zhejiang province and Hefei, Wuhu, Ma’anshan, Tongling, Anqing, Chuzhou, Chizhou, Xuancheng from Anhui province. It covers an area of 211,700 square kilometers, nearly 2.2% of the country; produce GDP at 1.267 billion yuan in 2014, nearly 18.5% of the country and boasts a large population of 150 million people, nearly 11% of the country.

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the leading role in the integration of the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster. This would strengthen the regional power and unite them as one to represent the country in international competition.

4.5.2.1 The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster Plan The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster (hereinafter referred to as the YRD City Cluster) is one of the special regions that boast the most dynamic momentum, highest opening-up degree, most powerful innovation, and largest population of temporary residents. Moreover, it is an essential converging zone between “the Belt and Road” and the Yangtze Economic Belt. Thus, it plays a decisive role in the national modernization construction and all-round opening-up. The state council approved The Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster Plan (hereinafter referred to as The Plan) as the guiding and binding document for the development of the YRD City Cluster integration in May 2016 to improve the YRD City Cluster, let it take part in the international cooperation and competition from a higher level and further fuel and lead the national economic and social growth. The Plan sets the medium-term and long-term developmental goal for the YRD City Cluster: by 2020, the world-class city cluster framework will have been established. The framework, as mentioned above, will be of dynamic economy, converging high-end talents, soaring innovation ability and intensive and efficient space utilization. The density of population and economy will be upgraded as it aims at attracting 11.8% of the overall population of the country and producing 21% GDP just with the land area taking up 2.2% of the total. By 2030, the pivotal role of the YRD City Cluster in global resource allocation will be more outstanding. The gateway position of it will be more consolidated in serving the country and impacting on the Asia-Pacific region. This will send the YRD City Cluster into top gears in the global value chain and industry distribution system, enhance its international competitiveness and influence in a profound way and finally create a world top class city cluster in an all-round way.

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4.5.2.2 The Position and Function of Shanghai in YRD City Cluster For Shanghai, the construction of global city relies on the YRD City Cluster’s support in various aspects. Conversely, for the YRD City Cluster to build the global city cluster also needs the facilitation of Shanghai. Therefore, the relationship between global city construction and global region construction is interacted and coordinated. The construction of global city cluster of the YRD region strongly supports the global city construction of Shanghai. These two “construction” of the two regions will lead cooperation and coordination as well as the economic benefits sharing and economic efficiency improving. By 2050, Shanghai, having the support of the city cluster economy, will have become a converging place of global factors and a vital node for global urban network. In the aspect of urban function, the gains of the Yangtze River Delta’s City system will be flattened, meaning more and more mutual-benefit and win-win situations. At present, the part Shanghai plays in global urban network mainly depends on the huge potential and promotion growth of mainland China economy. The position of Shanghai as China’s gateway and hub to the outside world owes much to Yangtze River Delta Region’s great capacity to aggregate the essential elements for economic growth. With the establishment of leading power of the leadership of mainland China in global economy, Shanghai will be characterized more by globalized than regionalized. And Shanghai’s ability to allocate factor will be unfolding more in a global scope. By that time, Shanghai will have been the pioneer and facilitator of other cities in the Yangtze River Delta’s City Cluster.

References Fan H (2017) The practice and direction of the national regional development strategy. Reg Econ Rev 1:5–10 (in Chinese)

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Hao Q, Zhou X, Zhoupu (2012) The development course and idea innovation of the national land-use planning. Science 64(3):42–45 (in Chinese) Li P, Wang C, Zhang X (2017) Did city cluster development help improve labor productivity in China? J Asia Pac Econ 22:122–135 Mao M (2014) Big data applications in urban planning: the thinking and practice from BICP. Urban Plan Int 6:51–57 (in Chinese) National land-use planning outline. http://www.gov.cn/ zhengce/content/2017-02/04/content_5165309.htm Outline of Shanghai’s 11th Five-year Plan for National Economy and Social Development. http://www. shanghai.gov.cn/nw2/nw2314/nw2319/nw11494/ nw12330/nw15821/u21aw142985.html Outline of Shanghai’s 12th five-year plan for national economy and social development. http://www.wmsh. gov.cn/xinwen/201101/t20110124_89176.htm Outline of Shanghai’s 13th five-year plan for national economy and social development. http://www. shanghai.gov.cn/nw2/nw2314/nw2319/nw22396/ nw39378/u21aw1101146.html Qiang H, Lan H, Zhang B (2012) Reviews and prospects of territorial planning studies in China. China Land Sci 6:92–96 (in Chinese) Shanghai master plan 1986. http://www.supdri.com/2040/ index.php?c=channel&molds=oper&id=4 Shanghai master plan (1999–2020). http://www.supdri. com/2040/index.php?c=channel&molds=oper&id=5 Shanghai master plan (2015–2040). http://2040.shgtj.net/ web/ The 11th five-year plan. http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/ 41179/41232/4210880.html The 12th five-year plan. http://www.gov.cn/2011lh/ content_1825838.htm Wang X (2010) Urbanization path and city scale in china: an economic analysis. Econ Res J 10:20–32 (in Chinese) Wang W, Liu X (2012) Spatial planning system in china: status, problems and reconstruction. Econ Geogr 32(5):7–15 (in Chinese) Xiao L (2015) 2050 shanghai development vision and goals: head for the leading global city. Sci Dev 2:5–12 (in Chinese) Yangtze river delta urban cluster plan. http://www.sdpc. gov.cn/gzdt/201606/t20160603_806396.html Zhang X (2012) Chinese regional economic growth, a new pattern of coordinated regional development. Sci Dev 7:64–78 (in Chinese) Zhang X (2013) Transformation of regional economy and development of megalopolis economy in China. Acad Mon 7:107–112 (in Chinese) Zhang X (2015) The adjustment of urban boundary and improvement of urban comprehensive carrying capacity in the background of new urbanization. Explor Free Views 6:28–30 (in Chinese)

Remaking ‘Urban’ in Twenty-first Century Neoliberal India

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Swapna Banerjee-Guha

Neoliberalism may be insatiable but it is not invulnerable (George 1999).

Abstract

Urban planning and related development processes in India have been experiencing significant changes in recent years reflecting a series of deconstructions and reconstructions. Deeply embedded in a neoliberal framework promoting private control of urban space, dispossession of the marginalized and sharpening of claims and counter-claims, they essentially go to delink ‘urban’ from its diverse regional realities and injects a universal ‘globalness’ in the concept. As neoliberalism is a form of ‘high politics’, the above reconstruction becomes a ‘highly regulated’ phenomenon characterized by market priorities, capitalist production (rather than social reproduction), privatization of basic services, growing exposure to global competitive frameworks and extensive place-marketing.

Introducing the concept of private cities as a part of urban planning agenda and drastic reconfiguration of the built environment of existing cities to make them act ‘smarter’ are expressions of multi-scalar materialization of the above design, Indian cities are experiencing rapidly changing spatialities grounded in a social process that continuously gets sharpened by class interests and interlocking public–private practices. Causes, trajectories and ramifications of this post-justice urban process are emerging as contentious issues in the field of critical urban research. Drawing theoretical understanding from Global city research paradigm and neo-Gramscian urban political theory, the chapter suggests that urban planning in contemporary India signals a clear shift in socio-political alliances, ideological imperatives and basic strategies and through discursive examination analyses the existing neoliberalism in urban development practices across the country. Keywords

S. Banerjee-Guha (&) School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India e-mail: [email protected]




Creative destruction Neo-Gramscian approach Neoliberal New economic policy Private cities







© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_5




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5.1

S. Banerjee-Guha

Introduction

Post 1970s, coinciding with the crisis of Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime and breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, a new urban order came to rule the world. Perspectives on urban development have undergone dramatic changes since then leading to drastic reconstruction in the very definition of ‘urban’. It was as dramatic as the change that was initiated in the concept of ‘global’ impacting the entire understanding of the global–local network. The reconstruction, deeply embedded in a neoliberal framework, promoted private control of space having a discreet aim of expanding consumption options for the elite, sharpening the debate of claims and counter-claims on urban space. As the ‘high politics’ of neoliberalism covertly sponsors regulation of ownership and access to land and facilities under the garb of an anti-regulatory, liberated, market-oriented agenda, the new ‘urban’ was found to have a deep link with the changing role of governance, backtracking of the state from active engagement in urban development to advancement of capitalist urbanization— all suited to the priorities of market. Competition among cities even within countries, marketing of urban space and dispossession of the poor surfaced as integral features of urban visions in several countries in subsequent years (Banerjee-Guha 2009a). In the time of advanced capitalism, we all know, the State agreed to share a considerable proportion of the cost of social reproduction— from housing to health, transportation and other infrastructures—expressing a peak in the relationship between urban scale and social reproduction, a characteristic feature of the Keynesian cities. With the ascendancy of neoliberalism, a multifaceted, multi-scalar global order came up, armed with deregulation and a new kind of entrepreneurial state intervention. Suited to a market-driven globalized economy (Brenner and Theodore 2002), it necessitated new forms of governance and differently structured institutional spaces. Distributive policies got replaced by supply side agenda seeking to derive efficiency in service delivery by privatizing public

services (Banerjee-Guha 2008). State-capital alliance, debated since long (Polanyi 2001) became a common practice and as a supportive system, neoliberalism flourished. Blind faith in market became the order of the day (Conway and Heynen 2006), advocating state fiscal austerity, market liberalization and public sector privatization, the three pillars of the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Goldman 2005). ‘The myth of the global market place’ (Conway and Heynen 2006) got finally institutionalized with the signing of GATT in 1994 and the emergence of World Trade Organization (WTO). Impoverishment of the poor across the world exacerbated with increasing exploitation of resources of the South and heightening inequities in their comparative advantages vis-à-vis the advanced capitalist countries and their corporate partners. Existing social order was thoroughly impaired with state power getting activated to usher in a competitive capitalist economy. Despite huge social dislocations, no organized effort of ‘social protectionism’ followed. Neoliberalism came with all arrogance, enforced its position as an unchallenged model of economic efficiency for almost the entire world expressing explicit spite for those who dared to challenge its revealed realities (George 1999). Given the disjuncture between the ideology of neoliberalism and its everyday political praxis (Mooney and Danson 1997; Keil 2002), neoliberal projects are often found tangled with institutional contradictions and tensions of everyday life (Banerjee-Guha 2009a, b). At the same time, while its ideology creates a ‘utopia’ of free market, liberated from all kinds of state interference, in practice it entails a coercive form of state intervention to facilitate market rule over a wider socio-spatial spectrum. At city level, it is characterized by increasing constraints in democratic planning, downgrading of local city governments, growing urban competitiveness and escalating support to private–public partnerships particularly in infrastructure projects, growing importance of para-statal bodies, privatization of services, dwindling organized sector employment leading to increasing social polarization, stiffening institutional control over city space

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Remaking ‘Urban’ in Twenty-first Century Neoliberal India

aided with anti-poor laws and finally, increased marginalization of the socio-economically disadvantaged. Together they reflect the power of a disciplinary finance regime and a hegemonic cultural framework entangled to a process of reconstitution of neoliberalism as an ideology. Metropolises located in the Global South deserve special mention as they show signs of intense conflict reflecting contestation between the global and the local (Banerjee-Guha 2002). Characterized by market priorities, a belligerent urbanism is found promoted in these countries, facilitating ‘creative destruction’ (Harvey 1989) at numerous scales leading to a systemic disorder and uncertainty in the lives of millions of people.

5.2

Urban Neoliberalism, Neo-Gramscian Approach and the Indian Scenario

Consolidation of a worldwide regime of ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ (Gill 1995) at urban scale has been examined substantially by scholars (Amin 1994; Harvey 1989; Smith 1996, 2002; Mitchell 2001; Brenner and Theodore 2002) from countries of the North. Few, however, have originated from the South and fewer from South Asian region on specificities of policies, institutional framework and consequences of neoliberalism, particularly with reference to cities. Critical works are scantier when it comes to the analysis of urban strategies of global capital and international financial institutions (IFIs) like World Bank, IMF, ADB or DFID and their alliance with state power although it is well known that their involvement in urban development in these countries has been substantial in recent years. Revival of ‘large city bias’ at policy level in India since the introduction of New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1991, gentrification as a key measure in urban planning or even the hype of private cities in the twenty-first century say it all. Celebration of neoliberal ethic of possessive individualism currently getting reinforced in the urban imagination of these countries, most spectacularly in India since the late twentieth century, making revanchist (Smith 1996) ‘new

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urbanism’ the sine qua non of the country’s urban future, thus calls for an in-depth analysis. The changing role of State and its mechanisms of implementing urban policies occupy a central position in this understanding. The present Indian State can be seen emerging as a modern, vociferous institution facilitating private sector operation and a developmental governmentality, sophisticatedly defined as a ‘politically neutral’ practice, pitched heavily on the rationality of experts and professionals (Sanyal 2007). In essence, it is a highly political project set to inculcate a hegemonic discourse having intense regulatory power and ability to restrict any alternative viewpoint in the name of ‘practical’ and ‘professional’ solutions (Peet 2002). For this, historically obtained ensembles of complementary economic and extra-economic mechanisms incorporating parallel power networks, numerous forms of complex interdependences based on intricate hierarchical placements, and last but not the least, networks of State, business and civil society alliances emerge as key factors. Their complex functioning has been elaborated in regulation theories by a number of scholars (Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1987) that is found to incorporate wide range of institutional and social forces, such as, legalities of land, housing and infrastructure, labour laws, social regulation of wage labour, nature of finance and industrial capital, structure of corporate organizations as well as economic, social and political institutions and finally the distributive mechanism of services. It is interesting to see how all these are mobilized by the Indian State in alliance with the dominant classes to make cities emerge as pivotal spaces of capital accumulation despite fundamental contradictions of capital relations. The viewpoint comes under the radar of Gramscian and neo-Gramscian analysis (Jessop 1997) that takes urban studies beyond cities, to the space of local state. The latter, seen as crystallization of uneven development, reflects complex institutional combinations—decentralized, recentralized and transnationalized—all enmeshed in market relations and market-based practices. The interface between State and civil

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society taking a fuzzy form emerges as a crucial phenomenon at this point. Gramsci (1971) noted that ‘the unity of the dominant class lies simultaneously at economic and political spaces …… and that propaganda for one of them is also propaganda for the other …..; in reality …. in this coincidence (that) the unity of the dominant class resides’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 116). Identifying the discordant ensemble of superstructure as reflection of a collective of social relations of production, Gramsci (1995) argued that the reciprocity between the economic and political is realized through socially grafted intellectuals, moral and political practitioners who make the nature of planning subservient to dominant class imperatives, manifested through catchy, liberal phrases while hiding the sinister goals. The organic relation between State and ‘civil society’ (Jessop 1995), as perceived by Gramsci hence becomes extremely important signifying a crucial role of governance in the realization of hegemonic projects. Understanding the intricacies of governance in new urban regimes thus becomes an important task. It is evident from various studies that the hegemonic discourse that such regimes give rise to in order to enforce a global urban order rests on the functioning of entrepreneurial governance that brings all domains of social life within the purview of market (Brenner and Theodore 2002). In both urban political theory and urban regime analysis, thus governance occupies a central position. The main question is how does it function in a new urban regime? Through both co-optation and non-physical coercive means, it expands and reaches out to a wider spectrum of the society. By coordinating with various forms of power located at institutional as well as at the level of everyday practice, governance in diverse forms produces consent and thereby gets enmeshed in the cultural production of values, attitudes, morality, beliefs and even aspirations. Through daily life practices, they go to support the existing social order and a prescribed way of life designed by the powers to be. One needs to note that since the introduction of NEP, a well-organized governance network has been developed in India that has further consolidated

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in recent years, operating much beyond the state and government mechanism, reaching out to an expansive space for achieving a larger goal. Tentacles and alliances of the network (Gramsci 1971) incorporate sections of civil society that work as peripheral limbs to earn the faith of the larger cross-sections of the society and instill in them a positive feeling about anti-people hegemonic projects, when in reality the latter always advance the interest of the dominant class (Jessop 1997). The wonder story of a seamless multiscalar relational web of governance connecting the local, the national and the supranational obtains authenticity through such co-ordinated functioning. In early twenty-first century India, by introducing Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and curbing the autonomy of local/city governments through the 74th Constitutional amendment, transferring their functions and responsibilities to para-statal bodies and making them subservient to international finance institutions and corporate sector and finally bringing a part of civil society and elitist organizations within its operational network, the State deftly fine-tuned the governance reform to suit the neoliberal regime. The current Indian polity has been reinforcing this viewpoint through a series of mechanisms having different forms to enhance the influence of such alliances on urban development. A careful look into the trajectory of urban development in India makes it clear that the ‘urban’ in this country has always been in the process of getting redefined, from the beginning of the plan period right up to the present. The journey is replete with diverse approaches, initial colonial vestiges in conceiving the ‘urban’ were followed by new experimentations backed by variant micro and macro perspectives of the central and state governments, and most importantly, an ambiguous understanding about the link between urban development and redistribution. From Seventh Plan (1985–1990) onwards, the ambiguity got reduced and urban policies overtly started supporting concentration in large cities. With the coming of NEP in 1991 and liberalization setting in, state-support to decentralized (Banerjee-Guha 2013a, b) urban

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development got replaced by a renewed spurt of centralization, increased private sector involvement and inclination towards hegemonic projects. The trend, consolidating since then, got culminated into a national policy of countrywide urban reforms in early twenty-first century. In the last two decades urban policy in India has followed an aggressive strategy of rewriting the very concept of ‘urban’ in two significant ways. First, through restructuring cities, beautifying urban space and privatizing the service delivery system, and second, by promoting the growth of urban enclaves or a ‘privatized urban’; both surface as complementary components of statist urban imaginations. The first component introduces an era of remapping the ‘urban’ by drastically gentrifying and transforming the urban institutional landscape (Banerjee-Guha 2007); through fragmentation of territories, it intensifies the contradiction between concentration and dispersal, introduces new/modern activities with the support of new legalities closure of factories and small scale units in the organized sector, anti-poor legal orders, land-use zoning, regulations on informal workers, hawkers and the poor, privatization of basic services and open spaces. The end result is displacement of the poor. The second introduces a new urban form of privatized urban enclaves, popularly known as ‘private cities’. Sponsored by corporate real estate giants, these cities target a narrow clientele of the affluent and rich. Urban development, more than ever before, is getting characterized by lack of social planning, backtracking of the State and a growing involvement of corporate capital de-prioritizing distributive justice and majority welfare (Banerjee-Guha 2004). The neoliberal worlding of cities in present-day India essentially comprises of speculative urban experiments in an atmosphere of inter-urban rivalry and tremendous uncertainty. Following Gramsci (1971), one can say that such efforts aim towards standardizing neoliberal lifestyles as desirable ways of articulating modernity and a global urban system. With rescaling of the ‘global’ and recasting of the ‘urban’ (Smith 2002), the Indian ‘urban’ is caught up in the imbroglio of an intense crisis

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(Banerjee-Guha 2009a) whereby cities are emerging as embodiments of capitalist development of the current time, achieved through ‘flexibilisation’ and disaggregation (Banerjee-Guha 1997), reflecting a wider restructuring of the national and regional economy. The current Indian urban imagination is embedded in two basic forms: the first being the network of interactions and flows that does not necessarily represent any specific urban norm but a hyper-modern ‘urban’ representing the accumulation process of capitalism and its market manifestations; the second personifying privatization of space by way of making private cities and urban enclaves produced out of existing natural and historically formed spaces (Lefebvre 1991). Backed by commodification pursuits of statist powers and representing a de-spatialized form, they stand way apart from surrounding macro-economic realities. Both are in total sync with the larger process of neoliberal restructuring resting partly on existing inequalities, but largely on the reproduction of newer areas of decline and growth. Based on the current economic momentum (Banerjee-Guha 2009b) and transformation of urban lifestyle, they emerge as categorized representations of ‘interdictory spaces’ (Flusty 2001) designed to exclude all those adjudged to be unsuitable, whose class and cultural positions diverge from the target clientele of the new urban spaces.

5.3

Neoliberalism and the Indian State Negotiating the ‘Urban’

Since independence, externally assisted urban sector projects in India have accounted for more than U.S. $230 million. Following the introduction of NEP, amidst the euphoria of infrastructural face-lift, the Expert Group on Commercialization of Infrastructure estimated a requirement of around Rs. 250,000 crore investment in urban infrastructure from 1996 to 2006 for which involvement of private capital was the only alternative. In the coming years, several international financial institutions like the World Bank, ADB, USAID and DFID were

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found drafting India’s urban reforms mandate bringing in a new regime of regulation in the urban sector. It cleared the ground for vigorous execution of state-sponsored neoliberal programmes in a wide range of cities impacting diverse sectors and affecting shelter and livelihoods of millions of urban poor. Emerging as a hallmark of urban imagination of state-capital alliance and exposing a deep structural imbalance (Banerjee-Guha 2010), the reform embodied the contradictions of economic globalization at both global and local scales (Sassen 1999). The following paragraphs examine its material manifesto, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), the first ever national urban policy in post-colonial India, launched in 2005 and the subsequent scenarios. JNNURM (henceforth mentioned as National Urban Renewal Mission or NURM) essentially aimed at putting cities on a fast track development through reforms. As it identified the gap between fast urban growth and shortage of urban infrastructure as the primary urban problem, priority was put on gigantic infrastructural projects. Sub-mission A (UIG Urban infrastructure and governance) of the Mission, administered by the Ministry of Urban Development, accounted for 65% of the total funds, and Sub-mission B (BSUP Basic services to the urban poor), administered by the Ministry of Urban Employment and Poverty Alleviation accounted for the remaining 35%. Involvement of two separate ministries with two divergent focuses exposed a deep anomaly in the structure of the Mission as it is very clear that making world class infrastructure and simultaneously providing basic services to the poor are antithetical to each other and cannot be taken up by one single policy initiative. Subsequent facts showed that while the infrastructure budget steadily increased (GOI 2008), BSUP funds never experienced any rise; even existing funds were either not released or remained unutilized for long three years after launching the Mission. Where was the space for the poor or concern for the majority’s welfare in this grand Mission? A close look at the reform-stricken cities shows that they fast started emerging as converging points (Banerjee-Guha

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2009b) of accumulation where majority of the population faced dispossession and economic uncertainty, giving rise to an utterly conflicting landscape of divergent claims. One should note that NURM reforms juxtaposed with several anti-people policies of NEP. The stated aim of the Mission was to render ‘world class’ status to 63 Indian cities by building infrastructure wide roads, flyovers, tunnels, skywalks, and gigantic commercial blocks and residential/recreational/entertainment complexes. Vision was the same for all cities, large and small, and all reforms were mandatory. To access funds, the state governments required to set up para-statal bodies that would evaluate projects, release and even manage funds. Mega infrastructure, commercial and cultural projects funded by the private sector were given priority. In conjunction, Central Government’s National Common Minimum Programme made necessary arrangements to bring land and housing within the orbit of market and paved way for 100% FDI in urban infrastructure from nearly Rs. 260 crores in 2007–2008, the infrastructure budget increased to Rs. 570 crores in 2011–2012 exemplifying the beginning of a new politico-economic regime that acted as a catalyst for changing the basic concept of ‘urban’ in India. After a change in government at the Centre in 2014, NURM was extended till 2015 and subsequently for more years with a change in name and increased dexterity. The apparent result was seen in the introduction of several hegemonic projects, particularly ‘smart cities’. I will discuss it later. To access NURM funds, the municipalities required to prepare city development plans (CDP), a 25-year vision document defining the direction they wanted to pursue. Most plans were ready by a month and got evaluated by hired private bodies. Within three months, Rs. 86,482.95 crores for 23 projects was released. All former schemes like National Slum Development Programme, Swarna Jayanti Sahakari Rozgar Yojana, Valmiki-Ambedkar Aawaas Yojana (for housing the socially marginalized and urban poor), National Transport policy, etc., were brought under the Mission. Newer forms of

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governance were designed involving film and media celebrities to entice people. Several NGOs got co-opted for its materialization Janaagraha in Bangalore was a forerunner that conducted number of workshops to sway people in favour of public–private partnership (Benjamin 2010) projects. A careful look at NURM shows that essentially it was a reform linked urban investment programme of private capital. Based on subtle forms of competition, place-marketing and regulatory undercutting to attract investment, it is tangled by a range of conditionalities, the key items covering wide range of areas’ privatization and commercialization of basic services; liberalization of land and real estate through repeal of Urban Land Ceiling Act; change in Rent Control Acts; making of a strong mortgage market with 100% FDI in housing and real estate; easier land use conversion norms; reforms in property tax; financial and administrative restructuring of municipalities; outsourcing of municipal services by cutting down organized jobs; introduction of e-governance, and prioritization of private sector and private credit rating agencies over elected civic bodies (CASUMM 2006)—the accompanying fall-outs affected huge cross sections of people. The sweeping transformation of governance was meant to cripple municipal bodies and encroach upon constitutionally devolved areas of state government jurisdictions, the new modalities often getting governed by the corporate sector. Take the case of repealing the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation (ULCR) Act. The Act was passed in 1976 to prevent concentration of land in the hands of speculative capital. A ceiling was subsequently introduced on the ownership of vacant urban land to make more such lands available for the poor. In 1999, the Central Government abolished the Act. Till 2005, it was still a vital legislation at state level for making surplus land available at affordable price. NURM made the repeal of the Act mandatory for accessing Mission funds and in the process brought huge quantity of land into the market that had earlier accommodated poor people’s housing. From late 1990s till early 2000, more than 200,000 families were evicted from such

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lands in Delhi; in Mumbai in 2005 alone, more than 90,000 slum units were demolished (CASUMM 2006). National Building Organization statistics stated that among 24.7 million people rendered homeless in 2006, more than 97% were urban poor (Singh 2008). Abolition of the Act opened up huge spaces in several cities for upscale real estate projects undertaken by public–private partnerships. With an apparent aim to regenerate declining industrial areas and create jobs in ‘dynamic’ (sic) sectors of culture and leisure, these projects started enclosing spaces in one city after another so long used by cross-sections of the society especially the poor. To preclude resistance, new zoning laws were enacted; surveillance stepped up targeting hawkers, rag pickers and vendors, the labelled encroachers on public land. To appease big capital for which NURM was essentially designed, the municipal governments started rewriting CDPs (city development plans). Take, for example, the CDP of Hyderabad. A number of projects in the Plan, initially aimed for public sector funding, were subsequently remodelled for the purpose of securing World Bank loans. Most of the BSUP projects in Hyderabad were relocated to the outskirts for making Hyderabad a ‘slum free’ city, a declared agenda of NURM. Like Mumbai and Kolkata, in Hyderabad too (Pakalapati 2010) scrapping of ULCRA brought huge quantity of slum land into the market. The city’s metro rail project under Sub-mission A went to displace thousands of poor from such lands and also demolishing huge areas for pedestrian shopping that were Hyderabad’s historical landmarks. The successful bidder, an Indian-Thai private collaboration (ITD-Thailand) company was offered huge concessions (Ramachandraiah 2009) and subsidies under the Andhra Pradesh Infrastructure Development Enabling Act, 2001. In Bangalore, on the other hand, real estate projects having IT professionals as the prime clientele got priority. New CDPs were drafted by private sector professionals and funding groups. The Pune City Development Plan was drafted by the Credit Rating Information Services of India Limited (CRISIL) with technical assistance from the Financial

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Institutions Reform and expansion-Debt (FIRE-D) Project of the USAID (Banerjee and Mukherjee 2008), the latter itself being a funder. Same was the case with Kolkata CDP. Nexus between real estate and infrastructure projects became a regular phenomenon of NURM. As Mumbai emerged as the largest recipient of NURM funds for becoming the country’s future International Financial Centre, it deserves a little more elaboration on its transformation process. Since 1980s, with the closure of cotton mills, the city, till then the former industrial capital offering direct and indirect employment to millions of workers, had started experiencing industrial decline. Following NEP, industrial employment fell further. One needs to note that during the same time Mumbai started getting officially publicized as a financial, service and entertainment hub. Contradicting the 1970s plan of decentralization, MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Regional development Authority) in 1995 plan opted for centralized investment (MMRDA, 1995) focusing on the metropolis. The new plan resembled the ten-year Vision Plan of ‘Bombay First’, a corporate sector NGO that had since long been forecasting Mumbai’s significant role in liberalization process (Bombay First 2003) strongly putting forth demand for thorough redevelopment of the city. Mumbai Transformation Project of the State government and the subsequent NURM CDP were identical with the Vision Plan that set the process of thinning the distinction between market, State and civil society (MacLeod 2002). It paved the way for random gentrification and upscale governance to evolve as prime strategies. The city economy now focused on ‘high-end services’ especially finance, healthcare, information technology, media/entertainment/telecom and modern format retail (Banerjee-Guha 2010) and the entire built environment was spearheaded to act as a seamless arena of upscale consumption. Within a short period, the city underwent unprecedented transformation causing tremendous uncertainty to its economic base with everlasting spatial implications. The most affected areas were the central parts, the cotton mill areas, and the eastern sea-board that I identified

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as ‘golden triangle’ (Banerjee-Guha 2009b), meaning source for enormous profit for the real estate. By 2008, the entire mill area (522 ha) in Dadar and Parel was redeveloped as an upscale commercial hub with global chain shops, hyper markets and corporate offices displacing more than 200,000 workers who had been directly employed in the mills. Adjacent to the mill areas in the north, Dharavi, one of the largest slums of South Asia, covering an area of 174 ha and home for millions of workers and over 2000 shops with an annual turnover of Rs. 4000 crores, started getting gentrified as a commercial-cumresidential hub. To its north, Bandra-Kurla international financial/commercial complex came up on the location of Bharatnagar slum housing countless recycling industry units. Further north, Andheri, a residential cum small industrial area, got transformed as an IT hub and mono-rail node. From the port area in the eastern sea-board, covering 753 ha (three and a half time bigger than the mill land), fishermen and port workers started getting evicted and, like displaced workers of the mills and Dharavi joined the queue of endless waiting for rehabilitation. Their struggle continues till date. The port-area redevelopment is a part of the ambitious project of Central Government of networking 12 ports across the country, some of which are going to become SEZs of corporate houses already having private ports. The present state government while elaborating on its innovative ‘Mumbai Next’ project, promised to make Mumbai’s metropolitan region a finance/service/entertainment hub (TOI 2015a) within a short period of time. Fate of smaller cities like Bhopal in central India or Kochi in the south-west coast is no different. Slums in Bhopal like those in Hyderabad have got shifted to faraway places and heavy user charges have been levied on those who stayed behind (Singh 2008). Cities like Chandigarh, Ahmedabad and Jaipur with an average population of 15 lakhs wait in the line for modernization. Thirty-three per cent of 300 new malls were declared to have destination to cities (TOI 2009) that would experience real estate boom. Urban space in India is revalorized with a determined aim of realizing more profit.

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Let’s come back to ‘smart cities’. After a change in government at the Centre in 2014, JNNURM was initially extended till 2015. In April 2015 Prime Minister Modi renamed JNNURM as ‘Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban transformation (AMRUT)’ after the name of Atal Behari Vajpayee, a former Prime Minister from Bharatiya Janata Party. For AMRUT, the allotted budget was Rs. 50,000 crores to be spent over a period of five years on 500 select cities. The budget decided to also support those JNNURM projects that were more than 50% completed and in addition re-develop few more cities with touristic prospects or having vantage locations. The previous UPA 2 government had completed all necessary preparations for launching JNNURM Phase 2, targeting 500 cities for modernization. It had also introduced a new concept of ‘smart city’ under which a selected few would be smartened up and some more would be built afresh. In 2012, the Delhi Metropolitan Industrial Corridor (DMIC) too had incorporated the idea of ‘smart city’ in its plan (Mint 2012). Amrut essentially was the new avatar of JNNURM having the same approach and focus. The Central Cabinet cleared all proposals of AMRUT and approved the ‘smart city’ project too, by then came to be known as the dream project of the new Prime Minister. Rs. 48,000 crores got sanctioned to smarten 100 existing cities across the country for optimizing service delivery efficiency by using improved technology. The project was supposed to adopt ‘local area approach’ to support regional and local distinctiveness of settlements. The routine rhetoric of JNNURM Phase II and AMRUT was identical and for both, the actual agenda was to make cities economically more competitive (Burte 2014). High points of the proposal were ‘operational and economic efficiency’ for the purpose of attracting business and ‘improved information and communication technology’ to assist the same (Hollands 2008). Where was any space for ordinary citizens and the poor in this smart vision whose contribution in the growth curve of any city is anyway undeniable? Essentially the smart city of popular idealization seeks to leverage a series of

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computational networking and self-regulation capacities that are integrated in the city’s administrative and infrastructural system through information and communication technologies (ICTs). Smart Cities Council (2013), an international industry-founded advocacy platform is one of the main propagators of this idea that projects the use of computers and data handling as a major aspect of city management. The overall perspective highlights two major characteristics of smart cities. The first focuses on human and social capital particularly in relation to business innovation and competitiveness and thus visualizes such cities as concentration areas of highly educated and ‘creative’ workforce (Caragliu et al. 2011). Cities seeking economic success thus have to be the home of highly skilled (read affluent) workers who would be attracted towards these novel spaces through concerted and interactive efforts of academicians, businesses and government. One needs to invoke the neo-Gramscian concept of extended civil society (discussed in the previous section) to understand this collaborative strategy. The second characteristic routinely speaks of sustainability and participatory governance that actually signify nothing but an extremely narrow space of elitist modernization. What is important in the discourse is its systematic silence of conflicts and contradictions that the smartening up would lead to, not just in spaces of so-called sustainability, governance or business, but also in the larger socio-political scenario (Burte 2014). So, a smart city needs to be visualized as a city without politics where all social problems would be taken care of by the ‘smart technology’ of modern infrastructure (Smart Cities Council 2014). Hollands (2008) categorically states that the overall emphasis of smart cities on business-driven technology and gentrification is clearly indicative of an obvious unconcern of class inequality, social justice and inclusion. Relation between technology and social transformation as well as between claimed smartness and real effectiveness (of e-governance or data-use), according to Hollands (2008), is marked by a series of definitional ambiguities that needs to be identified as a mix of corporate and political story-telling of

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the state power. The latter, in case of India, is looking as an obvious ‘fait accompli’ with conditions of FDI entry in these cities (Burte 2014) getting relaxed every day. Together these efforts exude a homogenous and one-dimensional image of urban that brazenly supports claims of the rich over city-space leading to extreme segmentation of the underclass. Smart as well as other gentrified cities (not always marked as ‘smart’) are being envisaged as techno-managerially controlled secluded spaces that promotes class-based spatial segregation, obviously favouring the rich, keeping out the majority who happen to be the ‘un-skilled’ workforce, from not only the space of the new urban, but also from all associated planning considerations. As a natural course, it undermines the complexity of urban life of multi-layered interactive cities where more than 50% live in slums (Banerjee-Guha 2009a). Actually these differently manicured cities are conceived more as ‘spatial products’ produced and reproduced by state-capital alliance and governed by a decisive control mechanism, rather than as settlements having organic ties with the surrounding region. The logic rests on a shift of capital from primary circuit of production to the secondary circuit of built environment (Harvey 1985), aiming at converting cities into nodes of consumption. Neoliberalism becomes an overarching reference for linking institutional landscapes and everyday aspirations that exclude ‘the unsuitable’ whose class and cultural positions diverge from that of the new clientele, involving bourgeoisie as a formidable factor in city governance that gets activated through ‘revanchist’ (Smith 1996) methodologies. The discussion brings us back again to neo-Gramscian analysis of governance in new urban regimes. The ensuing urban forms of these regimes manifest a disturbed heterotopia (Mitchell 2001), an uneven patchwork of microspaces that Soja (2000) identifies as landscapes of splintering ‘post metropolis’, barricading individuals both voluntarily and involuntarily. A new urban geography is being rewritten on the canvas of urban development in India replicating what happened in Toronto, New York or Birmingham in the 1980s (Kipfer and

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Keil 2002) and subsequently in hundreds other cities across the world as a fall-out of neoliberal crack down. In spite of differences from one region to the other, the nature of urban redevelopment across the country is universal that is fast altering the basic scale of city hierarchy through valorization and devalorization of land, re-aligning the very concept of ‘urban’ to the imperatives of market (Swyngedouw et al. 2002). For materialization of the above concept, huge land is required to be made available that has brought back the issue of land acquisition (started vigorously in 2005 for making Special Economic Zones) in the centre-stage linking it with the discourse of right to land and livelihood. All these take the discussion to the second component of contemporary urban development, that is, the privatized ‘urban’ or private cities that follow the ‘smart city’ concept as an obvious road map.

5.4

Paving Way for Private Cities

Since the early twenty-first century, State activism to indiscriminately convert areas into privatized ‘urban’ has been raising serious questions in the area of urban development studies in India. The spaces of hegemony (Lefebvre 1991) that these private cities are creating reflect not only a notion of a globalized urban, but also a secluded space, dissociated from wider realities. Using the dynamics of absolute space within the parameters of relative and relational spaces (Banerjee-Guha 2008), these cities are set to mutate all existing social relations and alienate specific space-economies from their respective realities to construct a system that conforms only to theory (Bourdieu 1998). The common collective interest and the public good are found to be negotiated by economic and political power-plays supporting individual accumulation and subordinating common people and their rights (Cox 1999). Armed with new legalities and sanctions, the State is found to openly facilitate enclave development—a colonial strategy reconstructed in a neoliberal framework.

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Remaking ‘Urban’ in Twenty-first Century Neoliberal India

How did it evolve? Conceptualization started in the early twenty-first century. In 2008, a Service Sector committee constituted by the Planning Commission recommended ‘new satellite towns’ to be built by the private sector with services provided by the State. In total contrast to the satellite or new towns or growth poles, conceived and developed by the State in 1970s in and around metropolitan regions or in interior areas to facilitate de-concentration or boost regional development in less developed regions, these twenty-first-century ‘new cities’ were conceived as solely private enterprises, operationalized by state-capital alliance and built through private initiatives or public–private partnerships. Subsequently at the India Economic Summit in 2009, all major real estate players came forward with private city proposals with a strong demand for removing ‘bureaucratic hurdles’ for speedy execution of the projects. The concept was co-opted by compatible policymakers who aggressively started promoting the concept in seminars and workshops joined by funding agency representatives and real estate players. Researchers, academics and activists (Mumbai Mirror 2010) were systematically kept out of the process. Finally the job of making these cities was entrusted to the private sector. In the next few years, considerable number of private cities, big and small, came up in the outskirts of existing cities or in rural areas located not very far from big cities. Although no specific law to promote private cities was passed, it became clear that the concept was to stay as a structural element of Indian urban planning. In 2014, soon after the new government was sworn in, the Prime Minister announced the decision to build ‘Smart Cities’ by restructuring a group of existing cities but mainly by developing new ones through private sector initiative (TOI 2014). Hailed as Prime Minister’s ‘dream project’, these cities were to become esteemed spaces of accumulation armed with ideas of corporate flexibility, policy decentralization (by locating them inside Special Economic Zones) and inter-local competition. The latter was meant to work towards localizing crisis and isolate opposition (Peck and Tickell 2006). Private sector, both

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Indian and non-Indian, started getting wooed for joining the effort. Quick results started showing up the Prince of Qatar agreed to invest in Smart City Projects of Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh with a promise of Rs. 12,000 crores and Rs. 60,000 crores, respectively. Barrack Obama during his visit in early 2015, promised financial support (TOI 2015b) for infrastructural development in these cities. The list of private cities built since 2009 is quite long. To name a few Lavasa in Pune; Sahara Amby Valley city near Mumbai—both in Maharashtra; Nano city near Chandigarh (Punjab); Sri city in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), planned by Jurong Consultants, Singapore; Sahara cities in Indore (Madhya Pradesh), Jaipur (Rajasthan), Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) and Nagpur (Maharashtra); Eldeco city in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh); Vedanta city in Kalahandi (Orissa); Arrow City-Manhattan in New Mumbai (Maharashtra). In Jaipur alone, nine private cities were planned. The state of Maharashtra became the forerunner of the endeavor. Under the Special Township Policy Act, a bunch of private cities started coming up in different locations of the state, mostly designed by overseas architects, bluntly advertising the cities as new lifestyle locales for those ‘who can afford to buy their living spaces’. In short, private cities became a pan-Indian phenomenon of urban modernization. The largest among the projects are handled by the Lavasa Corporation and Sahara Prime City Limited. The former, a major real estate firm in collaboration with a well-known media group, the Times of India, started a vigorous public relations campaign in 2010 supporting initiatives to privatize urban spaces in general. Lavasa city developed by them was labelled as a ‘path-breaker’ to introduce an era of ‘new urbanism’. Words like ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘inclusive’ were liberally used in the advertisements. Some even assured housing for rural migrants. In what way such corporatized urban enclaves, tailor-made for the elite could accommodate these migrants, has been clarified later. Terms like ‘new urbanism’ used in the advertisements proved the indifference of Lavasa experts towards serious researches on urban issues and

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the polemics that such concepts were associated with (Smith 1996). Let us look at the Lavasa city more closely. The city, located in a hill station on a valley is spread over 12,500 acres in western Maharashtra. Developed by HCC Real Estate, a subsidiary of the Hindustan Construction Company with investment coming from leading corporate houses at home and abroad (like Deutsche Bank), the city lies close to Warasgaon dam, a huge project that had initially displaced thousands of villagers from their homes. IT and architectural inputs for the city are provided by Lavasa, the realty arm of HCC, in partnership with IT Major Wipro and the Networking Major CISCO. With a total investment of Rs. 150,000 crores, the city boasts of being home primarily for IT professionals whose workplaces are located nearby as well as film and media celebrities. 18 hotels have come up only for Lavasa visitors. Inside the city precinct, Apollo Group has set up a 200 acre ‘Wellness island’ to monitor the residents’ health. To keep the investors happy, the city is developed as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), entitled for all benefits that SEZs enjoy, bypassing all regional and national laws. The city has a private police force responsible to monitor intra-city surveillance. Besides the regular accommodations, 100,000 chawls* have been constructed for the supporting staff (drivers, cooks, watchmen, etc.) of the primary residents that explains Lavasa’s promise to house rural migrants. It has been, however, argued by many that the minimum price of a chawl unit is well beyond the affordability of the target group (Shrivastava and Dutta 2011). Lavasa Corporation is granted the status of a ‘Special Planning Authority’ by the Maharashtra government, similar to the one granted to the City Industrial and Development Corporation (CIDCO) in early 1970s for building new cities. CIDCO, however, is wholly owned by the state government and its initial building efforts were undertaken by the public sector. Lavasa, in contrast, is a private body that enjoys all the power of a municipal authority that even CIDCO did not in its initial years. To offer land for Lavasa city, Maharashtra Government modified

S. Banerjee-Guha

several planning norms, changed hill station policies, increased the land ceiling limit and even allowed indiscriminate hill cutting. With the power of SEZ, Lavasa stays out of all existing laws of the state. The Sahara Group, having a total asset of worth U.S. $12 billion, is building large private cities under the brand name of ‘Sahara City Homes’. The Group has investments in diverse sectors like finance, infrastructure, housing, media, entertainment, consumer products, manufacturing, services and even trading. In association with Sahara Prime City Limited (mentioned earlier), Sahara Infrastructure & Private Limited is constructing 217 cities across the country. The firm has received several awards from the government for quality management in occupational health, safety assessment systems and social accountability. The total saleable area that Sahara Group owns is approximately 68.16 lakh sq. ft. residential, 23.82 lakh sq. ft. retail and 8.00 lakh sq. ft commercial. Health-care related and hospitality areas are spread over approximately 10.55 lakh sq. ft. Besides, the Group has acquired approximately 150 lakh sq. ft. in Amby Valley near Pune in Maharashtra, provided facilities and infrastructure (85 km. of road, 350 acres of landscaped area, an airport with a 1200 m runway and 11 artificial water bodies) and leased it out to a private luxury city that has become a popular destination of film and media personnel. The CEO of the city states that it embodies the true essence of luxurious India (TNN 2010). It is worth mentioning that the chief of the Sahara group is currently in jail for fraudulent activities in numerous transactions. Other private cities are not as big as Sahara or Lavasa. Significant is ‘Arrow City Manhattan’, located in Uran in New Mumbai. The proposed Reliance SEZ stands right outside the boundary wall of the city. Like all other private cities, this too is going to have golf course, stadia, commercial estates, malls, multiplexes, resorts and as many as fifteen parks. Livelihoods of several villages in Uran have been seriously affected by the making of this city creating deep uncertainty and socio-economic tension in the entire region.

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Remaking ‘Urban’ in Twenty-first Century Neoliberal India

The process offers a great investment opportunity for big capital and an attractive techno-managerial modern vision of living environment for the affluent. The new political consensus currently evolving in the country favouring more business opportunities for the corporate sector, openly supports the making of these private/smart cities as a result of which that justifies the huge rise in the number of these cities across the country. Almost in every state, the print and digital media is flooded with advertisements of private cities with film and sports celebrities appearing as icons for promotion. Drastic reorganization is taking place in the existing space-relations in several regions, thanks to the emergence of these cities. As regionalities of many of these cities are embedded in agriculture-related systems, remaking of spaces has directly affected livelihoods of farmers and land-related workers that were seen years ago in the outskirts of Lucknow during the making of Sahara City or in Noida near Delhi in recent years. Such remaking lends an identity of ambiguity and alienation to the new cities while de-linking them in several ways from the surrounding regional formations (Banerjee-Guha 2008). Private cities are fast emerging as real faces of state’s official attitude towards agriculture and related workers who steadily are getting converted into perennial migrants, uprooted from land and livelihood, always on the move in search of work. Uneven development produced at multiple scales is incorporating selective regions and sections of the society into a globalized framework leaving a large majority out of the safety net, reinforcing a destructive ensemble of obsoletism and re-building that systematically negates the existing use values, alters the discursive and material geography of people and spaces and creates a solid background of socio-spatial conflicts. Two major class-based, exploitative issues are linked with the above process. First, as huge land is a basic requirement for building private cities, the impact is felt on a wider space, affecting livelihood of the poorest, belonging to socially disadvantaged groups like Dalits and tribals.

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Private cities have brought direct assault on their economic rights. Second, as sections of urban elites hailing from diverse sectors are found actively involved in the making of private cities, the entire trajectory gets linked with a contested landscape where wealthy and the dispossessed stand anchored to each other, face to face, staking claims on space, opening up newer spaces of violence. Once more the neo-Gramscian approach on the synergy between neoliberal projects and entrepreneurial governance proves relevant.

5.5

Institutionalizing Creative Destruction

The current re-making of ‘urban’ in India reflects a larger restructuration of the economy, precisely indicating a shift towards financial manipulations as sources of profit. For understanding the nature of this shift and associated fall-outs, we need to look at three basic issues. First, the changing position of the Indian economy and the role of ‘urban’ therein. The thrust on private investment that got intensified in the Seventh Plan (1985– 1990), essentially reconfigured the concept of ‘urban’ and heralded a major shift in urban policy favouring centralization. NEP introduced in 1991 followed by the 74th Constitutional Amendment in 1992 came as supporting mechanisms that systematically reduced the importance of elected urban bodies (Banerjee-Guha 2009a, b) and promoted the role of capital market in urban development. With renewed importance of large cities, the earlier objectives of strengthening economic base of small and medium towns went backstage and investment started flowing into large cities and their immediate periphery. The Mega City Programme of the Central government (Banerjee-Guha 2009a, b) of 1991 worked in concurrence to strengthen the system in which economic changes had huge organizational and spatial implications for cities, characterized by rescaling of functions, activities and relations (Smith 2002). The first issue thus gets interconnected with the second, that is the ascendancy of neoliberalism as a capitalist model of

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accumulation and its umbilical link with entrepreneurial mode of governance, economic regeneration and urban restructuring (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Its authentic form, besides economic relations, includes a diversely patterned hegemonic structure. Tightening of control of the international financial institutions (IFIs) like World Bank, Asian Development Bank or DFID on urban development with a renewed focus on mega cities and privatization of ‘urban’ became a part of this hegemony that rested on a complex ensemble of institutional, social and political relations and practices. Forging a link with a wider process of capital accumulation, the resultant global–local nexus overtly symbolized a State supported neoliberalism agenda initiated at the behest of market (Harvey 1989). Its spatial logic was entangled with a need to restructure cities and privatize ‘urban’ for which entrepreneurial governance became a must that would practise neoliberalism at local scales. The neo-Gramscian approach discussed in the beginning of the chapter indicates that the current neoliberal urban praxis in India is further activated by a section of the civil society and business interests through various linked-up initiatives that are creating series of ambiguities in the public mind regarding the role of state vis-à-vis the poor. In reality, however, cities get converted into investment nodes overthrowing all previous policies of welfare and social security. The current entrepreneurial regime is all set to perk up competitiveness in urban economies through recommodification of social and economic life (Leitner 1990), emphasizing skill development and flexibilized labour systems as the modernization hallmark. The cities are fast becoming embodiments of non-Fordist economies operating through fragmentation of labour and disaggregation of production, opening up larger spaces of social reproduction of a specific nature. The official announcement (TOI 2015c) of making India a global hub of manufacturing by using cheap human resource of the country is a pertinent example. Contemporary neo-liberal urban worlding in India is comprised of speculative urban practices that vie for global status in the context of inter-country rivalry and extreme economic uncertainty (Roy and Ong

S. Banerjee-Guha

2011). Cities from both South and North, in this hierarchical global system are assigned specific roles as a result of which Mumbai, Dhaka, Sao Paolo, Brazil and Johannesburg become as important as New York, Chicago, London and Tokyo albeit having differential status in the hierarchy. As the current logic of entrepreneurialism brings all domains of social life within the framework of market, Lefebvre (1991) needs to be invoked he states that under capitalism while social space gets reproduced from existing natural spaces primarily as a tool of accumulation, a simultaneous process of representation of space, backed by the state, also takes place in the garb of planning that produces commodified spaces (Burte 2017). The privatized urban space in India exemplifies the latter. In the above framework, neoliberal urban forms are produced at diverse scales, sometimes through hegemonic projects, gentrification, booming real estate, privatization of services and sometimes through appropriation of huge land for constructing private cities and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that directly affect the rural and urban poor, appropriating their right to land and livelihood, making marginalization of the underprivileged (Banerjee-Guha 2013a, b) a part of the system and a structural element of state violence. Connected with the above two issues, thus comes the third, that is appropriation of land for making global urban and economic spaces. It should be noted that land appropriation for corporate activities has become a worldwide phenomenon that has intensified in recent time particularly in countries of Australia, South-east Asia, Africa and South Asia (Banerjee-Guha 2013a, b). Corporate take-over of farmlands, mineral bases and local production systems are pushing workers out of their roots, eliminating smallholder food production and increasing vulnerability of both rural and urban poor. In India, the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894 was the primary law of land acquisition till 2011 that gave power of eminent domain to the State to acquire any land for ‘public good’. The euphoria with which the Indian State started constructing Special Economic Zones (the first SEZ Act came up in 2005) and private cities in the beginning of

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Remaking ‘Urban’ in Twenty-first Century Neoliberal India

this century (Banerjee-Guha 2008) derived institutional support from this Act that displaced millions from their land leading to large-scale protests. Electoral compulsions finally forced the government to bring amendment to the Act and accordingly Amendment Bill was introduced in 2007 and the modified Act passed in 2013. Despite having allowance to acquisition for public purposes violating ceiling, consent and compensation clauses (Sampat 2013), the Act could not satisfy the corporate sector that demanded further dilution. A major step towards intensifying reforms that the newly elected government took after assuming office in 2014 was to pass an ordinance to further dilute the clauses (TNN 2014). Land thence became a major object of reorganization of speculative governance backed by state’s endeavor in devising mechanisms for making real estate (Ong 2011). Land acquisition, armed with new legalities is now a much smoothened affair having all the power to facilitate building of economic enclaves and private cities as symbols of modernism.

5.6

Conclusion

A proper understanding and theorization of urban neoliberalism and the new urban forms will remain superficial if it does not involve the issue of deepening segmentation of the urban space, marginalization of the poor and the resistance arising therefrom. Ever than before, cities and their peripheries are emerging as spaces of conflict and the new urban forms are abounding with differential claims over land, mobilizations of the dispossessed and resistances against state and market forces a disproportionate share of corporate capital no doubt is involved in revalorizing these spaces, but a growing number of marginalized and the disadvantaged are also involved in their alternate materialization that are making the same spaces emerge as new arenas of struggle. New urbanism and the ‘privatized urban’ are taking the discourse beyond the question of the ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2010), to a much broader issue of the ‘right to space and livelihood’. It is important to view the emerging

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spatiality with a perspective of justice and entitlement as in the long run that only can pave the way for opening up possibilities of global articulations of local contestations and work towards their effective networking across the world.

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98 Bombay First (2003) Vision Mumbai transforming Mumbai into a world class city. A Bombay first-McKinsey report, Mumbai Bourdieu P (1998) The essence of neoliberalism. Le Monde Diplomatique, pp 36–58 Brenner N, Theodore N (2002) Cities and the geography of actually existing neoliberalism. Antipode 34 (3):349–379 Burte H (2014) The smart city card. Econ Polit Wkly XLIX(46):22–25 Burte H (2017) The violence of worlding producing space in neo-liberal Durban, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. Econ Polit Wkly LII(7):66–74 Caragliu A, Del Bo C, Nijkamp P (2011) Smart cities in Europe. J Urban Ethnol 18(2):65–82 CASUMM (2006) JNNURM A blueprint for unconstitutional. Undemocratic Governance, Bangalore Conway D, Heynen N (eds) (2006) Globalization’s contradictions. Routledge, London Cox H (1999) The market as god, Atlantic Monthly, March 1999, pp 18–23 Flusty S (2001) The banality of interdiction surveillance, control and the displacement of diversity. Int J Urban Reg Res 25:658–64 George S (1999) A short history of neoliberalism. Global Policy Forum, Amsterdam Gill S (1995) Globalization. Market civilization and disciplinary neoliberalism, millennium 24:399–423 Goldman M (2005) Imperial nature the World Bank and struggles for social justice in the age of globalization. Yale University Press, New Haven Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart, London Gramsci A (1995) Further selections from prison notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart, London Harvey D (1985) The urbanization of capital. Basil Blackwell, London Harvey D (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geographiska Annaler 71B(1):3–18 Harvey D (2010) Right to the city: from capital surplus to accumulation by dispossession. In: Banerjee-Guha S (ed) Accumulation by dispossession: transformative cities in the new global order. Sage, New Delhi, pp 17–32 Hollands RG (2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive, or entrepreneurial. City 12(3):303–320 Jessop B (1995) The regulation approach and governance theory. Economy and Society 24(3):307–333 Jessop B (1997) A neo-gramscian approach to the regulation of urban regimes. In: Lauria M (ed) Reconstructing urban regime theory. Sage, London, pp 51– 73 Keil R (2002) Common sense neoliberalism. Antipode 34 (3):578–601 Kipfer S, Keil R (2002) Toronto Inc? Planning the competitive city in the New Toronto? Antipode 34 (2):224–264

S. Banerjee-Guha Lefebvre H (1991) The production of space, (Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith). Blackwell, UK Leitner H (1990) Cities in pursuit of economic growth the local state as entrepreneur. Polit Geogr 9:146–170 Lipietz A (1987) Mirages and moiracles. Verso, London MacLeod G (2002) From urban entrepreneurialism to a ‘Revanchist City’: on the spatial injustices of glasgow’s renaissance. Antipode 34(3): 602–24 Mint (2012) Government to develop smart cities under JNNURM 2 Kamal Nath, 15 Dec. www.livemint.com/ Politics/5nIHGRhqqmDGYil4jnarvO/Govt-todevelop-smart-cities-under-JNNURM-2-Kamal-Nath. html?utm_source=copy. Accessed 4 Aug 2014 Mitchell D (2001) Postmodern geographical praxis postmodern impulses and the war against homeless people in the post justice city. In: Minca C (ed) Postmodern geography theory and praxis. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 57–92 Mooney G, Danson M (1997) Beyond culture city. In: Jewson N, MacGregor S (eds) Transforming cities. Routledge, London, pp 77–86 Mumbai Mirror (2010) Private city India’s future urban destination, 23 Sep, Mumbai Ong A (2011) Worlding cities, or the art of being global. In: Roy A, Ong A (eds) Worlding cities Asian experiments and the art of being global. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, MA, pp 1–26 Pakalapati UV (2010) Hi-tech Hyderabad and the urban poor: reformed out of the system. In: Banerjee-Guha S (ed) Accumulation by dispossession: transformative cities in the new global order. Sage, New Delhi, pp 125–150 Peck J, Tickell A (2006) Neoliberalizing space. In: Brenner N, Theodore N (eds) Spaces of neoliberalism. Blackwell, Malden, MA, pp 33–57 Peet R (2002) Geography of power. Zed Books, New York Polanyi K (2001) The great transformations, 2nd edn. Beacon Press, Boston Ramachandraiah C (2009) Maytas, Hyderabad metro and the politics of real estate. Econ Polit Wkly 44(3):36–40 Roy A, Ong A (eds) (2011) Worlding cities Asian experiments and the art of being global. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, MA Sampat P (2013) Limits to absolute power eminent domain and the right to land in India. Econ Polit Wkly 48(919):40–52 Sanyal K (2007) Rethinking Capitalist Development. Routledge, New Delhi Sassen S (1999) Globalization and the formation of new claims. In: Beauregard RA, Body-Gendrot S (eds) The urban moment: cosmopolitan essays on the late 20th century city. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp 99–118 Shrivastava KS, Dutta AP (2011) Hill city on Shaky ground, Down to Earth, 1–15 April, pp 26–31 Singh P (2008) City development plan and urban poor in Bhopal, paper presented in the workshop on urban neoliberalism restructuring South Asian cities, 27–28 Nov. Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

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Swyngedouw E, Moulaert F, Rodriguez A (2002) Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. Antipode 34(3):543–577 Times News Network (2014) Government uses ordinance again, 12th December, TNN Times of India (2009) Tier III cities see new realty boom, Times of India, 3rd February, TOI Times of India (2015a) Smart cities, 12th January, TOI Times of India (2015b) Obama supports smart cities, 27th January, TOI Times of India (2015c) Mumbai next government reels off projects in the name of boosting infrastructure, 7th February, TOI

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South African Urban Planning in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries—Continuities between the Apartheid and Democratic eras? Brij Maharaj

Abstract

This chapter analyses urban planning in South Africa in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. A key contention of this chapter is that notwithstanding progressive policy shifts since 1994, there are also some remarkable continuities between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Until 1990, urban and regional development policies in South Africa were intended to implement apartheid, and the planning discourse was organised along the lines of racial separation and operationalised through spatial partition. In the early 1990s, as democratic initiatives gained momentum, urban planners in South Africa attempted to reconstruct apartheid cities by offering alternative development discourses to reverse the effects of racial planning. The first wave post-apartheid urban planning and development strategies were driven by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which was adopted in 1994. The government argued that the pressures of global economic restructuring forced a shift in the macro-economic framework with the adoption of the neoliberal Growth, Employ-

B. Maharaj (&) School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Science, College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]

ment and Redistribution (GEAR) structural adjustment strategy in June 1996. However, a major issue was whether the poor would benefit from such partnerships. In 1998 the White Paper set the foundation for a new developmental local government system with an emphasis on integrated development strategies. The neoliberal bent continued with successive policies such as National Development Plan (NDP) introduced in 2012, and Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) in 2016. An analysis of contemporary urban realities reveals that the desegregation of the apartheid city was generally taking place within the inner city and on the fringes of affluent suburbs. Decades of institutionalised segregation in South Africa will not be eliminated overnight. Segregation has been deeply entrenched in the social fabric, and is further reinforced by the socio-economic differences between blacks and whites. Also, the spatial inscription of class is becoming an increasingly conspicuous feature of South African urban space. Keywords




Apartheid Growth employment and redistribution (GEAR) Integrated urban development framework (IUDF) National development plan (NDP) South africa Urban planning

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_6













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6.1

B. Maharaj

Introduction

At different stages in South Africa’s history, urban planning was used as the main tool for reconstructing society. Urban and regional development policies were used by a centralised regime to entrench apartheid (Mabin and Smit 1997). In fact, urban planning under apartheid ‘crippled the ability of South Africa’s cities to offer a decent urban life to most of their citizens” (Mabin 1998:2). In the early 1990s, as democratic initiatives gained momentum, urban planners in South Africa attempted to reconstruct apartheid cities by offering alternative development discourses to redress the effects of racial planning. The aim of this chapter is to critically assess the alternative urban reconstruction and development discourses in post-apartheid South Africa. This chapter analyses urban planning in South Africa in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. A key contention of this chapter is that notwithstanding progressive policy shifts since 1994, there are also some remarkable continuities between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section briefly reviews the apartheid legacy. This is followed by an analysis of first wave post-apartheid urban planning and development strategies, which were driven, by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The subsequent transition to neoliberal GEAR orthodoxy encountered an aberration with the basic needs oriented RDP. The Urban Development Framework and the White Paper on Local Government facilitated the implementation of GEAR in cities. The White Paper set the foundation for a new developmental local government system with an emphasis on integrated development strategies. The third section analyses the spatial focus of urban policies during the second democratic decade. The neoliberal bent continued with successive policies such as National Development Plan and Integrated Urban Development Framework. The final section reflects on the grounded realities of urban policy impacts, which have in many respects entrenched and reinforced apartheid spatial patterns.

6.2

Apartheid Planning Legacy

Until 1990, urban and regional development policies in South Africa were intended to implement apartheid, and the planning discourse was organised along the lines of racial separation and operationalised through spatial partition. The apartheid planning discourse was organised along the lines of racial separation and operationalised through spatial partition. More specifically, Africans were denied access to, and participation in, all political structures, and hence had little or no influence on decision-making, especially about the allocation of resources. Although many factors have been responsible for the inequitable distribution of political power and wealth in South Africa, it has been argued that the dispossession of land had the most immediate impact on black communities. The 1913 Land Act allocated 13 per cent of the land to blacks. The economic and social structure of these communities was often premised on the distribution of land, typical of most agrarian communities. Therefore, dispossession was ‘an act akin to national destruction’ (De Klerk 1991:1). The Urban Areas Act of 1923 represented the first attempt by a minority white regime to control, manage and segregate urban Africans. This Act introduced influx control policies that restricted the movement of blacks into cities (Rich 1978). The Group Areas Act of 1950 was one of the key legislative instruments used to reinforce the ideology of apartheid, and emphasised separate residential areas, educational services and amenities for the different race groups (Maharaj 1997). The management of the apartheid city was thus characterised by a ‘complex process of functional inclusion, spatial separation, and political exclusion’ (Swilling et al. 1991:175). Despite the apartheid regime’s attempts to curb urbanisation through separate development and influx control policies, cities continued to grow. Poverty and lack of socio-economic opportunities led to the migration of large numbers of rural black people to the cities. The nature

South African Urban Planning in the Twentieth …

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of the apartheid planning discourse resulted in urban areas being characterised by open spaces, under-utilised infrastructure and services. Such spaces were exploited by the marginalised to gain a foothold in locations close to opportunities in the urban areas. Lack of housing led to an increasing number of informal settlements on vacant land close to cities and suburbs. By the late 1970s, the state was forced to acknowledge that influx control had failed, and to concede the reality of a permanent black presence. However, the product was ‘urban permanence without reincorporation into the primary local government system and the white cities’ (Swilling et al. 1991:175). As illustrated in Table 6.1, the contemporary South African city is reflective of a discourse of apartheid urban planning characterised by racially fragmented and discontinuous land use and settlement patterns, haphazard, dysfunctional and inefficient spatial ordering, land-use mismatches, low level population density and the concentration of the poor in relatively high-density areas on the peripheries and the rich in the core intermediate urban areas (Hindson et al. 1992:6). Furthermore, this urban form spatially inscribes racially informed power relations. The redress of this situation must, imperatively, be informed by:

(2) the physical and economic reconstruction of the racially divided city; (3) the introduction of a transparent and unified system of urban revenue creation; and (4) the social, political and psychological incorporation of all black South Africans into legitimate state structures and the sensitisation of the state to survival systems and social networks that dominate the lives of the poor citizens (Parnell and Pieterse 1999:65).

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(1) the creation of a new planning discourse as an alternative to the planning apparatus inherited from the segregationist and apartheid state;

6.3

Reconstruction, Development and Planning

An attempt to introduce a new urban planning discourse started with the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The RDP emerged as the key strategy to address the social and economic inequalities of apartheid and the transition to a non-racial democracy. The principles of the RDP were summarised by the African National Congress (ANC) as follows: ‘An integrated programme, based on the people, that provides peace and security for all and builds the nation, links reconstruction and development and deepens democracy’ (ANC 1994:7, original emphasis). The RDP played an important role from a policy perspective to ensure the ‘successful transition from separate development towards a more sustainable development future’ (Munslow and FitzGerald 1997:60). Many believed that the RDP was very

Table 6.1 Urban Challenges in South Africa in the 1990s • Deeply entrenched patterns of racial segregation • Highly fragmented urban areas with an inversion of the ‘natural’ relationship between density and distance • Low-density sprawl in the middle-class suburbs with decentralised economic activity and inner-city decline • A massive challenge for the daily movement of people, with transport costs excessively high for poor households in international terms • A process of land invasion and informal settlement formation • Poorly developed and deteriorating public transport systems (although the privately-owned minibus taxi industry was proving to be highly successful) • Cities of extreme inequality, with Gini coefficients among the highest in the world • Very low urban densities in relation to international benchmarks for efficient and vibrant urban forms • Inefficiency in the use of resources such as energy and water Source Presidency (2014:11)

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ambitious and utopian, filled with good intentions, but with no indication as to how this would be realised. The Urban Development Strategy was the first policy intervention in the democratic era to address challenges facing cities.

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social objectives and three areas have been identified:

The Urban Development Strategy (UDS) of the Government of National Unity, released in October 1995, was influenced by the RDP in terms of being ‘people driven, integrated and sustainable, and implemented mainly through the reallocation of existing resources’ (Ministry of the Office of the President 1995:15). More specifically, the UDS identified five priority areas:

(a) Social Development—this would be achieved through community-based development and the provision of health, educational, sport and recreational services and opportunities; (b) Social Security—would take the form of caring for the aged, children who had been neglected, broken families, provision of social care and services; (c) Safety and Security—would be achieved by addressing those socioeconomic conditions, which perpetuate crime and violence and undermine development (Ministry of the Office of the President 1995:11).

(i) Integrating the Cities and Managing Urban Growth: The UDS aims to integrate the cities and towns with special focus on rebuilding the townships, job creation, provision of housing and urban amenities through integrated development planning, reducing commuting distances and introducing environmentally sensitive management of development and improving public passenger transport (Ministry of the Office of the President 1995:10). The concern with compact cities was partly influenced by the World Bank which argued that ‘South African cities are among the most inefficient in the world and called for restructuring to achieve higher densities and more compact urban development’ (Mabin 1998:6). (ii) Investing in Urban Development: Urban development investment focuses on upgrading existing houses and constructing new houses; restoring and extending infrastructure services, reducing environmental health hazards, encouraging investment; providing job opportunities and social community facilities (Ministry of the Office of the President 1995:10). (iii) Building Habitable and Safe Environments: The strategy focuses on human and

(iv) Promoting Urban Economic Development: The new democratic government recognises cities as ‘engines of economic growth’, given that urban areas generate 80 per cent of South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Urban development had to ensure the concomitant effect of generating greater economic activity, maximizing direct employment opportunities and alleviating urban poverty. Local economic development has been identified as an important growth strategy in the post-apartheid era (Nel 2001). (v) Creating Institutions for Delivery: The primary task of delivering services was the responsibility of the local government, while the provincial government had to prioritise, monitor and evaluate development. Central government had the responsibility to provide funding which would be influenced by national reconstruction and development priorities. According to the UDS, there was a need for new local government to improve administrative, planning and implementation functions through the more efficient utilisation of resources (Government Gazette, No. 16679 1995:42). The UDS

6.3.1 Urban Development Strategy

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emphasises a strong relationship between private and public sector in the delivery of services.

and cuts in public spending, was viewed by many as a departure from the RDP, and was a neoliberal strategy. The transition to neoliberal GEAR orthodoxy encountered an aberration with the basic needs oriented RDP, and the influence of the World Bank was evident (Bond 2000a, b). The liberation movement was apparently assimilated into this ideological paradigm largely through appeals to pragmatism and the need to come to terms with the realities of globalisation (by highly paid World Bank academic consultants) (Desai and Bohmke 1997). Local authorities will be forced to generate a larger proportion of their own revenues, and there is a strong emphasis on public–private partnerships. Within an urban setting this ‘means privatisation and the promotion of the principle of cost recovery which will reflect in inadequate subsidies targeted at the poor’ (Parnell and Pieterse 1999:75). Two policy documents, the Urban Development Framework (UDF) released in 1997, and the White Paper on Local Government issued in March 1998, gave spatial impetus to the GEAR strategy.

In response to the UDS, there were ‘often vitriolic debates between those arguing for dramatic, community-driven, state supported urban transformation and those who supported a more measured pace of market oriented change’ (Bond et al. 1996:102). There was a view that in many respects, the UDS was more market-oriented and hence was a retrogressive step from the RDP. Some have argued that the UDS was ‘mainly geared to rearranging cities for the benefit of multinational corporations and export-oriented producers’ (Bond et al. 1996:102). It was therefore not surprising that the UDS was largely welcomed by the private sector. However, the Centre for Development Enterprise (CDE), a neoliberal private sector research/policy institute, was concerned that the emphasis on addressing basic needs and services in South African cities was lopsided as insufficient attention focused on issues of local economic development and productivity of urban areas which would generate the resources to provide the services (CDE 1996a, b). The second wave of post-apartheid urban planning strategies extended the market orientation of the UDS.

6.3.2 Slide to Neoliberalism The second wave of post-apartheid urban planning was influenced by significant shifts in the government’s macro-economic policy with the adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR) in June 1996. GEAR emphasises that economic development will be led by the private sector; there will be privatisation of state-owned enterprises; government expenditure (especially social services) will be reduced; exchange control regulations will be relaxed; and there will be a more flexible labour market (Department of Finance 1996). Contrary to the government rhetoric, GEAR, which emphasises fiscal discipline, debt reduction

6.3.3 Urban Development Framework The aim of the UDF was to ‘outline the urban initiatives necessary to give substance to the imperatives outlined in the GEAR strategy’ (UDF :ii). The UDF emphasised the importance of public– private partnerships in financing, managing and delivering services. The UDF argued that based on international experience, the ‘success or failure of national development initiatives will largely be shaped in cities and towns’ (UDF 1998:2). As explained in Table 6.2, the implementation of the UDF would depend on four key strategies: integrating the city; improving housing and infrastructure; promoting urban economic development; creating institutions for delivery (UDF 1997:ix). In its appraisal of contemporary urban realities, the UDF tends to emphasise the urgency to control and regulate the city in terms of

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Table 6.2 Implementing the UDF (i) Integrating the city aims to negate apartheid-induced segregation, fragmentation and inequality. The focus is on integrated planning, rebuilding and upgrading the townships and informal settlements, planning for higher density land use and developments, reforming the urban land and planning system, urban transportation and environmental management

(iii) Promoting urban economic development aims to enhance the capacity of urban areas to build on local strengths to generate greater local economic activity, to achieve sustainability, to alleviate urban poverty, to increase access to informal economic opportunities and to maximise the direct employment opportunities and the multiplier effect from implementing development programmes

(ii) Improving housing and infrastructure involves upgrading and the construction of housing, restoring and extending infra-structure, alleviating environmental health hazards, encouraging investment and increasing access to finance, social development, building habitable and safe communities, maintaining safety and security and designing habitable urban communities

(iv) Creating institutions for delivery requires significant transformation, capacity building of government at all levels and clarity on the roles and responsibilities of the different government spheres. This will also encompass a range of institutions, including civil society and the private sector, and require significant cooperation and coordination among all of these

Source UDF (1997:ix)

sustainability, economic efficiency and participation (Simone 1998:2). An important concern influencing the UDF was a need to examine the role and functions of cities against a background of increasing levels of globalisation. Conventional wisdom suggests that cities must become more competitive, which was mainly expressed by their ability to attract more private capital and new economic activities. Although the UDF is not explicit about this, the GEAR strategy ‘would seem to indicate coherence to this convention’ (Simone 1998:7). Linked with the UDF was a radical restructuring of the role and function of local government.

6.3.4 Developmental Local Government In 1994 the new democratic government in South Africa acknowledged that local authorities will have an important role in unleashing the ‘political and creative energies of the people and bring [ing] the government closer to the people’ (RDP 1994:22). The de-racialisation of local government represented a major challenge. The socio-spatial distortions of the apartheid era had to be addressed through a more equitable

distribution of resources, and the re-drawing of geographical boundaries. In an attempt to address these problems, the White Paper on Local Government provided the foundation for a new developmental local government (DLG) system, which is committed to working with citizens, groups and communities to create sustainable human settlements which provide for a decent quality of life and meet the social, economic and material needs of communities in a holistic way (Government Gazette, 13/3/98, p. 15). DLG exhorts local authorities to focus on achieving developmental outcomes, such as the provision of basic infrastructure and services; the creation of integrated cities and liveable environments; the encouragement of local economic development initiatives; and the empowerment of communities. Developmental local government has four basic characteristics: i) executing municipal powers and functions in a way that optimises the potential for social development and economic growth; ii) development should be managed in a manner which ensures that it is integrated (socially and spatially, as well co-ordinating public and private investments), and sustainable; iii) promote democratic values institutionally and within the community; and

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iv) empower that poor and marginalised and build social capital by providing community leadership and vision (Government Gazette, 13/3/98). Three inter-linked approaches to help municipalities to effectively play a developmental role were proposed: ‘integrated development planning and budgeting; performance management; and working together with local citizens and partners’ (Government Gazette, 13/3/98, p.16). An important strategy to help municipalities to become developmental is integrated development planning (IDP). Integrated development planning depends on the coordination of a range of services and regulations, including land-use planning, household infrastructure, environmental management, transport, health and education, safety and security and housing (Government Gazette, 13 March 1998). Trade unions and community organisations were critical about whether DLG would achieve its goals. While the DLG focuses on supplying basic services, the emphasis should be on providing basic needs that should be sustainable. This would only be possible if there was a funding system that would allow local authorities to meet these obligations. There was a failure to adequately consider the role that government intervention and funding can play in achieving the DLG objective of improving the quality of life of the poor (SAMWU 1997). The government emphasised the role of the private sector in the delivery of services. This shift seems to be driven more by budgetary rather than efficiency concerns. The private sector, however, is driven by the profit motive and is unlikely to invest in poor areas where people cannot afford to pay for services. A major criticism of urban planning in the first democratic decade was a failure to develop a ‘coherent spatial policy’:

A more focused spatial policy planning imperative emerged during the second democratic decade.

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Although there was broad consensus over the need to address the legacies of apartheid, there was no agreement on how to achieve this. For example, should jobs be brought to the people, or should people be brought to the jobs? Should investment go to the former homelands or should the state encourage people to move away from the homelands? (Harrison 2010:12).

6.4

The Spatial Imperative

Notwithstanding the above urban policies, during second democratic decade the South African government was concerned about the widening socio-spatial inequalities in the country. There was acknowledgement that while the South African space economy was complex, growth was concentrated in a few major urban centres. Hence, subsequent urban policy interventions had a strong spatial focus, and the aim was reducing inequalities and to promote social inclusion and integration. In this section, the National Spatial Development Perspective, the National Development Plan and the Integrated Urban Development Framework will be discussed.

6.4.1 National Spatial Development Perspective A major concern of the government was that the dysfunctional spatial patterns of the apartheid era were largely unchanged. Between 2003 and 2006, the National Spatial Development Perspective (NSDP) emerged providing guidelines ‘for bringing about coordinated government action and alignment to meet social, economic and environmental objectives’ (Presidency 2006: i). More specifically, the NSDP was based on the following principles: (i) Sustainable and inclusive rapid economic growth was critical for poverty alleviation and creating a better life for all. (ii) There was a constitutional commitment to ensure that all citizens had basic services (e.g. sanitation, electricity, health, schools) regardless of where they lived. (iii) Government should also identify localities with potential for economic growth and

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create conditions to attract private sector investment that would generate sustainable jobs. (iv) In areas with high levels of poverty, the priority should be on human capacity development (education, training, skills acquisition). (v) Settlement and economic opportunities should be developed in corridors and nodes that are contiguous to major industrial hubs, ‘to overcome the spatial distortions of apartheid’ (Presidency 2006:ii). The above spatial principles were further expanded in the National Development Plan.

6.4.2 National Development Plan The National Planning Commission (NPC) launched the National Development Plan (NDP) in 2012, and the goal was to reduce poverty and inequality by 2030. The objective was to develop an inclusive economy and build human capabilities. The NPC (2012:260) acknowledged that the RDP goals of ‘breaking down apartheid geography through land reform, more compact cities, decent public transport and the development of industries and services that use local resources and/or meet local needs’ have not been realised. Therefore, the NPC (2012:279) argued for a national spatial framework to: ‘Tackle inherited spatial divisions; unlock development potential; guide and inform infrastructure investment and prioritization; manage contemporary economic and demographic shifts; and facilitate coordination between parts of government and other agents’. Furthermore, planning in South Africa will be directed by a set of prescriptive principles ‘to create spaces that are liveable, equitable, sustainable, resilient and efficient, and support economic opportunities and social cohesion’ (NPC 2012:259). More specifically, the following five core normative principles would influence spatial planning, which was viewed as a ‘long-term project’: (1) Spatial justice: The historic apartheid legacy of socio-spatial segregation, the confinement

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of black people to ghettos and the unequal allocation of resources for the poor had to be reversed. Priority must be given to the needs of the poor. (2) Spatial sustainability: Principles of sustainable development must be incorporated in all facets of planning, especially about the natural environment. (3) Spatial resilience: Vulnerability to natural hazards, environmental deterioration, resource exploitation and climatic change must be reduced. Endangered ecological systems should be protected and revived. (4) Spatial quality: The built environment, especially the housing sector, must be aesthetically vibrant and liveable, and must accommodate those with disabilities. (5) Spatial efficiency: The spatial location of economic activities should reduce time, cost and distance for workers (NPC 2012:277). The Integrated Urban Development Framework is the most recent strategy for transforming cities, and is influenced by the NDP.

6.4.3 Integrated Urban Development Framework ‘Spatial transformation’ is a critical outcome of the Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) that was launched in 2016 by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA). There was acknowledgement that realising the above vision of the NDP ‘requires integrated and coordinated interventions to deal with social exclusion, environmental threats, economic inefficiencies, logistical bottlenecks, urban insecurity, decaying infrastructure and the impacts of new technologies’ (COGTA 2016:4). The implementation of the IUDF will also influence the attainment Goal 11 of the Sustainable Development Goals: ‘Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. The aim of the IUDF was to develop ‘inclusive, resilient and liveable urban settlements, while directly addressing the unique conditions and challenges facing South Africa’s cities and

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towns’ (COGTA 2016:8). There was also recognition that spatial transformation was a long-term rather than a quick-fix process. To realise this aim, four broad strategic targets were identified by the IUDF:

(3) The spontaneous growth of informal settlements within more affluent areas (Saff 1994, 1996; Crankshaw 2008; Schensul 2008).

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(i) Spatial integration: To forge new spatial forms in settlement, transport, social and economic areas. (ii) Inclusion and access: To ensure people have access to social and economic services, opportunities and choices. (iii) Growth: To harness urban dynamism for inclusive, sustainable economic growth and development. (iv) Governance: To enhance the capacity of the state and its citizens to work together to achieve spatial and social integration (Republic of South Africa 2016:8).

6.5

Urban Policy Impacts— Entrenching or Transcending Apartheid?

While the government and other interest groups were debating and developing urban planning policies, new realities were emerging on the ground. Three distinct processes about the changing racial structures of contemporary South African cities were identified in the mid-1990s, which persist in the contemporary era: (1) The desegregation of the inner city and the limited desegregation of the inner white suburban areas. It should be noted that this type of desegregation of white suburban areas is primarily due to class and wealth instead of race. (2) The expansion of the former black townships on land adjacent to the former white suburbs and the expansion of informal settlements on the urban fringes of former white suburbs.

During apartheid, large vacant land, known as buffer zones, separated white suburbs from black townships. In the 1980s, the black townships had experienced an increase in backyard shack dwellings, which expanded on vacant land on the peripheries of white suburbs. The scrapping of the Group Areas Act, violence and crime in the townships, and rising unemployment precipitated movement of people to vacant land in the inner city, and open land occupations and invasions replaced clandestine squatting (Hindson, Byerley and Morris 1994). While these processes spatially changed the racial impress of the apartheid, it had little social effect on the new black residents, as they were excluded from access to virtually all facilities and social institutions within the neighbouring white suburbs (Saff 1994). Although there was a major investment in infrastructure, poverty remained a major challenge, and there were remarkable continuities between the apartheid and democratic eras in terms of socio-spatial inequalities (Clarno 2013; Chapman 2015). Land invasions in South Africa, for example, have largely taken place on property adjacent to existing townships, on the periphery of urban areas. More recently, the urban poor began moving towards the city-core areas, mainly on land surrounding Indian and coloured suburbs. Hence, invasions ‘tend to reinforce the broad apartheid geography of the cities rather than fundamentally challenge it’ (Mabin 1992:21-2). Bremner (2000:87) has similarly argued that since 1994, urban policies have ‘reinforced rather than confronted apartheid geography’. Another urban reality in the post-apartheid era is the decline of the inner city and the flight of capital from the CBDs. The high crime rates in the inner-city areas played a significant role in the decline of the CBDs. The inner-city areas of

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Johannesburg were most severely affected, followed by Durban and Cape Town. Financial institutions were reluctant to grant loans in inner city areas because of the risk, overcrowding, and the inadequate maintenance of buildings (Wilhelm-Solomon 2016, 2017). To become more globally competitive, a neoliberal urban promotion strategy in South Africa was marketing the city as a mega-event destination. A concern is the impact of these neoliberal strategies on the lives of the poor. Hosting the Fifa 2010 World Cup was used to promote the status and power of the ruling elite, while simultaneously serving as a catalyst to push the poor to the edge, if not out of, the cities. About 100,000 street vendors, mostly women, lost their livelihoods throughout the duration of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. There were legitimate concerns that the escalation in the costs of the stadiums and infrastructure for Fifa 2010 resulted in the diversion of public funds from more urgent social priorities such as sanitation, housing, healthcare and education. There was simply no place for the poor in aspiring world-class cities (Maharaj 2011, 2015). South Africa’s urban poor have suffered most from the neoliberal strategies and they carry the burden of reduced subsidies, increased cost of services and disconnections (especially electricity and water), rising unemployment, and declining social welfare expenditure (Desai 2002). How are poor people responding to water and electricity disconnections? For some, there have been immediate illegal reconnections. Organisation and mobilisation around these issues have provided the catalyst for new social movements to emerge (Ballard et al. 2006). A key contention is that ‘the policy of cost recovery and the commodification of basic municipal services … has pitted local bureaucrats and politicians against communities’ (Ruiters 2002:42). In recent years, there have been about 8000 service delivery protests annually as the poor mobilise and militate against the neoliberal agenda (Mottiar and Bond 2012). Hence, there is compelling evidence that policy interventions and benefits are not reaching the poor. This is

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situation aggravated by rampant corruption and bureaucratic bungling. Public–private partnerships and the privatization of services have far–reaching geographical implications. Under apartheid, the access to services had a distinct spatiality. Townships were inadequately serviced, if at all, while the racially privileged enjoyed access to services comparable to those in the first world (Turok 1994). The provision of services under apartheid was also symbolic of the exclusionary nature of the system: black people were ‘outsiders’ in the urban system, a denial of their humanity and their citizenship. The privatisation of basic services militates against the aim to build an inclusive society. The provision of a minimum level of service to disadvantaged areas re-emphasises apartheid boundaries in the geography of service distribution (Bakker and Hemson 2000). It is becoming increasingly apparent that privatisation of basic services has a spatial impact which is accentuated by the spatial impress of apartheid. While some new urban policies, procedures and processes were developed since 1994, a major challenge has been weak implementation, and perhaps the lack of political will to do so: ‘Since the end of apartheid there has been much experimentation with spatial initiatives, but without any overarching vision or policy framework’ (Todes and Turok 2017:1).

6.6

Conclusion

The present South African city form is a hybrid product of the colonial and formal apartheid discourse that ordained urban spaces as the domain of the white race. Initially, alternate urban planning strategies were influenced by the RDP, which was perceived to be ambitious and utopian. Although the UDS was enthusiastically welcomed by the private sector, there were concerns that it was too market-oriented and was a departure from the RDP. The focus on market-led urban development reached greater heights with the GEAR policy. GEAR’s neoliberal orientation was criticised as it would only

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address the needs of big business and foreign investors, and the gap between the rich and poor would widen. The implementation of GEAR in cities was facilitated by the UDF and the White Paper on Local Government. Great emphasis was placed on local economic development strategies and public–private partnerships in delivering services. However, a major issue was whether the poor would benefit from such partnerships. The White Paper set the foundation for a new developmental local government system with an emphasis on integrated development strategies. A stronger spatial policy focus emerged in the second democratic decade with the NSDP, NDP and IUDF. An analysis of contemporary urban realities revealed that while some desegregation of the apartheid city was taking place within the inner city and on the fringes of affluent suburbs, the geography of apartheid was being reinforced in the apartheid era. Decades of institutionalised segregation in South Africa will not be eliminated overnight. Segregation has been deeply entrenched in the social fabric, and is further reinforced by the socio-economic differences between blacks and whites. Also, the spatial inscription of class is becoming an increasingly conspicuous feature of South African urban space. A major problem was that institutional approaches to urban planning were poorly coordinated between central, provincial and local levels.

Bond P (2000b) Cities of gold, townships of coal: essays on South Africa’s new urban crisis. Africa World Press, Trenton Bremner LJ (2000) Post-apartheid urban geography: a case study of greater Johannesburg’s rapid land development programme. Dev S Afr 17:87–104 CDE (1996a) cities and the global economy: new challenges for South Africa, Johannesburg CDE (1996b) response to the government’s draft urban development strategy. Urban Forum 7:90–100 Chapman TP (2015) Spatial justice and the western areas of Johannesburg. Afr Stud 74:76–97 Clarno A (2013) Rescaling white space in post-apartheid Johannesburg. Antipode 45:1190–1212 Crankshaw O (2008) Race, space and the post-fordist spatial order of Johannesburg. Urban Stud 45:1692– 1711 Department of Finance (1996) Growth, employment and redistribution - a macro-economic strategy. Pretoria, Government Printer De Klerk M (ed) (1991) A harvest of discontent: the land question in South Africa. IDASA, Cape Town Desai A (2002) We are the poors: community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. Monthly Review Press, New York Desai A, Bohmke H (1997) The death of the intellectual, the birth of a salesman. Debate 3:10–34 Harrison P (2010) background paper: regional and spatial development (written for the National Planning Commission) www.dpme.gov.za/…/20YR%20Regional% 20and%20spatial%20development.pdf 1 June 2017 Hindson D et al (1992) Restructuring the built environment. Report to working group 5, National Housing Forum Hindson D, Byerley M, Morris M (1994) From violence to reconstruction: the making, disintegration and remaking of an apartheid city. Antipode 26:323–350 Mabin A (1992) Dispossession, exploitation and struggle: an historical overview of South African urbanization. In: Smith DM (ed) The apartheid city and beyond. Routledge, London, pp 13–24 Mabin A (1998) Reconstruction and twentieth century urban planning. Paper presented at the planning history conference, Sydney Mabin A, Smit D (1997) Reconstructing South Africa’s cities? The making of urban planning 1900-2000. Plan Perspect 12:193–223 Maharaj B (1997) Apartheid, urban segregation and the local state: Durban and the group areas act in South Africa. Urban Geogr 18:135–154 Maharaj B (2011) 2010 FIFA world cup: (South)‘Africa’s time has come’? S Afr Geogr J 93:49–62 Maharaj B (2015) The turn of the south? social and economic impacts of mega events in India, Brazil and South Africa. Local Econ 39:983–999 Ministry of the Office of the President (1995) Urban development strategy of the government of national unity. Government Gazette number 16679, notice 1111

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112 Mottiar S, Bond P (2012) The politics of discontent and social protest in Durban, Politikon, 39: 309–330 Munslow B, FitzGerald P (1997) Search for a development strategy: The RDP and beyond. In: Fitzgerald P et al (eds) Managing sustainable development in South Africa. Oxford University Press, Cape Town, pp 41–61 NPC (2012) National development plan: vision 2030. Pretoria, The Presidency Nel E (2001) Local economic development: a review and assessment of its current status in South Africa. Urban Stud 38:1003–1024 Parnell S, Pieterse E (1999) developmental local government and post-apartheid poverty alleviation. Africanus 29:61–84 Presidency (2006) National spatial development perspective. Presidency, Pretoria Presidency (2014) Twenty-year review, South Africa, 1994–2014. Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Pretoria RDP (1994) White paper on reconstruction and development: a strategy on fundamental transformation. Government Printer, Pretoria Rich PB (1978) Ministering to the white man’s needs: the development of urban segregation in South Africa. African Stud 37:177–191 Ruiters G (2002) Debt, disconnection and privatisation: the case of beaufort, queenstown and stutterheim. In: McDonald DA, Pape J (eds) Cost recovery and the crisis of service delivery in South Africa. HSRC/ZED, Cape Town and London, pp 41–57

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7

A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana Aloysius Clemence Mosha

Abstract

Botswana, a landlocked country in southern Africa is bordered by Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. With an area of 582,000 km2 the country is slightly larger than France, or slightly smaller than the US state of Texas. Approximately two-thirds of the country lies within the Tropics. Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name upon independence in 1966. The economy, one of the most robust on the continent, is dominated by diamond mining and cattle. The country is sparsely populated because up to 70% of the country is covered by the Kalahari Desert. Botswana’s population of 2.2 million people (in 2016) is concentrated in the eastern part of the country. It is touted that the country is urbanizing quite fast and today nearly, 60% of the people live in classified urban areas. Like most countries in Africa, spatial planning has been practiced bringing order to both urban as well as rural/regional spaces. Many concepts and paradigms have been used to create such spaces resulting in a myriad of all sorts of outcomes. This book chapter focuses on Botswana’s experience of spatial planning and challenges faced with the hope that lessons learnt could enlighten other

countries in the continent in their quest for establishing sustainable urban settlements. The book chapter begins by looking at the evolution of spatial planning in Botswana before the colonial era, during the colonial era, and after Independence in 1966. Here, we shall highlight the concepts and approaches used and how they have shaped the urban space today. This will be followed by examining critical challenges facing spatial planning practice in both urban and rural areas especially in the areas of adoption of new urban planning paradigms, the African Urban Agenda 2030, inclusivity, sustainability, urban management, municipal finance, and plan implementation. This will be followed by an examination of the responses by both central government and municipal authorities to these challenges. In conclusion, many suggestions are offered to address these challenges and pave the way for some practical solutions. Lessons learnt from this experience will be shared by other countries in the region. Keywords

7.1 A. C. Mosha (&) Department of Architecture and Planning, University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana e-mail: [email protected]







Botswana Spatial planning Urban planning

Introduction

Botswana got its independence from Britain in 1966 with a very fragile economy and limited social services. Today, ninety percent of the

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population has access to clean water, education, and health care. Botswana has one of Africa’s highest per capita incomes at US $7080 in 2015, yet also one of the world’s highest rates of income inequality with a GINI index of 65.8. Forty-seven percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and 97% of all poor people live in rural areas. Botswana is a semi-arid country with harsh climatic conditions and a fragile ecosystem. Arable land is extremely limited, and livestock is the primary source of subsistence and income for two-thirds of rural households. The government has a robust land policy that endeavors equitable access for all and is frequently revised to meet current situations. Botswana’s population is becoming more sedentary and concentrated in its urban areas with urbanization being one of the fastest in the continent. The rate of urbanization has grown from 45.7% in 1991 to 61.8% in 2011, and is expected to have risen to over 70% in 2021 (GoB/Statistics Botswana 2011). Like in other developing countries in the global South, urbanization in Botswana has not been without challenges. These challenges include among others inadequate access to land for housing, inadequate access to infrastructure, poverty, and unemployment. Environmental challenges such as pollution, littering, overcrowding (especially in low-income residential areas) have been some of the consequences of the urbanization process. Rural–urban inequalities also increased over the years resulting in urban bias in the country’s development process. Within the emerging urban areas, the urban divide is evidenced by the emergence of gated residential estates and up-market shopping malls alongside burgeoning low income and inadequately serviced urban spaces where the informal sector has become a dominant activity. Botswana’s response to the challenges cited to be associated with the urbanization process provides a measure of the progress the country has made pursuant of the international Habitat Agenda. The country has made commendable progress toward realization of the Agenda. For instance, measures have been put in place to accord the urban population access to housing

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and related infrastructure. The development of slums has been kept to a minimum. This was realized mainly through the introduction of proactive legislative and administrative measures. Botswana has also witnessed the introduction of legislative instruments aimed at the creation of sustainable human settlements. In addition, the country has undergone strategic administrative changes aimed at decentralization and increased citizen participation in the development process. Economically, the country’s urban areas continue to be major players in economic development as centers of commerce, retail, and emerging manufacturing and service industries. Measures aimed at attracting foreign direct investment continue to be pursued alongside the adoption of Local Economic Development (LED) initiatives. The country has also witnessed implicit recognition of the informal sector activities (Cavric and Mosha 2001).

7.2

Literature Review

7.2.1 Evolution of Urban Planning Spatial planning has been practiced over centuries by Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians who have built great settlements that have stood the test of time. Historically, from an international perspective, spatial planning has been concerned mainly with the relationship between various land uses and infrastructure components and channels (Chapin and Kaiser 1985), and was dominated by the master planning approach in many parts of the world after World War II. This approach was aimed at developing detailed plans focusing on the configuration of various land uses. From the late 1970s, master planning has been widely criticized, especially for its static nature, as being incompatible with rapid urban growth (Clarke 1992; Hall and Pfeiffer 2000). The dominance of ‘control and command’ policies has given way to evolutionary and participatory planning principles (Baycan-Levent and Nijkamp 2008). This ushered the structure planning approach which is more flexible and less command. Many of these concepts were

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A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana

adopted in the 3rd world colonies, Botswana included.

7.2.2 New Concepts and Planning Approaches Important new concepts and approaches, which gained prominence from the 1990s onward include the concept of networks through the work of Castells, based on the tension between places and flows (Castells 1996), the rise of civil society and the question of power in the production of urban space (Friedman 1998, Amin 2002), dynamic conceptualizations of multiplex places, and methods for establishing and invoking a common “spatial planning doctrine”. Despite the introduction of these new concepts and approaches, many key elements have remained consistent aspects of the spatial planning process. Healy (2007) summarizes these elements as a proper understanding of the physical structure of an urban area and the forces shaping it, orientating goals expressed through policy statements, a framework of principles outlining concepts, projects and programs, and an inspirational future vision.

7.2.3 Critical Challenges Facing Spatial Planning Practice in the Third World The introduction of spatial planning in the developing world has not been on a smooth ride as it has been riddled with many challenges leading to a crisis in many third world cities. One of the challenges has been a rapid population growth and is now known that by the turn of the century almost half of the world will live in urban areas. Few city governments in the developing world have the power, resources, and trained staff to provide their rapidly growing populations with the land, services, and facilities needed for an adequate human life: clean water, sanitation, schools, and transport. The result is

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mushrooming illegal settlements with primitive facilities, increased overcrowding, and rampant disease linked to an unhealthy environment. In most Third World cities, the enormous pressure for shelter and services has frayed the urban fabric. Much of the housing used by the poor is decrepit. Civic buildings are frequently in a state of disrepair and advanced decay. So too is the essential infrastructure of the city; public transport is overcrowded and overused, as are roads, buses and trains, transport stations, public latrines, and washing points. Water supply systems leak and the resulting low water pressure allows sewage to seep into drinking water. A large proportion of the city’s population often has no piped water, storm drainage, or roads. Rapid urbanization has also caused poor environments in many of the cities. A growing number of the urban poor suffer from a high incidence of diseases; most are environmentally based and could be prevented or dramatically reduced through relatively small investments. Air and water pollution is on the rise as industrialization takes center stage.

7.3

History of Urban Planning in Botswana

The history and evolution of the planning system in Botswana context has not been widely documented as most spatial planning commenced in the nineteenth/twentieth century and has been heavily influenced by the west. Many patterns of settlement and land use that we see today in Botswana are the result of age-old processes. Large towns which are said to be characteristic of Botswana are not new; some village sites have been found which date back over a thousand years. It is important to study the evolution of settlement and land use patterns in Botswana because by doing so, we gain new insights into contemporary situations. In the following sections, the chapter presents an overview of the history of settlements in Botswana and then move on to give an overview of how modern town planning has formed the towns of today.

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7.3.1 Pre-Colonial Settlement Planning Modern conventional town-planning in Botswana is based on Anglophone Africa which had British colonial origins. There, the combination of cultural and structural segregation in the early colonial period existed. Before then, traditional villages and towns existed with no formal planning but had their traditional settlements patterns and physical structures largely dictated by traditional land-tenure and land use system as well as by kinship and religious order of villages. There was formally “unplanned” but meaningfully “ordered” physical structure to settlements, largely respecting traditionally established arrangements and ways of life. Activities had their places—markets and market squares, religious groves, farms, communal assembly places, playgrounds, and of course roads and footpath patterns. The morphology, form, or pattern of traditional settlements, of course varied within the country’s various areas along ethnic group lines, but there was always a recognized and accepted form to the settlements providing for all forms of necessary land uses. All in all, it can be said that, there was distinct and respected physical order. The population and housing congestions that characterize modern urbanization was not apparent then (Mosha 1995).

7.3.2 Rural Settlement Structure: The Homestead, Lands, and Cattle Posts The human and livestock population of Botswana is concentrated around the hill ranges of the eastern Hardveld and along the perennial rivers of the north. Approximately one-third of the population lives in scattered rural settlements, usually based around livestock pens. More than

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half the population lives in rural village settlements of over a thousand people, including traditional towns with up to 40,000 people. A growing proportion of the population, now exceeding one-fifth, live in the seven modern towns and cities classified as urban areas. The typical rural settlement and land use pattern of the eastern Highveld in the past may be characterized as having been concentric circles around a concentrated village nucleus. The family had a home base in the village, where most of its members spent most of the year. In the appropriate season, it cultivated “lands” (fields) within a day or two walk from the village. The family cattle, on the other hand, were pastured for most of the year at “cattle-posts” many days walk from the village. Finally, beyond the cattle-posts, there were hunting lands. This “traditional” pattern, inherited from the late nineteenth century, has however fragmented in the twentieth century with the decline of traditional political controls, the break-up of the family through long-distance labor migration, and the increased mobility offered by motor transport and options for new settlement offered by drilling of bore-holes (artesian wells) for water. Private and public capital investment in village centers has also precluded communities from moving their whole village, as in a bygone age, when nearby cultivable land and pastures become depleted (Mosha 1995).

7.3.3 Details of a Traditional Settlement Structure From the existing traditional parts of villages, it is obvious that a very distinct spatial arrangement has been in use for a long time. A look at a traditional village like Molepolole shows distinctly delimited residential plots, clustered in a circular shape (called horse shoe model) around an open space. The individual plots are quite

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A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana

small and consequently the density is quite high. Inside the fenced plots is the lolwapa that is used as an outdoor living room, a private space for the small family unit. The outdoor living is something often forgotten or neglected by planners and architects in modern layouts. Each cluster of 10–20 plots has a semi-private open space, the patlelo. Traditionally, the patlelo (40–50 m in diameter) was used for keeping a few domestic animals in a kraal for fresh milk and meat. The patlelo was also used by children playing within eye sight of the home. It was also the “neutral” ground for neighbors to meet. Here we have all the ingredients of the modern “western” neighborhood unit. So, the contemporary neighborhood unit planning concept, invented by western planners in the 1800, was already in use and functioning well here in the 1700. This dispels the myth that planning and organization were European origins. In the traditional village, public areas include the chief’s kgotla, the headman’s dikotla, the shops, schools, football fields, and often extensive communication areas. Modern thinking about neighborhood planning suggests that the full range of private, semi-private, and public areas should be included in planning layouts and the ideal size of neighborhood clusters is the same as that of typical villages in Botswana. It is also interesting that Fig. 7.1 A typical rural settlement set up (Kanye village)—see horse shoe settlement pattern. Source Google Earth

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road patterns in a traditional village allow for rather free movement. Dead ends or cul-de-sac are alien to Botswana. Traditional architecture of thatch roofing and clay walling has given way to corrugated metal roofing and brick walls. The new middle class is expressing its independence from traditional constraint, while retaining locational identity with traditional village roots, by building large modern suburban houses outside the old wards— especially on the paved approach roads to the traditional state capitals of Serowe, Kanye, Mochudi, Molepolole, Maun, Tlokweng and Ramotswa. Below we provide a snap shot of a traditional village settlement in Botswana. Other villages have similarly burgeoned with new construction, particularly along the line of rail (Figs. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3).

7.3.4 Town Planning During the European Era and the Influence on Settlement Structure the British Town Planning Era 1800–1966 In the late 1800 s, the Europeans brought with them a new form of settlement development and Botswana did not escape the negative aspect of

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Fig. 7.2 A closer look at a horse shoe cluster. Source Google Earth

Fig. 7.3 Molepolole village structure—“Lelwapa” or communal open space. Source Google Earth

segregation according to income. Towns founded during this time aped the British form of urban planning—the master plan approach—that was static and inflexible. Towns like Francistown and Lobatse show these quite clearly. Modern Francistown city was founded in 1897 and was planned in a grid pattern. Before Independence, the town was segregated. The main town was reserved as a white residential area, while Satellite Township was established for the colored (mixed race). Black Africans were initially settled in the area west of the railway and

east of Tati river. In 1957, they were removed to Tati town on the west bank of the river to create an industrial area adjacent to the railway line. Modern Lobatse began to take shape from 1897 as a stopover at the junction of the Mafeking to Bulawayo railway and the Kanye to Zeerust road. Like Francistown, colonial Lobatse existed as two towns: Lobatse proper and the township. Lobatse proper was the reserve of whites whose resident population by 1946 amounted to only 406. They imposed a segregationist culture on the greater community by

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A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana

excluding local Asian shop keepers as well as Africans from public facilities such as bars, the hotel, the hospital, and even European schools. Prior to the 1950 s, virtually no provision was made for the welfare of the “squatter community” at Peleng.

7.3.5 Gaborone (Capital of Botswana) —The Segregated City Gaborone city, founded in 1964, was planned by British while based in Mafeking (South Africa) and Harare (Southern Rhodesia then) colonial offices to accommodate a mere 20,000 inhabitants. The original layout did not assume any growth due to in-migration of job seekers. The concept used in the design was the Welwyn Garden City which had become a model for town planning in Europe (Molebatsi 1996). In 1979, the Gaborone West Structure Plan was prepared based on continuous growth in accordance with market forces/demand. The plan has been characterized as a kind of Milton Keynes concept, where large neighborhood units or superblocks are delineated by primary roads and communication routes (Keiner and Salmerón 2003; Keiner 2004). A serious concern of the original Gaborone plan was the segregation of people by income whereby different standards were provided and this was politically unacceptable. All housing south of the Main Mall was medium and low income and all high cost and executive residences were located north of the Mall for whites. The then president, Sir Seretse Khama objected to this arrangement and instructed the planners to come up with a more egalitarian concept for the future of Gaborone. This was later taken as policy applicable to all urban areas since then. The concept chosen was to mix low, medium, and high cost housing areas throughout the town and later in all towns in the entire country. This has made Botswana town planning an object of study by professional planners from other counties. Every unit which is a catchment area for a primary school or a local center contains all the different categories of housing; this

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has now become an accepted principle in Botswana.

7.3.6 From 1966 to Today With time, some changes to the way of planning Botswana’s towns and cities came into the scene. Town planning was based on cultural and social concepts borrowed mostly from the Scandinavian countries as the bulk of the then planners came from Sweden. After the British era, due to lack of local capacity the Department of Town and Country Planning (DTRP) of the Ministry of Local Government and Lands employed local and Scandinavian planners who put the mark on the planning of towns like Jwaneng and Sowa and of course the extension of Gaborone into Broadhurst and Gaborone West. These planners were well educated and familiar with contemporary international concepts, but had little knowledge of the cultural and traditional values existing in Botswana. A move was made to shift from master plans to structure plans as planning concepts. The planning was done by DTRP according to government policies. These included nonsegregation of different social-economic groups and easy access to services. This resonated with the Scandinavian (Swedish) planners’ urban planning practice which was based on inclusivity. Jwaneng Town: To achieve these goals, in all urban settlements like in the example of Jwaneng, residential areas were planned with environmental units of a size that could serve a primary school and a local service center were proposed. These were linked to a central business and service center by pedestrian ways and secondary roads. More and more units have been added to the initial 3 units then built. The full range of spatial components, that is, private, semi-private, and public areas was to provide a range of open spaces in the plan. Sowa town was based on the Jwaneng model. However, unlike Jwaneng the semi-private open areas were in front of the plots as was done with dipatlelo in the traditional horse-show clusters. This necessitated the introduction of simple

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driveways to give access to the plots, directly to the in front of the open space. This has been the hallmark of planning till today and has also been used in planning the so-called urban villages. Here was an example of trying to embed culture and local values in local urban planning to some extent.

7.4

Current Spatial Planning: Urban, Village, and Regional Planning

Below is a description of current spatial planning starting from urban areas, rural areas, and regional/territorial areas.

7.4.1 Urban Plans By and large, current urban planning is a continuation of the post-independence era (structure planning) with a few adoptions of planning concepts here and there. The country has adopted a Town and country planning act, revised in 2013, a development control code and planning has now been decentralized to the local authorities. All towns must date master plans that are revised time and again to catch up with current Fig. 7.4 A typical urban layout. Source Google Earth

situations. The urban structure is that of mixed development (low, medium, and high income) to achieve inclusivity. Residential blocks are in the form of super blocks and neighborhoods. These are served by a local center. Surprisingly, land use zoning is still paramount with vast layouts for single story buildings leading to sprawl with all its attendant problems of long commutes using private cars that pollute the environment using fossil fuel, extensive encroachment of scarce agricultural land, and displacement of farmers on the urban fringe areas. However, culture is not much embraced though efforts are made here and there in layout designs (Fig. 7.4).

7.4.2 Village Planning—Spatial Plans and Land Use Plans Today Across the country, all the major villages have spatial plans. There are two types of plans. They are (a) Village Structure Plans (b) Village land use Plans (a) Village Structure Plans The planning of urban villages is still using western planning principles and standards though paying lip service to old traditionally planned parts of the villages. Planning begins

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A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana

by declaring them planning areas followed by survey, analysis, and plan. Planning is the same as in urban areas posing a clash to social and cultural conflict. Modern layouts on the outskirts of villages are appended to exiting traditional layouts and these do not seem to fit very well with the old village structure. (b) Village Land Use Plans On the other hand, land use plans are produced for the whole rural territory, including all settlements and their hinterland within the administrative framework of rural district and/or sub-district. The major difference between spatial development and land use plans is in the level of generalization and the size of the area under consideration (Figs. 7.5 and 7.6).

7.4.3 Territorial Planning The other layer of planning is territorial planning. These comprise of the following: • District Settlement Strategic plans • Regional Master plans—these cover 2–3 administrative districts • National Spatial Plan (Currently in the making). Fig. 7.5 Molepolole village: contrast between traditional and modern layout. Source Google Earth

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Unfortunately, many of these plans are not implemented; they do not carry the hand of law; and hardly are these plans funded. Over time, it has been observed that there is some overlap between the spatial land use plans and economic plans prepared by other agencies, for example, by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development. Many of these plans are just advisory.

7.4.4 Achievements: 50 Years After Independence The country has prepared and implemented urban, village, and regional plans for most areas of the country to guide spatial and economic development. These settlements are functional and have resulted in beautiful settlements that are best in the Southern African region. The cities and towns are centers of investment—industry, commerce, educational facilities, etc. Nationally, cities are veritable incubators of economic activities. Some enterprises are large-scale but the clear majority is small. The planning for mixed residential areas has led to inclusivity in which people of all incomes live side by side, just like they used to do in the villages. Squatter settlements have been nabbed in the bud, with hardly any new ones sprouting up, while old ones are being upgraded with all necessary

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Fig. 7.6 Tlokweng village: traditional versus modern western layout.Source Google Earth

infrastructure including tarred roads, water and sewerage reticulation, street lights and all sorts of social and economic facilities provided for the low-income segments of urbanites. Planning laws and by laws are observed by citizenry. The country has also reviewed its urban development standards, the Development Control Code, and the Town and Country Planning Act to keep up with current modern system/stance. Finally, a national spatial planning framework is currently being prepared. The SDF addresses the spatial implications of issues like economic development, employment, housing, infrastructure services, education and training, tourism, leisure, transportation, communication, healthcare, economic infrastructure, culture and nature, and the environment.

7.5

Challenges Facing Spatial Planning in Botswana: A Critique

7.5.1 Spatial Planning Approach Challenges Although spatial planning has been practiced in Botswana for quite a while, it faces many challenges which impede its success. These challenges are discussed here under:

7.5.1.1 Lack of a Holistic and Comprehensive Urban Development Policy Botswana seems to be rather slow in the uptake of new planning paradigms in the planning of its urban spaces. Examples include the Integrated Planning Approach; Environmental Planning and Management Approach; New Urbanism Concept and Sustainable Cities Approach, etc. Many of these have hardly been embraced in the country. Many planners too are paying lip service to the adoption of cultural and social norms in planning our settlements. Further, many of the spatial plans are still too rigid and inflexible due to the adopted development control model. Local authorities are using uniform standards and development control codes in both urban and rural settlement planning—the “One size fits all concept”. Urban planning concepts are adopted also for rural settlements which exist and function in relatively different circumstances. As a result, some of the village authorities are defying using the stipulated standards and codes. This has resulted in a major challenge in planning as well as plan enforcement. Many of the planners are somehow still stuck on the old legal-organizational models of management that seek to place planning under administrative and executive authority and less

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on rational procedure and process model as informed by statutory planning provisions. Further, urban, rural, and regional plans are not given appropriate status and respect needed. Seriously speaking, there is a need to adopt the integrated development planning paradigm if conditions are to improve.

7.5.1.2 Institutional Coordination and Alignment Improved management of urban growth and improved urban governance are two of the strategic outcomes for Botswana’s urban areas’ plans. For sure, the cities look nice and could be better! The realization of these outcomes is however impeded by both horizontal and vertical coordination and alignment challenges. At a municipal level, the most fundamental horizontal alignment challenge is the lack of coordination of spatial plans with other sector planning activities within municipalities and with the planning of neighboring municipalities/towns and villages (Gaborone s and Tlokweng). One of the main criticisms against some of the spatial plans is that they do not provide sufficient detail and guidance to inform decision-makers. 7.5.1.3 Physical and Socio-Economic Integration (Hallmark of Botswana) Under Siege! It has been argued that spatial governance in places characterized by existing levels of social inequality and economic polarization will continue to be ineffective (Robins 2002). The concept of integration has been part of the Botswana spatial planning nomenclature since the early 1960 s, especially after Sir Seretse Khama instructed that the planning of settlements should be integrated. Noble as good as this idea was, do planners know what it meant? Was it social integration or physical integration? How can planners achieve both? Have the spatial plans achieved this? Do people mingle just because they have been forced

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to live in mixed development areas; how do we measure integration and so forth? Have the super-blocks in all urban areas achieved physical and social integration? An examination of settlement structure in many of the urban areas in terms of integration in Botswana confirms that, notwithstanding the importance of the integration concept in policy documents, its translation into practical terms remains unclear and is under siege. Practicing planners should pose and contemplate! How come that today it is standard practice to see gated communities being given planning permission by planners? How is it that new exclusive neighborhoods for the rich are sprouting at the peri-urban areas? For example, in the peri-urban areas of Gaborone, we have the following satellite developments exclusive to the well-to-do viz—Mokolodi, Lion Park; Sentlhane, Crocodile Pools? Planners need to introspect and do things better! Where did they lose the script? These observations imply that a significant reorientation of urban spatial plans will be required to achieve inclusivity in the country’s spatial plans. What is needed is “an explicit spatial restructuring strategy that is linked to instruments for implementation”.

7.5.1.4 Understanding the Space– Economy of Cities An evaluation of spatial plans prepared in Botswana remains devoid of any comprehensive spatial analysis of the urban economic space and the spatial analysis of market and investment trends. By and large, one of the difficulties facing the planning system in Botswana is a lack of understanding of economic principles, market forces, and commercial realities among planners and other professionals. This challenge is not unique to the Botswana situation, and Harris (1990) points out that the comprehensive metropolitan spatial plans in developing countries are normally devoid of analysis of the real economy. Critical elements of urban spatial plans should therefore include an

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appropriate and comprehensive analysis of urban economic space and market and investment trends. Planners also need to reflect upon the extent to which the spatial strategies and proposals make provision for economic competitiveness, as well as socio-economic development and redress. Spatial economic analysis at the urban level therefore appears to remain an area that would require significant attention in future urban spatial planning processes. Thus, it is suggested that planners need a deeper understanding of urban economic space and mechanisms through which planning relates to markets.

7.5.1.5 Infrastructure Development and Capital Investment An examination of many of the spatial plans confirms that the integration of infrastructure development and capital investment strategies with spatial development planning remains largely unsatisfactory. Infrastructure provision is one of the most powerful forces shaping urban areas. This notion is not entirely new and Doxiadis concluded that the complex problems of cities cannot be solved through the development and official recognition of a physical plan alone. Instead, he argued for a development program which is expressed in space by physical development plans, but also supported by economic, social, political, administrative, technological, and aesthetic programs (ibid). Specific issues that have a negative influence on the integration of infrastructure development and capital investment with spatial planning is the dominant influence of public sector-driven low-income housing projects funded by the Department of Housing (MLH) and the Botswana Housing Corporation (BHC) and the shaping of cities through up market private sector commercial and residential development and the emphasis on “mega-projects” disjointed from spatial planning. This therefore calls for the replacement of the traditional piecemeal pursuit of capital projects with a more coherent long-term view focused on selected areas and policy themes.

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7.5.1.6 Spatial Planning and Sustainability—Are We Paying Lip Service? The concept of sustainability has received prominence in development and spatial planning since the 1992 Earth Summit, where the important role that indicators can play in assisting informed decisions concerning sustainable development was recognized (Winston and Eastaway 2008). The country’s National Development Plans and the Vision for Botswana, all articulate the national vision for sustainable development and indicate strategic interventions to reorient Botswana’s development path in a more sustainable direction. Despite this recognition of the need for greater alignment of sustainability criteria in all levels of integrated and spatial planning, some challenges and shortcomings remain. Some of the key concerns are the lack of integration of sustainability principles, and the limited use of environmental information in the spatial plans and related processes. There are varying levels of response and commitment to the need for addressing sustainability issues in spatial planning. On a practical level, techniques such as Strategic Environmental Assessments and ecological sensitivity mapping are rarely applied in our plans. The way Botswana towns and villages are laid out does not lend themselves to sustainability. There is just too much sprawl and a waste of land, loss of agricultural land, long travel time, fossil fuel, and resources. This may in part be ascribed to the fact that the introduction of the concept of sustainability into the field of urban and regional planning has emerged largely from outside the national departments in control of planning. Other contributing factors include the provision of basic services, the primary delivery focus and often the most prominent criterion of political accountability at municipal level. Under these circumstances, the environmental dimensions are often perceived as subservient to the improvement of basic services and housing conditions.

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A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana

7.5.1.7 Spatial Planning and Informality Informality in the urban landscape can extend to various dimensions such as infrastructure provision, land and housing, and decision-making processes. In the Botswana context, the concept of urban informality is associated with informal economic sector activities and informal housing and services, both often including some measure of illegality. Botswana nowadays has a vibrant and growing informal economy, which sustains many communities. There are still many people staying informal backyard structures and squatter settlements. Despite the noble intentions of the government to eradicate informal housing and provide shelter through the various shades of Self Help Housing Agency (SHHA), many people are falling through the cracks and need help. Town planners in the country must do more to enable informal trading and provide shelter and services to the poor. In many other countries, there are guidelines for the establishment of targets to measure the success of plans. However, here in Botswana there is a surprising paucity of empirical evidence to evaluate and compare changes in both Botswana city structure and the role of new spatial policy and planning instruments since independence. A critical component determining the level of success of spatial plans is their ability to position informed intellectual arguments, so that they have significance in political contexts (Healy 2007). A key element of the ability to formulate and communicate these arguments is clear and easily understandable indicators reflecting the objectives and progress of spatial strategies and proposals. This suggests the need for a stronger analytical and technical basis for planning than has generally been the case in the past. Despite the increasing availability of GIS and other data, the required statistical, analytical, and planning support capabilities are generally still poorly developed and used. There is therefore a need to produce guidelines for the formulation of spatial plans. Some aspects of spatial plans that should be monitored

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and for which key performance indicators need to be developed include indicators for evaluating the desired spatial form, progress in addressing issues and needs, and decision-making in development applications. However, apart from illustrative density factors and their potential application, no quantified guidelines or spatial statistical indicators are provided. Specific elements of urban spatial plans that must be evaluated to respond to this challenge include the use and application of spatial statistical techniques for purposes of analysis and informing strategies, the identification of monitoring indicators, and the inclusion of a set of quantified spatial development targets. Indicators and targets to evaluate the aggregate impact of spatial strategies and proposals at an urban level is therefore still an element absent from most urban spatial plans. The recommendation of this chapter suggesting the development of “…a robust set of indicators as part of a spatial governance and evaluation framework” will require significant augmentation in the future review of spatial plans.

7.5.1.8 Link Between Planning, Budgeting, and Implementation Although Botswana has made some successes in preparing many spatial plans, problems emerge when translating paper plans to brick and mortar. The link between planning and monitoring of implementation of town planning projects is limited; there is no control over timeframes and there is often a lack of, or delays in, funding although in some cases funds are there but remain unused. Distortions occur through the forceful implementation of projects outside the plan. Funding for identified projects is mainly through central government budgets with local governments contributing little to the coffers. In some cases, planning policies and frameworks formulated have no significant relevance to actual development problems. This can be ascribed to rapid changing circumstances on the ground, slow pace of land acquisition, long timeframes to update plans, lack of coordination,

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and competition among planning entities. There is also lack of capacity and resources (manpower, equipment, etc.) that hinders plan implementation. Interestingly, economic plans do get implemented much more easily.

7.5.1.9 Poor Urban Management Until recently, settlement planning and development had, to a large extent, remained under the control of the then Ministry of Lands and Housing in central government and in collaboration with local authorities. As a result, many towns/cities have been unable to manage rapid urbanization using static blueprint master plans, insufficient and inadequately trained planning staff, and other resource limitations. Consequently, these towns and cities cannot cope and this can be attributed to the limitations of master planning with its assumption that cities will be dominated by formal developments, as has been in the case of cities in western countries. Even after decentralization, and now city management is under the councils, this has not been accompanied by power and resources to drive these processes. 7.5.1.10 Corruption and Political Expediency Corruption within the public and private sector is a serious hurdle in meeting the development challenges of most countries, and the management of urban areas. To some extent, Botswana is not as ravaged by corruption as in other countries. This practice poses a challenge to efforts to decentralize authority to regional and local levels where there is insufficient capacity. Parochial political agendas undermine urban growth management initiatives and this is exacerbated by poor political leadership and administration. These and other examples demonstrate that urbanization in Botswana as in other African cities is taking a completely different form in comparison with that of Western and Asian countries. In this context, rethinking the planning agenda and approach is of critical importance and should be a preoccupation of planners and policymakers.

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7.6

The Way Forward

Opportunities for making planning a more effective tool for development. For urban and regional planning to become more effective and remain relevant within the domain of government, it is critical that the discipline engage with political, market, institutional, fiscal, and other key forces impacting on development. Planners need to understand the underlying forces and acquire the necessary skills to identify the levers for appropriate interventions: Adopt a more flexible and appropriate approach. In the way towns and cities are built by embracing new planning paradigms, inclusivity and embedding social and cultural norms in the way space is designed for a better environment. City Growth Management. New forms of growth management are required, which are inclusive of measures introduced through town and country planning, informality, traditional authority land use management and private sector investment patterns. Of critical importance is for urban growth to be inclusive of the poor and marginalized. Engage the private sector in urban development. City planning should not be only in the domain of civil servants. The private sector and communities should be brought in the planning of human settlements. Need for safer towns and cities through creative design. Planners should try to embrace creative design in spatial planning through place making and livable and sustainable planning. Rural and urban development strategies and approaches. Strategies and approaches should be complementary rather than contradictory. The development of secondary centers is to the direct economic benefit of the resource areas they serve. Housing and services for the poor. Given the current fast urbanization trends in Botswana, there is no time to wait for slow and uncertain programs. Government intervention must be reoriented so that limited resources are put to maximum effect in improving housing conditions for the poor.

7

A Reappraisal of Spatial Planning in Botswana

Planners must move to energy efficiency. To reduce the demand-supply gap, the city needs to (1) identify and overcome information, technical and financial barriers to installation of rooftop solar PV, (2) focus on energy-efficiency and demand-side management via by promoting the use of energy efficient appliances and user education, and finally, (3) facilitate the procurement of renewables by large electricity consumers to reduce their dependence on diesel and other pollutants. Strengthen local authorities. To become key agents of development, city governments need enhanced political, institutional, and financial capacity, notably access to more of the wealth generated in the city. Only in this way can cities adapt and deploy some of the vast array of tools available to address urban problems—tools such as land title registration, land use control, and tax sharing. Need to tap more resources. The available resources in or close to our towns and cities are often underused. Many landowners leave well-located sites undeveloped to benefit later from their increasing value as the city grows. This has been seen in the major peri-urban areas across the entire country. Many public agencies have land that could be put to better use, such as the area next to stations controlled by the Railway Authority. Several countries have introduced special programs to encourage public and private cooperation in the development of such lands, a trend that should be encouraged here in Botswana. There is a general need to find innovative and effective ways of pooling land for the common good. The Government should also consider supporting urban agriculture as there is potential in this venture as has been seen in certain parts of the towns and cities. This may have less relevance in cities where land markets are highly commercialized and land for housing is in short supply. Urban agriculture, especially on city fringes, is undertaken by people to feed themselves, in other instances, the process is more commercialized, with enterprises specializing in vegetable production for sale within the city.

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Officially sanctioned and promoted urban agriculture could become an important component of urban development and make more food available to the urban poor. The primary purposes of such promotion should be to improve the nutritional and health standards of the poor, help their family budgets (50–70 percent of which is usually spent on food), enable them to earn some additional income, and provide employment. Urban agriculture can also provide fresher and cheaper produce, more green space, the clearing of garbage dumps, and recycling of household waste.

7.7

Conclusion

This submission has shown that Botswana has made tremendous steps in urban planning over the decades and the Government of Botswana should be proud of this as it is the envy of its neighbors in Africa. However, there is still room for improvement. Culture and tradition that has been neglected needs to be embraced to achieve better environments. This chapter has argued that there is a need to take a step forward in the country’s spatial plans. The very broad design-based spatial frameworks have been found wanting in several ways. It has highlighted their limits in understanding the spatial organization of cities and their complexity, particularly in terms of the socio-demographic trends and patterns of movement and settlement, and in terms of the spatial organization of economic activities. It has also pointed to their limits from the perspective of infrastructure planning. Planning however is at an interesting moment when its value is being rediscovered internationally. The new interest in planning is linked inter alia to a reaction to the fragmentation resulting from a purely market-driven approach in many contexts. One key element of the new focus on spatial planning is in linking spatial planning to infrastructure planning. This approach requires a far deeper understanding of the social and economic dynamics of the city and their spatial implications than has generally been the case in Botswana.

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This suggests the need for a stronger analytical and technical base for planning than has generally been the case in the past. There are obvious limits in the extent to which planning can transform cities. As Bertaud (2008) has argued, urban spatial change is slow and relatively path dependent. In effect, planners need to work largely around existing patterns, and this requires a better understanding of the socio-spatial and economic dynamics of cities and how they are changing. Most authors however also point to the importance of using the ideas and directions in spatial planning consistently in decision-making at all levels, and for coherence between spatial planning ideas and policy instruments. This requires strong political and stakeholder buy-in, and an agreement to use the plan as a key decision-making tool. The discursive element of spatial planning should therefore not be neglected.

References Amin A (2002) Ethnicity and the multi-cultural city: living with diversity. Environ Plan A 34:959–980 Baycan-Levent T, Nijkamp P (2008) Seven frequently asked questions (FAQs) in urban planning. Stud Reg Sci 38(2):351–371 Bertaud A (2008) Options for new alternatives for development control regulation and justification for increasing FSI. http://www.alain-bertaud.com/GoogleScholar Castells M (1996) The rise of the network society. Blackwell, Oxford Cavric B, Mosha AC (2001) Towards better urban development and management in Botswana. Paper

A. C. Mosha presented at the AESOP conference at Shanghai, 11– 15 July 2001 Chapin FS Jr, Kaiser EJ (1985) Urban land use planning, 3rd edn. University of Illinois, Chicago Clarke G (1992) Towards appropriate forms of urban planning. Habitat Int 16(2):149–165 Friedman J (1998) Planning theory revisited. Eur Plan Stud 6(3):245–254 GoB/Statistics Botswana (2011) Population, Household and Income in Botswana. Government Printer, Gaborone Hall P, Pfeiffer U (2000) Urban future 21: a global agenda for twenty-first century cities. Routledge, New York Harris N (1990) Urbanization, economic development and policy in developing countries. Development and Planning Unit, London College University, London Healy P (2007) Urban complexity and spatial strategies: towards a relational planning for our times. Routledge, London Keiner M, Salmerón D (2003) Sustainable urban development in Gaborone, Botswana. DIMSUD working paper, ETH e-Collection. http://e-collection.ethbib. ethz.ch Keiner M (2004) Sustainable development and urban management in developing countries: the case of Africa. In Koll-Schretzenmayr M, Keiner M, Nussbaumer G (eds) The real and the virtual worlds of spatial planning, pp 43– 59. Springer, Berlin Molebatsi CO (1996) Towards a sustainable city: Gaborone, Botswana. Ambio 25(2):126–133. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Mosha AC (1995) A reappraisal of the planning process. UNCHS, Nairobi, Kenya Robins S (2002) At the limits of spatial governmentality: a message from the tip of Africa. Third World Quart. https://doi.org/10.1080/0143659022000005328 Google Scholar Winston N, Eastaway MP (2008) Sustainable housing in the urban context: international sustainable development indicator sets and housing. Soc Indic Res 87 (2):211–221

8

Ecological Regional Planning in Costa Rica: An Approach to Protected Areas and Environmental Services Carlos Morera Beita and Luis Fernando Sandoval Murillo

Abstract

A protected area is a dynamic system that seeks to achieve a balance between sociocultural and bio-physical aspects. This needs to be planned in any region and at different scales (national, regional, and local). The first few protected areas in Costa Rica were created in the 1970s with a view to preserve ecological resources, although, there were some isolated initiatives such as the Cabo Blanco Absolute Reserve implemented in 1963 among others. The country has more than 200 protected areas spread over mainland and oceanic territories applying diverse categories (Biological reserves, national parks, wildlife refuges, forest reserves, water protected zones, and wetlands). To manage these protected areas in 1998, Costa Rica’s government established eleven regions. In addition, in 1996, Costa Rica approved a Forestry Law (7575) that carried out environmental services and afterward, established a new regional system with eight areas, as a result, the country has two different regional planning approaches to conservation issues: one for protected areas and the other for environmental services. This chapter analyzes how the two regional planning systems attend to

C. M. Beita (&)
L. F. S. Murillo Department of Geography, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica e-mail: [email protected]

environmental concerns and its implications from the spatial perspective. In addition, it analyzes the environmental services according to scale of the protected areas located in each region during the last five years as case study. Finally, it identifies some challenges for regional planning to improve conservation according to changing needs. Keywords







Conservation Costa rica Ecological regional planning Protected areas

8.1




Introduction

Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation (Saura et al. 2017) and is the main strategy to conserve natural values and reduce biodiversity loss (Jepson et al. 2017). In Costa Rica, conservation has been a key issue in the last century as most Latin-American countries. The first protected areas that were created in the 1970s based on the ecological conservation principle resembled those implemented in the USA (Boza 1993). Although, there were some isolated initiatives such as the Cabo Blanco Absolute Reserve implemented in 1963 in the Nicoya Peninsula, another example is the protection of the Poas and Irazu volcanic area and a corridor on either side of the Inter-American

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_8

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C. M. Beita and L. F. S. Murillo

PopulaƟon

6000000

forest conservation that has eight regions. This chapter analyzes the planning system that is carried out in Costa Rica from the regional approach considering that it is key to conservation.

8.2

Background of the Protection Areas in Costa Rica

Costa Rica, as most of the Latin America countries, during the last century presented a very high deforestation rate. During 1900s, 63.4% of the land in Costa Rica had its original natural cover; however, in 1984 it was reduced to 32.2% (Fig. 8.1). The accelerated reduction of the natural cover was the result of the economic transformation that was based on agriculture. This led to policies that decreased the natural cover up to 1980s. Rosero-Bixby and Palloni (1998) discussed Costa Rica’s deforestation and the consequence of some non-demographic factors such as credit and capital market failures, lack of suitable mediating institutions securing property

% of Forest Cover

120

PopulaƟon

5000000

100

4000000

80

3000000

60

2000000

40

1000000

20

0

% of Forest Cover

Highway in the Talamanca Range Mountain to preserve the forest that is dominated by oak tree (quercus) (Vargas 2000). It was in 1969 that under the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG), the National Park Service was created. Later in 1979, this department became a separate entity and in 1994 was transformed to National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC) that nowadays is the official institution responsible for the conservation of natural spaces. Costa Rica has 26.5% of land under some conservation categories such as biological reserves, national parks, wildlife refuges, protection water zones, forest reserves, wetlands, and marine reserves. In addition, there is around 30% of Costa Rica’s land that is located inside a biological corridor (Morera and Sandoval 2016). There is not a unique system for conservation goals in Costa Rica. On the one hand, there are the SINAC, located at the Environmental and Energy Minister founded in 1998 that has divided the country in eleven regions, while on the other, there is FONAFIFO (National Fund for Forestry Financing) that is in charge of planning

0 1522

1569

1802

1900

1960

1977

1984

1997

2000

2010

2015

Year Fig. 8.1 Costa Rica, percentage of forest cover and population 1522–2010. Source Sader and Joyce, (1988), Morera and Sandoval (2016), Morera et al. (2017)

8

Ecological Regional Planning in Costa Rica: An Approach …

rights, wretched poverty, uneven land distribution, consumption patterns in an undeveloped country, greedy multinational companies, ignorance and mismanagement by colonists of frontier land, among others. Later, the forest decline of 1990s in Costa Rica was influenced by transformations in the economy particularly, in services such as tourism and computer industry, which reduced demand for natural resources. The accelerated destruction of the natural ecosystem was the main reason for the establishment of protected areas in Costa Rica (Boza 1993). Although, there were some government initiatives for ecological conservation since nineteenth century (Sterling 1999), it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that the first protected areas appeared. However, it is Cabo Blanco under the biological reserves category that was established by a Danish and Swedish couple as a personal initiative in the Nicoya Peninsula. During 1970s, the first protected areas created by government included such as Cahuita, Poas, San Rosa, Manuel Antonio, Rincon de la Vieja, Barra Honda, Chirripo, Corcovado, Tortuguero, Coco Island, Braulio Carrillo, Carara, and Palo Verde (Boza 1993). There were two previous cases (Irazú and Turrialba Volcanoes) that government approved a special law to protect an area around the craters for prevention in case of emergency, however, they were not called protected areas. 26.5% of Costa Rica’s land is under some category of protection and they can be divided into three types namely government land, state-public land, and public land (Table 8.1). In the first category, are the stakeholders by state, that is, Biological reserve and National Parks. There are 8 Biological Reserves that cover 4% of nation land, which is defined as unaltered areas containing extremely vulnerable ecosystems, where ecological processes have continued with minimal human interference. These are the spaces with more fragile ecosystem which are dedicated to preservation and research and four over nine of those biological reserves were established in the decade 1971–1980. In the case of the National Parks that are singular areas which should include representative ecosystems

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with little evidence of human activity, and have the capacity for recreational and educational, 11.9% of Costa Rica’s land is a National Park. Most of them (43%–47% of the area) were established in the 1971–1980 decade. The second category is integrated by lands that are government and private lands such as wildlife refuges and forest reserves. It covers 8.6% of the Costa Rica’s land and there are 90 units (79 Wildlife refuges and 11 forest reserves). They were established after 1980–1990, and most of them are private lands. The wildlife refuges are spaces that by geographical conditions are special ecosystems and biodiversity, requiring the adoption of management actions while forest reserve are lands which are suitable to produce wood, in which management actions are carried out with sustainability criteria. The private land category includes water reserves and wetland among others. Around 4.7% of Costa Rica’s land is covered by this class and is integrated by 52 protected areas (32 water reserves, 15 wetlands, and others 4). Water reserves are areas that have no greater ecological value. It is the main reason for the protection of both land and underground waters while wetlands are ecosystems dependent on aquatic regimes, natural or artificial, permanent or temporary, sweet, brackish, or salty, including marine extensions such as mangroves. According to holder of the land, Costa Rica had different protected categories. Some are Biological Reserves and National Parks that occupy 48% of all the land under conservation. Other categories such as Wildlife Refuges and Forest Reserves represent 34% of the land under conservation while 18% are private land under Water Reserves, Wetland, and other minor categories.

8.3

Planning Conservation Zoning

In 1994, National System of Protected Areas (SINAC) established the regional approach of conservation management that addressed articulation of protected areas placed in a territory. The Biodiversity Law No. 7788 established SINAC

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50

300000

45 250000

40

Area (Ha)

30 150000

25

Number

35

200000

20 100000

15 10

50000

5 0

0 -1970

1971-1980

1981-1990

1991-2000

2001-2010

2011-2016

Decades Biological R-Area

NaƟonal P-Area

Wildlife R. Area

Water P- Areas

Forest R- Areas

Wetland- Area

Biological R- #

NaƟonal P- #

Wildlife R- #

Water Prot. #

Forest R. #

Wetland #

Fig. 8.2 Protection areas in Costa Rica by decades. Source http://www.sinac.go.cr/ES/asp/Paginas/default.aspx

Table 8.1 Categories of protection areas in Costa Rica Land owner condition

Categories

Government land

Biological reserves

Government and public land

Public land

Surface area (ha.)

% of Costa Rica´s surface area

8

21634

0.4

National parks

28

629394

11.9

Sub-total

36

651028

12.3

Wildlife refugees

79

237553

4.5

Forest reserves

11

216277

4.1

Sub-total

90

453830

8.6

Water reserves

32

157213

3.0

Wetland

15

69251

1.3

Others Sub-total Total

Number

4

21811

0.4

51

248275

4.7

148

1,353073

26.5

Source Pfaff and Sanchez-Azofeifa (2004), Morera (2011), http://www.sinac.go.cr/ES/asp/Paginas/default.aspx

8

Ecological Regional Planning in Costa Rica: An Approach …

which was constituted by territorial units called Conservation Areas under the supervision of the Ministry of Environment and Energy, through the National Council of Conservation Area (Asamblea Legislativa 2017). Each Conservation Area was considered as a territorial unit of the country, delimited administratively, and governed by the same development and administration strategy that coordinated with public-sector agents. Each protected area has its own management program based on regional and local strategies as well biodiversity conditions, where regions are a framework for coordination. Therefore, in 1994 the MIRENEN (Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and Mining), determined ten regions (Fig. 8.3) namely Osa (ACOSA), Central Volcanic Range Central (ACCVCC), Tortuguero (ACTO), La Amistad Pacifica (ACAP), La Amistad Caribe (ACAC), Central Pacific (ACOPAC), Coco Island (ACMIC), Guanacaste (ACG), Huetar North (ACHN), and Arenal Tempisque (ACAT) (Fig. 8.3).

Fig. 8.3 Map of SINAC regions, Costa Rica

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In the literature reviewed, there are not any scientific criterion that was used to define this region’s system and it is different compared to the official national planning zoning. According to Costa Rican decree (Asamblea Legislativa 2017), it is the environmental ministry in coordination with the Protected Areas Council, that is charged to delimit each region’s units, likewise, each conservation area coordinates with state agents, which presents challenges because action area is dissimilar with diverse power level.

8.4

Regional System of FONAFIFO

Besides SINAC region, Costa Rica’s government created another regional system called FONAFIFO (National Fund for Forestry Financing). Primarily, the reason for creation of this fund was the Payment for Environmental Services (PES) through establishment of Forestry Law 7575, 1996. Secondly, the forest environmental services and forest plantations that directly affect

C. M. Beita and L. F. S. Murillo

800000 700000

Total Surface of ConservaƟon Area ( Ha) % of Protected Area

120.0 100.0

600000 500000 400000 300000

80.0 60.0 40.0

200000 100000 0

20.0

% of Protected Area

Total Surface of ConservaƟon Area (Ha)

134

0.0

Fig. 8.4 Conservation areas units: surface and % of protected areas, 2017. Source http://www.sinac.go.cr/ES/asp/ Paginas/default.aspx

the protection and improvement of the environment such as mitigation of gases with protection of biodiversity, and protection of scenic beauty with the aim of promoting the conservation of forest resources, as well as an instrument of redistribution of wealth to strengthen family economies in rural areas. It establishes three modalities: Protection, reforestation, and forest management and are financed mainly by public funds collected through a tax on fossil fuels (Ortiz et al. 2003). There are some articles that analyzes the PES in Costa Rica, such as Rosaet al. (1999), Pagiola, (2008), Sánchez et al. (2007), however, none evaluates the regional system using dialogues with the SINAC regional system. SINAC and FONAFIFO, are both environmental state agent. The FONAFIFO regions are eight (Cañas, Limon, Nicoya, Palmar Norte, Caribe Norte, San Carlos, San Jose 01, and San Jose 02) (Fig. 8.5). The distribution of PES from 2011 to 2015 demonstrates that there are some differences between each region in many PES. These differences are not as big as SINAC regions (Fig. 8.6). Thus, PES area has 40% variance between the region with less amount area (Cañas) and the one with more area (Palmar

Norte) while in the numbers of farms, this difference went up to 60% in the different regions. In general, the priority areas to get support by PES is defined by SINAC policies, however, at the local level FONAFIFO was in charge to apply these policies that many times is only bureaucratic submissions with weak coordination. In addition, they are not evaluation about how PES has been supporting conservation or the effectiveness of space prioritization for their PES locations. If the policies are action at local level, it is difficult to carry out when the regions are dissimilar especially considering the coordination requirement. It is well known that protected areas, and conservation more generally, are underfunded (McCarthy et al. 2012). Hence it is necessary to be efficient with the financial resources, which is a challenge in the case of poor regionalization. Conservation policies articulate protection areas management and Costa Rica has been innovator in implementation of ecosystem approach establishing conservation areas in the last century. However, these are weak relationships that affect directly the PES effectivity and the improvement of the Costa Rica conservation conditions.

8

Ecological Regional Planning in Costa Rica: An Approach …

135

Fig. 8.5 Map of FONAFIFO region, Costa Rica

12000

200

10000

Area (ha)

180

# of Farms

160

Area (ha)

120 6000

100 80

4000

# of Farms

140

8000

60 40

2000

20 0

0 Cañas

Limón

Nicoya

Palmar Norte

Caribe San Carlos San José San José Norte 01 02

Regions Fig. 8.6 Payment for Environment Services (PES) in Costa Rica 2011–2015. Average of area and number of farms. Source FONAFIFO, 2017

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C. M. Beita and L. F. S. Murillo

Conclusions

As a small country, Costa Rica has made great policies for conservation that preserve around one quarter of nation’s land. In the 1970s, most of the National Parks were influenced by the USA’s model, however, later this model went through change which emphasized public land protection categories such as wildlife refuges, wetlands, among others. To carry out these actions, Costa Rica’s SINAC have been implemented in a regional approach for the protected areas that is innovative because it addresses the management of land where all the areas protected and not protected dialogue with each other. The SINAC regional system presents an important asymmetric as the cover area and protected areas land. In addition to this regional system, FONAFIFO has established another region for PES management that is totally different to SINAC.

References Adams JS (2006) The future of the wild: radical conservation for a crowded world. Beacon Press, Boston Asamblea Legislativa (2017) Decreto 40479 Modificación del Decreto 40054 Regionalización del MINAE. San José, Costa Rica. La Gaceta 141, del 26 de julio del 2017 Boza MA (1993) Conservation in action: past, present, and future of the national park system of Costa Rica. Conserv Biol 7(2):239–247 Jepson PR, Caldecott B, Schmitt SF, Carvalho SH, Correia RA, Gamarra N, Bragagnolo C, Malhado AC, Ladle RJ (2017) Protected area asset stewardship. Biol Cons 212:183–190 Malavasi EO, Mora LS, Carvajal CB (2003) Impacto del Programa de Pago de Servicios Ambientales en Costa Rica como medio de reducción de la pobreza en los medios rurales. Series de Publicaciones RUTA, San José, Costa Rica

McCarthy DP, Donald PF, Scharlemann JP, Buchanan GM, Balmford A, Green JM, Bennun LA, Burgess ND, McCarthy DP, Fishpool LD, Garnett ST, Leonard DL (2012) Financial costs of meeting global biodiversity conservation targets: current spending and unmet needs. Science 338(6109):946–949 Morera C, Sandoval LF (2016) Evaluación de la cobertura boscosa en costa rica: un análisis a nivel de áreas de conservación en el año 2000. Revista Geográfica de América Central 1(56) Morera C, Sandoval L, Romero M (2017) Índice de fragmentación/conectividad de la cobertura natural a nivel de cantones 2000–2015. http://www. observatorioambiental.una.ac.cr/index.php/indicadoresambientales/tema/540-indice-de-fragmentacionconectividad-de-la-cobertura-natural-a-nivel-decantones-2000-2015. Accessed 27 July 2017 Morera C (2011) Sinergias del Modelo Turístico con los espacios protegidos estatales en Costa Rica. En: Las vías del desarrollo sustentable en el medio rural: Naturaleza, sociedad rural y turismo en América Latina. Memorias de Seminario Internacional. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones y Estudios sobre Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México Pfaff AS, Sanchez-Azofeifa GA (2004) Deforestation pressure and biological reserve planning: a conceptual approach and an illustrative application for Costa Rica. Resour Energy Econ 26(2):237–254 Rosa H, Herrador D, González M, Cuéllar N (1999) Valoración y pago por servicios ambientales: Las experiencias de Costa Rica y El Salvador. Prisma 35:1–20 Rosero-Bixby L, Palloni A (1998) Population and deforestation in Costa Rica. Popul Environ 20(2):149–185 Sader SA, Joyce AT (1988) Deforestation rates and trends in Costa Rica: 1940 to 1983. Biotropica 11–19 Sánchez GA, Pfaff A, Robalino JA, Boomhower JP (2007) Costa Rica’s payment for environmental services program: intention, implementation, and impact. Conserv Biol 21(5):1165–1173 Saura S, Bastin L, Battistella L, Mandrici A, Dubois G (2017) Protected areas in the world’s ecoregions: how well connected are they? Ecol Ind 76:144–158 Sterling E (1999) The green republic: a conservation history of Costa Rica. University of Texas, Texas SINAC (2017) Recovered From: http://www.sinac.go.cr/ ES/asp/Paginas Vargas G (2000) Geografía turística de Costa Rica. EUNED, San Pedro, Costa Rica

Part III Methods Matter

9

Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach Ramiro Canelos Salazar, Montserrat Pallares-Barbera and Ana Vera

Abstract

Keywords

Classical analyses of constraints and challenges associated with development in middle-income Latin American countries have been performed based on per capita income levels. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the structural gap approach has been an alternative criterion to that of per capita income. It identifies areas where there are gaps, such as poverty, inequality and social inclusion, which hinder social and economic development. In the present study, we used hierarchical cluster analysis to assess the socioeconomic development of cities in Ecuador. The goal was to add depth and flexibility to the study in order to assess a more complex reality regarding the development level of the country. This way, the resulting taxonomies of cities could be used to address specific policies to improve quality of life and sustainability of the population.

Hierarchical cluster analysis Latin America Structural gap theory Socioeconomic development

R. Canelos Salazar (&) International University of Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador e-mail: [email protected] M. Pallares-Barbera Geography Department, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] A. Vera Department of Geography, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Cerdanyola, Spain e-mail: [email protected]




9.1







Introduction

The study of the explanatory factors of well-being, wealth and quality of life levels between countries, regions or cities is necessary for the development of rebalancing social policies. These factors are decisive to mitigate social differences and find tendencies that aggravate or improve the state of the population. Therefore, the analysis of inequality and how to avoid it by means of strategies and socioeconomic policies (Stiglitz 2015) is extremely important (Kanbur and Sumner 2012; Piketty 2014; Stiglitz 2012, 2015). This chapter discusses the major precepts that define structural heterogeneity in the cities of Ecuador, in order to explain territorial inequalities in social and economic terms. To that end, we prepared a classification of cities according to the development level based on the structural gaps and hierarchical cluster analysis. The structural heterogeneity of the territories is identified from the unequal occupational structure in terms of productivity, job access and quality of jobs. The result is uneven incomes with wealth concentration in the social and economic elite.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_9

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This population group has a similar living condition to that found in developed countries, and live in major cities. On the other hand, there is a clear economic and social alienation in middle and small cities (CEPAL 2016). Latin America is the most unequal region in the world in terms of socioeconomic discrepancies (de Ferranti et al. 2004; CEPAL 2010; Maryse 2011; Candia et al. 2015; Bárcena and Prado 2016). The study of sub-national1 disparities considering space and territory factors helps understand historical and structural events (Kanbur and Venables 2005; Rodriguez-Pose and Sánchez-Reaza 2005; Cuervo and Morales Gutiérrez 2009; Modrego and Cazzuffi 2015). Permanent differences in economic growth between territories (Candia et al. 2015) are generated by a productive structure based on natural resources, and the results are diverse. On the one hand, exported products, manufactures and services are characterised by a significant volatility of demand and international prices. On the other hand, the strong economic fluctuations lead to internal changes in economic policies. For example, the strong dependence of Latin America on its natural resources has inhibited the transformation of the productive structure towards more dynamic sectors, whether in terms of demand or activities carried out using new technology (Bértola 2016). In addition, this fact has configured a structural heterogeneity characterised by large differences in inter-and intra-sectoral productivity, with important asymmetries in technological capabilities in comparison to other more developed countries (CEPAL 2010; Kats 2016).

Ecuador is located in the western hemisphere in north-western South America. It has a total area of 257,217.10 km2 of continental and insular

territory. The continental territory has 248,983.90 km2, and the island territory, located on the west of the continental territory, corresponds to Galapagos Province. Ecuador is bordered on the north by Colombia, on the south and the east by Peru, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. The Andes mountain range crosses continental Ecuador and divides the country into three distinct regions: coast; hills; and Amazon. These regions have very particular characteristics in terms of climate, soil, culture and productive activity. The insular region is added to those regions, thus constituting a territory of extraordinary biodiversity. In 2016, the population was composed of 16,530,746 inhabitants (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses of Ecuador—INEC), and 64.4% of the population was concentrated in urban areas,2 with the highest demographic density of South America (56.8 inhabitants per km2). In the twentieth century, Ecuador had periods of specialisation and crisis in the production and export of primary products. In the first four decades, cocoa was the main source of resources and expansion. A deep production crisis in the sector was caused by the appearance of the ‘witch’s broom disease’. From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, the country specialised in the production and export of bananas. During this period, the roads infrastructure was restructured integrating the hills and the coast, and promoted banana trade, labour and new services associated with this business sector. The territorial consequence was an intense urbanisation process, in which cities like Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca and Machala emerged, thus expanding the agricultural frontier of the coast and integrating other provinces (Villalobos 1983). In the 1970s, petroleum production started and caused decisive and significant impacts on the economy. This was the trigger for rapid growth, consolidation of the State, and uneven sectoral development (Larrea 1983).

1

2

9.2

Social and Economic Characteristics in Ecuador

The term sub-national refers to the different levels of regional governments. In Ecuador, the administrative political division sets the regional, provincial, city and parochial levels. The present study was conducted at city level. Municipalities are the institutions that govern each city.

The last census in Ecuador was performed at the end of the 2010s. It determined a population of 14,483,499 inhabitants, of which 62.8% corresponded to the urban population. The average urban population in Latin America corresponded to 80.2% of the inhabitants.

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

The import-substitution model promoted incentives in the industry. This circumstance reinforced the growth of major cities and the polarisation of wealth distribution, causing high rates of migration from the countryside to the cities, and the emergence of misery around big cities. The urban population, which represented 28.5% of the total population in 1950, grew to 41.4% in 1974. Employment decreased since the 1960s. Unemployment went from an average of 5% (1960s) until 12% in the 1980s, with an ‘underemployment’ rate of about 50% (Pita 1991).3 In the 1980s and 1990s, the debt and structural adjustment crisis characterised a prolonged economic stagnation, with high rates of inflation, fiscal deficits, increased poverty, greater concentration in the distribution of incomes, increased unemployment and underemployment and reduced internal and external investments. In the twenty-first century, the crisis of the banking system caused the adoption of the US dollar as the official currency, which meant a strong adjustment in the relative prices of the economy.4 Ecuador’s growth was based on a scarce product diversification concentrated in primary products, namely: petroleum (44.6%); bananas (12%); coffee (0.15%); shrimp (10%); cocoa (2.5%); wood (1%); tuna (0.5%); other fish (0.8%); flowers (3.8%); and others (3.9) which in total represented 79.25% of exports.5 Until 2014, when the international price of petroleum fell, it had represented 70% of exports. The business structure of Ecuador has been little integrated and dominated by micro companies (90%) 3

Underemployment is an informal working condition with income generation below the basic wage and outside the social security system. 4 In December 1998, the US dollar had an official exchange rate of 6.825,0 sucres (Ecuadorian currency) per dollar. When the country adopted the dollar as the official currency in January 2000, the exchange rate adopted for the dollarisation of the economy was 25,000 sucres per dollar, causing a strong deterioration of salaries and deposits in sucres (Quarterly Newsletters of the Central Bank of Ecuador 1999–2000). 5 Central Bank of Ecuador. Economic statistics. Newsletter, April 2017. Series 3.1.1. Average figures for the export sector from 2012 to 2016.

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characterised by low productivity and employment generation.6

9.3

Theoretical Framework

Different studies found in the literature from the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century have discussed how structural differences among developing and developed countries were endogenous (new structuralist economics). The diversification and modernisation of the production system through innovation processes (Yifu Lin 2009) based on structural heterogeneity (Prebisch 1962, 1973) help interpret the differences in regions and countries. Another variable that influences structural heterogeneity is the peripheral condition of countries in a region (Pinto 1973), where sectors of high and low productivity coexist (Rodríguez 2006). More recently, structural heterogeneity, based on the coexistence of internal and external gaps (neostructuralism), has been used to explain unequal development among countries. The internal gap is understood as differences in inter-and intra-sectoral productivity, whereas the external gap is defined by the asymmetries in technological capabilities of the region with respect to international competitors (Pinto 1973, 1976; Cimoli 2005; Rodríguez 2006; Mattar et al. 2012; Cimoli and Porcile 2013; Candia et al. 2015; CEPAL 2010, 2016). The wide territorial inequality in Latin America, specifically in Ecuador, has been assessed from the structural heterogeneity reflected in productivity gaps. These gaps refer to workers’ uneven yields, capital and labour, as well as the differences in the levels of environmental sustainability (CEPAL 2010; Mattar et al. 2012; Cimoli and Porcile 2013). Structural heterogeneity has two main characteristics. The first includes the high geographic concentration of the population (= >40% of the total) and economic activity (with total gross 6

Labour and Companies Panorama of Ecuador 2016 (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses of Ecuador —INEC).

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domestic product = >50%) in major cities or metropolitan districts. The second characteristic is the existence of a great number of relative gaps between territories with respect to living standards of the population (Candia et al. 2015). These territorial disparities between regions and/or cities are structural gaps. In a circular and cumulative manner, levels of poverty, inequality, social inclusion and institutional and financial productive capacity are the variables that allow studying a complex reality (Tezanos 2012; Kaldewei 2015; CEPAL 2010, 2014a, 2016; Abramo et al. 2016). The analysis of these variables as hierarchical indicators provides depth in the development process of the regions (Pardo 2014). Reversing this circular process would imply achieving important changes in the productive and social structure (Titelman, Vera and Pérez-Caldentey 2012).

9.4

Methodology, the Structural Gaps Approach

Agencies such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have classified countries as ‘developed countries’ and ‘developing countries’ (Tezanos 2012). Eleven structural development gaps have been analysed in this classification. In this chapter, we used the traditional concept of structural gaps to classify 220 cities7 of Ecuador due to their development level. The cities, as an element of analysis, represent sites of high population density. In addition, they are a catalyst for territorial change, because they reveal growth cycles and tendencies (Ramírez et al. 2009). Cities have historical, economic, social and political particularities. They are structuring elements of a territory; cities reflect changes in the economy, reproduce social dysfunctions and constitute poles of economic and social attraction (Cuervo 2004). Structural heterogeneity of cities 7

We only excluded the city of Quinsaloma located on the coastal region, Los Ríos Province. This city was founded in 2007 and there were not necessary and inter-census statistical data (2001–2010) like those used in the present study.

reflect the state and dynamics of a country, the processes of poverty and marginality, the level of productive diversification, sectoral composition of economic activities and social characteristics (Abramo et al. 2016). The structural gap approach for the typology of cities consists of three phases. In the first, the structural gaps and the proxy variables are identified using a decision tree classification, in order to quantify and prioritise the main structural obstacles that limit the productive development of cities. In the second phase, hierarchical clusters are analysed using Ward’s method to create homogeneous groups with similar sizes. In the third phase, an analysis of consistency is carried out to validate the results using one-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Eta-squared to identify those variables with greater statistical significance in the discrimination of groups. To perform these calculations, we used the SPSS statistical package, which contains several cluster methods, including Ward’s method, and the calculation of one-factor ANOVA and Eta-squared.

9.4.1 Decision Tree to Identify the Structural Gaps and the Proxy Variables To identify the limiting factors of economic growth (growth diagnostics) on the basis of a standard model of neoclassical growth (Hausmann, Rodrick and Velasco 2005), it is necessary to define the restrictions using a decision tree. The branches represent the growth determinants. The decision tree is used to obtain a diagnosis to rank the interrelationships between the various gaps and their determinants (Kaldewei 2015). In the selection process of the proxy variables, which define the decision tree, the indicators can be quantitative or qualitative. Once the tree has been built, the structural gaps are used to identify, quantify and prioritise the productive, sustainable and inclusive development at sub-regional and sub-national levels (Titelman et al. 2012; Pardo 2014; Kaldewei 2015). In this method, the main indicator is the gross domestic

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

product (GDP), but it also includes determinants of the productive, institutional, employment and social structure of the country. Other authors (Hausmann et al. 2005) have diagnosed growth only based on the GDP. In the present study, we defined eleven structural gaps (Tezanos 2012; United Nations— CEPAL 2016) adapted to city level, namely: income; inequality; poverty; health; sex; environment; education; investment (savings and productivity); innovation; infrastructure; and taxation (Fig. 9.1). We identified sixteen quantitative variables as proxy. Of these variables, three belonged to ‘productivity and innovation’, two to ‘investment and savings’ and two to ‘taxation’ (taxes and fundraising). The other variables were used to estimate the rest of the gaps. The database was obtained from the Central Bank of Ecuador (BCE), the National Statistics Institute of Ecuador (INEC), the Superintendence of Banks, the Internal Revenue Service (SRI) and the Ministry of Finance (MF). The calculated period varied between each gap due to the limited availability of statistical data at city level (Table 9.1).

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9.4.2 Hierarchical Cluster Analysis Hierarchical cluster analysis combines variables based on the premise that they are heterogeneous and form groups, so that: (a) each city belongs to a single cluster; (b) all cities should be classified in one group and (c) each cluster should be internally homogeneous. According to a multivariate statistical method, the cities are grouped by levels of development, with a maximum homogeneity in each group and a great difference between groups (De la Fuente 2011). The method is based on a matrix of distances or similarities between cities and builds a hierarchy based on these distances (Fernández Santana 1991; Peña 2013). The criterion used to define the clusters was Ward’s method (or method of minimum inertia loss). Ward connects the cities trying to minimise the variance within each group using the squared Euclidean distance criterion (Peña 2013) as a measure of distance. Firstly, the average of all the variables in each cluster is estimated. Secondly, the distance between each case and the average of the cluster are determined. Finally, the distances between all cases are added to those data. Subsequently, the clusters that generated

Absence of territorial, economic, and social development

Low income per inhabitant

Low levels of investment and savings

Low productivity and innovation

Limited taxation – Local

Insufficient infrastructure

Great inequality

Limited public health services

High poverty indexes

Low education quality

Impacts on the environment

Gender inequality

Fig. 9.1 Decision tree used to establish the diagnosis of development using structural gaps in cities of Ecuador. Source Prepared by the authors based on Tezanos (2012)

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Table 9.1 Summary of structural gaps and their indicators Gap

Indicator used as proxy

Source

1. Income

Average GDP per capita

BCE (2007, 2013, 2014)

2. Inequality

Gini index

INEC-BID (2014)

3. Poverty

Poverty rate

INEC-BID (2014)

4. Health

Percentage of adolescent mothers

INEC (2010)

5. Gender

Female population affiliated to social security

INEC (2010)

6. Environment

Homes use firewood for cooking

INEC (2010)

7. Education

Higher education attendance rate

INEC (2010)

8. Investment and savings

Credit volume per capita Manufacture GDP/Total GDP

Superintendence of Banks BCE (2007, 2013, 2014)

9. Productivity and innovation

Homes with Internet access Sales/companies per worker affiliated to social security Population registered in the IESS

INEC (2010) INEC (2010, 2014) INEC (2010)

10. Infrastructure

Homes with inadequate characteristics

INEC (2010)

11. Taxation (local institutionalisation)

Municipal financial self-sufficiency Tax revenue per capita

BEDE (2002–2014) SRI (2010–2015)

Source Prepared by the authors

fewer differences in the sum of the distances within each cluster are grouped. This procedure creates homogeneous groups with similar sizes (Bartholomew et al. 2008; De la Fuente 2011). Ward defines a global measure of the heterogeneity of a number of observations as groups. This measure is W, the sum of squared Euclidean distances between each element, and the average of their groups. It is defined as follows: W¼

ng G X X

 0 ðxig  xg Þ xig  xg

g¼1 i¼1 ng G X X

¼ min

d2 ði; gÞ

g¼1 i¼1

where: W xg i g d2 ði; gÞ

Ward; The measure of group g; 1 element up to ng elements; Total elements, and The squared of the Euclidean distance between each element i of group g, and the mean of g

The elements that produce the minimum increase of W are grouped. This fact involves

using the closest values from the Euclidean distance. In the next step, two groups are again joined so that W grows as little as possible, thus having n—2 groups and so on until obtaining a single group. The W values indicate the growth of the criterion by forming groups, and can be used to determine the number of natural groups contained in the data (Peña 2013).

9.4.3 Consistency Analysis: ANOVA and Eta-Squared We used one-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) and measures of association (Eta-squared) in the consistency analysis of the results.

9.4.3.1 One-Factor Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) ANOVA identifies those variables with a higher statistical significance in the discrimination of groups (F = 0 represents low significance). All the variables analysed were significant at a 95% confidence level. The coefficient of the variable ‘home with Internet access’ was F = 103.145. Other variables with higher values (F > = 70)

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

were ‘higher education attendance rate’, ‘tax revenue per capita’, ‘average GDP per capita’ and ‘poverty rate’.

9.4.3.2 Measure of Association in One Sample (Eta-Squared) Eta-squared identifies those variables with greater dependence on the definition of the various established clusters. The Eta-squared coefficient compares the variability of the variables explained by differences between groups and total variability, with values between 0 and 1. Values close to 0 indicate that the behaviour of the variables is independent of groups, whereas values close to 1 indicate great dependence. In this case, the average of the variables is greater than or less than the global average depending on the group (Ferran Aranaz 2001). The variables ‘homes with Internet access’, ‘higher education attendance rate’, ‘tax revenue per capita’, ‘average GDP per capita’, poverty rate’, ‘population affiliated to social security’, ‘investment and savings volume per capita’ and ‘female population affiliated to social security’ had an Eta-squared value greater than 0.7. There were two other variables with coefficients higher than 0.6 and less than 0.7, two additional variables greater than 0.4. The value of only one variable, which represented the inequality gap by the Gini coefficient, was less than 0.3. In this sense, the inequality gap did not provide meaning in the discrimination of groups, given that the inequality in Ecuador was a feature present in all cities.

9.5

Results and Discussion— Developmental Taxonomy by Cities of Ecuador

The cities of Ecuador were grouped into five clusters hierarchised from the greatest to the lowest development level (Fig. 9.2). The results revealed a polarised country, with significant productive, economic and social inequalities. Very precarious development levels were observed in 85% of the cities, and only 15% of them had high development levels.

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Specifically, the classification of cities by development level was the following: • Cluster one (C1)–5 cities with the highest development level. • Cluster two (C2)–20 cities—Higher development level than the average of the country. • Cluster three (C3)–122 cities—Equal development level than the average of the country. • Cluster four (C4)–41 cities—Lower development level than the average of the country. • Cluster five (C5)–32 cities—Lower development level than the level of C4.

9.5.1 Characterisation of Clusters The characterisation of each cluster was obtained by the comparative analysis of the averages of each cluster.

9.5.1.1 C1–5 Cities with the Highest Development Level C1 consisted of the biggest cities and those closer to their metropolitan areas. They were Quito (capital) and Guayaquil (main port), in addition to Rumiñahui and Samborondón, which were close to the two main metropolitan districts, and, finally, Cuenca, which stood out for being the third city in population and economic development. C1 grouped 35.7% of the inhabitants of the country (Fig. 9.2). In nine of the eleven gaps and in fourteen of the sixteen variables used, this cluster had the indicators with the highest development level. It stood out in economy with the highest percentage of manufacturing activity (17%), followed by tax revenues, sales and credit per capita, which were five and six times greater than the national average. It exhibited the lowest poverty values relating to consumption (13.4%). However, this cluster had the greatest income inequality with respect to other values. The Gini index was 40% in comparison to the national average (33.3%). It had the highest higher education attendance rate (23.4%) and its cities raised 38% of total

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Fig. 9.2 Clusters of cities of Ecuador by development levels. Source Prepared by the authors

revenues by own management (average in the country = 11.3%). The GDP per capita and average rate of annual growth (13.5%) was significantly above the average (5.3%, 2007–2014) and notably higher than in all the other clusters. The sectoral composition of the economy of this cluster was in the sector services (financial and professional activities), manufacturing, commerce and construction, which together reached 65% of their GDP.

9.5.1.2 C2–20 Cities. Higher Development Level Than the Average of the Country C2 grouped 20 cities, nine of which belonged to the hills region, six to the coast, two to the Amazon region and included the three cities of the insular region. It had 17.1% of the inhabitants of the country, and the indicators were higher than the average of the country, but lower than

the indicators of C1. The population distribution by region was as follows: 55.1% in the hills; 42.5% on the coast; 1.3% in the Amazon; and 1.1% in the insular region. The level of per capita income (4,736 USD) was 2.4 times higher than the national average (2,105 USD); however, it had an important dispersion. The leading economic sectors were agriculture, livestock, manufacturing, commerce and construction, which together reached 53.5% of the GDP. The average growth rate of GDP per capita was 8.9% from 2007 to 2014, which was higher than the national average (5%). The average higher education attendance rate in C2 (16.2%) was lower than the average of C1 (23.4%) and higher than the national average (7.8%). Its tax revenue was five times lower than in C1, and just 1.3 times greater than the national average. Almost one-fifth of total revenues in their municipalities were being collected by own management. The population affiliated to social security was 21.8%, and 11.2% of the homes had

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

internet access (the national average was 5.1%). Average annual sales per capita (worker affiliated to social security) was twice the national average and three times less than in C1. Manufacturing represented 12% of the economic activity. However, even though this cluster had an important development level, 43% of the homes had ‘inadequate physical characteristics’. In social terms, the health indicators revealed that 16.6% of its female adolescent population exhibited pregnancy condition. Poverty level relating to consumption in the cluster was 25.5% lower than the national average (41.8%). Only 17% of the female population was affiliated to social security.

9.5.1.3 C3–122 Cities. Average Development Level of the Country C3 was characterised by indicators with values that were similar to the values of the country, and a significant dispersion relating to tax revenue, sales per worker and weight of manufacturing in the economy. It consisted of 122 cities, 44 of which were in the hills region, 57 on the coast and 21 in the Amazon region. It had 35.1% of the population of the country. With respect to the number of inhabitants per region, 25.4% were in the hills, 64.0% on the coast and 19.7% in the Amazon region. The income per capita (2,023 USD) was similar to the national average (2,105 USD), and with moderate dispersion. The leading economic sectors were agriculture and livestock, which represented the third part of the GDP. The tertiary economic sectors were commerce, public administration and education, which together reached 58.6% of the GDP. The tertiary sector also had negative growth rates in transport, communication and construction (between 4 and 6%). The average rate of higher education attendance exhibited a significant disparity in comparison to C1 (23.4%). As for taxation, ‘tax revenue per capita’ was 14 times lower than in C1, and only 4.8% of the homes had internet access. The income obtained from the management of its municipalities represented only 12% of total revenues. Finally, only 14% of its

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working population had social security. The ‘infrastructure gap’ had 60% of ‘homes with inadequate physical characteristics’, and the ‘sex gap’ revealed that only 11% of the female population had social security. In social terms, the health indicators revealed that the pregnancy rate in 21% of the adolescent female population was close to the national average rate (20%). Poverty relating to consumption in the cluster was 38.1%, that is slightly lower than the national average (41.8%). In the ‘environmental gap’, 8.6% of the homes used firewood for cooking, which was a lower value in comparison to the national average (15.1%).

9.5.1.4 C4–41 Cities. Lower Development Level Than the Average of the Country C4 consisted of 41 cities, of which 24 were in the hills region, nine on the coast and eight in the Amazon region. With respect to the number of inhabitants, this cluster had 6.0% of the country population, with 58.5% in the hills region, 22% on the coast and 19.5% in the Amazon region. The development level of these cities was lower than the average level of the country (Fig. 9.2). The level of income per capita in C4 (1,338 USD) represented 68% of the national average, with positive and dispersed asymmetrical distribution (coefficient of variation = 40%). As well as the former cluster, the agriculture, forestry, livestock and fishing sectors had about 25% of the GDP, followed by public administration (16.3%), teaching (15.6%) and construction (8.5%). The average growth rate of the GDP per capita in this cluster had been the lowest among all the clusters (2.6%) from 2007 to 2014. With respect to the other gaps, the average ‘higher education attendance rate’ (6.6%) was lower than the national average (7.8%). Regarding ‘tax collection per capita’, this cluster reached an annual average of 52.6 USD (38% of the national average and 30 times lower than in C1). Total revenues in its municipalities depended on State transfers (93.2%). Only 2.6% of homes had Internet access. Productivity per worker (annual sales average from 2010 to 2014

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relating to the affiliated population) represented 23% of the national average. The average volume of credit per capita represented 65% of the national average. There were no industries in its economic activity (manufacturing GDP = 2%). There was a high percentage of ‘homes with inadequate physical characteristics’ (66%), and only 21% of the female population had social security. In social terms, health indicators revealed that the fifth part of its adolescent female population exhibited pregnancy condition. Poverty related to consumption reached half of its population (approximately 47%). In the ‘environmental gap’, a quarter of the homes used firewood for cooking (25.2%).

9.5.1.5 C5–32 Cities. Lower Development Level Than the Average of the Country C5 consisted of 32 cities, 12 were in the hills region, whose inhabitants represented 43.0% of the cluster, 10 were on the coast, representing 44.8% of the population and 10 were in the Amazon region with the remaining 12.2% of the population. It grouped 6.2% of the country population. This cluster had the cities with the lowest development level of the country (Fig. 9.2). The income per capita (1,211 USD) was just 57% of the national average. The average volume of credit per capita (170 USD) reached 38% of the national average. The coefficient of variation in this indicator was the lowest among the other clusters (24%). Sectoral GDP was represented by 26.1% in agriculture, forestry, livestock and fishing, followed by education (20%) and public administration (14.7%). There were negative growth rates in transport, communication, commerce and construction, ranging between 6 and 8%. The average rate of GDP annual growth per capita (3.8%) from 2007 to 2014 was lower than the national average (5% per year). The average rate of ‘higher education attendance’ was the lowest (4.3%). In per capita terms, this cluster collected an annual average of

R. Canelos Salazar et al.

30.5 USD (50 times less than C1). Total revenues of its municipalities depended on State transfers (95%). The population affiliated to social security was only 12%, and there was a marked disparity with respect to Internet access, given that only 2.2% of the homes had access (the national average was 5.1%). The annual sales average per worker was 2,759 USD, representing 27% of the national average (10,161 USD). Manufacturing was virtually non-existent in the economic activity of the cluster (1%). A worrisome gap was ‘infrastructure’, because 82% of the homes had inadequate physical characteristics. Regarding the ‘sex gap’, only 10% of the female population was affiliated to social security. In social terms, the health indicators revealed that the fifth part of the adolescent female population exhibited pregnancy conditions. Poverty related to consumption in the cluster reached 63.9% of its population (national average = 41.8%). With respect to the ‘environmental gap’, 35.4% of the homes used firewood for cooking, a value that was higher than the national average (15.1%).

9.5.2 Analysis of the Structural Heterogeneity of the Clusters Structural heterogeneity in each cluster is presented in a comparative form considering the disparities observed in the structural gaps.

9.5.2.1 Income Concentration (GDP) The differences between clusters at the level of GDP per capita and the rate of economy growth were significant. The evolution of GDP per capita between 2007 and 2014 is illustrated in Fig. 9.3. There was steady growth in C1 and C2, and a slight growth in the other three clusters (C3, C4 and C5). According to the principles of structural heterogeneity, the disparity in income per capita between clusters had two main characteristics. The first was a strong geographic concentration of population and economic activity in the main cities and metropolitan districts. For example, C1 concentrated 36% of the total population, and

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

56.5% of the total GDP. The second characteristic was that the gaps relating to the general living conditions of the population had the highest values in C1.

9.5.2.2 Productivity Structure Structural heterogeneity was complemented with the characteristics of employment in the agriculture, livestock and fishery sectors, which prevailed in all the clusters except for C1. These sectors had low productivity and low incomes. On the one hand, income sharing in these sectors reached just 4.43% of the total; on the other hand, they employed only 10% of affiliated workers. Finally, 93% of the companies engaged in these sectors were micro companies.8 This way, sectoral, productive and business weakness was the cause of low potential for economic and social development in C3, C4 and C5. 9.5.2.3 Business Structure Structural heterogeneity was also reflected in the size of companies in the country,9 with a major presence of micro (90.6%), small (7.35%), medium type A (0.92%), medium type B (0.61%) and large companies (0.48%). According to the performance of companies, Ecuador had business weakness, because the companies with greater representativeness were those with lower total sales values, employability levels and income sharing. Large companies had 73.1% of total

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annual sales in 2015, employed 50% of affiliated workers, and had 61% of income sharing. Micro companies did not reach 1% of total sales, employed 5.4% of affiliated workers, and income sharing was 3.2%.10 The distribution of this structure in the clusters indicated that about 70% of large companies were concentrated in C1, 14.5% in C2, 14% in C3, 1.2% in C4 and 1% in C5. According to the 2016 Labour and Business Report, the INEC indicated differences in salaries between sectors. Incomes in the agricultural sector were equivalent to 65.8% of the average in the economy. This sector prevailed in C2, C3, C4 and C5. On the other hand, manufacturing companies were a minority in all clusters, which revealed a very low incidence and little industrial presence in the country. There was marked business, sectoral and productive weakness reflecting the structural heterogeneity in the clusters (Fig. 9.4). Despite the weakness of the business structure, which directly affected productivity, salaries and employment, it represented the formal sector of the economy in the cities. Ecuador had high indicators of labour informality (inadequate employment),11 which reinforced the weak productive structure that has persisted over time. For decades, the percentages of unemployment and underemployment had been higher than 50% considering the economically active population.12 This precarious employment structure was distributed with noticeable inequality in the clusters.

8

Labour and Companies Panorama of Ecuador 2016 (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses of Ecuador —INEC). 9 The methodology of INEC considers the size of companies in accordance with the annual sales volume and the number of employed personnel. The criterion of annual sales volume prevails over the criterion of employed personnel. Resolution of the Andean Community of Nations (2009), cited in the DIIIE—INEC 2015. • • • • •

9.5.2.4 Productivity Productive and business heterogeneity was directly linked with occupational structure, marked by gaps in productivity, whether in local companies, human resources and institutional 10

Large company: sales from 5,000.001 (USD) onwards; from 200 workers onwards. Medium type B company: sales from 2,000.001 to 5,000.000 (USD); from 100 to 199 workers. Medium type A company: sales from 1,000.001 to 2,000.000 USD); from 50 to 99 workers. Small company: sales from 100.001 to 1,000.000 (USD); from 10 to 49 workers. Micro company: sales from 0 to 100.000 (USD); from 1 to 9 workers.

Calculations made on the basis of data from the Directory of Companies and Establishments (INEC 2014, 2015). 11 Inadequate employment (INEC) is divided into three categories: underemployment (insufficiency of incomes and time), another inappropriate employment, and unpaid employment. In the present study, inadequate employment represented underemployment or informality. 12 INEC. National survey on employment, unemployment and underemployment. Labour indicators. 2007–2015.

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10000 GDP per capita (USD)

9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 2007

2008

CLUSTER 1

2009

CLUSTER 2

2010

2011

2012

CLUSTER 3

CLUSTER 4

2013

2014

CLUSTER 5

Fig. 9.3 GDP per capita (USD) from 2007 to 2014 per cluster. Source Prepared by Authors

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% CLUSTER 1

CLUSTER 2

CLUSTER 3

CLUSTER 4

CLUSTER 5

Agriculture, livestock and fishing

Explotion of mines and quarries

Manufacturing industry

Trade

Construction

Services

Fig. 9.4 Business structure of clusters per economic sector in 2014 (%)

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

151

14

Sales (USD) /Wages (USD)

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 CLUSTER 1

CLUSTER 2

CLUSTER 3

CLUSTER 4

CLUSTER 5

Fig. 9.5 Sales (dollars)/salaries (dollars). Annual averages (2010–2014), Total sales (companies)/salaries (companies) (2010–2015)

capacities. Employment incomes were very unequal, entailing a marked inequality in family incomes (Fig. 9.5). For the analysis of productivity, we calculated an indicator that related total sales from 2010 to 2015 to the salaries paid to workers affiliated to social security during the same period. The results indicated significant difference in productivity by personnel employed among the clusters. On average, total sales in C1 were 12.5 times higher with respect to the salaries paid, 2.5 times higher in C2, 0.59 times higher in C3, 0.49 times higher in C4 and 3.8 times higher in C5. Clearly, C2, C3 and C4 managed to establish sales amounts that were only sufficient to cover the cost of salaries.

9.5.2.5 Investment and Savings This gap reflected the heterogeneity in the concentration of tax collection and the volume of credit in C1 and C2 (expressed in per capita terms). The indicators revealed that the differences in tax revenues were significantly greater

in comparison to the differences in productivity. In this case, the difference between the clusters with the highest tax collection (C1) and the cluster with the lowest tax collection (C3) was 50%, indicating that the economy in the cities of C3 was little formal. Similarly, credits had similar concentration and distribution.

9.5.2.6 Education, Access to Technology and Poverty Education is the determining factor to improve employability and income level. The difference between clusters was significant. It was possible to observe strong direct and positive correlation between higher education attendance and Internet access, which was also opposed to the level of poverty (Fig. 9.6). C1 and C2 had the most advantageous indicators, as opposed to C3 to C5, where cities had the worst social conditions. The same fact occurred with the ‘environmental gap’, and health and environment indicators.

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70 63.9

60 50

46.8 38.2

% 40 30 23.4

25.6

20

25.3 16.2

13.4

11.2

10

7.2 4.8

6.6 2.6

4.4

0 CLUSTER 1 Poverty rate

CLUSTER 2

CLUSTER 3

Higher education attendance rate

CLUSTER 4

2.2

CLUSTER 5

Homes with Internet access

Fig. 9.6 Poverty rate, higher education attendance rate, and homes with Internet access per clusters (%)

9.5.2.7 Taxation—Local Institutional Capacity The results in this gap demonstrated the institutional management capacity of the decentralised autonomous governments of the cities (municipalities). The indicator used was financial self-sufficiency (collection of own incomes/total income). In this sense, the heterogeneity manifested itself with large disparities. C3, C4 and C5 barely managed to collect between 6 and 12% of their total incomes by own management. This aspect implies an institutional weakness and a high dependency on resources transferred by the state. In the case of C1, it was 38%, and 23% in C2.

9.6

Conclusions

The hierarchy of groups of cities led to a system that clearly reflected the territorial disparities between clusters and cities. We observed that, for measures of association, it is fundamental to choose the statistical indicators that most properly reflect the gaps to be assessed. Similarly to other authors’ findings (Tezanos 2012), we found that there is not a single classification for

assessing the needs of development in the structural gap approach. Our study revealed a clear territorial disparity in the cities of Ecuador. Quito and Guayaquil had the highest concentration of population and economic power. In this sense, this fact demonstrated a degree of urban primacy.13 This characteristic tends to be higher in small countries, where the largest cities impose economic, political or social hegemony (Cuervo 2004). Structural heterogeneity caused a territorial inequality linked to differences in the productivity of individuals and companies. In addition, this heterogeneity was reinforced by a sectoral composition and a fractional and weak business structure (98% of micro and small companies) whose productive orientation was primary in the less developed clusters. The growth rates of economy in the cities from 2007 to 2014 indicated clear growth 13

We used the definition given by Cuervo (2004) in the sense that urban primacy is the relative weight that a city or major cities have with respect to the rest of the country, in terms of population size and economy, when these indicators exceed the behaviour patterns in a double sense, i.e., historically and synchronically.

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Spatial Inequality in Ecuador: A Structural Gap Approach

tendencies in C1 and C2 (major cities) and virtual stagnation in C3, C4 and C5, which led to uneven and little sustainable development, in addition to expansion of territorial disparities. The sectoral composition of the clusters reinforced the territorial disparity. There was greater employment of non-skilled workers, and low probability of innovation and use of technology in the clusters with low development levels. To this fact, it should be added that there was a significant percentage of the population subjected to underemployment and informality. The significant differences in social and economic conditions observed in different gaps (poverty, education, environment, health, productivity, savings and investment, and taxation) reinforced the persistence and extent of disparities in the territories. There was a marked weakness of local institutions reflected in the almost non-existent capacity for financial management in the majority of the cities (85%) concentrated in the clusters with lower development levels. As the main agent of territorial development, this weakness in the municipal administration reinforced and extended territorial disparities.

References Abramo L, Cecchini S, Espíndola E, Maldonado C, Martínez R (2016) La matriz de la desigualdad social en América Latina. CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Banco Central del Ecuador. (BCE). (2017) Estadísticas Económicas. Boletín abril 2017. Serie 3.1.1. Cifras promedio del sector exportador período 2012–2016 Bárcena A, A Prado (2016) El imperativo de la Igualdad: Por un desarrollo sostenible en América Latina y el Caribe. Siglo XXI Eds and CEPAL, México Bartholomew D, Steele F, Moustaki I, Galbraith JI (2008) Analysis of multivariate social science data, 2nd edn. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, New York Bértola L (2016) Ciclo económico y heterogeneidad estructural. In: Amarante V, Infante R (eds) Hacia un desarrollo inclusivo: El caso del Uruguay. CEPAL, OITT, Santiago de Chile, pp 19–54 Banco de Desarrollo del Ecuador (BEDE) (2002–2014) Sistema de Información Municipal del Ministerio de Finanzas sobre la base de cédulas presupuestarias ejecutadas Candia D, L Riffo, C Sandoval, A Williner (2015) Panorama del Desarrollo Territorial en América Latina

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y el Caribe. United Nations—CEPAL, Cooperación Alemana, Santiago de Chile CEPAL (2010) La hora de la igualdad: brechas por cerrar, caminos por abrir. Trigésimo tercer período de sesiones de la CEPAL CEPAL (2014a) Cambio estructural para la igualdad. Una visión integrada de desarrollo. Naciones Unidas. Santiago de Chile CEPAL (2014b) Pactos para la Igualdad. Hacia un futuro sostenible. Santiago de Chile. XXXV Período de sesiones de CEPAL. Santiago de Chile Cimoli M (ed) (2005) Heterogeneidad estructural, asimetrías tecnológicas y crecimiento en América Latina. United Nations—CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Cimoli M, G Porcile (2013) Tecnología, heterogeneidad y crecimiento. Una caja de herramientas estructuralistas, serie Desarrollo Productivo, 194. United Nations— CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) (2016) Horizontes 2030: la igualdad en el centro del desarrollo sostenible. Síntesis LC/G.2661 (SES.36/4)), Santiago de Chile Cuervo LM (2004) Desarrollo económico y primacía urbana en América Latina. Una visión históricocomparativa. In: Torres AC (ed) El rostro urbano de América Latina. O rostro urbano da América Latina. CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, pp 77–141 Cuervo LM, Morales Gutiérrez FJ (2009) Las teorías del desarrollo y las desigualdades regionales: una revisión bibliográfica. Análisis Económico XXIV 55:365–383 de Ferranti D, G Perry, F Ferrerira, M Walton (2004) Desigualdad en América Latina ¿Rompiendo con la historia? Alfaomega—World Bank, Bogotá de la Fuente S (2011) Análisis de Conglomerados. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid Fernández Santana O (1991) El análisis de Cluster: Aplicación, interpretación y Validación. Papers. Revista de Sociología 37:67–76 Ferran Aranaz M (2001) SPSS para WINDOWS, Análisis estadístico. McGraw Hill Ed, Madrid Hausmann R, Rodrick D, Velasco A (2005) Growth diagnostics. In: John F (ed) Kennedy school of government. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA INEC (2010) Instituto de Estadísticas y Censos del Ecuador. Censo nacional 2010 INEC (2016a) Panorama Laboral y Empresarial del Ecuador 2016 INEC (2016b) Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, Desempleo y Subempleo. Indicadores Laborales 2007–2015 INEC-Banco Mundial (2014) Reporte de pobreza por consumo en Ecuador (2006-2014). Chapter 2. “Crecimiento y pobreza en Ecuador 1998-2014” Kaldewei C (2015) Brechas Estructurales en los países de renta media. Consideraciones para un diagnóstico a nivel de país, serie Financiamiento para el desarrollo. CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Kanbur R, Sumner A (2012) Poor countries or poor people? Development assistance and the new

154 geography of global poverty. J Int Dev 24(6):686– 695. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.2861 Kanbur R, Venables A (2005) Spatial inequality and development. Overview of UNU-WIDER. In: Kanvur R, Venables AJ (eds) Spatial inequality and development. Oxford Press, Oxford, pp 1–14 Kats J (2016) Adiós al viento de cola: se abre un nuevo ciclo de ajuste estructural, serie Desarrollo Productivo, vol 202. United Nations—CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Larrea C (1983) La estructura social ecuatoriana entre 1960 y 1979. In: Ayala E (ed) Nueva Historia del Ecuador, vol 11. Corporación Editora Nacional, Quito, p 97–148 Maryse R (2011) La desigualdad y la inclusión social en las Américas: Elementos clave, tendencias recientes y caminos hacia el futuro. In: Zela H, Esquenazi P, Briones A, Ochoa G (eds) Desigualdad e inclusión social en las Américas. 14 ensayos, 2nd edn. Organización de los Estados Americanos, Bogotá, pp 35–55 Mattar J, Buitelaar R, GonzáleZ S (2012) Panorama del Desarrollo Territorial en América Latina y el Caribe. United Nations, CEPAL-ILPES, Santiago de Chile Modrego F, C Cazzuffi (2015) Desigualdad y crecimiento económico: contribuciones desde el desarrollo territorial, serie documentos de trabajo, 155. Grupo de Trabajo Desarrollo con Cohesión Territorial. Programa Cohesión Territorial para el Desarrollo. RIMISP, Santiago de Chile Pardo E (2014). “Diagnóstico del desarrollo” en países de renta media a partir de las brechas estructurales. El caso de América Latina y el Caribe, serie Financiamiento para el desarrollo, 252. United Nations— CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Peña D (2013) Análisis de Datos Multivariantes. McGraw Hill, Madrid Piketty T (2014) El capital en el siglo XXI. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México Pinto A (1973) Heterogeneidad Estructural y Modelo de Desarrollo reciente de la América Latina. Instituto Latinoamericano de Planificación económica y social, CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Pinto A (1976) Notas sobre los estilos de desarrollo de América Latina. Revista de la CEPAL Primer semestre 1976:97–196 Pita E (1991) “La precarización del empleo en Ecuador” Organización Internacional del Trabajo. Instituto Internacional del Trabajo. Series de Investigación: Reestructuración y regulación institucional del mercado de trabajo en América Latina

R. Canelos Salazar et al. Prebisch R (1962) El desarrollo económico de la América Latina y algunos de sus principales problemas. Boletín económico de América Latina 7(1):1–26 Prebisch R (1973) Problemas teóricos y prácticos del crecimiento económico, 2nd edn commemorative. United Nations – CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Ramírez JC, I Silva, L Cuervo (2009) Economía y territorio en América Latina y el Caribe. Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Planificación Economía y Social (ILPES) – CEPAL, United Nations, Santiago de Chile Rodríguez O (2006) El Estructuralismo Latinoamericano. Siglo XXI Eds, México Rodriguez-Pose A, Sánchez-Reaza J (2005) Economic Polarization Through Trade: Trade Liberalization and Regional Inequality in Mexico. In: Kanvur R, Venables AJ (eds) Spatial Inequality and Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford Servicio de Rentas Internas (SRI) (2010–2015) Estadísticas por tipo de impuesto, provincia y cantón. http:// www.sri.gob.ec/web/guest/estadisticas-generales-derecaudacion Stiglitz J (2012) The price of inequality: how today’s divided society endangers our future. W. W. Norton and Co. Ed. Taurus, Barcelona Stiglitz J (2015) The great divide: unequal societies and what we can do about them. Ed Taurus, Barcelona Tezanos S (2012) Conglomerados de desarrollo en América Latina y el Caribe: Una aplicación al análisis de la distribución de la asistencia oficial para el desarrollo, serie Financiamiento para el desarrollo, 241. United Nations—CEPAL, Santiago de Chile Titelman D, Vera C, Pérez-Caldentey E (2012) Los países de renta media: Un nuevo enfoque basado en brechas estructurales. United Nations—CEPAL, Santiago de Chile United Nations—CEPAL (2016) El enfoque de brechas estructurales. Análisis del caso de Costa Rica. United Nations, Santiago de Chile Villalobos F (1983) El proceso de industrialización hasta los años cincuenta. In: Ayala E (ed) Nueva Historia del Ecuador, vol 15. Corporación Editora Nacional, Quito, pp 53–59 Yifu Lin J (2009) New structural economics. In: A framework for rethinking development. World Bank, Washington, DC

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction in Houston

10

Ling Wu and William Wells

Abstract

Researcher believe that repeat and near-repeat phenomena can inform how police react to earlier crime in preventing the future crime in near space and time. The current research utilizes a modified Knox close-pair method with spatial-temporal referenced data of gun violence and firearm arrests in Houston. The study assesses police responses to repeat/near-repeat and independent shootings and compares their differences at various spatial and temporal intervals. These examinations and comparisons are carried out at a fine-grained spatial scales and temporal scales. Results show that compared to independent shootings, police response to repeat/near-repeat shootings is different in terms of response level and spatial-temporal contour. Keywords




Arrest Firearm violence Space-time clustering


Police response


L. Wu (&) Urban Informatics & Spatial Computing Lab, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. Wells Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA

10.1

Introduction

Repeat and near-repeat studies indicate that locations at which shootings have occurred and their immediate surroundings face an elevated risk of experiencing follow-up shootings in the immediate aftermath of the initiator shooting (Ratcliffe and Rengert 2008; Wells et al. 2012). The phenomena have potential to improve policing policies, because they provide cues for preventing possible follow-up shootings and can thus be used to direct police activities at finer spatiotemporal scales. However, to date little is known about its practical value to policing, such as how police apply this information to their routine practices. Policing strategies regarding repeat and near-repeat shootings have not been documented at the event level. The current research will achieve this goal by examining the relationship between two phenomena, repeat and near-repeat shootings and police firearm arrests, utilizing a set of spatial and temporal-referenced shooting and arrest data from Houston, Texas. The goal of the current research is to examine the relationship between police arrests and repeat/near-repeat shootings at a fine spatial and temporal scale, and it can possibly reveal whether police have responded effectively to follow-up shootings. Police response is represented by firearm arrests which occur within a relatively short time period and in a relatively close distance to follow-up shootings. The analysis will generate information on two output

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_10

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measures: (1) the level of police response, as represented by the likelihood of increasing arrests, especially within the vicinity and a short time interval to follow-up or independent shootings; (2) the contour of police response, or the immediacy, longevity, and degree of spatial concentration of police response using arrest data. More specifically, this research will examine police response to follow-up shootings (or the relationship between follow-up shootings and later police arrests). The current work will also examine independent shootings: shootings which are not part of repeat or near-repeat sets. This allows for the measurement of police responses while distinguishing between follow-up and independent shootings. By comparing levels of police response between follow-up and independent shootings, we can examine whether police respond to follow-up shootings by conducting more arrests in the area thereafter. Comparison of the contours of police response between these two types of shootings can illustrate, to some extent, whether police adopt a different response strategy to follow-up shootings, such as assigning personnel resources for a longer time period and mobilizing these resources in a relatively larger surrounding area.

10.2

Literature Review

The discovery of repeat and near-repeat phenomena is a recent innovation in environmental criminology (Wells et al. 2012; Wu et al. 2015a; Ye et al. 2015). The phenomena indicate that shortly after exposure to a crime event, a victimized location and its immediate surroundings are more likely to experience a similar event. The first event is an initiator; an event at the same location and close in time to the initiator is a repeat, while an event close in space and time to the initiator is a near-repeat. Both repeat and near-repeats are follow-up events, as contrast to independent events which are not part of repeat or near-repeat sets (Morgan 2001). Although the phenomena was first discovered by studying burglaries in the UK, this line of research was quickly replicated across different sites, and was

expanded from burglaries to violent crimes, such as shootings. For example, Ratcliffe and Rengert (2008) examined the near-repeat patterns of shootings in Philadelphia between August 2003 and September 2005. The risk of a near-repeat shooting within 14 days and 400 feet apart from a previous event “was elevated 33% over the normal background risk of a shooting” (p. 71). Wells et al. (2012) found a similar pattern in Houston. A consensus rooted in repeat and near-repeat literature is that these findings have significant potential in policy implications. As Bowers and Johnson (2004) noted, they “have clear implications for operational policing, both in relation to crime prevention and detection” (p. 22). However, a challenge to the phenomena’s implication value is a lack of research primarily designed to examine the implementation of such phenomena in policing, such as how law enforcement officials capitalize on these findings and further refine their practices. The limited work has focused on police effectiveness in preventing repeat and near-repeat shootings (Ratcliffe and Rengert 2008; Wells and Wu 2011), but little work is done to examine how police respond to repeat and near-repeat shootings. To study police response is not necessarily straightforward here.1 Although police are commonly assumed to “undoubtedly respond to criminal behavior” (Decker and Kohfeld 1985: 439), the research specifically focusing on police response to crime is not prosperous. Extant studies focused on documenting how police outputs (such as arrests) represent responses to earlier crimes (Decker and Kohfeld 1985; Jacob and Rich 1980; Kohfeld 1983; Kohfeld and Sprague 1990). These studies examined associations between earlier crime level and later police arrest level, and they generally found a positive correlation between these two phenomena. Two hypotheses are thus proposed to explain why “arrests are a response to criminal behavior” 1

Although study police response time to calls for service is a traditional line of research, “responsiveness” here does not mean how quickly police respond to a specific call for service, but how police respond to earlier increased general criminal activities or situations.

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

(Decker and Kohfeld 1985: 448). First, a high level of later arrests can represent a reallocation of police resources. Police are expected to be aware of changes in criminal activity. Informed and responsive police administrators and patrol officers will react to the situation by changing the way police resources are distributed, such as allocating additional patrol force and conducting more intensive and aggressive activities. These changes then lead to a larger number of arrests. Second, later arrests could be an indirect result of an earlier crime while citizens’ calls for service facilitate the connection between the two. Elevated crime conditions are known or sensed by citizens, and this might increase their inclination to call the police, therefore increasing subsequent patrols and arrests (Jacob and Rich 1980). However, these early researches only allow for a cursory observation of the relationship based on correlation between the two (Kohfeld 1983). Large spatial scale and big-time window, these coarse scales could conflate many interesting internal dynamics. Direct evidence has not been provided to explain the dynamics of the linkage (Jacob and Rich 1980). Wyant (2010) attributed the swiftness and local nature of police response to beat officers’ spontaneous reaction to the shooting event. Police work is mostly incident-driven (Parks et al. 1999). Police activities should also be spatially concentrated with crimes which they respond to. This is the idea of hot spots policing or mobilizing police activities toward relatively small places that suffer from distinctly high volumes of crime (Mastrofski et al. 2010; Sherman and Weisburd 1995; Weisburd and Green 1995). Moreover, some research has specifically documented how localized police response can be, for prevention or detection purpose. For example, Herbert (1997) observed that LAPD police respond to a shooting by erecting a perimeter on each of the four streets surrounding the scene of the crime in order to seal the square block around the scene and apprehend a fleeing suspect, as wells as circle “at a distance of two or three blocks” to the last reported location of the incident (p. 105). In addition to being spatially targeted, police response activities are usually

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conducted in a swift manner. Research suggests that criminal activity has a relatively “immediate” impact on the level of arrests (D’Alessio and Stolzenberg 1998: 753). This can be a result of police responding to changes in criminal activity with “immediacy” (Kohfeld and Sprague 1990: 112). Little work has been done, however, to document the exact amount of time of police responsiveness. Kohfeld and Sprague (1990) posited that police would respond to changes in criminal activity in less than a week. Wyant (2010) suggested that the response is very likely to be even faster, considering police agencies are required to promptly update crime information on the media and the public. This puts the agency under the pressure of constant media and public scrutiny. As Wyant (2010) points out, “it brought considerable attention to and pressure on what police were or were not doing in response to serious local incidents. Given these pressures, it seems plausible to expect to observe police being responsive to shootings inside of a week’s time frame, perhaps within a day or two” (p. 20). However, in certain occasions, a somewhat delayed response is possible. This might occur when police need extra time to collect information about the location and trends of crime and shift additional resources to these areas (Herbert 1997). If the above assumption holds, shootings and later firearm arrests should not only be positively correlated in the counts, but also be spatiotemporally clustered. In other words, this elevated likelihood of later arrests should occur within a relative short time period following, and in relatively close geographical proximity to, general shootings. Recently, researcher extended these studies and examined police activities conducted specifically in response to gun violence. Wyant (2010) proposed that changes in the number of firearm arrests might be “a realistic and appropriate measure” of police response to general shootings (p. 18). The assumption is: police receive a call about a shooting. In addition to responding to a specific scene of a problem that they are dispatched to, police may patrol in or near the problem areas. During the patrol, they seek to “increase the number of police-initiated

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contacts with citizens via car and pedestrian stops, hoping to detect more illegal firearm carrying, resulting in more arrests” (Wyant 2010: 18). According to this assumption, if police actually respond to gun violence, it is expected that a higher level of firearm arrests will be observed following shootings. To test the assumptions, Wyant (2010) examined the relationship between general shootings and police firearm arrests, using spatially and temporally referenced data in Philadelphia between January 2004 and December 2007. His research explored the question, “Are shootings associated with more nearby firearm arrests in the period immediately following compared to what would be expected if the events are not related in space and time?” (p. 1). As expected, police respond to shootings by greatly increasing firearm arrests, and this response is carried out in a rather swift and geographically focused manner. The finding of police respond to general shootings should be reconsidered in combination of repeat and near-repeat phenomena. Although gun violence is among the most serious crime police respond to, this does not necessarily make them an exception to the general rule of police response, that is to unevenly distribute resources and selectively prioritize resources.2 The current research assumes that police respond to follow-up shootings and independent shootings differently in space and time and launch more resources toward follow-up shootings. For 2

Consider how police respond to calls for service. Timely on-scene response of a patrol unit will only be provided if the call is apparently serious. To noncritical calls for police service, alternative responses will be applied, such as 30 minute-delay on-scene response, telephone reporting and adjustment, walk-in reporting, and scheduled appointment response. These different responses illustrate how police agencies tend to more efficiently utilize resources through strategically and spatiotemporally arranging policing activities. For example, compared to an immediate on-scene response, either a 30-minute delayed (temporally lagged) response or an out-of-scene (spatially remote) response saves personnel resources. Police “response” to calls for service is different from police “response” to shootings as mentioned in the current work. Nevertheless, the two share a similar logic regarding the efficient distribution of police resources in space and time.

L. Wu and W. Wells

example, police might conduct more firearm arrests after follow-up shootings. Such arrest behaviors may be carried out more swiftly and in a relatively larger area, and last for a longer time period. There are three justifications for this hypothesis, which will be demonstrated below. First, more vigorous and diligent police response to follow-up shootings can be viewed as a result of overall organizational adjustment by police agencies. Such adjustments are emblematic of administrators’ efforts to appropriately distribute resources based on the overall criminal information at hand. Research has documented that police administrators will make organizational changes to address elevated crime risk. Focusing on repeat and near-repeat crimes is also natural to police agencies because many popular criminal justice policies pay special attention to repeat crimes (Emons 2007). Additionally, an important assumption shared by most repeat and near-repeat shooting literature is that follow-up shootings might be qualitatively different from independent shootings. Follow-up shootings might be part of contagious process of violence, such as retaliation, and thus deserve special attention from police and violence prevention specialists (Ratcliffe and Rengert 2008). To break the possible cycle of violence and restore a sense of safety, police administrators and supervisors are reasonably expected to dispatch additional officers to patrol in the vicinity of the shooting site immediately after a follow-up shooting. These officers will conduct intensive patrols, which may result in greater numbers of citizen contacts and arrests. Second, Patrol officers will also respond spontaneously based on their accumulated knowledge of the locale and considerable discretion in deciding patrol priorities (Maggs 1992). In addition to being dispatched to respond to follow-up shootings, police officers who serve the jurisdiction where a follow-up shooting occurs are likely to act independently within their jurisdiction. In other words, more arrests after a follow-up shooting can simply represent beat officers’ spontaneous reaction to the condition of elevated violence. This response is due to their localized knowledge of the jurisdiction and

10

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

considerable discretion in deciding work priority. Localized knowledge includes accumulated and recent information on crime incidents, as well as familiarity with the environment (Faye 1992). The local knowledge helps police form “finely-grained cognitive maps which equip them with sets of expectations of what will be required of them in different places at different time” (Brogden et al. 1988: 40; Faye 1992; Holdway 1983; Reiner 1985). The reoccurrence of another shooting (follow-up shooting) just a few days after a prior shooting should be included in this mental map, and police are likely to respond accordingly. Moreover, if officers’ local knowledge facilitates the prioritization of specific actions in response to follow-up shootings, their flexibility in deciding patrol orientation provides the possibility for this prioritization. Third, the linkage between follow-up shootings and later police arrests can be mediated or strengthened by the public’s reaction to follow-up shootings. Gun violence disturbs social norms and creates an “ecology of danger”, or a sense of instability and impending danger (Cook and Ludwig 2000; Delgado 1985; Fagan and Wilkinson 1998; Fagan et al. 2007; Wilkinson 2003; Wilkinson and Fagan 1996). A shooting site obviously receives much more public attention if one or more shootings occurred there or at nearby locations just a few days earlier. The occurrence of a follow-up shooting seems to reaffirm this “ecology of danger”, especially to people who live or perform daily routines nearby. More specifically, the public’s reaction to follow-up shootings can lead to more police firearm arrests for three major reasons. First, people perceive increased danger in their environment, and then prepare for their own protection, including by carrying a gun (Lizotte et al. 1997; Kleck 1998; Wright and Rossi 1994). This need may be especially prominent among people who live near the site of follow-up shooting, and those who need to routinely travel through this area. Second, people’s perception of danger will increase their vigilance and sensitivity to their surroundings. This might lead to more calls for service, especially to report people who might be involved in gun violence

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(Moore 1980). Third, follow-up shootings may get more publicity, and therefore place additional pressure on the police to make more arrests (Kohfeld 1983). There is an urgent need for identifying event-level linkage between repeat and near-repeat analysis and policing practice (Grubesic and Mack 2008). Research has just begun to examine space-time interaction between arrests and general shootings using event-level data (Wyant 2010). However, what remain unexplored is does the spatiotemporal relationship between general shootings and arrests mask the difference between follow-up shootings and independent shootings? In other words, do follow-up shootings differ from independent shootings in its spatiotemporal relationship with arrests? By examining police response to follow-up shootings at the event level, the current research is to understand the practical value of repeat and near-repeat phenomena in policing. It can improve our understanding concerning whether police pay closer attention to repeat and near-repeat phenomena, and accordingly allocate more resources toward follow-up shootings.

10.3

Data and Analysis Plan

This study utilizes two official datasets provided by the Houston Police Department (HPD), Texas: firearm violence dataset (named Dataset A here) and gun arrest dataset (Dataset B). Dataset A includes all violent gun crimes (simplified as shootings here) known to police, including murders, aggravated assaults, and robberies by firearm, in Houston in 2005. Dataset B includes all firearm arrests in Houston which were conducted by the HPD during the same time period. Both datasets include information about the date, time, and geographical location (x, y coordinates) of any event. 9,267 shootings and 1,227 firearm arrests are utilized in the analysis. This research includes mainly two stages of analysis. The premise of the current research is that repeat and near-repeat shooting patterns exist, and that they matter in shooting-arrest interactions in Houston. The first stage therefore

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identifies repeat and near-repeat phenomena. Once the statistical significance is established, follow-up and independent shootings are separated from each other among all shooting events, and they form two distinct shooting subcategories. In the second stage, we focus on examining the space-time interaction between two different types of events, namely all shootings (or any subcategory of shootings) and arrests. Utilizing an analytical tool specifically developed in this project, we firstly replicate the Philadelphia study by examining whether and how all shootings and firearm arrests interacted over space and across time in Houston, as compared to the findings in Philadelphia. Then, the current work advances the Philadelphia study by examining whether and how differently arrests interacted with two subcategories of shootings. More specifically, compared to an independent shooting, does a follow-up shooting incur more police arrests? Are these arrests conducted with immediacy (or delayed), in a longer (or shorter) time period, and around a larger (or smaller) geographical area?

10.3.1 The First Stage of Analysis Only if repeat and near-repeat shooting phenomena exist is all the remaining work necessary and meaningful. This stage identifies repeat and near-repeat shooting pattern, as well as categorizes follow-up shootings and independent shootings. Both tasks are achieved by utilizing the Near-Repeat Calculator, a toolbox designed for analyzing space-time clustering among a single type of crime events (Ratcliffe 2008). The computation logic of the Near-Repeat Calculator is based on the revised Knox close-pair test and Monte Carlo simulation. The revised Knox test improves this original Knox test by allowing for partitioning “both the space and time dimensions into a number of categories” (Townsley et al. 2003: 621). Therefore, it allows researchers to observe the interaction or contagion process among events at finer spatial and temporal scales than previous tests allowed. The calculation results will inform whether a significant repeat or

L. Wu and W. Wells

near-repeat phenomenon can be detected in this spatial and temporal band. The Near-Repeat Calculator can also calculate the risk level or the elevated likelihood of subsequent shootings in any given cell. This provides researchers and policymakers with even more practical information by specifying, assuming the phenomenon is significant, how likely a city is to witness a follow-up shooting. It is both logical and realistic to expect that repeat and near-repeat shooting patterns do exist in a statistically significant manner, because of our previous repeat and near-repeat research in Houston. We studied the space-time clustering of a total of 6,717 shootings in Houston from 2005 to 2006 (Wells et al. 2012).3 We used 400 feet as the basic spatial unit and 14 days as the basic temporal unit, which are jointly decided by local policing experience and exploratory data analysis. Manhattan distance was utilized in their research because it approximates the actual travel distance between two points in a city. The current work will also use these same predetermined criteria as that of Wells et al. (2012) to identify whether significant repeat and near-repeat shooting patterns exist in Houston by using Dataset A. Based on these predetermined criteria, the revised Knox test generates a contingency table wherein each cell represents a unique combination of a spatial and a temporal category. The Near-Repeat Calculator can also be utilized to identify which shootings are follow-up or independent shootings. The capability of Near-Repeat Calculator to identify these two subcategories of shooting is because the calculator is essentially run at the event level by examining how many incidents distribute before or after each event. Shootings within a relatively short distance and a limited number of days of another shooting can be distinguished from general shootings by utilizing their spatiotemporal distances to other shootings. The Near-Repeat Calculator views each shooting as a focal event and delineates a zone around this focal point. The zone is used to identify any Robberies by firearm are not included in shootings in our previous Houston study.

3

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

spatial and temporal near shootings to this focal point. Only two shootings which meet the criteria will be considered a near-repeat pair. Within a near-repeat pair, the incident that occurs earlier in time is referred to as an initiator, and the one that occurs later in time is identified as a repeat or near-repeat. Follow-up shootings include both repeats and near-repeats, while independent shootings include all general shootings which are not initiators, repeats, or near-repeats. Therefore, we can separate follow-up shootings from independent shootings. In Wells et al. (2012), repeats are operationalized as shootings which take place at the same location and within 14 days after the prior shooting. Near-repeats are shootings which occur within 1 to 400 feet away from an initial shooting and within 14 days after this shooting. The current research will apply these same criteria

10.3.2 The Second Stage of Analysis With the information provided by the first stage of analysis, the second stage examines three types of space-time interactions between all shootings (or follow-up shootings or independent shootings) and firearm arrests. The analysis of this interaction will generate information on two output measures: (1) the level of police response, as represented by the likelihood of increasing arrests, especially within the vicinity and immediate aftermath of all shootings or any subcategory of shootings; (2) the contour of police response, or the immediacy, longevity, and degree of spatial concentration of police response using arrest measures. Based on the results of these two output measures, we can compare how police respond to general shootings differently in Philadelphia and Houston as well as compare how police differently respond to follow-up shootings and independent shootings in Houston. These comparisons facilitate the determination of whether repeat and near-repeat shooting phenomena generate more arrest activities, which are conducted in an immediate and geographically focused manner.

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This stage utilizes the revised Knox test and Monte Carlo simulation in a modified framework to allow for examining cross-event interaction in space and time, as opposed to the single-event interaction examined in most previous studies. Criminologists have noted that the primary benefit of using the Knox method is its ability to statistically test the clustering of events in both space and time (Johnson and Bowers 2004a, b; Ratcliffe and Rengert 2008; Townsley et al. 2003). For example, near-repeat research has examined whether past burglaries increase the probability of later burglaries nearby (Townsley et al. 2003), or if past shootings increase the chance of future shootings nearby (Ratcliffe and Rengert 2008; Wells et al. 2012). However, with some exception (i.e., Johnson et al. 2009), these mainstream near-repeat studies only examine the space-time interaction among one type of event. Near-Repeat Calculator also only allows for analyzing space-time clusters among a single type of event. The recent Philadelphia study goes beyond this work by testing whether two different phenomena, shootings, and arrests, are linked spatiotemporally (Wyant 2010; Wyant et al. 2011). Based on the logic of the revised Knox test, the current research tailors the test to make it able to identify space-time clusters between two different phenomena. Stated differently, utilizing a similar logic as that of the Philadelphia study, the current research develops a spatiotemporal clustering technique which allows for an examination of the interaction of two different phenomena. This new technique is called AB Calculator here, because the two different types of events of interest are included in two separate datasets (Dataset A and Dataset B). An executable program for Windows is created using C# language in the environment of Microsoft Visual Studio with Multithread Program. AB Calculator is used to determine whether two types of events are associated, or whether they are independent of each other. Based on the revised Knox test, AB Calculator also establishes a contingency table with a series of continuous spatial-temporal segments. The temporal and spatial bandwidths are at the researchers’ discretion, and the range of

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spatial and temporal increments used will allow for a sensitive analysis of the hypothesis investigated. What need to be predetermined also includes a general spatial and temporal bandwidth, a basic spatial and temporal unit, and a distance calculation approach. An important difference between the Near-Repeat Calculator and the AB Calculator is that the former needs only three features of data (x coordinate, y coordinate, and date of an incident), while the latter also requires and processes an additional feature: event type (shooting or arrest). Because of this additional feature, the time order of each event pair matters to the current research, since shooting-arrest pairs and arrest-shooting pairs represent different things. Accordingly, AB Calculator will yield two potential contingency tables simultaneously. The first contingency table identifies the space-time clustering between shootings and later arrests, while the second one identifies the space-time clustering between arrests and later shootings. Only the first contingency table will be discussed in the current research, because we only focus on police response instead of police deterrence effect as that discussed by Wyant et al. (2011). In order to identify space-time interactions, the AB Calculator proposes an examination of all possible pairs of shootings and later arrests (or arrests and later shootings) to determine whether small spatial distances are positively associated with short time spans between pairs of arrests and shootings in two opposite temporal orders (Knox 1964). Spatial and temporal distances between all possible pairs are aggregated into two contingency tables in which rows and columns outline distances and temporal intervals between each pair of shooting and later arrest (or arrest and later shooting). More specifically, the calculator requires Dataset A and Dataset B to be loaded separately. Event-pairs are then formed by matching each shooting from Dataset A and each arrest from Dataset B. This matching process yields a total of NA*NB pairs of events (a multiplication of the number of shootings in Dataset A by the number of arrests in Dataset B). These NA*NB pairs will be screened and only those spatiotemporally close pairs will be

L. Wu and W. Wells

included in a specific cell. The definition of “close” here is based on the space-time band of that specific cell in a contingency table. The AB Calculator can then calculate how many event-pairs among NA*NB pairs fall into each cell of the two contingency tables. The number of event-pairs in each cell is an observed number. Once the two contingency tables are populated, the pairs of events are compared to the number that would be expected under the null-hypothesis. Like the Near-Repeat Calculator, a simulation process is involved in AB Calculator when calculating the statistical significance of interaction between two types of events. This permutation follows the same principle as the simulation process in the Near-Repeat Calculator: it shuffles incident times while holding the locations of incidents constant. AB Calculator, which processes two different datasets simultaneously, however, requires the simulation procedure to occur separately in Dataset A and Dataset B. More specifically, for one simulation, times of shooting incidents are shuffled within Dataset A, while times of arrests are shuffled within Dataset B. Then, each simulated shooting incident and each simulated arrest incident are matched again, forming NA*NB new event-pairs. These pairs are redistributed among all cells in the two contingency tables, which give each cell an expected number of event-pairs. If 999 simulations are conducted, there will be 999 simulated values in each cell. After getting the observed and simulated numbers of event-pairs in each cell, the AB Calculator can calculate the significance level and the elevated likelihood of subsequent arrests at the citywide level. The clustering of shooting-arrest pairs must be significantly different from what is expected by chance in space and time to suggest they are in some way related. This calculation process and formula are identical to that conducted by the Near-Repeat Calculator. Each space-time interaction between all shootings (or follow-up shootings or independent shootings) and arrests is examined by AB Calculator, respectively. Firstly, to replicate the Philadelphia study, the current research uses the same predetermined standards as that of Wyant

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

(2010): 0–14 days and 0–2800 feet as the general spatial-temporal bandwidth, two days and 400 feet as the basic spatial-temporal unit, and a Manhattan distance approach. The 400-foot increments are selected because many city blocks are approximately 400 feet and street blocks provide an important platform for both crime and police reactions to crime. Relatively small temporal increments (two days) are used since criminal activity should boost a quick response from police (Kohfeld and Sprague 1990). Finally, Manhattan distance is adopted because it most approximates the actual distance traveled by urban residents by taking into account the traditional grid layout of most streets. We will form a similar contingency table, so we can compare how police respond to general shooting differently in these two cities. The first analytical stage already identifies and categorizes follow-up shootings and independent shootings. Two new datasets are correspondingly formed, called follow-up shooting data, and independent shooting data here. To study the interaction between follow-up shootings and arrests, we can upload the follow-up shooting data and Dataset B together into AB Calculator. To study the relationship between independent shootings and arrests, we can load the independent shooting data and Dataset B into AB Calculator. The remaining analysis and calculation will then utilize the same process as that of examining space-time interaction between general shootings and arrests. This analysis ultimately yields two additional contingency tables identifying the interaction between follow-up shootings and later arrests and the interaction between independent shootings and later arrests, respectively. The comparison process is based on the results of these two contingency tables. It particularly focuses on the significance level and likelihood value in each cell, as well as how these two indicators spread across all fine spatial-temporal bands in the contingency tables. By comparing levels of police response between follow-up and independent shootings, we can examine empirically whether police respond to follow-up shootings by conducting more arrests in the nearby area thereafter. Similarly,

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comparison of the contours of police response between these two types of shootings can illustrate whether police adopt a different response strategy to follow-up shootings, such as assigning personnel resources for a longer time period or mobilizing these resources in a relatively larger surrounding area.

10.4

Results

For the first stage of analysis, the current research reveals a clear and strong pattern of repeat and near-repeat shootings in Houston. The cells that consistently display the highest Knox ratios with statistical significance are those indicating the shortest distances and the least amount of time passed between shootings. For example, the Knox ratio in the first space-time band (same location/0–14 days) is 1.30, which means once a location in Houston experiences a shooting, the chance of a second one taking place at the same location and within the next 14 days is 30% greater than if there were no discernible pattern. A general pattern of decay over space and across time is also observed because the values tend to be smaller when moving toward larger spatial or temporal bands, which indicate the decreasing level of space-time clustering when the spatial or temporal distance is extended. These results are similar to our previous Houston research (Wells et al. 2012). We then categorize all shootings within the dataset as follow-up and independent shootings. Among 9,267 shootings in 2005, 7,184 shootings (77% of total shootings) are independent shootings, and 1,189 (13%) are follow-up shootings. For the second stage of analysis, the AB Calculator is used because the Near-Repeat Calculator does not have the function to handle two different events. The total number of events uploaded into the AB Calculator are 10,494, including 9,267 shootings and 1,227 arrests. The AB Calculator is designed to take the time order of events into account. In this case, an event pair consists of a shooting and a firearm arrest, and the shooting has to precede the firearm arrest. Based on this standard, 5,537,401

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shooting-arrest event pairs are formed. Then, the toolbox calculates the distance and the amount of time elapsed between the two events in each event pair. Based on these calculated space-time distances, all event pairs are placed in the predesigned contingency table with fixed spatial and temporal bands accordingly. Table 10.1 calculates and reveals the spatiotemporal pattern of firearm arrests in response to shootings. Table 10.1 has nine rows and eight columns, and hence, 72 space-time bands. The first row of the table displays the results for arrests that occurred at the same location as a prior shooting. The following rows are partitioned into increments of 400 feet with the last rows displaying pairs that occur over 2,800 feet (about 0.5 mile) away from each other. All columns are divided into increments of two days up to 14 days, with the final column indicating pairs that take place more than two weeks apart. Each space-time band includes a Knox ratio, which indicates the relative frequency of shooting-arrest event pairs. The Knox ratio here represents the elevated likelihood of firearm arrests which occur after shootings within a certain space-time interval. Because firearm arrests here are considered to represent police response to earlier shootings, a higher Knox ratio indicates that police more intensively or actively respond to shootings by making more firearm arrests thereafter.

Attention should especially be paid to Knox ratios and significance levels in the top left portion of Table 10.1, including the three closest periods and four closest geographical distances. This portion of the table, including 12 closest space-time bands, might be the most theoretically relevant (Wyant 2010). The highest Knox ratios appear to be in the closest space-time bands, which suggest later arrest counts are most elevated at the same or very near locations immediately following the initial shooting. For example, the highest Knox ratio 3.16 appears in the same location/0–2 day’s cell, which indicates that the number of firearm arrests within that spatiotemporal band was over 216% greater than would be expected under a random distribution hypothesis. These results suggest that policing efforts in the wake of a shooting were swift and intense, with most arrests taking place within two days, and within a 400-foot radius of, the initial shooting. As theoretically anticipated, HPD’s initial response to shootings is very intensive, and it is conducted in a swift and geographically targeted fashion. Although statistical significance is important, only focusing on it has potential pitfalls. Observing the general pattern of the Knox ratios is equally crucial, especially in describing the contour of police response. Regarding the general pattern established by Table 10.1, the current

Table 10.1 Significance levels and Knox ratios: shootings and later firearm arrests Distance between events

Days between events 0–2 days

3–4 days

5–6 days

7–8 days

9–10 days

11–12 days

13–14 days

15+ days

Same location

3.16**

1.51

1.15

2.25**

0.64

1.02

0.53

1.02

1–400 ft

1.44**

1.17

0.9

1.02

1.31*

1.53**

0.91

1.02

401–800 ft

0.91

0.97

0.97

1.28*

1.04

1.26

0.95

1.03

801–1200 ft

1.08

1.12

1.17

1.1

1.14

0.8

0.85

1.02

1201–1600 ft

0.95

1.09

1.05

1.21

1.06

0.83

1.08

1

1601–2000 ft

1.15

1.08

1.18

1.15

0.88

0.9

1.24

0.98

2001–2400 ft

0.99

0.75

1.01

1.09

1.04

0.94

1.2

0.97

2401–2800 ft

1.04

0.95

0.97

0.98

1.28*

1.35**

0.85

1

2501+ ft

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Events = 10,494 (shooting = 9,267; arrest = 1,227); Event pairs = 5,537,401 *p < 0.05: **p < 0.01

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

research also finds the “spatial and temporal decay” feature of shooting-arrest interaction as identified by Wyant (2010). Our observation of “temporal decay close by” is suggested by a lower Knox ratio 3–4 days or 5–6 days after the initiating response as compared to 0–2 days after, for the two nearest buffers. For example, at the same location, the initial significant above-one ratio is 3.16, and it goes down to 1.51 in 3–4 days and then 1.15 in 5–6 days. At the same time, we also observed immediate spatial decay, or a spatially decreasing monotonic pattern. For instance, within a 0–6-day period, Knox ratios 401–800 feet from the shooting site become much smaller compared to ratios in the same location or the 1–400 feet buffer, and some of them even fall to below one (not statistically significant). The contour of police response also demonstrates the longevity and the degree of spatial concentration of police response. Wyant (2010) called the elevated patterns of firearms arrests across a broader area or for an extended time period after shootings the “persistent overrepresentation” (p. 103). The Philadelphia study discovered police continue to respond to shootings in a given broader space-time frame aside from their initial intensive response in two days, since statistically increased arrests are observed as far as 1600 feet (4 blocks) away from the initial shooting. However, the current research only

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observed the significant pattern within a block. In other words, the police response is not as broad as that in Philadelphia. Despite the general decay pattern across space and time, columns and rows experienced initial spikes in shooting-arrest pairs that subsided immediately afterward, but again rose significantly above one. For example, at the same location, the initial significant above-one ratio is 3.16, and it goes down in the next four days, but finally becomes 2.25 (statistically significant at 0.01 level) in 7–8 days. This 2.25 value is the second highest Knox ratio following 3.16. Although this special pattern was not observed in the Philadelphia study as a citywide pattern, it was detected in the Central, East, and Northeast Police Divisions in Philadelphia. These divisions all experienced a slight drop below one of the Knox ratios in the 3 to 4 days column before returning to above one (sometimes statistically significant). Wyant (2010) concluded this special pattern involves some unique features in these divisions. Table 10.2 reports arrest patterns in response to independent shootings. The patterns of police responses to independent shootings and to shootings in general are similar. The most intensive response to independent shootings takes place within two days, and is concentrated within a 400-foot radius, of the independent shooting. The elevated likelihood of later arrests

Table 10.2 Significance levels find Knox ratios: independent shootings and later arrests Distance between events

Days between events 0–2 days

3–4 days

5–6 days

Same location

7.40**

1.9

0

1.81

0

0

0

0.88

1–400 ft

1.94**

0.86

0.68

1.39*

1.46**

1.28

0.7

1.01

401–800 ft

0.81

0.88

1.03

1.09

1.07

1,23

0.85

1.01

801–1200 ft

1

0.99

1.26

1.07

1.11

0,75

1.13

1.02

7–8 days

9–10 days

11–12 days

13–14 days

15+ days

1201–1600 ft

1.11

1.02

0.9

1.09

1.09

0,73

0.97

1

1601–2000 ft

1.29**

1.19

1.40*

1.03

0.86

1,01

1.1

0.97

2001–2400 ft

0.91

0.63

1.01

0.95

0.98

0,93

1.2

0.95

2401–2800 ft

1.01

0.93

0,94

1.05

1.12

1,23

0.7

1

2801+ ft

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Events = 8,411 (independent = 7,184; arrest = 1,227); Event pairs = 4,324,127 *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01

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after independent shootings is even higher than that after general shootings. The likelihood of arrests was almost six and half times greater than if there is no discernible pattern (Knox ratio = 7.40 in same location/0–2 days band). In other words, police respond to independent shootings by heavily increasing firearm arrests in a very immediate and spatially targeted approach. A spatial and temporal decay feature is also identified, and the level of decay seems to be more intensive compared to police response to general shootings. Indeed, if one only considers the 12 most theoretically relevant bands, it appears that both the longevity and the spatial coverage of police response to independent shootings are quite limited. As far as spatial coverage is concerned, the response is concentrated at the same location and within one block of an independent shooting. In terms of time, the response at the same location is very intensive at the beginning (within two days), but does not last much longer than that. Table 10.3 documented the spatiotemporal contour of the interaction between follow-up shootings and firearm arrests. An obvious feature of police response to follow-up shootings is the lack of immediacy. No significant cells have significant above-one ratios in the first two days except for the 2001–2400 feet band. Within 1–400 feet, the earliest significant response to follow-up shootings occurs 3–4 days after a

follow-up shooting (Knox ratio = 1.82). At the same location, the response is even more delayed, since significant increased police arrests are first observed 7–8 days after the follow-up shooting (Knox ratio = 11.46). It appears, therefore, that police response to follow-up shooting is not immediate but somewhat delayed. At the same location, the elevated level of arrests 7–8 days after a follow-up shooting (Knox ratio = 11.46) is about ten times greater than the evaluated likelihood of arrests 7–8 days after an independent shooting (Knox ratio = 1.81 in Table 10.2). Like the police response to general shootings, it seems that police make another round of arrests at the same location after their initial (but not immediate here) response to follow-up shootings, except for the latter is more vigorous. The above-one ratios across Table 10.3, significant or not, are not well patterned to directly suggest a spatial and temporal decay as that observed in Tables 10.1 and 10.2. Based on the contour of police response to follow-up shootings, it seems that we can divide Table 10.3 into two important zones, including police response from 1 to 6 days (week 1) and that from 7 to 12 days (week 2). Police response to follow-up shootings in week 2 is generally more intensive than that in week 1, since all large ratios appear in week 2. Also, during week 2, police covers a broader geographical area. For example, after

Table 10.3 Significance levels and Knox ratios: follow-up shootings and later arrests Distance between events

Days between events 0–2 days

3–4 days

5–6 days

7–8 days

9–10 days

11–12 days

13–14 days

15+ days

Same location

0

2.45

0

11.46**

4.89**

2.54

0

1.19

1–400

1.31

1.82*

1.56*

0.9

0.61

1.95**

1.26

1.02

401–800 ft

1.18

1.4

0.96

1.83*

0.83

0.82

0.42

1.1

801–1200 ft

1

12

1.05

1.05

1.37

0.46

0.32

1.06

1201–1600 ft

0.67

1.54

1.76*

2.08**

0.93

1.06

1.6

1.01

1601–2000 ft

0.9

0,5

0.77

1.46

0.97

0.69

1.6

1

2001–2400 ft

1.63*

0.93

1.03

1.26

1.07

0.85

1.56

1.02

2401–2800 ft

1

1,03

1.32

1.11

1.82**

1.72*

1.36

1.01

2801+ ft

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

2005 Events = 2,416 (follow-up = 1,189; arrest = 1,227): Event pairs = 673,886 *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

9–12 days of a follow-up shooting, elevated police response is observed as far as 2800 feet (Knox ratio = 1.82 in the 9–10 days/2401–2800 ft. cell and Knox ratio = 1.72 in the 11– 12 days/2401–2800 ft. cell). It suggests that police spread their efforts more widely a week after a follow-up shooting than a week after an independent shooting. Overall, police response to follow-up shootings usually covers a farther distance from the initiator compared to police coverage following independent shootings. Based on the contour of police response to follow-up shootings, we did not find the spatial and temporal decay pattern as found in the Philadelphia study as well as our current analysis of police response to general or independent shootings. No matter in which spatial band in the rows, the highest significant Knox ratio is observed in the 7–8 days temporal band. In other words, police response earlier or later than this temporal band is not as intensive as the response in this temporal band. As mentioned earlier, the current research assumes that the range and duration of police response to follow-up shootings differs markedly from police response to independent shootings. More specifically, it is expected that police will launch more resources toward follow-up shootings than toward independent shootings. For example, police might conduct more firearm arrests after follow-up shootings. In addition, such arrest behaviors may be carried out more swiftly and in a relatively larger area, and last for a longer time period. The empirical findings in Tables 10.2 and 10.3 yield mixed results. Compared to independent shootings, police response to follow-up shootings lacks the immediacy in near space. Their response is somewhat delayed, but revoke to a higher response level and broader geographical area during the second week after a follow-up shooting. This pattern is different from the spatial and temporal decay found in the interaction between general (or independent) shootings and arrests.

10.5

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Conclusion

Novel space-time analytics facilitate crime investigation and policing strategy (Ye and Wu 2011; Leipnik et al. 2013; Wu et al. 2012, 2015b; Duan et al. 2017; Ye et al. 2017a). An important advancement made by the current analysis is to incorporate repeat and near-repeat shooting phenomena into an analysis of shooting-arrest interaction. A toolbox is developed to study the space-time interaction between two different types of events, shootings and arrests. Police are expected to respond to changes in criminal activity with immediacy, but scholars have rarely documented the exact amount of time of police responsiveness. Just like the Philadelphia study, we found that police response is predominately within a day or two after an initiating shooting. After shootings, beat officers intensively conduct firearm arrests within a day or two in time and up to one or two blocks away in space. Their spontaneous and informal response wanes thereafter. During the first week after an initiator shooting, police administrators accumulate more detailed information about the earlier elevated violence through follow-up investigation, and meanwhile receive the public’s pressure to act. Administrators and supervisors then initiate another round of response starting one week after the shooting by allocating or dispatching additional patrol forces in the vicinity of the shooting site. In this it can be compared to a relay race, wherein the second round of police action picks up once the initial response fades away. This organizational response reaches as far as two blocks away during the first two days (7–8 days) of this second round. Then it retreats to the 1– 400 feet buffer and remains focused there until the 12th day. During this one-week organizational response, the overrepresentation of firearm arrests is consistent with the response level, even slightly increasing as time goes by. After replicating the Philadelphia study, we examined interactions between two distinct

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subcategories of shootings and arrests and compared the levels and contours of police response to these two subcategories. Hence, the present study moves beyond the Philadelphia study, which only focuses on shootings. Overall, the citywide pattern of police response to independent shootings is quite like that of general shootings as described earlier. Like general shootings, police response to independent shootings is carried out swiftly and in a spatially targeted fashion. Police arrests are most heavily conducted within 2 days after an independent shooting and up to 400 feet around this shooting site. This brief spike in arrests is immediately followed by a waning of arrest rates in all spatial bands. However, a sharp difference exists in the police response between independent and follow-up shootings. After a follow-up shooting, no overrepresentation of firearm arrests is observed in any of the closest buffers within 2 days. In other words, police response to follow-up shootings lacks immediacy in the near space. One week after a follow-up shooting, police’s response becomes suddenly salient to a high level and covers a broader geographical area in most time periods. Police response to general shootings represents an aggregated result of police response to independent shootings and to follow-up shootings. Both the immediate response and the second round of responses are identified when examining the interaction between all shootings and firearm arrests. When separately observing police interaction within a subcategory of shootings, however, we can observe a different police response dynamic otherwise masked in the general pattern. Why are different patterns observed for police response to these two subcategories of shootings? As aforementioned, the current research assumes that police will launch more resources toward follow-up shootings than toward independent shootings. That is, police conduct more firearm arrests after follow-up shootings. In addition, such arrest behaviors will be carried out more swiftly and in a relatively larger area and last for a longer time period. According to the results of the current research, although a higher level of response on follow-up

L. Wu and W. Wells

shootings was found as expected, this response did not occur immediately. More specifically, the second round of police response to general shootings is mainly caused by the administrators’ effort in response to follow-up shootings, not to independent shootings. Also, the observed immediate police response to general shootings can be the result of beat officers’ swift and informal response to independent shootings, not to follow-up shootings. In other words, the dynamic of police response to follow-up/independent shootings is masked in the general pattern of shooting-arrest interaction. The results derived from the interaction between general shootings and arrests mixed crucial differences between the two distinct subcategories. We assume that police respond more immediately and intensively to follow-up shootings, the contrary finding indicating that beat officers do not immediately respond to follow-up shootings can be complicated. The premise of an immediate response is that police must realize that follow-up shootings are more serious than independent shootings. Firstly, police might not think that follow-up shootings are more serious than other shootings, and therefore follow-up shootings do not deserve to be prioritized. Beat officers have localized knowledge of the jurisdiction and they should notice the occurrence of follow-up shootings. Now of, or in the immediate aftermath of, a follow-up shooting, the nature or cause of the event is not so clear. Hence, police need some days to digest the information through investigation. Secondly, it can be corroborated by the fact that follow-up shootings are more likely to occur in areas with high crime rates. Previous research has documented an overlay between crime hot spots and the clusters of repeat and near-repeats in Houston (Wells et al. 2012). Police’s response to a shooting which happened in a “bad” neighborhood might not be as vigorous as to a shooting in a good neighborhood. Thirdly, if two shootings consecutively occurred in a place in a very short time interval, police might assume no offender is so bold to commit another shooting right there, so the “dangerous place” in turn becomes a temporally (a week or so) safe place. In addition, the lack of

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

immediate firearm arrests can be explained from the perspective of offenders. When contemplating whether to commit a crime, offenders consider the immediate characteristics of the situation (Cusson 1993). Right after a follow-up shooting, the offender in the local area might change their behavior by not carrying guns. Thus, there are simply fewer arrestable offenses. Another factor influences police’s immediate response can be the latitude to shift their work priority toward follow-up shootings. Shooting-arrest pairs over space and time is shaped by many local features, such as environmental factors, general patterns of crime, available police resources, and workload. The number of yearly shootings in Houston far exceeds that in Philadelphia. In 2005, Philadelphia only experienced 1,425 shooting and police conducted 1,427 firearm arrests. In contrast, Houston has 9,267 shootings (including 7,184 independent shootings) and 1,227 firearm arrests. If all these arrests represent police resources to response to shootings, police resources are much more limited in Houston. Therefore, even though police may have an instinct that the follow-up shooting might be serious (i.e., involving retaliation), they might not have the resources to shift attention immediately from another heavy workload. Moreover, as mentioned, there is a great overlay between crime hot spots and the clusters of follow-up shootings, while independent shootings are likely to occur in the regions with average or lower crime levels. In places where follow-up shootings occur, police might be overwhelmed by responding to high-priority calls and compelled to move on to the next pressing issue, leaving little time to carry out proactive police work nearby a prior follow-up shooting site (Gilderman 2006; Wyant 2010). In areas with fewer crimes, police are less compelled by other priority calls or work and thus have more time to patrol proactively in nearby areas after an independent shooting, which leads to more firearm arrests observed immediately thereafter. Even so, given the overall limited police resources, the immediate and intensive response to an independent shooting is only limited in a small space-time spectrum (400 feet

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and 2 days). We did not observe a spatial or temporal persistent overrepresentation of later arrests in Houston as that observed in Philadelphia. Another interesting finding is a delayed but very intensive police response to follow-up shootings. Starting 7–8 days after the follow-up shootings, the level of arrests reverses the spatial and temporal decay trend observed in the most theoretically interesting cells. A more diligent police response begins to appear, especially in the 1–400-foot buffer. At the same location and in 7–8 days after a follow-up shooting, the likelihood of firearm arrests is elevated over 10 times more than the expected level. Importantly, the elevated arrests at the same location maintain at a relatively high level until 12 days after the follow-up shooting. The revitalization of police arrests (7–8 days) after a brief period of reduced activity (3–6 days) suggests that police take another round of effort to respond to the earlier elevated violence. In Philadelphia, such a pattern was not observed at the city level, but was detected in several police divisions. Wyant (2010) noticed this interesting phenomenon but simply attributed it to some unknown and unique features of police divisions without providing any further explanation or discussion. However, the current finding shows the nonconsecutive overrepresentation is not a random pattern only limited to a small area. Instead, it suggests a different dynamic of police activity as compared to the mechanism of initial swift police response. The delayed but intensive response to follow-up shootings reflects administrators’ efforts. The firearm arrest rate in the period of 7– 8 days is so high that it must indicate organized deployment from administrators instead of spontaneous action from beat officers. The one-week delay is needed by administrators to collect more information about the follow-up shootings in the investigation’s aftermath and to shift additional resources to these areas (Herbert 1997). In addition, both the longevity and the diffuse area in which an elevated arrest rate is observed also concur with this formal dynamic. Theoretically, this second round of responses is likely to involve a different dynamic than the

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police’s initial response. Whereas the first round of police response represents police officers responding informally and on their own initiative to a shooting, the second round indicates that more formal dynamics are at work, such as an overall organizational adjustment by police agencies. Previous research has documented that police administrators will make organizational changes to address elevated crime risk by prioritizing patrol resources or dispatching additional patrol forces to the places that are hit hard by crimes. Such adjustments signify the administrators’ efforts to appropriately distribute resources based on the overall crime information at hand. Hence, the observed second spike can be explained as an informed and responsive redistribution of resources on the part of police administrators and supervisors. This organizational effort occurs about one week after the initiator shooting, and the temporal delay between the two rounds of police response represents a period of data collection about the location and its crime patterns in preparation to shift additional resources to these areas. At the same time, elevated crime conditions need time to be communicated to citizens and to arouse publicity through media and social networks. Hence, more pressure is put on the shoulders of administrators, and what they do or fail to do is under the media and the public’s scrutiny. Thus, the one-week delay before the formal dynamic takes place also reflects the time for the public’s reaction to the elevated violence to reach police administrators. The present study aims to generate new knowledge about police behavior and decisionmaking by comparing the spatiotemporal relationships between arrests and follow-up shootings to those between arrests and independent shootings. The results, however, must be considered considering some significant limitations. First, the primary limitation is that this research is an exploratory. It reveals interesting patterns and trends but cannot offer an explanation of the mechanisms which shape the spatial and temporal structure of arrests and shootings. The same limitation applies to Wyant’s (2010) research and most near-repeat studies. What requires great

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caution is the interpretation of the results of this research. The identification of two distinct spatial and temporal patterns of crime and arrest, applicable to follow-up shootings and independent shootings, respectively, suggests that only two different mechanisms might be at work. However, before the details of the events, offenders, victims, and local environments are investigated, it is too early to anticipate any confirmed conclusion regarding the mechanisms behind the scene. While the current research suggests the existence of a pattern, it can neither posit nor speculate on the workings of a causal linkage. Second, a more micro-level examination of the space-time interaction between follow-up shootings and arrests is necessary. Although it is not our main objective in the current analysis, we also conduct some localized analysis. For example, we compared the statistical variations of police response between follow-up and independent shootings. Two sets of numbers are first generated, including the numbers of arrests following follow-up shootings and the numbers of arrests following independent shootings. The coefficients of variation (CVs) of each set of number are 3.28 and 4.09. This means that the variations in police response to independent shootings are larger than police response to follow-up shootings. In other words, it indicates that police more unevenly distribute resources to respond to independent shootings. The question is why? In addition, we found that the significant follow-up shooting-arrest interaction is generated by only 126 follow-up shootings and 102 later arrests. Among these follow-up shootings, most of them (103) are only followed by one near-arrest, while the other 23 are followed by more than one near-arrest. We then identified sites that generate unusually large numbers of subsequent arrests. The sites where follow-up shootings are followed by three or more arrests are viewed as places where police very intensively respond. Only 11 such sites are identified. It is worthy to explore why certain event or site generate more vigorous response, compared with other events with no response. In addition, recent big social data analytics might also address such issues to some extent (Ye et al. 2017b).

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Spatiotemporal Analysis of Shooting-Arrest Interaction …

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172 Wright JD, Rossi PH (1994) Armed and considered dangerous: a survey of felons and their firearms. Aldine Transaction, New York Wu L, Ye X, Webb D (2012) Space-time analysis of auto burglary patterns in a fast-growing small city. Int J Appl Geospatial Res 3(4):69–86 Wu L, Xu X, Ye X, Zhu X (2015a) Repeat and near-repeat burglaries and offender involvement in a large Chinese city. Cartogr Geogr Inf Sci 42(2):178–189 Wu L, Liu X, Ye X, Leipnik M, Lee J, Zhu X (2015b) Permeability, space syntax, and the patterning of residential burglaries in urban China. Appl Geogr 60:261–265 Wyant B (2010) Micro-level spatio-temporal relationships between firearm arrests and shootings in Philadelphia: implications for understanding of crime, time, place, and policing. Dissertation, Temple University Wyant B, Taylor R, Ratcliffe J, Wood J (2011) Deterrence, firearm arrests, and subsequent shootings:

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11

What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday? Xinyue Ye, Bing She, Wenwen Li, Sonali Kudva and Samuel Benya

Abstract

Most studies on Black Friday have largely relied on survey or sales data from case studies of specific cities, which are lack of spatial-temporal granularity. The recent development of location-aware technologies has enabled what Goodchild described as “humans as sensors”, and as a result there has been a large volume of volunteered geographic information with explicitly spatial and temporal tags. Mining these rapidly growing and timely data in the context of space-time

X. Ye (&) Urban Informatics & Spatial Computing Lab, Department of Informatics, Ying Wu College of Computing, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. She Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA W. Li GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation & School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA S. Kudva School of Information, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA S. Benya Computational Social Science Lab & Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

synthesis provides a new perspective for understanding the pulse of shopping behavior. In this chapter, we analyze Black Friday patterns and trends in the USA using a dataset retrieved from Twitter. A spatial-temporal analysis of tweeting patterns is conducted. This study tries to discern patterns of tweets on Black Friday in a comparative context. Keywords







Black friday Shopping behavior Spatial-temporal data Twitter Volunteered geographic information

11.1







Introduction

All human-created and natural events in motion are reflected in the space (Blaikie et al. 2014). Access to geo-positioning systems through wireless devices that can now be incorporated into even-smaller recording instruments is enabling individuals to record their motion at specific locations and on a continuous basis (Lazer et al. 2009). As a Location-Based Social Network, Twitter is a system of short text messaging that is widely popular as a medium for instant communication of every kind of information and data and, as such, it is rapidly becoming a measure of generic communication (Lai et al. 2015; Chen et al. 2016). If the user switches on the Global Positioning System trace, the tweets are recorded in space and time and can be interpreted by the Twitter

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_11

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Applications Programming Interface (Lee and Sumiya 2010). This revolution in tracking human and electronic movement in digital form enables the collection of multiple attributes at the finest of scales of observation (Kitchin 2014). This emerging geospatial technology thus retrieves large raw georeferenced data over time. In short, the locations found in the tweets can be grounded in space and time through these new and more efficient personalized instruments. This kind of information is especially useful to both researchers interested in economics and business analytics (Chae 2015). For example, an economist could create an application to collect real-time shoppingbehavior data from Twitter and visualize shopping patterns in a specific area. Then, a business owner could use this resource to monitor venues with an aim to improve sales. Highly dynamic real-time social systems like Twitter have already published huge amounts of human sensor data in the form of status updates (Cheng et al. 2011). Furthermore, it is increasingly common for social media content to be georeferenced (Cranshaw et al. 2012). The space-time patterns and streams produced by Twitter indicate the density of the locations of active shoppers. It might even be possible to extract real structure from the messages, as a measure of locational focus that moves in space and time, but correlates in diverse ways with the substrata of the region—which changes much more slowly, especially the features such as demographics and related infrastructures. Twitter supports millions of user-driven footprints. These footprints provide the unique opportunity to study the social and temporal characteristics of how people use these services, and to model patterns of human mobility, both of which are significant factors for the design of future location-based services, traffic forecasting, urban planning, as well as epidemiological models.

11.2

Literature Review

Twitter is a popular online micro-blogging service that was established in 2006. Users must compose their short messages, or “tweets”,

within 140 characters (including spaces), and can broadcast the posts to their “followers” or their subscribed audience on Twitter. The character limit and the privacy filters employed by users could impede researchers from deriving a comprehensive conclusion through the keyword search in a single process (Small et al. 2012). Instead, a more complex combination of keywords must be designed, and then used in the search query via different processes (Abel et al. 2011). The results may then be aggregated in order to compose the bigger picture. For more complex analysis, it may be necessary to acquire a better understanding of the syntax and context within the social media messages through a separate linguistics study to arrive at a more reliable conclusion (Page 2012). Data intensive computation will be a critical component to enable data mining of the millions of daily messages during the data processing and analysis procedures (Compton et al. 2014). Social media messages have unique spatial distribution patterns, dynamic user-generated locational information, and are derivatives of complicated social networks (Wang et al. 2017). Mapping and analyzing social media content requires an innovative design of visualization methods and spatial analysis algorithms (Giridhar and Abdelzaher 2017). These research challenges may facilitate a paradigm shift in the discipline of geography because geographers and cartographers are facing a crisis about how to represent this new form of information (Fujita 2017). Unlike anything else so far, social media messages describe both cyberspace and real space phenomena and can be copied and distributed immediately to thousands of users globally, who may belong to different virtual communities (Shelton et al. 2015). Cyber-geography is an emerging discipline that studies the interconnected spatial patterns and relationships between cyberspace and the real world (Komosny et al. 2017). Cyber-geography will provide a unique research opportunity for geographers to integrate human geography, physical geography, and GIScience and to analyze the spatial and temporal dynamics of the collective thinking of human beings in cyberspace and social media (Yang et al. 2018; Ye et al. 2018).

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What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

In the past, geographic information was largely produced through a top-down process by governmental mapping agencies or corporations in the industry. The transition from paper-based to digital dissemination has left most of these arrangements intact (Goodchild 2007). Today, it has become possible for the average citizen to determine positions accurately, even without any formal training. The world of volunteered geography is breaking down the traditional distinctions between expert and non-expert in the specific context of creating geographic information, which also generates a large collection of user-described features, and numerous georeferenced citizen observations on socioeconomic phenomena. With social media websites becoming increasingly location-based, and also allowing users to create and share geo-tagged information about their real lives, we now have rich data about large populations for social and behavioral studies (Sui and Goodchild 2011). Using data harvested from location-based social media represents a major advancement in methodologies of social science research (Goodchild 2007; Tsou et al. 2013; Wu et al. 2016). Since resources are always limited, socioeconomic development thus far has been largely concentrated in different regions but has still been evolving in accordance with the changing market and environment (Ye and Rey 2011). While place-based public policy has been effective, location-based information has been difficult and expensive to retrieve (Batty 2010). At the same time, spatial and temporal components of events should be addressed jointly instead of being treated separately (Goodchild 2009; Anselin 2010). Researchers thus have to pay more attention to both spatial and temporal aspects in thematic research (Andrienko and Andrienko 2006). Timely and rigorous analysis of emerging socioeconomic events will open up a rich empirical context for the social sciences and in policy interventions. However, the challenges and difficulties of deriving effective, validated, and convincible information through intellectual inquiry and survey are higher for such highly topical subjects. Traditional survey solutions may be labor-intensive and time-consuming. The quality of the survey results may not be

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satisfactory either, especially if the response rate is low and insufficient, or too insignificant to support research efforts. Additionally, if the process of response collection for the survey takes too long, the results could cease to be as meaningful and significant to decision-makers who need to understand the immediate situation in-depth (Ye et al. 2016a, b). The emerging social media networks and the accompanying technology to process social media messages may be critical and helpful to understand the impact and response to certain socioeconomic policies and events in a timely fashion (Elwood et al. 2012; Goodchild 2007). However, although social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to researchers in studying socioeconomic dynamics, it also raises research challenges in both space-time data analysis and data-intensive computation (Jiang et al. 2018). While keyword-based search-and-analysis might be dominant in initial research efforts, the limitation of such an approach is obvious for analyzing the huge collections of tweets and their content, to conduct both qualitative and quantitative analyses of socioeconomic events and dynamics (Sharag-Eldin et al. 2018). The type of keywords or combination of keywords that can be utilized for analysis over a certain targeted topic has been another challenging issue, when considering the complex syntax and context embedded in the social media message. As a result, the rich details of space-time complexity remain largely unexplored because of the constraint in computational capacity in handling large-scale data (Guo and Mennis 2009; Lee and Mülligann 2011; Andrienko and Andrienko 2012; Ye et al. 2016a, b). Popular social media technology and applications have raised fundamental research questions and challenges pertaining to mainstream social science research on whether and how social media can be utilized as a method to collect thematic information that can help understand socioeconomic dynamics. It has also raised the question on whether and how social media can be used as a supplementary resource in correspondence with other survey approaches to enhance and advance research in social, economic, and behavioral sciences in general.

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In the case of measuring economic policy lags, it is rare to have any real time data resources for measuring the lag associated with policy implementation. Understanding the time lag between policy implementation and the actual impact on the economy or economic behavior of the agents is important to researchers, policymakers, citizens, and politicians. At the moment, even if we knew when a policy is to be implemented, we likely don’t have the ability nor the method to measure Twitter chatter to see if there is any indication as to the impact of the policy. For example, if the Federal Reserve passes monetary policy that reduces interest rates, we would look for whether there is any traffic talking about “capital investment”, “new projects”, “building expansion”, or “new hires”. Or, if Congress passed a budget that increased taxes, we’d be searching for chatter about reducing spending, deferring investments, or canceling projects. The spatial and temporal differentiation of such responses could reveal results indicating different growth patterns in the long term or near future. Analyzing social media messages could make a difference in determining the popularity of monetary vs. fiscal policy. While it is assumed that tax increases are more unpopular than increases in interest rates, this may not be the case in reality. However, this could be confirmed by measuring the negative chatter on Twitter in the wake of an announcement about a potential increase in interest or income taxes. Social media can be a great source of information to comprehend consumer confidence. It would be equally fascinating to note how long negative perception lasts in Twitter chapter, and whether this could prove indicative for future trends. Further, it would be important and interesting to see whether a fiscal change would last longer than a monetary change. In general, analyzing social media messages could be helpful in identifying indications of public perceptions and the impact of financial policy decisions. Other keywords that could prove insightful for indication of a regional economic state include “durable goods purchases”, “new appliances”, “furniture shopping”, and “real estate”.

X. Ye et al.

In order to model the spread of social media information across scales ranging from a neighborhood to global trends, a series of questions have to be answered, including how social media is spread from place to place across the scales. Can we model this spread and predict where and when topics will be picked up and become trends? Sui and Goodchild (2011) assert that two conflicting hypotheses may be tested about the nature of social media spread. The first is the spatial influence model, which asserts that social media spreads to nearby locations, while the community affinity influence model argues that social media spreads between places that are functionally connected. Reality though, might be a mix of the two forces. Based on the geospatial footprint of geo-tagged hashtags spread through Twitter, it is possible to evaluate these models for how efficient they are at predicting locations that will adopt hashtags in the future. Such predication will be vital to economists and policymakers, for example, to estimate the influence of a massive layoff over neighborhoods. It could be expected also, that community affinities (facilitated by the journey-to-work connection and supply-chain networks) enhance the quality of purely spatial models, indicating the necessity of incorporating non-spatial features into models of social media spread. Thus, such research helps advances the understanding of economic patterns and processes in human society. Social media data like Twitter messages could be valuable to political strategists who need to be aware of location-based hot-button issues. The data could help politicians focus their talking points on issues of interest to a given geographical region. It could also then be used to gauge the reaction of constituents by leaking potential policy change statements while monitoring the reaction on Twitter accounts. Convention and visitors’ bureaus may want to analyze tweets from certain geographical locations within their city or region. This data could provide indications about locations that are most enjoyed by visitors, which in turn can inform future marketing efforts emphasizing these locations. Local governments could utilize the data collected to support operational departments such

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What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

as Public Works. They could analyze data to determine whether a proposed utility extension would meet with much public opposition, and whether other proposed projects would be perceived as positive by their constituents.

11.3

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

The Twitter location crawler collected a total of users and unique tweets. The technique used for analysis in the study is termed Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). First, the locations of tweets in Fig. 11.1 are plotted, representing the distribution pattern of “Black Friday” tweets across the USA. To explore the spatial density, a surface map is created using kernel density estimation. The locations of these tweets are converted to latitude and longitude and are projected into a North America Equidistant Conic coordinate system. An “Equal distance” projection is selected to preserve the accuracy in distance calculation for the kernel density estimation.

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A quadratic kernel function by Silverman is used for estimating the effects of tweeting events across cyberspace (Silverman 1986). This analysis also finds that for counties that have a tweet density of over 0.1 km2, the average population is about half a million (476219). For counties with a tweet density of over 0.2 km2, the average population is 1.8 million. In addition, a clear linear correlation exists between the total number of tweets and the total population (Fig. 11.2). The next analysis was of the variance across races. As indicated by the values of R square, Caucasian/white is more predictable than all other racial groups (Fig. 11.3). The number of tweets reaches its peak on Nov. 23, 2012, and this observation stands for all populous counties (Table 11.1, Fig. 11.4). The trends show a variation during the development and the diminishment of “Black Friday” event. Kings County in New York State has far fewer tweets than it should, especially in comparison to the distributed patterns of tweets in other counties with a similar total population. Similarly,

Fig. 11.1 Distribution pattern of the ‘Black Friday’ tweets in the US by kernel density estimation. The highest density value (in red) is 0.275 tweets/km2. The texts show the county name of the hotspots

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# of tweets from tweeters within each county

CorrelaƟon between total populaƟon and number of tweets on 'Black Friday' for all US CounƟes 3000 y = 0.0002x -0.4952 R² = 0.9095

2500 Number(tweets)

2000 1500 1000 500 0 0 -500

2000000

4000000

6000000

8000000

10000000

12000000

PopulaƟon

Fig. 11.2 Correlation between the number of tweets on ‘Black Friday’ and the total population at the county level

Fig. 11.3 Correlation between number of tweets and population by race

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What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

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Table 11.1 A list of the 10 most populous counties State

County

2012 population

California

Los Angeles County

9818605

Illinois

Cook County

5194675

Texas

Harris County

4092442

Arizona

Maricopa County

3817117

California

San Diego County

3095313

California

Orange County

3010232

New York

Kings County

2504700

Florida

Miami-Dade County

2496435

Texas

Dallas County

2368139

New York

Queens County

2230722

Fig. 11.4 Temporal distribution of ‘Black Friday’ tweets for the 10 most populous counties. The population of the counties in the legend increases from top to bottom

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Dallas County in Texas State has more tweets than Miami-dade and Kings County, even though its population is about 13–14 thousand less than either of those two counties. The trend curve for medium-size counties varies significantly (Table 11.2, Fig. 11.5). Utah County

in Utah ranks third on the list for population, however, the number of tweets from this county stands at only 49, which is far fewer than the number received from other counties of similar or even less population. Sedwick, Kansas has the lowest population but receives the highest number of tweets.

Table 11.2 A list of medium-sized counties (population *0.5 million) County

State

Population 2012

# of tweets

Lancaster

Pennsylvania

519448

131

Douglas

Nebraska

517110

196

Utah

Utah

516564

49

Kane

Illinois

515269

103

Stanislaus

California

514453

135

Camden

New Jersey

513657

199

Ramsey

Minnesota

508640

117

Passaic

New Jersey

501226

141

Chester

Pennsylvania

498886

118

Sedgwick

Kansas

498365

207

Fig. 11.5 Temporal distribution of ‘Black Friday’ tweets for 10 medium-size counties. The population of the counties in the legend increases from top to bottom

11

What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

11.4

Topic Modeling

The textual content of tweets was analyzed in R, using the “tm” package. The tweets are first preprocessed, to remove all invalid characters, then a corpus of all these tweets is constructed. Then the text is preprocessed further in several steps, including removing the html tags, changing the text to lower-case, removing punctuation, removing numbers, removing a set of stop words such as “this” or “it”. After the data preprocessing, the Porter stemming algorithm is applied to convert the words back to their basic forms. This step ensures that the different morphological variants of a word are considered equivalent. A Document Term Matrix (DTM) is then generated, in which the rows correspond to the documents (tweets), and the columns correspond to the bigrams (considered over all tweets). If the j’th bigram is present in the i’th tweet, then element (i, j) of the DTM is set to 1, otherwise it is set to 0. This approach to constructing the DTM can lead to a large number of columns and thus a very sparse DTM. To reduce sparsity, only the terms that occur in three or more documents are considered. The final DTM comprises 72473 documents and 7394 terms. Using the DTM described above, we generated a topic model, using the LDA method. A topic model allows for the algorithmic identification of “topics” within a collection of documents based on the words contained in each document. For this study, documents are tweets. This topic model can be used to group individual tweets, based on the words in each tweet. Fundamentally, the LDA model repeatedly samples (based on a multinomial distribution) the words from a collection of tweets to identify which words tend to associate with each other. The result of this sampling process is that words are assigned to multiple topics (the number of which must be specified a priori) with differing

181

probabilities. The topics identified by the model are not explicit; rather they are identified in a probabilistic manner, such that certain terms (and therefore their associated documents) are more likely to appear in a certain topic over another. Therefore, topic modeling can be considered a form of clustering (so that topics are conceptually similar to clusters). After generating a set of assignments for the words, the LDA model determines the assignment of documents to individual topics. In this study, 10 topics are chosen to be generated. The final terms using one-gram in each topic are summarized in Table 11.3. As can be seen from the results, the topics can be broadly categorized into two themes: emotions, and, shopping and working. However, the differences are not that clearly defined, and reflect limited vocabulary used in people’s discussions about Black Friday. The final terms using two-grams in each topic are summarized in Table 11.4. The two-gram results show slightly more meaningful results than the one-gram. We can see new topics emerge, such as online shopping, and new terms emerge such as “park lot” and “wait line”. However, most of the topics are still related to general shopping behaviors and emotions, reflecting that people vary very little in the words they use to express themselves about shopping. The tweets are further classified into three groups in the temporal dimension (using two-gram), pre Black Friday (from 2012.11.14 to 2012.11.22), on Black Friday (2012.11.23), and post Black Friday (2012.11.24–2012.12.7). The results are summarized as follows. As seen in Tables 11.5, 11.6 and 11.7, there is no clear difference related to temporal dimension on the discussion among people.

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Table 11.3 Results of the LDA model (one-gram) Topic

Most likely topic components

Theme

1

Shop, work, people, store, deal, buy, hour, crazy, Walmart, excite, night, today, success, hate…

Emotions

2

Shop, sale, line, buy, wait, happy, target, Walmart, ready, home, thanksgiving, Saturday, shopper, work…

Shopping and working

3

Shop, work, people, thanksgiving, time, buy, day, sale, start, tonight, ready, wait…

Shopping and working

4

Work, shop, lol, hour, people, today, start, wait, good, crazy, don, gonna, line, online…

Emotions

5

Shop, sale, day, thanksgiving, money, people, time, mall, shopper, crazy, ready, Walmart…

Shopping and working

6

Shop, year, time, deal, sleep, work, day, tonight, good, lol, fun, sale, hate, store, big…

Emotions

7

Lol, shop, mom, work, store, love, people, good, line, buy, party, Saturday, wait…

Emotions

8

Shop, wait, buy, deal, day, tonight, work, Walmart, home, year, sale, night…

Shopping and working

9

Free, ship, great, work, year, holiday, stock, day, sale, shop, money, sleep, mad…

Emotions

10

Shop, sale, mall, sleep, crazy, work, people, good, shopper, start, open, haha…

Emotions

Table 11.4 Results of the LDA model (two-gram) Topic

Most likely topic components

Theme

1

Time shop, shop year, liquor store, store sale, Christmas shop, good morn, hate people, hour shop, crazy shopper, dealer sale, kick ass, long line, family shop, weed dealer, park lot…

Emotions

2

Shop tonight, people shop, shop begin, hunger game, night shop, start shop, shop fun, shop sleep, shop experience, drug dealer, Walmart, town center, Walmart worker…

Shopping

3

Work hour, people camp, Victoria secret, Walmart, shop start, store open, home shop, people crazy, save money, wait line, shop buy, hour shift, door open, spend money…

Shopping

4

Free ship, stock stuffer, sale day, great holiday, holiday stock, America people, great stock, cyber Monday, small business, shop today…

Stock

5

Shop work, work pm, good deal, time year, stand line, flat screen, shop girl, work line…

Emotions

6

Wait shop, office party, shop tomorrow, drink special, special night, sleep shop, free night, shop friend, sale lol, bed shop…

Emotions

7

Shop success, shop crazy, love shop, wait till, shop till, fun shop, final home, give money…

Emotions

8

Cyber Monday, don shop, online shopping, Thursday night, tomorrow night, credit card, online sale, work work…

Online shopping

9

Shop time, shop online, hour shift, success shop, full price, shop hour, pay full, wait line, apple store, wake early, finish shop, mad begin, buy thing…

Shopping

10

Excite shop, happy thanksgiving, gas station, shop Walmart, midnight shop, crazy ass, good sale, friend shop, stay home

Shopping

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What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

183

Table 11.5 Results of the LDA model (two-gram, pre black Friday) Topic

Most likely topic components

Theme

1

Wait shop, money shop, liquor shop, tomorrow night, save money, take shop, wait till, shop sleep…

Shopping

2

Shop year, wait line, shop begin, shop Walmart, thanksgiving night, day thanksgiving, crazy shop, full price, open thanksgiving, band account…

Shopping

3

Wanna shop, shop midnight, good luck, hunger game, spend money, work hour, work shop, shop money, thanksgiving Thursday…

Working

4

Time shop, work thanksgiving, cyber Monday, start tonight, shop hour, start midnight, dollar tree, Walmart shop…

Shopping

5

Walmart supercenter, work hour, free night, weed dealer, tonight tomorrow, stay night…

Shopping

6

Walmart, Christmas shop, work midnight, shop experience, shop sister, forward work…

Shopping

7

Happy thanksgiving, cyber Monday, shop time, good deal, thanksgiving shop, thanksgiving dinner…

Emotions

8

Shop tonight, American people, shop online, work retail, drink special, special night, official party, credit card, shop girl, wait line…

Shopping

9

Work tomorrow, love shop, shop crazy, wake early, hate work, love target, waste time, sleep work, shop hell…

Emotions

10

Stand line, hour shift, start shop, gonna shop, Victoria secret, crazy people, work retail, store open, food shop…

Shopping

Table 11.6 Results of the LDA Model (two-gram, on black Friday) Topic

Most likely topic components

Theme

1

Gotta love, hate shop, shop sleep, home depot, mom shop, mall shop, shop don, late shop, shop girl, home sweet, sweet home, hate work…

Shopping

2

People shop, shop time, love shop, party tonight, tonight host, shop good, people watch, money spend, bank account, shop Christmas…

Shopping

3

Good morn, money shop, spend money, Victoria secret, wait line, stay home, good time, family shop, mad begin, shop mad…

Emotions

4

Success shop, drink special, office party, hate people, work hour, start shop, day shop, sleep day, Victoria secret, Walmart open…

Working

5

Shop success, home shop, work retail, day work, waste time, shop target, record store, sport good, great thanksgiving, store day…

Shopping

6

Crazy people, liquor store, gas station, store sale, people crazy, drug dealer, crazy shop, shop begin, time sleep, urban outfit, dealer sale, big deal…

Emotions

7

Cyber Monday, sale day, America people, full price, shop buy, year shop, save money, finish shop, premium outlet…

Shopping

8

Broke Saturday, work retail, Christmas tree, Victoria secrete, shop hour, good thing, love deal, shop sleep…

Emotions

9

Free ship, stock stuffer, great stock, wanna shop, online shop, final home, apple store, Christmas shop, good night, lol shop, time work…

Shopping

10

Shop online, shop lol, shop year, round shop, premium outlet…

Shopping

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Table 11.7 Results of the LDA model (two-gram, after black Friday) Topic

Most likely topic components

Theme

1

Cyber Monday, full effect, team full, online thanksgiving, product search, search online, buy cloth, bloodiest weekend…

Shopping

2

Day thank, sale day, America people, good deal, work day, billion time, sale surpass, small biz…

Shopping

3

Cyber Monday, shop online, credit card, great deal, buy thing, Monday sale, nation retail…

Shopping

4

Cyber Monday, give Tuesday, Monday give, online sale, fish limit, money spent, liquor store…

Shopping

5

busy Saturday, online sale, shop day, day distant, Saturday cyber, area store, Walmart…

Shopping

6

Cyber Monday, sleep schedule, Monday deal, screw sleep, love cyber, shop online, ruin sleep, schedule bad…

Emotions

7

Broke Saturday, sale online, Walmart, schedule mess, online top, thing bought, gotta love, lazy people, spent money…

Shopping

8

Online shop, hour shift, thanksgiving shop, gun sale, bank account, people shop, work hour, plan parenthood, sale thanksgiving, store day

Shopping

9

Free ship, stock stuffer, great holiday, great stock, gas station…

Shopping

10

Christmas shop, Victoria secret, Christmas present, work weekend, work retail, dollar tree, bought item…

Shopping

11.5

Conclusion

According to Waldo Tobler, “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” (Tobler 1970). Ignoring this relationship may lead to overlooking many possible interactions and dependencies among space and time attributes in decisionmaking and policy-generation. As a result, spatiotemporal differentiation could be inevitably uneven when the same policy may be implemented or perceived differently over space and time and by different persons, socioeconomic or partisan groups. Research in the spatiotemporally integrated socioeconomic dynamic covers a variety of themes across multiple disciplines coupled with complex methodologies (Stefanidis et al. 2011). Understanding the socioeconomic dynamics through analyzing social media messages adds a higher level of challenges in linguistic study, data-mining, and data-intensive

computing (Belcastro et al. 2018; Flatow et al. 2015; Majid et al. 2013). This research will build the synthetic capability to develop, evaluate, and implement a framework to comprehensively quantify the changes and level of hidden variation within social media datasets on shopping. This research will build, enhance, and expand the community of researchers and participants, from scholars and entrepreneurs who share common interest in spatiotemporally integrated socioeconomic dynamics. The research and method should be of interest to marketing strategists at the regional, national, and international levels. For economic consultants who may use the data to solicit projects in an area, social media may help them understand, for example, whether there is a significant amount of Twitter traffic complaining about service deficiencies? Acknowledgements This material is partially based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1416509. Any opinions, findings, and

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What and Where Are We Tweeting About Black Friday?

conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Part IV Planning Challenges

12

Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes: A Study of Dhaka Bandhan Dutta Ayon, Md. Tanvir Hossain Shubho, Syed Rezwanul Islam and Ishrat Islam

Abstract

Land use change in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, has been documented in several studies. In recent years, development outside Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (DMDP) area is thriving and large chunks of agricultural land and wetlands have been converted with the growth of real estate projects. However, information on urban expansion around the boundary of DMDP is very limited in literature. In this context, our research selected a study area outside DMDP jurisdiction, where private real estate developers are operating large-scale projects. This research aims to identify the land development activities that resulted in changes in the agricultural and wetland. This chapter explores the spatial proponents to this change, and investigates the existing institutional and legal frameworks. Remote sensing and satellite imagery were used to trace land use change. Besides, different participatory research tools were employed to explore causes associated with this change. A comprehensive quantitativequalitative analysis was carried out to analyze the data. Proximity to Dhaka’s CBD, connec-

B. D. Ayon
Md. T. Hossain Shubho
S. R. Islam
I. Islam (&) Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh e-mail: [email protected]

tivity to major transportation network and availability of vast tract of undeveloped land were identified as the key issues that attract real estate developments. Increased selling price and low yield from existing land use were found as root causes for booming land sale. Besides these push and pull factors, this study identified the limitations of the local government policy initiatives responsible for this unplanned development. Detailed findings of the study are expected to contribute in formulating physical planning and policy strategies for sustainable development. Keywords

Dhaka metropolitan development plan (DMDP) Land use change PRA Real estate Remote sensing




12.1










Introduction

Rural interface between Dhaka city and its surroundings has already started changing a few decades ago ever since the extinction of open spaces, agricultural land, lakes, and greeneries. Being the capital city of Bangladesh and one of the most densely populated megacities in the world, Dhaka is developing at a brisk pace. More people are migrating from various parts of the country to this city due to the centralized development. Along with the increase in population, the city started to expand and the rate of

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_12

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expansion is alarming. The jurisdiction of Dhaka expanded 17.88 times over the period of 50 years starting from 1951 to 2001 (Islam 2009). At present, the population of Dhaka is more than 12 million. Population density and annual growth rate of Dhaka is the highest of all districts of Bangladesh enumerated as 8229 persons/sq. km and 3.48%, respectively (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics 2011). In quest of control over the development, the Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (DMDP 1995–2015) was prepared. The entire Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) area, Keraniganj, Savar, Part of Gazipur and Narayanganj came under the DMDP plan, which is comprised of 1528 km2 (RAJUK 2010). This plan defined land use policies for the entire area. Conservation of the agricultural land, vegetation, and wetland was given priority. Hence, the plan was supposed to be followed in every sphere of development. However, extreme violation of the plan is striking these years. In the last 12 years, private land development companies have illegally encroached huge amount of flood flow zones, retention areas, agricultural lands for housing projects (Bangladesh Institute of Planners 2008). About 124 km2 low lying lands in eastern fringe are now in the grip of private housing companies, of which only 4 companies partially approved their housing areas. More than 20 developers are filling the low land areas of this part of the city and building housing areas ignoring “flood retention pond” and “flood flow zones” in the DMDP Structure plan (Mahmud 2007). Recently these phenomena have spread over the area outside DMDP. Developers are grabbing large chunk of agricultural and wetlands outside DMDP and converting them for housing and commercial purposes without any premeditation of environmental sustainability and/or food security. From 2005 to 2011, the wetlands adjacent to Dhaka metropolitan area have diminished from 5.85 to 3.95 km2 due to the conversion of local water bodies and low lands for residential, commercial, and industrial use (IRIN 2012). Another dreadful impact of the unplanned and haphazard development is the loss of agricultural land and vegetation. Increasing populations are

B. D. Ayon et al.

being accommodated by transforming these agricultural fields and vegetation into residential, commercial, and other uses. As a result, Bangladesh is losing 8000 hectares of farmlands every year (Khan 2009). This occurrence is one of the prevailing features outside the Dhaka metropolitan area. Private developers are filling up vast agricultural lands in Rupganj, Narayanganj, Narsingdi, Gazipur, and other areas outside DMDP for housing projects, thereby endangering food security (Khan 2011). However, information on urban expansion around the boundary of DMDP is very limited in literature. In such backdrop, this research selected a study area outside DMDP jurisdiction, where private real estate developers are operating large-scale projects. This research aims to identify the land development activities, and quantify the loss of agricultural land and wetland due to these unplanned developments. This research also explores the physical, socio-economic and institutional factors responsible behind the uncontrolled land use change.

12.2

Materials and Methods

12.2.1 Study Area It was found from the reconnaissance survey that the real estate development activities are mostly conducted along the Dhaka–Sylhet highway within 10 km buffer of DMDP area. Therefore, a study area is selected, which is contained within the boundary of 10 km buffer outside DMDP and the boundaries of 5 km buffer extended either side of the Dhaka–Sylhet highway (Fig. 12.1). The total study area is 173.81 km2.

12.2.2 Data and Method In order to find out the land use change trend resulting from the real estate activities, three broad land cover classes, that is, vegetation, wetland, and built-up area were extracted from the satellite images of 1989, 1999, and 2010. Landsat-5 TM images of 1989 and 1999 were

12

Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes …

191

Fig. 12.1 Study area outside DMDP boundary along Dhaka–Sylhet highway

collected from Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF), and Landsat-5 TM images of 2010 were collected from SPARRSO. Following fundamental image preprocessing (Firl 2010; Firl and Carter 2011; Deng and Wu 2013; USGS), the Landsat images were reclassified. Since the study area is contained within two separate rows— Worldwide Reference System (WRS-2) Path 137, and Row 43 and 44—it became necessary to mosaic the images of two rows to create a single raster image. Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) were used to extract

vegetation and wetlands, respectively (Jensen 2000; Xu 2007). To extract built-up area, both Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) were used (He et al. 2010). A semiautomatic segmentation approach with Doublewindow Flexible Pace Search (DFPS) technique (He et al. 2010; Shubho et al. 2015) was employed to increase the accuracy of the extraction of vegetation, wetland, and built-up area. Based on the area of vegetation, wetland, and built-up features from 1989 to 2010, land use change trend was investigated.

192

Identification of the real estate projects was a prerequisite to understand the actual scenario of land use change through conversion of vegetation and wetland into built-up areas. To accomplish this task, location of the projects were identified through GPS (Global Positioning System) survey. 33 Real Estate Development (RED) projects were identified, which fell into five unions, namely, Amdia, Bholaba, Duptara, Kanchan, and Satgram (Figs. 12.2 and 12.3). A comprehensive quantitative-qualitative analysis was carried out to analyze the socio-economic data. Purposive or judgmental sampling strategy was employed for conducting

Fig. 12.2 Location of RED projects with union boundary in study area

B. D. Ayon et al.

different data collection procedures, as it is the only feasible sampling practice in exploring information from a certain group of people having a similar trait of interests (Castillo 2009). To collect the data through focus group discussion (FGD) and key informant interview (KII), the administrative boundary of the local community was considered. One Focus Group was formed and two key informants were interviewed from each of the local administrative units (union and municipality) lying in the detailed study area. To understand the local aspects, one of the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) tools—Historical Timeline—was conducted, which provided a

12

Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes …

193

Fig. 12.3 Different RED projects with respect to the Dhaka–Sylhet highway and local roads

notion about the initiation and consequences of the RED activities in the concerned area. Detailed field surveys were conducted to look into the existing conditions of the project sites and land cover types associated with likely land use change in the detailed study area. Developers and their agents were also interviewed over telephone in order to collect the information on price of developed land and their policies and visions toward this real estate development in the area. Past studies on land use change and real estate development, newspapers, websites of developer companies and their commercial catalogs and brochures were reviewed. Offices of developer companies and their stalls in the Real Estate & Housing Association of Bangladesh (REHAB) fair were visited to collect the brochures and related data on prices of developed land. To analyze the collected data, narrative analysis technique was also exercised. Pair-wise matrix method was conducted to rank and analyze the local land selling reasons. On the other hand, using Venn-diagram tool, various institutional issues were examined involving land transfer process. For additional interpretation, case study analyses were carried out based on the stories found from in-depth interview. Data

triangulation concluded the credibility or trustworthiness of collected data. Information from several sources were considered for cross checking the data and ensuring reliability.

12.3

Results and Discussion

12.3.1 Land Use Change Trend From the remote sensing analysis of 1989, 1999, and 2010, it is found that built-up area increased by 30.29 hectare per year from 1989 to 1999. From 1999 to 2010, built-up area increased by 115.51 hectare per year. Area of vegetation has decreased more rapidly during the last 20 years. From 1989 to 1999 and 1999 to 2010, the vegetation decreased by 171.66 hectare and 400.13 hectare per year, respectively. During the last 20 years, vegetation cover decreased by 61%. Wetland, during the first decade, decreased by 147.71 hectares per year, and during the last decade, by 18.62%, that is, average decrease of wetland was 81.52 hectare per year. Therefore, overall, the wetland decreased by more than 39.15% from 1989 to 2010. The trend of land use change is shown in Table 12.1 and Fig. 12.4.

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B. D. Ayon et al.

Table 12.1 Land use change in the study area in 1989, 1999 and 2010 Land Use Classes Built-up area

Area in hectare 1989

1999

Increase or decrease in hectare 2010

From 1989– 1999

From 1999– 2010

From 1989– 2010

93.48

396.38

1551.51

302.90

1155.14

Vegetation

9403.04

7686.48

3685.15

−1716.56

–4001.33

−5717.89

Wetland

5855.60

4378.50

3563.28

−1477.10

−815.20

−2292.32

12.3.2 Physical Issues 12.3.2.1 Proximity of Project Sites to Dhaka CBD, Purbachal New Town and Major Roads Existing transportation facilities of the study area ensure a sensible mobility, which is a prerequisite for peripheral development. This along with a reasonable proximity to Dhaka city and Purbachal New Town also stimulates the development process to their adjacent areas. Maximum project sites are located very close in proximity to the Dhaka–Sylhet Highway. 19 out of 33 RED projects are located within 0–2 km from that highway. Some other projects (e.g., Purbachal Eastwood City and Purbachal Regent Town) along the Dhaka City Bypass Road are enjoying additional location advantages as these are located within the municipal jurisdiction (Kanchan Pourashava) and closest to Dhaka city as well. This is also reflected on the land selling prices, as the buying prices associated with these projects are much higher than other RED projects. All RED projects are located within 5 to 15 km distance from Purbachal New Town, the biggest Planned Township in the country comprising an area of about 2488.82 acres. The Township is being developed with a view to meeting all the necessary provisions, infrastructures, and urban facilities. This has also led the developers to a vision of commencing real estate business activities in the adjacent area considering it as of paramount potentials. Both developers and clients are profoundly considering this issue of Purbachal and its substantial consequences toward the development in its surrounding area. The following price–distance analysis confirms the above-mentioned facts. Data on selling

1458.03

price and distance were analyzed to realize whether the distance of project sites from different key features has any implication on selling price of developed land. Selling prices are compared against projects’ distance from Purbachal New Town, Dhaka CBD, and Dhaka–Sylhet Highway. These comparisons are shown in Fig. 12.5 through scatter-plotting of prices (on Y-axis) and different distances (on X-axis). The outlier price of the project land (e.g., American City) was ignored to derive an un-biased scenario. From Fig. 12.5a it is apparent that with increase in distance of project sites from Purbachal New Town, the price of developed land is decreasing. This is a reflection of a common understanding and assumption that after completion of Purbachal New Town development, its adjacent areas will enjoy better facilities as well. The prices of the project land with greater proximity to Dhaka CBD are relatively higher than that of distant areas (Fig. 12.5b). There exists an enormous difference between the price of nearest project lands (about 150 thousand BDT/katha) and that of the outer most projects (about 400 thousand BDT/katha). It is worth noting that 1 Katha is equivalent to 69 m2, and 1 BDT is equivalent to 0.012 USD. This decline in the price with increase in distance may result from the perception that the people usually prefer to live near the Dhaka city for convenience in commuting and having the provision of better facilities than remote areas. Similarly, Fig. 12.5c demonstrates that the selling prices are proportionally related with distance from Dhaka–Sylhet highway. The RED projects located within 2.5 km from the highway are considered for this analysis. Developments closer to highway ensure easy accessibility and higher mobility. This is the reason for higher selling

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Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes …

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Fig. 12.4 Three land cover classes within study area in 1989, 1999, and 2010

(1989)

(1999)

(2010)

price for development projects closer to that highway. However, some projects those are away from Dhaka–Sylhet highway have relatively higher selling price. Few of these projects require to be developed with the connecting road networks, which increase the development cost, thereby increasing the selling price. After mapping the location of RED projects through ArcGIS tool, map dictates that most of the real estate projects tend to grow along the highway or the adjacent local roads. Out of identified 33 projects, there are 12 projects located in Satgram as the Dhaka–Sylhet highway goes through the middle of this union. Projects in Duptara and Amdia union are also being

developed along the highway and adjacent to the local roads to ensure good accessibility. In cases of Bholaba union and Kanchan Pourashava, the ongoing real estate projects are flourished along the local main road, which shows a clear implication of transportation facilities over the project location and concentration.

12.3.2.2 Availability of Vast Tract of Uninterrupted Land Vegetation and wetland are the two dominant land cover types of the project sites. This also reinforces the thriving of RED in the study area. Developers usually prefer farmland and wetland for REDs with no permanent structure. These

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B. D. Ayon et al.

(b) 1600

Selling Price (thousand BDT)

Selling price (thousand BDT)

(a) 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

6

8

10

12

14

16

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 18

Distance from Purbachal New Town (Kilometer)

20

22

24

26

28

30

Distance from Dhaka CBD (Kilometer)

Selling Price (thousand BDT)

(c) 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

Distance from Dhaka-Sylhet Highway (Kilometer) Fig. 12.5 Relationship between projects’ selling price and distances from a Purbachal New Town, b Dhaka CBD, and c Dhaka–Sylhet highway

lands can be found in an indiscrete form, which is one of the preconditions for RED as there is a need for large tract of vacant land. Again, buying price of farmland and wetland is considerably lower than other land uses.

12.3.3 Socio-Economic Issue 12.3.3.1 Relative Low Prices of Local Land The predominant differences between the monetary values of buying raw land from the local people and selling of processed land to the clients are of paramount consideration that motivated developer companies. This enormous difference in prices of land yields a handy profit for the developer companies, which act as an incentive

to invest more in the study area. Because of the very low price of raw land, the developer companies can sell the developed land at a substantially low rate relative to the price of the land inside the DMDP area to attract more clients. For instance, the average selling price of land at Basundhara Baridhara Project (inside DMDP) is 2.26 million BDT/katha while it is only 0.64 million BDT/katha (average) for the projects in the study area with a buying rate of 0.172 million BDT/katha for raw land. So far, the discussion covered the issues that attract real estate developers. The next section documented the reasons that stimulate local land selling, which were identified from the focus group discussion (FGD) and key informant interview. The PRA tool—Pair-wise Matrix—was also applied to prioritize the following reasons.

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Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes …

12.3.3.2 Change in the Price of Raw Land With the commencement of the developers’ activities in the study area, the land prices have increased enormously. The valueless, useless fallow land, low-lying land, and even wetland have become costly at once. Farmers even mentioned that, one-cropped and two-cropped farmland have showed no variability in the price of land market. This is simply like an aid for the land-owning farmers. There are few differences in the prices of land among different unions. This astonishing rise in price has observed over the last 2–4 years. Undoubtedly, this is acting like an incentive to farmers for selling their land irrespective of further contemplation. For easy understanding of the fact, Table 12.2 can be helpful. 12.3.3.3 Low Yield from Existing Land Use Likely conversion of farmland and wetland to developed land is the clear reflection of lack of enthusiasm in farming. Crops including coarse grains, lentils, roots and tubers, oilseeds, and spices, etc., have already become less attractive in terms of their profitability from farmers’ point of view. The notable exceptions, however, are rice and jute. Jute grows in less favorable production environment, especially in low-lying areas and comparatively more profitable. However, rice production is also becoming less attractive as the government strongly intervenes to keep its price considerably low. General people are benefiting from this; however, the farmers argued that, with increased expenses of

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agricultural inputs (e.g., seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides) and labor cost, it is no more profitable to produce rice as before. They also added that they could afford the production in profitable manner even during the high cost of fertilizer only because the market price of rice was also high at that time. Again, most of the lands of the study area are suitable for cropping in one season and there are only few two-cropping lands. These cropping pattern and geologic condition deteriorate the situation. It implies that the low beneficial return from agricultural land is inducing the landowning farmers to sell their land and go for alternative activities.

12.3.3.4 Land Fragmentation Losing potential agricultural land or farmland because of the division of land among descendants is of paramount concern. Rural families are predominantly large in size, which also deteriorates the situation. Muslim law of inheritance calls for distribution of land among all sons and other surviving heirs of a deceased person. Medium and large farmers were found to give land to female sharers since the late 1940s and it was higher during 1945 and 1965 because of having many wives and daughters (WRC 2000). However, giving land to female heirs differs among households. Nowadays, it has become a common practice. Subdivision among sons as well as daughters is naturally a factor of creating small parcels of land, which is often insignificant to yield as needed. This renders the way of thinking to sell the agricultural land and invest the earned money elsewhere.

Table 12.2 Land price before and after the commencement of RED activities Municipality/Union

Kanchan

Average land price (BDT/katha) Prior to real-estate activities (Thousand)

After commencement of real-estate activities (Thousand)

33–42

400–500

Duptara

13–14

170–200

Satgram

25–26

170–250

Bholaba

33–42

300–500

Amdia

33–42

130–170

198

12.3.3.5 Transfer the Ownership of Disputed Lands When a land-associated conflict (multiple shareholders, common boundary problem, etc.) is not likely to be mitigated, the current occupiers tend to transfer the ownership of the land to someone else to arrive at a safe side. Most of the conflicts are often familial. When developer companies buy that type of land and declare themselves as the new owner, nearly each of all disputes ends. As the claimants are mostly farmers, not much wealthy and influential, they believe the company is too powerful (politically and/or financially) to combat and become reluctant to claim for their share. On the other hand, the sellers benefit in two ways: they receive a good amount of money in return and avoid the hurdles arisen from the disagreements. 12.3.3.6 Investment in Non-farm Activities (NFA) NFA are no longer “marginal” in villages. Compared to the participation (66%), considerable labor time (approximately 93%) is allocated to the NFA resulting in higher income shares (87%). In other words, the relative returns from NFA are higher compared to own farming (Mahmud 2012). This is very much consistent with the findings from study area. Small and medium farmers of all of the four Unions are reluctant in farming as it is marginally profitable. They have already started to consider the non-farm employment as the main source of income for a household rather than a supplementary source. Some educated small farmers were engaged in innovative high-earning NFA, who invested money from selling a part of land. Again, for those villagers who are unskilled or semi-skilled, the incentives of going abroad have widened. Going abroad for working is very attractive among the villagers as the foreign remittances can radically upgrade their life standard. Fewer yields from agricultural production reinforcing with these above-mentioned facts are motivating farmers to invest in NFAs and in some cases, it is the root cause of selling land to the real estate company.

B. D. Ayon et al.

12.3.3.7 Selling Land to Meet the Expenses Small or medium farmers do not have cash capital but their farmland. Saving is not a very popular scheme to them and if exercised by someone, the amount is not that significant. Commercial bank loans are also not well targeted to the poor. Though sometimes microcredit programs prevail are often not enough or functional in some crisis context. Farmers have found their land as only the potential source of capital to meet the emergency demand of cash money. In the study area, many farmers sold their land to the developer company to manage the cash money for their daughter’s marriage or to bear medical expenses during severe sickness of any family members. To improve the dwelling and standard of lifestyle may not necessarily be a reason in alone for selling land, but reinforces the decision-making along with the other reasons. Rural Bangladesh is changing gradually. To enjoy a better life standard, medium and large farmers are now willing to improve their dwellings from katcha (made of mud, bamboo, straw, etc.) to semi-pucca (made of tin shed roof, RCC wall, wood, etc.) or pucca (RCC or Steel structures). It provides them an upgrade in social status, as well as a means of withstanding natural hazards (e.g., storm, flood).

12.3.4 Institutional Issues 12.3.4.1 Preparation of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) and Its Consequences After the gazette documentation of DAP in 2010, Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK)— Dhaka Development Authority—banned several housing projects (around 77 projects) within its jurisdiction due to non-conformity with the DMDP (Sarkar 2011). Such strong move by the Government was successful to cease the illegal housing projects inside the DMDP area. However, lack of such proper planning and authoritative role outside the DMDP area has been

12

Determinants of Land Use Change in Urban Fringes …

attracting the real estate agencies for new projects. Consequently, the RED projects are flourishing in the study area, as it is located just outside the eastern jurisdiction of RAJUK.

12.3.4.2 Governing Body The permission issue has become very crucial with rapid and enormous growth of real estate activities in the periphery of Dhaka city. Government has also planned and already taken some initiatives to develop the peripheral areas into satellite towns to release the pressure on the capital. However, several issues have arisen at the same time with the private initiative of RED projects outside the DMDP area. Some of these projects are even unauthorized as well as unplanned. “Real Estate Development and Management Act’ 2010” empowered Municipality as the authority to sanction project permission within its jurisdiction through inspecting all conditions, clearance certificates and documents as per the “Private Housing Project Land Development Rule, 2004”. According to the “Local Government (Pourashava) Act, 2009”, all of the Municipalities is subjected to prepare the master plan for its jurisdiction area within 5 years of enforcement of the law. However, the municipalities are approving RED projects before the accomplishment of Master Plan preparation because of the subtle flaw in the law. According to the section 4-2(d) of “Real Estate Development and Management Act, 2010” except the area of any concerned “Town Development Authority” (i.e., RAJUK, CDA, KDA, RDA), concerned “Cantonment Board” and Municipality, the National Housing Authority (NHA) will be responsible for the permission process. This renders that the RED projects in four unions of the study area are liable to NHA for the approvals of development projects. RED companies need to be registered first and then their specific projects need to be approved by the NHA. However, the NHA has very little or no regulation over these development activities in the concerned area. Again, there is no comprehensive planning document (e.g., Development Plan, Master Plan) for Union Parishad area to

199

follow and approve the development activities by NHA. Moreover, NHA does not have any setup or personnel at union level. These obscure and complicated processes of project approval along with weak authoritative role have paved the way of attracting opportunistic developers in the study area.

12.3.4.3 Limitations of Legal Administration According to the “Local Government (Pourashava) Act 2009”, a Pourashava can permit only those projects within its jurisdiction that are compatible with the Master Plan of the corresponding Pourashava. However, with the “Private Housing Projects and Land Development Act of 2004”, Pourashava has been empowered to give permission to the real estate projects within its jurisdiction. As a result, a number of projects received approval, although Master Plan has not yet been completed for any administrative entity lying in the study area. In some cases, the concerned Union or Pourashava has provided No Objection Certificate (NOC) to the RED companies, which has no legal basis. Moreover, some opportunistic RED companies misuse this NOC by claiming it as the approval of the project by local government authority. Among 33 identified RED projects, information regarding the development company’s registration or project approval could not be found for 23 projects. It concludes that the National Housing Authority of this country is failing to exercise its regulating power to control these unauthorized development projects within its jurisdiction.

12.4

Conclusion

Physical expansion of Dhaka is bringing on an unprecedented upheaval the way it is grasping the agricultural land and wetland. This phenomenon is also prevalent outside the DMDP, where the absence of stringent planning jurisdiction and perplexity in authoritative role are expediting the conversion of the valuable farmlands and water bodies into built-up area. This study has unfolded the scenario for a small

200

eastern fringe area immediately outside DMDP. Trend analysis of land cover change discloses that the average loss of vegetation and water bodies in the study area is as dreadfully high as 286 hectares and 114.62 hectares per year (0.79 hectares and 0.31 hectares per day), respectively. Several RED projects have direct contribution to this loss, as they are filling these valuable wetlands and farmlands. In the study area, there are total 33 RED projects on a large chunk of farmlands and wetlands. Existence of Purbachal New Town in a close proximity has an obvious inducement for the increased concentration of the projects in the study area. Qualitative research based on the issues associated with land use change reveals that the local people are willingly selling their farmlands or wetlands due to the lack of return from these resources. Land transfer process from the local owners to the RED companies is being held in a conventional legitimate way with a very few instances of discrepancies. However, a somewhat less comforting upshot is that among 29 companies, only nine RED companies have their registration completed by concerned authority. There is no regulation or supervision of relevant monitoring authority on the rest of the companies and their corresponding projects. If the development continues to grow in such unplanned and slapdash manner, the resultant consequence could be a great loss of farmlands and wetlands placing the future citizens in an immense jeopardy with the food and water security.

References Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Statistics and Informatics Division, Ministry of Planning (2011) Population and housing census: 2011. Community Report, Dhaka Zila. http://www.bbs.gov.bd/WebTestApplication/userfiles/ Image/Census2011/Dhaka/Dhaka/Dhaka%20at%20a %20glance%20General.pdf. Accessed 23 Jan 2013 Bangladesh Institute of Planners. (2008) Detail Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka: Shattering the vision of DMDP. The Daily Star. http://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail67825. Accessed 7 June 2012 Castillo JJ (2009) Snowball sampling. Experiment resources. http://www.experiment-resources.com/ snowball-sampling.html. Accessed 26 May 2013

B. D. Ayon et al. Deng C, Wu C (2013) A spatially adaptive spectral mixture analysis for mapping subpixel urban impervious surface distribution. Remote Sens Environ 133:62–70 Firl GJ (2010) Lesson 8: mosaicking and clipping landsat data. Tutorial conducted from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. http://ibis. colostate.edu/WebContent/WS/ColoradoView/ TutorialsDownloads/CO_RS_Tutorial8.pdf. Accessed 19 Feb 2012 Firl GJ, Carter L (2011) Lesson 10: calculating vegetation indices from Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+Data. Tutorial conducted from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. http://ibis. colostate.edu/webcontent/ws/coloradoview/ tutorialsdownloads/co_rs_tutorial10.pdf. Accessed 19 Feb 2012 GLCF Global Land Cover Facility: Earth Science Data Interface. http://glcfapp.glcf.umd.edu/ He C, P Shi, D Xie, Y Zhao (2010) Improving the normalized difference built-up index to map urban built-up areas using a semiautomatic segmentation approach. Remote Sens Lett 1(4):213–221. http:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01431161. 2010.481681. Accessed 5 May 2012 IRIN (2012) Bangladesh: Dhaka’s shrinking wetlands raise disaster risks. In: Humanitarian news and analysis. http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95671/ BANGLADESH-Dhaka-s-shrinking-wetlands-raisedisaster-risks. Accessed 21 June 2012 Islam I (2009) Wetlands of dhaka metro area: a study from social, economic and institutional perspective. A H Development Publishing House, Dhaka Jensen JR (2000) Remote sensing of the environment: an earth resource perspective. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, p 544 Khan S (2009) Fast depletion of arable land: tasks ahead. In: The financial express. http://print.thefinancial express-bd.com/old/2009/05/24/67447.html. Accessed 14 Jun 2012 Khan AR (2011) Move to protect arable land now in cold storage. In: The morning bell. https:// themorningbellbd.com/move-to-protect-arable-landnow-in-cold/. Accessed 07 Jun 2013 Mahmud MA (2007) Corruption in plan permission process in RAJUK: a study of violations and proposals. http://www.ti-bangladesh.org/research/ES_Rajuk_ Eng.pdf. Accessed 23 Jan 2013 Mahmud A (2012) Non-farm employment in rural Bangladesh. In: The financial express. http://print. thefinancialexpress-bd.com/old/more.php?news_id= 125132&date=2012-03-31. Accessed 27 Jan 2013 RAJUK Ministry of Housing and Public Works (2010) Preparation of detailed area plan for Dhaka Metropolitan Development Planning (DMDP) area: group A-E, Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha. RAJUK, Dhaka Sarkar A (2011) Over 70 housing projects illegal: HC asks Govt. to Demolish structures of those in 30 days. The Daily Star, p 1. http://www.thedailystar.net/

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newDesign/news-details.php?nid=189204. Accessed 26 Jan 2013 Shubho MTH, Islam SR, Ayon BD, Islam I (2015) An improved semiautomatic segmentation approach to land cover mapping for identification of land cover change and trend. Int J Environ Sci Technol 12 (8):2593–2602 SPARRSO Bangladesh Space Research and Remote Sensing Organization. http://www.sparrso.gov.bd/ USGS. United States Geological Survey. https://www. usgs.gov/

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WRC (2000) Women’s rights in muslim family law in Pakistan. Special bulletin of Women’s Resource Center (WRC). Arqam Printers, Lahore Xu H (2007) Extraction of urban built-up land features from landsat imagery using a thematic-oriented index combination technique. Photogramm Eng Remote Sens 72(12):1381–1391. https://www.asprs.org/a/ publications/pers/2007journal/december/2007_dec_ 1381-1391.pdf. Accessed 27 Apr 2012

13

Consequences of Unplanned Growth: A Case Study of Metropolitan Hyderabad Shah Manzoor Alam and Kalpana Markandey

Abstract

This study focuses on the growth of metropolitan Hyderabad from 1971 to the present time. It identifies the factors which caused its massive growth and created multifaceted, complicated, and chaotic problems which are now defying solution. Hyderabad, since its foundation, has retained its status as the capital city despite the change in its territorial boundaries. While it was the capital of Andhra Pradesh, it saw a huge influx of migrants from Coastal Andhra, leading to a change in its demography, growth pattern, and morphology. In the later part of the last century, Hyderabad expanded as its service and quaternary sector expanded. As the city expands to surrounding regions and the population rapidly increases, the challenges of managing Hyderabad have grown manifold in last few years. Basic infrastructural supports such as housing, water supply, power distribution, transport facilities, waste and sewage treatment for the city are still limited within the municipal boundary. Infrastructure related to social development, such as education, health care support, housing facilities for the poor, sports, and other recreation facilities are

S. M. Alam
K. Markandey (&) Department of Geography, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India e-mail: [email protected]

not up to the standard and need larger investment and planning efforts. This unplanned growth and uncontrolled economic activities and residential colonies have created manifold planning and development problems. It is a daunting task to find solutions to the problems which plague this city. Keywords











Infilling Infrastructure Migration Slums and squatter settlements Spontaneous growth

13.1

Introduction

Unplanned growth of urban areas manifests itself in the form of imbalance in physical growth, where certain parts of the city are out of synchrony with the rest of the city and this is displayed in convoluted street pattern, nondescript houses, crowded activity spaces and patterns, disease and pollution besides others. Spontaneous growth, both in terms of demography and areal extent, impacts the sustainability of resources and infrastructure in the city as well as the economy and society of the rural periphery leading to vulnerability at both ends of the scale. The peri-urban area registers a major increase in population owing to low cost of land, a basic level of infrastructure and easy accessibility as it is close to the source areas of most migrants

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_13

203

204

who are from the adjacent rural areas. This phenomenon is more manifest in the cities of the developing countries which have a large in-migration into the urban areas. Impacts of this on the health and hygiene of the city are all too evident to be ruled out. High density urban area had grown during 1989–2011 by encroaching into other land use classes. The urban growth has also affected water resources both, qualitatively and quantitatively in the region. The transformation of other land use types into urban area dynamically continued in the Northeast and Southern parts of the city. In the Northeast direction, the urban growth was mostly due to growth in industrial and residential area and in Southern part, mostly due to residential growth (Wakode et al. 2013). Infilling in different sectors of the city have brought in diverse types of people belonging to varying ethnic and income groups. While those in the western part are well off as they are either the relatively affluent people from coastal Andhra or those employed in the IT sector who are well paid, the other parts of the city have witnessed migration of mostly middle-class people from the districts of Telangana. For instance, areas in the northern part have attracted migrants from the neighboring Medak and Nizamabad Districts. In the east and south east, most of the migrants have moved in from the adjacent Nalgonda district. Quite often, the settlement pattern seems to follow the roads that radiate out from the city and connect with the district headquarters. In view of this large movement of migrants from the neighboring districts, the peri-urban zone of Hyderabad has seen a large increase in population and built-up area in the past 40–50 years. “The urban growth in Hyderabad—the IT capital of India—based on the analysis of spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the urban land use changes …. through remote sensing data of the period 1975–2009 shows a significant urban growth with an increase in impervious surface from 0.17–13.55%. Gradient based spatial metrics analysis reveals the tendency of sprawl at outskirts and the clumped or aggregated growth in core areas” (Ramachandra et al. 2013).

S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

The spatial expansion of the city to peri-urban regions and the rapid population increase has meant that the challenges of managing the city have grown tremendously in recent years—resulting in the development of unplanned urban sprawl. The existing infrastructure cannot keep up with the increasing demand, which in turn brings stratum-specific implications for Hyderabad (Das et al. 2014). As the city expands to surrounding regions and the population rapidly increases, the challenges of managing Hyderabad have grown manifold in last few years. Basic infrastructural supports such as housing, water supply, power distribution, transport facilities, waste and sewage treatment for the city are still limited within the municipal boundary. Infrastructure related to social development, such as education, health care support, housing facilities for the poor, sports and other recreation facilities are not up to the standard and need larger investment and planning efforts (Das 2015a).

The peri-urban area also provides a lucrative option to the intra-city migrants who migrate from the relatively high value pockets close to the Central Business District (CBD) of Hyderabad after disposing off their properties at a higher cost and opt to live in the peri-urban areas where land values are relatively low. In addition, these areas are not as congested as those close to the CBD and hence offer a more open natural environment. A unique feature in the morphology of Hyderabad is the consistent shifting of its Main Business Centre or Central Business District (CBD) with the shift in the residential areas of the elite who hold the power of the purse and are the consumers of luxury goods. It was only in the 1990s and onward, with the increasing concentration of high income groups in the Banjara Hills and Jubilee hills that the Main Business Centre or the Central Business District (CBD) was initially located in Begumpet—Somajiguda and then decisively moved toward Banjara Hills along Road Nos. 1, 3, 10, and 12. The intensity of land use and high rise buildings are marked in this sector (Alam and Markandey 2016). Thus, a shifting CBD in the direction of the movement of elite and a shift in the middle-class population mark the intra-city dynamics of Hyderabad.

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Consequences of Unplanned Growth …

13.2

205

Demographics, Growth, and Expansion of Hyderabad

13.2.1 Demographics Hyderabad, since its foundation, as stated earlier, has retained its status as the capital city despite the change in its territorial boundaries. It is now the capital of the newly formed state of Telangana in the southern part of India and has always enjoyed a prime position as the capital of Andhra Pradesh and before that as the capital of the Feudal state of Hyderabad which was ruled by the Nizams besides being a major city of India and a metropolitan center of international repute in the post-independence era. It is currently passing through an interesting phase in the evolution of its status from the capital of a linguistically united state of Andhra Pradesh to that of the state of Telangana, after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh on June 2, 2014. Hyderabad is the fourth largest city of India and the sixth largest urban agglomeration of the country. With a population of 9.5 million in 2017 (Table 13.1), it has grown consistently and rapidly over the past decades. Increase in the population of Hyderabad is associated with rapid migration from adjoining rural areas and from other states of India and due to the annexation of many peripheral villages and towns by the

expanding boundaries of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) in the recent past. Rapid intra-state rural to urban migration is making for an increase in the number and population of slums as well because the Municipal Corporation cannot provide the basic amenities of housing, water supply, power and sewerage. Slums in turn make for an increase in informal activities in the city. In contrast migrants from other states which account for 24% of the city population, are employed in the sophisticated tertiary functions like Information Technology, advanced research and educational centers which have a large proportion of the working population mainly in the upper and middle-income groups. They live in well served gated communities or can afford to live in better residential areas provided with basic amenities in this city. “Hyderabad attracts migrants from various linguistic areas and are, therefore, relatively more diverse than most other districts of the country” (Thakur and Parai 1993). During 1981–2001, inter-district migration, however, has contributed more to the decadal growth than the other types of migrants in Hyderabad (Iyer et al. 2007). Hyderabad catapulted to their present status as modern metropolises of national and international significance in the 1990s. It is linked to the global economy through firms that develop

Table 13.1 Growth of population of Hyderabad: 1970–2017 Year

Population

Growth rate (%)

Population increase

1970 1975

1,748,000

–

–

2,086,000

19.30%

338,000

1980

2,487,000

19.20%

401,000

1985

3,209,000

29.00%

722,000

1990

4,193,000

30.70%

984,000

1995

4,825,000

15.10%

632,000

2000

5,445,000

12.80%

620,000

2005

6,403,000

17.60%

958,000

2010

7,578,000

18.40%

1,175,000

2015

8,944,000

18.00%

1,366,000

2017

9,489,000

6.10%

545,000

Source Adapted from http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/hyderabad-population/

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software and hardware, call centers that meet the needs of firms located in the United States and in Europe (Chacko 2007). “No other city has been hailed as much by the media as Hyderabad as symbolizing an information-based economy exporting to global markets and drawing on high quality professionals and technology as Hyderabad” (Shaw 1999). The city is physically expanding much beyond the precincts of the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad especially toward the northeast, northwest, and the east. Most of the expansion is along the major highways and has been in the nature of unprompted growth to begin with. Areas of relatively high population density seem to be radiating out from the city center toward the outlying areas; some of the localities beyond the old MCH boundary portray a density of more than 38,000 persons per km2

Fig. 13.1 Source of Data Census of India 2011

S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

which is quite remarkable (Fig. 13.1). This is notwithstanding the fact that many parts within the old MCH limits have population densities about 97,000. Figure 13.2 about the distribution of population also depicts a similar picture. The population seems to have spread out from the core city more in the northeast, northwest, and the east. Most often the population distribution pattern seems to follow the line of transportation which is reflected in the road network pattern as the major roads that radiate out from the city seem to pull the settlements in their direction. This is clearly highlighted in Fig. 13.2. Though the bulk of the population is still living within the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) limits (Pre-2007 city limits), its rapid expansion outside the MCH in the north, northeast, and north-west are notably marked.

13

Consequences of Unplanned Growth …

207

Fig. 13.2 Source of Data Census of India 2011

The rapid growth of metropolitan suburbs is the most striking feature of spatial transformation in South Asian cities. Reduced carrying capacities of these metropolitan areas are pushing business and people out of their urban core, relocating them in the immediate suburbs and peripheries. Such relocation of industry and commerce or migrant residents are changing the very look and feel of the surrounding villages resulting into emergence of a zone of transition or peri-urban as it is popularly known, wherein urban and rural development processes meet, mix, and inter-react (Narain 2010, in Banerjee et al. 2014). Housing Density which portrays the number of houses per km2 (Fig. 13.3) also corroborates what has been said above about the expansion of the city in the northeast and north west. It is these areas which have registered a relatively high

housing density in the range of 3190–6607 per km2 in several continuous stretches making for a corridor like development in the northeastern and northwestern parts of the city.

13.2.2 Spatial Expansion The areal extent of the city increased from 175 km2 in 1971–650 km2 in 2011—an increase of more than 270%. The built-up area is clearly displayed in Fig. 13.4. While in the periods prior to the 1970s, the city expanded due to industrialization in the northeastern and northwestern parts of the city, subsequently because of the formation of Andhra Pradesh state, migrants moved in large numbers from coastal Andhra. They settled within MCH and even outside the municipal area but concentrated mainly in the

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S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

Fig. 13.3 Source of Data Census of India 2011

northwestern, northeastern, and eastern sectors. In the post globalization era—after 1990—the expansion has been more perceptible in the western part where most of the leading firms with Information Technology are located. The new growth corridors in the outer limits of the city have emerged in all the four regions: in north Hyderabad, these include Medchal Road, Alwal, Hakimpet, Kompally; in south, these are Shamshabad, Maheshwaram, Timmapur, and Mansapally; in east, Ghatkesar, Pocharam, Bongulur, and Cherlapally; while in west, the areas include Moinabad, Tellapur, Isnapur, Kokapet and Narsingi and Vattinagulapally (Sharma 2008).

In the context of global competition, the peri-urban appears to be a preferential zone for the location of specialized infrastructure: thus, for instance, the creation of growth centers, especially Information Technology or

Biotechnology hubs, at the portals of the major metropolises—as exemplified by the cases of Hyderabad and Chennai (Dupont 2005). The formation of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) on April 16, 2007 has also significantly contributed to this phenomenal increase in the population of metropolitan Hyderabad merging 12 municipalities and 8 g (village) panchayats with the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH). The population of Hyderabad increased by more than 2 million with this one move. The municipalities included are L. B. Nagar, Gaddi annaram, Uppal Kalan, Malkajgiri, Kapra, Alwal, Qutubullapur, Kukatpally, Serilingampalle, Rajendranagar, Ramchachandrapuram, and Patancheru. These municipalities are in Rangareddy and Medak districts. The panchayats are Shamshabad, Satamarai, Jallapalli,

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Consequences of Unplanned Growth …

209

Fig. 13.4 Source Survey of India Topo-sheet No. 56K/7NE, 56K/7SE, 56K/11NW, 56K/11SW and Google Image

Mamdipalli, Mankhal, Almasguda, Sardanagar, and Ravirala. Large swaths of territory have thus been enveloped by Hyderabad. Their levels of infrastructure and development, however, are much below those of pre-2007 Hyderabad (which comprised just the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad—MCH). An expansion of this scale in terms of both area and population demand better civic amenities with planned development. Otherwise, there will be a growing burden on infrastructure and environmental degradation, more slums and homelessness, social segregation, poverty, and marginalization.

13.2.3 Information Technology and Growth Because of the phenomenal growth in the industrial and tertiary sectors of economy such as advanced educational and research institutes and Information Technology, the hinterland of Hyderabad has assumed global dimension. There are 1200 units of Information Technology which employ over 300,000 skilled workers. The service area of IT reaches far beyond the borders of India. Known as the land of pearls, Hyderabad, India’s commercial base was once centered on

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textiles, handicrafts, gems and jewelry. Hyderabad today boasts of a different type of prosperity: “Information Technology (IT), IT-enabled Services (ITeS), biotechnology and the service sectors. These areas have grown by leaps and bounds in the city, which is witnessing widespread commercial development across its landscape. Tax benefits, subsidies, ease of conversion of land use and flexible floor space index (FSI) norms have acted as incentives that have spurred growth in the city’s economy” (Bakaya 2008). “Hyderabad has taken up a number of what are called ‘Cyber Extension’ initiatives in the country” (Ramachandraiah 2003). “Hyderabad is India’s ubercool Cyberabad. But the dazzling growth …… has not just brought in dollars and malls, but also large-scale migration, traffic jams, pollution, creaking infrastructure and discontent” (Mahalingam 2007). “Cyberabad provided a brand image for Hyderabad, showcasing the latter as a successful high-tech destination and pitching it as a serious competitor to Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India” (Das 2015b). “Hyderabad has various reasons to become an ideal city to multi-national enterprises for investment like: • Centrally located: Hyderabad is well connected by air, rail, and road and is just 2 h flying distance from any major metro in the country. • City Quality of life: All the advantages of a metropolitan center, without the congestion, and all the mega-city comforts at small-town costs. • Low operation costs: Low real-estate prices as compared to any other big city or metro in India. • Rich manpower: Hyderabad is rich in literate and well-trained IT manpower. Hyderabad is governed by the most explicitly industry-friendly administration in India today. Due to various reforms taken up by the government of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad has attracted IT and pharmaceutical industries to setup their work centers and in a short period of time,

S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

Hyderabad has evolved as an important IT center on national and international level” (Nayak and Keskar 2014). “A new era of industrial development and globalization began for Hyderabad when the city became biotechnology hub and so on. Built on the firm foundations of agrarian change, fostered in part by the munificence of ‘state capitalism’ and rentier capital, further boosted by the arrival of national and global business, Hyderabad has emerged as a major business center today” (Baru 2007). Each successive complex in Hi-tec City seems to outdo the other in terms of the area dedicated to office space. For instance, the Cyber Pearl complex boasts of 500,000 square feet, Cyber Gateway contains 866,000 square feet, and the Ascendas V complex contains a total of 1,282,950 square feet of office space in the five buildings located within the complex. These figures do not include the lifestyle options provided within these complexes. In comparison, office complexes and consumption sites in other parts of Hyderabad are a mere shadow of these mammoth complexes. Other distinguishing parameters such as the amount of surveillance, superior infrastructural facilities make these spaces much sought after. On the surface, the space offers a wide array of not only mammoth office complexes, but also malls, hotels and other consumption avenues to cater to a certain stratum among those who work in the area (Sam 2012). As a utopia for innovation, this megaknowledge-enclave houses IT firms, research centers and educational institutions, along with gated residential housing, shopping malls and lifestyle stores for engineers, scientists, and other knowledge professionals (Das and Lam 2016). Today, Hyderabad is one of India’s leading hubs of the knowledge-based industries. It is currently home to many of the most prominent informational technology companies, both domestic and foreign, including TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, as well as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. Hence, it is of no surprise that Hyderabad is one of India’s most globally connected cities whose global-city aspirations are never veiled (Das et al. 2014).

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Consequences of Unplanned Growth …

Hyderabad also vies for the position of the cyber capital of India with the rapid strides that the Information Technology sector has been making in this city. Apart from the Indian headquarters of Microsoft and Facebook, it has the famed International School of Business (ISB) which is accredited internationally in Pennsylvania and the UK, it is the international market for several products like those of IKEA, etc., who have opened the first Indian store in Hyderabad. “Hyderabad has established itself as a center for sunrise industries such as Information Technology and accounts for 10% of IT exports of the country” (Iyer et al. 2007).

13.3

Growth of Slums

Hyderabad has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of slums as also the population of slums (Figs. 13.5 and 13.6). The rapid pace of urbanization and associated rural to urban migration is not without its blemishes and it has brought in patches of decadence in the city. As in any other city of a developing country, this environmental degradation finds expression in the rapid spread of slums and squatter settlements. The 2011 Census data states an appalling increase of 264% in slum population in and around Hyderabad. The municipality has 0.5 million slum households with 2.2 million dwellers and 30% of the city population lives in slums. The increase in number of slums shows

the degradation of housing for the poor slum dwellers. If the growth of slums continues at this rate, it will lead to a situation where a large section of the population will become development deprived (The Times of India 2016). The trend lines of the number and population of slums have shown a near correspondence with the polynomial and linear curves. The upward incline is quite sharp in both the cases (Figs. 13.5 and 13.6).

13.3.1 Pressure on Infrastructure The burgeoning population makes demands on the basic infrastructure of the city. These include the liquid waste disposal systems like sewerage and drainage networks, solid waste disposal systems, water supply sources, and transport facilities besides others. The impacts are witnessed in the form of increasing pollution, overcrowding, insanitary living conditions besides many more.

13.3.1.1 Sewerage The Sewerage network of Hyderabad was initiated in 1931 on the recommendations of M. Visvesvaraya for a population of 4,68,000 and an area of 54 km2. In the 1990s, additions were made in the central part of Hyderabad and also pipes with a wider diameter were substituted for narrower ones in some localities. The sewerage disposal system of both the core city (MCH area)

HYDERABAD NUMBER OF SLUMS 1962-2016 Number of Slums

Fig. 13.5 Source adapted from Markandey, Kalpana, Urban Squalor as a Facet of Urban Landscape: Environmental Issues from Hyderabad, Final Report, ISRO RESPOND Project, February 2005

211

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600

y = 25.668x - 50315 R² = 0.9914

Number of Slums Linear (Number of Slums)

400 200 0 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Years

Poly. (Number of Slums)

212

2.5

PopulaƟon (in Millions)

Fig. 13.6 Source adapted from Markandey, Kalpana, Urban Squalor as a Facet of Urban Landscape: Environmental Issues from Hyderabad, Final Report, ISRO RESPOND Project, February 2005

S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

HYDERABAD POPULATION OF SLUMS 1962-2016 y = 0.0384x - 75.298 R² = 0.9717

2

PopulaƟon of Slums (in Millions)

1.5 1

Linear (PopulaƟon of Slums (in Millions))

0.5 0 1940 -0.5

Poly. (PopulaƟon of Slums (in Millions)) 1960

where it is inadequate and the peripheral parts where it is nearly negligible need a major overhaul. With increase in population, slums and industries, the pollutants let out into the sewerage have increased. At times, chemical effluents are let out by the industries and these go on to pollute the groundwater. Due to lack of a proper sewerage network, nearly 75% of sewage that is produced by the city is redirected into the storm water drains or the lakes. This is more so with the commercial complexes and shops which are unauthorizedly letting the sewage into the storm water drains. Higher concentration of Ammonia, Chloride, and Fluoride was observed which demonstrated the leakages from sewer networks into groundwater. The rising concentration of heavy metals (such as Fe, Mn, and Cu) along with Pb indicated the industrial pollution in this region. The presence of Nitrates and coliform bacteria indicated the pollution from residential sewage network. In 2011, facilities were available for only 80% of population in the central part of the city and about 60% in the suburbs (Wakode 2016). The Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB) needs to lay more pipes to carry the sewerage or extend the size of existing pipes to enable carrying of enhanced sewerage. To make the issue more complex, garbage is also dumped in the drains, at times the sewerage lines and drinking water lines which lie in close proximity get corroded and leak into each other. Thus, the problems

1980

2000

2020

Years

associated with escalating demands on sewerage are multifarious in nature. The problem of overflowing drainage is alarming. It adds to the woes of city residents during the rainy season when a mix of rain water and drainage clog the city roads. Streets witness inundation that hampers traffic and causes delays and breakdowns on roads.

13.3.1.2 Solid Waste Disposal The expanding population, increasing sprawl of the city and rising consumerism account for a huge increase in the amount of solid waste generated. Residences, commercial areas, hotels, and hospitals are vital generators of waste. The GHMC is supposed to collect, treat, and dispose of the waste. More than 5,000 tons of waste is apparently generated per day in Hyderabad. The waste is not segregated at the source, despite the insistence and incentives of the GHMC by way of cash awards to individuals and localities that segregate their waste properly. A very small part of the waste is treated and the rest is dumped in open landfills which leads to pollution of various kinds, threatening the health and hygiene of the people. Greenhouse gases are emitted at all stages in the collection and transfer process of waste. Hyderabad has 3 collection points at Yousufguda, Imlibun and Lower Tank Bund, which are hubs of busy activity with multiple garbage trucks going back and forth dumping and picking up waste….. Waste from all the three collection points eventually

13

Consequences of Unplanned Growth … gets collected and dumped into the landfill at Jawahar Nagar. Earlier there was a landfill in Autonagar, which needed a reprieve and Jawahar Nagar came to the rescue……. Though they are called ‘landfills’, essentially they are just dumping grounds. A landfill is scientifically constructed to reduce greenhouse gases and is lined to stop leachate waste liquid in this case from entering the land or groundwater. However, the ‘landfill’ at Jawahar Nagar is a dumping ground, which is covered with soil from time to time (Dandapani 2015).

The waste is segregated by waste collectors who are either contract employees of the municipal corporation or are engaged by resident welfare associations or individual households. Most often the waste is insanitary and at times hazardous, including untreated medical waste. They work in the most unprotected conditions exposing themselves to a lot of vulnerabilities. Most often the sieve out recyclable material such as paper, bottles, etc., from mounds of waste and sell it to the scrap dealers to make some extra money. At times garbage is just thrown out of the house by the residents or dumped outside the compound wall, making for public nuisance and unsightliness besides polluting the environment by means of leaching of the soil. Burning of garbage is common practice. This again causes environmental pollution and nuisance. At times garbage finds its way into the water bodies including river Musi which was once a source of drinking water. A number of vegetables and fruits including greens and water melons which find their way into the food chain of the city residents are grown in the dry bed of the Musi with the help of this water which is polluted. “The Musi River, a tributary of the Krishna River, flows through the city of Hyderabad and has become extremely polluted with discharges from the city. The scarcity of freshwater has encouraged wastewater irrigated agriculture, ranging from cereal to perishable crops, within and around the city boundaries, despite the health and environmental risks” (Ensink et al. 2007 in Gumma et al. 2011, 2017). “Heavily polluted water is used for irrigation, not as a planned means to address water scarcity but due to widespread pollution of existing irrigation

213

sources” (Van Rooijen et al. 2010). Milk from cows which drink from these polluted water bodies also forms part of the food chain. These substances have an adverse effect on the health of the residents.

13.3.1.3 Water Supply “The Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board, responsible for the supply of potable water, provided 355 million gallons per day(MGD) compared to the 611 MGD needed in 2015. It is estimated that demand will rise to 1,204 MGD by 2031, but supply will only fulfill half that amount. Following the formation of Andhra Pradesh State in 1956, schemes were taken up to augment water supply to the twin cities to meet the growing demand. The city, without any perennial river, is largely dependent on the lakes and tanks for drinking water purposes. Today, Hyderabad city’s typical drinking water need is around 320–340 MGD drawn from six sources…… The 2011 census reports that 93% of households have access to treated water supply in Hyderabad” (Government of India 2012–2013). The Osman Sagar Lake and Manjeera Phase I and Phase II have been meeting the drinking water needs of the city. Of late, keeping in view the increased demand and shrinking supply of water from traditional sources, water is being brought from Krishna and Godavari rivers also (Table 13.2). While the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board supplies drinking water to the localities in the city for two hours on alternate days from surface water sources, bore wells have also been dug up at various places to meet the water requirements for domestic purposes. These have at times led to depletion of the groundwater table in certain parts of the city. “The depth to water levels in general varies between 5 and 20 m and average water level is 12 m. The depth to water level ranges from 3.30 m (Manikeswarinagar) to 56.3 m in Filmnagar” (Government of India 2012–2013). “About 11% of the households in Hyderabad are dependent on tanker water

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S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

Table 13.2 Sources of drinking water in Hyderabad: 2015 Sources

Normal drawls (in MGD)

Present drawls (in MGD)

System mode

Water treatment plant

Osmansagar

25

0.00

Gravity

Asifnagar filter beds

Himayathsagar

15

0.00

Gravity

Miralam filter beds

Singur

75

75.00

Gravity/Pumping

Peddapur PH-3,4

Manjira

45

30.00

Gravity/Pumping

Rajampet, Kalabgoor

Akkampally (Krishna ph1,2,3)

270

226

3 stage pumping

Kodandlapur filter beds

SriPadaYellampally (Godavari)

86.00

56.00

Pumping

Godavari

Total

516

387

Source adapted from https://www.hyderabadwater.gov.in/en/index.php/about/source

supply. Out of this, 46% are dependent on private tankers” (Wakode 2011). There were nearly 932 water tanks in Hyderabad in 1973, the number decreased to 834 in 1996, leading to a reduction in area under water bodies from 118 to 110 km2 (Ramachandraiah and Prasad 2004). Some of the lakes like Masab Tank, Nallakunta, etc., have become extinct due to encroachment of built-up area. Increase in built-up area has also accounted for a lower recharge of groundwater and hence a remarkable decrease in the supply of water to some of the major reservoirs of the city apart from a lowering of the groundwater table and hence a plummeting of water level in the wells. “In the 1970s, as Hyderabad city began to grow a number of new physical and social processes set in gradually leading to fragmentation and erosion of the system of waterbodies. In particular, unrestrained disposal of industrial effluents, sewerage and municipal waste into waterbodies, encroachment by real estate interests and marginalization of established customary land use and stewardship practices in the last three decades have led to the virtual disappearance of many of the waterbodies with the result that out of the nearly 500 waterbodies that lay within the core city area, the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority could identify only 169 which could potentially be restored in 2001” (Maringanti 2011).

There are many lakes in this region but due to obliviousness and pollution, most of them have become unusable. To fulfill the increasing demand of water, the city has to import water from far away sources. In 2011, the demand for water supply was 2057MLD and they were able to only supply 1546MLD of water via piped network from five different sources and 114MLD was provided from groundwater. There are no fixed rules or accounting about the actual groundwater abstraction from wells (Wakode 2016). “The high draft in dense urban agglomerations has resulted in drying up of shallow hand pumps (Miyapur, Kukatpalli, Chanda Nagar, Dilsukhnagar, Sanath Nagar, Madhapur, etc.). The depth to water levels are shallow adjacent to the surface water bodies (Lower Tankbund, Kapra, Safilguda, etc.). The water levels are moderate at (5–7 m) at peripheral areas and semi-urban agglomerations. The water levels are depleted over the years at many areas like Kothapet, Moulali, Kukatpalli, Boinpalli, Aghapura, Erragadda, Bashherbagh, Langar house, Jubilee hills, Begumpet, Koti, West Maredpalli, Gudimalkapur, Musheerabad, Sanathnagar, Picket, and Madhapur (Government of India 2013). Insufficient rainfall, dwindling number and stretches of lakes, reducing water levels in tanks and withdrawal of additional water from borewells have depleted the groundwater levels

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Consequences of Unplanned Growth …

in the city. The water which is available has concentrations of nitrates and fluorides. While the acceptable levels of nitrates are 40 PPM, it is found to be around 240 PPM in certain places. The dissolved oxygen (DO) is much below the desired levels, resulting in organic pollution. High phosphate content is leading to the growth of algae, odor, and coloration in water. Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar showed fluoride content beyond permissible limits as well as algae (Wakode 2011). Metals like Lead, Nickel, Zinc, and Cadmium beyond permissible levels have also been detected in the groundwater in various parts of the city, especially those close to the industrial areas. “Ground water was exploited through shallow, large diameter dug wells until 1970 to meet domestic and irrigation requirements. Presently ground water is being exploited through shallow and deep bore wells with depth ranging from 100–300 m…. Considering the limited potential of hard rock aquifers, reduced recharge and that the resource is being tapped from deeper depths, there is possibility of degradation of groundwater beyond recoverable level in future due to rapid urbanization in Hyderabad” (Markandey 2013). Water conservation programs, which include a 5% conveyance efficiency improvement, reusing 90 million m3 (MCM) of urban runoff and adoption of water harvesting by 0.5 million households together with recycling 120 MCM of wastewater, recycling wastewater would be sufficient to meet the water demand by 2031, if the population grows at a rate of 2.5%. George et al. (2009). “The changes in land use and human manipulation of environment have severely affected the water resources in this region” (Wakode 2016).

13.3.1.4 Transport The increasing population of the city has imposed a burden on its transport network and services. Unprecedented traffic jams have become a norm especially during peak hours of the day in the mornings and evenings, this is notwithstanding traffic congestion at other times of the day particularly during the change in the

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work shift on the routes leading to the IT hub of Hyderabad. There is a great increase in private transport compared to public transport. Even among the modes of private transport, it is the two wheelers which have registered an extraordinary increase of 118% between 2008 and 2016. Their numbers were approximately 3 to 4 million in October 2016 (The Times of India 2016). There is a motley of vehicle types and means of transport in the city. These range from heavy trucks that ply between states, buses both inter-state and city bus services, auto-rickshaws, scooters, motor cycles, bicycles, and even bullock carts and cycle-rickshaws in places. The pressure on the modes of transport can be gauged from the overcrowded nature of public transport where people even travel on the foot boards of buses and auto-rickshaws which carry more than the permitted number of people, with passengers hanging out of them. Driving in the city is an ordeal at times, as very often people violate traffic rules. There has been a “phenomenal increase in vehicular traffic, both private and public. The road network of Hyderabad which was developed in the nineteen fifties and sixties is now totally inadequate to cope with this colossal increase in the volume of vehicular traffic. The roads get choked with vehicular traffic causing acute traffic congestion. The consequent delays in the flow of traffic is unprecedented (Markandey et al. 2014). “Public transport in Hyderabad is estimated to account for only 40% of the total passenger transport as against an ideal requirement of 70%. With the area under roads at 6–8%, the vehicular density in Hyderabad is estimated to be the highest in India, at 2,400 vehicles per km. Hyderabad has the dubious distinction of a large city without footpaths thus forcing pedestrians to walk on the roads. Wherever they exist, they are encroached. Presence of religious structures, a sign of competitive communalism particularly rampant in Hyderabad, on the roads (in the middle or on the sides) is further adding to the problems of road transport” (Ramachandraiah 2007).

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The city roads have a dense network with varying conditions of maintenance. While the main roads are by and large in good condition, the arterial roads which connect the localities to the main roads are most often in a poor state of maintenance. During the monsoon season, potholes appear on some of the main roads also as the top layer of the road gets washed away; these pose a threat to life and limb of the people. There are several suburban bus services from Hyderabad (Fig. 13.7) to areas beyond the city limits. The reciprocity between Hyderabad and its region is well brought out by them. They are pointers toward the direction of future growth and expansion of the city. The city may grow in a tentacle like fashion, the activity space of the people which is defined by the operation of these bus services is indicative of this.

13.3.2 Pollution Though Hyderabad is better than Delhi, which is considered the most polluted city in India, yet there has been a substantial rise in the levels of Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM). The rise in air pollution is associated with the increase in the number of vehicles in the city. The greater dependence on private modes of transport rather than using public transport accounts to a large extent for this rise in pollution. “The total suspended particulate matter (TSPM) in the air can be 200 mg per m3 but the average value being recorded in the twin cities is 280 mg per m3. The traffic-intensive areas like Panjagutta, Charminar, Paradise Circle and Abids have recorded a staggering TSPM rate of 300–400 on any given day. According to experts, vehicles contribute 50% of the total air pollution in urban areas while the dust on roads is the next major culprit and contributes 25%. Burning of refuse and vegetation is resulting in 15% air pollution while industries are responsible for the remaining 10%” (Centre for Science and Environment 2015). Automobiles generate 75% of the total air pollution in Hyderabad. Respirable Particulate matter is inordinately high in all traffic, commercial, and most of the residential areas. Most

S. M. Alam and K. Markandey

of the traffic/commercial areas are covered by a dust screen and have an adverse impact on health. High traffic density and increasing number of vehicles on the roads make for high levels of carbon monoxide in the ambient air (Rao 2005). “Traffic is growing four times faster than population in metro cities including Hyderabad. Even though the vehicle numbers are a lot less than Delhi, densely built Hyderabad is getting increasingly congested. The key areas show that Hyderabad’s Central Business District has nearly equal volume of traffic as in Delhi. The congestion index in the city is comparable to that of Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata. In the core areas of the city the traffic volume often exceeds the designed capacity of the roads due to high influx of vehicles to the city core. Major traffic issues arise as numerous commuters get to the central core (MCH area) from its hinterland through a high capacity radial network. But, the low capacity carriageway in the core area is unable to accept the influx of these flows leading to jams and delays. The vehicle density in Hyderabad is 720 vehicles per km of road (passenger car units per km of road) compared to 290 (Chennai) and 240 (Mumbai), which is very high. This is leading to enormous delays at intersection, waste of time, energy loss, and high emissions” (The Times of India 2016). Particulate matter is very high at the main road junctions, especially during the peak hours. Slow moving traffic on account of congestion and adulteration of fuel largely account for pollution. The metro rail which is being built in the city is also responsible for pollution. It has also been postulated that surface rail costs one-twentieth of an elevated metro rail and is a feasible alternative for many Indian cities such as Hyderabad (Ravibabu 2006).

13.4

Conclusion

Like any other city of its ilk, Hyderabad has witnessed an impromptu growth and densification of city space which has taken place in

13

Consequences of Unplanned Growth …

phases. “Re-densification of urban patches in the region is also indicated” (Priyadarshini et al. 2010). Some of this was associated with economic reasons like industrialization or

217

globalization at different points in time. Others had political reasons like the gravitational pull that the supremacy of a political party had on migrants from specific locations and also into

Fig. 13.7 Source Compiled from Google Imagery and web sources

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specific locations. Planning which came under the garb of City Development Plan at one time and various Master Plans that the city has had at one time or the other have not led to a concerted development effort where the various sectors of the city and the agencies that look after various facets of its planning and functioning worked in an integrated manner. While the slums which house most of the migrants are under the authority of the GHMC, they require the involvement of several agencies which deal with health, sanitation, and provision of amenities and facilities. A synthesized effort between all the agencies involved which would be multidisciplinary in nature is called for. There has been an ambiguity on this front and hence the planning for slums has been disorderly and erratic. The environment is being polluted because of poor waste management whether it is liquid or solid waste. This has repercussions on the health of the people leading to many diseases which owe their origin to unhygienic conditions. Apart from this, it also adds to global warming. The form, structure, and governance mechanism of the city is changing. From being a twin city along with Secunderabad in the 1970s, it grew into an urban agglomeration which expanded much beyond by annexing towns and villages on its periphery to attain the status of Greater Hyderabad. Planning and development of facilities and amenities has not kept pace with the physical expansion of the city and hence there is a severe crisis of sanitation as garbage is dumped indiscriminately, there is overflowing sewerage, sewerage mixed with drinking water, sewerage mixed with rainwater and flowing on the roads besides a whole horde of other problems like mosquitoes breeding, unhygienic living conditions, and attendant diseases. To add to the woes of the city residents, the groundwater table has fallen and the water has a lot of dissolved chemicals, this further adds to the diseases that they are likely to encounter. The city has an excessive pressure on the roads and on the means of public transport. Traffic jams have become a rule on city roads. Bad road conditions further compound the

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problem of traffic and pollution. The roads radiating out from the city which are served by the suburban bus services point toward the future growth directions of Hyderabad which may take an octopus like form. The city requires a coordinated action plan for the kind of multifaceted maintenance and development that it needs on various fronts.

References Alam SM, Markandey K (2016) Metropolitan Hyderabad: growth pattern and morphology: some salient features 1971–2012. J Urban Reg Stud 1(3):5. ISSN 2350-1162 Bakaya A (2008) Metamorphosis of the pearl: development in Hyderabad. Real Estate Finance, India Banerjee P, Mallik C, Babu N (2014) Measuring and mapping transitory spaces in India: a case study of Hyderabad city. Vision 18(4):277–287 Baru S (2007) The local and the global in Hyderabad’s development. Econ Politi Weekly 42(43):31–36 Centre for Science and Environment (2015) Pollution on the rise in Hyderabad. Hyderabad report Chacko E (2007) From brain drain to brain gain: reverse migration to Bangalore and Hyderabad, India’s globalizing high tech cities. Geojournal 68(2/3):131–140 Dandapani S (2015) Where does Hyderabad’s garbage go?: journey through the city’s waste disposal system. News Minute Das D (2015a) Hyderabad: visioning, restructuring and making of a high-tech city. Cities 43:48–58 Das D (2015b) Making of high-tech Hyderabad: mapping neoliberal networks and splintering effects. Singap J Trop Geogr. https://doi.org/10.1111/Sjtg.12112 Das D, Lam T (2016) High-tech utopianism: Chinese and Indian science parks in the neo- liberal turn. BJHS Themes. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2016.11 Das D, Skelton T, Rao AN, Nagasubbarao G (2014) City and neighborhood report: Hyderabad, India. A report from the Asian cities: liveability, sustainability, diversity and spaces of encounter’ research project. National University of Singapore Dupont V (2005) Peri-urban dynamics: population, habitat and environment on the peripheries of large Indian metropolois, an introduction. In: Peri-urban dynamics: population, habitat and environment on the peripheries of large Indian metropolises, a review of concepts and general issues, CSH Occasional Paper No 14, Centre de Sciences Humaines (Centre for Social Sciences), New Delhi George BA, Malano HM, Khan AR, Gaur A, Davidson B (2009) Urban water supply strategies for Hyderabad, India—future scenarios. Environ Model Assess 14(6): 691

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Government of India (2012–2013) Ground water brochure Hyderabad district, Andhra Pradesh, central ground water board, ministry of water resources, southern region, Hyderabad, pp 13 Government of India (2013) Central ground water Board, ministry of water resources, ground water Brochure, Hyderabad district, Andhra Pradesh, Southern Region, Hyderabad Gumma KM et al (2011) Expansion of urban area and wastewater irrigated rice area in Hyderabad, India, Published Online: Springer Science + Business Media B.V. Gumma KM et al (2017) Urban sprawl and adverse impacts on agricultural land: a case study on Hyderabad, India. Remote Sens 9:1136. https://doi.org/10. 3390/rs9111136 Iyer NK, Kulkarni S, Raghavaswamy V (2007) Economy, population and urban sprawl: a comparative study of urban agglomerations of Bangalore and Hyderabad, India using remote sensing and GIS techniques. In: PRIPODE workshop on urban population, development and environment dynamics in developing countries, pp 1–37 Mahalingam TV (2007) Growth pangs in techie land. Business Today Maringanti A (2011) No estoppel: claim right to the city via the commons. Econ Politi Weekly 46(50):64–70 Markandey K (2013) Hyderabad: from feudal city to hi-tec metropolis, in Misra RP urbanization in South Asia: focus on mega cities. Cambridge University Press, New Delhi Markandey K, Kumar VV, Kumar VS (2014) Metropolitan Hyderabad and the metro rail project. J Urban Reg Stud 1(1):107. ISSN 2350-1162 Narain V (2010) Peri urban water security in a context of urbanization and climate change: a review of concepts and relationships. Peri urban water security discussion paper series. Paper no 1, SaciWATERS Nayak S, Keskar YM (2014) Impact of foreign direct investment over the city form, a case of Hyderabad city, India. Int J Innov Res Sci Eng Technol 2(2) Priyadarshini JS, Shashikala V, Ramachandra TV (2010) Urban footprint dynamics in Indian metropolis, conference paper

219 Ramachandra TV, Bharath HA, Sowmyashree MV (2013) Analysis of spatial patterns of urbanisation using geoinformatics and spatial metrics. Theor Empir Res Urban Manag 8(4):5–24 Ramachandraiah C (2003) Information technology and social development. Econ Politi Weekly 38(12–13): 1192–1197 Ramachandraiah C (2007) Public transport options in Hyderabad. Econ Politi Weekly 42(23):2152–2154 Ramachandraiah C, Prasad S (2004) Impact of urban growth on water bodies the case of Hyderabad, working paper, no 60. Centre of Economic and Social Studies Rao CV (2005) Air pollution in Hyderabad urban region. Indian Geogr J 80(1–2):21–22 Ravibabu M (2006) Viability of surface rail for urban mass transit. Econ Politi Weekly 41(16):1506 Sam JS (2012) Globalization and layered spaces: the case of hi-tec city in Hyderabad, India. Perspect Glob Technol Dev 11:480–512 Sharma EK (2008) Taking a break. Business Today Shaw A (1999) Emerging patterns of urban growth in India. Econ Politi Weekly 34(16–17):969–978 Thakur B, Parai A (1993) A review of recent urban geographic studies in India. GeoJournal 29(2):187– 196 The Times of India (2016) Hyderabad, Dec 13 Van Rooijen DJ, Biggs TW, Smout I, Drechsel P (2010) Urban growth, wastewater production and use in irrigated agriculture: a comparative study of Accra, Addis Ababa and Hyderabad. Irrigation Drain Syst 24:53–64 Wakode HB (2011) Water issues in Hyderabad, water and megacities. Aachen University, Germany Wakode HB (2016) Analysis of urban growth and assessment of impact of urbanization on water resources—a case study of Hyderabad, India PhD thesis, Faculty of Georesources and Materials Engineering of Aachen University, Germany Wakode HB, Baier K, Jha R, Azzam R (2013) Analysis of urban growth using landsat TM/ETM data and GIS—a case study of Hyderabad, India. Arab J Geosci 7:109–121

Slum Upgradation, Redevelopment and Relocation through Slum Vulnerability Assessment in Delhi

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Anika Kapoor and Baleshwar Thakur

Abstract

In India, one-third of urban inhabitants live in impoverished slums and squatter settlements. Because of urbanization, people from rural areas have been migrating to urban centres primarily to improve their economic and social opportunities. Nevertheless, the opportunity has been accompanied with degraded quality of life, fear of eviction and deplorable health, making slums and slum dwellers vulnerable. The purpose of the paper is to summarize varied perceptions on the slum vulnerability. It also attempts to identify attributes of Slum Vulnerability Assessment (SVA), thereby, establishing SVA as a tool for slum upgradation and improvement. The study is based on primary data and analysis of 23 slum pockets of Delhi. The study also includes review of secondary data consisting of the existing research studies, slum-related policies and guidelines of related authorities. The authors have attempted to establish SVA as an assessment tool for effective slum improvement policies in urban areas. The findings are suggestive that slums are dynamic and

A. Kapoor (&) Amity School of Architecture and Planning, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India e-mail: [email protected] B. Thakur Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

transforming with urbanization. The study reveals that there is an absence of suitable assessment criteria for making policies related to slum in situ upgradation, redevelopment and relocation. Slum vulnerability has been neglected as an attribute for making decisions related to slum upgradation. It is, therefore, imperative to assess vulnerability of slums and to identify criteria for slum improvement and upgradation to make effective slum policies. The study engenders a tool for slum vulnerability assessment for its upgradation and improvement. It establishes the need for a technique for effective slum policies in the era of ever-increasing urbanization. In the process of reviewing existing slum situation and slum-related policies, the authors have identified the gaps and suggested SVA, as an effective tool for slum upgradation and improvement. Keywords







Slum Slum redevelopment Slum relocation Vulnerability assessment

14.1




Introduction

Unexpected rising trends of urbanization have been witnessed in the last two decades. According to forecasted figures of United Nations, it is probable to increase further by 70% by 2050 with

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_14

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90% of its concentration in the developing countries of Asia and Africa. The increased growth rates of urbanization are likely to be the result of migration from rural to urban areas in the search of employment and better quality of life. According to the UN-Habitat Report, 2012, one-third of urban inhabitants live in impoverished and squatter settlements in developing countries. Due to this unaccounted growth in slum population, the urban system that was initially designed for a certain population has not been able to sustain itself, leaving behind major urban centres in India with two major challenges of unchecked proliferation of slums and highly vulnerable slum population. The issue of rising population and escalation of slums has been realised globally by the developing world. The national and city governments of these nations are struggling to accommodate the rising population in slums. According to Sustainable Development Goals of UNDP (2017), 828 million people live in slums today and the numbers are rising. It is in the context of this challenge, Sustainable Development Goal 11 strives to make the vulnerable slum community safe by ensuring access to safe and affordable housing and upgrading slum settlements in all the possible ways. Nonetheless, slums are dynamic and are becoming more vulnerable. This change in character of slums seeks suitable assessment criteria for making policies related to slum in situ upgradation, redevelopment and relocation. This paper attempts to identify attributes of Slum Vulnerability Assessment (SVA), thereby, establishing SVA as a tool for slum upgradation and improvement.

14.2

Review of Background Research

Definition of slums in different researches and policy documents represents the varied perception regarding the term ‘Slums’. The existence of slums is not a novel phenomenon. It occurred in the past also, but its form, scale and reasons of growth have changed. According to UN-Habitat (2003), ‘a household is a slum that is

characterised by inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding and insecure residential status’. Census of India (2011), defines ‘slums as residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of streets, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities or any combination of these factors which are detrimental to safety and health’. Alcayna-Stevens (2015), defined slums as ‘a household in an urban area which lack one or more of the following: durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions; sufficient living space which means not more than three people sharing the same room; easy access to safe water in sufficient amount at an affordable price; access to adequate sanitation in the form of a private or public toilet shared by a reasonable number of people; security of tenure that prevents forced evictions’. No definitions provide any measurable parameters for area, which should be marked unfit for human habitation and declare as slum (Risbud 2010). However, they indicate that slums are formed by occupancy of people who are forced to occupy locations, which are vulnerable and liable to the effects of disasters. In the absence of required infrastructure and the means to cope with disasters, the slum population becomes the most vulnerable population in the world. According to Vaid et al. (2007), the infant mortality rate in the urban slums in India is very high and accounts for about 38 deaths per 1000 live births. These deaths are mainly because of diarrheal disease or respiratory infections. This adds to vulnerability of the slum dwellers who seeks better sanitation, water quality and better quality of life. The intensity of the problem can only be realized when it is quantifiable or measurable. This can be done through a tool called through vulnerability assessment. A vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, quantifying and prioritizing (or ranking) the vulnerabilities in a system. This involves cataloguing and inventory making,

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ranking or quantifying the attributes, identification of weaknesses and threats based on priority, mitigating and eliminating the risk. Many scholars have perceived slum vulnerability as a tool for slum upgradation and improvement. Agarwal et al. (2014) advocated slum vulnerability assessment through multidimensional approach. According to them, status of slum, its location, access of health and education services, gender status and existence of development organizations are the attributes to assess vulnerability of slums. Another attempt was made by USAID India, with Population Foundation of India, an NGO under HUP (Health of Urban Poor) Program in 2014 to make a score sheet of vulnerability for slums in 2010 (USAID India 2014). The attributes were slum characteristics, housing and basic amenities, socio-economic and demographic profile of slums and status of health and health services. Singh (2011) provided location of slums in the residential area, according to the Master Plan of Delhi 2021, place of work of slum dwellers, type of structure, age of slums and ties within the community as the attributes for slum upgradation or relocation. On the other hand, hazard zoning is another important attribute leading to vulnerability of slums (Guedira and Malti 2005). Various perceptions on slum vulnerability suggest that there still exists consternation as to what constitutes a part of attributes for slum vulnerability assessment, which is faced by the government organizations and discourage them to make viable decision for slum upgradation and improvement. History of slum development and policies pertaining to slum improvement highlights the sensitivity of the administrators and planners towards slums.

14.2.1 Slum-Related Policy Indian government formulates numerous slum-related ideologies, policies, schemes and recommendations to tackle the issue of slum vulnerability. All the slum-related policies have been initiated with an intention to integrate people with low incomes with the main stream. The history of slum-related legislations can be

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traced since enactment of Slum Area (Improvement and Clearance) Act of 1956. It aimed at inventorying of slums, demarcation of slum improvement and clearance areas, policy to protect tenants from eviction, removal of dangerous trades from slums and check on further proliferation of slums. Most contemporary attempt is made under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, which aimed at inclusive city development through provision of basic services and affordable housing to the slum dwellers and other city poor under Basic Services to the Urban Poor. In 1990–91, Delhi Government adopted ‘three-pronged strategy’. This included in situ development on land where land-owning agencies do not require the land for any other use in the next 15–20 years, relocation of Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters (squatters) that occupies land which are required to implement projects in the larger public interest and environment improvement of slums with the provision of basic amenities. No substantial success stories were reported in a decade and the same policy was re-stated in Master Plan of Delhi 2021. The budget for slums and JJC’s improvement has been increased to 87% in the Delhi Master Plan 2021. Moreover, the Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters Department was under the jurisdiction of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) since 1962 and was not set up under any statute. The Department was entrusted with the work of operating the provisions of slum areas under the Slum Improvement and Clearance Act of 1956 and in 1967, it got merged with Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Slum Department was never a matter of concern and has been transferred back and forth many times from MCD to DDA till 1992. Slum Department was made to Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) in 2010, which is a milestone. DUSIB has emerged as a mediator between government and slum dwellers. It is the only Governing Body for Slum Designated Areas (SDA), Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters (JJC’s) and Resettlement Colonies (The DUSIB Act 2010), which accounts for more than half of the population of Delhi. Core functions of DUSIB are survey of slum areas, removal and

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resettlement/relocation of slums, improvement plans of JJC’s and redevelopment of JJC’s. Unlike most urban services in Delhi, slums are made responsibility of one agency, that is DUSIB, across different levels of governments. The intent was, therefore, to make this area of governance accountable and transparent. Despite of policies and administrative set ups, very few real changes have occurred in context of slum improvement. All these policies have failed invariably to meet the objectives (Sheikh and Banda 2014). Not more than half of the projected residential land was developed, which further added to the existing number of slums in the city. Statistics revealed that the proportion of the slum population have increased from 5% in 1951 to 18% in 1981 to 27% in 2011, occupying less than 6% of the total city space (Census of India 2011). This data exposes the inadequacy of various slum policies since 1950s and also highlights the inability of the developing authorities to provide a safe and secure housing for poor of the city. Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG 2013, 61) states that ‘DUSIB had no mission to relocate the JJC’s, it only takes place on the request of land owning agencies’. In lieu of this, there have been three waves of slums relocation between 1962 and 1970, where the only reason highlighted was the requirement of land by the land-owning agencies for special purposes. Further, in 2000, many land-owning agencies needed land for construction of infrastructure for Commonwealth Games. In this drive, 217 Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters were impacted and about 50,000 households were displaced. It is also important to mention that slums that were relocated in 1960s were shifted to areas only 10 kilometres away from the city centre. Considering the range of place of work of slum dwellers, this criterion was later waved off in other slum relocation programs, due to the absence of any binding policy framework. In addition, the plots (land) that were allocated to relocated slum dwellers were replaced by small flats, according to the policy amendment of 2007. This reveals the unwilling approach and attitude of the administrators towards slums and slum dwellers. Besides, there are many studies

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pertaining to slums and their improvements. Authors have reviewed literature to recognize the loopholes and adaptable parameters for slum upgradation, redevelopment and relocation.

14.2.2 Literature Review There exists a huge literature pertaining to slums and efficacy of slum-related policies. According to Chattopadhyay and Biswas (2010), slums are integral part of urbanization, especially in the developing countries and are the cause of reduced economic growth. Thus, slums are important and should be addressed in parallel for the development of the city. Unfortunately, this fact was realized by the government only in 1970s and the policies pertaining to slum improvements were initiated. Since then, various approaches to slum eradication were used but the solutions were ineffective. In support of this, Andavarapu and Edelman (2013) elaborated the various phases, strategies and approaches used for slum upgradation over the period but in the absence of criteria for slum development, it is difficult for government to implement meaningful policies. One of the examples of failure of slum-related policies in India is the vacant houses built for slum dwellers under slum relocation policies. Masta et al. (2013) reported this in their paper, where slum dwellers refused to move into the houses built for them under relocation scheme. This is a sheer wastage of resource and raises a serious concern for policymakers as well as urban planners. Moreover, many problems related to existing slum policies were described by scholars. One of the important observations was that through slum clearance and improvement policies, the objective of the government was to pressurize the owner of the land on which slums are built, to develop their land, thereby, throwing the slum dwellers out of their premises. Chattopadhyay and Biswas (2010), in their paper, stressed upon inclusions of innovative schemes and proposals in the Slum’s Act, which are absent for now. Despite huge budget spent on slums, results of the policies are in vain. Patel (Patel 2013a, b)

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stated that slum improvement policies and proposals only incorporate economic costs of slum upgradation improvement and relocation and social costs are totally neglected. Therefore, social criteria should be incorporated in the framework for slum development. Patel (2013a, b) further argues that key attributes of slum improvement are to up-scale the statutory framework that can be used by the public agencies to structure and implement slums improvement schemes. Further, Patel et al. (2011) stressed that there should be matrix of conditions or attributes for relocation, redevelopment and in situ rehabilitation, thereby, deciding the fate of the slum dwellers to improve their living conditions. Beyond the observation of the researchers mentioned above, Patel (2013a, b) stressed upon the impact of community participation in slum upgradation and stated to legitimize informal power relations. In support, Dupont (2008) also reported that the existing slum policies are required to implement projects in the larger public interest. Till date, policies have been providing inadequate solutions, as a result of which the causes of problems are not identified at its root.

14.3

Purpose of Study

A review of the literature and policies reveals that attributes selected by the government for slum upgradation, redevelopment and relocation are not adequate. India is witnessing the era of smart cities, where experts are striving to achieve uninterrupted internet connectivity, transport, power and water supply, a framework to accommodate the most vulnerable population is almost absent. Lack of updated slum data, interference of judiciary, absence for framework and assessment tools are some of the reasons for failure of slum-related policies. It seems that government is experiencing the ad hoc and inefficient strategies in the name of slum improvement and upgradation. Therefore, it is

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alarming to develop a tool for slum vulnerability assessment to decide whether a slum be upgraded, relocated or redeveloped. The succeeding section of the paper identifies attributes of Slum Vulnerability Assessment (SVA), thereby, establishes SVA as a tool for slum upgradation and improvement.

14.4

Study Area

14.4.1 Location and Population Delhi, the capital of India, is selected as the study area. It is situated on the banks of River Yamuna, bounded by Uttar Pradesh in the east and on the north, west and south by Haryana. Delhi is spread over an area of 1483 sq. kilometres. It stands as a primate city in its regional setting with satellite towns like Faridabad, Gurgaon and Noida making it National Capital Region. According to 2011 census, Delhi’s city population was about 16 million, the second highest in India after Mumbai, while the whole National Capital Region population is about 16.8 million, making it the world’s 3rd largest city in terms of population. The National Capital Territory of Delhi comprises 9 districts, 27 tehsils, 59 census towns and 300 villages. Delhi is divided into the New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the Delhi Cantonment Board (DCB).

14.4.2 Growth of Delhi—Causes and Consequences Delhi is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The average annual exponential growth rate of population of Delhi during 2001–2011 has been recorded as 1.94% (Census of India 2011). The growth in urban area of Delhi during 2001–2011 was observed at 20.44%. According to Census of India, the overall population density of Delhi has increased from 9340 persons per sq. km. in 2001 to 11320 persons per sq.km. in 2011

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which is highest as compared to other states of the country. One of the many reasons for the growth of the city is higher rate of migration of people from neighbouring states as well as from other parts of the nation. According to Census of Delhi, percentage share of population growth in Delhi due to migration was 24.38% in 2011. Being the economic hub, Delhi generates enormous job opportunities for labourers, skilled and unskilled workers of the surrounding states, which results in migration of huge population. This unaccounted in-migration is inversely affecting the Capital. More than half the population of Delhi live in JJ clusters, slums designated areas, resettlement colonies, unauthorized and recently authorized colonies, etc. Delhi is the second largest metropolis with about 3 million people living in approximately 0.6 million Jhuggi Jhopri clusters.

14.4.3 Slums in Delhi Ironically, inhabitants of slums in Delhi are those people whose work makes the lives of its citizens stress-free, but they themselves face the worst of living conditions. This has been an issue of concern since 1960s but until date, there is not even a door-to-door survey to ascertain the actual population of slum dwellers by the Department. Nevertheless, DUSIB has prepared a list of 675 slum clusters and 82 additional Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters (JJC) which occupies varied locations in Delhi as shown (Fig. 14.1). Out of these, 23 slum clusters in 6 wards of Delhi are selected to accomplish slum vulnerability assessment as shown (Fig. 14.1). The Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the urban local body, has divided the city into electoral wards. In 2007, there were 272 wards with an average population of 50,000 each. The selected wards are among 33 wards, which were selected by Municipal Corporation of Delhi to prepare Local Area Plans as a pilot study. Local

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area plans are the lowest tier in the hierarchy of plans in India. This plan intends to direct development with stakeholder’s involvement. Slums are best addressed at the local level and, therefore, are part of scope of Local Area Plans in Delhi. Details of the selected slums are mentioned in Table 14.1 and location is marked in (Fig. 14.1). Details of each slum pockets in the 6 wards are shown in the succeeding figures.

14.5

Data and Methods

The study is based on physical survey of 23 slum pockets of 6 wards as shown in Figs. 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 14.5 and 14.6 and internal data of the concerned governmental offices in Delhi. The study has used primary and secondary sources of data. The present study is based on both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Primary survey technique is used to capture the socio-economic variables and people’s perception. 10% of the total population of each slum pocket is chosen as sample, using random sampling technique. This size of sample is considered ideal to generalize the results. Primary survey is conducted on the identified population using closed-ended structured questionnaires. The questionnaire designed for slum dwellers comprised of four sections. The first section included socio-economic profile and ownership status, the second section intended to tap satisfaction level of the existing infrastructure pertaining to water supply, sewerage, solid waste and electricity, the third section was to capture the perception about disaster risk and health hazards of the local residents and the fourth section included questions related to their range of work place. A methodological review is conducted based on secondary data. The sources of secondary data include the government reports and documents like MPD 2021, Zonal development plan and reports of Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board. The secondary data presents the existing

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Fig. 14.1 Location of slums in Delhi Source Slum and Jhugghi Jhompri Department, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), 2015

tools and policies pertaining to slums and helps in identifying attributes for slum vulnerability assessment, other than primary survey.

14.6

Derivation of Attributes for Slum Vulnerability Assessment

Based on review of literature and policies related to slums in Delhi, key attributes for slum vulnerability assessment are derived, keeping in view the availability of authentic data related to slums and

legislations under the purview of existing policies. Reconnaissance survey and studies of 23 slum pockets are conducted in Delhi and relevant vulnerability attributes are identified based on consultations and discussions with the community and other stakeholders. The attributes are contextual and may differ from city to city depending upon the local conditions. These attributes are listed based on their priority and importance. Ownership of land on which slums are built is one of the most critical attributes. Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board has listed slums in Delhi and updated the same after every 5 years.

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Table 14.1 List of slums in the selected wards in Delhi Ward

Ward characteristics

Details of slums

Ward 81Minto Road

Hub of institutions

8 (Meer Khwaja Basti, Furniture Basti, Dhobi Ghat (9,11,12), Mahavat Khan Road Dhobi Ghat No. 28, Meer Dard Road JJC, Chausath Khamba Dhobi Ghat No. 26, East of Chausath Khamba Meerdard Road, Dhobi Ghat No. 27 Near MAMC)

Ward 153Daryaganj

Heritage and recreational in character

4 (Gandhi Sahitya Samiti Stadium 100 Seater, Balmiki Basti Kabristan Behind Express Building, Anna Nagar Sanjay Colony, T-Huts Behind MCD School Village Sarai Kale Khan)

Ward 154Nizamuddin

Heritage zone

3 (JJC Janta Camp, Slum Near DPS Mathura Road, Madrasi Camp, Jungpura)

Ward 158Kotla Mubarakpur

Zone of urban village and elites colonies

1 (Thyagraj Camp)

Ward 159Andrewsganj

Houses elites and plush colonies

2 (Indira Camp, JJC Behind Police Colony)

Ward 191Shahpur Jat

Primarily an urban village and ward of unplanned settlements.

5 (Lal Gumbad JJC, Jagdamba Camp Near SFS Sheikh Sarai, JJC Near Madarsa Zeenatul, Soami Nagar JJ Camp Near Water Tank, Shri Ram Bhan Das Malviya Nagar, Corner Market)

Total Slum pockets

23

Source Compiled by Authors

It is an authentic source of information pertaining to ownership of land occupied by slums. Moreover, Land and Development Office, Ministry of Urban Development maintains a record of ownership of land in Delhi. Slum dwellers occupy the land where there are disputes, disputes of ownership, subversion of the existing land legislations and informal nature of all transactions (Madadevia et al. 2010). To combat this issue, the Government of India has proposed to make the cities slum free, through vehicles like Rajiv Awas Yojana, assigning property rights to the slum dwellers and also by introducing inclusive Master Plans as focused by Ministry of Housing and Poverty Alleviation. Despite these efforts, ownership of land has been a critical element in the process of slum development. Therefore, the slum dwellers suffer from a constant fear of eviction. According to the report on ‘Housing conditions in Delhi’ (2006), 65.56% of slums are on the land owned by local bodies and 13.58% on the land owned by other government agencies. About 22% of slums are on the land whose ownership was not known. The listing of slums

by Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board relieves the slum dwellers from this fear, thereby reducing the vulnerability of being uprooted. Another criterion for slum vulnerability assessment is requirement of occupied land for immediate use by the land-owning agency. Slums on the land, which are not required for immediate use as per the policy document for next 15–20 years are considered suitable for upgradation instead of relocation unlike those which are required immediately in larger public interest. According to Rajiv Awas Yojana guidelines, it is important to identify slums, which can be improved in situ and those that need to be relocated. However, slums are relocated only in extreme conditions or in land which are designated as green spaces and other conflicting land uses, etc. Slums that need to be relocated are called untenable slums (Rajiv Awas Yojana 2013). Land use on any parcel of land that is marked in Master Plan of Delhi 2021, is also a deciding factor for vulnerability assessment. Therefore, slums on land that are marked as residential or complementary to residential

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Fig. 14.2 Location of slums in ward 81- Minto Road Source Based on survey, 2015

land use is less vulnerable and fear eviction as compared to those where the land use is not compatible with respect to human habitation. Disaster risks are inevitable attributes in the assessment of vulnerability. Slum dwellers occupy the most vulnerable space of the city. Besides, natural disasters like floods and earthquake, they are vulnerable to the risk of fire and collapse also. According to Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (2009), the risk is felt most acutely by people living in poor rural areas and slums. Moreover, slum dwellers are more vulnerable to disasters not only because they live in congested and poorly built houses, but also because they survive without emergency services. Therefore, this criterion is an important deciding factor for relocation of slums. Age of slums and its population are key attributes of slum vulnerability. Since slum

dwellers have no tenure security, residents are at constant risk of being thrown out of their homes. Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board enumerates the numbers of households in slums. The larger population gives recognition to the existence of slums. This not only indicates the number, but also the space it occupies in the city. More the number of dwelling units, more confident the slum dwellers stand. On the contrary, small numbers of households are more vulnerable to eviction. In addition, age of slums is also one of the factors affecting population size of the slum. Old slums are deep-rooted and have become the part of cityscape. Ironically, density of population is the attribute that reduces the risk of eviction, but also increases risk of disaster, making the slum population more vulnerable. Further, range of work place of majority of slum dwellers is also an important parameter of

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Fig. 14.3 Location of slums in ward 158- Kotla Mubarakpur Source Based on survey, 2015

slum vulnerability. Slum dwellers occupy land near their place of work to decrease the cost of travel. The distance from the place of work and livelihood is an important factor of consideration while deciding relocation of the slum. The latest newspaper article ‘We made them criminals’, the failure of a Delhi slum relocation (2012), states that ‘as a result of relocation, most people lost their jobs because they were repositioned far away from their employers in New Delhi’. This often leads to selling out of the properties at relocated sites by slum dwellers and they tend to occupy spaces near their place of work again. Thus, it is better for the authorities to consider the range of work place of majority of the slum dwellers as one of the critical indicators. Physical conditions, in terms of types of clusters and infrastructure, are key attributes for slum vulnerability. Infrastructure adequacy is decided by the supply of tap water supply,

metered electric connections, drainage system and presence of dhalao for disposal of solid waste in close vicinity. The provision of these services by the municipalities and authorities are indications of acceptance of slums in the locality, unlike those which are not catered by the bare minimum infrastructure. Moreover, in the absence of basic minimum infrastructure, slums become vulnerable to the risk of health hazards. According to City Development Plan (2006), water and sanitation facilities in the unorganized colonies, particularly JJ clusters, are poor. Only 21% of colonies are covered with piped water supply and 10% are covered by sanitation. Therefore, this is an important attribute to evaluate vulnerability of slums. In addition, types of clusters, building materials and separate space for cooking are indicative of fire hazards and risk of collapse. Further, there are a few policy-linked indicators that are important yet highly neglected

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231

Fig. 14.4 Location of slums in ward 153- Daryaganj and Ward 154- Nizamuddin Source Based on survey, 2015

factors by the authorities. They are crucial to decide whether a slum is to be upgraded, relocated or redeveloped. According to Section 20 A of the Ancient Monument and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act (Amendment and Validation Act, 2010), every area beginning at the limit of protected area or protected monument, as the case may be and extending to a distance of one hundred metres in all directions shall be the prohibited area in respect of such protected area or protected monument and no construction is allowed in this zone. Area starting from the boundary of the protected/prohibited area extended up to a distance of 200 metres in all

directions shall be the regulated area. Similarly, according to Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning and Engineering) Centre (UTTIPEC), DDA 2010, 500 metres on all sides of Metro Rail Transit Corridor (MRTS) have been designated as zone of minimized walking and biking distance. It is recommended to have a high-density housing, retail and employment uses in this zone. Slums lying in prohibited or regulated zone of the heritage and on MRTS influence zone always fear eviction and are more exposed to social vulnerability. Lastly, value of land occupied by the slum also adds to the vulnerability of slums (Collins 2015). Slums that

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Fig. 14.5 Location of slums in ward 159- Andrewsganj Source Based on survey, 2015

occupy land of high value are liable for eviction since these lands are designated for the elites of the city or are accounted for public uses at large. All these factors together or in isolation add to the vulnerability of slums and are summarized in Table 14.2. They indicate the attributes and their vulnerability assessment criteria for slums. These attributes are arranged according to their importance and are grouped as most important, moderately important and least important. The data and information of 23 selected slums are summarized in Table 14.3, according to the

criteria as mentioned in Table 14.2, where red colour indicates high risk, yellow moderate and green less vulnerability.

14.6.1 Results and Discussion The results of the Slum Vulnerability Assessment (SVA) are quite inclusive and comprehensive. The assessment has been done from two perspectives; one being the relevance of chosen attributes in the context of Delhi and another

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233

Fig. 14.6 Location of slums in ward 191- Shahpur Jat Source Based on survey, 2015

being the assessment of slums for in situ upgradation, redevelopment and relocation, using SVA as a tool. Figure 14.7 shows slum dwellers tend to occupy government land and are therefore listed and accounted for. Since these slums are listed, the land-owning agencies do not make proposals for which they might require the land for immediate use. Nevertheless, many slums lie on non-conforming land uses and are liable to be relocated in the near future in lieu of the Master Plan of Delhi. However, the study reveals that 90% of slums lie in disaster prone areas, which make them vulnerable. Therefore, disasters seem to be important criteria for relocation and redevelopment of slums. Figure 14.8 reveals that about 70% of slums are old and therefore inhabit large population. These slums are less vulnerable to the risk of eviction. Most of the slums in Delhi are fed by basic minimum infrastructures by the

municipal corporation. However, about 50% of slum dwellers work near the household in order to minimize the time and cost of travel and thus should be considered as criteria before the relocation of such slum pockets. Moreover, more than 50% of slums are not stable and shall be made liable for in situ upgradation. Figure 14.9 indicates that most of the slums in Delhi occupy the regulated and prohibited areas of heritage. Eventually, when the relevance of the heritage under AMASR Act, 2010 will be realized by the government, these slum pockets will be liable to relocation. Land value has not been taken into consideration by the concerned agencies even though the study reveals that slums in Delhi occupy the most valuable land. To sum up, Master Plan of Delhi, 2021 seems to be the legal tool to decide the fate of the slum dwellers as slums on non-conforming land uses

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Table 14.2 Redefining slum vulnerability assessment criteria

Vulnerability Least

Moderate

High

Attributes Ownership of Land

Listed Slum On Land

Non- Listed Slum On

Unauthorised Slum On

Belonging to Development

Public (Central/ State

Any Land or On

Authorities/ Urban Local

Government) or Private

Natural Features Like

Bodies.

Land.

River Banks, Along

Most Important

Drains etc. Requirement For

Land Not Required For Next

Land Required For Next

Land Required For

Immediate Use

15-20 Years.

15-20 Years.

Immediate Use As Per Master Plan.

Land Use

Residential Land Use

Not Residential But

Non-Complimentary

Complementary Land

Land Use

Use Disaster Risks

Slums Where No Disasters

Slums Where Risk Of

Slums Where

Have Been Reported In The

Two Or More Disasters

Disasters (Fire, Flood

Past But Is Prone To Risk Of

(Fire, Flood Or Collapse) And Collapse) Have

Fire And Collapse.

Exist.

Been Reported In The Past.

Moderately Important

No. of Jhuggies

A Slum With More Than 500

A Slum With 100 To

A Slum With Less

Jhuggies And There Is No Fear

500 Households.

Than 100 Households

Slums Established Before 1990

Slums Established

Slums Established

(More Than 20 Years Old)

Between 1990-2007

After 2007

Within 500 Meters

Within 1 Km.

Beyond 1 Km.

Of Eviction. Age Of The Slum

Range Of Work Place Of Majority Of Slum Dwellers

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Level Of

Adequate Provision By

Less Adequate.

Not Adequate

Infrastructure

Municipal

(Presence Of Water

(Absence Of

Corporation. (Presence Of

Supply And Metered

Infrastructure)

Water Supply, Metered Electric Electric Connections) Connections, Drainage System And Presence Of Dhalao)

Least Important

Type Of Structure

Permanent Pucca Structure

Semi- Pucca Structure.

Kuchcha Structure

With Separate Space For

With No Separate

Cooking

Place For Cooking

Heritage Influence

Not A Part Of Heritage

Slum Lying Within

Slum Lying Within

Zone

Influence Zone

Regulated Zone.

Prohibited Zone, Established Post 1992

MRTS Influence

Not A Part Of MRTS Influence

Partially A Part Of

Part Of MRTS

Zone

Zone

MRTS Influence Zone

Influence Zone

Land Value

Settlements Under Category

Settlements Under

Settlements Under

F, G and H

Category C, D and E

Category A and B

Source Compiled by the Authors

are liable to relocate. Another important attribute in context of slums in Delhi is disaster proneness as majority of them lie in vulnerable areas, also, density of slums and typology of dwelling units add to the vulnerability of slums. Therefore, the chosen attributes for the vulnerability assessment of slums are relevant and contextual to slums in Delhi and yield meaningful results. The results of SVA tool shows that four slum pockets, that is Furniture Basti, Meerdard Road JJC, Chausath Khamba Dhobi Ghat No. 26, East of Chausath Khamba Meerdard Road and Dhobi Ghat No 27 near MAMC are most vulnerable as they fear eviction since they occupy land which is required for development in interest of public at large in near future and are also susceptible to disasters. These are recently built weak structured slums that lack basic minimum infrastructure which make them more

exposed and vulnerable. Six slums of Dhobi Ghat 9,11,12, Mahavat Khan Road Dhobi Ghat No. 28, JJC Janta Camp, DPS Mathura Road, Madrasi Camp, Jungpura and Thyagraj Camp are moderately vulnerable. These slums lie in safe zone as far as most important attributes are concerned, but fall in critical zone while assessing moderately important attributes. Rest of the 13 slums are less vulnerable. Unfortunately, these results are not found complementing to those which are proposed for relocation by Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board. Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board has proposed relocation for three slums, out of the list of 23 slum pockets. They are Mahavat Khan Road Dhobi Ghat No. 28 to Holambi Kalan/Khurd, Meer Dard Road JJC and Balmiki Basti Kabristan behind Express Building to Narela. Except for Meer Dard Road JJC, all the

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Table 14.3 Adaptability of slum vulnerability assessment tool

ATTRIBUTES S.no

Slums

1

Meer Khwaja Basti

2

Furniture Basti

3

Dhobi Ghat 9,11,12

4

Mahavat Khan Road Dhobi Ghat No. 28

5

Meerdard Road JJC

6

Chausath Khamba Dhobi Ghat No. 26

7

East of Chausath Khamba Meerdard Road

8

Dhobi Ghat No. 27 Near MAMC

9

Gandhi Sahitya Samiti Stadium 100 Seater

10

Balmiki Basti Kabristan Behind Express Building

11

Anna Nagar Sanjay Colony

12

T-Huts Behind MCD School Village Sarai Kale Khan

13

JJC Janta Camp

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Most

Moderately

Least

Important

Important

Important

Slum Upgradation, Redevelopment and Relocation through Slum …

14

14

DPS Mathura Road

15

Madrasi Camp,

237

Jungpura 16

Thyagraj Camp

17

Indira Camp

18

JJC Behind Police Colony

19

Lal Gumbad

20

Jagdamba Camp Near SFS Sheikh Sarai

21

JJC Near Madarsa Zeenatul

22

Soami Nagar JJ Camp Near Water Tank

23

Shri Ram Bhan Das Malviya Nagar, Corner Market

Note: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Ownership of land Requirement for immediate use Non- conforming land use Disaster risks No. of jhuggies Age of the slum Range of work place of majority of slum dwellers Level of infrastructure Type of structure Heritage influence zone MRTS influence zone Land value

Source Based on survey, 2015

other slums were found less vulnerable. This is indicative of the fact that the system lacks framework or criteria to decide whether a slum needs to be upgraded, relocated or redeveloped. Review of policy documents reveals that along with the absence of an assessment tool for effective slum improvement policies in urban areas, there are certain flaws in the machinery

that need to be recognized. The analysis shows that slums that are old and dense are only considered more vulnerable by the authorities. Other attributes like ownership of land, non-confirming land uses, level of infrastructure, etc., are not considered effective vulnerability factors. Moreover, authorities rely on data from authentic sources only, information perceived from visual

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A. Kapoor and B. Thakur 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Low Moderate

Disaster risks

Non- conforming land use

Ownership of land

Requirement for immediate use

High

Fig. 14.7 Slum vulnerability assessment based on most important attributes Source Based on survey, 2015

Type of Structure

Level of infrastructure

Range of work

Age of the slum

low Moderate High No. of Jhuggies

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Fig. 14.8 Slum vulnerability assessment based on moderately important attributes Source Based on survey, 2015

survey and physical inspection of site is not considered worth incorporating. Lack of identification of probable stakeholders and their involvement in documentation and decision-making for assessment of slums is another major issue of concern. Further,

overlapping jurisdictions and policies also restrict the authorities to develop a tool for vulnerability assessment of slums. Therefore, there is an urgent need to create detailed database using geographical information system (GIS) or through timely physical sample surveys to

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Fig. 14.9 Slum vulnerability 100% assessment based on least 90% important attributes Source 80% Based on survey, 2015 70% 60% 50% 40% 30%

Low

20%

Moderate

10%

High

establish measureable attributes of slum susceptibility, thereby creating a slum vulnerability assessment tool to take decision for improving the conditions of living in slums.

14.7

Conclusions

The following conclusions may be drawn from this study. Slums are inevitable proliferations that are accompanied with the process of urbanization. These unplanned settlements not only stress the city systems, but are also susceptible to hazards and disasters since they occupy most vulnerable and unwanted space of the city. Despite the efforts at international level and in India, there is a dearth of effective policies and guidelines to check the growth of slums. Moreover, there are dedicated institutions and set of legislations for slum improvement, but in the absence of appropriate tools and framework, the government have failed to yield the desired results. Since Delhi is a big megacity and houses 0.6 million slum clusters, an effort was made to combat the issue of vulnerability of slums in Delhi through this study. Twelve contextual attributes were identified which ranged from

Land Value

MRTS influence zone

Heritage influence zone

0%

most important to least important attributes of slum vulnerability. These attributes helped in identifying slum pockets that are highly vulnerable and seek relocation and least vulnerable slum clusters that may only require in situ upgradation. The result of the analysis suggests that more than 25% of the total slums in Delhi occupy highly vulnerable land of the city. Another major finding is the absence of the criteria for relocation, redevelopment and in situ upgradation. The slum pockets which are more vulnerable are left for in situ upgradation and least vulnerable ones are relocated, giving rise to another set of issues like unemployment, crime, social and cultural exclusion, etc. The development authorities have not realized the importance of vulnerability assessment because of which the authority’s proposal for redevelopment and relocation of slums are not matching the results of the analysis. The above study establishes the need for a technique for effective slum policies. Since all the urban areas possess different characteristics, no one framework or model can be applicable to all urban centres. Therefore, the attributes of SVA can be dynamic and varying according to the changing perceptions and pursuits of

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vulnerability in the era of ever-increasing urbanization to be used as an effective tool for slum upgradation and improvement by the authorities. To use SVA successfully as a tool, it is imperative to have an updated data on slums in the city. Gap in the data bank may yield misleading results. Else, Slum Vulnerability Assessment is an instrument that may aid city planners and administrators to prioritize the development process in the city. Unless the slum pockets are mapped, they remain unprivileged and out of the purview of government’s initiatives. Therefore, as the first step of intervention, it is critical to identify and map all the listed and unlisted slums, thereby creating a database for slums. Slums are inevitable part of any city and thus should be considered as a part of the city and included in overall development plan of the city. Consequently, before the promotion of SVA as a tool for slum improvement, redevelopment or relocation, there is a need for research in future on ‘Mainstreaming Slums’ for practitioners and academicians. Furthermore, since the characteristics of slums differ according to their age, location, size and attributes of the parent city, no one set of attributes or framework of vulnerability assessment is applicable universally. It is, therefore, critical to identify factors that make slums unsafe and vulnerable and to develop appropriate developmental strategies. This topic offers tremendous scope for research in future. We believe that this research can help practitioners to understand development strategies pertaining to slums and its successful implementation for better governance at grass-root level and assist researchers to orient their efforts in a way that is consistent with past development and future perspectives. This paper provides a base for further research on strategies for in situ upgradation, redevelopment and relocation of slums. This subject is a matter of concern for the policies and programmes like Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY)—

A. Kapoor and B. Thakur

housing for all, Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojana (VAMBAY) and Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP). This may require an extensive primary survey of various stakeholders. Stakeholders may include policymakers, experts, bureaucrats and slum dwellers. Cognitive mapping analysis can be used to analyse the qualitative data. Cognitive mapping is a visual method for formatting information (Plotnick 2001) and it facilitates reasonable thinking on complex issues and on complex range of factors at work. They are useful in exploring individual perceptions as well as group-level perceptions about intricate concepts (Bryman 2004). Analysis of the results may yield meaningful inputs for making strategies to facilitate existing policies and programmes pertaining to slums to meet their deliverables.

References Agarwal S, Taneja S, Patra P (2014) Vulnerability assessment of slums: assessing multi-dimensions of urban poverty for better program targeting. Urban Health Resource Center (UHRC) Alcayna-Stevens T (2015) Slum socio-ecology: an exploratory characterisation of vulnerability to climate-change related disasters in the urban context Andavarapu D, Edelman DJ (2013) Evolution of slum redevelopment policy. Curr Urban Stud 1(4):185 Bhattacharya S (2012) We made them criminals—the failure of a Delhi slum relocation, News Article, The National, World, March 8 Bryman A (2004) Social research methods, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford Census (2011) Primary census abstracts, Registrar General of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India Chandramouli C, R General (2011) Census of India 2011. Provisional population totals. Government of India, New Delhi Chattopadhyay S, Biswas A (2010) Slum improvement through legal framework in India. Int J Hous Sci Appl 34(2) City Development Plan of Delhi (2006) JNNURM Report, Department of Urban Development Government of Delhi and IL and FS Ecosmart Limited, New Delhi, October

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Collins A (2015) Categories of residential colonies and properties in Delhi. Government of NCT, Delhi CAG Auditor General of India (2013) Report of the comptroller and auditor general of India (No. 2). Report Dupont V (2008) Slum demolitions in Delhi since the 1990s: an appraisal. Econ Polit Wkly 79–87 DUSIB (2015a) List of J.J. clusters in Delhi, Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, Government of National Capital Region, Delhi, 2014 DUSIB (2015b) List of additional J.J. Clusters in Delhi, Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, Government of NCT, Delhi, 2014 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (2009) United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Secretariat (UNISDR). ISBN/ISSN: 9789211320282 Guedira A, Malti ME (2005) Evaluating and reducing the vulnerability of slums, traditional housing and migrant populations—Experience from Morocco, World conference on disaster reduction, Kingdom of Morocco Ministry of housing and Urban Planning Guidelines for Preparation of Slum Free City Plan of Action, 2013 – 2022 (2013) Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India Kattakayam J (2017) Out of 4 lakh low-cost dwelling units only 85 allotted: CAG, The Hindu Press, 3 April 2013, web: 18 February 2017 Madadevia D, Joshi R, Gogia T (2010) Handbook on land tenure for slum free cities, Centre for urban equity, a NRC of ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, March 2010 Masta DK, Naik G, Mukherjee K (2013) The challenge of relocating urban slums: the impact of program governance on its acceptance Patel B, Joshi R, Ballaney S, Nohn M (2011) Slum planning schemes: a statutory framework for establishing secure tenure and improving living conditions in Indian slums. Environ Urban ASIA 2(1):45–75 Patel K (2013a) A successful slum upgrade in Durban: a case of formal change and informal continuity. Habitat Int 40:211–217

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Patel S (2013b) Upgrade, rehouse or resettle: an assessment of the Indian government’s basic services for the urban poor (BSUP) programme. Environ Urban 25 (1):177–188 Plotnick E (2001) A graphical system for understanding the relationship between concepts. Teacher Librarian 28 Risbud N (2010) Typology of slums and land tenure in Indian cities. In: Presentation at the national workshop on land tenure issues in slum free planning, Ahmedabad, India Sheikh S, Banda S (2014) The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB): the challenges facing a strong, progressive agency. A report of the Cities of Delhi project, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (May 2014) Singh P (2011) Sheltering Delhi’s slums. Working Paper 230, Centre for Civil Society, New Delhi. http://www. ccsindia.org/ccsindia/downloads/intern-papers-09/ sheltering-delhis-slums-230.pdf. Accessed 15 Aug The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board Act, 2010 (Delhi Act 07 Of 2010) (2010) Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi, Department of Urban Development, Delhi Secretariat, New Delhi Tripathi A (2007) The ancient monuments and archaeological sites and remains act, 1958: with rules, amendments, notifications and orders. Sundeep Prakashan United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) (2003) The challenge of slums: global report on human settlements. Earthscan Publications Ltd, Sterling United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) (2006) State of the world’s cities 2006/7. United Nations, New York USAID India (2014) Population foundation of India, “Slum Level” vulnerability assessment scoring sheet “ under HUP (Health of urban poor) program UTTIPEC (2010) Uses within 500 m influence zone of MRTS as part of transit oriented development policy. Delhi Development Authority, New Delhi Vaid A, Mammen A, Primrose B, Kang G (2007) Infant mortality in an urban slum. Indian J Pediatr 74 (5):449–453

15

Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety Rituparna Bhattacharyya and Sanjay Prasad

Abstract

Public spaces are those spaces where all citizens, irrespective of gender, caste, class, sexuality, disability or any other social identity have a right to access. Importantly, the geographies of public space are gendered and ‘practiced place’, where individuals use these spaces to fulfil their varied needs and aspirations of their everyday life while trying to maintain dignity, safety and self-respect. With increased urbanization and neoliberal economic transformation, Indian women’s mobility through public spaces has increased. A number of recent evidence including the high-profile December 2012 Nirbhaya (fearless) gang-rape case in New Delhi suggest that the towns and cities lack a sense of belongingness and fail to safeguard its women

R. Bhattacharyya—In Charge of Training and Development, Alliance for Community Capacity Building in North East India. S. Prasad—Providing Consulting services for Greater Yangon Water Supply Improvement Project Ph-2, in Yangon Myanmar. R. Bhattacharyya (&) Journal Space and Culture, India & Alliance for Community Capacity Building in North East India, North Shields, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Prasad SAMNE Associates Private Limited Delhi, Provision of GIS Consulting Services under the Institutional Development Program of the JICA Assisted Ganga Action Plan Project, Varanasi, India

and vulnerable population. The horrific Nirbhaya incident, which triggered massive nationwide protest led to the constitution of a number of committee/commission like Justice Verma Committee (JVC), Justice Usha Mehra Commission as well as amendments to a number of legislations—Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015—all aimed at enhancing women’s safety. Yet, the incidents of women’s assaults continue to bear powerful resonance. Arguably, women’s safety is development. The key aim of this chapter is two-fold. First, it aims to review the spatialities of women’s unsafety using the National Crime Records Bureau database. Second, using these data and in conjunction with the recommendations of the JVC report, Justice Usha Mehra Commission, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, it makes suggestions for improving the geographies of gendered public space in order to make them liveable. Keywords




Indian women Justice Usha Mehra commission Justice Verma committee Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013 Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 Safety

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_15













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15.1

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

Introduction

I wanted to get her abortion done in the village. I didn’t know that she would accuse my husband, I thought someone from the neighborhood was responsible for this crime, says the mother (Dwivedi-Johri 2017).

This poignant story is about a 10-year-old child living in Rohtak, Haryana, who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather, but the mother, a domestic worker, does not want her husband (the key earner of the household who works in a plywood factory) to be jailed simply because of the fact that the family, already mired in acute poverty, would be pushed further into the scourge of poverty. Following on a consent from the high court, while this 10-year-old had the abortion at 21 weeks into her pregnancy, another 10-year-old {hailing from a similar background (mother—domestic worker and father—guard)} was raped repeatedly and made pregnant by her uncle, but, this little girl was denied an abortion by the honourable Apex Court on 28 July 2017, as there remain high-risk of complicacies on her health as she has already passed 28 weeks (Pokharel and Narayan 2017). Similar painful stories find resonance in many Indian households across the nation-state (Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016, 2017; Bhattacharyya and Singh 2018). It can be argued that while for many, ‘home’ is an emotive private space and a safe haven (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Duncan and Lambert 2004); home can also emerge as a risky space for women facing brutal assaults including sexual harassment and rape (Walby 1990; also, Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016, 2017; Bhattacharyya and Singh 2018; Das et al. 2015, 2016). Assaults often transcend the private spatial boundaries of home to include varied forms of violence against women1 (VAW) in public space (Pain 2014; also Bhattacharyya 2015). The high-profile horrific Nirbhaya2 (fearless), gang-rape incident of December 1

Although, cases of VAW could be varied spanning from murder, robbery, demanding ransom, cheating, etc., but here, only gender-specific crimes are considered as VAW (Crime in India 2015). 2 Nirbhaya was a 23-year-old woman who was being gang raped by six men in a moving bus and then left in a ‘vegetative state’ (who later died), when she was returning

2012 was among the many heinous incidents that continue to be replicated across the country in public space (Saxena 2017). One of the attributes of development is safety in public space. This chapter discusses about the geographies of Indian women’s everyday public safety. Using the database of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)3 and contextualizing it through ArcGIS tools, it first discusses the spatialities of VAW, which in turn helps a deeper probe of the data to share location specific insights. There are no robust NCRB statistics on VAW occurring separately in private and public space. Hence, while mapping, overall reported cases of different forms of VAW are considered from which one can infer that reported cases of VAW {both under Indian Penal Code (IPC)4 and Special and Local Laws (SLL)5} are on the rise, albeit during the year 2015, the reported cases of VAW recorded a decline by 3.1% (Crime in India 2015). It remains well-documented that the nefarious Nirbhaya incident, which escalated massive nationwide protest led to the constitution of a number of committee/commission—that is, on 23 December 2012, athree-member committee called Justice Verma Committee (JVC) was constituted. It was headed by late Justice J. S. Verma, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, late Justice Leila Seth, former judge of the High Court and home from cinema with her boyfriend on that fatal night of 16 December 2012 (Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016). Among the six men, one of them was a juvenile at the time of committing the crime (Bhattacharyya and Sarma 2017). 3 The NCRB data are collected from all police stations across the nation-state based on the First Information Reports (FIRs) filed in the police stations. These data are first collated at the state level, which are then accumulated at the national level (S 2016). 4 VAW considered under IPC are rape, attempt to rape, kidnapping and abduction of women, dowry deaths, assault on women with intent to outrage her/their modesty, insult to the modesty of women, cruelty by husband or his relatives, importation of girl from foreign country and abetment of suicide of women. 5 Those acts that aim to handle VAW effectively— Commission of Sati Prevention Act, Indecent Representation of Women (P) Act, The Dowry Prohibition Act, Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act are considered under SLL.

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Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

Gopal Subramanium, former Solicitor General of India who had prepared a 630-page report and submitted to the Prime Minister of India on 23 January 2013 (Verma 2013). This report identified ‘failure of governance’ as the central cause of VAW in public space (Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016). Based on some of the recommendations of the JVC report, the Government of India passed the stringent Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 20136 known popularly as the Nirbhaya Act or Anti-rape Act. Simultaneously, Justice Usha Mehra Commission7 was initiated. Further, in the post-Nirbhaya incident and against the backlash of the juvenile being released from the remand home, the government made an amendment to the Juvenile Justice Act through the passing of Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015.8 The egregious Nirbhaya and similar other episodes underscore the fact that combating VAW is not simply about implementing criminal laws but building adequate safety measures to heighten women’s safety. Therefore, in the second part of the chapter, NCRB data is critically analysed in conjunction with the recommendations of the JVC report, Justice Usha Mehra Commission, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 to make suggestions to improve geographies of gendered public space and make those spaces liveable. The chapter begins by laying out the theoretical dimensions of the research. Following this, a critical analysis of NCRB data on VAW is presented. The final section, as stated above, uses the recommendations of the JVC report, Justice Usha Mehra Commission, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and Juvenile Justice 6

The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. Ministry of Law and Justice (Legislative Department), The Gazette of India. Retrieved from, http://indiacode.nic.in/acts-in-pdf/ 132013.pdf. 7 Institute of Objective Studies. (2012). Submission from IOS, New Delhi to Hon’ble Justice Usha Mehra Commission. Retrieved from, http://www.iosworld.org/ download/submission1.pdf. 8 The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, No. 2 of 2016. Retrieved from, http:// trackthemissingchild.gov.in/trackchild/readwrite/JJAct_ 2015.pdf.

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(Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 as intervention strategies to magnify women’s safety in the public spaces.

15.2

Mapping the Intersection of Public Space and Geographies of Everyday Women’s Safety

The debates on geographies of women’s safety, fear of crime, harassment and violence in public space (Pain 1991, 1997a, b, c, 2014; Madan and Nalla 2016; Starkweather 2007) have emerged as robust academic, activist and policy endeavours across many countries (Fesenko et al. 2017; Bhattacharyya 2013a, 2015, 2016; Shaw et al. 2013; Viswanath 2013). In this research, public space is connected to the discursive and the highly contested notion of the public sphere, albeit public sphere and public space are not always interchangeable, but they might be interlinked (Staeheli 1996; Németh 2009). Public spaces are those spaces where all citizens, irrespective of gender, caste, class, sexuality, disability or any other social identity have a right to access. The geographies of public space are gendered and ‘practiced place’ (de Certeau 1984: 117), where individuals use these spaces to fulfil their varied needs and aspirations of their everyday life while trying to maintain dignity, safety and self-respect. The notion of everyday practices as ‘practiced places’, is intimately connected to the hierarchy of private and public spaces. The language of everyday life refers to ‘the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place, on the complex processes’ through which diverse acts are carried out such as those of aspiring for something, reading, talking, walking, cooking, caring and so on (de Certeau 1984: xxii). The practices entailed are active (though not always pre-conscious) ways of going about daily life; ‘ways of operating’ that embrace trivial as well as sophisticated ‘background social activity’. With increased urbanization and neoliberal economic transformation, Indian women’s mobility through public spaces has increased. The research locates the discourse of women’s

246

safety and security within a broader framework —using NCRB data, it includes all sections of women of India, although experiences of VAW vary from woman to woman (Bhattacharyya 2009, 2013b, 2015, 2016). Feminist proponents argue that the public/private divide stems from the unequal practices of everyday life (Rose 1993; Smith 1987). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas (1989) is one of the most influential accounts on the public sphere. Habermas (1989) divided the early capitalist societies into four key institutions—family (private), market economy (private), the state (public) and the citizen’s political participation (public). According to Habermas, the first two institutions, that is, family and market economy lacks power, while the other two institutions rendered ‘citizen’s power to actively participate and debate in the political life’ (Bhattacharyya 2009: 29), thereby associating the last institute as a bourgeois. Scholars argue that in contemporary times, the notion of public/private divide should be looked at beyond its binary distinctions, as there is often a tendency for both the space to overlap in complex ways reproducing obscured space (MacKinnon 1989; Rose 1993; Walby 1997). In fact, the use of the notion is context-specific. In her article, Hindu and Muslim Veiling in North India: beyond the public/private dichotomy, Abraham (2018) illustrates the ways Hindu and Muslim women practice veiling in Bikaner, Rajasthan that is largely spatio-contextual. In so doing, she explains that while the practice of veiling can be a symbol of ‘subordination’ and suffocation for some, it can also be a way to achieve one’s identity. She goes on to explain that within the male-dominated Bikaner society, how some women used their veiling practices not only to gain education, but also to become financially independent. The observations of Abraham (2018) resonate with Khan (2007) who demonstrates as to how Muslim women of Mumbai negotiate the gendered public space to accomplish their geographies of everyday practices. In this research, public streets, shopping centres, market place (bazaars), public transport,

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

cinema halls, restaurants, hotels, parks, office space, etc., are considered as public space. Evidently, the public spaces of India suffer from gendered inequalities stemming from the patriarchal structure (Bhattacharyya 2009, 2013b, 2015, 2016; Phadke et al. 2011; Phadke 2005, 2007; Ranade 2007; Viswanath 2013; Viswanath and Mehrotra 2007). Earlier studies have revealed that every 51 min, an Indian woman face some form of harassment in public spaces ranging from minor assaults such as leer, jeer, touching, singing Bollywood songs to more serious forms such as stalking, acid attacks, indecent exposure, voyeurism, rapes, gang rapes and even murder (Bhattacharyya 2009, 2013b, 2015, 2016; Saxena 2017). Locally known as ‘eve-teasing’, most of these assaults are considered as cognizable crimes under IPC and SLL, albeit some minor forms of assaults such as leer, jeer, singing Bollywood songs, etc., are approved of culturally and sub-culturally across the nation-state. Arguably, at times, public spaces emerge as highly misogynistic buttressing dis-belonging (Bhattacharyya 2009, 2013b, 2015, 2016, 2018; Khan 2007; Phadke et al. 2011; Phadke 2005, 2007; Ranade 2007; Viswanath 2013; Viswanath and Mehrotra 2007), whereby, women face restrictions in accessing these spaces at all times (Shaw et al. 2013). The notion ‘belonging’ refers to the daily practices of an individual at a particular space through which the individual procures comfort, emotions and attachments (de Certeau 1984 see also, Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016; Fenster 2005; Hamdan-Saliba and Fenster 2012). The notion of belonging, however, might bear multiple dimensions and could differ from one individual to another (Antonsich 2010; Yuval-Davis 2006, 2011; also, Bhattacharyya and Singh 2018). Shaw et al. (2013: 4) argue that women ‘have just as much right to go out and use public spaces as men’. While Shaw et al.’s (2013) argument is agreeable, it is also arguable that some public spaces, which are well recognized as unsafe or high-risk, both women and men might face restrictions in those spaces, but generally, far greater restrictions are imposed on women than men pertaining to geographies of women’s

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Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

everyday safety and security (Bhattacharyya 2016). In light of these intersectional backdrops, the following section critically analyses the NCRB data taking into account the temporal and spatial variations across the nation-state.

15.3

Spatialities of Gendered Crime

On 8 August 2017, the Indian Express published spontaneous reactions about women’s safety in public arising from a post on social media with the hashtag AintNoCinderella.9 Some of these reactions are: If I’m out at 12am, it DOES NOT mean I’m to be raped, molested, and chased. My dignity is my right 247 #AintNoCinderella No man can stop me from going out whenever I want. Public spaces for women! #AintNoCinderella The night is ours, #AintNoCinderella

just

like

the

day.

Don’t teach me what to wear, what to eat and when to go out.. #AintNoCinderella #ItsMyLife Dear regressive India, I will do as I please, night or day. Don’t ever think you have the right to stop me #AintNoCinderella Hey it’s midnight and I’m “out”!#AintNoCinderella Hi to all regressive authorities, from a cab, past midnight, dressed like I’m going to a party, but I’m actually not. #AintNoCinderella Dear Regressive India, We ain’t damsels in distress. We are independent & we don’t need you to curb our freedom#AintNoCinderella here! Women who are trending #AintNoCinderella should be called as Batgirls (Queen by day, Warrior by night) These #AintNoCinderella gorgeous ladies should realise, we don’t live a very safe world, but nobody can prevent them from a night out!!

#AintNoCinderella: Women fight for safety by sharing late-night photos on Twitter (2017, 8 August). The India Express. Retrieved from, http://indianexpress.com/article/ trending/trending-in-india/aint-no-cinderella-women-fightfor-safety-by-sharing-late-night-photos-on-twitter-4787653 /?utm_source=izooto&utm_medium=push_notification& utm_campaign=browser_push&utm_content=&utm_term=.

9

247 I Support #AintNoCinderella hashtag no one has right to dictate/suggest terms on women… Constitution gives them equal rights.

Majority of these reactions pertain to women’s safety and dignity in public although one has shown his concerns about the unsafe public space. Arguably, any form of VAW can be considered as an act of power, domination and violence over a woman’s bodily or personal space, which in turn strengthens her subservient position in society. Research evidence suggests that the onus of being sexually assaulted lies on the victim (who happens to be mostly women) rather than the perpetrators (Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016). Although the Ministry of Home Affairs initiated recording NCRB data since 1953, it was only since 1971 that NCRB started recording data on VAW under the title ‘victims of rape’. Interestingly, during 1971, the country recorded 2,487 cases of rape, out of which 45% were reported from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Among the 59 cases that were recorded from the seven Union Territories, the Union Territory of Delhi alone recorded 51 cases (Crime in India 1971). Indeed, Delhi continues to be infamously labelled as the ‘rape capital of India’ (Bhattacharyya 2015; Rukmini 2016c). Statistics suggest that a woman in India is raped every 22 min (Bhattacharyya 2015). Strikingly, between 1971 and 2013 the cases of rape rose by a staggering 1255.3% points (Crime in India 2013), which is up by 353.2% points for the period 1971–2012 (Crime in India 2012). Now the question is why are the reported cases of rape so high? According to the report Crime in India (2015), in 95% cases, the victims knew their perpetrators. Dr. Deepak Mansharamani, a Delhi-based psychiatrist observes: the easy availability of sexually explicit literature and audio-video, especially through the internet and social media, is fanning the suppressed sexual urge of men in society….This urge for immediate gratification of sex continuously sends signals to

248 one’s mind and (as a result) that person does not hesitate in breaching the trust of the woman concerned10

Growing rates of alcoholism perhaps, further add to the problem (Bhattacharyya and Sarma 2017). A six-month study conducted among 583 cases in Delhi 2013 by The Hindu unravels the complex realities of reported cases of rape.11 The study found that 123 cases (21.10%) could be labelled as ‘spurious’ resulting in acquittals of the perpetrators. While it could be the case that in some of these cases, women were forced to withdraw their respective cases following threats from the perpetrators (Rukmini 2016b; also Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016); in several others, the complainants falsely filed FIRs for money or because of a property dispute. The findings of this study further revealed that, in one-third cases (that is, 189 cases), the couples were engaged in consensual sexual relationships but the girls’ parents had accused the boys of committing rape; in 18.69% (that is, 109) cases, boys were accused of rape for breaching the promise to marry; in 141 cases (that is, 24.18%), the victims knew the perpetrators (111 were either neighbors or acquaintances, while 30 were family members); nine girls/women were raped by strangers; rest nine were raped while being trafficked (Rukmini 2016a, b; see, also Bhattacharyya 2017). Nonetheless, when reported cases of rape are compared to other countries of the world, the rate of rape in India is far lower and stands at 2.95% per 100,000-population (Rukmini 2016a). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 2013 defines ‘rape’ as sexual 10

In 95% cases of rape in 2013, culprits are known to victims: NCRB (2014, 20 July). Deccan Herald. Retrieved from, http://www.deccanherald.com/content/ 420801/in-95-cases-rape-2013.html. 11 The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013, which was passed aftermath of the Nirbhaya incident on 2 April 2013 (Bhattacharyya 2013a) incorporated a rigorous definition of rape and punishment of rape and gang rape by substituting the earlier Sections 375, 376, 376A, 376B, 376C and 376D of the IPC into sections as 375 (rape); 376, 376A, 376B, 376C (punishment of rape); 376 D (gang rape) and 376 E (punishment for repeat offenders) (for details, please see pages 5–8 of The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, No. 13 of 2013, Ministry of Law and Justice. Retrieved from, http://indiacode.nic.in/ acts-in-pdf/132013.pdf).

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

intercourse without valid consent.12 In the light of this definition and considering rate of reported rapes per 100,000-population, UNODC unveiled that Sweden with 58.9% reported incidents of rape occupies the topmost country in the world followed by the UK with 36.4%. Belgium and the USA occupied, respectively, the third and the fourth positions with 27.7 and 24.9%. This finding markedly signals that women across the world (including the USA and the UK where women’s liberation movement started) are looked upon as objects of sexual exploitations (Bhattacharyya 2009, 2013b, 2015, 2016; Fenster 2005; Hamdan-Saliba and Fenster 2012; Pain 1991, 1997a, b, c, 2014; Shaw et al. 2013; Walby 1990). However, one has to acknowledge that the definition of ‘rape’ differs from country to country with varied nuanced issues, albeit sexual intercourse without a valid consent is considered as a common definition of rape in most countries. Critics argue that in India, cases of rape largely remain under-reported (Rukmini 2016a) and even, the newly passed The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013 (Bhattacharyya 2013a, b) fails to consider ‘marital rape’ (despite the recommendation of the JVC report) as ‘rape’, rather it is considered as cruelty by husband (please refer to the trend of the numbers in Table 15.1). Perhaps, the size of the population of the country13 also matters in the case of the country’s low rate of reported rape when compared to other countries of the world. There is evidence to suggest that the law enforcement agencies lack gender sensitization, therefore, many a times, these agencies give far more importance to other forms of crimes—murder, robbery, land disputes, etc., rather than on cases of VAW. Table 15.1 illustrates the breakdown of the trend of different forms of VAW (taking NCRB 12

Rape at the National Level, Number of Police-Recorded Offences, United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Retrieved from, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/ United-Nations-Surveys-on-Crime-Trends-and-the-Operati ons-of-Criminal-Justice-Systems.html. 13 According to the World Bank, in 2016 the size of the population stood at 1.324 billion, Populatiion, total, The World Bank. Retrieved from, http://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=IN.

10971

15658

17651

23582

32437

1995

2001

2005

2011

2015

42238

33305

33537

20664

Molestation

8377*

9723

9613

9363

Eve-teasing

97494

56901

48976

21916

(Torture) Cruelty by Husband and His Relatives

452

2916

Indecent Representation Of Women (P) Act

77202

Assault On Women With Intent To Outrage Her Modesty (Total)

22911

Sexual Harassment

8101

Assault or Use of Criminal Force to Women With Intent to Disrobe

775

Voyeurism

5132

Stalking

40283

Others

Note After passing of The Criminal (Amendment) Act 2013 on 2 April 2013, few more forms of VAW were identified and incorporated—Assault On Women With Intent To Outrage Her Modesty, Assault or Use of Criminal Force to Women With Intent to Disrobe, Voyeurism and Others *Sexual Harassment (Eve-Teasing) (Sec. 509 IPC) Source Crime in India (1995–2015), National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

Rape

Year

Table 15.1 Trend of forms of violence against women 1995–2015

15 Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety 249

250

data every five years) occurring nation-wide (1995–2015).14 The Crime in India (2015) reports a total crime of 3, 27, 394 cases of VAW (both under IPC and SLL) across the country; the overall rate of all these crimes stood at 53.9% (Fig. 15.1). As usual, the Union Territory of Delhi reported the highest rate of crime (184.3%) followed by Assam (148.2%). Figure 15.1 illustrates a detailed rate of spatialities of VAW across the states—the states of Telangana, Odisha, Rajasthan, Haryana and West Bengal, respectively, reported 83.1, 81.9, 81.5, 75.7 and 73.4%. India is home to 35 major cities with a population of over one million. From the different forms of VAW, four forms of VAW were selected that are more likely (but not necessarily) to occur in public spaces. These are—rape, molestation, eve-teasing and Indecent Representation of Women (P) Act. Alongside, 15 major cities were selected from different geo-spatial locations across the nation-state to glean a deeper understanding of the different forms of VAW occurring in the cities that are seldom talked about.15 These 15 cities are—Amritsar, Ludhiana, Delhi (City), Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Jaipur, Bhopal, Bengaluru, Varanasi, Lucknow, Thiruvananthapuram and Vishakhapatnam. Figures 15.2, 15.3, 15.4 and 15.5 maps the trend of the numbers of aforementioned four forms of VAW since 2001–2015 (taking into account the data every five years).16 Scholars argue that it is usually the smaller cities/towns from where the higher rates of VAW in public spaces are more likely to take place, even though Delhi is disparagingly addressed as the ‘rape capital’ of India (Bhattacharyya 2016; Rukmini 2016b). This would include the 14

Until 1994, NCRB data on crime against women were available only for rape, and kidnapping and abduction of women and girls. Since 1995, NCRB data on gender-specific crime against women is available under separate heads. 15 There are no individual data for different forms of VAW from the cities of North East India. 16 The breakdown of the NCRB data for different forms of VAW (under IPC and SLL) is available for the cities only since the year 2000.

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

conflict-ridden spaces and regions suffering from natural and human-made hazards, where cases of VAW in remote regions go under-reported for various reasons—lack of awareness, embarrassment, fear, threat, insensitivity on the part of the police to tackle sex-crime, complex medical and judiciary processes, kidnapping, trafficking, etc. (Bhattacharyya 2017, 2018). Hence, preventions of crime and improvement of public safety remain paramount. It should be noted that NCRB data bear limitations and are unable to shed light beyond the form of VAW and the nature of the crime committed, which are categorized under either IPC or SLL. The following section informs prevention strategies so that women and vulnerable population are able to use their ‘practiced public spaces’ free from violence.

15.4

Mapping for Prevention of VAW in Public Spaces

The pandemic prevalence of harassment across the nation-state bear testimony to the fact that the country as a whole is yet to tackle VAW in public space with necessary visibility, available resources and of course, through its political commitment. Moreover, it is the failure on the part of the government and police departments to build and maintain a social environment in the public spaces, where such sordid acts of assaults against women are not endured. Access to a violence free and safe public space is the basic gendered right of each individual (Bhattacharyya 2013a, b, 2015, 2016; Fenster 2005; Hamdan-Saliba and Fenster 2012; Phadke et al. 2011; Phadke 2005, 2007; Ranade 2007; Shaw et al. 2013; Viswanath 2013; Viswanath and Mehrotra 2007). Yet, the greatest challenge relates to the alarming threat to women’s safety and freedom in public spaces. It is in this respect, the ‘disconnect’ between the official rhetoric of equal opportunities for men and women and the reality of persistent gender inequality becomes clearly visible. Arguably, ‘the state is required to play a key part in determining the nature and extent to women’s liberation—whether by

15

Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

251

Fig. 15.1 Rate of crime against Indian women. Source Crime in India, 2015, NCRB

restricting women’s lives through legislation, or failing to intervene in situations of sexual discrimination and harassment’ (Bhattacharyya 2015: 1350). As stated above, following some of the recommendations of the JVC report spearheaded the amendment and passing of the rigorous The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013. Divided into 14 chapters plus introduction, methodology, conclusions and recommendations, the JVC report, inter-alia recommended for curbing rising

sexual violence against women. It proposed for the bill of rights guaranteed to women, which would include the right to life, security, bodily integrity, democratic and civil rights and equality. It also advocated for rigorous punishment for rape (up to seven years or for life), gang rape and murder suggesting life-imprisonment causing death or a ‘persistent vegetative state’ for a term not less than 20 years rather than capital punishment. In addition, the JVC report endorsed for

252

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

Fig. 15.2 Cases of rape in few major cities of India (2001-2011). Source Crime in India, NCRB

fast-track judgement through establishments of fast-track courts or women’s courts for speeding prosecution of cases on VAW, recruitment of female doctors (and scrapping of ‘two-finger’ test—the practice that examines the vagina’s laxity determining as to whether the victim is ‘habituated to sex’), police reforms through recruitment of more female police officers, electoral reforms and gender sensitization through education. Contrary to the JVC report, the Criminal Act incorporates death penalty (or capital punishment) or a minimum of 20 years in prison (which

was 10 years earlier) for the perpetrators (including government and police officials) of rape or leaving the victim in a vegetative state. The Act makes mandatory registration of FIR for all sex crimes; failure to register an FIR by a police official would be considered dereliction of duty and be punishable. In addition, for the first time, this Act recognized other forms of despicable sex-crimes (stalking, touching, sexually colored remarks, voyeurism, human trafficking and acid attacks) addressing penalties and awarding a minimum of 10-year jail term to the perpetrators of these crimes including a reasonable fine for

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Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

253

Fig. 15.3 Cases of molestation (under section 354 of the Indian Penal Code) in few major cities of India (2001-2011). Source Crime in India, NCRB

meeting the medical expenses of the victims. The Act has already made some groundbreaking impact on high profile cases. For instance: The 429-page historic death-penalty verdict17was conferred on the four appellants of the Nirbhaya gang rape case on 5 May 2017 labelling it as the ‘rarest of the rare case’. The

17

Criminal Appeal Nos. 607-608 OF 2017, Retrieved from, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article18390998. ece/binary/SupremeCourtverdict.

chronology of the whole incident is as follows (Table 15.2). Further, as already stated above, as a result of the juvenile being released from the remand home, the government was propelled to make an amendment to the Juvenile Justice Act through the passing of Juvenile Justice (Care And Protection of Children) Act 2015, wherein, the age of the delinquency were lowered from 18 to 16 for those engaged in horrific crimes. Another high profile case that faced media trial too was that of Mr. Tarun Tejpal, the former

254

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

Fig. 15.4 Cases of sexual harassment/eve-teasing (under section 509 of the Indian Penal Code) in few major cities of India (2001-2011). Source Crime in India, NCRB

editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine, who was booked under IPC Sections 376, 376(2)(f) and 376(2) (k) and charge-sheeted for alleged rape of one of his junior employees inside a hotel lift in Goa on 30 November 2013. He was later released on bail on 1 July 2014, but the honorable court ordered him to submit his passport and

his trial continues.18 This case further amplifies the stringency of the criminal Act. Had this incident taken place prior to the passing of the bill, perhaps, Mr. Tejpal would have walked away scot-free. Notwithstanding, pendency of rape cases approximately stands at 85.17% in courts across 18

Tarun Tejpal case: Media banned inside the courtroom (2017, 16 June). Hindustan Times. Retrieved from, http:// www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/tarun-tejpal-case-me dia-banned-inside-the-courtroom/story-QNW5GM8tHaG3 szD69SomkI.html.

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Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

255

Fig. 15.5 Cases of indecent representation of women (P) act, 1986 in few major cities of India (2001-2011). Source Crime in India, NCRB

the country (Crime in India 2012; also Bhattacharyya 2016) with abysmally low conviction rates, although, some cases turn out to be bogus (Rukmini 2016b); let alone, 1,600 cases remain pending across fast-track courts established in Delhi following the post-Nirbhaya incident.19 The delay in rape trials signals that the judiciary 19

Fast-track courts have over 1,600 pending cases (2016, 17 December). The Times of India. Retrieved from, http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Fast-track-courtshave-over-1600-pending-cases/articleshow/56027161. cms.

process remains in favour of the perpetrators. Arguably, ‘death penalty’ is not the answer for escalation of everyday geographies of women’s safety in public spaces. In the said context, Bhattacharyya and Sarma (2017) argue for a legislation, which castrates convicted rapists. Of course, there has to be rigorous debates considering its pros and cons and the issues of medical ethicalities entailed. By having a piece of powerful legislation such as this will, perhaps, rigorously deter and reduce sex-crime.

256

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

Table 15.2 Chronology of the Nirbhaya incident 16 December 2012

Nirbhaya was gang-raped and brutally harassed by six men (among them the youngest was juvenile) when she was returning home from Cinema with her boyfriend. She was left in a ‘vegetative state’

17 December 2012

Police were able to identify the four accused including the bus driver—Ram Singh

18 December 2012

Ram Singh and the three accused were arrested

20 December 2012

Testimony by victim’s boyfriend

21 December 2012

Juvenile was nabbed from Anand Vihar Bus Terminal

22 December 2012

The sixth accused was arrested from Aurangabad district of Bihar

23 December 2012

The incident triggered massive public protest

29 December 2012

Nirbhaya was flown to Singapore following a cardiac arrest where she was declared dead

11 March 2013

The key accused—Ram Singh committed suicide in Tihar jail

31 August 2013

The Juvenile Justice Board found the juvenile guilty of committing rape and murder and sent him to remand home

13 September 2013

Additional sessions judge awarded death sentence to the four accused, which was upheld by Justice Yogesh Khanna of Delhi High Court in 13 March 2014

18 December 2015

Delinquent juvenile walks home free

15 March 2014

Apex Court stays execution of the accused

03 April 2016

Hearing begins at the Apex Court

27 March 2017

Apex Court reserved the verdict of the appellants

05 May 2017

All the four were awarded death penalty

Sources Is gender justice only on paper, asks woman judge (06 May 2017). The Hindu and Delhi gang rape case: chronology of events (05 May 2017). The Hindu

The post-Nirbhaya budget sessions since 2013, started by the United Progressive Alliance government, continue to allocate INR 10 billion every year as corpus fund (known as Nirbhaya fund) for escalation of women’s safety but the fund (INR 30 billion) remains unspent until now.20 Under the Nirbhaya Project, we urge

20

Delhi gang rape case: Rs. 3,000 crore Nirbhaya fund remains under-utilized (2017, 05 May). Hindustan Times. Retrieved from, http://www.hindustantimes.com/indianews/delhi-gang-rape-case-rs-3-000-crore-nirbhaya-fundremains-under-utilised/story-eVXZH3RFfVMmYnOlvIrx NM.html.

upon the Home Ministry to act in synchronization with the respective state governments and Smart Cities Mission21 of the Ministry of Urban Smart Cities Mission is a flagship programme of the Government of India launched in 2015 that aims to build 100 smart cities across the nation-state with an allocated budget of INR 980 billion (US$15 billion). In the first phase, based on proposal competition among the 100 cities, 20 cities have been selected. These 20 cities are— Bhubaneshwar (Odisha), Pune (Maharastra), Jaipur (Rajasthan), Surat (Gujarat), Kochi (Kerala), Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh), Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh), Solapur (Maharashtra), Davangere (Karnataka), Indore (Madhya Pradesh), New Delhi, Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), Kakinada (Andhra Pradesh), Belgaum (Karnataka), Udaipur (Rajasthan), Guwahati (Assam),

21

15

Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

Development in order to establish One-Stop Rape Crisis Centers across the states as recommended by Justice Usha Mehra Commission suggesting for a victim-centric approach. Each such centre would act as an umbrella centre recruiting and regulating a dedicated group comprising of a nurse, a doctor (gynaecologist), a police inspector, a forensic expert and a counsellor bearing facilities for registration of FIRs by the complainants as well as making provisions for medical check-up and treatment plus counselling and collecting forensic evidence. This would augment cooperation among the functionaries (Bhattacharyya 2016) endowing a sense of obligation among the lawyers in delving out the facts for an immaculate trial. That is, with properly collated evidence under one umbrella, there would be very little room for a magistrate or a session judge to deem a case as false, thereby, a complete report could be submitted to the court within a short span of time (say, two weeks), which would allow for prompt and punctual disposal of the trial proceedings. Such streamlining would definitely reduce victim vulnerability by making the complaints victim-centric and conviction of the offender through a fast trial would send a clear message that the perpetrators of sex-crime are no longer in control (Bhattacharyya 2016). Perhaps, such measure would transform the spaces safer and liveable for women. The government has already proposed for establishments of 660 rape crisis centres in its first phase. The first rape crisis centre has been operational in Bhopal since 2014, which was launched in collaboration with Action Aid India (Tomar 2015; also

Bhattacharyya 2016). The Delhi Commission for Women has proposed to run 11 one-stop centres across the National Capital.22 Nonetheless, statistics unveil that more than 27 million cases of all crimes remain pending in courts and the judiciary process suffers from acute judges scarcity with 4635 vacancies in different courts (Supreme Court: 5 vacancies, High Courts: 464 vacancies and District and Sub-Courts: 4,166) (Prakash et al. 2016). Prakash et al. (2016) go on to unravel that there are only seven judges per 1 million population in India. The judge-population (1 million) ratios for other countries are—France (124), the USA (108), Australia (40), Canada (33) and England (22).23 In addition, the country is home to one of the lowest police-population ratios in the world (Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016) with 106 police officials per 100,000 persons (Tiwary 2014). This is more than half the recommended figure by the United Nations, which stands at 222 per 100,000 persons (Tiwary 2014). The JVC report argued that the police officials are insensitive in tackling sex-crime and often debase the victims (Verma 2013; Bhattacharyya 2013a, 2015, 2016). According to the Anti-Rape Act, for cases of offence—sexual harassment, acid attack, disrobing and voyeurism, outraging a woman’s modesty, rape (of all kinds)—a female official must be called in to record the statements of the victim. The percentage of female police officials are abysmally low and stands at merely 7% of all the total police force, which increased from 6% in 201224,25, but the government wants to increase its strength to 33.3% (Bhattacharyya 2013a, 2015, 2016). 22

Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Ludhiana (Punjab), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh). Each of these 20 cities would receive INR10 billion over a span of five years (Central government funding of INR 5 billion to be matched with equal funding from States and local bodies). None of these 20 cities has dedicated strategies for enhancing women’s safety in public spaces although there are provisions for providing smart lighting system, CCTV for surveillance/crime monitoring, seamless Wi-Fi connectivity/Wi-Fi hotspots in some of these cities (Smart Cities Mission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India. Retrieved from, http:// smartcities.gov.in/content/smart_solution.php).

257

DCW to open one-stop centres in 11 districts (2016, 10 October). The Indian Express. Retrieved from, http:// indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-commissionfor-women-dcw-stop-centres-swati-maliwal-arvindkejriwal-3074435/. 23 The numbers in parentheses show the number of judges. 24 Bureau of Police Research and Development, Ministry of Home Affairs. Retrieved from, http://www.bprd.nic.in/ content/62_1_DataonPoliceOrganizations.aspx. 25 Only seven per cent women in police forces: Government (2017 28 March). The Indian Express. Retrieved from, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/only-sevenper-cent-women-in-police-forces-govt/.

258

Following the JVC report, the honourable Apex Court abolished the two-finger test on a rape victim as it violates the right to privacy of the victim, and has requested to replace it with better a medical mechanism in order to validate sexual assault.26 JVC report (page 420) further recommended for provision of more streetlights which ‘would provide more safety since dark areas are more prone to facilitate crimes’. Under the Ministry of Urban Development, it is a requisite norm for the cities to make provisions for streetlights every 40 m with an illumination capacity of minimum 35 lx (Bhattacharyya 2013a, 2016). Evidently, most public lights remain either malfunctional or debilitated with poor glimmering strength. It remains paramount for the states to rebuild highly efficient street lighting system, possibly through installation of smart Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights or solar streetlights, which are reckoned eco-friendly and highly efficient entailing less maintenance. More installation of CCTVs at major intersections would act as deterrents for potential criminals while committing any kind of VAW. Perhaps, the introduction of eco- and user-friendly women-only buses might reduce some form of VAW. The JVC report advocated that in all public transport, not only the identities (name, age and address with photographs) of the bus drivers, conductors and other employees (if any) must be displayed in areas of good visibility, but also must be GPS-enabled with regular monitoring to check that the system has not been tampered with. The JVC report further recommended that the number plate of the vehicle be easily noticeable both from within and outside the vehicle (Verma 2013; also Bhattacharyya 2016). Further, to alleviate women’s unsafety in public spaces, Between Two Stops programme could be perhaps implemented. Between Two Stops is a programme launched by the cities of Toronto and Montreal, Canada aimed at

R. Bhattacharyya and S. Prasad

escalating women’s safety and perception of safety when commuting by public transport. The programme aims at shortening women’s walking distance, especially at night to reach their final destinations. ‘This friendly service allows any women regardless of age commuting during night hours to alight from the bus between stops. Replication of this idea on public transport… might augment women’s safety to a certain extent’ (Bhattacharyya 2016: 11). It is arguable that the perpetrators are the products of society. The JVC report, therefore, recommended for increased gender sensitization via drastic redesigning of formal curriculum in schools. It advocated for making sex education an integral part of the curriculum. Alongside, increased gender sensitivity must be created among the officials of all functionaries dealing with VAW—police, medical, judiciary. Gender sensitization is equally important within the spatial boundaries of the home. Previous studies have shown that children growing up witnessing their mothers or other women within their home facing some form of violence are more likely to reckon this as a ‘normative’ practice and use violence to assert their dominance over women in public (Bhattacharyya 2015, 2016; Dhawani 2014; Sinha 2012). It is saddening to note that approximately 57% boys and 53% girls rationalize domestic violence against women (Bhattacharyya 2015; Sinha 2012).

15.5

Conclusion

We conclude using the last quote (page 429) of the historic Nirbahya verdict: [t]he battle for gender justice can be won only with strict implementation of legislative provisions, sensitization of public, taking other pro-active steps at all levels for combating violence against women and ensuring widespread attitudinal changes and comprehensive change in the existing mind set. We hope that this [Nirbhaya] incident will pave the way for the same.27

26

No two-finger test for rape: SC (2016, 02 November). The Hindu. Retrieved from, http://www.thehindu.com/ news/national/No-two-finger-test-for-rape-SC/ article12141055.ece.

27

Criminal Appeal Nos. 607-608 OF 2017, Retrieved from, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article18390 998.ece/binary/SupremeCourtverdict.

15

Geographies of Indian Women’s Everyday Public Safety

Notwithstanding, would these changes make the public spaces liveable for women, where they enjoy some ‘sense of belonging’ to practise their everyday duties maintaining dignity, safety and self-respect. Perhaps, time will speak…. Acknowledgements At the outset, we offer ‘very big thank you’ to all the editors—Rajiv Thakur, Ashok Dutt, George Pomeroy and Sudhir Thakur for offering us the opportunity to contribute this chapter. We are equally grateful to Dhritiman Biswa Sarma for copy-editing the manuscript.

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Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India: A Study of Regional Differentials in Northwestern India

16

Surya Kant

Abstract

The paper examines regional and sub-regional differentials in socio-economic transformation of Dalits, officially known as scheduled castes, in Northwest India with the help of three indicators, namely literacy level, residential mobility or degree of urbanization, and rural occupational transformation making district as a unit of data mapping and analysis. Data on these indicators have been used from Census of India, covering a period of six census decades, 1961–2011. Deprivation index method has been used to prepare composite index of socio-economic transformation. In Northwest India, every fifth person belongs to dalit category of population, against the national average of one in each six persons. Dalit population is lagging far behind the general population in socio-economic transformation in different parts of India. There were, however, wide inter- and intra-state disparities in their well-being. Within NW India, Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh (UT) recorded the high level of socio-economic development of dalit population, both in 1961 and 2011. But Haryana performed well, especially in comparison to neighboring Punjab, in terms of socio-economic transformation during 1961–

S. Kant (&) Department of Geography, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India e-mail: [email protected]

2011. It is satisfying that the pace of socio-economic transformation of dalits has accelerated during post-Independence era, narrowing down the wide gap between dalits and general population in the country. This speaks of the success of government sponsored programs and policies for their socio-economic transformation, initiated by the State in Independent India. The former dalit castes are now more awakened in social, political, and economic terms. This trend is likely to continue in future, but with greater benefits to newly emerged elite class within the dalits. The government programs and policies in future must concentrate not only on reducing the interand intra-regional disparities in their socio-economic well-being, but also addressing those inequalities found between “dalit” and “non-dalit” castes, on one hand, and “creamy” and “non-creamy” layers within the dalits. Keywords

Dalit

16.1


Deprivation index method

Introduction

The State in Independent India took various constitutional and administrative measures to safeguard the interests of the former oppressed groups of Indian society, “officially” termed as

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_16

261

262

“Scheduled” castes and tribes but preferring to call themselves as Dalits (oppressed). The abolition of untouchability and the reservation of seats in educational and democratic institutions along with that in the public sector enterprises have contributed significantly to their upward socio-economic mobility, resulting in higher educational attainments, occupational diversification, and residential mobility along with loosening of the upper caste dominance. Nevertheless, this has also exposed their internal differentials emanating from the caste, sub-caste, clan, and class identities. For example, the relatively well-off and politically articulate Dalit castes have cornered the major share of government largesse. This eventually consolidated the position of the elite groups or individuals within the Dalit castes. Moreover, rivalries among the lower castes such as Mahars and Mangs in Maharashtra, Malas and Madigas in Andhra Pradesh, Chamars and Chuhras in the north Indian states have emerged as the impediments to political mobilization, further reinforcing cleavages. In fact, these castes and tribes have never been a homogeneous group. Given the wide differences in historical background across regions and sub-regions in the country, some states have done better than others in terms of socio-economic upliftment of such castes and tribes. It is generally stated that not only a creamy layer has emerged within the “Dalit” population, but also inter-regional and sub-regional differentials in their socio-economic development have widened further. Taking a cue from the above, the paper attempts to examine inter-regional and sub-regional differentials in socio-economic development of Dalit population in Northwestern region, comprising of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, and Union Territory of Chandigarh (Fig. 16.1). The region contains 8.3% of the total Dalit population against its share of 6.0% in the total population of India. Further, 22.9% of total population of the Northwestern India comprises of Dalits against the national average of 16.6%. Obviously, there was a higher concentration of Dalit population in this region.

S. Kant

It is hoped that an understanding of regional pattern of socio-economic transformation of Dalit population will help the state governments to evolve programs and strategies for socio-economic upliftment of this segment of the Indian population, remaining deprived of their rights, historically. For measuring socio-economic transformation of Dalit population, the three broad indicators of literacy, urbanization, and (rural) occupational diversification were picked up. Increased literacy among such castes has created not only a greater awareness, but also opened up the new avenues of employment opportunities especially in the public sector, concentrated mainly in urban areas. All the indicators are inextricably intertwined. Data on these indicators were picked up from the Census of India, published by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi. According to 2011 Census data, twenty-one states and three union territories, in combine, had 99.9% of the total Dalit population in the country. For studying change in the socio-economic conditions of Dalit population a period spanning over five decades, from 1961 to 2011, has been selected. This period was selected for two reasons. A period of five decades is long enough to assess the impact of change in the socio-economic conditions of the Dalit population. Secondly, it was during the 1961 Census that for the first-time, detailed information about this segment of population was collected. The 2011 Census is the latest in the series. For a composite index of socio-economic transformation, the methodology evolved by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP 1999, p. 134) for the construction of human development index was pressed into service. Minimum and maximum limits for each indicator are 0 and 100, respectively. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section examines demographic attributes of Dalit population in Northwestern India within the broad frame of India followed by inter- and intra-state comparison within the region under study. The second section examines inter- and intra-regional disparities in socio-economic

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

263

Fig. 16.1 The study area, 2011

North-West India The Study Area, 2011 Data not available

Bandipora

Kupwara

Baramula

Ganderbal Srinagar Badgam

Leh (Ladakh) Kargil

Pulwama

Shupiyan Anantnag

Punch

Kulgam Rajouri

Kishtwar Ramban

Reasi

Doda Jammu

Udhampur

Samba

Chamba Kathua

Lahul & Spiti

Kangra

Gurdaspur Amritsar

Kullu Hoshiarpur

Tarn Taran

Hamirpur Una

Kapurthala

Ludhiana

Faridkot

SAS Nagar C Panchkula Fatehgarh Sirmaur Sahib

Barnala Bathinda

Sangrur

Patiala

Ambala Yamunanagar

Kurukshetra

Mansa Sirsa

Shimla

Rupnagar SBS Nagar Solan

Jalandhar Firozpur

Muktsar

Kinnaur Bilaspur

K

Moga

Mandi

C - Chandigarh K - Part of Kapurthala

Kaithal Karnal

Fatehabad Jind

Boundaries:

Panipat

Hisar

International

Sonipat Rohtak

State

Bhiwani Jhajjar

District

MahendraGurgaon garh Rewari

Faridabad Palwal

Mewat

0

100 Kms.

development of Dalit population and changes therein in Northwestern India.

16.2

Dalits: A Demographic Profile

The term “Dalit,” which stands literally for the oppressed, came into wider currency in the latter half of nineteenth century through the writings and speeches of Jyotiba Phule. He was the first reformer in the modern period to take up the

cause of the untouchables in Maharashtra state (Gore 1993, p. 211). Castes having neither power nor privileges are equated with Dalits. However, this group includes both “touchable” and “untouchable’s” castes. Such castes are officially termed now as “Scheduled castes”1 in modern India. However, now they prefer to call themselves as Dalits. In fact, the term “Scheduled castes” speaks of social and administrative identity and “Dalits” of political identity of such castes.

264

16.2.1 The National Scenario According to the 2011 Census, 201.4 million or 16.6% of the total population of India is composed of Scheduled castes or Dalits. Another 104.3 million persons are Scheduled tribes. In combine, 305.7 million or more than 25% of the total population of India belonged to the Scheduled population (castes and tribes). In other words, almost every fourth person of Indian society belongs either to a Scheduled caste or a Scheduled tribe. Separately, every sixth person in India is a Scheduled caste or a Dalit. With the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, and Nagaland states and the union territories of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep, Dalit castes are notified in all the states and union territories of India. However, they were unevenly distributed at the state level. In some states, they are highly concentrated, against this they make up only a small fraction in total population. In Uttar Pradesh alone, there are 41.3 million or more than one-fifth (20.5%) of the total Dalit population in the country. Next to it, West Bengal accounts for another 21.5 million or 10.7% in total Dalit population. These two states together share about one-third of the India’s Dalit population. Strikingly, six states namely, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, each one having more than 13 million Dalit population, have more than three-fifths or 60.1% of the total such population in the country. In fact, roughly nine-tenths or 87.4% of the total Dalit population resides only in twelve states namely, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Odisha, and Haryana. A majority of these states are located in northern India. In comparative terms, four southern states (i.e., Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala) together have only about 21.0% of the total Dalit population in India, whereas the share of the four northern states (Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, and Rajasthan) tends to be as high as

S. Kant

45.5%. Evidently, inter-state distribution of Dalit population in India is highly uneven, as there was a higher concentration of such population in the north Indian states (Table 16.1). It varied from a high of about 32.0% in Punjab to a low of 0.1% in Mizoram. National average being 16.6%, eleven states (Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Tripura, Karnataka, and Odisha) and two union territories (Chandigarh and NCT Delhi) had Dalit population share above the national average. Against this, eight states (Jammu & Kashmir, Assam, Gujarat, Sikkim, Manipur, Goa, Meghalaya, and Mizoram) along with the two union territories (Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli) had less than the national average (16.6%). As stated earlier, Dalit population was not enumerated in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Lakshadweep, and A & N Islands. In other words, these states and union territories did not notify castes for inclusion in the Scheduled list of castes to be declared as “Scheduled castes” as per the provision of Indian Constitutions. In the four states of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, the Dalits constituted more than 20% in their total populations. In comparison, Dalits’ population made only about one percent or less in the total population of Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Mizoram states dominated by the tribal population. In fact, in areas dominated by the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Muslims in India, the Dalit population was conspicuously low. In the past, conversion of the low caste Hindus to Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam in such areas was mainly responsible for such a low share of Dalit population in such states. In four states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Himachal Pradesh, the share of Dalit population was higher than their respective shares in total population of the country. For example, Uttar Pradesh accounted for only 16.1% of India’s total population against 21.2% of the total Dalit population in the country. Similarly, the respective shares of West Bengal

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Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

265

Table 16.1 Concentration and dispersal tendencies in distribution of Dalit population by states in India Rank in 2011

Name of state/UT

Dalit population 2011

Dalit population 2001

Absolute change

Rank in absolute change

Compound annual growth rate (%)

Rank in annual growth

1

Uttar Pradesh

41,357,608

35,148,377

6,209,231

1.64

18

2

West Bengal

21,463,270

18,452,555

3,010,715

3

Bihar

16,567,325

13,048,608

3,518,717

4

1.52

19

2

2.42

6

4

Tamil Nadu

14,438,445

11,857,504

2,580,941

5

Andhra Pradesh

13,878,078

12,339,496

1,538,582

5

1.99

15

10

1.18

22

6

Maharashtra

13,275,898

9,881,656

3,394,242

3

3.00

5

7

Rajasthan

12,221,593

9,694,462

2,527,131

6

2.34

7

8

Madhya Pradesh

11,342,320

9,155,177

2,187,143

7

2.17

12

9

Karnataka

10,474,992

8,563,930

1,911,062

8

2.03

13

10

Punjab

8,860,179

7,028,723

1,831,456

9

2.34

8

11

Odisha

7,188,463

6,082,063

1,106,400

11

1.69

17

12

Haryana

5,113,615

4,091,110

1,022,505

12

2.26

9

13

Gujarat

4,074,447

3,592,715

481,732

15

1.27

21

14

Jharkhand

3,985,644

3,189,320

796,324

14

2.25

11

15

Chhattisgarh

3,274,269

2,418,722

855,547

13

3.07

4

16

Kerala

3,039,573

3,123,941

−84,368

17

Assam

2,231,321

1,825,949

405,372

16

2.03

14

18

Uttarakhand

1,892,516

1,517,186

375,330

17

2.24

10

19

Himachal Pradesh

1,729,252

1,502,170

227,082

18

1.42

20

20

Jammu & Kashmir

924,991

770,155

154,836

19

1.85

16

21

Tripura

654,918

555,724

99,194

20

1.66

18

22

Manipur

97,042

60,037

37,005

21

4.92

2

23

Sikkim

28,275

27,165

1,110

24

0.40

24

24

Goa

25,449

23,791

1,658

23

0.68

23

25

Meghalaya

17,355

11,139

6,216

22

4.53

3

26

Mizoram

1,218

272

946

25

16.17

1

27

Arunachal Pradesh

a

6,188

a

a

28

Nagaland

a

a

a

a

1

NCT of Delhi

2,812,309

2,343,255

469,054

1

1.84

5

2

Chandigarh

199,086

157,597

41,489

2

2.36

3

3

Puducherry

196,325

157,771

38,554

3

2.21

4 (continued)

1

−0.27

Union Territory

266

S. Kant

Table 16.1 (continued)

a

Rank in 2011

Name of state/UT

Dalit population 2011

Dalit population 2001

Absolute change

4

Dadra & Nagar Haveli

6,186

4,104

2,082

4

4.19

1

5

Daman & Diu

6,124

4,838

1,286

5

2.39

2

6

A&N Islands

a

a

a

a

7

Lakshadweep

a

a

a

a

India

201,378,086

166,635,700

34,742,386

1.91

Rank in absolute change

Compound annual growth rate (%)

Rank in annual growth

State/Union Territory, where Dalit population was not enumerated

were 7.8 and 11%. Such interstate variations in distribution of Dalit population were full of implications in the context of political mobilization in India’s democratic setup, which is based on adult franchise. Yet another peculiarity of Dalit population distribution is the high degree of heterogeneity in terms of castes. In 2011, there were as many as 1241 castes of Dalits. Earlier in 1951, this number was only 779. Obviously, over the years more and more castes were notified as Scheduled castes or Dalit castes, mainly for populist considerations; influenced by the attractive benefits, including reservation in legislative bodies, government jobs, and educational institutions. The number of castes varies from a minimum of four in Sikkim to a maximum of 101 in Karnataka. In other words, Dalit population was the most homogeneous in Sikkim and the least in Karnataka. Nonetheless, only a few Dalit castes are numerically large and regionally concentrated too. According to 2001 census, sixteen top-ranking Dalit castes, each with million or more persons, accounted for 74.2 million or about 84.0% of total such population in India. The Chamar caste was numerically the largest and most widely distributed of all the Dalit castes, followed by the Mahar, and the Madiga. With 32.5 million persons, the Chamar was the first ranking caste in 178 districts of the country. Its share varied from a high of 87.6% in Bilarpur district (Chhattisgarh) to 20.1% in Sahibganj

district (Jharkhand). It was in absolute majority (having more than 50.0%) in 107 districts. Nine such districts were in Haryana state. The Chamars made one-fourth in total Dalit population of India. In their spatial distribution, they were widely distributed in north Indian states while the castes such as, the Mahar, the Madiga, the Adi Dravida, the Pasi, the Rajbanshi, the Mala, the Namasudra, the Bagdi, the Megh, the Dusadh, the Adi Dravida, the Mazhabi, the Pallan, the Pod, and the Mahyavansi, constituting the other numerically large Dalit castes, were regional concentrated. The Chamars dominated in as many as seven states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar. Against this, Adi Dravida and Paraiyan dominated only in Tamil Nadu; Madigas and Malas in Andhra Pradesh; Dusadhs in north Bihar; Dhobis in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Odisha; Mahars in Maharashtra; and Adi Karnataka in southern Karnataka.

16.2.2 The Regional Scenario Northwestern region (including Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, and Chandigarh Union Territory) shared 16.83 million or 8.4% in total Dalit population in India against only 6.1% of their share in total population of the country. Obviously, Northwestern region has higher concentration of Dalits in comparison to other regions. For example, Dalits

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

made 22.9% in total population of Northwestern region against only 6.4% in Northeastern India, 11% in Western India, 16% in Southern India, 18% in Eastern India, and 19% in Central India, the national average being 16.6%. Within Northwestern India (henceforth NW India), Punjab alone shared more than one-half (52.7%) or 8.86 million of the total 16.83 million Dalits in the region. Another 5.11 million or 30.4% were in Haryana. Both states, in combine, had 83.0% of total Dalit population, against their share of 72.2% in total regional population at 2011 Census. Earlier in 1961, the share of Punjab in total Dalit population of the region was as high as 55%, and Haryana shared only about 26%. Hence, their combined share in 1961 made about 81.0% against 83% in 2011; indicating faster growth of DALIT population in Haryana than Punjab during 1961–2011. Interestingly, unlike Haryana the share of Himachal Pradesh in regional total of Dalit population declined during the same period: from 12.7% in 1961 to 10.3% in 2011. Against this, there has been a remarkable increase in share of Chandigarh (UT) in total regional Dalit population. It rose to 1.2% in 2011 from 0.3% in 1961. The same is well reflected in phenomenal growth of Dalits in Chandigarh (UT) during 1961–2011: 6.44% against the regional average of 2.63%. The share of Jammu & Kashmir in regional total of Dalits declined marginally to 5.50% from 5.60% during this period. Nevertheless, annual growth rate of Dalit population in Jammu & Kashmir (2.66%) was higher than the regional average (2.63%). In comparative terms, Dalit population had grown at the slowest rate in Himachal Pradesh and the fastest rate in Chandigarh (UT) in the whole region during 1961–2011 (Table 16.2). Chandigarh (UT) attracts Dalits in lower categories of jobs pertaining to sanitation, garbage disposal, and other menial activities. However, there is no evidence of heavy out-migration of Dalit population from Himachal Pradesh to explain the slow growth of Dalit population in the state. In fact, in Kinnaur and Lahul & Spiti districts of Himachal Pradesh, tribal population in good number

267

reported themselves as Dalits before the Census Enumerators in 2001, while reporting as Scheduled tribes at the time of 1991 Census. Notably, Dalit population in NW region grew at a faster rate than the national average during 1961–2011. Annual compound growth rate of Dalit population in the former was 2.63% in comparison to 2.40% in the latter. Secondly, Dalit population in the NW region grew at a much high rate (2.63%) than the non-Dalit population (1.68%) in the region. In 2011, Dalit population was recorded in all the seventy-sixty districts of NW India. There were, however, wide inter-district variations in distribution. It varied from a high of 9.2 lakh persons in Ludhiana district (Punjab) to a low of only 18 persons in Kargil district (Jammu & Kashmir). Dalit population was highly concentrated in few districts. Six districts namely, Ludhiana, Firozpur, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, and Hoshiarpur, all in Punjab and each one having more than 5.0 lakh Dalits, had in combine about 30.0% of total such population in the region (Fig. 16.2). Another thirteen districts, each having between 5.0 and 3.0 lakh Dalits, in combine, had another 26.0% of total such population in the region. In this way, 19–76 districts, making only one-fourth of total districts in the region, had in combine more than a half (56.6%) of the total Dalit population. The dominant majority of such districts were located in Punjab. Twelve of total 20 districts in the state fell in this category. Of the remaining, five belonged to Haryana and one each to Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. Another 17 districts, each having more than two lakh Dalits, had, in combine, another about one-third of total such population in the region. These districts were mainly in Haryana and Punjab. In this way, less than a half or 47% of total districts had more than four-fifths (81.6%) of total Dalit population in the NW region. In contrast, remaining 40 districts, making more than a half or 52.6% of the total districts in the region, had less than one-fifth or 18.4% of total Dalits in NW region. Most of the districts in this category were located either in Jammu &

268

S. Kant

Table 16.2 NW India: some demographic characteristics of Dalit population, 1961–2011 States/UT

DALIT population (000 person)

% in total population

% share in all India population

Annual growth rate

Urban population in (000 persons)

Annual urban growth rate (%)

2011

1961

2011

2011

1961– 2011

2011

1961

1961–2011

Punjab

8860 (52.6)

2632 (55)

31.9

4.4

2.49

2363

341

4.11

Haryana

5113 (30.4)

1268 (26.4)

20.2

2.5

2.97

1393

350

2.33

Himachal Pradesh

1729 (10.3)

610 (12.7)

25.2

0.9

2.28

123

9.5

6.03

Jammu & Kashmir

925 (5.5)

269 (5.6)

7.4

0.5

2.66

174

21

4.74

Chandigarh

199 (1.2)

13 (0.3)

18.9

0.1

6.44

194

3.7

9.57

Regional Total

1683 (100)

4792 (100)

22.9

8.4

2.63

4247

725.2

3.58

All India

201378

64511

16.6

100.0

2.40

47527

6899

4.06

Note Figures in parentheses indicate to percentage share of individual State/UT in total Dalit Scheduled castes population in the Northwestern region Source Calculated from (i) Census of India (1961), Special Tables on Scheduled Castes, Part V, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi, and (ii) Census of India (2011), Special Tables on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes-on CD, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi

Kashmir or Himachal Pradesh, where resided the tribal population in substantial number. For historical reasons, Dalit’s population was relatively less in areas dominated by Tribal, Christian, and Muslim population in India. Within the Northwest states, Punjab, Haryana, and Chandigarh (UT) did not notify tribes for scheduling purpose. Tribal population residing in their respective territories was enumerated under the general category of population at the time of Census enumeration. Against this, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir notify both castes and tribes. In proportional terms, Nawanshahr district (renamed as Shahid Bhagat Singh Nagar, Punjab) recorded as high as 42.5% share of Dalit population in its total population, against the regional average of 22.9%. This share was not only the highest among all the districts in the NW region, but also the second highest, after Koch Bihar (50.2% in West Bengal), in the whole country. Sixteen districts in the region had more than 30.0% share of Dalit population in their total

population. Fourteen of them belonged to Punjab; and one each to Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. In the country as a whole, there are 186 districts, where DALIT population made one-fifth or more in total population at 2011 Census. 46 districts of them, falling in NW region, were distributed in the following manner: all the 20 districts in Punjab, 10 of 12 in Himachal Pradesh, 12 of 21 in Haryana, and four of 22 districts in Jammu& Kashmir (Kant 2012, pp. 25–26). At the level of Individual states, Nawanshahr (42.5%), Sirmaur (30.3%), Faridabad (30.2%), and Samba (28.8%) had the highest share of Dalit population in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Jammu & Kashmir, respectively. Chandigarh (UT) had 18.9% share of Dalit population. Against this, Kulgam district (negligible share) in Jammu & Kashmir, Mewat (6.9%) in Haryana, Lahul & Spiti (7.1%) in Himachal Pradesh, and Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar/Mohali (21.7%) in Punjab recorded the lowest shares of Dalit population in respective states.

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

269

Fig. 16.2 Distribution of scheduled caste population 2011

North-West India Distribution of Scheduled Caste Population 2011 (Data by districts)

Data not available

* * * *

*

*

*

*

*

SC Population in lakh More than 5 2-5 1-2 Less than 1 Largest Population = 923358 Persons (Ludhiana) Smallest Population = 18 Persons (Kargil) 0 * - Districts where total SC Population is less than one thousand

Eighteen of 76 districts in the region recorded less than 10.0% share of Dalits in their total population (Fig. 16.3). This group includes 16 of 22 districts in Jammu & Kashmir. Of the remaining two districts, one was Mewat (6.9%) in Haryana, and other one Lahul & Spiti (7.1%) in Himachal Pradesh. Within the NW region, Dalit population was highly concentrated in Punjab and the least in Jammu & Kashmir. All the 20 districts in Punjab

100 Kms.

had their share of more than 20.0% in total population. Against this, the number of such districts was only four (Samba, Udhampur, Jammu, and Kathua) in Jammu & Kashmir. Interestingly, all the four districts were from the Jammu region of the state. In districts falling under the Kashmir Valley along with Leh (Ladakh) district, the proportional share of Dalit population ranged from low to very low share. Kashmir Valley is dominated by the Muslims. In

270

S. Kant

Fig. 16.3 Proportional share of scheduled caste population in total population, 2011

North-West India Proportional Share of Scheduled Caste Population in Total Population, 2011 (Data by districts)

Data not available

SC Share in percentage More than 40 25-40 10-25 Less than 10

0 Regional Average= 22.9% Highest Share= 42.5% (Shahid Bhagat Singh Nagar) Punjab Lowest Share= 0.0% (Kulgam) J&K

the past, there has been religious conversion of such castes belonging to the Hindu fold to the Christianity and the Islam. Notably, the Indian Constitution allows the notification of castes belonging to Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism for inclusion in scheduled category of (Dalit) castes. The same is not allowed in case of such castes belonging to either the Christianity or the Islam. Hence, the geographical distribution of Dalit population in India finds association with Hindu,

100 Kms.

Sikh, and Buddhist population in areas dominated by agricultural and pastoral economy. In the past, Dalits were mostly engaged in menial jobs, providing services to upper castes in agricultural and rural economy under a system known as “Jajmani System.” They were mostly working as agricultural laborers, scavengers, disposers of dead animals, and skin and hide workers. There has been, of course, a noticeable change in traditional system with change in environment and ecology, life style, and the

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

Table 16.3 NW region: distribution of Dalit castes by state/UT, 2011

Name of state/UT

Number of Dalit castes

1. Jammu & Kashmir

13

2. Punjab

39

3. Haryana

37

4. Himachal Pradesh

57

5. Chandigarh (UT)

36

NW region

182 (63 if common castes excluded-see Appendix)

All India

1241

271

Source Census of India (2011), Special Tables on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes-on CD, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi

initiatives and actions of the Welfare State in Independent India supplemented with the efforts made individuals with the Dalit community.

16.2.3 Scenario at the Caste Level In NW India, the number of Dalit castes ranged from a high of 57 in Himachal Pradesh to a low of 13 in Jammu & Kashmir. The number of Dalit castes was 39 in Punjab, 37 in Haryana, and 36 in Union Territory of Chandigarh (Table 16.3). After the conduct of 2001 Census, one more caste (Barwala) was added in Himachal Pradesh list, and the two more (Mochi and Mahatam/Rai Sikh) in Punjab. No new caste has been notified in Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, and Chandigarh (UT). There are, however, five Dalit castes, which are common to all the states of NW India. These include Batwal/Barwala, Chamar/Ramdasi/ Ravidasi, Doom, Megh/Julaha/Kabirpanthi, and Balmiki/Chura/Bhangi. Further, as many as 30 castes are common in Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh (UT). Against this, as many as 19 castes are notified only in Himachal Pradesh; two in Haryana and Punjab; and six in Jammu & Kashmir (See Appendix). In overall, in spite of homogeneity of Dalit castes in NW India, that too for historical regions, there are well marked inter-states differentials. In fact, inclusion or exclusion of different castes in the “Scheduled” category of castes makes an interesting story. For illustration, castes, namely Jogi, Lohar, and Teli are generally categorized as

“other backward castes” (OBC) in majority of North Indian States, but these castes find place in the Scheduled lists of Dalit castes in Himachal Pradesh. Though there were 63 Dalit castes in NW India, but only a few castes are numerically large and spatially widespread. The nine Dalit castes, each having more than half a million persons, subsumed, in combine, more than four-fifths of total such population in the region. These include Chamar, Mazhabi, Balmiki, Ad-Dharmi, Dhanak, Megh/Kabirpanthi/Julaha, Kori/Koli, Mahatam/Rai Sikh, and Dumna/Doom. Their total number made 13.96 million or 82.9% in total Dalit population of 16.83 million in NW region in 2011 (Table 16.4). Within these castes also, the Chamars was the largest and the most widely distributed caste in the region. They made 5.24 million or 31.1% in total Dalit population of NW India in 2011. Further, they constituted between 40 and 90% in total Dalit population in areas of their concentrations. Numerically, they dominate in whole of Haryana and northeastern Punjab (in Gurdaspur, SBS Nagar (Nawanshahr), Kapurthala, Jalandhar, and Hoshiarpur districts). Such a geographical distribution of castes carries great significance in political mobilization and gaining of political power in a democratic system based on adult franchise, as in India (Kant 2005). Those embraced Sikh religion are called Ramdasia, after Guru Ramdas and those in Hindu fold are also known as Ravidasi, after saint Ravidas. The Raigars were generally the lowest position among the Chamars. They were traditionally

272 Table 16.4 NW India: nine numerically largest Dalit castes (each having more than half a million population, 2011)

S. Kant Serial Number

Name of DALIT caste

Population

% in total DALIT population

1

Chamar

5,238,096

31.1

2

Mazhabi

2,779,228

16.5

3

Balmiki

1,926,020

11.5

4

Ad Dharmi

1,029,160

06.1

5

Dhanak

673,711

04.0

6

Megh/Kabirpanthi/Julaha

656,730

03.9

7

Kori/Koli

628,193

03.7

8

Mahatam/Rai Sikh

516,695

03.1

9

Dumna/Doom

508,694

03.0

Total

13,956,527

82.9

Total Dalit population

16,827,123

100.0

Source Census of India (2011), Special Tables on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes-on CD, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi

engaged as tanners and leather workers, shifted now to wage labor or working in government/private jobs. The Mazhabis, the second largest Dalit caste in region and making 2.78 million or 16.5% in total Dalit population in the region, were mainly concentrated in Punjab. In fact, those Balmikis/Chuhras converted to Sikhism are known as Mazhabis. They were mostly working as agricultural laborers/wage laborers in rural areas. Many have joined army services or working as industrial laborers or in government services. The Balmikis, the third largest Dalit caste with 1.93 million persons or 11.5% in total Dalit population in the region, were also known as Chuhras and Bhangis. Their traditional occupation is scavenging. In urban areas they were mostly engaged in sweeping and sanitation activities. The combined strength of the Balmikis and Mazhabis comes to about 28.0%. The main difference between the two is that the latter refuse to touch night soil. They were also widely distributed in the region. With 1.03 million persons, making 6.1% of total Dalit population in NW India, the Ad-Dharmis made the fourth largest caste in the region. They are mainly concentrated in doab region of Punjab, comprising of Jalandhar, Nawanshahr, Hoshiarpur, Balachaur, Kaputhala, and Ropar districts. Though this caste originated from the Chamar community and skin tanning

being their main occupation, they called themselves Ad-Dharmis under the influence of the movement launched by the Ad-Dharmi Mandal (Singh 2003: 20). The combined strength of Ad-Dharmis with the Chamars, the community from which Ad-Dharmis originated, come to more than one-third or 37.3% of all Dalit castes in NW region. Ad-Dharmis are the followers of Guru Ravidas; hence also known as Ravidasia in Punjab. Better education has resulted in new job opportunities among the Ad-Dharmis. Several are employed in government jobs as teachers or administrators. Some others are engaged in business or employed in defense services. Ad-Dharmis along with Chamars have modified and diversified their heredity skills to process the hides and skins to the extent that some have even entered into the manufacturing of leather goods for the export (Judge and Bal 2009: 160). The Dhanak, the fifth largest Dalit caste, has a total strength of 0.67 million or 4.0% in total such population in NW region. More than 86.0% of total Dhanaks in the region were in Haryana and another more than 13.0% in Punjab. Traditionally, Dhanaks are scavengers and weavers. The main difference between and a Dhanak and a Balmiki/Chuhra is that the former while doing general scavenging would not remove night soil. Most of them were engaged in collection and cleaning of grains and then filling it into the bags

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

in grain markets. Some of them were also engaged as weavers. Modern education is making in-roads among youths, who are now attracted to white-collar jobs in public and private sectors both. The Megh/Kabirpanthis/Julahas, the sixth largest Dalit caste in the region with total strength of 0.66 million or 3.9% were distributed in all the four states and Chandigarh Union Territory in the region. Kabirpanthis are Hindu by religion and the followers of saint Kabir, while the Julahas could be both Hindus and Muslims. The Julahas and the Chamars had the same origin with a difference of occupation (Singh 2003: 253). Their traditional occupation was weaving, but the youths among them were now attracted to modern education and white-collar jobs. Education and literacy were now picking up among the Megh/Kabirpanthis/Julahas. The Kori/Koli caste, which subsumes another 0.63 million or 3.7% of total Dalit population in the region, were mostly concentrated in Himachal Pradesh distantly followed by Haryana. They got their name from dragging the dead cattle and took to removing of carcasses of cattle (Singh 2003: 287). It is stated that the Koris migrated to this region from the eastern Uttar Pradesh. They were engaged in the trade and work of hides and weaving. Gradually, they were leaving the work of hides to concentrate on weaving. Modern education and value system was fasting picking up among them. Some of them were well educated, employed in white-collar jobs. Mahatam/Rai Sikh, notified as Dalit castes in the Punjab after 2001 Census, has a strength of 0.52 million persons, making 3.1% in total such population of the region. They got converted to Sikhism. The Rai Sikh community was highly diversified in economic, occupational, educational, and religious terms. It has agricultural laborers, tenant cultivators, landowners, and lawyers. Modern education was making in-roads among the youth of the community looking for white-collar jobs. Mahatams, who trace their earlier caste affiliation to the Rajputs, are now moving to white-collar jobs and defense services. The Dumna/Doom, the ninth ranking Dalit caste of the NW region with the total strength of 0.51 million persons or 3.0% in

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total Dalits, were mainly concentrated in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir states. These two states, in combine, had more than three-fourths or 77.9% of the total Dumnas/Dooms in the region. They were also called as Mirasis. Traditionally, they were engaged in making sieves, winnowing fans, mats, grass ropes, baskets, and other articles made of bamboo. The young girls and boys from this community have now started attending schools and colleges for higher education. The Dalits were predominantly rural by residence. In 2011, nearly 75.0% or three-fourths were residing in rural areas, this proportion being 72.0% for the country as a whole and only 65.0% for non-Dalit population. Earlier in 1961, about nine out of each ten Dalits (or 89.3%) were rural by residence. Then, this was two out of ten for the non-Dalit population. There have been wide inter-state variations in urban–rural distribution of Dalits. In general, the states having a high degree of urban-industrialization along with Union Territories have a higher proportion of Dalits in urban areas. In NW India, more than 25.0% or one-fourth of Dalits resides in urban areas. Though, it was slightly higher than the national average (23.6%), but lower than the non-Dalit population share (35.5%) in the region. There were wide inter- and intra-state variations within the region. The share of Dalits in urban areas varied from a high of 27.2% in Haryana to a low of only 7.1% in Himachal Pradesh. Also, in Jammu & Kashmir, the share of urban Dalits was quite low (18.8%). However, Chandigarh (UT) had more than nine-tenths (97.5%) of its Dalit population in urban area. Earlier in 1961, only about 16.0% of Dalits were urban by residence in NW India. This share was only about 11.0% for the country as a whole. Within the region, the share of urban Dalit in Himachal Pradesh was only about 4.0%. This share was 8.0% in Jammu & Kashmir and 9.0% in Haryana. Evidently, Punjab was the only state in region, where the share of urban Dalits was higher (13%) than the national average. Notwithstanding, the low proportion of urban Dalits in Himachal Pradesh, urban Dalit population in the state grew at an annual compound

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rate of 6.0% during 1961–2011. Against this, annual growth rate of urban Dalits was only 2.3% in Haryana, 4.0% in Punjab, and about 5.0% in Jammu & Kashmir. In case of Chandigarh (UT), it was as high as about 10.0%. In 2011, the share of urban Dalit population among 76 districts in NW India varied from a high of 100.0% in Srinagar district to only 2.0% in Doda district, both in Jammu & Kashmir. Within Punjab, Jalandhar district recorded the highest percentage (39.7%) of urban Dalits, against the lowest (10.0%) share in Tarn Taran district. More urbanized and industrialized districts of Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Amritsar recorded higher share of urban Dalits, against this low urban-industrial districts of Mansa, Moga, Muktsar, Firozpur, SBS Nagar (Nawanshahr), and Hoshiarpur recording the lower share of urban Dalits. Twelve of 20 districts in the state had this proportion lower than the regional average. In Himachal Pradesh, where Shimla was the only district having urban Dalits share in two digits (16.9%), all other districts recorded urban Dalits share lower than the regional average. In Kinnaur and Lahul & Spiti districts of the state, any urban settlement was yet to come. In Jammu & Kashmir state wide inter-district differentials in urban shares of Dalit population were noticed. The share of urban Dalits ranged from a high of 100.0 % in Srinagar district to a low of only 2.0 % in Doda district. Here, proportional share of urban Dalits in one-half of the districts was lesser than the regional average. In Haryana, where was Faridabad district at the top with 68.1% and Fatehabad at the bottom with only 15.9%, thirteen of the total 21 districts in the state had urban Dalits share lower than the regional average. Evidently, Dalit population is still predominantly rural by residence. Nonetheless, some of the Dalit castes are highly urbanized. Nearly, a half of the urban Dalits come from the Chamars, the Chuhras, the Adi Dravida, and the Bauri castes in India. Within NW region, Churas/Balmikis, and Meghs/Julahas in Jammu & Kashmir, Dhanaks, Pasis, and Kabirpanthis in Punjab, Khatiks, Meghs, Ad-Dharmis, and Balmikis in Chandigarh, Ad-Dharmis, and Khatiks in Haryana, Balmikis, Pasis, and Baurias in

S. Kant

Himachal Pradesh were more urbanized than other Dalit castes. In general, numerically large Dalit castes were less urbanized and vice versa in NW states. For example, numerically the largest Dalit caste (The Chamar) in Haryana had very low degree of urbanization in comparison to the small sized Darain caste, whose members were totally urbanized. Urban living and employment in tertiary sector had made them aware of their rights and induced awareness to fight against injustice. Being literate, it was easy for them to organize politically. Hence, numerically large and more urbanized Dalit castes enjoyed the advantage over the others in the context of awareness and mobilization. Chamars, AdDharmis, Mazhabis, and Balmikis who were numerically the large in north Indian states including Punjab and Haryana are placed in an advantageous position in comparison to the other such castes of the region. Other such states in north India included Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. The same applies to Adi Dravida in Tamil Nadu and Bauri in parts of Odisha, Bihar, and West Bengal. Briefly, there was relatively higher concentration of Dalit population in NW states, the region sharing 16.8 million or 8.4% in total such population of the country against its share of only 6.1% in total population in 2011. In NW region, Dalits made about 23% in total population, which was not only the highest among all the regions in the country, but also higher than the national average of 16.6%. Within NW region, Punjab and Haryana states, in combine, shared 83% of total Dalit population, against their share of 72.2% in total population of the region. At the district level, SBS Nagar (Nawanshahr) district (Punjab) recorded 42.5% share of Dalit population in its total population, which was the second highest share in the country as a whole. The twelve top-ranking districts in Dalit population, making only about one-fifth of total districts in NW India, had, in combine, more than two-fifths of total Dalit population in the region. The number of Dalit castes varied from a high of 57 in Himachal Pradesh to a low of 13 in Jammu & Kashmir. The number of Dalit castes was 39 in Punjab, 37 in Haryana, and 36 in Union Territory

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

of Chandigarh. After 2001 Census, new castes were added in the list of Himachal Pradesh and in Punjab, against no change in Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, and Chandigarh (UT). There were, however, five Dalit castes, which are common to all the states in NW India. In all, there were 63 Dalit castes in region but nine of them, each having more than half a million persons, subsumed more than four-fifths of total Dalit population in the region.

16.3

Socio-economic Transformation of Dalit Castes

In the following, we examine inter- and intra-state disparities in socio-economic development of Dalits and the change therein during 1961–2011. Three indicators of literacy, degree of urbanization, and rural occupational diversification were picked for this purpose. For measuring the level of socio-economic development, a development index, based on the concept of human development index, was pressed into service, the index value ranging between 0 and 1: 0 stands for no development, 1 stands for the maximum socio-economic development. Education plays a pivotal role in awakening an individual against socio-economic and political prejudices. The literacy level of Dalits was not only much lower than that of non-Dalits, but also varies widely across states. In 2011, Dalit literacy rate was 66.1% against 73.0% for general population in India. Earlier in 1961, it was only about one-third that of the non-Dalit population literacy rate. Evidently, literacy rate of Dalits has been growing fast in the post-Independence period, but still much lower than that of non-Dalit population. Further, the national average being 66.1%, it varied from a high of 88.7% in Kerala to a low of 48.7% in Bihar in 2011. Fortunately, NW region average was higher (67.3%) than the national average (66.1%). Within the region, Himachal Pradesh topped in Dalit literacy rate with 78.9% in 2011. Against this, Punjab was at the bottom with 64.8%. Accordingly, the literacy index varied from a high of 0.789 (Himachal Pradesh) to a low of

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0.648 (Punjab). While none of the states had index value lower than the national average (0.661), Punjab and Haryana had lower than the regional average of 0.673. Earlier in 1961, except Haryana all other states in the region had literacy rate lower than the national average of 10.3% (Table 16.5). At the district level, Dalit literacy rates differed sharply, ranging from a high of 100.0% in Pulwama and Shupiyan districts (Jammu & Kashmir) to a low of only 45.7% in Ramban district in the same state. However, the total number of Dalits both in Pulwama and Shupiyan districts is quite low. Though, 10 of 22 districts in Jammu & Kashmir state ranked among the top ten districts in Dalit literacy in the region, but locationally all such districts fall either in Kashmir Valley or Ladakh region, where Dalits are thinly populated. Majority of them may be adventitious persons, either stationed as defense personnel or central government employees. Majority of districts in Himachal Pradesh also recorded high literacy rates for Dalits. Ten of its twelve districts in 2011 had Dalit literacy rate between 75.0 and 86.0%. However, such a distinction was available to only five districts of Hoshiarpur, Rupnagar, SBS Nagar (Nawanshahr), Jalandhar, and SAS Nagar (Mohali) in Punjab and only one district (Gurgaon) in Haryana. Chandigarh (UT) also falls in this category. Within Punjab, Hoshiarpur ranked first with Dalit literacy rate of 82.5% and Mansa district at the bottom with 48.7%. Within Haryana, Gurgaon district topped with 76.3% and Sirsa district ranked at bottom with 55.1%. Interestingly, 22 or nearly 30% of 76 districts in the region in 2011 had Dalit literacy rate lower than the national average (66.1%); and the seventeen of such districts (11 from Punjab and 6 from Haryana) were from either Punjab or Haryana, nationally known states for their economic prosperity. Geographically speaking, most of the low Dalit literacy rates districts are located in southwestern parts of these two states. This speaks of the failure of these two states to make economic achievements socially and spatially inclusive. Urbanization varied widely within NW region. In 2011, proportion of urban Dalits varied

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Table 16.5 NW India: indicators of socio-economic transformation of Dalit castes by States/UTs, 1961–2011 (Figures in percentage) State/UT

Literacy rate

Urbanization

Rural non-agricultural workers

1961

2011

1961

2011

1971

2011

Punjab

8.9

64.8

13.0

26.7

29.6

51.2

Haryana

11.0

66.9

9.0

27.3

17.7

46.9

Himachal Pradesh

9.2

78.9

3.9

7.1

13.0

41.8

Jammu & Kashmir

6.3

70.2

7.8

18.8

24.5

55.8

Chandigarh

24.4a

76.5

81.9a

97.5

93.6a

97.7

NW India

–

67.3

–

25.2

–

49.0

All India (DALIT population)

10.3

66.1

10.7

23.6

17.5

28.2

All India (General population)

27.8

73.0

20.6

31.1

35.3

29.3

For Chandigarh (UT), figures relates to 1971 Census, as figures for 1961 were not available Source (i) Census of India (1961), Special Tables on Scheduled Castes, Part V, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi, and (ii) Census of India (2001), Special Tables on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes-on CD, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi Note Census data on Industrial classification of workers for 1961 and 2001 are not comparable due to definitional change. Hence, to maintain comparability data for the third indicator relates to 1971 and 2001. Further, literacy figures for 1961 and 2011 are not strictly comparable, due to definitional change

a

from a high of 27.3% in Haryana to a low of 7.1% in Himachal Pradesh, the national average being 23.6%. For Chandigarh (UT), this share was as high as 97.7%. Accordingly, the urbanization index ranged from 0.977 for Chandigarh to only 0.071 for Himachal Pradesh. The index value for national average being 0.236, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir faired quite lower than this. Earlier in 1961, inter-state variations in this regard were still wide. Then, the index value varied from a high of 0.130 for Punjab to a low of 0.039 for Himachal Pradesh. Again, Chandigarh (UT) recorded a very high index value of 0.819. Then, Punjab was only state in the region to fare above the national average. In terms of change in Dalit urbanization index, NW region, as a whole, did better than the country as a whole during 1961–2011. Out of the 76 districts in the region, Srinagar (Jammu & Kashmir) had the highest (100.0%), and Doda the lowest (2.0%) share of urban Dalits in 2011, both the districts falling in the same state. In districts of Lahul & Spiti and Kinnaur in

Himachal Pradesh, urban centers were yet to emerge. Chandigarh had the second highest share of 97.5% in this context. On the whole, more than one-half districts in the region had urban Dalit population share lower than the national average (23.6%). As many as 13 districts of region had this share less than 10% or less than one-half of the national average. Obviously, there were wide inter-district variations in this context. Within the region, Jammu & Kashmir had the sharpest inter-district variations in the share of urban Dalits. The reverse was true of Himachal Pradesh. Srinagar (100.0%) and Dada (2.0%) in Jammu & Kashmir, Faridabad (68.1%) and Mahendragarh (12.8%) in Haryana, Jalandhar (39.7%) and Tarn Taran (10.0%) in Punjab, and Shimla (16.9%) and Mandi (4.5%) in Himachal Pradesh recorded the highest and lowest shares of urban Dalit population, respectively. Occupational diversification, which plays an important role in raising the income level and social status of those working in non-farm occupations, especially in rural area, was quite

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

low among Dalits in the region. They were lagging far behind the general population. In 2011, only about 28.2% of total Dalit rural workers in the country were engaged in non-farm occupations, against 29.3% of general workers in rural areas. However, the situation in the NW region was much better since about 49% of total Dalit rural workers in the region were engaged in non-farm occupations. Nevertheless, this share was much lower than the share of rural workers for the general population in the region. Evidently, Dalits were still predominantly linked with farming, working mainly as agricultural laborers and casual workers. In 2011, rural occupational diversification index varied from a high of 0.557 in Jammu & Kashmir to a low of 0.418 in Himachal Pradesh, regional average value being 0.489. In case of Chandigarh (UT), index value was as high as 0.977. At the district level, the share of Dalit rural workers in non-farm activities varied from a high of 100% in Bandipore and Ganderbal districts (Jammu & Kashmir) to a low of 18.3% in Kullu district (Himachal Pradesh). The Dalit population was completely urban in Srinagar and Kargil districts of Jammu & Kashmir. The top twenty districts, each having more than 75.0% Dalit rural workers in non-farm occupations, were distributed in the following manner: eleven in Jammu & Kashmir, five in Haryana, three in Punjab, and the remaining one in Chandigarh (UT). On the whole, in about three-fifths or 45 of total 76 districts in the region, one-half or more of Dalit rural workers were engaged in non-farm activities. On the other side of the scale, there were ten districts, where only less than 30.0% Dalit rural workers were engaged in non-farm activities. Of such districts, five were in Punjab, three in Haryana, and the two in Himachal Pradesh. Districts having higher share of Dalit rural workers in non-farm activities were either urban-industrialized districts or had border location, especially in Jammu & Kashmir. In Jammu & Kashmir, districts having the high proportion of Dalit rural workers in non-farm activities had Dalit population in a small number. Secondly, almost all the Dalit workers in such districts were engaged in the category of “other services”

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including trade, transport, and services. This means that majority of Dalit rural workers in such districts of Jammu & Kashmir were engaged in government services, either stationed as paramilitary/armed forces personnel to guard the international border with Pakistan or working in administrative services run by the state/union government. A composite index of socio-economic development of Dalit population arrived at by averaging the indices of literacy, urbanization, and rural occupational diversification both for 1961 and 2011, was highly revealing. Socio-economic development of Dalit population was quite low in comparison to the general population. In 2011, development index for Dalit population was 0.393 in comparison to 0.506 for general population. Earlier in 1961, index was less than a half that of the index for general population (Table 16.6). Evidently, the gap between the Dalits and general population though has remained wide, but reduced considerably during 1961–2011. There are, however, wide inter-state disparities in development of Dalits in the region. Index value for Himachal Pradesh (0.426) was less than a half or 47% of Chandigarh UT (0.905) in 2011. Jammu & Kashmir recorded the second highest index value of 0.482 next to Chandigarh (UT). Index value for Haryana was marginally lower than that of Punjab. In other words, Dalit population was marginally well-off in Punjab than in neighboring Haryana. Happily, Dalits in NW region enjoyed much better level of socio-economic well-being than the Dalits in the country as a whole (Table 16.7). During 1961–2011, development index value for Dalit population in the country as a whole rose to 0.393 in 2011 from 0.128 in 1961, suggesting faster change in socio-economic well-being of Dalits in post-Independence era. During this period, the development index value for the Dalit population increased by more than thrice. Against this, index value for the general population increase only by about 80.0%: from 0.279 in 1961 to 0.506 in 2011. Evidently, socio-economic transformation of Dalits had been faster than the general population in India.

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Table 16.6 NW India: indices socio-economic transformation of Dalit castes by states/UTs, 1961 and 2011 States/UT

Literacy rate

Urbanization

Non-agricultural rural workers

1961

2011

1961

2011

1961

2011

Punjab

0.089

0.648

0.130

0.267

0.296

0.512

Haryana

0.110

0.669

0.090

0.273

0.177

0.469

Himachal Pradesh

0.092

0.789

0.039

0.071

0.130

0.418

Jammu & Kashmir

0.063

0.702

0.078

0.188

0.245

0.578

Chandigarh

0.244

0.765

0.819

0.975

0.936

0.977

Regional average

–

0.673

–

0.252

–

0.490

All India (Dalit population)

0.103

0.661

0.107

0.236

0.175

0.282

NW region general population

0.278

0.688

0.206

0.316

0.353

0.514

Table 16.7 NW India: composite index of socio-economic transformation of Dalit castes and change in index during 1961–2001 States

1961

2011

Change, 1961–2011

1

2

3

4

Punjab

0.172(2)

0.475(3)

0.303(4)

Haryana

0.126(4)

0.470(4)

0.344(2)

Himachal Pradesh

0.087(5)

0.426(5)

0.339(3)

Jammu & Kashmir

0.137(3)

0.482(2)

0.345(1)

Chandigarh

0.666(1)

0.905(1)

0.239(5)

All India (Dalit population)

0.128

0.393

0.265

NW (General population)

0.279

0.506

0.227

Note Figures in parentheses indicates rank of the state/UT in the region

This clearly indicated the success of government programs and policies initiated for the upliftment of the downtrodden sections of the society by the State in Independent India. Within NW India, Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana performed much better than other states of the region, with increase in index values of 0.345 and 0.344, respectively. Against this, Chandigarh (UT) was at the bottom level with increase in index value of only 0.239. With increase of 0.339 in index value, Himachal Pradesh ranked third after Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana. Notably, increase in index value for Himachal Pradesh, having the lowest index value in 1961 in the whole region, was higher than that for Punjab. On the other side, Chandigarh, ranking at the top both in 1961 and 2011, recorded the lowest

increase in index value (0.239). In other words, states where the development level of Dalit population was initially higher recorded relatively slow change during 1961–2011. In fact, after the attainment of a higher level of socio-economic development in any region, further increase becomes a challenging task. At the district level, there were sharp variations in this regard. In 2011, index value varied from a high of 0.994 for Srinagar (Jammu & Kashmir) to a low of only 0.306 for Mansa (Punjab). In other words, socio-economic condition of Dalits in Srinagar district was better by more than thrice in comparison to Mansa district. Of the 18 districts of NW India, where index value was higher than 0.6, the overwhelming

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

majority (11 districts) belonged to Jammu & Kashmir. Of the remaining, four belonged to Haryana, two to Punjab, and one to Chandigarh (UT). In their geographical distribution, the majority of such districts was located along the Indo-Pak border (in Jammu & Kashmir), in Beas-Satluj doab (in Punjab), and in the vicinity of Chandigarh (UT) and the National Capital (in Haryana). In Punjab and Haryana, all such districts are urban-industrialized, where a variety of low paid jobs in informal sector and sanitation services provided by the municipal bodies attract Dalit workers. In Jammu & Kashmir, in such districts Dalits were relatively small in number, working either as the employees of state government or serving the Indian Armed Forces to guard the International border with Pakistan. Against this, there were 18 districts where index value for Dalit population was less than 0.4. In their distribution, seven of such districts are in Punjab, five in Jammu & Kashmir, and three each in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Further, of the 40 districts, where development index value for Dalits ranged between 0.6 and 0.4, as many as 25 districts were located either in Haryana or Punjab. In fact, fourteen of 21 in Haryana, eleven of 20 in Punjab, nine of 12 twelve in Himachal Pradesh and six of twenty-two districts in Jammu & Kashmir fall in this category. There were as many as 17 or more than one-fifth districts of the region, where development index value for Dalits was lower even than the national average (0.393). In this category are included the seven districts of Punjab, five of Jammu & Kashmir, three of Himachal Pradesh, and remaining two of Haryana. On the whole, 18 districts in the region, having development index value for Dalit population was higher than 0.6, are categorized as “high,” another 40 or more than one-half districts as “moderate,” and remaining 18 districts as “low” in level of socio-economic development of Dalit population (Table 16.8 and Fig. 16.4). Within NW region, Srinagar district (0.994) was at the top and Ramban district (0.309) at the bottom, both in Jammu & Kashmir. Jalandhar (0.627) and Mansa (0.306) districts in Punjab,

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Faridabad (0.719) and Sirsa (0.323) districts in Haryana, and Lahul & Spiti (0.582) and Kullu (0.331) districts in Himachal Pradesh held the respective positions. Intra-state disparity in socio-economic transformation of Dalits was the widest in Jammu & Kashmir and the narrowest in Himachal Pradesh. Briefly, the socio-economic transformation of Dalit population has been not only lower than the general population in the country as a whole including the NW region, but also displayed the wide inter- and intra-state differentials. However, there has been a rapid transformation, even faster than the general population, in socio-economic conditions of Dalit population during the post-Independence period. This speaks of the positive impact of government policies and programs initiated for the socio-economic upliftment of Dalit population in post-Independence period. However, some states have done better than other states. Union territories, on the whole, have done very well in this regard. Within the NW region, Jammu & Kashmir and Chandigarh (UT) were placed in category of high level in socio-economic development of their Dalit population. However, the change in socio-economic conditions of Dalit population during 1961–2011, Haryana was placed at the top among all the states in NW region. It performed much better in comparison to Punjab, of which it was a part till Punjab was linguistically organized in 1966. At the district level, with an index value of 0.994 Srinagar was at the top and Mansa at the bottom (index value only 0.306) in the whole region. There were 17 or one-fifth of the total districts in the region, where index of development for Dalit population was less than the national average of 0.393. On the whole, 18 districts in the region, where index value for Dalit population was higher than 0.6 were categorized as “high,” another 40 or more than one-half districts as “moderate,” and remaining 18 districts as “low” in level of socio-economic development of such population in 2011. Inter-district disparity in socio-economic transformation of Dalit population was the sharpest in Jammu & Kashmir and the least in Himachal Pradesh.

280

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Table 16.8 NW India: classification of districts by level of socio-economic development of Dalit population, 2011 Index value/level

Name of the district

More than 0.600 (High)

Srinagar, Shupiyan, Pulwama, Baramula, Bandipore, Chandigarh, Badgam, Leh(Ladakh), Punch, Anantnag, Kupwara, Faridabad, Ganderbal, Gurgoan, Punchkula, SAS Nagar (Mohali), Jalandhar, Rewari (Total = 18)

0.600–0.400 (Moderate)

Ludhiana, Rupnagar, Kargil, Lahul & Spiti, SBS Nagar (Nawanshahr), Hoshiarpur, Rohtak, Jammu, Samba, Fatehgarh Sahib, Kulgam, Mahendragarh, Gurdaspur, Panipat, Mewat, Kangra, Una, Ambala, Jhajjar, Kinnaur, Palwal, Sonipat, Kapurthala, Amritsar, Yamunanagar, Hamirpur, Patiala, Bilaspur, Solan, Rajouri, Sangrur, Kathua, Kurukshetra, Karnal, Bhiwani, Barnala, Mandi, Jind, Shimla, Hisar (Total = 40)

Less than 0.400 (Low)

Kaithal, Chamba, Doda, Reasi, Faridkot, Moga, Tarn Taran, Bathinda, Fatehabad, Udhampur, Sirmaur, Kishtwar, Firozpur, Kullu, Sirsa, Muktsar, Ramban, Mansa (Total = 18)

North-West India Levels of Transformation of Scheduled Caste Population 2011 (Data by districts)

Data not available

Level High Moderate Low

0

100 Kms.

Fig. 16.4 Levels of transformation of scheduled caste population 2011

Index Value More than 0.600 0.400-0.600 Less than 0.400

Highest Level= 0.994 (Srinagar) J&K Lowest Level= 0.306 (Mansa) Punjab Regional Average= 0.472 National Average= 0.393

16

Transformation of Dalit Population in Independent India …

16.4

Concluding Remarks

The size of Dalit population in India is massive. In 2011, the total Dalit population was more than 201 million persons, much higher than the total population of Brazil (199 million in 2012), the fifth largest area sized country in the world. With an exception of two states, in the northeast, and the two union territories, Dalit population was recorded in all states and union territories of the country. Dalit population was highly concentrated in north Indian plains and the coastal plains of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In NW India, where resides 16.83 million or 8.4% of total Dalit population in the country, every fifth person belongs to Dalit category of population. This ratio was of one in six for the country as a whole. Dalits made about 23% in total population of Northwestern India, which was not only the highest share among all the regions in the country but also much higher than the national average of 16.6%. Within Northwestern India, the share of Dalit population in Punjab was not only the highest in the region, but also the highest among all the states in the country. Punjab together with Haryana shared 83% of total Dalit population in the region. Among 76 districts in NW India, Nawanshahr district (Punjab) recorded 42.5% Dalits in its total population; placed next only to Koch Bihar district (50.2%) in West Bengal. Twelve top-ranking districts in Dalit population, making only about one-fifth in total districts, had, in combine, more than two-fifths of total Dalit population in the region. There is a large heterogeneity of castes among Dalits in India. There were as many as 1241 Dalit castes at the time of 2011 Census, the number varying from a maximum of 101 in Karnataka to a minimum of four in Sikkim. Within NW India, the number ranged from a high of 57 in Himachal Pradesh to a low of 13 in Jammu & Kashmir, this number being 39 in Punjab, 37 in Haryana, and 36 in Chandigarh (UT). The DALIT castes such as Batwal, Chamar/

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Ramdasi/Ravidasi, Doom, Megh/Julaha/Kabirpanthi, and Chura/Bhangi were common to all the states/UTs in the region. Further, as many as 30 castes were common in Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh (UT). Against this, nineteen castes were found exclusively in Himachal Pradesh, and six in Jammu & Kashmir. Nine Dalit castes, the Chamars, the Mazhabi, the Balmiki/Chuhra, the Ad-Dharmi, the Dhanak, the Megh/Jalaha/Kabirpanthi, the Kori/Koli, Mahatam/Rai Sikh, and Dumna/Doom, each having more than half a million persons subsumed together more than four-fifths or 82.9% of all Dalits in the NW region. The Jogis, Lohars, and Telis were generally categorized as “other backward castes” (OBC) in majority of North Indian States, but as Dalits the Himachal Pradesh. The Dalits were lagging behind not only the general population in different parts of India including the NW, but also display a wide interand intra-state variation in their well-being. However, there has been a rapid socio-economic transformation of Dalits during the postIndependence period; even faster than that of the non-Dalit population. This speaks of the positive impact of government policies and programs, initiated for their socio-economic development by the State in post-Independence India. Within NW India, Jammu & Kashmir and Chandigarh (UT) recorded a high level of development of their Dalit population in the whole region both in 1961 and 2011, but in terms of change in well-being of its Dalit population during 1961–2011, Haryana performed high, especially in comparison to neighboring Punjab. At the district level, with an index value of 0.994 Srinagar district was at the top and Mansa district (Punjab), with index value only of 0.306, at the bottom in the whole region. As many as 17 districts in the region had development index for Dalit population lower than the national average of 0.393. On the whole, 18 districts in the region having index value of higher than 0.6 had “high” development level of Dalit population, another

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40 or more than one-half districts fall in “moderate” level and remaining 18 districts in “low” category in 2011. Intra-state disparity in well-being of Dalit population was the widest in Jammu & Kashmir and the narrowest in Himachal Pradesh, in the entire NW region. Finally, it was satisfying to note that the pace of transformation in socio-economic conditions of Dalit population accelerated during post-Independence era, narrowing down the wide gap between the Dalit and the general population in the country. In fact, the former Dalit castes are now socially, politically, and economically more awakened than before. This trend is likely to continue in future, but with likelihood of greater benefits accruing to the newly emerged elite class within the Dalit community. In future, therefore the focus of welfare programs oriented to the welfare of the Dalits should aim not only to minimize the inter- and intra-regional disparities in their socio-economic conditions, but also those found between “Dalit” and “non-Dalit” castes, on one hand, and “creamy” and “non-creamy” layers within the Dalit castes. Note 1. However, some scholars prefer to use the term “Dalit” in an ideological and political sense. According to Sharma (1995, p. 88) “the word Dalit refers to ideological transformation of the Scheduled castes indicating their heightened protests against the upper caste domination by way of rejection of the upper caste cognitive paradigms and creation of their own cultural idioms, literature and ethnic harmony.” He further adds, “the process of the emergence of the word Dalit is a part of journey which starts from harijan to ‘scheduled castes’ and from scheduled castes to Dalit” (p. 93). Acknowledgements The paper is part of a major research project entitled “Socio-economic Transformation of Scheduled Caste Population in India: A Comparative Analysis of inter and intra-regional differentials within Northwestern States,” sponsored by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi. The financial support from the Commission is duly acknowledged.

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Appendix: NW Region: Distribution of Castes of Dalit Castes, 2011 • DALIT CASTES NOTIFIED IN ALL THE FIVE STATES/UTS Batwal/Barwala, Chamar/Ramdasia/Ravidasi, Dumna/Doom, Megh/Julaha/Kabirpanthi, Chura/Bhangi (5). • DALIT CASTES NOTIFIED IN PUNJAB, HARYANA, HIMACHAL PRADESH, AND CHANDIGARH Ad-Dharmi, Bangali, Barar, Bauria/Bawaria, Bazigar, Bhanjara, Chanal, Dagi, Darain, Dhanak, Dhogri/Sigi, Gagra, Gandhila/Gandil/Gondola, Khatil, Kori/Koli, Mariya, Mazhabi, Nat, Od, Pasi, Perna, Pherera, Sanhai, Sanhal, Sansi, Sansio, Sapela, Sarera, Sikligar, Sirkiband (30). • DALIT CASTES NOTIFIED ONLY IN PUNJAB AND HARYANA Deha/Dhaya/Dhea, Mochi (2). • DALIT CASTES NOTIFIED ONLY IN PUNJAB Mahatam/Rai Sikh (1). • DALIT CASTES NOTIFIED ONLY IN JAMMU & KASHMIR Basith, Dhyar, Gardi, Ratal, Saryara, Watal (6). • DALIT CASTES NOTIFIED ONLY IN HIMACHAL PRADESH Badhi/Nagalu, Bandhela, Bansi, Barad, Chhimbe/Dhobi, Darai, Daule, Dhaki, Dhaogri, Hali, Hesi, Jogi, Kamoh, Karoack, Lohar, Rehar, Sipi, Teli, Thathiar (19). TOTAL = 63.

References Gore MS (1993) The social context of an ideology: Ambedkar’s political and social thought. Sage Publications, New Delhi, p 211 Judge PS, Bal G (2009) Mapping Dalits: contemporary reality and future prospects in Punjab. Rawat Publications, Jaipur Kant S (2005) Socio-economic transformation and political mobilization of Dalits in India. J Gandhian Stud (J Ind Soc Gandhian Stud) III(3):47–83

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Kant S (2012) Dehomogenising Scheduled caste population in India. Popul Geogr 34(1&2):19–34 Sharma KL (1995) Caste and class in the emergence of Dalit identity and movement. In: Nahar UR (ed) Sociology of rural development. Rawat Publication, Jaipur, pp 81–105

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Singh KS (2003) People of India: Punjab, vol XXXVII. Manohar Publications, New Delhi (Anthropological Survey of India), pp 20–24 UNDP (1999) Human development report. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 134

Part V Urban Governance and Politics

State-Led Urbanity: Reexamining Modern Movement Servicescapes

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Marta Alonso

Abstract

Is retail to be planned to achieve urban quality? While collective identity markers are constantly evolving in today’s city, the hyper-consumption society has allowed retail, even though greatly transformed, to remain a community hub for socialization. Society’s commodification takes shape precisely within the public realm and the urban scene: sprawling analogous drivable retail-only suburbs and turning city centers into bland, soulless, and undefined places displaying homogeneous frontages characterized by the same retail storefronts worldwide. More than ever, urban policies on retail-oriented servicescapes seem crucial to urban and regional planning from a sustainable perspective. Modern movement new towns, as the most radical form of state-led retail planning, have failed to assure a lively retail offer able to create centrality as planned. Through the study case of a modern movement servicescape, the only modern Spanish planned city of Tres Cantos, our research focuses on what can we learn from the state-led planning model and its policies. How could we today foster urbanity in

M. Alonso (&) Environmental Governance and Territorial Development Hub (GEDT), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

complex projects through retail without succumbing to the prevailing commodification of the public realm? Keywords







New towns Servicescape Sustainable planning Tres Cantos Urbanity




17.1




Introduction

The relationship between public and private space leads us to a fundamental question: should collective planning integrate reinforcement mechanisms for retail centralities within public realm or retail publicity should remain timidly restricted to private domain? Should public collectivities allow total freedom or on the contrary, be controlling retail presence within the public realm? Peripheral developments that took place in the prosperous three decades following World War II and sector-based divisions enhanced the proliferation of large retail malls in response to the societal needs of that time. However, sustainability perspectives of nowadays cities as well as strategic issues of urban regeneration encourage to build the city within the city, to reduce sprawl and to invest the possibilities that offer inner core of the city. In this context, sustainable planning has influenced Europe establishing a mindset of values that try to avoid as much as possible the waste of land that could be

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_17

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preserved for its natural or agricultural values, thus making large retail malls harder to develop. Retail strategies in today’s Europe need to adapt to a new reality of a comeback to the inner-city central places. But is retail to be planned in order to achieve urban quality or shall we let the market orient itself to new societal values? By looking back to modern movement state-led centralities and how they have evolved over the years, we approach a state-led form of urbanity, where servicescapes were conceived as a public service (not as a private activity) to complement and ensure the well-functioning of modern planning developments.

17.2

Relevance of the Study

Modern movement has still today an impact on how we approach planning. Modern movement servicescapes are a full example on how state-led planning pretended to create centrality. In today’s debate and context, where private takes more and more importance, we question how state-led planning has worked over the years. Literature has longtime study the past of new towns in Britain and other western countries; however, the only existing planned city in Spain remains unknown. Its political implications and the low accessibility to archives make it an un-researched subject that only few researchers have explored. We then thought it might be a good opportunity to exemplify through Tres Cantos European planned cities under dictatorial regimes in the twentieth century.

17.3

Scientific Framework

Sustainable planning promotes participative process integrating environmental, social, and economic criteria to the decision making in building the city. The values and principles of sustainable planning looked forward to ensure the quality of the city. Since the 1970 (Pacione 1990), a great number of researchers looked

upon the concept of urban livability, as an effort to make more livable cities and since the 1990s, to increase also their sustainability. We shall precise that we can only measure urban quality if we are aware of how societies live. Urban quality depends on the relationship between inhabitants and their built environment. Thus, urban quality evaluation should take into account the subjectivity of human behavior. In this research, we evaluate urban quality in the servicescapes where retail takes part, from the point of view of not only their form, functions, and usages but also their image and their meanings. In this direction, we can question how retail planning takes part in the urban quality of the public realm. Firstly, we’ll define a key concept: the servicescape. Booms and Bitner (1981) defined a servicescape as “the environment in which the service is assembled and in which the seller and customer interact, combined with tangible commodities that facilitate performance or communication of the service”. In this research, servicescape is the townscape (Cullen 1961) within the centrality, configurated by storefronts and the public realm, it set at the interface between public and private, built and open space. Servicescape’s configuration of retail is key to ensure walkability (Gil 2004) which is one of the objectives of a sustainable city. Analysis of the townscape helps up enlighten the participation of retail to the global servicescape image. Urban townscape reflects colors, movements, forms, mineral and greenery as well as the levels of intricacy where retail takes part. The servicescape is part of the street qualities of being a double public place by its status and its usage (Fleury 2004). Through sensitive analysis retail qualities are shown at microscale (Gehl 2010). Retail in the city is where vertical meets the horizontal plan, an interfacing place where lays the ability to “make the city” (Masboungi 2013) in favor of urbanity and multiple usages. From a sustainable city point of view, multiple centralities recreate a neighborhood scale, lively, human, vital, functioning and reassuring

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for the pedestrian. Centralities are also landmark signs that take part in the whole urban site and complement its functioning. Close vicinity to housing is one of the quality characteristics of servicescapes. Neighborhood scale was defined as a relative space that enhances the effort to move from one place to another (Cosinschi and Racine 1998). This christallerian relationship depends on the effort required to move, whether is transport money, of ease of walk and time. While this is the classic definition of the neighborhood scale for services, new dimensions are added to the appreciation of what is neighborhood close (Laut 1998) retail vicinity depends also on feelings and take part on urban meaning: commercial exchange can let us understand how people relate to their built environment, how they identify what is their neighborhood (Chevalier 2007). Like Krier (1984) we back the idea that a sustainable city is one where movements are reduced, where everyday servicescapes are feasible in walking distance. Community feelings of neighborhood are a consequence of walking. In today’s context of neoliberalization, where market-led seems to be the way to go, we can attest the prevailing commodification of the public realm in central areas of the cities (Alonso 2016) where textilization is becoming a global phenomenon that no planning policies are prepared for. Thus, we go all the other way to the extreme opposite of state-led centralities, planned and executed to serve the population and try to understand how this expert-planning dealt with centrality planning and how it managed or failed to create lively servicescapes.

17.4

Historical Background of a New Town State-Led Development

New towns, following modern movement functionalist principles and produced by an “expert planning” have created urban spaces without poetry and without surprise. These state-led

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developments have managed to answer quite well societal needs such in Chandigarh in terms of fluidifying and rationalizing road traffic there is a consensual thought today that these questions are no longer at the center of the challenges of a sustainable city. Tres Cantos, the Spanishlittle Chandigarh For the purpose of this study, we have chosen the planned city of Tres Cantos, a Spanish new town that was planned under the last years of Franco’s dictatorship and executed in the first years of democracy. Tres Cantos is an example of a holistic and tabula rasa total planning. Scientific literature on new towns in continental Europe focuses mainly on functionalist neighborhoods such as the grands ensembles in France, which, like Evry, they did not directly apply all modern movement principles. In fact, the urban production of a ready-made and from nothing to a city kind of development was only possible where totalitarian regimes were at power. Tres Cantos is thus a singular new town that was made possible through a new democracy that still granted totalitarian tools (Fig. 17.1). We could have chosen to study Louvain la Neuve, Cumbernauld, or even overseas new town to study the relationship between retail and state-led developments. Nevertheless, Tres Cantos presented a main advantage that was the first-hand access to main public and private operators. This city, as many other new towns such as Cumbernauld, Chandigarh or even Brasilia was designed following an expert planning. Expert planning is symbolized by the figure of the architect and planner. Like a Rennaissance-man, he oversees the creation of all urban aspects, following a positivistic logic that as an expert, he should be able assess all problems of modern society through technical means. Expert planning took the challenge of translating into spatial response the way society should live in this self-organized cooperative city, where sectorization was done without separation of private and public domain (Fig. 17.2).

290 Fig. 17.1 Comparison between Chandigarh sectors and Tres Cantos original planning

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Fig. 17.2 Tres Cantos, aerial view of the new town in 1979

17.4.1 First Movement: The Sociocultural Context that Enabled the Rise of a Functionalist Integral City In the twentieth century fifties and sixties, Madrid was overwhelmed by its demographic growth due to the ongoing rural exile. The production of the new city developments did not follow a well-structured pattern, creating a somewhat disorderly growth, emerging around main infrastructures poles that connected the capital to the main migration home regions as Andalucia or Extremadura. This phenomenon boosted spatial segregation, not only at inner-city districts scale but also in the first ring. This first ring was rich in nature, mainly in its northern part while developing low-income migrant’s suburbs in all other directions. In 1957, Franco’s government end up with political self-sufficiency and a group of technocrats arise from an Opus Dei’s background to take the government lead. The country is thus

evolving from a military dictatorship setting into place a controlling economy toward a liberalization period and the rise of the tourism industry. Between 1961 and 1973, multiple “Development Plans” try to fulfill the deficiencies of the country. Urban planning only exists then in large cities such as Madrid and is oriented to meet the challenges of housing low-income migrants from rural areas that are massively moving to the country’s capital (Delgado Jimenez 2012). At this time, Spain was flirting with modern movement’s urbanism for instance transforming the fishing Mediterranean village of Benidorm into a skyscrapers paradise, a new town created around the main function of tourism. In 1970, the new technocrats’ government is fighting to solve the lack of housing, a great challenge that first needed to overcome the legal difficulty of serving large quantities of land ready to be consumed very fast. With this main challenge in mind, legal document Decreto-Ley 7/1970 created the tool named Actuaciones Urbanisticas Urgentes (ACTUR) a series of emergency planning operations with a triple

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objective: to overcome the lack of housing in Madrid and Barcelona, to set a legal base to land-use modifications able to facilitate and simplify expropriation of land and to preserve some lands for collective amenities purposes. The ACTUR tool opened the door to a very ambitious model, inspired from the British experiences of planned cities and taking the urbanism ideals of Howard and Le Corbusier for tabula rasa developments. This ambitious planning tool was so disconnected from economic, social, and political reality that the only new town that was planned and developed was TresCantos, in the peripheral outskirts of Madrid. In Barcelona, new towns had to cope with inhabitant’s resistance who had greater respect for the built environment, thus reducing the planned new towns to only partial districts. In the seventies, Madrid is planning to develop a full ex-novo city designed for 150,000 inhabitants using the ACTUR tool. This new town wants to become ideal, but not to solve the rural migrant issue as the ACTUR foresaw, but to give place to new associative movements whose voice started to raise in academic and professional spheres. Even though the right to assembly did not exist in the totalitarian regime at the time, associative movements were arising through the camouflage of professional associations. Thus, cooperative communities arose, assembling young individuals aiming to create cooperatives of different kinds: educational, consumers, housing, etc. These young individuals fail to comply with housing standards of the time and dreamt of quality housing surrounded by public space and amenities in an equalitarian way, defending Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city. The regime was touched by the political connotations of the project and the new town planning fully stopped for several years. However, the need of a new housing model and the functionalist ideas applied to the creation of a new town were very synergic and finally set into place the construction of most of the planned city. Franco’s death brings a new era, more welcoming to the new town project. Professional’s cooperative communities took advantage of the moment to push forward the project: they

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looked for political support to expropriate 1691 has of land. The cooperatives gather together under the flag of a private company in 1976 that was named Tres Cantos S.A. a company without proletariat (Garrido 1979) a legal status that will facilitate the self-sufficiency and the innovation of the new town project (Fig. 17.3). A Cooperative Model of Society and Consumption Given the fact that a new town was not going to attract retailers from its start, the new town project foresaw consumption cooperative communities that should ensure consumer’s basic goods since the arrival of the first inhabitants. Consumption cooperative communities should follow Rochdale’s principles: free and non-compulsory admission, democratic governance, cooperatives equalitarian returns of profit and finally political and religious neutrality. This cooperative model of consumption showed multiple advantages: availability of goods when necessary and vicinity of goods according to a buying frequency that was organized in three levels of centrality—from everyday groceries to special occasions pleasure shopping (Fig. 17.4). Location: A Major Issue in the Ex-Novo Planned City Le Corbusier did not achieve his Plan Voisin for Paris, but he will later find his dream come true in Chandigarh, where he took over in 1951 Mayer’s duty of designing and building a new town. From the modern movement’s logic, the location at a place without any historical background, neither population already settled was ideal.1 Following ex-nihilo cities project, Tres Cantos S.A. closely examined several locations with good accessibility to locate the new town. Finally, the project chose an area 20 km north of the capital and close to El Pardo natural reservation that provided all the criteria to build a city

1

Even though Le Corbusier design Chandigarh as an ex-nihilo city, he found at the time some native communities. In the follow-up of the projet took over by his cousin Jeanneret these natives were integrated in the less central sectors. Source: Le Corbusier Center, Chandigarh.

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Fig. 17.3 Expert planning both in Chandigarh and Tres Cantos. No civil society participation is asked for at this time

without having to deal with any existing remains. Furthermore, the choice of this northern location was seen as a spatial justice issue. As a radial city, all south and eastern peripheral areas are the ones accommodating the poorest working-class families so the location of choice aimed to counter-balance class segregation by developing collective housing in the north (Fig. 17.5).

17.4.2 Second Movement: Form and Functions of a State-Led Planned City Following modern’s movement separation of functions, Tres Cantos was cut into different sectors: most of them dedicated to housing, some

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Fig. 17.4 The new town project foresaw a consumption cooperative model

of them dedicated to production and industrial means and all of them linked by a network of car traffic-oriented roads. Road structure reminds of Chandigarh, only a little distorted to adapt to the abrupt topography that couldn’t be totally flattened due to the presence of many granitic cliffs. Tres Cantos was so-called since the initial project designed three phases of construction forming a “Y” shape. During the construction years, only the two first phases were built accordingly to the original plan and the third phase was abandoned (Egea Reche 1993) (Fig. 17.6). Inside every sector, car traffic is forbidden according to flow separation principles that were developed mainly in Britain (Milton Keynes,

Cumbernauld, Hatfield to name a few) where pedestrian traffic was completely separated from car traffic. Public space is the residual void between built forms and is completely dedicated to pedestrians, landscaping nature and gathering places. Every sector is then divided into plots that are each given to a cooperative community. The plot plan is thus divided into huge plots for each cooperative, in a way that no public plots are created. Every cooperative should develop the open spaces that were within their plot, but they will be open for common use to everyone. Thus, the C or G forms were preferred by most of the cooperatives and public space was

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Fig. 17.5 Residential centralities and Tres Cantos today

Fig. 17.6 Functional zoning in 1977 project. Phase 3 (in yellow) a low density development was never built

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then flowing from the C or G block to the surrounding areas of the sectors. A shaded area that ensured an all-weather walking grid surrounded every block. This shaded area is a direct copy from Chandigarh’s plan and plays a key role in creating continuity of pedestrian flows along the storefronts in linear retail centralities. The public realm of the planned city was entirely financed by the cooperatives since land was no longer owned by the city council where it was located but owned by the company of Tres Cantos S.A. Every cooperative had at least one housing block that was around 300 and 500 housings. These cooperatives decided what should be done with public spaces by democratic voting in public assemblies (Fig. 17.7). Since cooperatives owned and designed mega plots of land and even sectors, there was no urban mix regarding future inhabitants. Cooperatives established after professional associations gather agronomists, healthcare professionals, public employees, educators, and so on. It was then normal that, within the same sector plan the inhabitants shared the same career field. Distribution of centralities considered amenities at the scale of each phase, while retail was considered and dimensioned at the scale of each sector. In other words, along the structural axis of every phase, vicinity everyday retail shops would be centralized within two-storey buildings that aimed to become each sector’s shopping centrality, located at the heart of the sector’s pedestrian structure. This distribution of centralities fully corresponded to the initial logic establish by the cooperative movement that every cooperative should have a groceries and basic goods consumers cooperative. Free retail forms, segregated from blocks, would be able to host more conflicting commerce activities—such as bars or fish stores—that would be located at the storefronts on the main pedestrian grid of each phase. This small-scale polarization of retail into neighborhood scale shops has permitted to avoid the location of large car-oriented scale malls in the following years. Nevertheless, the miscalculation of retail activities that were dimensioned in

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the project to serve the initial project population of 125,000 inhabitants—while only 45,000 inhabitants were scored—meant that the percentage of empty storefronts and activities at the street level is today very high, almost over 50% (Fig. 17.8). The land breakdown into mega-plots has shown to go in opposite direction to urban mix. Urban role players in this integral city from the modern movement had to face many challenges due to the intrinsic characteristics of an ex-novo operation. First, the cooperatives had to face the rejection of the city-councils where the land was expropriated (Colmenar Viejo and Madrid). The total absence of dialogue (neither spatial, neither political nor even social) between the agriculture-oriented city council of Colmenar Viejo, that based its income in the cattle field created a cultural and socioeconomical break between new town inhabitants and natives. Right-wing council of Colmenar also refused to grant amenities in Tres Cantos, since all land expropriated was of private property—even if owned by the cooperatives—and its owners were finally a company, which should by law be able to self-finance its amenities while continuing to pay council taxes. As one may easily foresee, many conflicts came from this vague status of governance of the new city where public space belong to a cooperative but private owner. Rapidly arose the problem of the security and surveillance of public spaces. Cooperatives decided to recruit a private company to secure its public space. But soon, new inhabitants paying taxes to Colmenar start claiming for local police to take over the surveillance of the public realm. Secondly, while the new town was designed to work with Centralsug, a Swedish company that should be able to build a centralized suction lines grid for all kinds of residential waste by an automatic system, this showed up to be way overpriced and inhabitants start claiming also for garbage collection to Colmenar council (Fig. 17.9). Due to these ongoing conflicts, many cooperatives announced their own failure.

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Fig. 17.7 Sector 1A-1st phase whole-approach design

Banalization of democracy in the early eighties calmed down the utopic vision of collective living in the production of this city. By 1986, new town inhabitants had very few amenities (no pharmacy or healthcare center for instance) and the failure of many cooperatives stopped their construction work, leaving only half of the public space finished. The huge plots did not help: at the end of 1985, three mega sectors of the second phase remained natural land (Egea Reche 1993). In the other sectors, huge plots were left to nature or in dead building sites. Land and existing housing prices went dramatically down, many cooperatives sell their half-built projects for

ridiculously down prices. The idea of retail consumption cooperatives was abandoned but retail centralities were built following the original plan. Egea Reche (1993) explains that amenities and retail cooperatives had the indirect support from central government that through UTECO2 was trying to favor the inhabitants’ gatherings in very small assemblies in order to reduce the government’s risk of having a strong residents’ association. Abbreviation of “Union Territorial de CooperativasOrensanas”, created in 1959 as a government tool for controlling cooperative movements.

2

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Fig. 17.8 Aerial view of Tres Cantos new town. Tabula rasa nature at its greatest state

17.4.3 Third Movement: The Collapse of the Society Model Result in Failure of the Urban Model The functionalistic making of the city did not take any inheritances into account, neither the cultural heritage nor socio-economic background. In this manner, Tres Cantos was created from zero, in a very artificial way. The assemblies debate in the first years over how should they name the streets or on what to dedicate local holidays in the local calendar. Without any local history, and with the desire to break with recent history that reminded of the dictatorship period, a naming competition is organized and local holidays are dedicated to sports (that avoided religious connotations).

Expert planning had therefore over-dimensioned public spaces and a globally over-dimensioned city that struggled to attire new inhabitants. Left-wing new regional government decided to buy partially Tres Cantos S. A. to finally give public space to the public domain and solve all conflicts by making the new town fit into regular urban planning models and legal practices. The introduction of government money into Tres Cantos S.A. had some major consequences. First, the densification of the city, that located low-rise residential into cities’ green areas, even with the huge opposition of the inhabitants. This densification came along the accessibility by local train that linked the new city with the capital with a twenty minutes ride. But it also had less material results such as the breakdown into public plots of the public space

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Fig. 17.9 Exhibition model of a sector aiming to attract investors. Tres Cantos 2nd phase

and the final answer to the independence of the city and its establishment as an independent council in 1991 that finally ended the never-ending conflicts with the previous council of Colmenar. From its independence and the city’s linked by local train, housing prices went up and many cooperatives families decided to sell and move out. The city attracts new inhabitants. The vicinity to UAM (Autonomous University of Madrid) and the location of European industrial activities of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) on one of the production sectors start also attracting technological companies finally creating the PTM (technology park of Madrid) on the second phase of the planned city, gathering almost all companies dedicated to research and development in Madrid. From 50 inhabitants in the 1982 census, the city grew to 22,000 inhabitants in 1992 and 44,764 in the last census (INE 2016). In 1996, the growth of the new town is very specific to the demographics of the city showing an inverse pyramid of ages with a very young population featuring mainly families with children.

17.5

Discussion on This Twentieth-Century Planned City and Its Servicescapes Revisited from the Sustainability Point of View

This ex-novo city is one of the most attractive residential areas of Madrid, but not really thanks to its model of urban production. Its utopic development was based upon some urbanism ideals that wanted to produce a new city for a new society. These principles aimed to produce and further manage the urban space without any state intervention only the planning being state-led. But governance was to be based on direct democracy through these cooperative assemblies that were to take in charge all city services as well as housing and retailing. However, the economic challenges that encountered these cooperatives, the high prices needed for a quality management of the city along with the progressive disenchantment of the population

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with the new political regime make Tres Cantos S.A. a failure company that had to struggle to fit in regular urban planning procedures to get the city back on track (Figs. 17.10 and 17.11). Today, the city lacks social mix, but the location of technological industries and the high socioeconomical inhabitants that the city managed to attract are paying the high council taxes required to maintain the over-dimensioned public and green spaces (designed and planned for a city of more than three times the actual population). This fact creates a vicious circle: on the one side, gentrification has back economic viability of the initial project, while on the other side, new inhabitants do not feel as much implicated in the society project that was at the origin of the urban development. Therefore, more and more physical boundaries are being built; translating in form what the breakdown of land determined separating what public property and private one. The switch to right-wing government since 2000 in the newly established city council also shows societal changes. While the initial model was designed for lowand middle-class workers, the current city has become the 4th richest council in the country.

Fig. 17.10 Chandigarh, retail frontages in 2014

M. Alonso

This effect of attracting higher income families has developed in a similar way to Chandigarh in India, which is today’s richest city in India. The cost of maintenance of functionalist open spaces has encouraged the construction of bigger and higher quality housing to attract the richest population, which should be able to up with high taxes needed to the expenses of modern movement urbanscapes. Helas the strong buying power did not stop the closing of sectors’ centralities as were planned initially. Storefronts are completely empty in some peripheral sectors while others are all rented to shops that contribute to a lively streetscape. Scientific planning decided by experts has failed to forecast location aspiration of future retailers. Retailers’ aspirations are a way more complex phenomenon that involves the image of the centrality and the neighborhood. This fact confirms the relevance that should be granted in planning to the mutability of street-level built spaces. Urban programming is greatly limited in short term, while it fails to predict long-term changes in the fast-changing world of shopping. Finally, the planned cities of Chandigarh and Tres Cantos showed how the right dimensioning

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State-Led Urbanity: Reexamining Modern Movement Servicescapes

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Fig. 17.11 Tres Cantos, commercial frontages in 2016

and balance of public space and private space, open, and built space have consequences that go beyond urban morphology and have implications in the demographics and governance of the city as well.

various contexts lead to many different relationships between retail centralities and the urban space.

References 17.6

Further Perspectives

After Lefebvre (1974), we know that cities are the spatial projection of societies. The awareness of societal and political structure is thus of what has been called the hyperconsumption society (Lipovetsky, 2006) seems key to determine the urban model that is chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to produce the built environment. Urban developments are a direct consequence of urban culture framed within the time and geographical context where planning takes place. This way, cultural and political specifics of

Alonso M (2016) Urbanitésmarchandes: le commerce dans la qualitéurbaine et sesrégulations, le cas de Lausanne. Doctoral thesis, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland Booms BH, Bitner MJ (1981) Marketing strategies and organisation structures for service firms. In: Donnelly J, George WR (eds) Marketing of services. American Marketing Association, Chicago, IL Chevalier S (2007) Faire ses courses envoisin. Métropoles (1) Cosinschi M, Racine JB (1998) Géographieurbaine. In: Dans Bailly A (ed) Les concepts de la géographiehumaine. Armand Colin, Paris Cullen G (1961) Concise townscape. Routledge, London Delgado Jimenez A (2012) Evolucion y crisis de la region metropolitana de Madrid 1985-2007. Analisis de las

302 diversas perspectivas para la transformacion del gobierno urbano: una revision critica del planeamiento (PhD thesis). Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Madrid, Spain Egea Reche M (1993) Tres Cantos en el contexto de las nuevas ciudades, de Actur a municipioindependiente (1971–91). Doctoral thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Espagne Fleury A (2004) La rue: un objetgéographique? Tracés. Revue de Sciences Humaines 5:33–44 Garrido E (1979) Vocacion del cooperativismo de viviendas. Viviendas Cooperativas (2) Gehl J (2010) Cities for people. Island Press, Washington Gil T (2004) Influencia del bordepublico-privado sobre el com portamiento del peaton. El caso de la ciudad de Madrid. PhD thesis, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, Madrid, Espagne

M. Alonso INE (2016) Publicacion del Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, 2016, Spain Krier L (1984) Houses, palaces, cities. Architectural design. St. Martin’s Press, New York Laut JL (1998) Proximité et commerce: pour l’éclairage du concept. Commun Lang 116(1):92–107 Lefebvre H (1974) La production de l’espace. Editions Anthropos, Paris Lipovetsky G (2006) Le bonheur paradoxal: essai sur la societe d’hyperconsommation. Gallimard, Paris Masboungi A (2013) Les rez-de chaussée, uneclé pour ouvrirune autre porte de la ville. In: Masboungi A (ed) (Re)aménager les rez-de- chaussée de la ville. Le Moniteur, Paris Pacione M (1990) Urban liveability: a review. Urban Geograp 11(1):1–30

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Urban Governance under Neoliberalism: Increasing Centralization or Participatory Decentralization Bikramaditya K. Choudhary and Diganta Das

Abstract

Urban governance has become the buzzword for urban planning under the present trend of liberalisztion, globalization and privatization. Urban governance in general refers to a market-led entrepreneurial activity including risk-taking by the urban local bodies, though often argued as ‘maximum governance’ and ‘minimum government’. However, in the fray of attracting more and more international finance, it seems that, especially in the developing world, opposite is equally happening. The state adopts a proactive approach at identifying market opportunities for urban regeneration. In India, urban governance has been propagated by the national as well as international agencies as an approach that will make the create solutions for the existing problems of urban India. Governance on the one hand has resulted in withdrawal of state from various sectors conspicuously from housing and basic civic amenities. The New Economic Policy in India was introduced as a

B. K. Choudhary (&) Center for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] D. Das Humanities and Social Studies, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

means of decentralization of administration, finance and function with greater autonomy to sub-national and urban local bodies. Over the period of last few decades, however, it has become clearer that resources, capital, investment and growth are increasingly getting concentrated in mega-cities of the country often at the cost of smaller towns and urban centres. This is quite contrary to the proclaimed objective of bringing decentralization. The present chapter emphasizes the state’s initiatives of urban rejuvenation programmes through analysing cases from India to understand the contemporary urban governance situation. Keywords











Accumulation AMRUT Decentralization Governance JNNURM Urban rejuvenation urban renewal




18.1

Introduction

Governance as a concept encompasses a range of ideas and deviations. In the context of postWashington consensus consolidation, ‘good’ governance is understood as a system of government in which countries had to be structured in

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_18

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terms of layer I governance1 (Angelis 2003). Contrary to this conception, scholars also understand governance especially metropolitan governance in terms of cooperation or collaboration including cooperation among government, non-governmental and private organization (Norris 2001). As such, the focus moves away from the actor or entity that is doing the governing, but instead analyses the process of ruling and managing the territories and the populations (Gupta et al. 2015b). Different countries and societies have applied governance as the ‘magic potion’ to end the miseries of their respective societies. Such applications often remained limited to articulations only and failed to get translated in something that can be measured on the outlined principals of governance at different scale (Gupta et al. 2015a). This also means that the neoliberal governments often acted as neo-populists, where the messianic characteristics of the leader become unquestionable and these also form the benchmark for governance. The structure of governance has in-built mechanism of decentralized decision-making, which stands against the crucial selling point for governance, i.e. efficiency (van Dijk 2015). Feiock (2009) argued, ‘fragmentation of policy among multiple governmental units diminishes problems of concentrated powers and can promote competition and innovation, but it also imposes inefficiencies, as decisions by one governmental unit impose positive and negative externalities on others’. The highlighted contradictions in the functioning of multiple levels of government systems or decision-making processes are more commonly reported from different parts of the world, though not recognized as the epistemic inconsistency. We discuss this inconsistency in the outlined structure of governance and its application taking Indian 1

Massimo De Angelis mentions two types of governance and argues that most literature deals with Layer I governance, which is to discuss issues such as reforms of international organizations and institutions. In all these In all these cases, the key words are notions of ‘transparency’ and ‘good governance’. Governance in this sense becomes the institutional backbone of neoliberal projects. For more on layer I and Layer II, please see, Angelis (2003).

B. K. Choudhary and D. Das

case. In 2001, the Government of India (GOI) along with United Nations (UN) agencies and other multilateral institutions launched the campaign for ‘good governance’. The overall goal of the campaign was outlined as ‘to move towards an improved quality of life in cities, particularly, for the poor and marginalised, through good urban governance’ (GOI 2001). However, when funds were allocated in the decades that followed, one can see the contradictions in fund allocations. We also highlight how governance eventually promotes centralization in the functioning of the state rather than participatory decentralization.

18.2

Governance as Absence of Government

Urban governance refers to the introduction of a variety of actors (Fig. 18.1) into the task of the provision of public services, which potentially constitutes a withdrawal of the central state and the government. Such actors include the private sector, the civil society and supranational organization. This approach is sometimes referred to as ‘maximum governance’ and ‘minimum government’ (Hacker and Pieterson 2010). With this, market-led entrepreneurial activity including risk-taking by the urban local bodies is encouraged (van Dijk 2015). The central question remains—Which sector does the state withdraw from? Is it from decision-making processes or from service delivery system? Neoliberalism often gets associated with withdrawal of the state and absence of the state from public domain. Jouve (2009) wrote that the term governance is used by the international financial institution to indicate a new approach to aid-receiving developing state giving more weight to civil society and less to national institutions in the management of loans and implementation of international programmes. It is interesting to note here that the Indian state has talked about governance more than once. One would certainly wonder if the Indian state is truly in favour of less power to national institution and more devolution of power to civil society, given the contradictory evidence of the banning of non-governmental

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Federal Government JNNURM

JNNURM

AMRUT

AMRUT

Sub-national Governments

Private agencies /Finance

Private agencies /Finance

Major cities

Towns

Municipal Corporations

Municipalities

Mayor (as head)

Chairperson (as head)

Fig. 18.1 Flow-chart on India’s urban governance

organizations. This is especially carried out to those critical to current policies of the government; for instance, the activities and finance of Green Peace (Rowlatt 2015) and Amnesty International (Doane 2016) have been constrained, signs of a more intervening government. Moreover, the critique of government and governmental policies are not naturally welcomed and are termed as against ‘national interest’. However, governance that primarily focuses on decentralization of financial liability on one hand and almost complete control in favour of international agencies constitute the tone of ‘nationalist’ narrative. The new narrative is embodied in the emerging global context in which cities are continuously being transformed. Cities across the globe are undergoing deconstruction and reconstruction. Brenner and Theodore (2005) wrote that during 1980s and 1990s, categories like deindustrialization, reindustrialization, post-Fordism, internationalization, global city formation urban entrepreneurialism, informalization, gentrification, social polarization and so on were utilized to describe and theorize the ongoing deconstruction and attempted

reconstruction of urban social space. The shifting from a Keynesian model of uniformity, central management, redistribution for the creation of even spaces into a model that places priority on downscaling and a competitive economy (Klink 2013) constituted to a re-scaling of the state space. As such, cities then become key sites where resources are concentrated for the purpose of creating value and encouraging production, essentially serving as growth engines for the region and the state. Prince (2012) described governance as hollowing out of the state as the nation’s power and responsibilities are rescaled ‘upwards’, ‘downwards’ and ‘outwards’ to supranational institutions, local administrations and non-state actors respectively. The urban on one hand goes global on the other it gets inward in terms of creation and manifestations of local conflicts and contestations in name of culture, religion and other pre-modern identities. In the fray of attracting more and more international finance, it seems that in the developing world opposite is equally true. The state adopts a proactive approach at identifying market opportunities for urban regeneration. In India, urban

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governance has been propagated by the national as well as international agencies as an approach that will make the problem of urban area as the reality of past (James and Verrest 2015). However, governance has resulted in withdrawal of the state from various sectors conspicuously from housing and basic civic amenities. The New Economic Policy (NEP) in India was introduced during early 1990s as a means of decentralization of administration, finance and function with greater autonomy to sub-national and local bodies. Over the period of the last few decades, it has become clearer that resources, capital, investment and growth are increasingly getting concentrated in mega-cities of the country often at the cost of smaller towns and urban centres. This is quite contrary to the proclaimed objective of the NEP to bring decentralization. With NEP in place India became part of a new global economy that has already begun to unfold. The role of FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) which was as low as 0.14% for India during 1980–85, rose to 2% of the global FDI flow for 2016 (Krishna 2018). The population in towns and cities grew from 217 million in 1991 to 377 million in 2011 as per census of India; the share of urban population also grew from 26% in 1991 to 31% in 2011. Though, the relative share of urban population in total population in still low by international standard. For example, even in developing countries, like 48% in China, 78% in Mexico, and 87% in Brazil the relative percentage is higher compared to India. In most Asian cities, a majority of GDP is generated by their cities, with extreme cases like Bangkok (44%), Dhaka (40.9%) and Seoul (24.1%) and so on (Yeung 2011). In India, Mumbai contributes to 40% of income tax and 60% of custom duty, an indication of the centralization of economic and commercial activities at the largest urban centre of the country. Roy (2009) also considered city-region as the building block of the global economy. Quoting Scott (2001) she argued that city-region heralds a new phase of capitalist territorial development which in turn makes city-region the key space of accumulation, competition and governance. Most of the Third world cities either tried to maintain the city-region as nodes of global capital

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accumulation or were enthusiastic to join the league as viable node. This rise of city-region as a key space and scale of accumulation is also an evidence of the growing re-spatialization and the re-scaling of state space (Brenner et al. 2003; Brenner 2004).

18.3

Renewal/Rejuvenation Missions as Neoliberal Projects

This section takes examples from the urban renewal missions namely Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) initiated by the federal government in India and helped and financed by the private agencies. Indian cities in recent times got remodelled and articulated as ‘world class cities’ with the aim to function as nodes of circulation of global finance and high-tech activities. The aim was to attract investments across cities, especially to the larger ones. The organization of investment summits, seminars by different states in India since late 1990s supports this understanding that the cities are competing within the national territory. Sub-national states of India have been projecting their cities as world-class, global and high-tech and entrepreneurial destination for investment. The chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu’s efforts of promoting Hyderabad through Cyberabad high-tech knowledge enclave during late 1990s and early 2000s can be taken as an example. Similarly, the Karnataka chief minister, S. M. Krishna branded Bangalore as the Silicon Valley of India since 1990s, which helped in investment flow into both the cities. This initiative was in tune with what Roy and Ong (2011) would call ‘art of being global’. The beginning of such autonomous city level neoliberal initiatives lies in the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act which was adopted by Indian Parliament in 1992. The aim of the act was to grant greater autonomy to urban local bodies (ULB) along with decentralization of power and ensuring better participation of people especially weaker section in decision-making processes of these bodies (Ghosh et al. 2009). The art of being global also means that

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the urban local bodies are no more dependent on the financial resources allocated by the sub-national and federal governments and, are expected to generate resources, prioritize needs and act based on local requirements. Government of India on December 3, 2005 launched JNNURM across 63 cities with centralized financial support. The support was to be routed through existing ULBs. The then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (2005) launched the mission with two clearly stated objectives namely: strengthening infrastructure and addressing urban poverty. Singh during the launch of the mission noted that ‘our vision of urban development has been so far ‘uni-dimensional’; we have focused more on space and less on the people. We need to have an integrated framework in which spatial development of cities goes together with improvement in the quality of living of ordinary people living there’. The renewal mission seems to be ideal as it considers the concerns of citizens in the city and as outlined in the speech it aimed to have an integrated framework. The reality, however is the centralization of entire renewal process as the mission itself was launched as ‘top-down’ approach. In 2001, when the ‘good governance campaign’ was launched the government expected mobilization of finance to create infrastructure to make the ‘world class city’ that will have ease of doing business. However, since 1992 when 74th Constitutional Amendment Act was brought in, most of ULBs failed to mobilize finance for upgradation of existing infrastructure or creation of new infrastructure. The talks of ‘good governance’ proved to be hollow as one important component of good governance, i.e. to bring qualitative change in the lives of citizen remained mostly unattended and to some extent that could be said to have contributed in the loss of NDA government in 2004 despite high-pitched ‘shining India’ campaign. The UPA government after assuming office in May 2004 decided to mobilize finance for urban infrastructure and for improvement of basic amenities in slums and in 2005 officially launched the renewal mission. Actual implementation of JNNURM started only in 2006. Moreover, JNNURM was clearly biased towards large cities, with the funding given proportional to

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the population. As a result, the urban poor and small and medium towns were neglected under the scheme (Kamath and Zachariah 2015). Decentralization has been a key to the propagated model of governance. The governance model advocates for autonomy for the local bodies but also restricts the national governments from directly financing the ULBs to provide services to their citizens including the poor. Under aegis of international development institutions like UN Habitat (1996) and World Bank (2004) which advocate models of urban management premised on the decentralization of government responsibilities, the local government ought to be a facilitator rather than a direct provider of services (Lindell 2009). The local bodies across the world including that of poor countries like Uganda ought to coordinate at best the provision of services and infrastructure by other actors and by entering partnerships with private enterprises and non-governmental organizations (Lindell 2009). It is expected to draw on the capacities and energies of these multiple actors especially transnational corporations and to create an ‘enabling environment’ for their direct involvement. India while pumping money under the UPA government for urban infrastructure across 67 cities for seven years, mode of expenditure was through consultants and private entrepreneurs. The guidelines under JNNURM was clear enough in favour of the funding agencies who will receive money from the centralized funded renewal mission as it states that (i) Privatization of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) will be the preferred mode of implementing projects and (ii) the onus of minimizing risks for the private investor would be on state governments/ULBs. The hypocrisy of JNNURM has been argued by several theorists. For instance, Fitch (2012) argues that the focus was on finance and making the municipal funding sustainable by depending on private funding, so that they are less reliant on the state, rather than for the wellbeing of the people. Moreover, while JNNURM discursively argued for a decentralized governance, it does not empower the ULBs who are still under the control of the state government; state do not seek to increase the capacity of the ULBs nor the

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municipalities, but instead encourage the outsourcing the consultants (Grant Thornton 2011). As such, rather than engendering decentralization as proposed by the 74th Constitutional Amendment, has increased centralization (Jha and Jha 2010) and reduced local capacity (Mehtaand Mehta 2010; Ghosh et al. 2009). By pushing the cities into debt financing, local municipalities have been bogged down by the need to expand their energies on forging partnerships and ensuring the balance of accounts instead of focusing on meeting the needs of people through services and infrastructure (Goldman 2011). The seed of ease of doing business was planted in the renewal documents, with certainty the laws of business was ought to prevail over rights to citizen in such a situation. The AMRUT mission document (2015) concedes that ‘learnings from the earlier Mission have shown that infrastructure creation should have a direct impact on the real needs of people, such as providing taps and toilet connections to all households’ in the opening paragraph. The mission, therefore claimed to have objective of (i) ensuring that every household has access to a tap with assured supply of water and a sewerage connection; (ii) increasing the amenity value of cities by developing greenery and well maintained open spaces (e.g. parks); and (iii) reducing pollution by switching to public transport or constructing facilities for non-motorized transport (e.g. walking and cycling) (GOI 2015). Under AMRUT it was decided to that grant approvals were to be carried out through the State Annual Action Plan annually rather than project to project basis; this was claimed to be a form of ‘cooperative federalism’ by the union government. The mission, unlike JNNURM was extended to all Class I towns means all urban centres with more than 100,000 population. In the hill regions, population criteria was further relaxed, same was the case with thirteen towns situated along the river (GOI 2015). Under AMRUT, the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) pays for half the project costs for cities with populations of less than 10 lakhs and a third of the cost for those with population

B. K. Choudhary and D. Das

above 10 lakhs. Moreover, the central government funding is higher for the North-east and Hilly States (90% and is completely centrally funded for the Union Territories (Pandey 2016). The funding formula made provincial governments more accountable than earlier as union government pledged to fund only one-third of the cost for the infrastructural components including, water, sewerage, transport. Moreover, the states, as opposed to the MoUD are now responsible for the evaluation and approval of projects (Sadoway et al. 2018). The union government pledged to fund one half for the cities having population less than 10,00,000. The rest of the funding was to be mobilized either by the provincial government or through private investment. Experiences have shown that it is difficult to mobilize funds for basic infrastructure like water supply and sewerage in small and medium towns. This was the reason why the ULBs have largely failed to improve their infrastructural and sanitation condition since 1992. Larger cities which were made to aspire to be ‘world-class’ got funding under JNNURM but small and medium towns remained largely untouched and were at best left to their own. The launch of AMRUT in 2015 brought hope to the citizens of small and medium towns especially Class I towns, however the guidelines on funding patterns ultimately constrains the possibility of these cities improving their basic services. Bringing in reforms remained the key similarity in both the renewal missions; higher tax collection by ULBs which was 85% under JNNURM and 90% under AMRUT was significant. To ensure user charges, collection of property tax and levy of new/additional changes to ensure better financial health of ULBs were part of the reforms. Another commonality is the focussed priority in favour of larger cities to make them ‘world class’ which not only allows, but also encourages private investors to generate profit using the public assets of the city. Smith (2016), taking the example of San Francisco, argued in an article how public spaces are going private and make cities vulnerable for the future especially for the poor and marginalized.

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18.4

Participation in Peril

In 2001, during launch of the good governance campaign, one of the three objectives were ‘to secure the commitment of key stakeholders to improving the quality of urban governance through the public signature of a memorandum of understanding (MOU)’. Different countries of the world have shown us that meanings of law are taken differently, and they usually imply multiple things rather than one universal understanding. Sellers (2002) while studying three cities from three countries, viz. USA, France and Germany concluded that in the USA respondents conceived of the rule of law as a comprehensive trope that encompassed most of the ends of policy; in France respondents identified it mainly with the public interest; and in Germany respondents from the left and the right related it to very different norms. Based on standardized and open-ended questions to some 240 respondents, Sellers (2001) in his book Governing from Below concluded that differences in the rule of law and its operational reality did differ in multiple ways and contributed different results. Not only did the patterns in the rules vary, but the surveys showed that elites and activists in different settings thought about law and its application in significantly different ways. Although the concept of governance and participation across the world is taken as universal in literature, the meaning varies in different context; local bodies implement participation under the governance frame as they find fit. In most of the cases the public signature of MOUs is taken as the display of terms of reference (TOR), and modification plan for the review of the stakeholders in the darkest corner of the municipal head-office for thirty days. The same is of course taken out without any observation or comments from the public. In some of the cities, where aware activists give in writing the objections on plans or TOR, they are conveniently ignored. If the case is pursued further, a legal battle ensues for years. In certain cases, like Metro Project in Hyderabad faced opposition by the traders or got caught up in legal battle, the part of the project remained unfinished. Such situations contribute negatively

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to larger public interest in more than one way. For instance, if the cost of project gets escalated, the builders and consultants pass the cost to people, citing public disturbance as the reason for delay. Moreover, there will be additional inconvenience to people because of long duration of work left incomplete. The TOR in most cases though unfairly (to the people of the city) provides such immunity to the builders/consultants/operators. Liberalism ideologically claims that economic, political and social relations are organized through free choice of formally free and rational actors who seek to advance their own material or ideal interests in an institutional framework (Jessop 2002). The idea is based on the spontaneous freedom only constrained through constitutional provisions. The governance model propagated claimed to have every citizen’s participation in decision-making as per their free choices. The so-called free choices are exercised as per the relative power each one has. As Marx (quoted in Jessop 2002) once said ‘where equal rights exist, force decides’; it is witnessed that the relative balance of economic, political and civic power decides the mode of development let alone be the individual free choices in decision-making under the neoliberal governance model. The strengthening of transatlantic capital and technology even if not through hegemony resulted in rolling back of state intervention to contain inflation and government deficit. The outcries like that of the newly elected PM of India in 2014s ‘minimum government and maximum governance’ can be considered also one such reassurance to the transnational producers and financers. The reassurance, that India was going to continue to be a hospitable location for foreign capital, was required especially when the inherent articulated characteristics of the party and the organization in government was that of an ‘indigenous’ model. The United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UNHABITAT) has developed 23 indicators to measure governance including efficiency, equity, etc., the key component of governance, i.e. participation which was articulated in 2001 governance campaign remained at best absent in the implemented governance model.

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AMRUT has advanced JNNURM to more cities with adding of SMART city Mission for 100 cities. The internal competition of cities and the participation of citizens in voting/ranking of the cities on certain services can be articulated as participation. However, participation does not mean to respond/react to the agenda already set up by those in power politically with having the capabilities to influence the investments across sectors and spaces. In the case of JNNURM, the citizen inclusion and public transparency are included as specified reforms in exchange for central funding assistance for urban infrastructure (Sivaramakrishnan 2011). However, the cities were subject to the different steering and monitoring units with their concomitant approval, reporting and accountability procedures that ensure that the cities fall in line and conform to the wider agenda (Sadoway 2018). This is on top of a centrally determined ‘scorecard’ that the cities are graded upon, in exchange for funding (Kamath and Zachariah 2015). Additionally, Citizens reviews have shown that the role of the citizens is limited to selective consultation and not participatory democracy, with little accountability of the Mission (Kamath and Zachariah 2015). It was also revealed that the authorities did not hold the required number of meetings with the civil society as part of JNNURM mission (Kamath and Zachariah 2015). This can be argued to be a form of ‘social steering’, whereby instruments are utilized to ‘get people to do things that they might not otherwise do’; or it enables people to do things that they might otherwise not have done (Schneider and Ingram 1990: 513). This ultimately accounts to a form of ‘social control and the ways of exercising it’ (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007: 1). The rise of consultants and contractual provision is also evidence of this effect, where there is an increased reliance on ‘third parties’ […] to deliver publicly financed services and pursue authorized public purposes (Salamon 2000). Therefore, the shift in from a hierarchical government to a more network-oriented approach with governance in the name of participation and empowerment (both for the citizens and for the municipal authorities) has been accompanied by

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a change in the instruments applied (Majoor and Schwartz 2015). Means such as agreements, contracts, incentives (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007) are considered as less interventionist and less authoritative (Savini 2013), but do not go far in diluting or reducing the power of the central government. It encourages accumulation by the big consultants and global corporate who participate in planning the rejuvenation of such ‘global cities’ and execute them. In short, the new model of governance is also a new means of accentuation of power and wealth which can be safely called ‘accumulation by rejuvenation’.

18.5

Conclusions

This conceptual paper aims to develop a hypothesis that contradicts the established propagated norm of decentralization with liberalization and the myth of absence of state after globalization. As Harvey (2008) rightly puts it, ‘rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights’. The governance model of the twentieth century did not challenge the profit maximization model of our time; it only deviated from the post-Thatcher-Regan insofar as consolidating the energy of neoliberal era towards the notions of participation and empowerment. Exclusive enclaves, exclusive shopping centres, clubs and exclusive residential complexes, exclusive areas with free internet facilities became key features of the rejuvenated cities. The poor and ‘dirty’ were to be relegated from the real city despite always dominating the speeches of the key political leaders and policymakers, in a way reminiscent of what Kundu (2001) terms ‘in the name of urban poor’.

References Angelis MD (2003) Neoliberal governance, reproduction and accumulation. The Commoner 7:1–28 Brenner N (2004) New state spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of statehood. OUP, Oxford Brenner N, Theodore N (2002) Spaces of neoliberalism: urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Blackwell, Oxford

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Participatory Comprehensive Planning of Amphawa District, Thailand

19

Wannasilpa Peerapun

Abstract

The objectives of this article are to examine comprehensive planning process in Thailand and to discuss community participation in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning for the year 2030. The methodology of Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning incorporated the principles of H. M. King Bhumibol’s “Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy” and UNESCO’s “Sustainable Development Model” into Thai common planning process. Major participation techniques were planning workshops and informal community leaders’ meetings. Community visioning and mapping techniques were applied to raise common understandings and to generate future land use and transportation plans. Keywords




Amphawa district Comprehensive planning Community participation

W. Peerapun (&) Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand e-mail: [email protected]




19.1

Introduction

Comprehensive planning in Thailand is a long and complicate process because the planning agency must follow rules and regulations stipulated by the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning and the Office of the Council of State. In addition, the planning process is still based on rational planning approach of which the primary shortcoming is the absence of stakeholders’ participations. Although the 1975 Town Planning Act states that there must be a Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board comprising representatives from local administrative organizations, the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning, the offices where the planning is implemented and related organizations to act as planning advisors as well as a public hearing, community involvements are still very low. In practice, the representatives do not come from every involved area, especially when the planning area covers several local administrative organizations. Likewise, the public hearing is conducted after the draft plan has been completed. The absence of community participation in the stage of plan-making complicates comprehensive planning, resulting in increasing conflicts between local communities and the committees who are responsible for planning approval, and the decrease of local communities’ trust on the comprehensive planning process.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_19

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Amphawa District’s Comprehensive Planning, Samut Songkram Province, targeting for the year 2030, is an attempt to cope with the problems. The district is situated in the central part of the province, 72 km. To the southwest of Bangkok. It comprises 3 municipalities and 10 sub-district administrative organizations, covering the area of 170.16 km2. It is important in terms of history, arts and culture, and agriculture. Its ecological system is still intact while its settlement patterns and architectural styles are unique. Fruit trees are planted on raised mounds surrounded by ditches that carry water to the orchard. It is also the birthplace of King Rama II, his mother and his wife. In Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning, delegates from communities and local administrators were invited to participate in the stage of plan-making. The common comprehensive planning process was still followed but suitable participation activities were added to raise community involvements. This article aims to discuss comprehensive planning process in Thailand and to discuss community participation and its effectiveness in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning. The lesson learned from Amphawa is expected to provide a new direction for participatory comprehensive planning in Thailand in the future.

19.2

Comprehensive Planning in Thailand

19.2.1 Authorities in Charge of Comprehensive Planning According to the 1975 Town Planning Act, there are two agencies responsible for carrying out comprehensive plans: the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning and local officials. A local official is defined as the chief executive of the provincial administrative organization, or mayor, or chief executive of the sub-district administrative organization, or the governor of Bangkok Metropolitan, or the mayor of Pattaya City, or chief administrate or chief of

executive council of other local administrative authority established by the law (Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning 2015). Although local officials have the power to carry out comprehensive plans, it is difficult for most of them to do the job. This is due largely to the lack of qualified staffs, couples with complicate planning process. Moreover, the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning can carry out a comprehensive plan without consulting the Town Planning Board while local officials have to ask permission from the Town Planning Board and the local council. Before implementation, the comprehensive plan has to be issued as ministerial regulations. Practically, it has to be approved by the Town Planning Board prior to submission for approval from the cabinet. According to the 1975 Town Planning Act, the Town Planning Board consists of the following members (Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning 2015): (1) The Permanent Secretary for Interior as the Chairperson; (2) Ex officio members consisting of the Permanent Secretary for Agriculture and Cooperatives, the Permanent Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, the Permanent Secretary for Industry, the Secretary-General National Economic and Social Development Board, the Secretary-General Thailand Board of Investment and the Director of Bureau of the Budget; (3) Expert members appointed by the Council of Ministers from persons with thorough knowledge and skill, expertise, and experience in town planning, architecture, engineering, law, economics, environment, history or archaeology or social science, Such members shall not exceed nine persons, and at least one of such members shall possess the experience related to an instruction of town planning curriculum in the institution of higher education; (4) Members from a representative of the Council of Engineer, a representative of Architect Council, a representative of the

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Participatory Comprehensive Planning …

Federation of Thai Industries and a representative of Tourism Council of Thailand; (5) Members appointed by the Council of Ministers or representative of independent institution, independent entity and other persons involved in town planning. Such members shall not exceed 4 persons. The Director-General of Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning shall be a member and the secretary. In practice, before being approved by the Town Planning Board, the comprehensive plan must be approved by the Planning Consideration Board appointed by the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning and by the Town Planning Sub-committee appointed by the Town Planning Board to help monitor the plan and reduce the workload of Board.

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drafting the comprehensive plan and preparing related documents in a form of report. (3) Meetings of the Planning Consideration Board and the Town Planning Subcommittee The meetings are organized by the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning who appoints the Planning Consideration Board to consider the plan before presenting it to the Town Planning Sub-committee. The Sub-committee is chaired by the Director-General and related officials both in the Department and outside the Department are members so that the board can have complete information and all projects are in line with each other. The members outside the Department are from offices such as the Department of Highway, the Department of Land and the Department of Factories.

19.2.2 Comprehensive Planning Process in Thailand According to the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning, the processes of comprehensive planning in Thailand can be divided into 3 categories determined by the 1975 Town Planning Act, the administrative process enforced by the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning and the process of issuing ministerial regulations. When the three categories are combined, the processes of comprehensive planning are as follows (Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning 2010):

(4) Meetings of the Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board and the public hearing This is a part of public hearing mandated in the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand and the 1975 Town Planning Act. The Board comprises 15–21 representatives from local administrators, the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning, related government agencies and planning experts. At least one Board meeting and one public hearing have to be organized. (5) Meetings of the Town Planning BoardMeetings of the Town Planning Board

(1) Survey and designating the planning area This involves the primary survey of areas possible to be included in the plan and the decision to define the boundary of the plan. (2) Analysis and plan-making This involves the analysis of data such as economic data, social data and physical data,

This stage is carried out according to the 1975 Town Planning Act. Having received comments from the public hearing and the advisory board, the planning agency will revise the plan and submit to the Town Planning Board for approval. If there are further comments, the planning agency must revise the plan until it is approved. (6) Putting up a notice for 90 days

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W. Peerapun

This stage is carried out according to the 1975 invited to sit in the committee meeting so that Town Planning Act. After the comprehensive they can provide further information. plan has been approved by the Town Planning Board, the agency responsible comprehensive (10) Submission of the comprehensive plan to the cabinet for approval in principle planning must make a public announcement by putting up a notice about the plan at designated places for 90 days and ask stakeholders to con- After the approval by the above committee, the sider the plan. During the 90 days, the stake- Minister of Interior will sign a letter prepared by the Legal Affairs Division indicating that the holders can file complaints about the plan. regulations have been officially approved and they will be sent to the Office of the Cabinet (7) Collection and consideration of complaints Secretary so that the cabinet can approve them in This stage is mandated by the 1975 Town principle. Planning Act. After the 90 days of stakeholders’ filing complaints about the plan, the planning (11) Consideration of the Office of the Council of State agency must collect all the complaints and submit them to the Advisory Board and The Town planning Sub-committee for Complaint Consid- After the regulations have been approved by the eration to help make comments and suggestions cabinet, the Office of the Council of State will before submitting the results to the Town Plan- invite related agencies to discuss whether there is ning Board for final consideration. The planning any legal conflict and what to do with it. Legal agency must act in response to the decision made personnel, urban planners and representatives from local administrative organizations are also by the Town Planning Board. invited to sit in the committee meeting so that (8) Drafting of ministerial regulations enforcing they can provide further information. Then the the implementation of the comprehensive Department of Public Works and Town & plan to be submitted to the Ministry of Country Planning has to make changes in response to the comments given by the Office of Interior the Council of State and after that the regulations This stage is carried out according to the 1975 have to be resubmitted to the Office of the Town Planning Act. Having revised the plan in Council of State for approval. response to the decision of the Town Planning Board, the planning agency has to send all doc- (12) The Office of the Council of State informing the Ministry of Interior of the result uments to the legal affairs division so that it can draft the ministerial regulations to be submitted After the Office of the Council of State has to the Ministry of Interior. approved the regulations and the Department of (9) Submission of the ministerial regulations to Public Works and Town & Country Planning has the Law and Regulation Consideration verified it, the Office of the Council of State will inform the Ministry of Interior of the approval. Committee for approval The Department of Public Works and Town & (13) Signing and enforcement of the regulations Country Planning must submit the regulations to the Ministry of Interior’s Law and Regulation With the approval of the Office of the Council of Consideration Committee to consider. Legal State, the regulations will be signed by the personnel, urban planners and representatives Minister of Interior. The regulations, as well as from local administrative organizations are also the maps and the charts and other necessary

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Participatory Comprehensive Planning …

items, will be sent to the printing house to be made into a manuscript before being sent to the Office of the Government Gazette. Having been announced in the Government Gazette, the regulations are officially imposed. According to the above comprehensive planning process, most of the decisions are made by government agencies and boards which may not satisfy community needs. Thus, conflicts between local communities, the Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board and the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning frequently occur.

19.3

Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning Methodology

19.3.1 Amphawa’s Participatory Planning Methodology The methodology of Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning incorporated significant community participation activities and sustainable development concepts into the common comprehensive planning process. Sustainable development was the goal of Amphawa’s Comprehensive Plan. “The Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy,” or “middle path,” initiated by H. M. King Bhumibol was adopted as the key principle of sustainable development. This philosophy stresses three principles in all modes of conduct: moderation, reasonableness, and self-immunity (Miller and Tinio-Le Douarin 2013). It was emphasized in the stage of visioning and plan-making. Four dimensions of UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Model (n.d): natural and built environment, economic, social and culture, and politic were adopted as supplementary principle of sustainable development. They were placed on the stage of data collections and analysis. As discussed earlier, the Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board was established to act as planning consultants. In terms of community participation, only one board meeting and one public hearing after the completion of the draft comprehensive plan are required. Thus, the level

317

of community involvements is very low. According to Grabow and Hilliker (2006), there are five different levels of involving citizens in the comprehensive planning process: public awareness (lowest level), public education, public input, public interaction, and public partnership (highest level). To raise the level of community involvements which are at the lowest level, selected participation activities were added to the regular planning processes. Planning workshops and related activities such as visioning and mapping were chosen as general community participation techniques. Due to budget constraints, the number of participants in the workshops was limited to a small working group comprising 13 local administrators and 27 delegates from all communities in the planning area (Peerapun 2017). In addition, several informal meetings with local administrators and chiefs of sub-district and villages were held to enhance common understandings and community collaborations (Fig. 19.1).

19.3.2 Participants in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning Stakeholders engaging in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning could be classified into four groups: (1) Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board comprising representatives from local administrators, the Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning, related government agencies and planning experts. After the draft comprehensive plan had been completed, it had to be presented to the board to get approval. (2) General public. After a draft comprehensive plan had been approved by the advisory board, a public hearing meeting with local communities and interest groups had to be arranged. (3) Community participants, or the working group, comprising 13 local administrators

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W. Peerapun

Fig. 19.1 Amphawa’s comprehensive planning methodology. Source Peerapun (2017)

and 27 delegates from all communities in the planning area who participated in the stage of plan-making. (4) Local administrators and village chiefs who participated in informal meetings. Within Amphawa District, informal meetings were occasionally held among local administrators and village chiefs to discuss community problems. To raise their planning involvements, relevant issues of Amphawa’s

Comprehensive Planning were added to the meetings to generate common understandings and to ask for comments. Since the law only required a meeting with the Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board to get approval and a public hearing after the draft comprehensive plan was completed, the first two groups had little involvements in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning. Only the third and

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Participatory Comprehensive Planning …

fourth groups really participated in plan-making stage and their involvements were much higher.

19.4

The Effectiveness of Community Participation in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning

Community participation was emphasized in the stage of plan-making. Planning workshops were very effective in terms of time-saving and conflict reductions. At the beginning of the workshop, basic knowledge was built to raise common understanding among the participants, following by general discussions to identify key concepts and issues of the future land use and transportation plans. By dividing participants into small groups and using community mapping technique, vision and future land use and transportation maps were quickly developed. The outputs of community workshops were also presented and discussed in informal meetings with local administrators and village chiefs to generate common understanding and to ask for recommendations. Informal meetings with local administrators were very effective because all the mayors and sub-district administrators were parts of the working group and the planning advisory board at the same time while the village chiefs who did not participated in plan-making stage had the opportunity to critic the plan during the plan-making stage. There were no problems on changing land use structure from the old one which preferred large-scale and modern development to the new one which preferred small-scale development and conservation of local environment and heritage. This was due largely to common understanding development at the beginning of the workshops and heritage tourism development trends in Amphawa District in recent years. There were no problems with the future land use plan to get approval by the Comprehensive Planning Advisory Board and by people who joined public hearing meeting. A small difficulty occurred when the plan had to get approval by the Town Planning Sub-committee, however.

319

Some committee members worried about the dramatic change of land use structure. The problem was resolved after they made a trip to Amphawa to see the situation there. They finally approved Amphawa’s land use plan without alterations. There were no problems with road cancellation and road size reduction in plan-making stage. A problem occurred when the transportation plan had to get approval by the Town Planning Sub-committee. The proposed roads were small to conserve orchard patterns, but the transportation expert suggested that they should be wider to cope with future demands. The problem was solved via an informal meeting with the expert. The road widths were carefully adjusted to cope with future traffics while maintaining the unique patterns of the orchards. A problem of road network also occurred during the public hearing. Although several roads proposed in the expired comprehensive plan were cancelled and all remaining roads were scaled down, some local residents wanted to cancel more roads for fear that their lands might be appropriated. The Town Planning Sub-committee did not agree with them and ordered to keep the proposed road network. Although there were some problems, community participation was found to be very useful in terms of reducing conflicts and time-saving. Even though the budget, the available time and the number of participants were limited, community participation in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning was intensive. It was found that a small working group was more effective when dealing with areal based issues while a large working group was more effective when dealing with planning integration. Informal meetings with local administrators and village chiefs were very useful for promoting common understandings and seeking local support.

19.5

Conclusion

Amphawa’s comprehensive planning was unique in terms of community participation. It received strong support from local communities.

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Community participations in Amphawa’ Comprehensive Planning were praised by the Town Planning Board who stated that they were the model for other participatory comprehensive planning in the future (Town and Planning Board 2013). Applying community participation in Thai comprehensive planning had a limit due to the nature of centralized decision-makings, however. The highest level of citizen involvements— public partnership—proposed by Grabow and Hilliker (2006) could not be reached in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning. They could only be elevated from the level of public awareness found in common comprehensive planning to the levels of public input and the early stage of public interaction. The value of community participation in Amphawa’s comprehensive planning not only came from the effectiveness in terms of time-saving and consensus buildings but also came from the ability to draw people to come together to envision the future of their communities (Peerapun 2017). It provided a new direction for participatory comprehensive planning in Thailand. To effectively integrate community participation into common comprehensive planning process, more participation techniques and tools should be tested and evaluated in the future. Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges Samut Songkhram Province and Samut Songkhram Town Planning Office for financial support and all

W. Peerapun participants for their contributions in Amphawa’s Comprehensive Planning.

References Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning (2011) Manual. Steps and Procedures in Comprehensive Planning and Specific Planning. Wannasilpa Peerapun, Bangkok Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning (2015) Town Planning Act B. E. 2018. Wannasilpa Peerapun. Bangkok Faculty of Architecture, CU (2013) Amphawa Comprehensive Plan (2nd revision), Amphawa District, Samut Songkhram Province. Wannasilpa Peerapun, Bangkok Grabow SH, Hilliker M (2006) Comprehensive planning and citizen participation. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, UW Extension Miller M, Tinio-Le Douarin ML (eds) (2013) Towards a sufficiency economy: a new ethical paradigm for sustainability. UNESCO, Paris Mongsawad P (2010) The philosophy of the sufficiency economy: a contribution to the theory of development. Asia-Pac Dev J 17(1):123–143 Peerapun W (2012) Participatory planning approach to urban conservation and regeneration in Amphawa community Thailand. Asian J Environ Behav Stud 3 (7):35–44 Peerapun W (2017) Community participations in Amphawa comprehensive planning Thailand. Environ Behav Proc J 2(5):41–48 Town and Country Planning Committee (2013) Minute No. 2/2013. 25 January 2013 UNESCO (n.d.) Four Dimensions of Sustainable Development. http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/TLSF/ theme_a/mod04/un-com04t01s03.htm. Accessed 20 November 2016

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Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence: Financial Challenges and Participatory Development in Small Cities of West Bengal Gopa Samanta

Abstract

The urban planning regime in Independent India started with the Master plan and the Town and Country Planning Act (1947), and continued for decades with an overwhelming importance on large and metropolitan cities. In the 1980s, the emphasis on urban planning and development experienced a shift from large cities to small and medium cities following the Integrated Development of Small and Medium Towns (IDSMT) Program launched in 1979. In 1990s, the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA) was passed to ensure decentralized planning and participatory development of cities in India under independent local governments. The present chapter, based on both secondary sources and empirical findings in the context of smaller cities, tries to explore the trajectories of changes in governing cities over the last three decades, especially after the 74th CAA and the impact of such changes. The models of urban governance differ from state to state followed by the State Municipal Acts. This chapter looks into the changes in the urban governance structure and in the pattern of municipal financing in West Bengal, and their impact on the efficiency of the provision of

G. Samanta (&) Department of Geography, The University of Burdwan, Badhaman, West Bengal, India e-mail: [email protected]

basic service in smaller cities. The paper critically analyses the nature of changes at the city level and shows how decentralization and people’s participation are undermined by the omnipresence of the party and the State in controlling the local governments of financially dependent smaller cities in West Bengal. For in-depth understanding of the ground level situation, the chapter focuses on four cities of West Bengal—Burdwan, Durgapur, Balurghat and Kalimpong. Keywords




Basic services Municipal finance Participatory development Urban governance

20.1







Introduction

The decades following the Independence of India experienced emphasis on planning in every sector. The urban sector was no exception. The planning regime in urban development continued for decades with an overwhelming importance on large and metropolitan cities in India such as the Master Plan, the Town and Country Planning Act, etc. In the 1980s, there was a change in the emphasis of planned urbanization following the recommendations of National Commission on Urbanization (NCU). The report of NCU published in 1988, prioritized the development of small and medium towns which together

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_20

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constitute the major share of urban population in India. The early 1990s also experienced another significant change in the management procedures of cities prioritizing the decentralized model of governance instead of the centralized model of ‘planning’. The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA), passed in 1992, tried to ensure these changes. The people-centric model of governance became an important tool to improve the quality of life of the people through the means of enhanced urban basic services. Restructuring and reforms in urban governance have been initiated in West Bengal much before the 74th Constitutional Amendment. Among the newer aspects of governance such as decentralization, people’s participation, accountability, etc.; decentralization is an important one, and in West Bengal decentralization took place much faster than in the other states in India (World Bank 2006). This process of decentralization has made the cities in West Bengal self-governed local bodies and has made people’s participation mandatory in the process of urban governance. Institutional autonomy is enjoyed by the city governments, although their financial dependence on the State Government is still very high. This financial dependence is higher in smaller cities and therefore, the efficiency of the city governments in the provision of basic services depends mostly on the grant from the State Government. When the financial condition of the state is not good, there is a cut in the State Government grants, which ultimately impacts the functioning of the small cities. The number of statutory towns or Urban Local Bodies (ULB) and the population living in existing cities are both increasing. The increase of population is much faster than the capacity enhancement of resource generation in these cities. Moreover, the financial condition of the state is not very good to bear the cost of the increasing urban population. The impact of all these conditions together is going to be high, affecting the basic services in the cities. Around 31.87% of the state’s total population lives in 127 statutory ULBs and 780 census towns1 of West Bengal occupying hardly 2.93% of the total land area. The high rate of increase

G. Samanta

in urban population (Table 20.1) is not compatible with the growth in the cities’ economy. As a result, among the total urban population of the state, about 40% live in slums (Mitra and Mukherjee 2008). The state has not performed well in the economic front for the last couple of decades. In terms of per capita state domestic product (SDP), West Bengal declined from first in 1960 to fifth among Indian states by 2014– 15. The share of the state in the total industrial production of the country had been reduced from 24% in 1947 to 11.9% in late 70s (Khasnobis 2008) and to 4.38% in 2012–13. In terms of Human Development, the state’s position has changed positively from 0.492 in 2007–08 to 0.604 in 2015. However in terms of rank among Indian states, its position is still tenth. One significant characteristic of the recent urbanization in West Bengal is that the percentage share of urban population outside the metropolitan area has increased considerably (Table 20.1), which indicates that more urban places are coming up outside the metropolitan area and its shadow zone. Although the rate of urbanization has increased significantly, the notification of statutory town since 2001 is very limited in West Bengal (Table 20.1). On the contrary, census towns have increased considerably over the last two decades. Although there are lots of debates regarding the role of census towns in measuring the level of urbanization (Pradhan 2013; Kundu 2011), there are many census towns whose agglomerated urban population exceeds the minimum population requirement, i.e. 30,000 for being a statutory town in the state (Samanta 2017; 2014). The process of municipalization has been slowed down significantly in the last two decades. This situation may be linked to the bad financial condition of the state of West Bengal, as the cost of developing and maintaining a statutory town is a state affair. The governance structure of ULB in West Bengal is a decentralized one. The chief 1

The settlements attaining urban characteristics such as density of population and non-farm activity, but not notified or administered as statutory town.

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Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

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Table 20.1 Urban West Bengal, 1961–2011 Year

Percentage of urban population

Percentage growth of urban population

Number of census towns

Number of statutory towns

Percentage of urban population in Kolkata Metropolitan area

1961

24.40

35.97

–

80

–

1971

24.70

28.41

48

83

64.11

1981

26.50

31.73

89

87

63.64

1991

27.48

29.49

148

106

58.92

2001

28.03

20.20

252

123

58.88

2011

31.89

–

780

127

48.44

Source ILGUS 2002 and 2011 Census

characteristic features of the municipal government are well narrated in GOWB Report (2003). The ULBs are divided into smaller areas called wards. Each ward is represented by an elected member, a councillor. One-third of the total seats of a municipality are reserved for women. Seats are proportionately reserved for the weaker sections (SC and ST) as well. Municipal elections are governed at a regular interval of five years under the direct supervision of the State Election Commission. Mayors/Chairpersons of the municipal bodies should be elected by the councillors. The municipal corporations (big cities) and municipal towns are governed by a cabinet form of the local self-government through the Mayor-in-Council/Chairman-inCouncil model respectively. Respective municipalities appoint their officers and employees with approval of the State Government. There should be Municipal Accounts Committees in the ULBs to keep vigil on municipal accounts. Municipal bodies are responsible for urban planning, socio-economic development of its residents, especially the underprivileged ones and for providing infrastructure for basic civil services. Constitution of ward committees in each municipal ward has been mandatory. To ensure transparency and accountability in municipal administration, each ward committee is required to hold at least two general meetings annually where the citizens can participate in the development plans and programs.

The present chapter traces the changes in the process of urban governance in West Bengal with a special focus on small cities. Decentralization and people’s participation have become important components of urban governance in West Bengal since the 1980s. The municipal financing system has become more transparent. This chapter looks into the state level changes in the urban governance structure in West Bengal and their impacts on the efficiency of the provision of basic services in smaller cities. The chapter is part of a long term research on the cities of West Bengal under different funded projects. The governance process and its changes have been understood through rigorous reading of government documents from both the state and the local governments, and a series of interviews with government officials and elected representatives at both levels. The impact of the policies on the citizens has been studied through an in-depth empirical research, following methods starting from detailed questionnaires to informal individual interviews and group discussions with the citizens at the household level. The cities covered in this empirical research are Kalimpong, Balurghat, Burdwan and Durgapur. The selected cities are well scattered over the state—Kalimpong in the north, Balurghat at the centre and Burdwan and Durgapur in the south. The population size of those cities also varies widely from around five hundred thousand in Durgapur to around fifty thousand in

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Kalimpong. The common element of the selected cities is their location away from the metropolitan city of Kolkata and they all belong to the secondary city group in their relative importance in the state.

20.2

20.2.1 Pre 74th CAA Period The state of West Bengal started the decentralized planning experiment in 1978 following the recommendations of Urban Development Strategy Committee. The major recommendations of the committee (Datta 1990) were as follows:

Reforms in Urban Governance

The history of urban governance in the state of West Bengal dates back to early eighteenth century, as Kolkata was an important city in the then British India. Kolkata became a municipal corporation in 1876 and reached a size of around one million when British changed their capital from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911. Even after the British shifted their capital to Delhi, the importance of Kolkata did not decline because of its strategic location in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent. Thus, Kolkata is one of the oldest municipal bodies in the country. Besides Kolkata, there were 71 ULBs in West Bengal in 1947, the year of independence. In the 60s and 70s, only a few ULBs were developed in the state. However, things started to change from the 80s once the Left Front Government came to power and remained consistent with their policy of decentralization. Since then, West Bengal Government started to put increasing emphasis on the then existing Municipal Corporations and other ULBs (GOWB 2003). It has been a conscious policy decision, having its roots in the recommendations of the Urban Development Strategy Committee that was set up in the late 1970s. This committee was appointed to make a reorientation in the approach to urban development, with special focus on diffusion of urbanization to the non-Kolkata metropolitan areas with the development of growth centres. However, the central focus of formulating the committee was on decentralization of development programs through increasing responsibilities of ULBs for preparation and implementation of those programs.

• The difference in per capita investment between ULBs in Calcutta Metropolitan Area (now Kolkata Metropolitan Area, shortly called KMA) and those in non-Calcutta Metropolitan Area should be brought down by tilting the balance in favour of the latter in order to restrict migration to the metropolis and to develop the latter as growth centres; • The difference between development grants and per capita development expenditure should be reduced. • The use of local resources and materials should be, as far as possible, maximized; • Special efforts need to be made for improving the quality of life of the urban poor and the weaker sections; • The ULBs should be entrusted with the responsibility of preparation of development plans and implementation of development programs in a decentralized manner. Following those recommendations, West Bengal government practiced many facets of the 74th CAA before it got passed by the parliament, such as decentralization of development programs, especially preparation and implementation of development programs directly by the ULBs. A major step in the direction of change in governance in West Bengal started in 1978 with the formation of two independent departments in the State Government for urban areas namely, Municipal Affairs and Urban Development. Both the departments are under a single ministry of Municipal Affairs and Urban Development. In the 80s and the early 90s, a number of new institutions such as the

20

Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

325

Municipal reforms and change in urban governance have been prioritized in India since the 74th Constitutional Amendment in 1992. This amendment enables urban local bodies to prepare plans for economic development and social justice, to levy taxes, and to emerge as forums for the political representation of hitherto marginalized sections of the society (Roy 2006). The major thrust among all the recommendations of the 74th CAA was on good governance—to make ULBs as independent units of self-governance through decentralization and

devolution of power and functions, and active participation of communities in the governance process. Besides decentralization and participation, good governance also emphasizes upon transparency and accountability. The West Bengal Municipal Act (1993) listed 49 obligatory functions and 40 discretionary functions for making ULB effective local self-government. In this new Act many services such as health, sanitation, environmental management, etc., were defined as obligatory functions of the ULBs which were not mandatory functions of the ULBs before. Datta (2003) has attributed the achievement of West Bengal in decentralization and participatory governance to the character of the regime rooted in the ideological commitment of the Left Front partners and the strong political will to strengthen the elected local government. Following many reform initiatives for structural, organizational and institutional changes, the municipal governance process in West Bengal has been changed significantly (GOWB 2003). As a part of this, it is mandatory to form the Municipal Accounts Committee which is headed by the opposition leader, to keep vigil on municipal accounts. Municipalities are to prepare their respective five year Draft Development Plan (DDP) and annual development plan in consultation with the respective Ward committees, against which the grant is sanctioned by the State Government for the development activities in the cities. The 74th CAA recommended the creation of separate planning committee for districts and metropolitan areas, for finalizing the municipal plans in their ambit, along with the commitment of the state and central assistance for the purpose. These committees are supposed to undertake planning for matters of common interest between the panchayats3 and the municipalities especially of physical and natural resources, infrastructure development and environmental conservation (Datta 1995). Immediately following the 74th CAA, the government of West Bengal enacted both the District Planning Committee (DPC) Act

2

3

Directorate of Local Bodies (DLB), Municipal Engineering Directorate (MED), Institute of Local Government and Urban Studies (ILGUS), State Urban Development Agency (SUDA) and West Bengal Valuation Board (WBVB) were created as support agencies to give administrative and technical assistance for capacity building of the ULBs to accommodate change in the governance more efficiently. However, as part of a recent administrative reform of merging different departments of the State Government; the Municipal Affairs and the Urban Development Departments have been merged again in 2017 for better coordination of the two departments in charge of urban development, administration and basic services.2 Besides empowering the ULBs, another important recommendation was to reduce the gap in the per capita investment for infrastructure and services between the ULBs of KMA area and ULBs of non-KMA area. This is a crucial aspect of urban governance and planning in West Bengal. There are clear-cut divisions between these towns and cities in terms of monetary allocation under different heads. The towns located in KMA area get more grants, more facilities from the State government. Although recommendation was made in 1978 to reduce this gap, it still exists in many fronts.

20.2.2 Post 74th CAA Period

https://wbxpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/1505FB.pdf.

Lowest unit of local government for rural areas in India, usually covering several villages.

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G. Samanta

and the Metropolitan Planning Committee Act for effective decentralization of planning process. The West Bengal District Planning Act was passed in 1994 and most of the District Planning Committees in the state are effectively performing their role since then. This committee prepares draft development plans for the district as a whole. Under the District Planning Committee, there is a sub-committee called the Urban Development Sub-Committee (UDSC) which co-ordinates plans and programs of the ULBs under DPC’s Draft Development Plan (Datta 2003). The field level observations from four cities of West Bengal scattered over three districts revealed that the District Planning Committees have effectively monitored and sanctioned both the DDPs and the double entry accounting system of the ULBs. The structures of both the DPC and the UDPC are decentralized, consisting of both district level and city level representatives. These committees are functioning effectively without any interruption since its formation.

20.3

Decentralized Structure of City Governments

West Bengal is the first state in India to accept and operationalize the cabinet form of city governance through the Mayor/Chairman-in-Council model in all the ULBs (Datta 2003). This model, based on the concept of democratic decentralization and collective responsibility, make the urban government more accountable. The Mayor/Chairman-in-Council system was introduced in West Bengal in 1984. Under this system, there is a five to ten members’ board of councillors who run the local government with the help of the Mayor or the Chairperson. Under the Mayor/Chairman-in-Council, there are different committees such as the Finance & Resource Mobilization standing Committee, Solid Waste Management Standing Committee, Water Supply Standing Committee, Public Works Standing Committee, Health Education & Urban Poverty Alleviation Standing Committee, Public Health & Sanitation Standing Committee,

Minority, SC & ST Development Sub Committee, Municipal Accounts Committee, Mutation & Separation Sub Committee, etc. However, the number of such committees and their respective names are found to vary widely depending on the respective importance of the activities in the cities. These municipal level committees are composed of elected representatives and officials from the local government. These are headed by the President and Vice President who are elected representatives. Below the level of municipal committees, there are ward committees in each and every ward of the cities. These ward committees are headed by the Ward Councillor as by the President and the Secretary, nominated by the ward committee members. In most states, the state appointed Municipal Commissioner is the executive functionary and the executive powers are exercised by a triumvirate set of authorities—the council, the standing committees and the appointed commissioner (Datta 1995). However, in the Mayor-in-council pattern of the city governance in West Bengal, the Mayor/Chairperson is the designated executive, and therefore, exercises greater control and supervision over the Chief Executive Officer who represents the state bureaucracy in the ULBs. As a result, there is no coercion between the bureaucrats and the elected representatives, as the overall power is enjoyed by the Mayor-in-council. While on one hand, this has helped in decentralization of power amidst the people’s representatives and in smooth running of the urban government, on the other hand the ruling parties with their overwhelming majority in the city governments have made the governing process more influenced by political leadership through its elected representatives. Although political stability in the governance helps in pursuing policies and programs on a continued basis at least for certain period of time (Ghosh and Ahmad 1996), a very long stability sometimes corrupts the system and only because of this, one section of the citizens get benefited at the cost of the others due to their similar political identity with that of the people in the city government. This has happened in most of the cities

20

Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

of West Bengal. Lack of sizeable representatives from the opposition in the ULBs has made the Mayor-in-council system more powerful and has enabled to control the city governance to a large extent. As part of the reforms process for better running of urban administration, a number of new posts have been created in the ULBs. Executive officers have been recruited in each and every ULB in the recent past.

20.4

Institutional Reforms and Basic Services

Improvement of basic services and the necessary institutional reforms in the cities of West Bengal started with external funds. Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor (KUSP) was an externally funded program of the Government of West Bengal to improve the urban basic services and the quality of life, especially for the poor people living in the urban areas. The program was initiated through a tripartite agreement between the Government of India, the Government of West Bengal and the Department for Urban Development (DFID) of UK in 2003 and continued up to 2012. This program was meant to transform the urban poor as mere bystanders in the development process to involved participants of it, and to increase the institutional capacity of the ULBs (Basu 2006). In the first phase, it was being implemented in 40 ULBs of Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA).In the second phase, it was introduced in the rest of the ULBs located outside KMA of West Bengal. The basic objectives of this program, as stated by Biswas (2003) were: I. To improve urban planning and governance in the ULBs by supporting the strengthening of ULBs in the line with the 74th Constitutional Amendment and transforming support agencies at the state level such as, Municipal Affairs Department (MAD), Municipal Engineering Directorate (MED), Directorate of Local Bodies (DLB), Institute of Local Government and Urban Studies (ILGUS), Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority

327

(KMDA) and State Urban Development Agency (SUDA) to enable them to better serve the needs of the ULBs. II. Improved access of poor people to urban services in the ULBs by engaging the slum communities in the provision of basic services through needs identification, prioritisation and community contracting. III. Economic development by promoting livelihood opportunities through participatory approaches. The KUSP Program was implemented by the Municipal Affairs Department (MAD), Govt. of West Bengal through the support agencies to strengthen the capacity of the ULBs. It included a number of key players and stakeholders at different levels of operation. The main inventory feature of the KUSP was to focus on the capacity building of the ULBs in order to deliver proper services based on participatory ‘bottom-up’ planning. By putting the main thrust on prioritization and affordability in the preparation of Municipal Draft Development Plans (DDP), the KUSP established demand-side approach and demand management practices in the urban basic services provided to the citizens in the cities of West Bengal. For the effective implementation of the KUSP program, a Change Management Unit (CMU) was created to work within MAD. The CMU was headed by the Project Director with the support of the project manager. The unit had a range of specialists either recruited or contracted as consultants. The CMU comprised of experts from different institutions of the state government such as Municipal Finance, Organization, Development, Urban Planning, Poverty Monitoring, Health, Information Technology, etc. The CMU played both the roles of the program manager as well as the facilitators of change, working with the support agencies and the ULBs (Biswas 2003). After the KUSP program was over in 2012, the provision of basic services entirely became the responsibility of the ULBs with the financial support from the State Government. Following the Town and Country Planning Act of 1979, the state of West Bengal has nine

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G. Samanta

development authorities for planning of big urban centres and their surrounding areas. These authorities are to facilitate industrial, infrastructure and social development activities in their demarcated areas. They also perform statutory functions like preparation of Land Use Development and Control Plan (LUDCP), and are responsible for identifying growth centres having economic potential, and for providing support in attracting and facilitating investment in the industrial sector of the state (GOWB 2003). For example, Burdwan Town is under the Burdwan Development Authority (BDA) established in 2002, and Durgapur is Under Asansol Durgapur Development Authority (ADDA) which was established in 1980. These development authorities are under direct regulation of Urban Development Department of the State Government. The cities coming under these statutory planning bodies usually get some infrastructural support from development authorities. These authorities usually control the physical infrastructure of the cities and their newly developed areas. In Durgapur and Burdwan, the development of city centres, shopping malls, parks, industrial estates and the development of housing estates have been observed under the infrastructural development of the cities under ADDA and BDA. Recent trends show that most of the development efforts done by these planning bodies are made under public-private partnership. Although the urban basic services are completely under the domain of the ULBs, the management of solid waste in Durgapur received some infrastructural support from these planning organizations.

20.5

New Governance: Towards a Better Accountability, Transparency and Participation

The new governance process puts more emphasis on the devolution of power to the people and therefore, demands accountability, transparency and participation of the community in the

decision-making processes of ULBs. In West Bengal, several initiatives have been taken to ensure accountability, transparency and the participation of communities in the urban local governance as part of the urban governance reforms.

20.5.1 Accountability Among the different aspects of the new governance, accountability has a special role in improving the service delivery mechanism. The general weakness of accountability mechanism is considered to be a major barrier to the improvement of basic services. Clearly, strengthening accountability mechanisms and sparking greater citizen demand for change are therefore, important pillars of any strategy aimed at improving services in India (World Bank 2006). According to United Nations Millennium Project (2005) accountability is needed to impel individuals and institutions in the right direction. Accountability mechanisms are essential to hold the government, and the other service providers responsible for their action (or inaction) in the improvement of services. Liberalization has allowed market forces to operate in Indian cities to produce basic urban services and therefore, market accountability needs to be ensured for the citizens. In the competitive urban market, service providers are obliged to become more accountable to retain and expand their businesses. In Indian cities, the ULB is the prime service provider. However, as a service provider, they also have to be accountable to the citizens. Improving access to information (including prices, forms, officers to be contacted, grievance redressal and procedures to be negotiated by applicants) has been identified as a process to make the local governments more accountable. Publication of the citizens’ charter with all the detailed information on the service provision and establishing a grievance redress cell to receive complaints from the citizens are essential tools for ensuring accountability. According to Datta (1995), incorporating citizens’ charter in the municipal legislation makes

20

Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

the municipal services more responsive and accountable to their clients, thus improving the quality of service and involving the people’s choices. Publishing and circulating a citizen’s charter has become mandatory in the ULBs of West Bengal to make them more accountable as part of the reforms process under KUSP. All the case studies show that the ULBs have published their citizens’ charter and upgraded those from time to time to make the urban government more responsive and more accountable. In addition to the citizens’ charter, hoardings displaying the information on the municipal services are also observed in different nodal points of the four cities under study. However, the household level survey results show that the number of citizens lodging complaints against the municipality are still very low and even for that minority, not much action has been taken by the municipality yet. Therefore, it is clear that although institutional reforms have taken place, it is yet to make the municipalities more accountable in service delivery.

20.5.2 Transparency Transparency in the ULBs’ activities, especially in finance and decision-making, is an important prerequisite of good governance. As part of the new reforms process to ensure transparency in financial dealings, municipal accounts committee is formed in most of the ULBs in West Bengal. This committee, chaired by the opposition leader, has the power to monitor and supervise the municipal accounts as a whole. However, our field observation revealed that in most cities, the Municipal Accounts Committee could not perform its role due to the negligible representation of opposition in the local government. The ULBs in West Bengal are in most cases controlled by the ruling party in the state and therefore, even if the opposition party members exist in the municipality, the Municipal Accounts Committee does not perform at all. As part of the municipal reforms, the accounting system of the cities in West Bengal has been transformed from single entry

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accounting to double entry accrual-based accounting. An amendment to the West Bengal Municipal (Financial and Accounting) Rules (1999) has been made in order to provide necessary guidelines on how to do it. Single entry cash basis of accounting was used to record transactions only on receipt and payment of cash (for income and expenditure items). As a result, an analysis of the true and fair view of the activities of the ULBs was not possible as income accrued (but not received) and expenditure incurred (but not paid for), were not reflected in the financial statements of the ULBs. The new accounting system follows: (a) accounting standards issued by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India; (b) West Bengal Municipal (Finance and Accounting) Rules (1999); (c) National Municipal Accounts Manual issued by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India.4 This new system has been introduced in the municipalities of KMA from the financial year 2006–2007, and later on in the ULBs outside KMA. By the end of the KUSP Program in 2012, all the municipalities transformed their accounting system from single entry to double entry. This reform in municipal accounting can be considered as a step forward in making the urban governance more transparent

20.5.3 Participation in Urban Governance The formulation and effective functioning of a ward committee can be considered as an effective step to ensure participation of common people in the urban governance process. West Bengal is one of the few states where ward committees have been functioning for nearly a decade. The state government is committed to decentralized and participatory urban local governance through making ward committees more broad-based and truly participatory (Ghosh and Mitra 2006). The West Bengal Municipal Act of 1993 4

https://www.wbdma.gov.in/HTM/MUNI_NewAccountingSystem.htm.

330

(section 417) first made the provision for the formulation of ward committees. On the basis of that recommendation, the Department of Municipal Affairs of the Government of West Bengal has made the West Bengal Municipal (Ward Committee) Rules (2001) to make the constitution of ward committees mandatory for all the ULBs. This is done to ensure participation of people in the development activities of the cities as well as in the urban governance. Enhancing participation of poor people in cities does not simply mean empowering the poor to assist the powerful in advocating for physical rights. It also includes the responsibility to devolve power over decision-making to those most affected by the problems (Sridharan 2008). The participation of the citizens can be ensured at two levels of the city governance—planning and implementation (Ghosh et al. 1995). At the planning stage, citizens’ participation ensures area-specific needs of different parts of the city, i.e. the demand-driven approach to city planning and participation in implementation ensures the quality of services. The Ward Committees have a range of supervisory and monitoring powers within the ward, and the committee has dual accountability —they are accountable to the people, as well as to the urban government (Datta 2003). Ward committee is chaired by the Councillor of the respective ward and are constituted by two types of members—nominated by the Councillor and nominated by the Mayor/Chairman-in-council. These members are nominated from different sections of the society inhabiting in a ward under the discretion of Councillor, as a result of which, the party members or the dedicated supporters of the ruling party in the respective wards get nomination. Therefore, Ward Committee does not represent the voice of all the people in a ward. Although Ward Committees are meant to be non-political entities, they function as the political organization at the sub-municipal level (Ghosh and Mitra 2006). The Councillor even has the power to remove a member from the committee which indicates the overwhelming power of the elected representative. Therefore,

G. Samanta

any voice raised against the Councillor’s decision remains either unheard or ignored. It is required to convene annual general meetings of the citizens every year, and a monthly meeting at the committee level. In this annual general meeting, the Councillor has to face the citizens of his/her ward by means of which the ward committee can make the Councillors more accountable to the local people. The field level observation over more than a decade, has noted that during the earlier regime of the Communist Party of India (CPIM) led government in West Bengal, the ward committees in the cities were very regular at organizing the annual general meeting but the committee level meeting was not done regularly (once a month). The frequency of such meetings varied from once in two months to twice in a year. This difference at ward levels depended mostly on the levels of initiatives taken by the Chairman (Ward Councillor) and the Secretary of the Ward Committee. The resolution adopted in the general annual meeting used to be sent to the municipality. However, our enquiry into the status of submission of the copies of resolutions taken in the Ward Committee general annual meeting ends up with the findings that in most cities they were very few. This raises the question of effectiveness of the Ward Committees. The recent observations from the cities indicate that the ward committee meeting has become very irregular, especially during the new regime of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) led State Government since 2011. Our household level field survey indicates that poor people, mostly from slum areas, participate regularly in the Ward Committee annual meetings. Observations from our group discussions with the middle and high income group people in the cities regarding participation in city governance indicate a very low level of participation in the Ward Committee meetings and their functioning. However, from the in-depth survey, it has been found that poor people in most cases only attend the meeting on the direction of the local Councillor and the other party members. They often confuse the Ward Committee meeting

20

Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

as party meeting. On our queries on the compulsion of attending the meetings, they replied that if they do not attend the meeting, they would not get the benefits given to the poor people that come from the local government. This small answer explains how political parties control the local governance in the cities of West Bengal. Although they have a number of problems in basic services, especially in water supply and sanitation, none of these issues are raised by them in the meetings. Moreover, even if they get to raise their local problems regarding basic services, no action is taken to resolve them. Therefore, they have stopped raising their voice and now remain silent in the meeting. A deeper analysis of the nature of participation reveals that, what is happening is simply inclusion of more people, rather than enhancing participation in the decision-making process.

20.6

Financial Reforms and the Status of Municipal Finance

Strengthening Municipal finances and promoting fiscal autonomy of the ULBs were among the major objectives of the 74th CAA. This act also mandated the establishment of State Finance Commissions to advice on the devolution of state resources to the ULBs and the management of financial resources in the ULBs (Datta 1995). The Government of West Bengal formed two Municipal Finance Commissions (the first in 1979 and the second in 1990) for recommendations on municipal management and finance prior to the 74th CAA. After the 74th CAA, the GOWB formed four State Finance Commissions (the first in 1995, the second in 2000, the third in 2008 and the fourth in 2016) and the Municipal Administrative Reforms Committee in 2001. All these committees recommended the strengthening of decentralization, transparency, and the improvement of municipal finances and they put major thrust on the enhancement of individual income of the ULBs to lessen their very high dependence on grants from the State Government. The State Finance Commission reports

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give the yearly details of municipal funding of each and every ULB. It is mandatory for all the ULBs in West Bengal to submit the Annual Administrative Report. Accounting reform has been done in all the ULBs in West Bengal in different phases since 2006 to correctly reflect the financial position of the ULBs and to make their projects bankable and viable. This financial reform has been realized under the externally funded KUSP Program, as the KUSP puts a lot of emphasis on government reforms, as a result of which, the financial credibility of the ULBs has increased to a certain extent. In order to bring clarity in the municipal financial management system, the old single entry system of accounting that was being followed by the ULBs has been replaced by the doubled entry accrual based system. In spite of financial reforms such as increase in property tax, introduction of water tax, etc., the ULBs of West Bengal are still highly dependent on the government grants. One of the reasons for this higher level of dependence lies in the municipal fiscal structure in West Bengal. Here the pattern is—Property tax as the main municipal tax and major dependence on state transfers. Therefore, the ULBs are financially highly dependent on the State Government with their meagre source of own revenue generation. Gopalkrishnan (2007) has identified several factors which are responsible for the imbalances in revenue and expenditure of the ULBs in India. A few important ones among them are defective pricing policy, limited revenue sources, lack of revenue efforts, obsolete norms governing price fixation, cost hike due to inflation, increasing marginal costs, etc. From the field research, it has been noticed that a number of initiatives were taken to increase the income from own sources. These are enhancement of property tax, property tax collection of current demand, arrear and outsourcing of collection, advertisement tax through hoarding, establishment of parking zone and introduction of parking fees, implementation of water charges, enhancement of administrative fees, user charges for different services and leveraging

332

G. Samanta

idle assets. Although, the tax collection rate has considerably increased in the recent past, property tax base has not yet become a dependable source of revenue. This is sometimes due to the low rate of collection of both the current and the arrear of the tax. To recover the gap in property tax collection, ULBs are reforming property tax with the help of GIS in the cities of the state in general and in the four studied cities in particular. GIS technology is being used by the ULBs to identify the un-assessed properties’ tax assessment and to increase collection efficiency. Introduction of Property Title Certification System is also done in many cities. In spite of all several financial reforms, municipal governments are not yet able to recover the cost they incur in providing different services. Kundu (2007) opines that it would also be erroneous to expect small and medium towns to finance capital expenditure through internal resources or borrowing from the capital market. That is why they are still dependent on State Government grants (for example see Table 20.2). Although, due to the increase in property tax and with the introduction of water tax revenue income from own sources increased; the overall income never reached even 50% of the total income in case of many ULBs. In recent years, there is considerable decrease in the revenue income from own sources of the cities under study. The figures in Table 20.2 between the year 2010–11 and 2015–16, clearly indicates this trend. This has happened due to the withdrawal of the water tax in the cities of West Bengal by the TMC led new state government which is in power since 2011 and it indicates how the

financial condition of the cities, even their own income, is controlled by the State Government. The analysis of the Municipal Budget gives us an idea about the nature of urban services in the ULBs. Capital expenditure may be viewed as providing pure or impure public goods, whereas revenue expenditures most directly provide private goods such as office equipment, wages, and salaries, and therefore, higher capital rather than revenue expenditures imply better service delivery (Sridhar 2007). The analysis of the budgets of four cities indicates that in each category of services, revenue expenditure is much higher when compared to capital expenditure, which means that cities spend more on establishment and salaries than on development work.

20.7

Other Partners

20.7.1 Public-Private Partnership (PPP) The state governments in India are no more in a position to continue the subsidization of civic amenities, and in order to overcome the problem of government failures in providing basic urban services, they look for unconventional methods of financing urban basic services (Bagchi 1999). Public-private partnership is one of those emerging unconventional methods of financing urban infrastructure and services. PPPs are co-operative arrangements between private and public sector organizations for providing infrastructure services and products to the public

Table 20.2 The proportions of own fund and government. Grant in the total revenue income of the Burdwan Municipality Sources of revenue income (Rs.)

1988–89

2003–04

2007–08

2010–11

2015-16

Own fund

7,977,997 (25.06%)

49,254,882 (37.95%)

102,478,803 (41.89%)

124,485,310 (33.43%)

158,470,503 (31.47%)

Government grant

23,854,451 (74.94%)

80,524,355 (62.05%)

142,183,460 (58.11%)

247,808,063 (66.57%)

345,057,148 (68.53%)

Total income

31,832,448

129,779,237

244,662,263

372,293,373

503,527,651

Source Copies of the Municipal Budget

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Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

where the parties agree to share duties, responsibilities, costs, profit and risks. Association of the private sector is necessary to get technical know-how, financial resources and management skills. Stakeholder’s association is significant to ascertain the user’s preferences and demands to reduce operation and maintenance costs of the scheme, to be able to ensure financial sustainability, and the fact that private providers use part of their profits to serve the poor (Bagal 2008). To meet the increasing gap between the growing demand for infrastructure and services and the increasingly scarce public sector outlays, the government of West Bengal emphasized the public-private partnership initiatives in urban areas. The State Government had adopted a policy on infrastructural development through PPP in 2003 and has just finalized ‘the state government policy on infrastructure development through PPP in the urban sector’ to be placed before the cabinet for approval. Nurturing and implementing PPP projects are more challenging than that of the conventional projects. PPP is often a complex arrangement and requires more skills. The ULBs in most cases are not capable enough to handle these projects. Therefore, the D\development authorities are taking up the PPP projects instead of the ULBs. The majority of the PPP projects in the cities are the housing projects. Health and solid waste managements in many cities have also come up under the PPP projects in the recent years. Sridhar (2007) opined that strong public sector governance can regulate public-private partnership projects to reduce the cost and to improve the quality of services. Otherwise the private partner would take the profit and public sector would bear the risk. Some senior level officers of the Urban Development Department of West Bengal have stated that in most cases the private companies benefit more from the PPP projects as the government does not have appropriate rules and regulations regarding the PPP projects. According to a news report (SNS 2009) the private partner plans, executes and completes the projects whereas, the state government officials are consulted only to complete the formalities. However from the field

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observations, it is too early to comment on the effectiveness of the PPP projects in the cities.

20.7.2 NGOs and CBOs in the City Successful urban management needs involvement of citizen’s groups in the improvement of urban services. Among different citizen’s groups, NGOs and CBOs can play a significant role in the management of different services in the ULBs by providing support to the people, the community and the local government. The NGOs help mobilize local resources, communicate information about needs to local political leaders, lobby for programs and policies to expand urban services, provide financial assistance, promote new approaches to service delivery and interact with the municipal officials, program managers and field staff (Ghosh and Ahmad 1996). However, in comparison to the other states, NGOs got a very late entry in West Bengal as the state government vehemently opposed the NGOs to play their role as citizen’s group in the 1880s and the early 1990s. Therefore, the role of NGOs in urban management and in service provision is extremely poor in the cities of West Bengal. From the field research in four cities in West Bengal, it has been noted that a few NGOs are there, especially in Burdwan and in Durgapur as individual service providers in the health and the education sectors. Although they have insignificant share in the total quantum of services in the cities, their services to the poor are significant. Though in the West Bengal Municipal Act, much emphasis has been given to the participation of citizen’s group in the city governance, NGOs are still not involved in the processes in the cities studied. The NGOs in the cities remained as individual service providers and have no association with the local government. Although the health officers of Burdwan and Durgapur claimed that NGOs are invited in the health program initiatives, it has been seen that they are only invited for preventive health care programs like pulse polio to get the assistance of more manpower in the effective running of such programs. Thus, it can be said that the NGOs

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could not develop in West Bengal as effective citizen’s groups in urban governance. For the Urban poverty alleviation programs such as SJSRY, three levels of Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) were created in the cities. These are Neighbourhood Group (NHGs) at the lowest level, Neighbour Committees (NHCs) at the second level, and Community Development Societies (CDS) at the city level. These different levels of CBOs are officially empowered with a number of responsibilities such as dissemination of information and medium of communication, encouraging people’s participation, supporting planning, implementation and monitoring of activities at the local level, motivating BPL people to join thrift and credit societies, facilitating recovery of loan, and creating small community assets (Datta 2006). However, the empirical research at the city level observed that these CBOs are formed by the city government officials following the nomination of the local Councillor. The Councillor usually nominates people belonging to their party supporters. Therefore, these CBOs are not independent bodies to be able to raise their voice on different issues as they are controlled by the party structure. All four cities under study do not have representative CBOs formed outside the local government institutions and therefore, the role of CBOs is utterly negligible in monitoring the services and the overall governance process of the cities. From the empirical research at the city level, it is found that high political interference is one of the major obstacles in the participation of non-political institutions such as NGOs and CBOs in the activities of the city government.

20.8

Centralized Politics Versus Decentralized Governance

In spite of being the pioneer in decentralized urban governance and despite having early reforms and regulations, the ULBs in the state of West Bengal still suffer from centralized control of the political parties. This situation creates enormous problem in the way of participatory

development in the cities. The election of ULBs is regular in West Bengal and takes place at an interval of five years, but the nature of election is different from that of the other states. Here electoral process takes place directly under the political party and the candidates contest under the party banner, whereas in many other states, such as in Bihar and Jharkhand, people are elected as independent candidates from the local area without direct involvement of political parties. Due to the involvement of political parties in the local government election, the local issues often do not get prioritized. In West Bengal, since the election of local governments in the 1980s, the situation is different. The dominant political parties of the state take a major drive to contest the local election and the central organization of the party decides which candidates would contest. The situation with the earlier government supported by Left Front and the present government supported by TMC are no different in this context. According to the Municipal Act, the Mayor/Chairperson should be elected by the elected Councillors. However, it was observed during field research, that the decision is often taken by the central party authority, so that the state level organization of the party can control the local government as well as the city politics. From the discussions with the Councillors at the city level, it was found that they are ignorant about the way in which the Mayor/Chairperson is decided in their own cities and think that it is decided by the central party office located in Kolkata. In some states such as Jharkhand and Bihar, the Mayor/Chairperson is directly elected by people of the city, which is not the case in West Bengal. To retain political control in the local government, the political party in power in the state tries its best to be elected, and this sometimes leads to violence during election of ULBs in West Bengal. The party in power in the state always tries to control the activities of the cities and that is why there is always tremendous presence of political parties in the local governments. The government grants from the state to the city governments become skewed depending on the party colour of the local government. The

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Decentralized Governance Versus State Dependence …

cities run by opposition parties do not get an equal share of the government grants. It has also been seen in recent years that the elected members in the local governments change their party affiliation to ensure the grant to the ULBs to keep the activities of the city running.

20.9

Conclusion

The decentralized model of urban governance in West Bengal is efficiently running for decades starting from the period before the 74th CAA. People’s participation has become mandatory since a long time in the state through a number of committees such as the Ward Committee. However, empirical research shows that the formation and action of those committees are highly controlled by the political parties. The poor people are usually highly dependent on the city government, especially for water supply and other basic services. The access to those services is often controlled by the parties especially for informal settlements. Therefore, the compulsion of the poor makes them participate more in the process of governance. On the contrary, the middle class is not interested in the running of the local government as they do not depend on the municipal services in a big way. In small cities, people belonging to the middle class can have their own water sources within the premises of their own houses through deep tube wells which are usually banned in big cities. They only depend on the municipal garbage collection system. Political interference in local governance is also a major reason why the non-political middle class do not participate in the governance process either through the ward committees or through resident associations. NGOs at the city level are also not found to be actively engaged in the governance process. The absence of bodies questioning the city governments’ activities lead to the excessive control of political parties. Thus, effectiveness of decentralized governance in city management is not found in a big way at the city level. The most significant problem of governing small cities is the municipal funding. The Central

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Government grants through different urban development programs often come for big cities but not much for the small cities. Both the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) from 2005 to 2014 and the new scheme Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) starting in 2015 facilitate the funding for bigger cities. The funding under these Central Government schemes for small cities is negligible. To adjust with this situation and for more funding from the Central Government schemes, the West Bengal government has started merging smaller cities with the existing Municipal Corporation (MC). For example, Rajarhat-Gopalpur has been merged with Bidhannagar MC and Raniganj, Jamuria and Kulti have been merged with Asansol MC. The small cities are highly dependent on State Government grants as they either do not receive much from the Central Government or are not financially efficient enough due to poor economic bases. The dependence on State Government funding makes them more politically dependent on the State Government. The basic services are often affected by the financial limitations of the local governments and by the delayed arrival of the government grants. The funds from the State Government grants are also controlled by the fixed projects and therefore the funds are often tied. Untied funds are very rare, which limit the independence of the city governments to spend according to their specific needs. The generation of individual revenue is the only way to overcome this constraint and small cities still have to go a long way to reach that stage, as they only depend on property and commercial taxes for their major sources of income. Acknowledgements This Chapter has been developed from the research carried out under two research projects: 1. Small and Medium Towns in Eastern India: The Dynamics of the Economy, Mobility and Governance funded by ICSSR Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi and 2. India—Urban rural boundaries and basic services, funded by IRD Institut de recherche pour le développement, France. The author acknowledges the financial support of the funding agencies—ICSSR and IRD. The author also acknowledges the comments from Valerie Clerc, IRD, France on the draft version of the paper.

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Gentrification and Its Implication in the United States

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Samuel Thompson and Keya Willis

Abstract

This paper discusses a contentious issue in regard to gentrification and displacement in the United States. The urban gentrification process shows how hard it can be to formulate housing policies that are devoid of major side effects, while striving to achieve create successful integrated communities with mixedincome. This paper traces the process of gentrification during the period of urban renewal and slum clearance. It then discusses the nature of gentrification in major U.S. cities, and identifies overall impact of housing programs and federal housing policies. The paper concludes by showing both negative and positive impacts of gentrification, and planning policies to address any negative impacts of future gentrification projects. Keywords










Cities Displacement Equity Gentrification Housing Metropolitan Middle class










S. Thompson (&) Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Geographic Information Sciences, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Willis Department of Economic Development and Planning, DuPage County, IL, USA

21.1

Introduction

There continues to be widespread public engagement in the discourse of gentrification across the United States. To supporters of gentrification, it brings about transforming formerly declining neighborhoods into desirable properties with high aesthetic improvements. To opponents of gentrification, it amounts to uprooting existing residents who happen to be poor. Countless studies have shown that gentrification is one of the most common processes that force residents out of their neighborhoods. Schaffer and Smith (1986) argued that gentrification is the movement of primarily middle class families into areas where property values are increasing while at the same time pushing out poor families from their existing neighborhoods. This is especially true for those who are affected by rehabilitation or demolishment of their living space attributed to economic and political forces. As long as economic and political forces continue to play a major role in advancing gentrification in American cities and reshaping the urban landscape, the discourse will continue for many years to come. For many decades in the U.S., upgrading neighborhood infrastructure and housing rehabilitation have been the hallmark of neighborhood revitalization and improvements. At the time not much attention was paid to the urban transformation because it coincided with major infrastructure upgrades and other urban space changes through slum clearance and urban

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_21

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renewal. In all of these instances, a new middle class engaged in an extensive rehabilitation of neighborhoods block by block, forcing existing residents with low income to move out to other areas. By the 1960s and 1970s, there was an increase in the number of gentrification projects, particularly in Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia and many more as distressed neighborhoods are transformed into middle and upper income areas. In essence, the main focus of this paper is to discuss the gentrification process, gentrification cases in four U.S. cities, the impact of housing acts and federal housing programs in gentrification, and the overall effects of gentrification.

21.2

Gentrification Process

In order to grasp the significance of gentrification, a quick overview of the literature is provided. Glass (1964) noted that gentrification is a way to displace local working class groups. Laska (1982) identified gentrification as the process of wealthy individuals being more willing to reside in the city than in the suburb. Wagner (1995) indicated that gentrification is the upgrading of residential areas of central cities, and the revitalization of neighborhoods in the inner city at the detriment of the local working class. According to Lang (1982), gentrification symbolized an area that became oriented toward newcomers of greater wealth than the old residents. In essence, an area that is once considered undesirable by the middle class has become a hotspot for the same socioeconomic group, especially after the area is transformed (Zukin 1987; Watt 2008). As illustrated by the varying definitions of gentrification, the empirical research shows that the process adversely impacts the neighborhood poor and working class groups. Gentrification became prominent during the period of urban renewal, slum clearance, and the post-war reconstruction programs in the 1950s and 1960s (Schaffer and Smith 1986). Gentrification began as a process that originally occurred in residential areas, but it has grown to include central and inner city land areas. It has taken

many forms, the most common form is the rehabilitation of old inner and central city building stock for new uses, mainly to serve the middle-class people. Previous studies have shown the reasons why certain area areas are vulnerable to gentrification and why others are not (Wyly and Hammel 1998; Duany 2001; Betancur 2002; Lin 2002; Galster et al. 2003; Anderson 2014). According to Timberlake and Johns-Wolfe (2017), there are certain neighborhood characteristics that make an area susceptible to gentrification, including disinvestment, declining infrastructure, and low quality housing stock. Additional contributing factors are prime locations such as proximity to entertaining facilities and business centers. The prime locations spurred gentrification in places such as Boston, Miami’s South Beach, and west as far as Los Angeles. Newspapers were first to report on various case studies of developers renovating deteriorated houses and selling or renting them to young professionals (Goodman 1980). Gentrification has always been controversial as developers try to renovate old and decaying buildings that once belonged to poor residents. For developers, the main purpose of gentrification is to try and provide ways to attract the middle class to the inner city such as Boston’s South End project. In this particular example, the area was gentrified with an emphasis on office space and other service activities. The developers built high-rise buildings and retail centers, which coincidentally contributed to an increased in property taxes and forced low-income residents to relocate to the city boundary (Teitler 1995). Many metropolitan areas followed Boston’s urban resurgence. Neighborhoods in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Philadelphia transformed their neighborhoods as well, through the gentrifying process. This was a time when the emerging middle class began to renovate abandoned houses in blighted conditions and other residential structures near the central business districts. In the 1970s, many highly educated young men and women migrated into areas once occupied by the poor and low-income people.

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Gentrification and Its Implication in the United States

These areas included central business districts and inner city neighborhoods, leading to the uprooting of the poor. The 1980s and 1990s ushered in an era of warehouse transformation into residential units, creative centers and culturally themed places. It was in this era that gentrification disproportionally impacted minority neighborhoods as the new middle class moved into renovated urban areas such as Brooklyn, Harlem, Cincinnati, and Chicago.

21.3

Gentrification in U.S. Cities

Most of the urban neighborhoods in U.S. cities were not immune to gentrification. It occurred across the country in places such as Brooklyn Heights, Harlem, Cincinnati, and Chicago. As these places are gentrified, the process slowly begun to have an impact on the working poor and their ability to remain in place became seriously compromised. It became a financial burden to remain in place for some of the existing residents.

21.3.1 Brooklyn Heights Neighborhoods, New York In Brooklyn Heights, New York during the late nineteenth century, wealthy businessmen, shipping and tradespeople, came across the East River from Lower Manhattan and began to gentrify the city (Lees 2003). This location was known as Manhattan’s first commuter suburb, and the cultural center for the City of Brooklyn, and one of the wealthiest communities in the state of New York. As more and more of the people who resided in this area, left and moved to distant suburbs, their brownstones were bought and converted into apartments and other dwelling units for a high price. By the 1960s, gentrification became commonplace in this area again, this time both developers and individuals were buying and renovating brownstone houses throughout the city. Every time a property changes ownership,

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the new owners often charge higher rents and tenants immediately move out. For example, when a wealthy young lawyer bought and moved into the fourth floor of a four-storied brownstone, within a couple of months all the remaining tenants moved out (Lees 2003). The tenants could not afford the new rent without any financial support from the government. Another example involved a family taken to court and evicted on the grounds that the landlord had an immediate need for the space for his own use. These examples illustrate the economic power of the middle-class family, by virtue of buying and renovating brownstones, the working class is likely to be displaced. Overtime Brooklyn’s neighborhoods were overwhelmed by young professionals who chose not to reside in the far suburbs. They preferred the city as a vibrant place to the suburbs. By the 1980s and 1990s, another wave of gentrification projects began, this time attributed to the development of downtown Brooklyn (Lees 2003). As the area was being gentrified as part of a comprehensive redevelopment plan, some observers viewed the redevelopment as necessary for the area, and not intended as a way to displace working class residents. However, the new development influenced the middle-class to move into these newly revitalized places. The long term residents, without adequate economic resources, were placed at a disadvantage and had no choice other than to move.

21.3.2 Harlem Neighborhoods, New York Since the 1920s to present, Harlem is home to many blacks. For many years, Harlem was synonymous with limited opportunities and high unemployment rates. The high unemployment rate led to a city with physical deterioration, social problems, crime, and drugs in the neighborhoods. According to Schaffer and Smith (1986), Harlem became known as the symbol for black deprivation in America. Given its proximity to New York City proper, gentrification accelerated in the 1970s. Being located on the

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northern end of Central Park, not far from Manhattan, this location promises economic opportunities for developers to initiate gentrification projects. The majority of residents were primarily poor, working-class residents, with a small percentage of middle-class people. And for a change, the people moving in were predominantly blacks from other parts of the city or from out of state. This was a case of black on black gentrification. As professional, managerial, and administrative jobs became available, the push for gentrification became as frequent as possible. In order to solve the problem of the poor being displaced, the local government took steps to address inadequate housing for the poor. The city felt a need to work with residents to create a redevelopment strategy intended to support the working poor, and eliminate any possible displacement due to the gentrifying projects. This strategy has worked well for some of the black residents by reducing the level of displacement.

21.3.3 Cincinnati Neighborhoods, Ohio In Cincinnati on Klotter Avenue, the poor experienced their own form of gentrification, with wealthy residents living up the hill and poor residents in the downtown area at the bottom of the hill. For many years, the middle and upper class residents moved to the suburbs and only return to the city for work. Meanwhile, the downtown area overflowed with poor people, mainly African Americans escaping poverty from the South (Rolfes 1999). By the 1960s, many of the houses that were on Klotter Avenue had been turned into apartments for families. Even though the apartments were in terrible living conditions, landlords rented them to the poor and elderly residents. It was not until the 1970s that the middle and upper class residents who once lived in the suburbs found themselves moving back to the city on Klotter Avenue, now seen as a desirable place to live. For several economic reasons, the middle class began to move back to the downtown and

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Klotter Avenue, after developers began to buy and rehabilitee the buildings in the area. After the middle and upper class residents moved in, the current residents had their rents raised, which meant that they could no longer afford to live there and they were forced to move out. Residents complained about the increase in their rents and property value, because it was not fair since many of them were poor and had nowhere to go. By the 1990s the Klotter Avenue and surrounding areas were filled with many young professionals and not many low-income families (Rolfes 1999). Many of the poor migrated to different parts of the city, often another poor area.

21.3.4 Gentrification in Chicago, Illinois 21.3.4.1 Pilsen Neighborhood The Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago, is now the home of Latinos, but it used to be the port of entry where immigrants first settled. This neighborhood’s distance to the downtown area, made it a prime target for outside developers, especially when rent was increasing and residents were beginning to experience gentrification in the 1980s (Ervine 1994; Lin 2002). Property developers insinuated that their purpose in the area was for developing affordable housing for the residents. However, the required median income for local residents to remain in place was far higher than most expected. As a result, and with low-income family homeowners in mind, an organization called the Interfaith Community Organization decided to help make funds available to residents by creating their own housing subsidy program in 1989, which resulted in the purchasing of empty city lots and building of 125 new homes on the lots (Ervine 1994). And with the organization’s generosity, instead of residents moving to different areas, they decided to stay because they did not want to abandon their cultural connections. The residents believed that due to the Interfaith Community Organization’s intervention, they were able to afford homes, which they would not have been able to afford if they had moved out to other areas in the city.

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Gentrification and Its Implication in the United States

21.3.4.2 Robert Taylor Public Housing Unlike a neighborhood gentrification, the Robert Taylor Homes was an example of a public housing gentrification. It was located on the Southside of Chicago next to the Dan Ryan Expressway. It was once famous for being the largest subsidized residential complex in the world. A significant proportion of the residents, over 80%, were unemployed and listed public assistance as their primary source of income. The majority being single-family, female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year (Venkatesh 1999). In 1995 a plan surfaced calling for demolishing the Robert Taylor Homes and replacing them with a mixed-income community in low-rise buildings. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had declared the housing and living conditions as deplorable. HUD and the Chicago Housing Authority developed a plan to address the terrible living conditions by demolishing all the housing units. The residents were against the plan to destroy their place of residence. Additionally, many residents disagreed with demolishing a place known to them with many cultural links. Many of the residents held the view that the demolition would lead to their displacement. The fear in the eyes of the residents is shared by empirical research showing that these types of developments often lead to uneven development. When a government housing is demolished to make room for new development, the public housing residents are no match to an escalating price war among developers who build new and fancy properties either for sale or rent (Hwang and Sampson 2014). The City of Chicago Housing Authority, for its part, wanted to demolish the Robert Taylor Homes, because the crime rate was very high in the housing projects, and the units were not safe in many standards of living indicators. The Chicago Housing Authority noted that more than 17,000 public housing units across the city had failed as a livable place, and that meant more than 34,000 residents would have to be moved out so that all of the high-rises in Robert Taylor Public Housing would be destroyed. With support from a federal block grant through a HOPE VI program, an off-site

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was selected for the construction of mixedincome housing as a replacement for the housing projects. There were mixed feelings among the residents, because many wanted to remain in place, but then there were others who wanted a Section 8 voucher support in order to find rental housing elsewhere in the city. Other residents thought that the demolition of the housing project was just a conspiracy to remove blacks as an inner city voting block and move them to the suburbs to dilute their votes (Venkatesh 2000). Today, all the buildings have been demolished and residents scattered across the city. As part of the redevelopment of the empty lots, construction of 2,388 mixed-income rental and homeownership units, community facilities, and new retail space, with 851 units being used for public housing replacement had been completed. There were 894 rental units available for mixed-income families, with 290 units being used for public housing.

21.3.4.3 Cabrini Green Public Housing The Cabrini Green housing projects, once located on Chicago’s North side in the North Town neighborhood was another place of neglect, gang members, drug dealers and lots of crime. The infamous housing projects, no longer exist because they have been demolished. The buildings were demolished in order to make room for mixed-income housing and townhouses (Glasser 2000; Levine 2004). The vacant lot is undergoing new development with government and private investments, leading to the construction of upscale high-rise and row houses residential development. The plan called for mixed-income housing with some of the housing reserved for low-income people. As of 2011, all the public housing units have been demolished and the area undergoing major redevelopment efforts. In 2015, the development went into full operation after years of legal disputes. The residents associated the demolition plan akin to urban cleansing, an attempt to force them to move to other areas in the city (Glasser 2000). Some of the residents also complained about the strict regulations set for them in anticipation of

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receiving replacement housing units. Since the city could not rebuild fast enough for the people being displaced, they were left on their own to find their own accommodation.

21.4

Impact of Federal Housing Programs on Gentrification

The federal government has been providing housing assistance to improve living conditions and reduce the cost of rental housing for low-income families and displaced people (Dolbeare 1978; Schill and Nathan 1983; Duany 2001; DiPasquale et al. 2003). Such housing programs are supposed to provide poor residents subsidy to cover the cost of rentals. There are six federal housing programs that aid in providing housing assistance to the poor: HOPE VI, the Housing Choice Voucher program (housing voucher), Low-income Tax Credits, Section 202, Section 811, and Section 515 (DiPasquale et al. 2003).

21.4.1 HOPE VI In 1992, the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) was created by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a federal housing program that provides grants to rebuild public housing, support community and social services, and promote mixed-income communities (Williams 2003; DiPasquale et al. 2003). The deconcentration of poverty is one of the primary goals of HOPE VI, which is supposed to relocate residents to apartments in the private housing market, under HUD and Section 8 programmes. The HOPE VI program was used to help convert many older housing projects into mixed-income communities, and low-rise housing communities. Unfortunately, when the existing family housing is removed from the housing stock, the lack of enough affordable housing pushes the poor into apartments in neighborhoods worse than the one they had lived in. According to Venkatesh (1999), the HOPE VI program provides families

Section 8 vouchers, which send them out to fend for themselves, in order to make room for the moderate-and middle-income tenants. In order to meet the demands of private developers, the HOPE VI program condemns public housing units under its control and the poor are relocated to other areas. Many residents who lived in public housing disapproved of HOPE VI, because they realized that they were being evicted to go live somewhere different on a permanent basis. According to Williams (2003), the HOPE VI program often condemns housing for the poor too often. Most of the replacement developments are high-rise buildings and other housing types not suitable for people moving out of public high-rise housing. HOPE VI still faces some serious challenges, mainly because too many families are displaced (Kingsley et al. 2003). Too many people are relocated to other seriously distressed high-poverty neighborhoods not far from the original site. For a program created to help the poor, it is safe to say that the HOPE VI program is failing to help the residents. This is causing residents to end up in racially segregated neighborhoods, not very different from the neighborhoods they came from in public housing. Relocation tends to impact a large number of mostly poor African Americans being clustered into a small number of poor neighborhoods, replacing the high concentrations of poverty with ones that could be equally pernicious. The only smart thing that the HOPE VI program did is, make housing look more appealing to mainstream Americans, and more attractive to moderate- and middle-income residents, while the low-income residents end up in housing somewhere else in the private market (Venkatesh 1999).

21.4.2 Housing Choice Voucher The Housing Choice Voucher programme is one of the largest sources of federal funding for housing assistance. The purpose of this program is to provide residents with vouchers that will pay for their apartments. They are used primarily

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Gentrification and Its Implication in the United States

by low-income and poor residents who are between the ages of 30–65 years old (DiPasquale et al. 2003).

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The low-income tax credit provides tax incentives for private equity investment and is often used in conjunction with other federal state, and local government and private subsidies in the construction of new and rehabilitated affordable housing units consistent with state-determined housing priorities (DiPasquale et al. 2003). This tax credit can be combined with Section 811, which distributes grant money for housing residents with disabilities, because of the similar type of assistance that is provided to families. Section 811 houses single-family residents in independent living projects or group homes.

gentrification mainly includes the working poor and low-income residents who are being displaced from gentrifying areas (HUD 1979, 1981; Kasarda 1980; Schaffer and Smith 1986). Gentrification was considered for providing hope to cities that the areas can be demographically and economically revitalized. However, studies have found that as high as 23% of residents are displaced in gentrifying neighborhoods. According to LeGates and Hartman (1981), displacement is a widespread problem that occurs almost everywhere people exist, roughly 500,000 families are being displaced annually from their homes, and that gentrification is the main reason. As ownership and rental costs go up in a gentrified area, the residents have no choice but to flee to new locations. Cameron (1992) puts it succinctly that the problem with gentrification is that, it tends to displace low-income families who are evicted. To some observers, gentrification is used to harm rather than benefit low-income residents.

21.4.4 Sections 202 and 515

21.5.2 Positive Effects

Sections 202 and 515, both provide support money for family housing, the elderly and project-based rental assistance (DiPasquale et al. 2003). The money can be used for the construction of new properties. Section 202 properties consist of high-rise buildings with elevators like those in housing projects, while Section 515 consists of row houses, where houses are connected to one another.

There are some positive effects of gentrification, mainly that of residents being satisfied with their new housing arrangements. People who are opposed to the idea of gentrification do not have a clear understanding of what it does to the community. They are blinded by gentrification changing the social and economic structure of the community, and this causes them not to see tangible benefits (Cravatts 2004). Gentrification can help improve the quality of life in the neighborhood for all the residents, and it will promote a new era of development. The new development occurs when new residents move into rehabilitated areas and their former houses become available to others. As the process recycles itself, it is only creating more space for more residents to buy or rent. In this way, gentrification transforms a community and makes it attractive to investors, which allows other renters to move up the housing ladder into what they would consider to be better apartments. Gentrification can also offer the opportunity to increase socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic

21.4.3 Low-Income Tax Credit and Section 811

21.5

Effects of Gentrification

21.5.1 Negative Effects Perhaps, the most negative effect of gentrification is displacement, because it is the cause of residents being removed from their neighborhoods to other locations within the city. Displacement is when a family is forced to move from their current location by conditions that affect the dwelling unit or its immediate surroundings (Freeman and Braconi 2004). The effect of displacement in

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integration (Freeman and Braconi 2004). However, residents who live in inner-city neighborhoods can only feel the benefits of gentrification if it brings new services to their neighborhoods. Also, it can help create a better environment for residents, while giving them better public services. As far as employment goes, low-income residents could feel the effects of gentrification when more jobs are created for them and are provided job information that would help them become better working class residents. Another positive view of gentrification shows that people are not really being displaced, but they are following an upward mobility trend which has nothing to do with whatever is occurring in their community. People can continue to have negative images about gentrification, or they can look at the substantive benefits emerging in the neighborhood such as decent housing, thriving commerce, and a greater sense of community for all residents (Cravatts 2004). The commonly held view is that gentrification is a process that offers privileges to new residents at the expense of existing residents. That is the crux of the debate in the United States. Is it possible to explain that gentrification benefits the low-come people directly or indirectly by way of economic opportunities associated with new developments? In order to address this issue and mitigate the negative impacts, decision-makers need to focus on how best to retain existing residents while at the same time welcoming new ones. Using the example of the Interfaith Community Organization action plan in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois, a city should create a special housing fund to support existing residents who are likely to be impacted as a result of gentrification. This must be done in concert with any state and federal programs aimed at helping the poor or low-income working groups. Since homeownership is of the hallmarks of the American dream, cities must strive to promote housing ownership opportunities among current residents as part of rehabilitation of neighborhoods. The existing residents value their community, and they should not be allowed to languish in the hands of developers. The existing residents must be involved in the planning phase

S. Thompson and K. Willis

so that their housing needs are integrated into any official plan to redevelop an area. Rather than ceding the process to market-based forces, current residents, city official and other stakeholders must be at the same table to chart a development process that is equitable to everyone.

21.6

Conclusions

This paper discussed the gentrification process, gentrification in the U.S., the impact of federal housing programs in gentrification, and the overall effects of gentrification. Gentrification is the process of moving middle-income families into an area and forcing low-income families out of their existing areas. There were examples of gentrification in major urban areas and the implications such as the impact on the poor and low-income people. Gentrification will continue to be a topic of discussion in the United States, and an important piece of the urban housing market (Lang 1982). At the same time, if gentrification is closely examined, it can be the solution to many of our urban problems. It provides us with a strong force for revitalization, and it is a reflection of only part of the current urban change process. Gentrification is definitely an inconvenience to families, since they are being forced to leave their homes so that other families can move in. To prevent gentrification from forcing people to move, more appropriate programs must be implemented to support people in gentrifying areas. It is not enough to provide subsidies and money vouchers to poor people to find housing of their choosing as the evidence shows that they end up living in similar mediocre housing conditions. Based on the discourse and examples in the paper, it is important that there is a consensus on the meaning of gentrification, so that people can better understand the effects on residents. As long as existing recognize that there are adequate opportunities for mobility in housing, they are more than likely to accept the notion of gentrification, when housing programs exist and are available for them. In this instance, gentrification will be seen as a positive idea instead of a negative idea.

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Gentrification and Its Implication in the United States

References Anderson K (2014) My Brooklyn: the real story behind the takeover of America’s hippest city. www. mybrooklynmovie.com Accessed 18 Nov 2014 Betancur J (2002) The politics of gentrification: the case of west town Chicago. Urban Aff Rev 37(6):780–814 Cameron S (1992) Housing, gentrification and urban regeneration policies. Urban Stud 23(1):3–14 Cravatts R (2004) Gentrify or die! Builder (National Association of Home Builders) 27(11):73–74 DiPasquale D, Fricke D, Garcia-Diaz D (2003) Comparing the cost of federal housing programs. Econ Policy Rev 9(2):147–168 Dolbeare CN (1978) Involuntary displacement: a major issue for people and neighborhoods. Report prepared for the National Commission on Neighborhoods, Washington, DC Duany A (2001) Three cheers for gentrification. Am Enterp 12(3):36–39 Ervine M (1994) Beating back gentrification. Progressive 58(2):13–22 Freeman L, Braconi F (2004) Gentrification and displacement: New York City in the 1990s. Am Plan Assoc 70 (1):39–52 Galster GC et al (2003) The fortunes of poor neighborhoods. Urban Aff Rev 39:205–227 Glass R (1964) Introduction. London: aspects of change, Center for urban studies report No 3. MacGibbon & Kee, London Glasser J (2000) From big and ugly to small and promising. U.S. News World Rep 129(10):4–5 Goodman JL (1980) People of the city. Am Demogr 2:14–17 Hwang J, Sampson RJ (2014) Divergent pathways of gentrification: racial inequality and the social order of renewal in Chicago neighborhoods. Am Sociol Rev 79 (4):726–751 Kasarda JD (1980) Implications of contemporary distribution trends for national urban policy. Soc Sci Q 61:373–400 Kingsley TG, Johnson J, Pettit KL (2003) Patterns of section 8 relocation in the HOPE VI program. J Urban Aff 25(4):427–447 Lang MH (1982) Gentrification amid urban decline: strategies for America’s older cities. Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge

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Laska SB (1982) Inner-city reinvestment: neighborhood characteristics and spatial patterns over. Urban Stud 19(5):155–165 Lees L (2003) Super-gentrification: the case of Brooklyn Heights, New York city. Urban Stud 40(12):2487– 2509 LeGates R, Hartman C (1981) Gentrification-related displacement. Clear Rev 15(3):249–297 Levine MA (2004) Government policy, the local state, and gentrification: the case of Berlin, Germany. J Urban Aff 26(1):89–108 Lin J (2002) Gentrification and transit in Northwest Chicago. J Transp Res Forum 56(4):175–191 Rolfes SJ (1999) Gentrification and the incredible Klotter street war. America 180(7):15–17 Schaffer R, Smith N (1986) The gentrification of Harlem. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 76(3):347–365 Schill M, Nathan R (1983) Revitalizing America’s cities. State University of New York Press, Albany Teitler A (1995) Not in my neighborhood. Crisis 102 (4):31–32 Timberlake JM, Johns-Wolfe E (2017) Neighborhood ethnoracial composition and gentrification in Chicago and New York. Urban Aff Rev 53(2):236–272 United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (1979) Whither or whether urban distress. Working Paper, Office of Community Planning and Development, Washington, DC United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (1981) Residential displacement: an update. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC Venkatesh S (1999) Midst the handguns red glare. Whole Earth 99(97):41–45 Venkatesh S (2000) American project: the rise and fall of a modern ghetto. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Wagner GR (1995) Gentrification, reinvestment, and displacement in Baltimore. J Urban Aff 17(1):81–96 Watt P (2008) The only class in town? Gentrification and the middle class colonization of the city and the urban imagination. Int J Urban Reg Res 32:206–211 Williams SL (2003) From Hope VI to hope sick? Econ Aff Rev 248(1):32 Wyly EK, Hammel D (1998) Modeling the context and contingency of gentrification. J Urban Aff 20:303–326 Zukin S (1987) Gentrification culture and capital in the urban core. Ann Rev Sociol 13:129–247

22

Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico: Comprehensive Versus Participative Planning Under a Colonial Estate José R. Díaz-Garayúa and Carlos J. Guilbe-López

Abstract

The ongoing economic and colonial crisis in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has sharpened an already polarized environment between the government and many sectors of the local society. These conflicts had translated in the implementation of planning practices at different scales. Public planning has been coordinated by the Puerto Rico Planning Board since 1942 but in the past 25 years has been adopting neoliberal approaches and spatial frameworks. During this period numerous marginal communities, local governments, environmental organizations, political groups, and scholars’ groups has been confronting the institutional styles in the planning decision-making process. These communities and organizations has progressively been responding through open demonstrations such as mobilizations, camp sites, blockages, and open forums in social networks as a daily response against public planning. Every day, more citizens demand more participation in the formal planning processes. The local

J. R. Díaz-Garayúa (&) Department of Anthropology, Geography & Ethnic Studies, California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. J. Guilbe-López Departamento de Geografía, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, USA

recession and the ratified colonial status of Puerto Rico by the U.S. government has widened the difference not only in the development scenarios but also in the planning process. This chapter’s focus lies on the Puerto Rican experience where planning has been serving as a method to construct a sense of democracy in the status quo. Participative planning practices have been used as framework to challenge not only the institutionalized normative planning but the existing colonial conditions in the island. Keywords




Colonialism Comprehensive planning Participative planning Puerto Rico

22.1







Historical Setting

The practice of planning in Puerto Rico can be traced as early as 1519 when the first settlement, Caparra, was moved to its present location in what today is known as Old San Juan (Picó 1953a, 1962). The relocation instructions included the delineation of streets and basic zoning principles (Zeno 1959). By this time, architecture and large-scale design were regulated by military design guidelines and religious dogmas. According to Howell (1952), Fuller (1985), and de Hostos (1981), the Ley de las Indias

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_22

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Occidentales became the first guidelines for planning regulations in Puerto Rico. In 1783, a new building code was adopted while a local planning office opened in 1821 (Howell 1952; Pico 1962). However, most of the urban design and zoning practices focused on the military nature of San Juan (García et al. 2006). By 1846, a large-scale perspective was developed with a new classification system of the island’s settlements. These planning guidelines redefined the urban hierarchy and consolidated San Juan as the primate city of the island. During the Nineteenth Century, the island registered a significant population growth. The wave of pro-independence revolutionary movements in Latin America forced many wealthy families to emigrate. This demographic shift represented more pressure on the island’s resources and enforced local authorities to adopt legislation to protect and preserve the natural environment. According to Domínguez-Cristóbal (2007), in 1824 the governor of Puerto Rico, Miguel de la Torre, released a document, Circular 493, addressing the conservation of trees, lands, and waters. Mangroves, wildlife, rainforests, and drainage basins were protected by the new legislation was regulated and enforced by the Inspección de Montes. The Caribbean National Forest (CNF), locally known as El Yunque, is one of these major protected areas in Puerto Rico originally protected by the Inspección de Montes. Today, this area still protected under U.S. Forest Service and is becoming a geographical node for many local plans in northeastern Puerto Rico (Maldonado et al. 2000).

22.2

Mainland’s Planning Practices in “Porto Rico1”

The Spanish-American War of 1898 transformed the Puerto Rican society. According to Herb and Kaplan (2008) the political relationship between the island and the new metropolis was defined as follow: “Porto Rico” until the 1930s.

1

was

the

imposed

official

name

After the American invasion, a linked form of colonial self-government was established and justified by defining the island as an unincorporated territory ‘domestic in a foreign sense’. The U.S, Supreme Court sustained the political definition that Puerto Rico ‘belongs to but does not form part of the U.S’ in a series of important constitutional decisions known as the ‘Insular Cases’ (page 836).

The military government served as a facilitator in this plantation economy. Major sugar companies from the United States and Canada became stakeholders in the land use planning of the island. One planning practice that beneficed overseas corporations was the 500 Acres Law. Under this framework, the acquisition of land was limited to only 500 acres but major corporations overlooked this act. Córdoba (1993) describes this colonial setting as: From the moment that United States acquired Puerto Rico, the American sugar and tobacco trusts began to come to the Island. Puerto Rico offered unrivaled opportunities to the Wall Street business man: cheap land, cheaper salaries, and other advantages all under Uncle Sam’s flag. Because of the naiveté of Puerto Rican patriots and the craftiness of local lawyers, all the property these businessmen desired would be in the bottomless pockets of the trusts. The Foraker Act prohibited corporations from owning more than five hundred acres, but that was soon ignored because many prominent local landlords were politicians or financial backbones of the Federal and Republican parties. It was not long before American trusts owned the largest sugar and tobacco corporations. Needless to say, the transportation business from Puerto Rico to the mainland was also owned by American interest (page 77)

Under this lawless colonial environment was not possible to develop a rational planning process within the insular government. In 1899, only 15% of the land were dedicated to sugar cane but by 1935, over 34.5% of the island were transformed into sugar cane fields (Ayala and Bernabe 2011). The sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco defined the primary sector of the economic structure. These cash-crops experienced severe problems during the 1920s. The sugar cane sector over-produced, the tobacco was facing a fall in prices, and the coffee production was in decline since the WWI affected the European market (Picó 1986). Hurricane San Felipe in

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Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico …

1928 subsumed the island into a precarious scenario and the great depression in the United States provided the final blow to the Puerto Rican economy (Ibid 1986). In September 1932, another hurricane, San Ciprián, devastated the island. In his visit in 1934, Redford G. Tugwell, a U.S. public official from Washington D.C. described “wages were miserable, living cost high, housing as bad, surely, as any in the world, people half-starved … and sick with all the diseases to which malnourished and ill-housed people are subject in the tropics” (Tugwell 1947: 36). As a result of this environmental, political, and economic settings, the island became known as “The poor house of the Americas” (Herb and Kaplan 2008).

22.3

Centralized Planning as a Response to the Crisis

Hurricanes, landlord exploitation, poor infrastructure, unproductive educational system, expansion of squatter settlements in major urban areas created the social environment for grassroots political parties, religious movements, and critical literature from local intellectuals. In 1933, the unemployment rate reached 65% of the workforce (Mathews 1960). Puerto Rico had a significant geographical dislocation between land tenure concentration and displaced rural population. This situation was critical for any agrarian reform. In 1933, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Administration included the island into the New Deal policies (Wells 1969). The program was locally labeled as the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA). The first stage was implemented between 1933 and 1935. The funds were used for upgrading infrastructure (roadways and bridges), mitigate malaria, construction of food distribution centers, training and workshop to the labor force, and improvement of the census facilities (Wells 1969). These projects were the beginning of governmental plans to address poverty in the island. The development and implementation of Plan Chardón (1934) was the second stage in the

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economic restructuration of the island. This stage has been identified as a cornerstone of public planning in the island (Santana Rabell 1984). The plan proposed the acquisition of private sugar mills to produce 250,000 tons of refined sugar (or 25% of the island production). It also included the creation of 24,000 land parcels to be redistributed to rural workers. The goal of this agrarian reform was a “new Puerto Rican economy to the Puerto Rican people” (Ayala and Bernabe 2011: 152). The revision of the Puerto Rico–United States overseas relation proposed in the plan and land tenure against major sugar companies were the major challenges for Plan Chardón. The proposed agrarian reform was too radical for many public officials and corporations not only in the island but in the mainland (Muriente 2007). The economic and political failure of Plan Chardón forced the FDR administration to modify and reconceptualize the original plan under the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). The new program included more visible projects such as expanding the electric grid, large-scale housing projects (caserios) within major urban areas, food assistance programs (labeled locally as “comida de la PRRA”), and individual housings in rural areas (parcelas) among others. The PRRA also faced several limitations in its implementation. Public officials in Washington D.C. were not enthusiastic with the program because centralized planning practices under the insular government were incompatible with the free market system. Planning was considered a leftist practice in many conservative circles and this view of public administration was not acceptable during a pre-World War II period.

22.4

The Insular Governor: A Planner

Dr. Redford Guy Tugwell (1891–1979) was an important figure in the institutionalization of government planning in Puerto Rico. He was the last appointed American Governor of Puerto Rico from 1941 to 1946. As part of the FDR

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“brain trusts”, he “was an intellectual with a pronounced liberal point, an administrator with extensive experience in a national and municipal government, and, for many years, a close observer of Puerto Rican affairs” (Goodsell 1965: 16). In 1923, Tugwell became part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust and helped to draft the New Deal. In 1935 “organized the Resettlement Administration, which attacked the problem of rural poverty” (Goodsell 1965: 17). His view on a centralized bureaucratic structure as the gravitational joint of the governmental decision-making process was not popular in major governmental centers in Washington D.C. in the 1930s. Tugwell’s detractors accused him of communist due to the emphasis on social planning aspects of his resettlement program. Many institutions and local politicians wanted him out from the FDR administration and later he was sent to Puerto Rico (see Fig. 22.1). Tugwell was inclined to favor citizens while putting to test big companies. During his years in Washington D.C. “newspaper editors, congressmen, and conservative in general were charging him with being, in a curious contradiction, a ‘starry eyed dreamer’ who could accomplish nothing and a ‘frank revolutionary’ who was undermining the republic” (Goodsell 1965: 19). Even Tugwell himself provides clues about how liberal and progressive he was in his book The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (1975) when mentioned, “All Washington seemed to

Puerto Rico as a colony of Spain Planning & Architecture: Defined after the Catholic Church and Spanish military Design

Urban Design: Emphasized environmental conservation, to be preserved as the “Cadiz of the Americas”

Fig. 22.1 Puerto Rico’s planning timeline

resent the undoubted success of our ‘socialistic’ program” (Tugwell 1975: xxi). This book evidenced his battles against major wealthy sugar planters in the colony. Later in his life, Tugwell recognized these challenges in his memoirs (Puetschke 2008).

22.5

Comprehensive Planning on the “Stricken Land”

For Dr. Tugwell, planning was a rational and scientific exercise carry out by public officials. Data acquisition and analysis were important to achieve the desired societal goals. Geographic data and spatial knowledge played an important role in the process (Navas Díaz 1977). This centralized governmental exercise was critical in small countries with limited resources. For him, “scientific planning” was the cornerstone of an efficient public sector. Governmental planning was foreseen by Tugwell as the “fourth power”, side by side with the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. This administrative concept was defined by Padilla (1975) as “the brain of the governmental setup” or “a democratic developmental planning” (White 1963: 540). The Puerto Rico Planning Board (PRPB) was created in 1942 to implement this comprehensive vision of planning in the island. The first tasks of this agency were the creation of innovative legislation, land use plans, capital improving

Puerto Rico as a colony of the United States Centralized Planning, throughout a comprehensive planning process

Community Planning, throughout the community and local participation

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Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico …

programs, zoning maps, and land cover inventories among other tasks (Buthet 1961). Industrialization was the core for the economic development of the island (Baer 1959: 649) but was not the core of the agency. Its main effort was the development of urban areas. As a result of this administrative project, public planning in Puerto Rico was ahead of United States and Western Europe (Goldsmith and Vietorisz 1979; Picó 1962). Furthermore, Goldsmith and Vietorisz point that “prior to the end of the war, nationalization and public enterprises were dramatically successful” (1979: 1). Hansen (1953), Galbraith and Shaw (1953), Rosenn (1963), Wells (1969), Carr (1984), and Lapp (1995) among others, argue that government planning was part of the experiments implemented in the island. Under Tugwell, Puerto Rico served as a laboratory for political and social experiments “with relevance not only for the developing world but also for the United States itself” (Lapp 1995:174). According to Berman Santana (1998: 124), the island was used as training ground and a “development laboratory” for non-socialist “third world” development. Rosenn summarizes the role of planners in the experiment: In Puerto Rico, the only Latin American polity with an experience with peaceful land reform in existence long enough to be studied profitably, politicians and planners sincerely devoted to wide-spread tenurial reform as their principal developmental program concluded that it was both economically desirable and politically possible within this aim to subordinate redistribution in individual farms, which they originally felt necessary to satisfy rural sentiments, to a tenurial reform program designed to maintain the productivity and efficiency of the plantation latifundia. Sub-sequently, these same statesmen were led to the conclusion that their primary goal of speedy economic development could be achieved only by subordinating their avidly pursued tenurial reform program to industrial development (page 335).

The output from the Puerto Rican experiment was very popular among scholars and Latin American public officials during the 1950s and 1960s. However, publications and researches from this experience did not differentiate between public planning, industrialization, and

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the political setting.2 Public planning and industrialization were separated projects under the new political formula; the Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State). The claimed success of public planning and industrialization was used to justify the political feasibility of the new political status. The Estado Libre Asociado (officially translated as the Commonwealth3 of Puerto Rico) was not recognized as a colonial condition by the United States government in the 1950s.

22.6

Puerto Rico in World War II

Puerto Rico was an integral part of the United States’ strategic defense plans during World War II (Rodríguez Beruff and Bolívar Fresneda, 2012). The Caribbean fell under the extensive occupation of the North American armed forces (García Muñiz 1991: 82). The island, again, became part of the metropolis’ military plans. Ironically, this global conflict embodied an opportunity for economic growth in the island. Military strategists in Washington D.C. pointed out the possible scenario of a Nazi invasion in southern United States through Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Furthermore, the presence of German U-Boats in the Caribbean prompted a series of military base construction in Puerto Rico. The construction of strategic infrastructure during the war was also the basic framework for a comprehensive planning in the island (Howell 1952). During this period, the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO) was established to facilitate industrial development. After the war, FOMENTO was the agency in charge of the industrialization program. However, one of 2

Goldsmith et al. (1974) published an extensive bibliography on the public planning practice during that period. This work flashed the assumption in the bonding between the three areas. 3 It is important to notice that the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico does not have similar powers or representation in the U.S. Congress as other Commonwealths in the United States (i.e. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia).

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the major challenges was the formation of an industrial climate for investment. Government permits and regulations were visualized by industrialist as an obstacle to invite new industries to Puerto Rico. Moscoso (1953) recognized many planning regulations as one of these obstructions in generating the “industrial climate” in the island. After WWII, and at the end of the Tugwell administration, FOMENTO became more aggressive in the development of industrial incentives, especially on tax exemptions favoring North American companies. These initiatives were, in many cases, conflicting with the planning policies established by the PRPB.

22.7

Implementing “Industrialization by Invitation” by FOMENTO

After WWII, Puerto Rico took advantage of the new global economic order. An aggressive industrialization program was designed by FOMENTO under its political framework with the United States.4 This program was planned on the principle that economic growth and industrialization will result in a “trickle-down” process that is beneficial to all groups in the Puerto Rican society (Dietz 1982: 500). The governmental strategy was planned through the granting of additional tax-exemption years to industrial projects operating in the less-developed areas of the island (Aponte 1981). It was labeled by local politicians as Operation Bootstrap. Irizarry Mora (2011) elaborates on the three phases of Operation Bootstraps: (1) Development of light industries (1948–1965)—Focused on labor-intensive industries such as clothing, leather, textiles, and canned products; (2) Incentives for heavy industries (1965–1982)—Focused on oil-refined products. Refineries and complementary facilities were 4

Compañía de Fomento de Puerto Rico (locally knows as FOMENTO) was the government agency to promote industrialization in the island. However, this constant promotion of industrialization was in constant friction with the Puerto Rico Planning Board. Consequently, many original master plans were altered from their original guidelines.

developed during this period; and (3) Incentives for high technology industries (1976–1993)— This phase was based on tax intensive capital investments, especially in pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and electronics as a response to the collapse of previous industries. Baer (1959) and Bain and Molina (1989), recognized Puerto Rican industrial and planning experience as a showcase for Latin America. Over 500 projects were promoted. Most of the investment funds came from sources outside the island and 40,000 jobs were created. The early period of Operation Bootstrap was “spectacular” in its success (Calem 1998: 89). From 1950 until 1960 the rate of annual economic growth was 8.4%, and from 1960 until 1970 it increased to 10.8%. In the emerging capitalist order of the 1950s the major advantage of the island was its large pool of unskilled labor combined with tax incentives. Puerto Rico became a “‘symbolic showcase’ of U.S. developmentalist policies toward the periphery of the world economy” (Grosfoguel 2003: 2). These were the facts used by FOMENTO against the Puerto Rico Planning Board (PRPB) in their never-ending conflicts between planners from the public sector and indutrialists. Landgon (1987) summarized the Puerto Rican planning experience: In the 1950s and 1960s, every government economic planner in the United States had heard of Operation Bootstrap, to celebrate program to transform a poverty-stricken Caribbean island into a manufacturing center (page 18).

For outsiders, industrialization and public planning were two opposite sides of the same issue. Both were cornerstones of Operation Bootstrap. The PRPB was not in charge of the industrialization efforts. FOMENTO was the agency in promoting industrialization. Both agencies had many frictions during this period. The PRPB role under the aggressive industrialization program was to regulate space and provide infrastructure for the industrialization program. In addition, participative planning was part of the educational curricula under Operation Bootstrap. The local public education agency (Departamento de Instrucción Pública),

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Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico …

implemented the Community Education Program to serve communities in rural areas of the island between the 1940s and the mid-1960s (Cuadrado Pitterson et al. 2016). This program was based on principles of local partnership, empowerment, and collaboration as the framework of community planning in Puerto Rico. The location and construction of industrial facilities were regulated by the PRPB’s master plans prepared for each Municipio.5 Nevertheless, the PRPB did not have total control on the land use tendencies registered during the 1950s and 1960s. FOMENTO had a different perspective. Geographically, the industrialization strategy was planned to be developed beyond major urban areas (Guilbe López 2016: 83). Based on the theoretical principles of industrial location, FOMENTO promoted industrialization away from San Juan and its metropolitan area.6 This locational policy settled the diffusion of industrial activities in rural areas. Extensive industrial projects, such as mining, faced opposition in many communities. Preliminary studies evidenced the feasibility of extraction of cooper in the mid-1960s. This project “galvanized various forces to put environment concerns on the political agenda” (Concepción 1995: 112).7 Politicians, scholars, and environmentalists began to question many large-scale industrial projects and claimed and demanded open participation.8 5

Puerto Rico is divided in 78 Municipios. The United States Census Bureau do not translate this legal units as Municipality because the Municipios are a smaller territorial unit similar to the U.S. County. 6 The spatial dispersion of industries has been used as a measure of success of the Puerto Rican industrialization program during the 1950s and 1960s. Based on the Core-Periphery principles that dispersion mitigates uneven regional developments. 7 It was estimated a reserve of 4 billion pounds of copper in the western tip of the Cordillera Central. Two U.S. companies acquired exploration rights thru the local government. 8 According to Concepción (1995), the early expression of modern environmental movements in Puerto Rico can be traced on the local novelist Enrique Laguerre in the early 1950s and 1960s. His journalistic work critiqued the Puerto Rican and federal government development strategies and its consequences on the natural resources. His publications spawned public awareness in the Puerto Rican society.

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Many organizations were responsible for these social and environmental mobilizations. Berman Santana (1994) pointed out that environmental groups were more than “Third World” radical groups fighting against foreign corporations. She linked environmental groups and communities: It would be an error to dismiss Puerto Rican environmentalism today as a narrowly-based movement of left-wing intellectuals, because serious environmental degradation and health threats to workers and communities has broadened the movement to include members of nearly every social and ideological sector of the island (page 3).

The achievements from community-based environmental organizations shaped a new outlook in the public planning practice in the island. Other large-scale projects confronted the same opposition. The Sun-Oil Petrochemical complex in Yabucoa and the regional sea-port in the island of Mona in 1973 and others faced fierce resistance not only from environmental organizations but from local communities. Local master plans based on heavy industries began to crumble in public opinion. Public hearings were no enough in the Tugwell’s vision on citizen’s participation in rational planning. Baver (2012) summarizes the Puerto Rican experience: … Puerto Rico is, perhaps, unique in the Caribbean given the length and extent of its industrialization experience and the sophisticated environmental movement that has grown over the decades in opposition to it, with notable successes (García et al. 2006). While Puerto Rican environmental activists are not technically part of a transnational movement, Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, have worked on joint campaigns since the 1960s (Gandy 2002); and this linkage can serve as a model for other Caribbean environmental and social justice struggles (p. 18).

The increasing local empowerment, the increasing support of the environmental movements, and the erosion of the PRPB generated by FOMENTO were not the only factors in transforming the institutionalized comprehensive decision-making process. Externalities such as the popularity of grass-root movements in the mainland, the oil-price crisis in the mid 1970s, new federal legislation on environment

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protection (such as the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA), and a new planning law in the island (1975) were important elements in renovating the public planning practices in Puerto Rico.

22.8

The Earnestness for a New Model

The crisis during the mid-1970s awakened local officials on the reconfiguration of the existing planning model. Operation Bootstrap shaped an extensive public sector of hundreds of agencies with three levels of legislation (federal, state, and local) on 78 Municipios. This spread of public offices corroded the role of the PRPB’s central planning practices. Leap-frog urban expansion along major roadways, deficiencies in the major public transportation systems, uneven regional development within the island, pollution, and poverty became major issues. Simultaneously, the historical achievements of the industrial development began to be challenged by economic and political externalities. For the first time under the development program, the economy registered a negative growth (Aponte 1981). Industrialization as previously recorded was no longer possible and “had run out of steam” (Cabán 2005: 519). The public debt increased 410% between 1970 and 1984 (Irizarry-Mora 2011: 143). Notwithstanding the modernization achieved by the industrialization program, the island revisited the pre-industrial economic conditions of the 1930s. The economic crisis in 1970 opened a new era in Puerto Rico—U.S. relationship. Federal social welfare transfers became an important component in the island’s economic structure. As political mitigation response, federal transfers in payments to individuals and government increased dramatically. Puerto Rico became a “colonial welfare state” (Morrissey 2006). According to Carr (1984) and Seda (1990), the percentage rose dramatically in the 1970s. Welfare escalated dramatically through this decade. During the Fiscal Year 1973–74, only 3% (88,374) of the Puerto Rican population received

food stamps from the U.S. government. By the Fiscal Year 1975–76, the percentage increased dramatically to 53.15% (1,298,526) (Colón, 2013). In 1975 federal transfers to the commonwealth totaled $1.5 billion, $4.5 billion in 1985, and $9.5 billion in 1998 (Morrisey 2006: 33). This tendency continued in the 1980s and unbolted a new era in the local planning practices. The high proportion of Puerto Rican families living under the poverty level (according to the U.S. standards) made possible the participation of the local governments in major programs. Access to grants for construction and maintenance of major projects redefined public planning as an exercise to identify federal funds for projects.9 Industrialization was halted and Puerto Rico did not have the political competence for improvement. The local response to this structural crisis was to consolidate the role of the PRPB within the local public sector. The Act No. 75 of June 24, 1975 was an underline of the Tugwell’s vision of comprehensive planning. Under the Puerto Rico Planning Board Organic Act, the PRPB had more jurisdiction and entitlement to “guide the integral development of the island”. The administration of official statistics, the preparation of land-use plans, development plans, four-year investment programs, official maps, and economic reports were developed exclusively by the PRPB. The agency became also the link in the island with the U.S. Census Bureau. The government planning became more centralized under the 1975 Planning Law. Environment protection, permits procedures, and citizen participation were reinforced in the new law. This was the second attempt to become the “fourth power” in the local public administration. In the 1980s, the scope of public planning focused on the capacity of the municipios and the commonwealth to be recipient of federal assistance from the U.S. federal government. Planning and federal grant became synonymous. Preparation of proposal for federal grants became a professional expertise to be developed by local 9

Puerto Rico, as a territory of the United States, has access to a limited extent of federal grants.

22

Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico …

planners. Employment was produced mainly with the Comprehensive Employment & Training Act (CETA), Transportation systems and roadways became subsidized by Urban Mass Transportation Administration or UMTA, infrastructure projects, town revitalization, and urban renewal were supported by grants from Community Block Grant Programs (CBGP) or State Block Grant Program (SBGP), housing projects were subsidized by the Housing & Urban Development (HUD) programs and large-scale urban projects were backed by the Urban Development Action Grants (UDAG). Other programs were used for maintenance of facilities and organizations, to provide direct assistance to individuals and to subsidize public services. Beyond the public sector, non-profit organizations were also recipients of federal assistance. Planning practices during this period perpetuated dependency and the island changed became a subsidized society. Poverty was softened with federal transfers and for many public officials, this issue was not an important problem in the 1980s (Rodríguez Roldán 2014: 13). Meanwhile, in the United States, many federal programs began to display neoliberal principles. This governmental philosophy was the cornerstone of the Reagan Administration. Under these emerging ideology, poverty was not with the scope of public planning and development at any level (local, state, and federal). From this moment, the focus of federal assistance were on infrastructure and communications. The Puerto Rican urban structure became an outcome of federal assistance of the federal government of the United States. This scope in planning created two circumstances: the grinding down of the 1975 PRPB organic law and the planning enslavement to federal assistance. Most of the federal assistance for urban projects were based on small-scale units and the municipios became major stakeholders in public planning. Mayors (alcaldes) of the municipios also became an important political force in the Puerto Rican electoral system. They argued that planning

355

should be concentrated exclusively at local level, especially the administration of zoning ordinances, urban renewal, redevelopment, and construction permits. Public hearings and designation of local planning commissions were not enough at this moment. A new planning model was necessary in the late 1980s. The imminent decentralization of government planning meant the end of the Tugwellian model in Puerto Rico.

22.9

Downscaling Again the Planning Model

The 1990s was an intensive period in planning paradigms not only in Puerto Rico but Worldwide. Based in the Asian experience, the centralized decision-making processes became obsolete in many countries. In Puerto Rico, two philosophical perspectives defined the course for government planning practices: the adoption of Spanish land-use planning tradition (ordenación territorial) and the recognition of the global neoliberal discourse. In 1991, the commonwealth implemented a series of legislation locally known as the Ley de Municipios Autónomos del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico. Theoretically, this legislation represented the end of the central planning tradition and the beginning of local planning at municipio level. Under the new guidelines, citizen participation was organized in community boards (Juntas de Comunidad). Communities had explicit and straight input in the Planes de Ordenación Territorial (POT). The PRPB was transformed into a coordinator and facilitator in the preparation of POTs and retained the control on large-scale projects. The main objective of the local reform was to grant autonomy to the municipios. Planning, zoning, construction permits, maintenance, transportation, tax collection, security, and other governmental services could be offered from a structure close to citizens. This administrative change could be achieved if the local structure has the technical and administrative capability to

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set up and implement a local land use plan (POT). Community planning, according to the 1991 law was a critical element to achieve local autonomy. Parallel to the Reforma Municipal, the commonwealth government adopted neoliberal principles such as privatization, deregulation, downsizing of the government, and investment on infrastructure for development (Ayala and Bernabe 2011). The elimination of the tax incentives for capital intensive industries in 1993 halted the Operation Bootstrap.10 Tourism and related industries became the backbone of the Puerto Rican economic structure (Santana Rabell 1997). Under this political environment, municipios officials and communities were the targets from local and international investors. The terciarization of the island’s economy unwrapped a front for speculation on tourist-oriented activities. Although public officials and community leader claimed for planning participation and governmental decentralization, few municipios achieved autonomy. Twenty-five years later, the Reforma Municipal is still unfinished. Many municipios never had the resources to prepare, upgrade, or implement a POT. This circumstance affected the integration of many communities into the formal process of planning.

22.10

The Community Entitlement Under the Neoliberal Discourse

Energy generation and production has always been a major issue in the Puerto Rican economic model. The oil-crisis in the mid-1970s reflected 10

During the past 50 years, two political parties have ruling the colonial electoral system in the island; the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) and Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP). The PPD is the pro-commonwealth organization that supported Operation Bootstrap and the existing territorial relation with the United States. The PNP is the pro-statehood organization that has been dominating the political spectrum during the last 20 years. In addition to the political annexation to the United States, their party program is more neoliberal than the PPD. Both parties accounts for the 95% of the electoral votes in the island.

the dependency on fossil-based sources for industrialization. Operation Bootstrap was configured on fossil-based fuel. Energy production and consumption became also a major planning issue. The urban sprawl and subsequent land use configuration registered during the industrialization era required more energy. In 1961 a nuclear plant (BONUS) was built in western Puerto Rico (Rincón) and it was shut down in 1968. The official projections for energy consumption in the island for the 1990s forced public officials to identify additional sources. Under a neoliberal model, government served as a facilitator and energy became an important issue for development. A coal-fired power plant was proposed in Mayagüez. A contract was signed with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) to provide energy to western Puerto Rico. The proposed project had the capability to affect the approved land use plan (POT) and general urban morphology in the region. This scenario was interpreted by local officials as an assault to the approved reform, the planning procedures and local autonomy. Centralized planning decisions continued to be implemented from San Juan. Irizarry Mora (2012) points out the community efforts (Mayagüezanos por la Salud y el Ambiente) against a large energy producer corporation (Cogentrix) in western Puerto Rico. Community leaders and scholars organized an intensive campaign against public officials and consultants on the environmental impacts of the proposed facilities on the nearby communities. Public debates between government officials and local leaders exposed the empowerment that communities could achieve. Other communities joined efforts against Cogentrix and public officials. The project was abandoned in 1993 and represented a historical accomplishment for communities in the island. Nevertheless, years later, Applied Energy Systems (AES) proposed another coal-fired power plant in southern Puerto Rico (Guayama). Again, the project was supported by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) but rejected by local community leaders. Despite the overwhelming opposition, the plant was approved and built in

22

Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico …

2002.11 Both cases denoted the ineffective legal procedures on community planning and genuine citizen’s participation in planning in Puerto Rico. In San Juan the political relationship experience between communities and local government was different. Local officials and the private sector implemented a new small scale planning model. The Península de Cantera experience as a method to mitigate poverty became a political model in planning. This area in the center of San Juan is composed by a dense cluster of squatters and public housing projects with 12,000 families living under poverty level. The initial project was backed by the San Juan Municipio, University of Puerto Rico, federal grants, and local sponsors. Planning from a community-based organization became a popular initiative and the resident’s ideas became part of the land use plan of San Juan. Education and capacitation of residents, community self-management, identification of leaders, and open communication between public officials and the communities has created a unique bonding between residents and institutions. Community leaders became the voices for local rehabilitation and urban redevelopment. Strategic planning was used as the framework at this geographic scale. The planning process was not easy. Friction between communities’ leaders, politician’s interferences, budgeting decisions, and governmental bureaucracy affected the dynamics between locals and government officials. The results were not just visible but also promising; participative planning in marginal areas was possible as a strategy to mitigate poverty but it requires more coordination from local, state, and federal agencies for effective community empowerment. Simultaneously, participative planning was perceived as a path to confront neoliberal initiatives in their communities. In eastern Puerto Rico, communities faced another scenario. According to García et al. (2006: 51) the conflict between the U.S. Navy 11

The waste disposal of the coal-fired power plant in Guayama Municipio still generating debates. The disposal of ashes on limestone in Peñuelas Municipio created a legal situation between residents and AES.

357

and the communities in the island of Vieques settled the bases for community planning in Puerto Rico. Residents and planners in this island-Municipio participated in an initiative called “la protesta con propuesta” (protesting with a proposal on hand) and it was a historical success. The community and scholars prepared a Master Plan and “forced the U.S. EPA to set up an air monitoring stations” (Baver 2012: 24). The withdrawal of military activities (including bombing) reinvigorated community empowerment in local planning. Communities were demanding active participation everywhere in the island. At state level, the neoliberal spirit of the 1990s distressed the community planning procedures approved under the Reforma Muncipal. Conflicts in the imposition of large-scale projects such as energy generation, local participation, and waste disposal not only in Mayagüez, San Juan, Vieques, and Guayama and other Municipios reflect that community planning continue to be an attractive but difficult scenario in Puerto Rico.

22.11

Community Planning in the New Millennium

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, at the end of the millennium, over 46% of the families lived under poverty level and 63% of the Puerto Rican Municipios registered 50% or more of families with an annual income below $15,000. Dramatically, 78% of the Municipios registered over 30% of families living with incomes under the U. S. poverty level. Poverty, again, is a major planning issue. Puerto Rico continued to be a third-world country within the United States of America. A new perspective grew among scholars. Colón Reyes (2005, 2013), Kliskberg and Rivera (2007) among others proposed that poverty can be mitigated by integrating these sectors in the decision-making process. Community organization and participation in local planning were keys for development, especially in marginal settlements. Based on the Península de Cantera experience during the 1990s, the “Puerto Rico Special

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Communities Integral Development Act” (locally known as “comunidades especiales”) was approved as the first project of Governor Sila María Calderón in 2001. Downsizing the tactics on the war against poverty was an acknowledgment of the insolvency of the colonial industrial model and the failure of traditional planning processes implemented in the island for five decades. Both facts were exposed in the original act: It is imperative for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico … to modify their view on intervention and to replace their traditional role or performance as a paternalist form of government, by a model that can incorporate the working capacity and will of the communities in the solution of their problems … This Act recognizes that in the development of special communities they should have the main role by becoming efficient agents of change, capable of establishing and attaining their goals and objectives geared to achieving a better quality of life (Act No. 1 of March 1, 2001).

There were identified 650 poor communities and an extensive program on providing them with basic infrastructure, organizing communities for the planning process, coordinating services with local, state, and federal agencies, and non-profit organizations were the first task of this government initiative. The processes to empower the communities were also difficult. Neoliberal policies from the central government, budgeting cuts, the fiscal bankruptcy, and continuous friction between community leaders and public officials has minimized the goal of participative planning in Puerto Rico.

22.12

The Future of Public Planning Practice in the Commonwealth

Planning is a political process. In Puerto Rico, public planning is closely related to the colonial status. Planning practice in the island has been used as an administrative structure to create a sense of operability of the economic system. When the colonial system faces structural challenges, a new planning model at a smaller scale is conceptualized and implemented.

The historical path from state large-scale planning during the first phases of the industrialization program, regional plans in the 1970s, municipios’ plans (POT) in the 1990s, and community plans in the 2000s reflects the failure of the Puerto Rican economy and planning practices in eradicating poverty under a colonial political framework. Public planning in Puerto Rico has historically focused on internal geographical issues. Urban design, land use planning, zoning, and permits are the major tasks in planning practice. Public planning at macro-economic level is not possible under a colonial context. Dietz (1982) summarizes this dichotomy: Puerto Rico’s growth path has been distinguished by an absence of planning. Industrial location and investment has been by self-selection and has depended upon “market mechanisms” and the initiatives of U.S. firms rather than on an integrated and comprehensive long-term strategy designed to meet the needs of Puerto Rico’s future. Official development (non) planning has not been guided by a vision of its mission beyond that of simply promoting economic growth and industrialization. It is almost as if the government maintains a rather naive faith in Adam Smith’s in-visible hand, and believes that U.S. oligopolies locating in Puerto Rico automatically create benefits economy-wide (p. 500)

The diverse models and scales of public planning implemented in Puerto Rico during the past 75 years have been also affected by the colonial relation with the United States. Hudson (1980: 7) sustains that public planning has been unsuccessful. Subsequent small-scale planning models has been also ineffective because the PRPB has retained control of the processes but has been unproductive and unable to implementing plans. Under this historical track, environmentalist and community-based planning will continue to be perceived as radical and anti-capitalist movement against the existing institution. Protests, mobilizations, campsites, blockages, and open forums in social networks will continue to be the forums demanding participative planning in the island. The colonial status of Puerto Rico and therefore its political subjection to the United States is extremely complex. Local electoral forces

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Confronting Styles and Scales in Puerto Rico …

overwhelming support an integration with the mainland. Statehood has been recording absolute majority in local electoral events. The pro-commonwealth supporters have been decreasing and pro-independence faction still a marginal electoral movement. Conversely, nowadays the United States has been outspoken in recognizing the colonial status but the federal response has been innocuous, especially in supporting a statehood bill for the island. Under the existing political environment, the solution of the colonial status will take decades to be settled. Meanwhile, public planning will continue to be a marginal exercise generating a sense of “democracy” within this Caribbean colony.

References Aponte JB (1981) The lash of inflation on a developing economy: Puerto Rico, a case study. In: The annals of the American academy of political and social science, vol 456, Social effects of inflation, pp 132–153 Ayala CJ, Bernabe R (2011) Puerto Rico en el siglo americano: su historia desde 1898. Ediciones Callejón, San Juan, Puerto Rico Baer W (1959) Puerto Rico: an evaluation of a successful development program. Q J Econ 73(4):645–671 Bain N, Molina F (1989) Development policy in Puerto Rico, 1952–1980: an example of successful industrial decentralization. In: Yearbook of the conference of Latin Americanist geographers, vol 15, pp 79–86 Baver S (1979) Policy-making for industrialization of Puerto Rico 1947–1976. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University Baver S, Lynch BD (eds) (2008) Beyond sun and sand; Caribbean environmentalism. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick Baver S (2012) Environmental struggles in paradise: Puerto Rican cases, Caribbean lessons. Caribb Stud 40 (1):15–35 Berman Santana D (1994) Colonialism, resistance, & the search for alternatives: the environmental movement in Puerto Rico. In: Race, poverty and the environment, vol 4 (3), Latinos and the environment (Fall 1993/Winter 1994), pp 3–5 Berman Santana D (1998) Puerto Rico’s operation bootstrap: Colonial roots of a persistent model for ‘Third World” development, Revista Geográfica, (124), pp 87–116 Buthet J (1961) Planificación en Puerto Rico. Desarrollo Económico 1(3):197–215

359 Cabán P (2005) Puerto Rico, Colonial is In. Latin America, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino study faculty scholarship, vol 19. http://scholararchive.library. albany.edu/lacs_fac_scholar/19 Calem A (1998) Economics and business. In: Bender L-D (ed) The American presence in Puerto Rico. Publicaciones Puertorriqueños, Hato Rey Carr R (1984) Puerto Rico: a colonial experiment. New York University Press, New York Concepción CM (1995) The origins of modern environmental activism in Puerto Rico in the 1960s. Int J Urban Reg Res 19(1):112–128 Córdoba G (1993) Resident commissioner Santiago Iglesias and his time. Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR Cuadrado Pitterson L, Marvel LF, Maldonado M, Ortiz EM, Villarini MA (2016) Planificación para un Puerto Rico Sostenible. Sociedad Puertorriqueña de Planificación, San Juan, Puerto Rico de Hostos A (1981) Ciudad Amurallada. San Juan, Instituto de Cultura de Puerto Rico Dietz James (1982) Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 1980s: crisis of the development model. J Econ Issues XVI (2):497–506 Domínguez-Cristóbal Carlos M (2007) Índice de fechas destacadas en la historia forestal de Puerto Rico (1508–1953). Acta Científica 21(1–3):37–52 Fuller Marvel L (1985) Taller de Planificación Municipal en Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR Galbraith JK, Shaw CS (1953) Puerto Rican lessons in economic development. In: The annals of the American Academy of political and social sciences, vol 285, Puerto Rico: a study in democratic development, pp 55–59 Gandy Mathew (2002) Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York city. MIT Press, Cambridge García M, García Ramos T, Rivera Rivera A (2006) Puerto Rico: economic and environmental overviews, pp 75–85. In: Baver S, Lynch BD (eds) Beyond sun and sand: Caribbean environmentalism. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick García Muñiz H (1991) U.S. Military installations in Puerto Rico: an essay on their role and purpose. Caribb Stud 24(3/4):79–97 Goldsmith William W, Clavel Pierre, Roth Deborah (1974) A bibliography on public planning in Puerto Rico. Lat Am Res Rev 9(2):143–169 Goldsmith William W, Vietorisz Thomas (1979) Operation bootstrap, industrial autonomy, and parallel economy for Puerto Rico. Int Reg Sci Rev 4(1):1–22 Goodsell C (1965) Administration of a revolution; Executive reform in Puerto Rico under governor Tugwell 1941–1946. Harvard Political Studies, Harvard University Press Grosfoguel Ramón (2003) Colonial subjects: Puerto Ricans in a global perspective. University of California Press, Berkeley

360 Gubtram Herb, Kaplan David H (eds) (2008) Nations and nationalism: a global historical overview. ABC-CLIO Inc., Santa Barbara, California Guilbe López C (2016) Operación Manos a la Obra: a key for development or dependency in Puerto Rico? In: Frazier J, Tettey-Fio EL, Henry NF (eds) Race, ethnicity and place in a changing America, 3rd edn. State University of New York Press Hansen M (1953) Training and research in Puerto Rico. In: The annals of the American Academy of political and social science, vol. 285, Puerto Rico; a study in democratic development (January), pp 110–115 Howell Brandon (1952) The planning system of Puerto Rico. Town Plan Rev 23(3):211–222 Hudson B (1980) Urbanisation and planning in the West Indies. Caribb Q 26(3). Development Perspectives, pp 1–17 Irizarry Mora E (2011) Economía de Puerto Rico, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, México Irizarry Mora E (2012) Fuentes Energéticas; Luchas Comunitarias y Medioambiente en Puerto Rico. Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Kliskberg B, Rivera M (2007) El capital social movilizado contra la pobreza: La experiencia del Proyecto de Comunidades Especiales en Puerto Rico. Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLASCO), Buenos Aires Langdon P (1987) Beyond operation bootstrap. Planning (J Am Plan Assoc) 53(6) Lapp Michael (1995) The rise and fall of Puerto Rico as a social laboratory, 1945–1965. Soc Sci Hist 19(2):169– 199 Maldonado Marta María, Valdéz-Pizzini Manuel, Latoni Alfonso R (2000) Owning and contesting El Yunque: forest resources, politics, and culture in Puerto Rico. Berkeley J Sociol 44(1999–2000):82–100 Mathews Thomas (1960) Puerto Rican politics and the new deal. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, Florida Moscoso T (1953) Industrial development in Puerto Rico. In: The annals of political and social science, vol 283, Puerto Rico: a study in democratic development, pp 60–69 Morrissey M (2006) The making of a colonial welfare state: U.S. social insurance and public assistance in Puerto Rico. Lat Am Perspect 33(1). Struggle and Change in Puerto Rico, pp 23–41 Muriente J (2007) Ambiente y desarrollo en el Puerto Rico contemporáneo; Impacto ambiental de la Operación Manos a la Obre en la región Norte de Puerto Rico. Publicaciones Gaviota, San Juan Navas Díaz G (1977) Geography and planning. Rio Piedras, Editorial Universitaria

J. R. Díaz-Garayúa and C. J. Guilbe-López Padilla Salvador (1975) Tugwells thoughts on planning. Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Picó F (1986) Historia general de Puerto Rico. Ediciones Huracán, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico Picó R (1953) The role of planning in Puerto Rico. In: The annals of the American academy of political and social science, vol 285, pp 70–75 Picó R (1962) Puerto Rico: Planificación y Acción. Banco Gubernamental de Fomento, San Juan, Puerto Rico Puetschke Hubert (2008) Memoirs from the turbulent years and beyond: analysis and consequences of the World War II. Xlibris, Bloomington Reyes LC (2005) Pobreza en Puerto Rico; Radiografía del Proyecto Americano. Editorial Luna Nueva, San Juan Reyes LC (2013) Sobrevivencia, pobreza y “mantengo”; La política asistencialista estadounidense en Puerto Rico: el PAN y el TANF, 2nd edn. Ediciones Callejón, San Juan, Puerto Rico Rodríguez Beruff J, Bolivar Fresneda JL (2012) Puerto Rico en la Segunda Guerra Mundial: Baluarte del caribe. Ediciones Callejón, San Juan, Puerto Rico Rodríguez Roldán N (2014) Pobreza en Puerto Rico: Una Mirada desde las experiencias de las personas que habitan sectores empobrecidos. Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas, San Juan Rosenn Keith (1963) Puerto Rican land reform: the history of an instructive experiment. Yale Law J 73 (2):334–356 Santana Rabell L (1984) Planificación y política durante la administración de Luis Muñoz Marín: un análisis crítico. Análisis, Santurce, Puerto Rico Santana Rabell L (1997) Gobierno facilitador: La reorganización del poder ejecutivo bajo el gobernador Pedro Rosselló. Escuela de Administración Pública, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Seda RM (1990) Puerto Rico, pp 202–248. In: Dixon J, Scheurell RP (eds) Social welfare in Latin America. Routledge, London Tugwell Rexford G (1947) The Stricken land, the story of Puerto Rico. Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY Tugwell Rexford G (1975) The Stricken land, the story of Puerto Rico. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY Wells Henry (1969) The modernization of Puerto Rico: a political study of changing of values and institutions. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA White Byron (1963) Puerto Rico: a partial developmental model. Am J Econ Sociol 22(4):539–542 Zeno FM (1959) Historia de la Capital de Puerto Rico. Gobierno de la Capital, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Planning to Segregate: The Case of Bogota, Colombia

23

Luis Sánchez-Ayala

Abstract

Planning of cities is a perilous process, demanding the striking of a series of delicate balances between competing interests. Going against each other are the forces of power, public policy and justice. Planning practices in Bogota have come to be characterized by a clash between the ideal, and the “real world” of bargaining, controversy and concessions. This chapter investigates the competing interests, the people who make the decisions and the processes they use. It also answers questions such as who makes these decisions, how, and why are some choices made rather than others? An examination of the historical and structural arguments demonstrates that Bogota’s land use management policies tend to reproduce and deepen socio-economic inequalities. In the case of Bogota urban fragmentation, social segregation, and discrimination is visible as a result of “estrato zoning”. Bogota’s planning process is influenced by the interplay between the “00” and the many, between one small group and another, and between one bloc of the “many” and its rivals. Estrato zoning is marked by two basic sociopolitical processes: cooperation and conflict. As a result, the challenge of

L. Sánchez-Ayala (&) Department of History and Geography, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia e-mail: [email protected]

Bogota is to enforce the role of urban planning and therefore the intervention of the state in favor of mass and not only the elite. Keywords

Bogota

23.1


Estratos
Planning
Segregate

Introduction

Planning practices in Bogota (Fig. 23.1) have become a strategy of control, influencing not only the spatial organization of the city, but also the social dimension of its population. However, the planning decision process is highly influenced by real estate developers. Consequently, centralized planning is giving way to privatization, thus, operating under a market paradigm in land development. This has generated a segmented city scheme, with a high degree of social and spatial segregation, where real estate developers regulate where and how the city develops. Therefore, the city planning process, but more importantly the zoning policies, not only behave according to the “market needs”, but also have reinforced the social labels that create boundaries that generate a dramatically different spatial context for the everyday life of the people. These differences are the source of fundamental self-consciousness, which creates identities that

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_23

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L. Sánchez-Ayala

Fig. 23.1 Localization of Bogota

goes beyond the high income and low income, or rich and poor division.

23.2

Planning and Real Estate Developers

In Colombia, the planning process (or territorial planning) is a constitutional mandate. Planning, therefore, has its fundamentals on Article 311 of the Constitution, which establishes that all administrative divisions (municipalities and districts) have the obligation of “planning the development of their territories”. This provision was regulated by the Organic Law of the Development Plan (Law 152/94), Article 41, which establishes that municipalities, in addition to development plans, must have a territorial

planning plan. Following this, on July 18, 1997, the Colombian Congress approved Law 388; better known as the Law for Territorial Planning. This Law advances the previous constitutional and legal precepts, giving the territorial planning process the legal bases for its application. In this context, territorial planning is defined as the process that “comprises a set of concerted political-administrative and planning actions in order to have efficient instruments to guide the development of the territory and regulate the use, transformation and occupation of the land, in accordance with socioeconomic development strategies and in harmony with the environment, and historical and cultural traditions (Law 388/97, Article 5). Consequently, this Law (388) was intended to target five particular points: (1) principles of land use planning,

23

Planning to Segregate: The Case of Bogota, Colombia

(2) urban planning, (3) zoning, (4) planning tools, and (5) land management. Following these legal antecedents, in the year 2000 the Capital District of Bogotá approved its first Master Plan. The plan had as its first priority the adoption of strategies for the use, occupation, and management of the land, including actions in environmental matters, and the construction of infrastructures (regulating its uses and intensities). This Plan has to be understood in the urban contextual development of the city. In other words, historically Bogotá has grown in a dispersed way, absorbing the surrounding municipalities, and the Regulatory Plan, as the first urban planning exercise of the 1930s, was just a mechanism to regulate the city’s economic space. Therefore, since the 1930s, one of the most outstanding debates about the city was whether it should be compact/concentrated or dispersed. This debate was influential in the city’s first Master Plan (2000), where the city opted for compact, drawing as main strategy the consolidation and densification of what has already been built. However, the city’s Master Plan adopted in 2000 has been revised or change many times over, seriously affective its implementation. The first of these changes was in 2003, just three years after the formulation of the Mater Plan, when the mayor of Bogotá (AntanasMockus) decided to carry out a structural review of the plan. Then, in 2008, the new mayor (Samuel Moreno) decided to revise the plan again; revisions that lasted until the new administration took power in 2012, when Mayor Gustavo Petro formulated a complete new Master Plan. Following this pattern, the new administration of Enrrique Peñalosa (2016–2019) is already in the process of formulating a new Master Plan. Nevertheless, regardless of the changes made to the Master Plan with each new mayor, there are other factors that play an important role in the planning process of the city. In other words, the plans (and therefore, the planning process in the city) not only behave according to whoever is in office (periods of 4 years), but also to other factors that effectively pressure the city officials to revise (and change) the land use policies to

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accommodate their interests. Among these external factors (and actors), the most influential (and powerful) is the construction sector, especially the real estate developers. As a result, the land use and zoning policies in Bogotá have been highly influenced, for not saying decided, by real estate developers. In this sense, regardless of the efforts made by former mayor Gustavo Petro in his 2012 Master Plan, where he made its priority the implementation of mix land-uses and the construction of low-income housing projects in the city center and other high-income areas of Bogotá, as a way to contest social segregation and exclusion, most of the Plans for the Territorial Planning of Bogotá have accentuated socio-spatial segregation due to the land use and zoning policies that responds to the interest of the construction and the real estate sector. In this logic, the city has designed different “planning scales”. On one hand, there are the Partial Plans, used to developed and complement the Masters Plan’s provisions for specific areas. On the other hand, there are the Zonal Plans (Fig. 23.2), used to define and specify the planning conditions of a particular area (in terms of infrastructure and public space), as well as the delimitation and criteria for the management of Partial Plans. These Zonal Plans are applied in areas of urban expansion and in urban areas with large portions of undeveloped land. So, what these different planning scales do is to give special conditions to specifics areas. For instance, the Zonal Plan for the northern parts of Bogotá excluded the mandatory provision to build priority social housing. It should not be a surprise to anyone that the northern sections of the city are the wealthiest, where the high-income population is greatly concentrated. Therefore, the real estate agents are free to exclusively build expensive housing projects in the wealthiest area of the city, in order to obtain higher profits. Thus, behind all this is the pressure of real estate agents to raise the amount of land that can be developed without any restrictions. Consequently, low-income housing projects are built almost exclusively in the southern side of the city, as the real estate agents prefer this

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Fig. 23.2 Zonal and Partial Plans

L. Sánchez-Ayala

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Planning to Segregate: The Case of Bogota, Colombia

spatial division due to land prices. This practice reinforce a fragmented city, to the extent that the population is spatially segregated under socioeconomic marks that are materialized by means of the “zoning policies” coming out of the private sector and their land distribution vision, where greater valued lands are for the rich, and worthless lands for the poor. Therefore, since the planning code mandates that the developer is the one responsible for the provision of public spaces, low-income housing projects lack adequate public spaces, such as parks, sidewalks, roads, etc. Again, it should not be a surprise to anyone that there is a serious deficiency of green spaces, adequate infrastructure and public spaces in south Bogotá. To illustrate this even more, in 2014 the mayor at the time was in the center of a public controversy because he decided to build a few low-income housing projects in some lots located in the wealthiest neighborhood of northern Bogotá. The proposal was to use four parking lots (public lands) located in exclusive sectors of Bogota to build 372 homes. Those homes were intended for people victims of the armed conflict (low-income from the rural areas of Colombia), so that the apartments would be of “social interest”. Opposition to the proposal quickly appeared, including from the real estate agents. At the end, the mayor had to withdraw his proposal, and the housing projects had to be moved to other lots, ranging from the city center to the southern outskirts of the city (Fig. 23.3). In this same line, Gutiérrez (2014) notes that the urban renewal programs contemplated in the city’s master plans are an example that illustrates these practices of how planning policies are being influenced by the private sector. The Urban Renewal Agency of Bogotá has as main objective to identify, promote, manage and execute integral projects related to the public policy of development and urban renewal of Bogotá. Therefore, this branch of the city government is the entity in charge of: (1) promoting the massive supply of urban land to facilitate the execution of comprehensive housing projects, (2) functioning as a land bank, (3) manage the execution of integral urban actions for the recovery and

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transformation of deteriorated urban sectors, through programs and projects of development and urban renewal, (4) sell, buy, manage, construct, rent or lease real estate, (5) promote and commercialize real estate projects, real estate consulting, and other activities related to the real estate sector. However, in practice the Agency identifies the economic projection (future profitability) of a depressed sector, buys the land from its owners and sells the project to large private investors in exchange for certain conditions, which generates a displacement of the old owners of low-income toward the peripheral zones of the city, as the new urban norm automatically triggers the value of the square meter (Gutiérrez 2014: 80). The city is privileging the interest of private sector by adjusting and implementing planning policies that basically give the real estate agents the influences to decide where things get to be built. In this context, this system, that fractions the city into units of zonal planning and normative sectors, is used in some cases to favor interests of powerful economic groups, to the detriment of other sectors of the population that do not enjoy the same power (Gutiérrez 2014: 79). Therefore, the planning exercise in Bogotá does not usually respond to the needs of the majority (the low-income population). This has become a process that has deepened the urban contradictions, and lacks the rationality capable of anticipating the city’s urban dynamics. This is fundamental in a city of nearly 10 million inhabitants, where the existing urban structure could be seriously damaged if the city officials fail to rethink the development model that has prevailed, which privileges the market and the accumulation of capital by subordinating the planning process in favor of private investment, and therefore, systematically undermining the collective welfare. This scenario is reinforced by the fact that in Colombia, since 1991, governmental housing policies have almost exclusively meant the formulation subsidies. In this logic, instead of directly promoting or developing housing projects, the government gives subsidies to the people to buy houses in the private sector, and

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Fig. 23.3 Housing projects

give subsidies to the private sector to cover the housing demand. These policies work under the assumption of the greater efficiency of the private

sector to construct and cover that housing demand. With the pass of the years, these policies have proven to be deficient, as the housing

23

Planning to Segregate: The Case of Bogota, Colombia

projects being built by the private sector does not meet the demand, and in most cases, accentuate the segregation and fragmentation of the city. Specifically, decades after the implementation of the housing subsidies, most of the new low-income housing build in Bogotá is informal (self-built). So, what these policies had actually accomplished is to build the low-income housing projects almost exclusively on the outskirts and remote peripheral areas of Bogotá, where private real estate developers plan and build their projects in order to get the most profitability, under the argument that it is the only way to find and provide low land prices. All this is evidence that in Bogotá the decisions on land use management policies tend to reproduce and deepen socio-economic inequalities. This is evident, since residential segregation is associated with other forms of segregation that are expressed in deficient infrastructures, which in general are increasing socio-economic inequalities; all manifestations of a structural problem where the crisis of the model of the cities of the global south is associated to the model of capitalist development (García 2011: 4). This is related to, as García (2011: 4) puts it, the failure of the so-called Welfare State and its transit to a state tuned with the neoliberal model that leaves public affairs in the hands of the market; meaning that the State has been disregarding the public and strengthening the private sector as a definitive agent in the direction of urban and regional development, fully applying the task of privatizing public and social services and opening up asymmetric advantages for private investment.

23.3

Planning and Social Labels

The planning policies and practices in Bogotá have constituted a pattern of urbanization and spatial organization responsible, among other things, of the socio-spatial segregation that can be observed in the city. The fact that in Bogota the majority of the poor population is located in the south and the elite in the north is associated with the planning dispositions that determine the type and the location of the available

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infrastructure, which in turn affects land prices. In this sense, the land use and zoning policies, serving the real estate developers that only build high-income projects (housing, commercial, offices) in the north, and low income projects in the south, create a fragmented city, that not only affects the urban spatial configuration, as it also influences the everyday life of the population. The effects of the spatial configuration of the city (through its planning policies) are much more complex than only a matter of the everyday life activities of the population. In other words, the way in which Bogotá is being planned (its land use and zoning polices) is reconfiguring the social structures of the city, by creating new social labels on the basis of the spatial locations, or zones, that the city planning officials created. After all, the social and the spatial are inseparable (Massey 1995), or, as Castells (1974: 430) puts it, space, as a social product, is always specified by a definite relation between the different instances of a social structure, the economic, the political, the ideological, and the conjuncture of social relations that result from them. Therefore, Space is capable of producing specific effects on the social conjuncture, by virtue of the particular form of articulation of the structural instances that are constituted by it (Castells 1974: 430). Since 2002, the planning of Bogotá has been regulated by a zoning policy that further divides the city. This zoning plan included six zones called estratos, categorized from 1 to 6. Therefore, since that date, the city is divided into areas classified with a number, from 1 to 6, were estrato 1 refers to the poorest areas, and gradually, until estrato 6, which are the wealthiest areas of the city (Fig. 23.4). The result is that 84% of the city population lives among zones 1, 2, and 3, and only 16% among zones 4, 5, and 6. As one can imagine, land values are congruent with the estrato zoning, as are also the type of developments (housing, commercial, etc.) the real estate agents plan and construct. Initially, the argument for the creation of such zones was to identify the areas of the city where economic subsidies for public utilities where most needed. However, the estrato system caused the division of the population of the city, but not only

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Fig. 23.4 Estratos

in economic terms, as it had social implications as well. Consequently, the physical development of the city and its urban ecology has been closely tied to this zoning system. In that sense, the higher zones (estratos 5 and 6) enjoy a better infrastructure, parks, open and green areas, and a more

formality in the economic activities, in comparison to the lower estratos. In other words, the estratos mark a dramatically different Bogotá. This is causing a deep fragmentation of the city, as microsegregation is been used to reinforce such zones, and thus social labels. In that

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Planning to Segregate: The Case of Bogota, Colombia

sense, similar zones are not necessarily concentrated in big areas. On the contrary, it is possible to find small pockets of different estratos in the entire city, with just one street dividing one from the other. It is important to realize that those lines dividing one estrato from the other are boundaries that, as Newman (2003: 123) notes, are hierarchical, as a person’s location within the society-space form is determined by the many boundaries within which he/she is enclosed, some of them being crossed with ease, others retaining features which make it more difficult, in some cases impossible, for the lines to be crossed. However, those boundary lines not only means a spatial division, they are also related to authority, power, movement, and more significantly, to identity. As such, the notion of lines that separate play a prominent, somewhat deterministic, role in the contemporary discourse on the poetics of identity (Newman 2003: 130). The spatial configuration practices that are taking place in Bogotá means a real and physical delimitation of the daily development of the individuals subject to such urban policies. In that context, it is through the organization of the space that people learn the meanings of the different labels that are socially assigned to them, whether those are in racial, ethnic, political, economic, or gender terms. As a result, today it is common to talk about estrato as a spatial reference of the people, having a great impact on the ways the population of Bogotá interacts. The estrato classification is been used as a social label, where people refer to each other as a number; in this logic, you are 1 or you are 6, for example. Therefore, it is not a surprise that 1 and 2 individuals are discriminated and denied access to many places, jobs, etc., while 5 and 6 individuals are perceived as very wealthy and influential (which may or may not be the case). The particularity of the case of Bogotá is that the source of urban fragmentation, social segregation, and discrimination are the planning policies that not only create boundaries, but also determine the way in which the city’s infrastructure materializes. Therefore, this is not a matter of being rich or poor, with each group in its own space. On the contrarily, this is a matter

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of the virtual existence of a “different city” (or cities) with Bogotá; each one with a completely different urban and social landscape (e.g., lack of, or low quality infrastructure). After all, as Mejía (1998: 479) argues, urban infrastructure is power; as such infrastructure is the spatialization of domination based on the control of the different techno-economic and social tools that every city encloses by means of congregating a determined human group in a constructed space. As a result, in Bogotá, urban actions, instead of providing the necessary tools and atmosphere for the convergence and democratization of the urban space, they have polarized the city. This is evident by the fact that low estratos (1 and 2), corresponding to 50% of the population, are located in the least valued and depressed areas located mainly on the periphery (to the south, to the southeast, to the west, to the central-east and to the northeast of the city). While the upper estratos (5 and 6), which make up 4.3% of the population, are located in highly valued areas (in the northern and extreme north).

23.4

Conclusion

The spatial configuration of Bogotá, Colombia is serving as a source of meanings for the production of different identities. The zoning policies of the city are creating much more than administrative divisions. The city is privileging the interest of the private sector by adjusting and implementing planning policies that basically give the real estate agents the influences to decide where things get to be built. In this context, this system is fractioning the city into units of zonal planning and normative sectors, which in turn favors some, while neglecting many others. Therefore, most of the Plans for the Territorial Planning of Bogotá have accentuated socio-spatial segregation due to the land use and zoning policies that respond to the interest of the construction and the real estate sectors. As a consequence of these planning policies, the city’s zoned areas are spatially segregating the population, creating boundaries that generate dramatically different spatial context for the

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everyday life of the people. These differences are the source of fundamental self-consciousness, which creates identities that goes beyond the high income and low income, or rich and poor division. The estrato zoning, therefore, goes well beyond a city planning measure. The estrato classification is been used as a social label, where people refer to each other as a number. This practice creates the spatial contrast and context that reminds individuals of the meaning of such labels. Labels, that in the case of Bogotá, are not defined in the more traditional ways of race or ethnicity, but on urban and economic terms, which are providing the context for the creation of a new system of social categorization. Therefore, it is through the organization of the space that people learn the meanings of the different labels that are socially assigned to them. As a result, the challenge of Bogotá is to enforce and reinforce the role of urban planning, and therefore the intervention of the State, in favor of the public. The first measure should be an effective exercise of state regulation that does not leave the development of the city in the hands of the market and the private sector, especially the real estate agents. In the same way, city officials should dismantle the estrato zoning

L. Sánchez-Ayala

system, in order to offer the same living conditions (infrastructure, economic, social) in all areas of the city, no matter whether it is in the north or in the south, or in the east or in the west. In this way, the city can plan and organize its territory for the integration, equality, and equity of all its population.

References Castells M (1974) The urban question: a Marxist approach. MIT Press, USA García C (2011) Bogotá: Un ModeloContradictorio de OrdenamientoTerritorial. Centro de PensamientoRaizal, Bogotá Gutiérrez R (2014) Segregaciónurbanaen Bogotá. Crítica al ordenamiento y control urbanísticoenmateria de construcción. Cuadernos de Vivienda y urbanismo 7 (13):68–83 Massey D (1995) The conceptualization of place. In: Massey D, Jess P (eds) A place in the world: places, cultures, and globalization. Open University, Buckingham Press, pp 45–86 Mejía G (1998) Los años del cambio. Historia urbana de Bogotá, 1810–1920. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá Newman D (2003) Boundaries. In: Agnew J, Mitchell K, Toal G (eds) A companion to political geography. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 123–137

Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession in the High Growth Period of Urban Transformation in India

24

Debjani Ghosh, Ajith Kaliyath and Anil Kumar Roy

Abstract

There are several knowledge communities and professional organizations responding to the emerging urban sector opportunities in their own ways. Irrespective of their affiliations and objectives, all these generate new knowledge. The call for specific skills to address the urban complexities in an effective manner has grown louder in recent times. These multiplicities offer a rich opportunity to review the entire landscape of urban planning skill and its potential future directions. According to Heurkens et al. (2015:630), ‘helping planners operate more effectively in markets, requires the analysis and classification of how different types of planning instruments impact on the decision-making environments of development actors’. The authors attempt to review the gaps in the current system and what could be achieved by the urban planning profession by making it growth oriented. This paper tries to assess the various

planning knowledge and skills required in the process of current urban transformation in India. It also assesses the job market conditions that will be required to support the new trajectory of urban planning. It relies on the secondary sources of data in identifying the current and future demand of urban planners in India. This paper draws upon the available evidences regarding new competencies for the leading employers from the various sectors. Data shows that the planners are more often in subordinate positions rather than in active decision-making roles. These have resulted in several barriers for shaping the right market conditions for urban planners in the country. Keywords




24.1 D. Ghosh (&)
A. Kaliyath South Asia Urban Knowledge Hub, National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] A. Kaliyath e-mail: [email protected] A. K. Roy Faculty of Planning, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India e-mail: [email protected]




Urban transformation in India Urban planning Knowledge and skills

Background

24.1.1 Planner’s Knowledge and Skills-Contemporary Discourses Urban societies incessantly support large volumes of transactions and generate innumerable opportunities. The advent of technology has introduced real-time and digital transactions enabled by people and systems largely located in urban centers.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_24

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These have further increased the complexities within modern urban societies, which are home for more than 50 percentage of the world population. According to Glaeser (2012) cities that realized the power of ideas for creating wealth will prosper. This leads one to the need for knowledge and skills for planning and governing cities. Naturally, urban planners assume centrality in these discourses. According to Home (1997), during early twentieth century, town planning emerged as a new instrument for governing the colonial cities. ‘As the pace of change accelerates in contemporary society, there is an increasing need for planning to help integrate diverse innovations into coherent wholes and provide processes of assessment and control for new physical development’ (Heywood, 2006:28). In the competitive new world order, Afshar and Howe (1994) remarked that Planners were not adequately trained to respond to global trends. ‘Since 1990s numerous reports and surveys focused on skills need and skill shortage among planners and the published data showed that the skills of planners has been, and continues to be an issue’ (Durning and Glasson, 2006:457). One of the most significant and holistic reports in this regard was the Egan Review (2004) commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), United Kingdom. The Egan Review stated that ‘world class companies know that the difference between success and failure lies in the skill level of the people they employ: we believe this is equally true of sustainable communities. Only by developing the skills, behavior and specific knowledge, everyone involved in this agenda—albeit to different degrees and at varying levels, depending on their role and responsibilities —will we be able to deliver communities we want’ (ODPM, 2004:52). Towards this, it called for establishment of a new National Centre for Sustainable Community Skills so that ‘upskilling the broad range of core and associated occupations with a role in planning, delivering and maintaining sustainable communities’ can be undertaken. The New Urban Agenda (2016:14) adopted by HABITAT-III has proposed to ‘improve capacity for urban planning and design and providing training for urban planners at national, sub national and local levels’.

D. Ghosh et al.

24.1.2 Relevance to India The recent efforts of the Government of India to harness the benefits of urbanization through planned investments have been changing the spatial configurations across India. Most of the urban areas experience a sudden surge in their socio-economic activities. Since JNNURM, India has been responding positively to the planning and governing needs of its rapidly changing urban society. The sustained efforts by the Government of India helped in having a multi-pronged strategy for addressing the deficits in the policy, knowledge and investments in Indian cities. Apart from the Government, other key drivers of this change are knowledge communities, technology providers, entrepreneurs and investors, media and the communities themselves. Interestingly, planners have a critical role in this process. According to the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India (ITPI, 2017), ‘town planners have a decision role in setting our urban areas to embrace a sustainable future’. However, they have not succeeded in securing adequate number of decision-making roles in the urban mission. This is probably due to the conflicting views about the core competencies of planners. The observation of Heurkens, Adams and Hobma (2015:627) ‘even wholly within the public-sector domain, the issue of whether the everyday planner is primarily a decision-maker or a decision-taker remains important focus for debate’ supports the need for wider consultations in this regard. The result is an appropriation of new opportunities by other professions. The process of urban transformation in India has just initiated and most of the decision-making positions have been assumed by the bureaucrats who do not have skillsets required to handle the multiplicity of knowledge or are not adept in spatial thinking. According to RTPI Manifesto (2010) ‘planning requires highly skilled professionals who can create and sustain places that are successful and enjoyable for their communities’. The absence of critical numbers required for influencing the policy makers along with shortage in key skills is plaguing the profession in India. One of the objectives of the School of

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Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

Planning and Architecture Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 2014 was to promote global leadership in the field of architecture, planning and allied fields. Figure 24.1 shows the key skills identified by various scholars for planners. These have been discussed by Egan Review (2004), RTPI (2010), Seltzer and Ozawa (2002) and Alexander (2001). Along with technical and analytical skills, they also need to have some generic skills, decision-making capabilities and communication skills. The recent research by the Authors on curricula in Indian Planning Schools revealed that the emphasis is on technical and analytical skills. There is a growing acceptance among the planning academicians in India that soft skills especially communication skills need to be part of the academic training (see Fig. 24.2).

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24.2

Transforming Urban India

With nearly 300 million urban residents, India ranks second in the world in terms of total urban population. Paradoxically, India also figures amongst the least urbanized countries world-wide. While, the twenty-first century witnesses the transition into a world in which more than 50% of its inhabitants live in urban areas, India records a figure far below this average (31.16% in 2011) The Census 2011 data shows that 65.5 million Indians living in urban slums and 13.7% of the urban population are falling below the national poverty line. Urbanization has been relatively slow in India, with the share of population living in urban settlements growing at an average annual growth rate of just over 1.64% during 2001–11.

Fig. 24.1 Planner’s skill sets. Source Prepared by Authors

Communication

Decision Making

Generic

Planner’s Skills

Technical

Analytical

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Fig. 24.2 Number of ITPI members in major cities in India. The above map is taken from the Institute of Town Planners, India (ITPI). Similar to the RTPI in UK and

APA in the USA, ITPI is the apex body of professionally qualified planners. Source ITPI (2017)

Urban India today, faces serious challenges of growth and its management. Across geographies, the issues of urbanization manifest in the form of over-crowding, congestion, insufficient infrastructure, inadequate service provisioning— mainly in terms of drinking water, sanitation, energy, transport, solid waste management, environmental degradation, and pollution, etc. These, along with the poor management of rapid population growth, affect the socioeconomic development of the country. At the core lies the question of urban planning and its capacity to organize towns, manage their growth and make them more efficient and sustainable. Similar to many other countries with high rate of urban development, India too acknowledges insufficient and inappropriate

planning, which raises the questions of its relevance while triggering skepticism. Very few Indian cities have 2030 master plans that take into account all aspects of holistic development. Also, the capacity to execute the urban reforms and projects at the municipal and state level has been historically inadequate. India needs to work on several areas to manage its urbanization. While urban planning and its effectiveness are being debated, the need for ‘planning’ is again revisited in a favourable manner and its need acutely felt. The question is ‘how to initiate more effective and responsive urban planning by revisiting the conditions indispensable to its implementation’. Though, the 74th CAA (Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992) was aimed at

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Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

transforming the process of urban planning, rarely has there been a coordinated spatial development to this effect. The job of preparing the Master Plan lies with the planning authorities or urban development authorities. This is being challenged often due to lack of trained personnel, overlapping jurisdictions and contradictions in regulations. A real step-up in the capabilities and expertise of urban local bodies is critical to devolution and improvement of service delivery. Reforms address the development of professional managers for urban management functions, who are in short supply and are required in large numbers. In view of the failure of master planning approach in improving the quality of urban development, the Government of India had launched the initiative of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNUURUM) to encourage the states to carry out urban sector reforms and get ahead with the task of infrastructure development. Capacity building of local government institutions to adequately deal with reform implementation suddenly became the most important aspect of the Mission and it was felt that reorienting planning education to equip planning graduates with skills that are needed to comprehend and implement reforms, should be promoted. Under JNNURM, the institutional structure provided to build capacities in urban areas and assist the city governments was the Program Management Unit (PMU) at the State level and Program Implementation Unit (PIU) at the ULB level. It was recommended that PMU and PIU would be manned by professionals (headed by an Urban Planner). These units were responsible for hand holding the ULBs for reform implementation and in turn build their capacities. Implementation of reforms under the Mission raised certain issues on Capacity Building as highlighted in 12th Five-year Plan Challenges and Strategies by erstwhile Planning Commission (now NITI Aayog) in 2013. These were as follows: • Capacity deficits at all levels of the Government have slowed down the reforms.

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• Urban management suffers from major skill gaps. • There is a need to have a comprehensive framework for addressing the staffing, training and overall skill development. • The Advisory on Municipal Cadre prepared by erstwhile Ministry of Urban Development (now Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs) should be used for institutionalizing municipal cadres in states. There was a near consensus that building capacities in urban sector were one of the key tasks for successful urbanization. The Arun Maira Committee (Unpublished—2013–14) had recommended building appropriate institutional arrangements to drive the capacity-building program. In this context, the central government in 2015, has approved an Rs. 1 trillion plan to create 100 Smart Cities and rejuvenation of 500 cities through AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation). Currently, there are 11 national missions (Fig. 24.3) focusing on cities. They are Swachh Bharat or Clean India Mission (SBM), Housing for All (HFA), Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) Smart Cities, Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY), NULM (National Urban Livelihood Mission), National Urban Health Mission (NUHM), Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Augmentation Drive (PRASAD), Shyama Prasad Mukherji RuRBAN Mission, Solar Cities and Urban Jyoti Abhiyan. This was the first time a multi-pronged strategy was effected to address the urban planning issues in the country. However, the capacity gap and the city’s preparedness to implement the Mission mode projects remained a big question. Subsequently, policy reforms were put in place to strengthen the capacity of urban local bodies for ensuring urban infrastructure and access to basic services to citizens. Presently, the Ministry is supporting States and ULBs in capacity building activities through the Capacity Building for Urban Development (CBUD) Project which also has a

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D. Ghosh et al.

Fig. 24.3 National missions/initiatives impacting Urban India. Source Prepared by Authors

Program Management Unit (PMU) for operationalization. All of the urban missions are being operationalized through setting up of Mission Management Units (MMU) or Program Management Units (PMU) comprising of a team of 6–8 professionals and in most cases, led by an urban planner. Some of the other team members are also urban specialists (Refer Table 24.1) which strengthens the argument of the demand for planners as also their involvement in mainstream urban agenda which has been quite poor otherwise. Along with demand creation, there is a need to augment the supply side. In order to address the supply side constraints, preference should be accorded to re-orienting and augmenting such capacities in the existing institutions, both at the national and the state level. However, the present capacity-building efforts are not aligned to the

gap in the capacity available at different levels. Hence assessment to ascertain the deficit in capacity at different levels should be taken up. The realization that there is a need for urban planners in nation building has led to establishment of new Planning Schools in India mainly in the private sector. During the last 15 years (2000–2015) more than 50% of the total institutes offering urban planning courses have been established. Central Government has also felt the need for public sector engagement in planning education. To add numbers to the need, according to a recent estimate by the Institute of Town Planners, India (ITPI), there are only 5000 registered planners, too little a number to deal with the existing demand for planning professional. It needs 300,000 planners by 2031 (MHRD 2011). Thus, on an average, India needs 8,000 planners every year over next 20 years. Only a few

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Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

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Table 24.1 Project management units of Urban Missions Name of the PMU

Consultants

Number of team members

SMART cities

Deloitte+Meghraj Consultants

AMRUT

CRISIL

11

HRIDAY

KPMG

4

Team Leader (Urban Planner)

CBUD

IPE, Global

7

Team Leader (Planner) Urban Specialist (Planner)

NE PMU

JPS associates

8

Team Leader (Urban Specialist)

8

Remarks 2 posts for Urban Planner: Team Leader (Urban Planner) Urban Planning Specialist Project Management Specialist+Team Leader [Urban Plng.+Others (MBA)] (Sr.) Reform Management Specialist (Planner with additional requirements) (Jr.) Reform Management Analyst (Planner with additional requirements)

Source MoHUA

metropolitan cities in India have a functioning planning department supported by a Metropolitan Authority. Even where they exist, they are staffed with only 8–10 planners and are usually led by engineers. As per the Mckinsey Global Report (2011), the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs estimates that India needs 30,000–40,000 planners across its cities and presently the number is merely 3,000. India needs 200–300 planning professionals (planners, geographers, economists, architects and digital experts) per city in Tier 1 and 2 and 15–20 planning professionals per city in tier 3 and 4. In comparison, in Singapore the team of the Urban Redevelopment Authority under the Ministry of National Development consists of more than 300 professionals. Greater London Authority alone has 500–600 professionals and New York’s department of City Planning has more than 200 planners. Intervention in urban policymaking is a continuous process. Monitoring and performance evaluation skills are as necessary for effective policy planning as substantive expertise in the urban problem issues. If planners are serious about redirecting the profession’s energies toward policy planning, curricula must be redesigned to provide the skills, knowledge, and experience necessary for effective management of urban change. Today, town planners not only need to be

educated about development plan making, public policy framing and implementation, and enforcement of planning and development control norms, but they should also acquire skills of effective communication, coordination among different individuals, groups and organizations, and diverse perspectives of stakeholders and political leaderships. In this regard, planners must acquire skills of negotiation, mediation, deliberation, conflict resolution, public reasoning and governance. Implications of policy interventions require good comprehension by the planner of issues of inequality, spatial justice and planning rights, inclusion, sustainability and vulnerability. Thus, it is most important that planning education should seek to undo the isolation of planners from the mainstream of institutions and organizations engaged in the formulation and implementation of policies, programs and projects for urban development (Roy et al. 2015:22).

24.3

Recent Urban Projects and Profession Skills—An Enquiry with Evidence

Smart City Mission was launched in June 2015 in India with a total investment of Rs. 98,000 Cr. (US$15 billion) for the development of 100 selected smart cities. The aim of the Smart City

378

Mission is to improve the living conditions in these cities and at the same time provide a smart solution to the day to day activities. The major objectives of the mission are to promote the cities that provide basic infrastructure, a good quality of life, clean and sustainable environment and apply a smart solution in maintaining all of them. The focus is to create a sustainable and inclusive model of cities that can be replicated within and outside of the cities in India. There are ten core infrastructure elements that are included in the smart city projects and they are the followings (http://smartcities.gov.in/ upload/uploadfiles/files/What.%20is%20Smart% 20City.pdf) The core infrastructure elements in a smart city would include: • • • • • • •

adequate water supply assured electricity supply sanitation, including solid waste management efficient urban mobility and public transport affordable housing, especially for the poor robust IT connectivity and digitalization good governance, especially e-Governance and citizen participation • sustainable environment • safety and security of citizens, particularly women, children and the elderly • health and education. The government of India further selected 20 smart cities out of 100 to showcase the progress of mission across the core infrastructure elements. We have got only 19 cities data that provides initial details of a number of projects (i.e. SPV-Special Purpose Vehicle) being undertaken both on Area Based Development (ABD) and Pan City approach. It is noted that Smart City Mission has two above mentioned components for the implementation of various projects under SPV through which the funds are being sanctioned and utilized. The data available with us also capture the technical expertise required for the SPV management and the available funds sharing between Centre, State and Local Bodies. The Tables 24.1

D. Ghosh et al.

and 24.2 provide the details which are indicative of the nature of urban projects that the mission promotes and clearly bring out linkages with the project management and technical know-how that are in place. It also helps us in understanding the urban planning skills and knowledge that are being in demanded under these SPVs in this current agenda of urban transformation. It also reflects on the nature of projects that will require a vast pool of skill building and technical expertise from the urban planning professionals. The Table 24.1 shows that a total of 729 SPVs (urban projects) have been initiated in 19 selected cities during the first phase of roll out of the Smart City Mission, in which the Area Based Development (ABD) projects far outnumbered the Pan-city Projects in all the 19 selected cities. There are altogether 601 SPVs of various nature being undertaken in ABD basis and 128 under Pan City projects. ABD projects are by and large of aiming to improve the urban transport, basic services, waste management, housing and slum rehabilitations and other piecemeal projects. More than 50% of total number of SPVs under ABD are categorized as other projects which are of a piecemeal project. They include heritage development, footpaths facilities, smart health, city level GIS projects, ICT projects, smart educations etc. The majority of projects undertaken in ADB are of transportation or smart urban mobility (151 SPVs), basic service improvement projects (122 SPVs), waste to energy (4 SVPs), slum rehabilitation (18 SPVs). One observes that the entire focus of the smart city mission is on the smart urban mobility and provisioning of basic services. These sectors require a skillset that urban planner must have before looking for employment in the job market under the current urban transformation in India. These two sectors are considered to be the primary sector of urban planning and the niche areas demanding planning interventions. Therefore, smart city mission offers a huge employment opportunity to the urban planning professionals as far as their employability is concerned. The Pan City projects are less in number (see Table 24.2) compared to the ABD projects.

6

151

Belgavi

Bhopal

Bhubaneswar

Chennai

Coimbatore

Davangere

Guwahati

Indore

Jabalpur

Jaipur

Kochi

Ludhiana

NDMC

Pune

Solapur

Surat

Udaipur

Vizag

Total

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 122

6

10

5

12

8

2

4

0

10

2

21

5

3

2

17

3

4

0

8

4

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

Waste to energy

18

1

1

2

1

2

0

0

0

0

1

4

0

0

0

0

3

2

1

Slum rehabilitation

Source PMU, Smart City Projects, MoHUA, Government of India, 2017

3

15

7

14

4

5

7

30

8

17

1

3

3

13

7

1

2

5

Ahmedabad

1.

Transport improvement

City

Sl. no.

Basic services

31 601

306

53

27

37

42

33

20

8

66

41

81

11

10

21

40

24

29

8

19

Total ABD

18

39

5

17

18

27

11

1

25

29

39

5

4

16

10

11

22

6

3

Others

20

0

3

8

1

0

2

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

2

0

0

0

3

IT survilience

32

0

5

4

0

1

0

0

2

0

0

0

5

0

7

0

3

1

4

Comand and control

76

3

11

4

2

4

7

0

0

13

20

0

3

3

0

0

0

6

0

0

Others

128

3

19

12

7

4

10

0

0

15

20

1

3

8

0

9

0

9

1

7

Total pan city

729

34

72

39

44

46

43

20

8

81

61

82

14

18

21

49

24

38

9

26

Total

Number of the project (SPV) Smart city SVP

Table 24.2 Smart city projects in India-2017

Pan city

Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

ABD

24 379

380

There are 128 Pan City projects across the 19 cities which look obvious as the pan-city projects are big in terms of spatial dimensions and funding. Pan city projects (SPVs) also follow a piecemeal approach as the number of other category projects are larger than the intended projects. As many as 76 such projects are undertaken by the Pan City SVPs in all the 19 cities so far. The major sectors that have emerged under pan city projects are IT surveillance and command and control facilities. This indicates that the Pan City projects largely provide smart solutions to urban management and not to the urban planning (allocations and provisioning of resources across the cities). This is an indication that the role of urban planners needs to change from being the provider of planning solutions (land use regulations, mobility and the provisioning of basic services) to project management and ensuring the effective execution of the projects in hand. A fairly good amount of variations has been observed in terms of the number of projects between the selected 19 cities across India. Indore has taken up as many as 81 such projects under ABD and only 1 Pan City Project, followed by Jaipur which has taken a total of 81 projects of which 66 are ABD and 15 are Pan City Projects. Kochi has undertaken the lowest number of projects (8 SPVs of ABDs) while Belgavi has 9 projects including 1 Pan City projects. Table 24.3 provides a fairly good idea of project management and related human resources required. It shows that SPVs of each city is being managed and or planned by a team consisting of the board of directors dominated by the bureaucrats and a project monitoring units represented by the technical experts of urban planning and management consultants. They are being hired from a pool of national and international management consultants including the urban planning experts. Financial aspects of project funding and monitoring are being managed by the nodal fiancé officers of the respective urban local bodies. The funding is fairly well distributed between and amongst the 19 cities. The major funding comes from the Central government, followed by 50:50 ration of state and local bodies.

D. Ghosh et al.

Thus, one observes that these current urban projects under the urban mission require a multi-disciplinary team to manage them. The nature of urban planning is also changing in the due course of time in India, keeping the economic reforms and rapid urbanization in recent decades. The planning approach is changing from a comprehensive or holistic planning towards more strategic and targeted approaches of finding smart urban solutions. This provides both challenges and opportunities for urban planning professionals in order to equip themselves with the required amount of skill and knowledge that are in demand under the current urban transformation in India. However, the planning education being a multi-disciplinary in nature has sufficient scope to deal with the current as well as future requirements of job markets for urban planning professionals and urban managers as the case may be.

24.4

Case Study

24.4.1 Urban Professionals Employment: Current Trends of a Planning School 24.4.1.1 Brief History of Planning Education of CEPT University Faculty of planning, CEPT University has more than four decades of history of planning education and professional development in India. It was established in the year 1972 with a batch of 12 students in urban and regional planning. Subsequently, the then School of Planning added a couple of specializations in the planning education. They are Environmental Planning and Housing in the year 1987 and 1989 respectively. It was not until the beginning of new millennium that a new demand of various infrastructure needs in the urban area was realized by the school of planning. It started Infrastructure Planning, Industrial Area Planning and Transport Planning in the year 2004, 2008 and 2009, respectively (see Table 24.4).

24

Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

381

Table 24.3 Smart city projects and required technical expertise S no

Name of city

1.

Project monitoring cell (PMC)

Project funding (Rs. Cr.)

Managerial/decision making

Technical (consultants)

Financial

Ahmedabad

Municipal Commissioner

PwC

Finance Officer AMC

2.

Belgavi

Managing Director

M/s Lahmeyer International India Ltd

3.

Bhopal

Chief Executive officer

PwC and TCE

Finance Officer BMC

103

4.

Bhubaneswar

Chief Executive Officer

EGIS India Consulting,IBI Consultancy India)

Office of Financial Solutions Bhubaneshwar

196

5.

Chennai

NA

NA

NA

186

200

200

6.

Coimbatore

Municipal Commissioner

Darashaw& Company Pvt. Ltd.

NA

186

200

200

7.

Davanagere

Municipal Commissioner

M/s Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd.

NA

194

194

194

8.

Guwahati

Chief Secretary, GoA

TCE Ltd and Arcadis Netherlands B.V

NA

189

189

189

9.

Indore

Additional Commissioner

Knight Frank with Rudrabhishek Enterprises Pvt Ltd.

Finance Officer

194

51.78

51.78

10.

Jabalpur

Chief Executive Officer

PwC and IPE Global

Finance Officer

194

25.05

25.05

11.

Jaipur

Nominee Director

M/s Eptisa Servicios de Ingenearia

Chief Finance Officer

196

12.

Kochi

Managing Director

IPE Global

NA

196

194

194

13.

Ludhiana

Chief Executive officer

AECOM Asia and PwC

NA

200

100

100

14.

NDMC

Chief Executive Officer

Finance & Accounts

196

100

100

15.

Pune

Chief Finance Officer

McKinney’s & Co.

NA

194

93

93

16.

Solapur

Chief Executive Officer

CRISIL Risk and Infrastructure Solutions Limited

NA

186

93

93

17.

Surat

Deputy Municipal Commissioner

TCE, IBM India, PwC, TERI, EESL

Chief Finance Officer

195.75

100

100

18.

Udaipur

Municipal Commissioner

EPTISA

Chief Finance officer

194

111.6

111.6

19.

Vizag

Municipal Commissioner

AECOM

NA

194

200

200

Total

NA

MoHUA

State

ULB

195.5

100

100

194

194

194

3583.25

31.41

31.41

194

194

111.6

2482.44

111.6

2482.44

Note MC = Municipal Commissioner; MoUD = Ministry of Urban Development; NA = Data Not Available Source PMU, Smart City Projects, MoHUA, Government of India, 2017

382

D. Ghosh et al.

Table 24.4 Brief History of planning education in CEPT University Sl. no

Specialization

Establishment year

1

Urban and regional planning

1972

2

Environmental planning

1987

3

Housing

1989

4

Infrastructure planning

2004

5

Industrial area planning and management

2008

6

Transport planning

2009

7

Rural panning

2009

Discontinued

2013 2013

Source Faculty of Planning, CEPT University, 2017

There was also a strong need for rural planning in the country alongside the rapid urbanization, hence the Faculty of Planning started Rural Planning in the year 2010. However, in recent time the faculty of planning reorganized its curriculum and instead of giving a degree of Master in Planning in the above specialization, it has renamed the planning program as Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) in 2014. The two years’ master degree in Urban and Regional Planning is limited with five majors in the area of Land-use Planning, Environmental Planning, Housing, Infrastructure Planning and Transport Planning. The placements of the graduates of Faculty of Planning are usually done through a campus recruitment process where the respective faculties are organizing the placement events running through the last semester of respective courses. However, there is a full-fledged unit within the University called Career and Alumni Services (CAS) which organizes the placement events in the campus. The invitations accompanying a brochure of CEPT University are sent to the recruiting organizations well in advance say 4– 6 months before the graduation of the outgoing batch for both Post Graduate and Undergraduate program at CEPT University. The respective Faculty follows with the recruiting organization with a shortlisted profile of the candidates. The interested organizations then finalize the dates for interview and or group discussion and writing

ability test depending on the suitability of the post. Usually, Faculty of Planning Post Graduate students are only interviewed and selected candidates are sent an offer letter through the CAS office at CEPT University. The placement process is well decentralized at CEPT University. Like other Faculties, Faculty of Planning forms a placement committee every year where student volunteers represent their respective specialization/major streams headed/ supervised by a distinguished faculty member. One candidate one offer policy has been the motto of the placement committee. Based on the brief profiles of the candidates, recruiting organizations shortlist the probable candidates for campus interview. The selected candidates are intimated within two working weeks of the interview. The recent trends in the placement of postgraduate candidates of Faculty of Planning reveal increasing opportunities in the job market.

24.4.1.2 Placement and Remunerations: Public Sector Vs Private Sector The overall campus placement of MURP candidates in the last three consecutive years has been increasing. From as low as 10% final placement of 120 students in the year 2013–14, a little more than 75% of the total candidates finally got placed in the year 2015–16. During the year 2014–15, it reached 70% (Table 24.5). Further

24

Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

383

Table 24.5 Placement (faculty of planning) 2013–14 Year 2013–14 Total MURP students sit for placement (N = 120)

Total

Public

Pvt.

Total placement

12

4

8

Average salary/annum (in INR in Lakhs)

4.27

4.43

4.19

Total MURP students sit for placement (N = 89)

Year 2014–15

Total placement

62

22

40

Average salary/annum (in INR in Lakhs)

4.56

3.45

5.11

Total MURP students sit for placement (N = 99)

Year 2015–16

Total placement

75

26

49

Average salary/annum (in INR in Lakhs)

4.61

4.45

4.69

Source CEPT University Placement Office, 2016

breakup of the placement shows that the bulk of job offers come from the private sectors organization and the trends continue. This is the national phenomenon for all the streams as more and more jobs are being created under private sectors. The remunerations are also relatively higher in the private sector jobs than the public sectors. As per the last three years’ placement record of the CEPT University, the highest salary has increased from Rs. 5.50 Lakhs/Annum to Rs. 12.00 Lakhs/Annum during 2013–14 and 2015– 16, however, the lowest salary offered is around Rs. 3.00 Lakhs/Annum during the same period. This is a serious issue of employability of MURP candidates with very low paying jobs, while the fees have been consistently increasing for this course at CEPT University. A good number of students take admission in this course by taking education loans from the banks. In the last three years, the total jobs offered by the private sector are more than twice of the job offered by the public-sector organization. The compensation in terms of annual salary offered by the private sector organizations has been higher than those offered by the public-sector organization, except in the year 2013–14. It has been observed that the average annual salary of MURP candidates has been marginally increased in the last three years during 2013–14 and

2015–16, however, the same is not true in the case of the salary given by the public and private sector recruiters. The annual average salary offered by the private sector recruiters was Rs. 2.19 lakhs in the year 2013–14, which lower than the salary offered by the public-sector agencies. This is because only 4 jobs were offered by the public-sector agencies of Government of Gujarat which generally pay a very competitive salary at par with the private sector agencies to hire the best candidate, however, they offered project based contractual job. The subsequent placement scenario is somewhat different in the last two years during 2014–15 and 2015–16. In the year 2014–15, private sector agencies not only hired 2/3 or the total candidates that sit for the campus placement but also have also offered higher salary package compared to that of the public-sector agencies. The average annual salary for the year 2014–15 went as high as Rs. 5.11 lakhs offered by the private sector and public sector agencies offered only 3.45 lakhs during the same time, while the average annual salary of all the 62 candidates (out of 89) who got the jobs through campus placement was Rs. 4.56. The average annual salary has slightly increased to Rs. 4.61 Lakhs for all the 75 candidates (out of 99) who got the offer, whereas there has been a

384

D. Ghosh et al.

24.4.1.3 Nature of Job Market—A Trend As indicated by the broad picture of job market of urban regional planners of CEPT University, consultancy and research firms have offered the majority of jobs during the last three years (Table 24.6). The hiring ratio between those appeared and finally offered a job in the research and consultancy firm has throughout been better than the rest of the firms. This indicates that planning jobs are concentrated in this sector, henceforth the role of planners is changing from being regulators and facilitators to service providers of big firms and ultimately to the government agencies including the urban local bodies. If one looks at the year-wise distribution of jobs offered to CEPT planning graduates (MURP candidates), the second biggest employer is the educational institutes offering Architecture and Urban Planning Courses, followed by the NGOs and real estate agencies which hire planners for actions research, site supervision and project management related activities. The last three years’ trends show that the number of jobs offered by the research and consultancy firms is on the rise. It has increased from as low as 9 offers in the year 2013–14 to 45 offers in the year 2015–16 registering 5 times increase in the last three years. The other big job opportunities are coming from the educational

substantial increase in the average annual salary of those offered by the public-sector agencies during the year 2015–16 compared to the previous years. And at the same time, a decline in the average annual salary has been observed in the case of those job offered by the private sectors. While there has been an increasing trend in the salary of urban planners from CEPT University the average salary offered by both public and private sectors are fluctuating year on year during the last three years. This indicates a volatile nature of job market in the planning profession. The fluctuating job opportunities and compensations need to be further explored in order to understand the existing job market. However, the total number of jobs offered by the private sectors are substantially higher than that of the public-sector agencies throughout the period in consideration. This implies that urban and regional planning is no more a public sector driven profession, as government agencies are outsourcing their technical jobs preparing Master Plans, Regional Strategic Plans, Development Plan, Comprehensive Development Plan, DPRs and project proposal of mega urban projects etc. to the private agencies especially the big consultancy firms of India and abroad.

Table 24.6 Sector wise details of placement 2013–14 to 2015–16 Year 2013–14 Consultancy/research

ULBs

Govt.

NGOs

Int. agencies

Banking

Real estate

Edu. Inst.

Total

Job offered

9

0

2

0

0

0

0

1

12

Appeared for the job interview

85

0

22

0

0

0

0

13

120

Year 2014–15 Job offered

32

1

0

7

2

0

2

13

62

Appeared for the job interview

33

1

0

9

10

4

6

19

89

Job offered

45

1

5

7

2

0

2

13

75

Appeared for the job interview

60

1

7

9

3

0

3

16

99

Year 2015–16

Source CEPT University Placement Office, 2016

24

Knowledge and Skills for Planning Profession …

institutes, which is a new phenomenon. This is a market response to a sudden increase in the Architecture and Planning Schools in India which hire planners and architects as a teacher. This could be further explored as emerging avenues for planners and architects inclined in planning and architecture education. NGOs, Real Estate and the various governmental agencies are also hiring planners project planning and management of their existing project area interventions across various developmental sectors. Development sector job opportunities for planners especially those having social science training are preferred. NGOs and International/bilateral agencies hire them for community planning and policy interventions both at the micro and macro-level interventions in their project geographies across the world, particularly in India. Some of the big recruiters are especially the consultancy firms including the “Big Four” Deloitte, PWC, E&Y, KPMG along with a host of National and International consultancy firms such as IL&FS, CRISIL India Ltd., LASA India, SAI Consultants, JLL Pvt. Ltd., IPE Global, etc. Action Aid, Oxfam, DFID India, USAID, The World Bank, UNDP, etc. are international and bilateral agencies engaged with the development sector who also hire planners of CEPT University through in and off-campus placement on a regular basis. The real estate marketing and consultancy companies such as Magic Bricks, Marathon Realty, CBRE, Kalpataru, Liases Forus, etc. are new recruiters of planners for making their strategic business plan besides the real estate construction agencies which hire planners for real estate planning and management. Big Metropolitan bodies such as National Capital Region (NCR) Board, Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA), etc. have been hiring the planners from CEPT University on a regular basis, however largely on a contractual basis project appointment.

385

They employ planners for generally making and revising their Regional Plans, Development Plans, Master Plans, Strategic and Business Plans for large mega urban projects in their respective jurisdictions. It is expected that with the rapid urban transformations, planners’ job opportunities are likely to increase in India. The national urban agenda has become a priority under the current political economy of the country. The national urban policies and programs such as Smart City Mission, AMRUT, PMAY and Swachh Bharat Urban which are being implemented across the length and breadth of the country are likely to demand planners at various stages of project planning and implementations. This survey of nature of job opportunities for the planners is indicative and not conclusive. CEPT University being one of the pioneering planning education institutes in India has undertaken many experimental decisions for preparing a pool of urban and regional planners specializing both in area planning and sectoral planning at the same time. However, the employability of the planners from CEPT University has shown fluctuating job market responses from both public and private sectors employers in the recent years. However, there has been an increasing trend in the total number of campus placement. The average annual salary for overall job offers being made during the last three years has also been increasing, but both public and private sectors’ responses of remunerations are fluctuating. One contrast finding of the above case study is that planners’ job opportunities are concentrated with private sector agencies largely because of a huge amount of outsourcing taking place in the public sector/government agencies of the planning jobs. This has led to big consultancy venturing into the urban planning domain for providing their services for urban planning and urban management related services. It is expected that the demand vis-a-vis supply for planning-related job is likely to increase with

386

D. Ghosh et al.

increasing importance being accorded to the urban agenda in the era of rapid urban transformation in India.

24.5

Conclusion

The emerging discourses on skills are too important for any profession to ignore. The arrival of sharing economy in near future will offer several new challenges and opportunities for human kind. Planning being at the center of such discourses, it is essential that planners and their skill sets are studied objectively and across various cultures. Successive governments in India have been responding purposefully to the opportunities planned urbanization could provide. This has resulted in a series of reforms and socio-spatial changes in the country. Through this paper, the authors have attempted to draw a sketch of the emerging skill landscape for urban planners India. The evolution of a vibrant ecosystem that has been constantly nudging the planning profession to review its strength, potential and upskill wherever required is a key enabler. The increase in the number of professional avenues irrespective of the physical location is a game-changer for planners. The advent of smart cities mission has attracted a lot of new talent as there are several exciting ideas in the play which are not place-specific or city-specific. The 100 smart cities along with other urban sector missions have for the first time offered a multitude of opportunities for planners and associated professionals. These have generated many new ideas and investment opportunities leading to a new demand for new skills and sustained learning. The current review has revealed some of the initial trends and future directions for urban planners in India. The shift from Master Plan to strategic project planning through ABD and Pan City projects marks a new era in India planning. While the process is faster and results could probably be visible in a shorter span of time, they will struggle

to produce inclusively prosperous cities if these are to be strengthened through community participation. While the Government system will focus its efforts on strategic projects, the community level institutions and wider knowledge community can initiate steps to engage the communities. This opens more avenues for planners on both sides of the table. The formal planning process needs a lot of new knowledge and skills which are in short supply within the Government. This has provided a variety of possibilities for infomediaries and consulting agencies, the latter emerging as a major employer for planners in India. Urban India today attracts a wide range of knowledge, technologies, business opportunities, enterprises and politico-legal solutions. The challenge is in providing realistic solutions to make Indian cities livable.

References Afshar F, Howe DA (1994) Redefining planning practice, in Globalizing North American planning education Final Report of the ACSP Commission on Global Approaches to Planning Education, pp 27–33 Alexander ER (2001) What do planners need to know? J Plan Educ Res 20(3):376–380 Durning B, Glasson J (2006) Delivering the planning system in England: skills capacity constraints. Town Plan Rev 77(4):457–484 Glaeser E (2012) The triumph of the city. Penguin Books, London Government of India (undated) Urban development management for the formulation of the twelfth five year plan (2012–2017): planning commission report of the working group on capacity building Heurkens E, Adams D, Hobma F (2015) Planners as market actors: the role of local planning authorities in the UK’s urban regeneration practice. Town Plan Rev 86(6):625–650 Heywood P (2006) Educating Australia’s planners. Australian Plan 43(4):28–31 ITPI (2017) Message of the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India for the ITPI International Conference-2017 MHRD (2011) Committee of experts in town planning and architecture to frame policy guidelines to strengthen architecture and town planning education, New Delhi

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ODPM (2004) The Egan review on skills for sustainable communities, London Roy AK, Ghosh D, Kaliyath A (2015) Exploring multi-disciplinary approach in urban planning: need for a paradigm shift in planning education in India. In: Presented at the APSA-2015 Conference in Malaysia

387 RTPI (2010) Shaping the future: RTPI Manifesto for planning, London Seltzer E, Ozawa CP (2002) Clear signals: moving on to planning’s promise. J Plan Educ Res 22(1):77–86 Smartnet Website at NIUA: smartnet.niua.org

Ethics and Professionalism in Planning Practice: An Experience from Dhaka

25

Shakil Akther and Ishrat Islam

Abstract

Ethical and professional dimensions of planning practice deal with the art and science of urban planning, in its many aspects. Ethics in planning are the values, standards, and philosophies that planners live by. Ethical planning helps planners establish codes of professional behaviors, and collectively ethics which translated into institutional, government policies and programs. In Dhaka, planning practitioners struggle with three priorities, i.e. environmental protection, economic development and social equity in the context of a fast paced urbanization and limited resources. In this chapter, we explore how the ethical issues of planning were perceived by the professionals, academics, civil society, media, government and politicians during the preparation, monitoring and implementation of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka Metropolitan Area. Keywords




Ethics Dhaka Metropolitan Area practice


Planning

S. Akther (&)
I. Islam (&) Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh e-mail: [email protected] I. Islam e-mail: [email protected]

25.1

Introduction

Planning-related decisions are made daily through a complex, often politically charged processes involving the interests of multiple stakeholders. Though Friedman (1987) claimed that planning links scientific and technical knowledge to actions in the public domain, planning theorists now describe planning both an agent and an object of restructuring of space, economy and institutions (Winter and Brooke 1993; Filion 1996). Studies suggest that planning is a crucial ground of political struggle among different interest groups including civil society stakeholders and politicians (Hillier 1993; Nedovic-Budic 2000). Potter (2012) argued that due to controversial nature of planning and development, understanding the political dimension is basic to form the urban system in the third world. Planners work to balance among environmental protection, economic development and social equity (Campbell and Marshall 1998). Policy makers, planners and other professionals involved with city planning and development in Bangladesh are continually struggling with the three priorities of development, i.e. environmental protection, economic development and social equity in the face of fast pace of urbanization with limited resource. In case of Bangladesh, social equity and environmental protection is often compromised in the name of economic development.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_25

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Land speculation is a common phenomenon which is supported by government policies and it encourages undeclared or illegally earned money to be invested in the real estate sector (Anonymous 2013; Byron and Ali 2014). Taking this opportunity, real estate companies are operating many housing projects all over the country particularly in big cities. Many of these projects are located in ecologically fragile areas ignoring various environmental and planning laws and rules. To pursue these real estate ventures, the developers often influence the professionals and officials of planning authorities in an unethical manner during plan preparation, approval and implementation phases. The public sector of Bangladesh has been identified as one the most corrupt entity over the years by Transparency International (1996, 2001, 2012, 2013). Publication of reports regarding violation of approved plans during permission of land use clearance and construction is common in media (Mahmud 2007; Priyo desk 2011; Anonymous 2014). It needs to be mentioned here that the practice of ethical codes and norms seldom get the attention of either academia or media. In such a context, this research aims to explore how the ethical issues of planning were perceived by the professionals, academics, civil society, media, government and politicians during the preparation, monitoring and implementation of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka Metropolitan Area.

25.2

Material and Methodology

25.2.1 Theoretical Framework of the Research Urban planners all over the world debate the nature and principle of practice in their profession (Campbell and Marshall 1998). In the developed world there is at least implicit recognition that moral judgments and ethical questions pervade the daily practice of planning (Reade 1987; Low 1991; Cook and Sarkissian 2000). But there is very few literature to support or refute the issues of moral judgments and ethical

questions in planning profession in the developing world. Campbell and Marshal (1998) identified two different streams addressing ethical dilemma of planners. While one stream explores the theoretical foundation of truth, values in normative principles, the other look into from the frame of reference of individual practitioner. Wachs (1985) identified four types of ethical issues faced by planning professionals, and each of these has implication on society and citizen. The first category identified by Wachs (1985) includes the moral implication of practice and rules of behavior. The second one concerns ethical judgment of administrative discretion. The third one is the most important one: the moral obligation and ethical criteria used by the planners in setting planning goals and in using planning tools, techniques and models. The last one is the selection of purpose and choices of priorities in the formulated plans and policies from the ethical perspective. Howe and Kauffman (1979) found from surveys of American Planners concludes that there are sharp differences among planners what constitutes ethical practice. They claim role orientation, political view of planners, allegiance to employer and propensity to express values in the job are the reasons which could explain the difference among the planners on defining ethical practice. In addition, one has to consider the value system of the society to understand the ethical principles. Perloff (1980) considered that quality of life, efficiency and equity are the three core values of planning. Marcuse (1976) in his seminal work on planning ethics argued that planners have to look beyond planning ethics to see broader decision rules that frame the activities of planners. He claimed four sources of obligation and three kinds of enforcement in practice forms the basis of planning ethics. The basic framework of analysis of this research paper is based on this study. He mentioned nine principles (allegiance, autonomy, knowledge and competence, guild loyalty, concern for public interest, dissent, loyalty, advancement of knowledge, statutory

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regulation) should be considered for ethical practice of planning. He claimed allegiance imposes some obligation of professionals to client which include confidentiality of information, disclosing ‘conflict of interest’, etc. On the issue of autonomy he stated that planners expected to give client sound and independent advice irrespective of whether client asked for it or not and would cover every aspect of planning. Knowledge and competence is self-explanatory as it is expected that ‘mastery of its terrain is an essential obligation of the professional planner’. Marcuse stated two types of ethical obligation (to the fellow professionals and to the professional body) as guild loyalty. On the other hand ‘loyalty’ is described as respect to scope of the employment, serving employer’s interests, and confidentiality. One of the conflicting principles is to ‘principle of dissent’. Marcuse claimed on three grounds (the public as employer argument, the whistle-blowing argument, the organizational flexibility argument) dissent is necessary as ethical principle. He claimed the democratic process relies on the integrity of the professional to present a considered independent judgment; hence dissent is necessary. The social scientist role within planning profession makes planners more rely on scientific process than traditional client-professional business as a bearer of advancement of knowledge. The work also stated that planners’ statutory responsibility should be more like professional accountant than lawyer as it is expected that planer should provide a fair and unbiased description of the condition. As most planners work as public servant, concern for the public is essential ingredient of every definition of a professional as per Marcuse. But he also claimed that it gives planners neither the right to make decision on public matters nor to make him publically responsible for the decision. In the end, he asserted that planner’s ethical practice must seek redistribution of income from the rich to the poor and to overcome any obstacle to achieve that equity principle.

It is understood that the theoretical understanding of the work of Marcuse (1976) is difficult to be translated in real-world practice. The code of conduct of the professionals can be the vehicle to operationalize the moral and ethical principles of planning practice. All over the world, professional practice is regulated by code of conduct of professional bodies. However, the ‘Code of practice’ of the professional body of planners of Bangladesh, has not yet been published by the Bangladesh Institute of Planners (BIP). The Ethical Code of American Planning Association (APA) (1992) guides the planners of USA to practice ethically in order to uphold public interest, maintain high standard of integrity and proficiency and last but not the least pursue improvement in competency. Due to absence of any code of practice in Bangladesh, this research evaluated the practice of planners of Bangladesh in the light of the code of conduct developed by APA.

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25.2.2 Data and Methodology The aim of the research is to explore how the ethical and professional issues are perceived and dealt in planning practice in Bangladesh. The research took Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka as case study and tried to understand the process of plan preparation and implementation phases from the point of ethics and professionalism. The authors of this article took part in various capacities as part of academia and civil society during the consultation process of the plan. The information used in this research is primarily obtained from planning reports submitted by the consultants, the report submitted by the technical review committee, the notes of the researchers, minutes of meetings, reports from print media. The role of planners was analyzed from the point of the nine ethical principles suggested by Marcuse (1976). The Ethical Code of American

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Planning Association (APA) is used to appraise the professional issues of plan preparation and implementation phases of DAP in the absence of any code for the practice of planning in Bangladesh.

25.2.3 Planning Process in Bangladesh Alam (2011) concluded that western style of normative planning approach is not applicable to South Asian Cities (like Dhaka) due to political culture and socio-economic context of the society. Urban and regional planning in Bangladesh is dominated and led by public sector. Plan preparation, management and implementation are the responsibility of urban local government except in the major cities and areas surrounding them (Government of Bangladesh 2009a, b, c). On the other hand, parastatal bodies are responsible for preparing and implementing the plans for the larger cities and its vicinity. For example, Rajdhani Unnayan Kortipokkhaya (popularly known by its acronym in Bangla, RAJUK) is responsible for plan preparation, monitoring and implementation within the Dhaka Metropolitan area which covers about 1,528 km2. The formal planning procedures in Bangladesh involves several phases: (1) Call for Expression of Interest (EOI) for Plan Preparation; (2) Selection of Consultant for Planning; (3) Preparation of planning documents; (4) Publication of planning document for public review and (5) finalization of the plan as a legal document. The plan implementation process also consists of several steps involving land use clearance, development clearance (for large-scale projects), construction permission and occupancy certification from planning authority.

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25.2.4 Brief Background of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka Like most of the cities of the developing country, growth of Dhaka is organic. In 1917, Sir Patrick Geddes was commissioned to prepare a master plan for the city. However, the plan was neither adopted nor implemented (Ameen 1998). Later a number of plans were prepared, but unfortunately implementations of the plans were limited (for detail Kabir and Parolin 2010). The development of Dhaka is currently governed by Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan 1995–2015 (also known as DMDP). It provided strategies for 20 years up to 2015 for the development of the area under RAJUK jurisdiction. The validity of the plan is now extended up to December 2019. The population of the area is more than 15 million (SAMAN, HAN A Urban Research Institute et al. 2015). DMDP is a three-tiered plan of which top two tiers Structure Plan (the policy plan) and Urban Area Plan (the interim plan for 26 Special Planning Zone, SPZ) were completed in 1995. In 1997, the national parliament adopted DMDP as the governing law for development in Dhaka (Government of Bangladesh 1997). According to the DMDP, the second tier of plan—the Urban Area Plan was the interim plan for 26 Special Planning Zones (SPZ) within Dhaka Metro area to guide development till 2005 and it was expected that Detailed Area Plan for these SPZs there would be prepared by then (Hammadi 2008). The lowest tier, ‘The Detailed Area Plan (DAP)’, was supposed to be completed by 2005, but the plan preparation task was started in 2004 and it was expected that the DAP would be completed by the middle of 2006 (Hammadi 2008). Due to resource constraint, RAJUK was

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not able to prepare its own plan, and it had to appoint four consulting firms to prepare the DAP. With considerable delay, the draft reports of DAP were submitted by the consultants in the last week of September 2008. Once the DAP was open for public consultation in October 2008, RAJUK became embroiled in largest controversy in its history on planning in Bangladesh. Both professional planners and civil society opposed the DAP, as it did not follow the policies of the Structure Plan (1995–2015) and its proposals contradicted existing environmental laws (for example Parks, Playgrounds, Open Space and Natural Waterbody Conservation Act, 2000) and policies (for example policies of DMDP) (for detail, Bangladesh Institute of Planners 2008). In addition, at public hearings, local people also opposed the plan because it was not compatible with the local land use and existing built-up structures. For two months, planning professionals through the Bangladesh Institute of Planners (BIP) and a number of professional and civil society organizations used the print and electronic media to convince RAJUK and government to address the controversial issues of the proposed plan. Unfortunately, no favorable response was found from the government and RAJUK. In such a backdrop, three professional bodies—Bangladesh Institute of Planners (BIP), Institute of Engineering (IEB) and Institute of Architects (IAB);one research organization— Center of Urban Studies (CUS); two organizations from Civil Society—Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon, (BAPA) (Civil society organization for the environment of Bangladesh), Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) respectively formed a coalition and demanded the necessary revision of the plan. During the time, there were very few nights where members of the coalition were not present in popular talk shows in electronic media. In addition, BIP formed a committee on its own to review the plan. These activities forced RAJUK to invite civil society and professionals to discuss about the plan on 3rd and 4th December 2008. Unfortunately, the discussion sessions ended without any result. Secretary in charge of Ministry of Public Works in a meeting with

representative of civil society and professional bodies reconfirmed his determination to finalize the plan by mid of December 2008. On 20th December 2008, BIP published its review committee’s report to media. This created added pressure to RAJUK and forced the Advisor in charge of Public Works Ministry to intervene. He verbally directed the RAJUK Chairman to organize a joint workshop of RAJUK and civil society coalition. In the workshop, the planning consultants presented the draft Detailed Area Plan (DAP), and a representative from the coalition body presented the discrepancies of the draft plan and showed how it has violated the Structure Plan and the prevailing Environmental Laws (Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act 1995, Parks, Playgrounds, Open Space and Natural Waterbody Conservation Act, 2000, etc.). The presentation also indicated how the planning norms (like following standards for facilities) and ethics (for example protection of poor) were ignored in the plan. The audience of the workshop also raised other issues including food security of the city, consideration of climate change, etc. At that point, the Advisor and Secretary of Public Works Ministry postponed the workshop and asked RAJUK to form a ‘Technical Review Committee’ consisting of representative from RAJUK, consultants, civil society and professionals to address the controversial issues and to finalize the plan. The Technical Committee with assistance from Technical Working Group reviewed the plan for six months, and then finalized the plan. On 21st June 2010, government adopted the Detailed Area Plan as the final tier of DMDP through a gazette notification (Ali and Alam 2010, 2015). After gazette notification, RAJUK is legally bound to follow the DAP to provide planning and development permission. However, the approved plan faced substantial opposition from real estate business houses (Ali and Alam 2010; Ratan 2010; Ali 2013). As a consequence, government formed a Ministerial Committee to review the DAP. The committee consists of seven ministers headed by the Minister of Public Works. The Chief Town Planner of RAJUK is acting as secretary of the committee. To assist the

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Ministerial Committee a technical committee was also formed, but the composition of the Technical Committee was never disclosed to public. In news report Bhuiyan (2014) accused this Ministerial Committee was formed to secure the interest of the powerful stakeholders.

25.3

Discussion and Analysis

The following sections of this paper present how the ethical issues of planning was perceived and practiced by the professionals and officials of RAJUK during the plan preparation and implementation phases of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka Metropolitan Area. Nine principles mentioned by Marcuse (1976) (allegiance, autonomy, knowledge and competence, guild loyalty, concern for public interest, dissent, loyalty, advancement of knowledge, statutory responsibility) are discussed here in the context of planning practice and enforcement in Dhaka Metro Area. The researchers also studied the activities of the planners in the light of Code of Ethics of American Planning Association (APA 1992) as there is no such approved code of ethics for the planners of Bangladesh.

25.3.1 Ethical Issues in Preparation Phase of Detailed Area Plan 25.3.1.1 Allegiance Marcuse referred allegiance that imposes some obligation of professionals to client which include confidentiality of information, disclosing ‘conflict of interest’, etc. The issue of ‘conflict of interest’ is discussed in the Public Procurement Act of Bangladesh (Government of Bangladesh 2006) as well as code of conduct of professionals all over the world. But ‘conflict of interest’ issue was totally ignored during the selection of consultant by RAJUK. One of the owners of one of the selected consulting firms also owns a real estate company operating in Dhaka Metro Area. In fact, one of the lead consultants was the president of Real Estate and Housing Association

of Bangladesh (REHAB). The access of the real estate developers makes the planning process questionable both from legal (Government of Bangladesh 2006) and ethical (Marcuse 1976) perspective. Involving this consulting firm in the DAP preparation definitely had impact on the planning decisions. In the draft proposed plan (Shelltech (Pvt) Ltd. 2007) it was found that the alleged consulting firm gave proposals for residential development in the designated sub flood-prone zone of Structure Plan where a firm of its owner is operating real estate business.

25.3.1.2 Autonomy Ethical practice demands that planners (in this case Planners working at and as consultant for RAJUK) would give sound and independent advice to its client (in case of DAP, Government of Bangladesh) regarding planning and development of Dhaka Metro Area. Deviation of policies of Structure Plan (1995–2015) to conserve waterbodies and agricultural land are evident in the proposed plan. This implies that the planners involved in plan preparation did not play their ethical role to serve the Government of Bangladesh. It is important to note that several other policies and acts of the country also ensured conservation of water bodies and agricultural lands to address the issue of flood management and food security (Government of Bangladesh 2000; Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development 2001; Minisitry of Land 2001). 25.3.1.3 Knowledge and Competence Term of Reference (ToR) demanded that the consultants have to geo-referenced 2,210 sheets of 1,156 mouza maps1 by GPS survey. As RAJUK did not have the necessary resources to supervise this extensive procedure and the consultants took advantage of it. Instead of GPS survey consulting firms digitized the mouza maps (paper copy) on computer resulting in inaccurate 1

In Bangladesh land parcel maps are known as Mouza maps. Mouza is the lowest level of aerial unit of land since Mughal period in Bangladesh. Every land parcel belongs to one Mouza and larger mouzas have two more sheets to cover all the land parcels belongs to map.

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Proposed conversion of "high value agriculture land" to "Urban Use"

Fig. 25.1 High value agricultural land converted into urban use. Source (Technical Working Group 2010)

demarcation of land parcel in the submitted maps (Hammadi 2008). Survey is one of the primary steps in any planning process. Both physical and land use survey were conducted and supervised in an unprofessional way in DAP. To cross-examine the physical survey output, RAJUK employed Survey of Bangladesh (SoB)—the government organization mandated for conducting geophysical survey in the country. SoB checked two per cent of the survey area as sample and found severe deviation on the maps (Hammadi 2008). In addition, the methodology of the socioeconomic survey was challenged by professionals and civil society members. Neither the consultants nor the planners in RAJUK followed the planning goals and policies stated in the upper tier plans, i.e. Structure Plan and Urban Area Plan.

25.3.1.4 Statutory Responsibility Detailed Area Plan (DAP) has to follow the goals and policies of Structure Plan (1995–2015) (Government of Bangladesh 1997). But the draft plan significantly violated the policies related to conservation of flood flow zones, water retention areas and agricultural land. The draft reports of

DAP completely ignored these guidelines and extensively provided residential land use even in flood flow and agricultural land with scant regard of Structure Plan. Vast swathes of fertile agricultural lands are proposed to be converted to urban residential and mixed-use development. ‘High Value Agricultural Land’ and ‘Agricultural land’ category of DMDP has been replaced by ‘urban residential use’ or ‘Agriculture with Rural Homestead’ category without any rational explanation (Fig. 25.1). This change of land use classification created opportunity for land speculation by private developers and individuals which would eventually cause displacement of rural population from their homestead. Through detail calculation, it has been found that the proposed residential land use of DAP would accommodate about 36 million people with nominal density of 175 people/acre (the standard allow up to 350 people/ acre in planned area) which is far above the projected population of 15.57 million in Dhaka by 2015 mentioned in DMDP. The population estimated by DMDP was found to be correct by a recent report (SAMAN, HAN A Urban Research Institute et al. 2015) submitted to RAJUK in 2015.

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25.3.1.5 Advancement of Knowledge Through Scientific Process The consulting firms did not conduct any study on land use demand, infrastructural demand or economic growth except population projection. The methodology followed for population projection was manipulated to rationalize higher housing demand for accommodating growing population. According to them Dhaka needs housing for 27 million people by 2015 (Calculated from DDC 2007; EPC 2007; Ganibangla Ltd. and DDC 2007; Shelltech (Pvt) Ltd. and Dial Consultants Ltd. 2007) though independent studies found that the population would be close to 15 million in 2015 (Government of Bangladesh 1997; Technical Working Group 2010). It is to be noted here that the consultants never gave any number of the projected population of the DMDP area rather population projection was made at micro level using growth rate of the city as a whole. Consultants and RAJUK also did not follow any standard methodology or uniform standard for number and location of amenity and community facilities. Though in the DMDP Structure Plan (1995–2015) (Government of Bangladesh 1997) standard for facilities were provided but out of four consultants, two consultants used their own standard without explaining the reasons behind the selected standard for determining number and size of facilities and amenities. On the other hand, the other two consultants did not provide any standard for amenities. The technical working group reported these issues to the review committee. 25.3.1.6 Guild Loyalty, Loyalty and Dissent As discussed in the background of this paper, the proposed draft plan was vehemently opposed by the coalition of the fellow professional bodies which include planners, architects, engineers, social scientists and civil society members. RAJUK and their consultants constantly ignored the opinions of professionals regarding the problems and controversial issues of the proposed plan. Instead they tried their best to get

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approval of this plan. They tried to manipulate the media through advertisement accusing the professional bodies ‘anti-development’ and dishonored the fellow professionals and criticized their role. Such incidences are clear indication of absence of guild loyalty. It also questions the scope of participation in the planning process. As mentioned earlier, allocation for land for residential use was too high in the proposed DAP. It seems that the primary intention of such allocation of residential category was to benefit Real Estate Developers and to legalize a significant number of illegal housing projects located in the conserved areas indicated in DMDP (Bangladesh Institute of Planners 2008). The consultant in cooperation with RAJUK totally ignored the environmental and social aspects of such development and worked as a machinery to ensure financial gain of the private corporations. To serve the interest of real estate companies, the consultant did not hesitate to propose road development inside the ecological sensitive area like existing retention pond (Fig. 25.2). So it could be concluded that the planning team of RAJUK and their consultants were more loyal to meet the interest of the real estate companies than citizen. From the very beginning, criticism of such planning approach by the professionals and fellow junior planners were not at all addressed by planning authority. As whistleblowers, some of the junior planers supported the coalition when they failed to convince their superiors regarding the drawback of the proposed plan.

25.3.1.7 Concern for Public Interest In planning literature the issue of social justice and equitable distribution of resource is considered as a planning and ethical goal of the planners (Marcuse 1976; Perloff 1980; American Planning Association (APA) 1992). Though draft DAP overestimated the housing demand in Dhaka, it was surprising that the planners failed to address the housing requirements of poor and middle income groups who constitute majority of the population of Dhaka. Instead it encouraged development of high income residential area

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Road inside Goran Chandbari RetenƟon Pond

Fig. 25.2 Road through ecologically critical area (retention pond). Source (Ganibangla Ltd. and DDC 2007)

through acquisition of low and middle income area. There was also proposal for gated community (Ganibangla Ltd. and DDC 2007). Transport land-use interaction was not viewed comprehensively. Some radical suggestions raised questions regarding the justifications in terms of cost and their impacts on transportation system. Though a large segment of the population is pedestrian and dependent on non-motorized transport (NMT) but no specific programs are proposed to develop and improve facilities for pedestrians and NMT. As mentioned earlier, four consultants were assigned for five planning zones and RAJUK was supposed to coordinate their task. But unfortunately, RAJUK failed to integrate the final output. The consultant only concentrated in their local area, as a result, regional level facilities were absent in the plan. For example, there was no provision of regional level hospitals and open spaces to accommodate growing population of Dhaka. As a public organization, RAJUK failed its basic responsibility to guide the consultants and to uphold the policies of DMDP.

25.3.2 Ethical Issues in Implementation of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) Implementation is the most important phase of planning. RAJUK gives planning permission to individuals, groups or businesses based on the Master plan (Government of Bangladesh 1987). As mentioned earlier, there was an allegation that to appease the powerful groups, government appointed a Ministerial Committee to review the DAP though there is no such provision from legal perspective. The committee in the name of reviewing the DAP, is seriously jeopardizing the environmental health of Dhaka. For example, in two meetings (Ministerial Committee for DAP Review 2014a, b) the committee approved 56 applications for land use class change among those 30 cases was were approved to convert flood flow zone/open space or water retention area to built-up area (mainly urban residential class). The committee also declared that all the privately owned small water bodies (below the

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size of 0.33 acre) which are not connected with water flow network and privately owned open space (below the size of 0.33 acre) are declassified from their respective land use class to the need of the owner. The three cases of Box 25.1, illustrates how the committee actually worked in supporting rich and powerful. It is also evident from the case studies that the appeals of the business houses and bureaucrats were approved by the Ministerial Committee while for the similar case individual applicant was denied. Box 25.1 Example of Cases Considered by Ministerial Committee for DAP Review Case 1 The applicant is a land developer. He applied for changing land use classification from Flood Flow Zone to Urban Residential Zone for one of his project. The application was accepted on condition of submitting reports on EIA, TIA and Water Modeling. In the next meeting he again applied for reconsideration of the conditions as development work for the project already started. The committee accepted his application on the condition that he has to implement the recommendations of the reports. But it was gross violation of Structure Plan (Government of Bangladesh 1997), DAP and Water body Conservation Act (Government of Bangladesh 2000) as nobody is allowed to do development work in flood flow zone before it is reclassified. Case 2 The applicant applied on behalf of government civil service in administrative cadre for change of land use from flood flow zone to urban residential area for 50 acres of land. The land is privately developed by the bureaucrats. A committee member who himself is a member of administrative service vouch that the area is ready for residential development in the ministerial committee meeting and The committee approved the change of land use classification on condition of water modeling. Administrative cadre was supposed to defend the laws of the land but this case illustrate that they worked to deter the law for their own benefit.

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Case 3 The applicant is an individual. He applied for changing land use classification from institutional to urban residential for his plot. His application was denied on the ground that the plot is currently vacant and this plot is big enough to set up a university. Moreover this plot is designated for institutional use in DAP. This case illustrates how the powerless individual was treated by the committee. The change sought by the applicant would have little impact to environment and society compared to the other changes approved by the committee. But it seems that the individual is not influential enough to change the landuse class from one built-up urban use to another built-up urban use while influential persons, businesses get permission to convert environmentally sensitive areas into built-up area. Source Ministerial Committee for DAP Review 2014a, b).

25.4

Practice of Ethical Code by Professional Planners

The Ethical Code of American Planning Association (1992) guide the planners of USA to practice ethically in order to uphold public interest, maintain high standard of integrity and proficiency and last but not the least pursue improvement in competency. In order to achieve these three goals, APA formulated 31 principles. As there is no ethical code for planners practicing in Bangladesh, the role of planners involved in DAP are evaluated (Table 25.1) in the light relevant principles applicable for the case of DAP. It was found that out of 31 principles 22 principles were applicable for planners working in DAP. Table 25.1 clearly portrays the ethical standard of the planning process in DAP. Out of the applicable 22 principles, only one was followed fully and another one partially. The rest was either simply ignored or some cases just went against it.

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Table 25.1 Relevance of APA code of practice in DAP Principle of APA code (as modified in May 1992)

Relevance in DAP

1. Recognize the rights of citizens to participate in planning decisions

Nominal scope of participation in planning process. Citizens were informed about the plan during the hearing of draft plan before finalization. At lowest rung of participation ladder by Arnstein (1969)

2. Strive to give citizens (including those who lack formal organization or influence) full, clear and accurate information on planning issues and the opportunity to have a meaningful role in the development of plans and programs

No attempts were made to give citizen full account of information on planning issues. There was instance when application for information was denied

3. Strive to expand choice and opportunity for all persons, recognizing a special responsibility to plan for the needs of disadvantaged groups and persons

In some cases opportunities and choices for disadvantage group were squeezed instead of expanding choice. Plan for low and middle income housing, integration of Non Motorized Traffic and provision of community facilities like open space, health and education are ignored

4. Assist in the clarification of community goals, objectives and policies in plan-making

No community goals, objectives and policies were set; So assistance in clarification was non-existent

5. Ensure that reports, records and any other non-confidential information which is, or will be, available to decision makers is made available to the public in a convenient format and sufficiently in advance of any decision

Deliberately tried to obstruct access to information

6. Strive to protect the integrity of the natural environment and the heritage of the built environment

Reclassified a significant amount of flood flow zone, water retention and agricultural land to urban residential use

7. Pay special attention to the inter relatedness of decisions and the long range consequences of present actions

No attention was given

8. Exercise fair, honest and independent judgment in their roles as decision makers and advisors

There is a feeling that planners were not decision maker rather they were exploited by the consulting firms and RAJUK to uphold the interest of the powerful stakeholders

9. Make public disclosure of all “personal interests” they may have regarding any decision to be made in the planning process in which they serve, or are requested to serve, as advisor or decision maker

No public disclosure was made on “personal interests”. Attempts were made to hide ‘conflict of interest’

10. Define “personal interest” broadly to include any actual or potential benefits or advantages that they, a spouse, family member or person living in their household might directly or indirectly obtain from a planning decision

No ‘conflict of interest’ clause was in ‘Expression of Interest’ and ‘Terms of Reference’ document

11. Abstain completely from direct or indirect participation as an advisor or decision maker in any matter in which they have a personal interest, and leave any chamber in which such a matter is under deliberation, unless their personal interest has been made a matter of public record; their employer, if any, has given approval; and the public official, public agency or court with jurisdiction to rule on ethics matters has expressly authorized their participation

One of the Lead Consultant has personal interest in real estate business

(continued)

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Table 25.1 (continued) Principle of APA code (as modified in May 1992)

Relevance in DAP

12. Seek no gifts or favors, nor offer any, under circumstances in which it might reasonably be inferred that the gifts or favors were intended or expected to influence a participant’s objectivity as an advisor or decision maker in the planning process

There was allegation that Director of the Project took bribe from real estate developer (Special Reporter 2009)

13. Not use confidential information acquired in the course of their duties to further a personal interest

There was allegation of using confidential information acquired in the course of duties for personal gain

14. Not disclose confidential information acquired in the course of their duties except when required by law, to prevent a clear violation of law or to prevent substantial injury to third persons; provided that disclosure in the latter two situations may not be made until after verification of the facts and issues involved and consultation with other planning process participants to obtain their separate opinions

There was allegation of using confidential information for other purposes

15. Not misrepresent facts or distort information for the purpose of achieving a desired outcome

There were many cases of misrepresentation of facts and distortion of information

16. Not participate in any matter unless adequately prepared and sufficiently capacitated to render thorough and diligent service

There were evidences in various meetings that the planning team was not prepared sufficiently

17. Respect the rights of all persons and not improperly discriminate against or harass others based on characteristics which are protected under civil rights laws and regulations

Personal attacks were launched against the critiques of the draft and final plan including threat of physical harm

18. Do not commit a deliberately wrongful act which reflects adversely on planning as a profession or seek business by stating or implying that they are prepared, willing or able to influence decisions by improper means

A deliberate attempt was made to estimate a very high population for DMDP area. The planners also unjustifiably allocated higher percentage of land use for residential and commercial use

19. Accurately represent their qualifications to practice planning as well as their education and affiliations

The planners accurately represent their qualifications to practice planning as well as their education and affiliations

20. Accurately represent the qualifications, views, and findings of colleagues

The planners accurately represent qualifications, views, and findings of colleagues in the planning team; however, view of professional colleagues who are not part of planning team often ignored or misrepresented

21. Treat fairly and comment responsibly on the professional views of colleagues and members of other professions

Professional views of colleagues who are not part of the planning teams and members of other professions were not treated fairly and even personal attacks were launched

22. Examine the applicability of planning theories, methods and standards to the facts and analysis of each particular situation and do not accept the applicability of a customary solution without first establishing its appropriateness to the situation

Did not follow any established guideline of planning. At the same time failed to establish the rationale behind the chosen methodology

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25.5

Conclusion

Discussions in this paper raised the question of value-laden nature of planning profession, the need of discourse while setting the vision and goals of a plan. It also raised issues regarding mandates of government organizations and their commitment to the society. We found that there is lack of will of the planners working in DAP for upholding professional honor in terms of guild loyalty, advancement of knowledge and performing statutory duties. Though planners are considered as the professional group who would give voice to the poor and powerless strata of the society but this role of planners was absent in DAP planning team. This paper also reveals the fact that within the government machinery it is difficult for planners’ particular junior officers to practice their own judgment due to stringent top-down approach. But at the same time, planners and other professional bodies showed their significant commitment and dedication to uphold social and environmental values of planning. It is also notable that the strong leadership and active role played by the Bangladesh Institute of Planners (BIP) compelled the government authority to step down from their rigid position. As a result, to some extent, the plan was revised to accommodate a number of necessary observations placed by the Technical Review Committee. All the discussions occurred during the final stage of DAP approval had definitely established a culture that plan prepared by the authority can be challenged and peoples’ voice needed to be heard. In the context of socio-political framework of Bangladesh, recognizing the environmental and social dimension in planning is definitely a mentionable win. The debates over DAP was able to create awareness among residents of Dhaka. Moreover, planning professionals working within government organizations and outside, both got a message that they are accountable to society and people. They need to make justice to their knowledge and expertise rather than merely satisfying their clients’ particular the powerful of the society. This paper tries to document the examples of gross violation of the approved plan by the special Ministerial

401

Committee within the development agency. Many academic forums and news media have reported on the cases of violation of DAP. This sort of reporting would definitely improve the platform of plan preparation and implementation in Bangladesh with supportive political will. The aim of this chapter was to document the series of activities involved in preparation and implementation of Detailed Area Plan for Dhaka Metro Area. These activities were analyzed in the light of planning ethics and professionalism. We do not claim that the presented case study of DAP is representative of general planning practice in Bangladesh. Rather it has been tried here to understand the reality of planning practice where various pressure groups are active to materialize their interest. This study is solely concerned about professional ethics in planning profession in Bangladesh not about individuals, agencies and individual actions. Acknowledgements We would like to thank all our colleagues from academic institutes, professional bodies and civil society organization who worked tirelessly with us during the time of movement against the proposed Draft DAP. We would also like to thank Dr. Afsana Haque who is maintaining the depository of all things related with DAP.

References Alam BM (2011) Are Anglo-American-Style normative planning theories applicable in South Asian cities? an exploratory study. Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde Arab 14(1):72–93 Ali T (2013) Death for Dhaka if DAP fails. The Daily Star, Dhaka, p 22 Ali T, Alam H (2010) DAP now official. The Daily Star, Dhaka, p 20 Ali T, Byron RK (2015) New 20 year DAP amid failure of the old one. The Daily Star, Dhaka, p 25 Ameen MS (1998) Growth potentials of a pre-mature mega city: an event of grim portent. Journal of Civil Engineering 6(2):151–72 American Planning Association (APA) (1992) Ethical Principles in Planning. Retrieved July 10 2017, from https://www.planning.org/ethics/ethicalprinciples.htm Anonymous (2013) Bangladesh Budget 2013–2014 and Implementation. Retrieved Nov 12, 2014, from http:// gurumia.com/2013/06/09/bangladesh-budget-2013-20 14-and-implementation/

402 Anonymous (2014) RAJUK chairman Deny graft in plot distribution. The Independent. Dhaka Arnstein SR (1969) A ladder of citizen participation. J Am Instit Plann 35(4):216–224 Bangladesh Institute of Planners (2008) Detail Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka: shattering the vision of DMDP. The Daily Star, Dhaka, p 18 Bhuiyan K (2014, March 2, 2014) 80pc Wetlands and Flood Flow Zones Filled Up. Retrieved 26 Jan 2015, from http://www.steinandpartners.com/eco/80pcwetlands-and-flood-flow-zones-filled-up Byron RK, Ali T (2014) Amnesty to breed more black money: govt to gain little yet welcomes taka-legalising in real estate. The Daily Star, Dhaka, p 24 Campbell H, Marshall R (1998) Acting on principle: dilemmas in planning practice. Plann Pract Res 13 (2):117–128 Cook A, Sarkissian W (2000) Who cares? Australian planners and ethics. Local Government: Public Enterprise and Ethics. P. Bishop and N. Preston. Sydney, Federation Press: 112–137 DDC (2007) Detailed Area Plan of Dhaka (Draft). Rajdhani Unnayan Kotripokkho (RAJUK), Dhaka EPC (2007) Detailed Area Plan of Dhaka (Draft). Rajdhani Unnayan Kotripokkho (RAJUK), Dhaka Filion P (1996) Metropolitan planning objectives and implementation constraints: planning in a Post-Fordist and Postmodern Age. Environ Plann A 28(9):1637– 1660 Friedmann J (1987) Planning in the public domain: from knowledge to action. Princeton University Press Ganibangla Ltd DDC (2007) Detailed area plan of Dhaka (Draft). Rajdhani Unnayan Kotripokkho (RAJUK), Dhaka Government of Bangladesh (1987) Town Improvement (Amendent) Act, Government of Bangladesh. Act 29/1987 Government of Bangladesh (1997) Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (1995–2015), Government of Bangladesh. SRO 184/97 Government of Bangladesh (2000) Waterbody Conservation Act, Government of Bangladesh. Act No 36/2000 Government of Bangladesh (2006) The Public Procurement Act, Government of Bangladesh Act no 24/2006 Government of Bangladesh (2009a) Local government (municipality) law (Local Government Paurashava) Act) Government of Bangladesh. Act No 58/2009 Government of Bangladesh (2009b) Local Government (City Corporation) Ordinance Local Government (City Corporation) Ordinance, Government of Bangladesh. Act 60/2009 Government of Bangladesh (2009c) Local Government (Union Council) Act (Local Government (Union Parishad) Act), Government of Bangladesh. Act no 61/2009 Hammadi S (2008) Hotchpotch map on faulty plan. The New Age, Dhaka Hillier J (1993) To boldly go where no planners have ever. Environ Plann D Soc Space 11(1):89–113

S. Akther and I. Islam Howe E, Kaufman J (1979) The ethics of contemporary American planners. J Am Plann Assoc 45(3):243–255 Kabir A, Parolin B (2010) Planning and Development of Dhaka—a Story of 400 years. In: 15th international planning history society conference, Sao Paulo, International Planning History Society Low N (1991) Planning. Political Foundations of Planning Thought London, Unwin Hyman, Politics and the State Mahmud MA (2007) Corruption in plan permission process in RAJUK: a study of violations and proposals. Transparency International, Dhaka Marcuse P (1976) Professional ethics and beyond: values in planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 42(3): 264–274 Ministerial Committee for DAP Review (2014a) Minutes of Records of the Meeting Held on 4th June 2014. Dhaka Ministerial Committee for DAP Review (2014b) Minutes of Records of the Meeting Held on 25th August 2014. Dhaka Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (2001) National Rural Development Policy, Government of Bangladesh Minsitry of Land (2001) National Land Use Policy, Government of Bangladesh Nedovic-Budic Z (2000) Geographic information science: implications for urban and regional planning. URISA J 12(2):81–93 Perloff HS (1980) Planning the post industrial city. APA press, Chicago Potter R (2012) Urbanisation and planning in the third world: spatial perceptions and public participation, Routledge Priyo desk (2011) RAJUK Corruption Makes Dhaka an Unplanned City-TIB. Retrieved 10th Oct 2014, from http://news.priyo.com/law-and-order/2011/07/03/ rajuk-corruption-makes-dhaka-u-30546.html Ratan RI (2010) Experts have created a radical change in the opinion of the DPA. (For whose interest DAP prepared by Expert has been drastically changed by Review Committee?). Daily Jugantor. Dhaka. 11:20 Reade E (1987) British town and country planning. Oxford University Press, Milton Keynes SAMAN, HAN A Urban Research Institute, et al (2015) Dhaka Structure Plan 2016–35 (draft). Dhaka Shelltech (Pvt) Ltd (2007) Detailed Area Plan of Dhaka (Draft). Dhaka, Rajdhani Unnayan Kotripokkho (RAJUK) Shelltech (Pvt) Ltd and Dial Consultants Ltd (2007) Detailed Area Plan of Dhaka (Draft). Dhaka, Rajdhani Unnayan Kotripokkho (RAJUK) Special Reporter (2009) Due to corruption, the implementation of RAJUK’s DAP project is not progressing (RAJUK’s DAP project implementation is stalled due to corruption). Top News (The Shirsho Khobor). 5:17–8 Technical Working Group (2010) DAP Review. Technical Review Committee for DAP, Dhaka

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Wachs M (1985) Ethics in Planning. Transaction Publishers Winter I, Brooke T (1993) Urban planning and the entrepreneurial state: the view from Victoria, Australia. Environ Plann C Government Policy 11 (3):263–78

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Part VI National and Local Responses to Urban Transformations

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India: Spatial Planning Implications

26

Sudhir K. Thakur

Abstract

The Indian economy has shown a high rate of growth of gross domestic product of 7.56% during 2015–16 relative to 6.69% during 2011– 12. In the post-liberalization economic era the size of fiscal debt has been skyrocketing as well. The fiscal debt is defined as the difference between total government expenditure and current revenue which has been escalating to an unsustainable level in recent periods. Maharashtra the most industrialized state in Western India has the largest debt followed by Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal in Central and Eastern India. Also, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in the south have witnessed the maximum increase in debt during the past five years. Although Kaur et al. (2014) suggest that debt position of states at the aggregate level is sustainable. Gupta (2001) on the contrary opined unsustainability of debt at the state level. Government borrows debt to finance plan expenditure such as building roads, dams and airports and non-plan expenditure such as paying salaries or making interest payments. Debt is not bad provided states are growing at a rapid economic rate to service loans. This implies the interest payment to gross state domestic product (GSDP) ratio will be a better

S. K. Thakur (&) College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

indicator of sustainability. Using these criteria, it is observed that states from all corners in India, i.e. Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Gujarat and Punjab have been consistently paying huge amounts of servicing costs. Given this overview, this research examines temporal and spatial patterns of state debt in India during the period 2002–15. National and state level data are utilized to study the spatial analysis of state debt in India for 30 regions comprising 28 states and 2 territories, i.e. National Capital Territory of Delhi and Puducherry. The following questions are addressed in this paper: (1) What insights does the literature on public debt provide in improving the understanding of the relationship between public debt and growth? (2) What are the broad trends of public debt and regional inequality in India at the state level? and (3) What are the characteristics of space-time patterns of public debt in India during 1991–2015? Several spatial analytical methods such as Gini Coefficient, Kernel density, Theil Entropy and regression analysis are utilized to identify and describe spatial patterns of state liability and its geographical dynamics in India. Data for analysis are obtained from Planning Commission and Reserve Bank of India. Spatial planning implications are addressed as well. Keywords

India


Public debt

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_26

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26.1

S. K. Thakur

Introduction

Geography of finance has been burgeoning and has been at the center stage of economic geographic inquiry in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown of 2008. It examines such themes as ‘financial globalization’ and the ‘geographic patterns of finance’ (Martin 1999; Clark and Wojcik 2007). Further, this field studies themes like sovereignty, culture and different barriers that affect the spatial distribution of finance. It examines three areas: ‘uneven development and financial exclusion’, ‘global and local connectivity of financial flows and networks’ and the ‘creation of new financial networks’ (Nagurney and Siokos 1997). The financial meltdown affected the Western world vehemently, especially US and the European nations leading to an explosion of public debt ranging from 53% to almost 80% (The Economist 2015). To recover from the recession developed countries pump-primed their economies with low-interest rates, and quantitative easing to make available cheap money to the economy for providing financial stimulus. Rajan (2010) in his opus ‘Fault Lines’ aptly explains how individual choices have collectively led to the economic meltdown. The decisions made by bankers, government officials; homeowners were essentially rational responses to a defective global financial order in which the short-term benefits of the risks were outweighed by the dangers of the risks that it posed. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) studied the relationship between public debt and growth for a sample of advanced countries, and aptly prescribed that if debt levels were higher than 90%, than growth rates taper off sharply. This stylized fact has been relegated by Herdnon et al. (2014) on grounds of methodological limitations. Similarly, in Europe Stiglitz (2016) noted the prevailing economic stagnation and debt crisis in several pockets of the 19-member Eurozone especially Greece, Italy and Spain which has generated questions of ‘sustainability of debt’. At the extreme, it has been shown that in post-war Britain debt ratio of over more than 200% still generated a solid medium-term growth (The

Economist, March 1, 2014). This global overview leads to the question, that if an economy experiences skyrocketing public debt what should the government do? Ostry et al. (2010) provide three scenarios: (1) if the economy experiences unsurmountable levels of debt which is a malaise for growth than a rapid reduction in indebtedness is warranted through taxes and reduction in expenditure, (2) if the debt levels are moderate than Keynesian demand management would prescribe consolidation, with increase in the public investment while interest rates are still low and (3) a middle ground would suggest if debt sustainability is not an issue than it could be reduced organically through growth and revenue availability. These responses depend upon the ‘fiscal space’ available to government. A fiscal space is defined as the distance between the ratio of debt-to-GDP and an assumed upper limit beyond which action would have to be taken to avoid default and bankruptcy (Ostry et al. 2010). The Indian economy during the start of the planning era in 1951–52 grew at a rate of 2.33%, which subsequently increased to 5.63% during 1981–82. This rate of growth declined significantly in 1991–92 to 1.43% due to the ‘balance of payments’ crises. During 2001–02 the rate of growth rebounded to 5.39%, which further increased impressively to a rate of 8.91% during 2010–11 (Fig. 26.1). The current rate of growth is 7.2% at the beginning of 2018. Economists are of the view that during the past several decades the Indian economy has been experiencing an exponential increase in the absolute size of fiscal deficit, especially since the period 2007–08 (Fig. 26.2). This leads to the question of sustainability of debt (Thirlwall 2011). Is it possible that after a certain period, even though the Indian economy needs additional resources for development, the disadvantages of additional loan outweigh the benefits of it? It is conceivable that during the process of attaining higher growth additional government borrowing is needed to promote capital formation under the assumption that investments would result in a higher rate of return. And this positive rate of return will be utilized to pay service costs of borrowing.

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

26

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Rate of Growth (%)

15 GDP Growth (constant, 2004-05)

10 5

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2008-09

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-5

1951-52

0

-10 Fig. 26.1 Gross domestic product rate of growth for Indian economy: 1951–52 to 2013–14. Commission, Government of India and Economic Survey, 2014–15

900000 800000 700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0

Source Planning

2014-15 (BE)

2012-13

2013-14(BE)

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Fig. 26.2 Fiscal deficit of center and states in India: 1990–91 to 2014–15. Source State Finances, a study of budget, 2015–16

Governments borrow either to meet plan expenditure or non-plan expenditure. Plan-expenditure is defined as spending on such items as roads, dams, schools and hospitals; whereas non-plan expenditure comprises expenditure on paying salaries and interest payments. The former is categorized as productive expenditure generating more revenue, and the latter is categorized as unproductive expenditure. In addition, debt-financing is necessary for raising aggregate demand and decreasing high unemployment to restore full-employment equilibrium. Additionally, debt is justified if the investment is related to intergeneration equity. This means that if government policies deliver economic benefits to multi-generations and

require elevated levels of investment in the short-run then future generations should bear the cost burden (Neck and Sturm 2008). The reality is that debt has always been drawn by governments to reconcile the gap between income and expenditure. All borrowings whether domestic, foreign or private involve repayment obligations. First, the loan must be repaid over a certain number of years referred to as amortization payments, and second, interest payments will be paid as servicing costs till maturity of loan. Since the fiscal imbalance has been exponentially increasing in India during the past decade it would imply that cost of servicing will be rising as well. Thus, debt becomes unsustainable when it accumulates at a faster pace than the ability to

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pay servicing costs. The implication of this trend is that it will discourage domestic and foreign investment, with the perception that deflation will take place and they will be taxed to service the debts deterring any further investment. Given this overview, this research is at the intersection of financial geography and spatial analysis. It investigates the space-time trends of public debt in India. Three broad research questions are addressed in this paper: (1) What insights does the literature on public debt provide in improving the understanding of the relationship between public debt and growth? (2) What are the broad trends of public debt and regional inequality in India at the state level? And (3) What are the characteristics of space-time patterns of public debt in India during 1991– 2015? Several descriptive statistics such as measures of dispersion, Gini coefficient, Kernel density, Theil Entropy are computed to identify trends of state liability in India. Data for analysis are obtained from Planning Commission and Reserve Bank of India. The remainder of the paper is divided into six sections. The second section succinctly develops the analytical framework, reviews the spatial dimensions of public debt research in developed countries and in India. The third section pursues the discussion on the structure, types, composition and growth of public debt in India. The fourth section discusses the methodology of exploratory spatial data analysis. The fifth section provides an interpretation of the results and the last section concludes with implications for future research.

26.2

Public Debt and Spatial Analysis

26.2.1 Analytical Framework A budget deficit is defined as the difference between government expenditure and income and tax receipts. More so, it can be

conceptualized as the sum of spending and interest payment on debt less taxes net of transfers. The big question is what will happen if the government starts with a balanced budget and later decides to cut taxes leading to a deficit? Would this generate increased debt overtime, and would the government need to increase taxes at a later period and by what size? Blanchard (2009) provides an analytical framework to understand the growth and evolution of debt (Eqs. 26.1– 26.5). Budget deficit can be expressed as ðDt ¼ Bt  Bt1 Þ: Dt ¼ sBt1 þ Gt  Xt

ð26:1Þ

Dt is deficit in year t Bt1 is government debt at the end of year t  1 and thus, sBt1 is the product of real interest rate and debt in year t s is real interest rate which will be assumed to be constant Gt is government spending on goods and services during year t Xt are taxes subtracting transfers during year t In Eq. (26.1) the first term on the right-hand side is the interest payment and second term is the primary deficit. Substituting Dt in Eq. 26.1 and rearranging terms the equation can be expressed in terms of Bt . Bt ¼ ð1 þ sÞBt1 þ Gt  Xt

ð26:2Þ

The second equation implies debt in year t is the sum of two terms: debt at end of year t  1 multiplied by (1 + s) and added to the primary deficit ðGt  Xt Þ at the end of year t. This formulation will be useful to explore the implications of a one-year decrease in taxes to the evolution of debt and future taxes. Let us assume that at the beginning of year 1 the debt is zero, then during year 1 the government decreases taxes by (1 million Rupees) for one year. Therefore, debt at the end of year 1 will be 1 million Rupees. If the government waits to pay till year t, then debt at the end of year t  1 will be determined by

26

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

Bt1 ¼ ð1 þ sÞt2

ð26:3Þ

Analogously, if taxes are cut only in year 1, the debt keeps rising over time akin to the rate of interest. The payment of debt would lead the government to incur a primary surplus equal to Xt  Gt ¼ ð1 þ sÞt1

ð26:4Þ

t1

ð1 þ sÞ during year t. This has two implications. First, if the government spending is unchanged, then a decrease in taxes today can only be paid off by a higher tax in future; second, the longer the wait to increase taxes, the higher the possibility of a hike in interest rate and an eventual increase in future taxes. Therefore, in the context of sustainable debt policy-makers must be aware that first, past deficits will lead to higher government debt, second, to stabilize debt, the deficit needs to be paid off, and finally, to eliminate deficit, some primary surplus needs to be maintained equal in magnitude to the existing debt which leads to higher taxes in perpetuity. Further, an economy undergoes fluctuations in economic activity, thereby suggesting output expansion or contraction over time. Thus, the evolution of debt can be understood if debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio is analyzed over time and space. Equation 26.5 depicts the relationship between output growth assumed to be constant and measured by ðZt Þ and the rate of growth of output measured by (h). Bt Bt1 Bt1 Gt  Xt  ¼ ð s  hÞ þ Zt Zt1 Zt1 Zt

ð26:5Þ

Equation (26.5) encapsulates the evolution of debt as a ratio of GDP over time. The simple interpretation is that change is debt over time is a sum of two components. The first component is the difference between real interest rate and the growth rate multiplied by the initial debt ratio, and the second component is the primary deficit as a ratio of GDP. This equation manifests richer analysis of the determinants of public debt analysis: debt ratio will be higher if the interest rate is higher; it will be higher if rate of growth of output is lower, debt ratio will be higher if the

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initial debt ratio is higher, and debt ratio will be higher if the ratio of primary deficit to GDP is higher. This interpretation provides the rationale for selecting debt to GDP ratio for an in-depth spatial analysis of public debt in India at the state level.

26.2.2 Public Debt and Regional Development: Western Studies In the wake of the recent financial turmoil the relationship between public debt and economic growth has caught immense attention in developed market economies. Fincke and Greiner (2015) detail the analytical foundations, mechanism of the effects of public debt on the short-term and long-term as well. They further delve into the allocation of resources aspect under the effects of distortionary taxation. Reinhart and Rogoff (2009, 2010) posited an inverse relationship between high debt and growth relationship. They classified their sample data into groups with more than 90% debt, 60–90% debt and 0–30% debt. In their observation GDP growth reduces to a snail pace once government debt exceeds 90% of GDP (also known as debtburden cliff) and countries experience a spiraling downward rate of growth as debt level increases. This relationship is posited to be non-linear. The debt levels are benign until a critical level is attained, and then growth rates steadily decline as borrowing rises beyond a threshold is crossed, with subsequent tax revenue declines and spending increases. Beyond that critical threshold there is an eminent danger of default and financial panic and interest rates can rise leading to financial market stress, and difficult choices such as austerity, inflation or default are the only options. Reinhart and Rogoff’s (2010) study was severely criticized when the analysis was replicated since the former study was limited by coding errors in the spreadsheet, exclusion of data and data gaps in their analysis (Herdnon et al. 2014). Gomez-Puig and Sosvilla-Rivero (2015) studied the relationship between debt and growth for detecting a possible existence of

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bi-directional causal relationships in the central and peripheral countries of the European Union. Their analysis tested for the presence of heterogeneity in the bi-directional Granger-causality across both time and space during the period 1980 and 2013. A rigorous analysis supported evidence of a ‘diabolic loop’ between low economic growth and high public debts in Spain especially during post-2009 period, and a negative effect overgrowth in countries like Belgium, Greece, Italy and Netherlands for high debt thresholds. Subsequently, Neck and Sturm (2008) and their colleagues analyzed sustainability of public debt in developed Western nations (US, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, UK and Switzerland) and determined that fiscal policy turns out to be sustainable in the long-run and most of the countries (except Italy) returned to sustainability path after a short duration of unsustainability. Further, positive public debt is often justified on grounds of inter-generational equity. Government spending on upfront costs on such projects as schools, hospitals and public infrastructure benefits future and current generations. If the current generation picks the costs, then they will not reap the full benefits of the public spending. The benefit of social infrastructure is reaped by future generations as well and hence they should bear the costs too. Several researches by economists examine the public debt and growth relationship from a spatial perspective. Also, such an analysis attempted to derive a stylized fact that could fit policy prescriptions for all countries and did not consider the possibility that context might matter, and local economic structure might vary among countries (Bell et al. 2015). Further, they posit the importance of spatial heterogeneity and employ a multilevel distributed lag modeling framework to conclude the direction of causation is positive between debt and growth is positive. This observation is limited with the caveat that spatial variations exist among countries. Borck et al. (2015) investigate the theme of geographical spread in debt in German municipalities as a function of a neighboring municipality increase in per-capita debt. They derive a reaction of the

S. K. Thakur

jurisdiction’s debt levels in response to their neighbor’s debt levels and then determine the spatial interdependence of public debt among a panel of municipalities in the two largest states of NRW and Bavaria during 1996–2006. Analysis reveals an increase in municipalities per capital debt to the extent of 16 Euro in NRW and 33 Euro in Bavaria for a 100 Euro increase in debt per capita in neighboring municipalities. Such a trend would call for a spatial policy for curbing public debt. The ‘debt overhang hypothesis’ posits that a region’s unmanageable debt can have a detrimental effect on the economic growth via its negative effect on investor’s rate of return. Romero and Burkley (2011) examine this phenomenon in the Eurozone with an explicit focus on the spillover effects and heterogeneity that debt has on neighboring countries. They utilize a spatial Durbin model to conclude that a concave relationship exists between debt/GDP ratio and growth and at a certain level a turning point occurs. Their analysis posited that the turning point occurs at a lower debt/GDP ratio due to the spatial effects. Further, their analysis identified spatial vectors such as a strong spatial relationship between GDP growth and neighbor’s GDP growth, implying that when a country’s growth declines it will negatively influence neighbor’s growth too. Mitze and Matz (2015) explored the short-term and long-term relationships between regional public debt intensities and growth for German federal states between 1970 and 2010 periods. Analysis revealed a significantly negative relationship between regional public debt and per capital GDP in the long-run. Further, this inverse relationship is not of a miniscule level for the interregional differences in per capita GDP levels. Statistical results show that a 1% increase in the debt intensity reduces the long term per capita GDP level by −0.01 to −0.05%. The relationship between public debt and spatial distribution of output in the context of a two-region model has been explored in an analytical framework using New Economic Geography model (Trionfetti 2015). Assume two countries that have an identical current tax rates, whose government budget initially balances. Further, assume that one country creates public

26

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

debt by reducing taxation today and increases it at a future time consistent with inter-temporal budget constraint. This neutral fiscal policy induces migration away from the country in short-term debt to benefit from tax reduction today and in the future. Three policy implications can be identified: first, temporary debt divergence and convergence leads to destabilization of spatial configuration, second, debt overhang reduces the ability of the country to engage in international tax competition and third, a policy of debt convergence makes the debt reducing country stronger player in tax competition in the long-run and weaker in the short-run. Thus, the spatial integrated social sciences framework can be utilized for exploring public debt analysis. There is scope for analysis of the space-time patterns and geographical dynamics of public debt research.

26.2.3 Studies in Regional Public Debt in India Public debt in India refers to the borrowings of the Central and State government. Debt can be a good instrument for enhancing development by paying for plan expenditure such as building roads and dams and non-plan expenditure like paying for salary and interest payment. The total debt of the state government has increased substantially from Rupees 8,749 crores [1 crore = 10 million] in 1971 to Rupees 27,729 crores in 1982, to Rupees 158,853 crores during 1994 and to a whooping Rupees 105,583.23 crores in the form of loans and advances from public sector undertakings and the Central government as of March 31st, 2015 (Misra and Puri 1996; Patil in The Hindu 2016). Several studies have analyzed the relationship between public debt and growth in the Indian context and have observed a mixed outcome. Many observed that the debt position of states is not sustainable, and others noted the declining debt to GDP ratio attributable to improving economic performance at state levels in India. Bansal (2001) in an eight-year study (1990–91 to 1997–98) examined the development and non-development expenditure and

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surplus/deficit patterns across Indian states. No consistent pattern could be identified although states such as Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Nagaland, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal showed high shares of non-development expenditure. An optimistic picture has been noted on the fiscal health of Indian states barring Haryana Jharkhand, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. The remainder of Indian states have shown stabilized state public debt as a proportion of GSDP (Makin and Arora 2012). The fiscal health of Indian states during the latter part of 1990s escalated due to four factors: (1) declining central transfers due to diminishing central tax revenues, (2) there was pay and pension revision of employees, (3) increasing government debt and its steady accumulation had adverse impact on cost of borrowing thereby, making the state’s borrowing cost soar up, and (4) coalition politics at the center and states has led to proliferation of subsidies and transfers (Rao and Jena 2009). Kaur and Mukherjee (2012) opined a statistically significant non-linear relationship between public debt and growth in India. The implication of this evidence is a negative relation among debt and growth at higher levels. The threshold level of debt to GDP ratio is 61% beyond which a negative relationship is observed between debt and growth. This has an implication for debt sustainability and calls for fiscal consolidation in the wake of potential adverse debt dynamics. Further, Kaur et al. (2014) studied 20 states for the period 1980–81 to 2012–13 and observed that debt level of the Indian states is sustainable in the long-run. However, a disaggregated analysis suggests an overall improvement in performance of Indian states, although some states show a disconcerting sign of fiscal stress and heightened debt burden. Gupta (2001) on the contrary opined unsustainability of debt at the state level in India. Bajpai and Sach’s (1999) analysis of the state government finances in India suggested fiscal lacunae. They opined while expenditure to GDP ratio had reduced, the ratio of internal public debt to GDP has incessantly increased. Also, the debt service burden has persistently increased since interest rates have risen.

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And the composition of government spending has shown a lop-sided pattern towards unproductive current expenditure, moving away from basic infrastructure provision and human resource development. They have recommended several areas for cutting expenditures at center and state governments such as ‘interest payment on domestic debt’, ‘fertilizer and food subsidies’, ‘public administration’, ‘grants to the states’ and ‘losses of public sector enterprises’. Further a privatization approach in water and electricity departments where user charges are aligned to cost incurred in providing services would fulfil the goal of cutting budgetary losses. The fiscal health of Indian states has been of concern and the Eleventh Finance Commission made suggestions that led to the creation of a Fiscal Reform Facility (2000–01 to 2004–05). The aim of this facility was to incentivize the states to take a short-term reform measures that will address improvements in revenue deficits to the extent of 25%. Several states such as Karnataka (2002), Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab (2003) enacted legislation on fiscal responsibility and budget management. Further, this effort set a precedence that led to the enactment of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003. This act manifested in furthering the urgency of fiscal consolidation by Indian states but did not lay a strategy of achieving a sustainable debt trajectory (Kishore and Prasad 2007). An analysis of state budgets reveals Maharashtra incurred the largest debt of Rupees 338,730 followed by Uttar Pradesh with Rupees 293,620 crore and West Bengal with Rupees 280,440 crores. The southern state of Tamil Nadu has witnessed the maximum increase in debt (92%) during the past five years followed by Karnataka with 85% and Andhra Pradesh with 78%. Debt for all the major states have increased to the extent of 66% during the past five years from Rupees 1,648,650 crores during 2010 to Rupees 2,733,630 crore during 2015 (Salve 2015). The State Finance report (Reserve Bank of India 2008–09) opined the level of development expenditure as a proportion of GDP increased from 9.2% during 2005–06 to 10.5% during 2007–08 and non-development expenditure

S. K. Thakur

declined from 5.3 to 5.1% during the same period. Also, the proportion of social sector expenditure which had dropped during 1999–2000 to 2003– 04, rose subsequently from 5.1% of GDP to 6.3 during 2008–09 (Kapila 2009; Reserve Bank of India 2008–09). The report from Reserve Bank of India (RBI 2015–16) titled ‘State Finances: A Study of Budgets 2015–16’ states the introduction of an indirect tax called the Goods and Services Tax (GST) (Government of India July 2017) would have economy-wide ramifications with respect to growth, inflation, government finance and external competition. This form of taxation would be a single tax due based on value added and would replace the myriad of local and national taxes. This form of taxation will champion a new form of cooperative federalism in India based on the collaboration of Center and States. It will be the vehicle of State governments which will manifest in a trajectory towards fiscal consolidation without squeezing productive expenditure. The study notes the consolidated fiscal position of states deteriorated immensely during 2014–15 and 2015–16 (revised estimates). Further, many states estimated for an improvement in 2016–17 (budget estimates), data for almost 25 states show decline in fiscal health (Reserve Bank of India 2016).

26.3

Structure, Types and Composition of Public Debt in India

The vital role of government is to provide public goods and services to its citizens. Most governments perform this task by taxation, borrowing or by printing money to pay for capital formation in the public sector and investment in priority areas in the private sector. The public expenditure of the government has increased exponentially during recent decades in India since borrowings were not directed towards projects that yielded positive rate of return. Instead the fiscal crisis has deepened since revenue expenditure has exceeded current revenue, and capital expenditure financed by borrowings has not generated expected rates of return. The provision of social

26

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

services by taxation has its limits and once the economy reaches an upper bound the only way to pay for further services is through borrowings. In this context public debt is defined as the debt owed by Central Government or State Government to RBI, banks and other financial institutions. Thus, such a mechanism of government financing of development plans through borrowings has become a valuable tool of development in less developed nations. The difference between total government expenditure and current revenue is termed fiscal deficit. It is also referred to as the net borrowings of the government or the net addition to public debt. Figure 26.3 shows the structure of public debt in India. Indian public debt can be delineated into major components, i.e. debt obligations of the Central government and State government. Further Central government debt can broadly be divided into three categories: internal debt, external debt and other liabilities. The internal debt constitutes borrowings through market loans, treasury bills, special securities issued to RBI, special bearer bonds, special floating and other loans, small savings, Provident Funds, reserve funds and deposits (Bhattacharya and Guha 1990). The internal debt was of the size of Rupees 398.64 billion during 1980–81, which increased to Rupees 1540.04 billion during 1990–91, and subsequently increased to Rupees 8036.98 billion during 2000–01 and Rupees 26671.15 billion. Currently, the internal debt in India is of the magnitude of Rupees 58017.76 billion. During 1980–81 and 1990–91 the internal debt increased almost five-fold, between 1990–91 and 2000–01 the increment was a little over five times, during the penultimate decade 2000–01 and 2010–11 the increase dropped to a little over three times in the intervening period. And during 2010–11 and 2016–17 the increase in internal debt was almost a little over two times. Market loans are a key component of internal debt and have maturity period of 12 months or more at the time of issue. These loans are interest bearings and are sold in the open market by the sale of securities by the Reserve Bank of India of any maturity on its own account (Gupta 1979). During the period 1980–81 to 1989–90 the

415 Structure of Public Debt in India Central Government Debt

Internal Debt: 1. Market Loans 2. Special Bearer Bonds 3. Treasury Bills 4. Special Floating and other loans 5. Special Securities Issued to RBI 6. Small Savings 7. Provident Funds 8. Reserve Funds and Deposits

State Government Debt

Internal Debt Loans and Advances from Central Government Provident Funds etc.,

External Debt: IMF, IBRD, WB, Japan, USA, UK, France Other Liabilities

Fig. 26.3 Structure of public debt in India. Misra and Puri (1996)

Source

average rate of growth of market loans was 33.15% which increased to 36.37% during the post-liberalization period in 1990–91 to 1999–00. This rate of growth declined sharply to 18.90% during 2000–01 to 2009–10 and continued to decline further during 2010–11 to 2016–17 to an average rate of growth of 16.7% (Fig. 26.4). Another component of internal debt is the Treasury bill (TB) for 91 or 364 days. This is an important source of short-term funds for the government to close the gap between revenue and expenditure. The TB is usually issued to the Reserve Bank of India, Commercial Banks, State Governments and other financial institutions. The average rate of growth of TB for 91 days increased by 9.59% during 1980–81 to 1989–90 which declined to a negative rate of growth of (–) 7.81 during 1990–91 to 1999–00. In the penultimate decade of 2000–01 to 2009–10 the average rate of growth increased by 371.3% and then subsequently dropped to 24.9% during the period 2010–11 to 2016–17. Another component of internal public debt of Central government is the small savings and provident funds. The small savings in the Indian economy has increased due the overall improvement in the performance of the Indian economy during the post-liberalization period, as well as the provision of alternative schemes of encouraging savings by the

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S. K. Thakur

Fig. 26.4 Rate of growth of public debt in India: temporal. Source Data from RBI calculated by Author

government. Likewise, Provident Funds are contributions made by employees and employers which the employees get paid back upon retirement. This category of internal debt increased at an average rate of growth of 38.4% during 1980– 81 and 1989–90 and dropped surreptitiously to 0.75% during 1990–91 and 1999–00. It rebounded back to an average rate of growth 54.41% during 2000–01 to 2009–10. It declined to a low of 3.75% average rate of growth during 2010–11 and 2016–17. Another category of internal debt composition is the reserve funds and deposits which can be divided into interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing components. This category includes items such as depreciation and reserve funds of railways and department of posts and telecommunication. This category increased at an annual growth rate of 43.09% during 1980–81 and 1989–90 and dropped by almost 75% during most of the remaining period’s, i.e.11.67%, 10.40% and 11.95% in 1990–91 and 1999–00, 2000–01 and 2009–10, and 2010–11 and 2016– 17. Another major category of the Central government’s debt obligation is the external debt. This amounts to mobilization of resources in foreign nations and international banks to finance development and infrastructure projects a home. This debt rose at an annual average rate of growth of 38.9% during 1980–81 and 1989–90, which mirrors the pre-liberalization period of balance of payment crisis. In the

post-liberalization period, the volume of external liabilities has precipitously declined from a low of 18.67% average rate of growth during 1990– 91 to 1999–00, to 2.48% and 9.47% during the periods 2000–01 and 2009–10 as well as 2010– 11 and 2016–17. Thus, total liabilities increased from Rupees 619.30 billion to Rupees 3058.86 billion during 1989–90 and a magnitude of Rupees 76250.02 billion during 2016–17. This translates to an increase in external debt at an average rate of growth of 39.38% to a high of 77.13% during the twenty-seven-year period from 1990–91 to 2016–17 (Fig. 26.5). Like the Central government, the State government requires financial resources for paying expenses towards education, infrastructure and services for its citizens. Debt obligations of the state government can be divided into three categories: (1) internal debt, (2) loans and advances from the Central government and (3) State Provident funds. A key component of internal debt is the market loans or open market operations. The market loans during the three decades 1980–2010 increased steadily from 33.7% annual rate of growth during 1980–81 to 1989–90, to 38.1% during 1990–91 to 1999–00, to 51.6% during 2000–01 to 2009–10 with a freefall to 17.6% rate of growth during 2010–11 and 2015–16. The annual rate of growth for total internal debt for State government increased from 26.4% to 54.9% and 49.9% during the three decades 1980–81 to 1989–90, 1990–91 to

26

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

417

Fig. 26.5 Rate of growth of public debt in India: spatial trend. Source Data from RBI, calculated by Author

1999–00 and 2000–01 to 2009–2010. During the last half, a decade (2010–11 to 2015–16) the annual rate of growth of internal debt dropped to 13.5%. A major component of State government’s loan comprises of loans and advances from Central government. This loan declined from 63.3 to 5.5% during the periods 1980–81 to 2015–16. Loans and advances from the Central government to State has been declining over the past three and half-decades. It grew at an annual rate of growth of 27.7% during 1980–81 to 1980–90, then decreased to 21.3% during 1990–91 to 1999–00 and further declined to a (–) 4.0% during 2000–01 to 2009–10 and more recently increased to 3.22% during 2010–11 and 2015–16. Another category of State government loan is State Provident Funds which constituted 8.15% of the total loans in 1980–81 and this marginally has increased to 9.97% during 2015–16. The annual rate of growth during pre-liberalization period, i.e. 1980–81 to 1989–90 was 42.6% and during post-liberalization period (1990–91 to 2015–16) increased substantially to 81.1% annual rate of growth. Likewise, reserve funds increased from 1.6 to 5.1% during 1980–81 and 2015–16 and in terms of volume from Rupees 4.49 billion to Rupees 1538.86 billion during 1980–81 and 2015– 16. Finally, total liabilities increased from Rupees

267.83 during 1980–81 to Rupees 31043.80 billion during 2015–16. The increase disaggregated into pre- and post-liberalization period depicts an annual rate of growth of 31.01% during 1980–81 to 1989–90; and during the post-liberalization period increased by 89.3% annual rate of growth during 1999–00 to 2015–16.

26.4

Research Methodology

The period (1991–2015) has been chosen since the then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh steered the Indian economy in the wake of balance of payments crisis and adopted structural reforms policies: privatization, liberalization and deregulation. Prior to this period, the Indian economy was under a command economy regime. Thus, for the sake of consistency, the post-1991 period has been chosen. Data from the RBI were utilized to collate state liability and gross state domestic product space time-series data from 1990–91 to 2014–15. Several measures of statistics such as GINI Coefficient, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, Theil Temporal and Spatial Entropy, Kernel Density Estimation, and spatial prediction models (three-year moving

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S. K. Thakur

average, lag regression and multiple regression model) to estimate predicted values of state liability for the periods 2016–2020. Several measures of error such as mean deviation, mean absolute deviation, mean percentage error, mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error were calculated to estimate the difference between actual and predicted values for 2014–15. These results have been mapped to detect spatial patterns of state liability.

26.5

Analysis

In this section, a descriptive and interpretative analysis of space-time trends of debt to gross state domestic product (GSDP) are provided. Figure 26.6 shows the gross interest as percentage of state debt in India during fiscal year 2014–15. The average gross interest as percent of state liability was approximately 7% (excluding NCT of Delhi). The National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi during 2014–15 had an exceptionally huge interest burden to the extent of 156%. Figure 26.7 shows the average debt to gross state domestic product during the periods 1991–2015. Three phases can be identified. The first phase (1991–1993) during the aftermath of balance of payments (BOP) crisis when the government reached a default position due to currency devaluation, current account deficit and loss of investor confidence. Therefore, the average debt continuously increased during the post-BOP crisis years. The implementation of structural reforms measures in the early 1990s led to the adoption of market-friendly policies and foreign investment along with liberalization, deregulation and privatization of financial, industrial and trade sectors led to an improvement of the health of the Indian economy. This led to a decline in relative debt during the second phase (1994– 2004) but the size of average debt showed a continuous increase during the period. Finally, in the third phase (2005–2015) the average debt dropped in the initial period but in more recent years the average debt levels have increased due to mismanagement of fiscal health, high unproductive expenditure and accruing debt service

burden. However, none of these descriptive statistics suggests anything about the geographical pattern of debt in India. The next set of Fig. 26.8a–e illustrates the spatial pattern of debt to GSDP ratio for the periods 1991–2015. Five maps were prepared for 1991, 2001, 2011, 2015 and an average map for the period 1991–2015. Further, the debt to GSDP ratios were classified into three groups namely states that fall within 0–44.9%, 45–69.9% and 70% and above debt categories. The first category is low debt, the second category is medium debt, and the third category is high debt. During 1991 (Fig. 26.8a) the high performing states showed low debt to GSDP ratio and these states are in the western coast namely Maharashtra and Kerala. Three states namely Uttarakhand (Northwest), Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh (Eastern India) are states that show low-debt, but these states did not exist in 1991 and were delineated and separated from states in 2000s. The medium debt states are in Northwest (Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh) and Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the southern part of India. The poor performing high debt states are in North, Northeast and eastern regions of India comprising Jammu Kashmir, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Sikkim, Northeastern states and Odisha. After a decade in 2001 (Fig. 26.8b) the overall pattern did not change dramatically as the high debt states were still in the northern part of India, medium debt states were in the industrial region of west and southern India, and low debt states were Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in west and south as well as the agricultural state of Haryana in northwest. Subsequently, after a decade during 2011 (Fig. 26.8c) there seems to be some mobility of states across the three debt categories. The poor performing high debt states have reduced in number since several states moved into the medium debt categories. The only states in high debt categories are Jammu Kashmir, Mizoram and Manipur in North and Northeast. The medium debt states comprise of states in Northwest, North and Northeast such as Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Panjab, Bihar, West Bengal and many of the Northeastern states. During this period the low debt and high performing states expanded to include most of the

26

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

419

4,000.0 State Liability (2014-15)

3,500.0 3,000.0 2,500.0 2,000.0 1,500.0 1,000.0 500.0

Andhra Pradesh Bihar Chhaƫsgarh Goa Gujarat Haryana Jharkhand Karnataka Kerala Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Odisha Punjab Rajasthan Tamil Nadu UƩar Pradesh West Bengal Arunachal Pradesh Assam Himachal Pradesh Jammu and Kashmir Manipur Meghalaya Mizoram Nagaland Sikkim Tripura UƩarakhand NCT Delhi Puducherry

0.0

180% 160% 140% 120% 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0%

Fig. 26.6 Gross interest as % of state liability in India: 2014-15. SourceRBI, Mumbai

industrial and high technology states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamilnadu and few of the Eastern states such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand. In the half-decade since then, i.e. during 2015 (Fig. 26.8d) not much changed. It can be observed that high debt states are in North, medium debt states are in West, South and Northern regions of India. Also, the low debt states are in west, central and southern regions of India. The last map shows an aggregate or average pattern during the 1991–2015 (Fig. 26.8e) periods. Three clusters can be identified. The high debt states are Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, Sikkim and most of Northeastern states. The medium debt states are the industrial and agricultural states in West and Central India, as well as the coastal states in the technology state eastern part of India. Finally, the low debt states are in a pattern (T) extending from the industrial and high technology states to eastern states.

26.5.1 Inequality Measures: Gini Coefficient and Standard Deviation A Gini coefficient and standard deviation are computed to observe the pattern of inequality across space and overtime during the period 1991– 2015. These results are mapped in Fig. 26.9a, b for the debt to GSDP ratio. A Gini coefficient is a

measure of inequality where the value of 1 represents perfect inequality and a value of 0 represents perfect equality. Figure 26.9a shows the Gini coefficient with a maximum value of a little over 0.25. It also shows periods of increase and decrease in the Gini coefficient. First, it increased during 1990–91 to 1993–1994, then decreased during the following five years (1994–95 to 1998–1999) followed by another episode of increase till 2005–06 and then a relative decline till 2014–15 except a sporadic increase intermittently. The standard deviation almost follows the same pattern with a range between 0–0.45 across various years (1990–2015). Likewise, the Gini coefficient for average debt to GSDP ratio is mapped for all states in Fig. 26.9b. The maximum Gini coefficient value is 0.4 and the maximum standard deviation is 0.42. There is considerable intra-state variation in debt to GSDP ratio over the period 1991–2015. Goa, Odisha and the Northeastern hilly states of Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim have the relatively highest intra-state variations in debt to GSDP ratio.

26.5.2 Theil Entropy: Temporal and Spatial Entropy is a measure of the amount of uncertainty in a probabilistic distribution or a system subject to constraints (Batty 1974, 2010; Wilson

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S. K. Thakur

1.0000

12

0.8000

10 8

0.6000

6 0.4000

4 2

0.0000

0 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

0.2000

Average Ra o Debt/GSDP

GDP Rate of growth, Constant Prices 2004-05

Fig. 26.7 Average Debt/GSDP ratio versus GDP Rate of growth: 1991–2015. Source RBI Data, Mumbai

2010). This measure has been utilized in geography and regional science for many decades. The notion of entropy in recent years has also been utilized to decompose the sources of inequality, i.e. inter-regional and intra-regional. Further, Theil entropy has been computed for the debt to GSDP ratio for the Indian economy. The entropy is computed for time series and spatial data and due to paucity of data the sources of inequality (inter-regional and intra-regional) were not computed. Figure 26.10a, b show the variations in entropy statistic at the spatial and temporal scales for India’s debt to GSDP ratio during 1991–2015. This measure can take a minimum of 0 or a maximum of 6.04. At the temporal scale there does not seem to be much of a variation. Although the normalized entropy shows an upward increase from 0.96 to 0.98. Similarly, at the spatial scale there does not appear to be much variation as the spatial normalized entropy takes values ranging between 0.91 and 0.99.

density for a random variable. The purpose is to delineate a smooth histogram from a finite set of sample observations (Bailey and Gatrell 1995). The KDE is based on a data smoothing technique for making inferences about a population from a finite data sample. Figure 26.11a, b depicts the KDE for debt to GSDP ratio at the temporal and spatial scales for selected years and states during 1991–2015. Figure 26.11b shows the KDE for selected Indian states that represent (1) industrial and agricultural states in the West and Northwest, i.e. Maharashtra, Gujarat and Panjab (2) less developed states in the Central and Eastern parts of India, i.e. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh (3) the highly developed high technology states in the south, i.e. Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

26.5.3 Kernel Density Estimation (KDE): Temporal and Spatial

A simple linear and logarithmic regression models are run with (debt/GSDP) ratio as the dependent variable and rate of growth as independent variable. The regression output and line of best fit are reported in Fig. 26.12a, b. In both the linear and logarithmic regression models the relationship between (debt/GSDP) ratio and rate of growth of the Indian economy

Another tool utilized for analyzing data is Kernel density estimation (KDE). This is a nonparametric technique to derive a smooth estimate of a univariate or multivariate probability

26.5.4 Regression and Prediction Maps

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Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

421

Fig. 26.8 Debt/GSDP ratio for Indian states: 1991 (a), Debt/GSDP ratio for Indian states: 2001 (b). Debt/GSDP ratio for Indian states: 2011 (c). Debt/GSDP ratio for

Indian states: 2015 (d). Debt/GSDP ratio for Indian states: 1991–2015 (e)

through the period 1991–2015 (25 years) negative and the models have a statistically nificant relationship between the dependent independent variables. The P values for

model, intercept and slope terms are less than að0:05Þ. The linear model shows that for every 1% increase in rate of growth the (debt/GSDP) ratio will decrease by 3%. A similar conclusion

are sigand the

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S. K. Thakur

(a)

(b)

India: 1991-2015

Indian States: 1991-2015

Fig. 26.9 a, b Measures of dispersion/inequality for Indian economy: Gini coefficient and standard deviation. Source RBI Data

can be derived from the logarithmic regression model. The correlations for both models are negative 0.4 and R2 values are 18.2% and 19.06% for the linear and logarithmic models respectively. The models show a weak R2 and this could be since only one variable is being considered to explain average debt ratio and in finance models the complexity of the phenomenon being studied does not allow us to expect a high R2 . In the next phase of the analysis a three-year moving average, simple lag regression model and a multiple regression models are run to forecast the predicted debt levels for 2014–15. The following functional relationships are utilized: Three Year Moving Average ðStateDebtÞt ¼ f ½ðStateDebtÞt1; ðStateDebtÞt2; ðStateDebtÞt3 

ð26:6Þ Lag Regression ðStateDebtÞt ¼ b0 þ b1 ðStateDebtÞt1 þ 2 ð26:7Þ

Multiple Regression Forecast ðStateDebtÞt ¼ b0 þ b1 LagðStateDebtÞt1 þ b2 GSDPt1 þ 2

ð26:8Þ The regression models are run utilizing the information for 1990–91 to 2013–14 to estimate the regression equation and then predict the forecasted value for 2014–15. The actual debt (2014–15) and the forecasted debt (2014–15) are compared for errors. Measures of error structure are computed and reported (mean deviation, mean absolute deviation, mean percentage error, mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error). These results are presented in Fig. 26.13a–c and Table 26.1. Figure 26.14a–c show the predicted debt levels for Indian states utilizing the multiple regression model forecast. It shows the pattern that both rich states and poor states will have high debt with the difference that rich states will pay for service costs and plan expenditure. In comparison, the poor states will pay for huge debt servicing cost and non-plan expenditure.

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Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

423

(a) 0.98500

12

0.98000

10

0.97500 8

0.97000 0.96500

6

0.96000

4

0.95500 2

0.95000

0 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

0.94500

Temporal Normalzied Entropy

GDP Growth (Constant Prices, 2004-05)

(b) 1.02 1 0.98 0.96 0.94 0.92 0.9 0.88 0.86 Andhra Pradesh Bihar Chha sgarh Goa Gujarat Haryana Jharkhand Karnataka Kerala Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Odisha Punjab Rajasthan Tamil Nadu U ar Pradesh West Bengal Arunachal Pradesh Assam Himachal Pradesh Jammu and Kashmir Manipur Meghalaya Mizoram Nagaland Sikkim Tripura U arakhand NCT Delhi Puducherry

0.45 0.40 0.35 0.30 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0.00

Spa al Normalzied Entropy

Gini Coefficient

Fig. 26.10 a Temporal entropy for Debt/GSDP ratio versus GDP rate of growth of Indian economy: 1991–2015. b Spatial normalized entropy versus GINI coefficient for Indian economy: 1990–91 to 2014–15. Source RBI, Mumbai

26.6

Conclusion and Spatial Planning Implications

Geography of finance has been at the heart of economic geography debate for almost 25 years and has been at its helm since the global economic crisis of 2008. The financial meltdown in North America and Europe has affected the public debt which soared to 50–80% in many countries (The Economist 2015). Reinhart and Rogoff’s (2010) analysis revealed that if debt

levels were higher than 90% then growth rates taper off sharply. This stylized fact has been criticized. There has been a surge in interest of the space-time dynamics of public debt analysis. The structure of public debt in India consists of Central and State Governments debt. The size of internal debt increased from Rs. 398.64 billion during 1980–81 to Rs. 58017. 76 billion; market loans increased from 33.1% annual rate of growth (1980–81 to 1989–90) during pre-liberalization period to 36.37% (1990–91 to 1999–00) in the post-liberalization period and has sharply declined

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S. K. Thakur

(a)

KDE for Indian Economy: 1991

KDE for Indian Economy: 2010

KDE for Indian Economy: 2001

KDE for Indian Economy: 2015

Fig. 26.11 a Kernel density estimate of Debt/GDP ratio: Indian economy 1991, 2001, 2010 and 2015. b Kernel density estimate of Debt/GDP ratio for selected states, India: 1991–2015

to 16.7% during 2010–11 to 2016–17; external debt has decreased from 38.9 to 18.67% during pre-and post-liberalization period and more recently to 9.4% during 2010–11 to 2016–17. For the State Government market loans increased during the first three decades from 26.4, 54.9 and 49.9% and sharply declined to 13.5% during 2010–11 to 2015–16; loans and advances from Central Government declined from 63.3 to 5.5% 1980–81 to 2015–16. Overall spatial pattern of (Debt/GSDP) ratio reveals high debt ratio in Northern states, two clusters of medium debt ratio in Northwest and eastern states and low debt ratio states in the form of ‘T’ shaped pattern cutting into Western, Southern and Eastern states of India. Spatial prediction of debt levels for 2016, 2018 and 2020 reveals both poor and developed states will have high debt levels. Poor states will pay for high servicing costs and non-plan

expenditure and developed states will pay for servicing costs and plan expenditure. This analysis raises further questions in the context of political economy, spatial development and planning dimensions. The analysis has demonstrated that the states in North and Northeastern India have consistently demonstrated high debt-ratios for the period under study. This pattern needs to be considered in the context of the ‘Special Status’ and ‘Special Category Status’ of several states in India. While the Special Status provision is a Constitutional right provided by the Parliament of India; the Special Category Status is provided through the National Development Council which is a preferential treatment of certain states with respect to central assistance and tax breaks. Thus, states such as Jammu and Kashmir and several Northeastern states are protected under special status categories. Further, Jammu and Kashmir is

26

Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

KDE for Maharashtra

KDE for Bihar

KDE for Andhra Pradesh

425

KDE for Gujarat

KDE for U ar Pradesh

KDE for Tamil Nadu

KDE for Punjab

KDE for Madhya Pradesh

KDE for Karnataka

Fig. 26.11 (continued)

protected under Article 370 which grants special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir. Currently, there are eleven states namely: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand protected through Special Category status. These states are given preferential treatment due to regional factors such as: low resource base, hilly terrain, low population density, higher share of tribal population and hostile location. Due to such social, political and geographical constraints it is perceivable that average debt ratio in these states will be high relative to state domestic product. The political economy of the relationship between public debt and regional

inequality will be a theme addressed in another paper. A second issue deals with spatial development and planning of public debt in India. There are several types of expenditures such as electricity, food, petroleum and agriculture subsidies that constitute the lion’s share of financial expenses in India. Further, increases in salaries and benefits and non-plan expenditure contribute to mounting debt in India. The lagging states need to make a sustained effort akin to the high growth states to first minimize subsidy component of unproductive expenditure. And, second, utilize debt towards increasing the size of productive expenditure so that the returns from productive investment can be utilized to pay-off debt and

426 Fig. 26.12 a Linear regression model. b Logarithmic regression model

S. K. Thakur

(a)

Model I (Temporal) Debt/GSDP Ratio versus GDP Rate of Growth Debt/GSDP ratio = 0.7773 - 0.0344834*(Rog 2004-05 constant prices) Correlation: (-)0.427 R-squared = 18.2929 percent, P Value (Slope)= 0.0329 P Value Model: 0.0329

(b)

Log Model II (Temporal) Debt/GSDP Ratio versus GDP Rate of Growth Ln(Debt/GSDP) ratio = -0.0914352 - 0.303972* Ln (rog 2004-05 Constant Prices) Correlation: -0.436662 R-squared = 19.0673 percent, P Value (Slope)= 0.0291P Value Model: 0.0291

Table 26.1 Measures of error structure Models

MD

MAD

MPE

MAPE

RMSE

3 year moving average

791.57

174.16

Lag forecast

791.57

21.47

176,683,866

92169.06

45.3

176,656,467

92153.57

6.96

Multiple regression forecast

791.57

22.22

176,656,607

92154.12

7.15

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Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

(a)

427

Actual 2014-15 Predicted 2014-15 3,500.0 3,000.0 2,500.0

28 25

(b)

22 19

16

13

10

7

4

2,000.0 1,500.0 1,000.0 500.0 0.0

3Year Moving Average Variables: Actual Data State Debt 2014-15 and Predicted State Debt 2014-15 CorrelaƟon: 0.998

1

Actual 2014-15 Predicted 2014-15 3,500.0 3,000.0 2,500.0 2,000.0 1,500.0 28 25

(c)

1,000.0 22 19

16 13

500.0 10 7

4

0.0 1

SpaƟal LAG Regression Variables: Actual Data State Debt 2014-15 and Predicted State Debt 2014-15 CorrelaƟon: 0.999

Actual 2014-15 Predicted 2014-15 3,500.0 3,000.0 2,500.0

29 25

21 17

13 9

5

2,000.0 1,500.0 1,000.0 500.0 0.0 1

MulƟple Regression Forecast Variables: Actual Data State Debt 2014-15 and Predicted State Debt 2014-15 CorrelaƟon: 0.999

Fig. 26.13 a Three year moving average forecast of state debt: India. b Lag regression forecast of state debt: India. c Multiple regression forecast of state debt: India

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2016

2018

(a)

(b)

2020

(c)

Fig. 26.14 a–c Predicted debt for Indian states: 2016, 2018 and 2020

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Public Debt and Regional Inequality in India …

further invest in regional development of state economies.

References Bailey TC, Gatrell AC (1995) Interactive spatial data. Longman, Essex Bajpai N, Sachs JD (1999) The state of government finance in India. Development Discussion Paper No. 719, Harvard Institute for International Development, Harvard University Bansal RK (2001) Budgetary trends and revenue deficits in different states. In: Gupta JR (ed) Fiscal deficit of states in India. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, pp 128–151 Batty M (1974) Spatial entropy. Geogr Anal 8:1–32 Batty M (2010) Space, scale, and scaling in entropy maximizing. Geogr Anal 42:395–421 Bell A, Johnston R, Jones K (2015) Stylized facts or situated messiness? The diverse effects of increasing debt on national economic growth. J Econ Geogr 15:449–472 Bhattacharya BB, Guha S (1990) Internal public debt of Government of India: growth and composition. Econ Polit Wkly 25(14):780–788 Blanchard O (2009) Macroeconomics, 5th edn. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey Borck R, Fossen FM, Freier R, Martin T (2015) Race to the debt trap: spatial econometric evidence on debt in German Municipalities. Reg Sci Urban Econ 53:20– 37 Clark GL, Wojcik D (2007) The geography of finance: corporate governance in the global market place. Oxford University Press, Great Britain Fincke B, Greiner A (2015) Public debt, sustainability, and economic growth: theory and empirics. Springer, Berlin Gomez-Puig M, Sosvilla-Rivero S (2015) On the bi-directional causal relationship between public debt and economic growth in EMU countries, IREKA, Research Institute of Applied Economics, Working Paper 2015/12, University of Barcelona, Barcelona Government of India (2017) Goods and services tax. Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance. http:// dor.gov.in/tax/goods-and-services-tax. Accessed 30 Dec 2017 Gupta SB (1979) Monetary planning for India, First Edition. Oxford University Press, New Delhi Gupta JR (2001) Fiscal deficit of states in India. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi Herdnon T, Ash M, Pollin R (2014) Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. Camb J Econ 38:257–279 Kapila U (ed) (2009) Indian economy since independence: new revised, 20th edn. Academic Foundation, New Delhi

429 Kaur B, Mukherjee A (2012) Threshold level of debt and public debt sustainability: the Indian experience, Reserve Bank of India. Occas Pap 33(1&2):1–37 Kaur B, Mukherjee A, Kumar N, Ekka AP (2014) Debt sustainability at the state level in India, WPS (DEPR): 07/2014 RBI Working Paper Series, Department of Economic and Policy Research, Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai Kishore A, Prasad A (2007) Indian subnational finances: recent performance. IMF Working Paper, WP/07/205, International Monetary Fund, Washington DC Makin AJ, Arora R (2012) Fiscal sustainability in India at state level. Public Financ Manag 12(40):350–367 Martin R (ed) (1999) Money and the space economy. John Wiley, Chi Chester, Northampton, MA, USA Misra SK, Puri VK (1996) Indian economy: its development experience. Himalaya Publishing House, New Delhi Mitze T, Matz F (2015) Public debt and growth in German Federal States: what can Europe Learn? J Policy Model 37:208–228 Nagurney A, Siokos S (1997) Financial networks: statics and dynamics. Springer, Berlin Neck R, Sturm JE (eds) (2008) Sustainability of public debt. CESifo Seminar Series. The MIT Press, Cambridge Ostry JD, Ghosh AR, Kim JI, Qureshi MS (2010) Fiscal space, IMF Staff Position Note, SPN/10/11. International Monetary Fund, Washington DC Patil VK (2016) State’s government debt stands at more than Rupees 1 Lakh crore, The Hindu, 24 March 2016 Rajan R (2010) Fault lines: how hidden fractures still threaten the world economy. Princeton University Press, New Jersey Rao MG, Jena PR (2009) Recent trends in state finances. In: Rao MG, Shah A (eds) State’s fiscal management and regional equity: an overview. Oxford University Press, New Delhi Reinhart CM, Rogoff KS (2009) This time is different: eight centuries of financial folly. Princeton University Press, New Jersey Reinhart CM, Rogoff KS (2010) Growth in a time of debt. Am Econ Rev: Pap Proc 100:573–578 Reserve Bank of India (2009) State of finances: a study of budgets of 2008–09. Department of Economic and Policy Research, 6th Floor, Reserve Bank of India, Government of India, Mumbai Reserve Bank of India (2016) State of finances: a study of budgets of 2015–16. Department of Economic and Policy Research, 6th Floor, Reserve Bank of India, Government of India, Mumbai Romero AA, Burkley ML (2011) Debt overhang in the Eurozone: a spatial panel analysis. Rev Reg Stud 41:49–63 Salve P (2015) Maharashtra most indebted, Tamilnadu gathering debt fastest. http://www.indiaspend.com/ cover-story/maharashtra-most-indebted-tamil-nadugathering-debt-fastest-73343. Accessed 31 Oct 2015

430 Stiglitz JE (2016) The Euro: how a common currency threatens the future of Europe. WW Norton and Company, New York The Economist (2014) Debt and growth: breaking the threshold, The Economist, 1 March 2014, London The Economist (2015) Public debt: how much is too much? The Economist, 3 June 2015, London Thirlwall AP (2011) Economic development: theory and evidence, 9th ed. Palgrave-Macmillan

S. K. Thakur Trionfetti F (2015) Public debt and economic geography. Int Reg Sci Rev 38(1):92–113 Wilson AG (2010) Entropy in urban and regional modeling: retrospect and prospect. Geogr Anal 42:364–394

27

Studies in Tourism Geography of India: Definition, Approaches and Prospects Rajrani Kalra

Abstract

Tourism geography is a novel area of research and broadly examines the interaction among such themes as ‘spatial organization’, ‘land-man relations’ and ‘areal differentiation’ (Taaffe 1974; Gibson 2008) in the study of the distribution and spatial pattern of tourist places. Tourist activities generate wealth and employment, attract foreign exchange, promote travel and hospitability industry, advance cross-cultural communication and understanding, build infrastructure, and lead to local as well as global development. Pearce (1979) examined the range and scope of tourism geography and opined the centrality of spatial interaction in the geographies of tourism. The geography of tourism examines a variety of areas like ‘the effects of scale’, ‘spatial distribution of tourist phenomenon’, ‘tourism impacts’, ‘planning for tourism’, and ‘spatial modeling for tourist development’ (Williams 1998). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2016) reports that tourism will continue to grow in most Western developed economies. Recently, Indian geographers have been interested in the spatial dimension of tourism in

R. Kalra (&) Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

India (Mir 2016). Given this overview, the objective of this chapter is to address two research questions: (1) how is tourism conceptualized by geographers? (2) what insights do Indian studies provide about tourism geography? Keywords




India Spatial dimensions of tourism Tourism geography

27.1




Introduction

Tourism geography is a novel area of research and broadly examines the interaction among such themes as ‘spatial organization’, ‘land-man relations’ and ‘areal differentiation’ (Taaffe 1974; Gibson 2008) in the study of the distribution and spatial pattern of tourist flows. Tourism is one of the largest global industry, which generates a sizeable wealth, and employment, attracts foreign exchange, promotes travel and hospitability industry, advances cross-cultural communication and understanding, builds infrastructure, improves social well-being, and enhances local as well as global development. Of this 55%, tourist arrivals were destined for advanced economies and the remaining 44% in emerging economies. Most of the tourist arrivals were directed for core regions comprising North America and European countries. Regions such

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_27

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as South Asia, Africa and Middle Eastern show the least arrivals. In addition, Fig. 27.1 depicts Asia and Pacific region witnessed 9% increase in arrivals, followed by Africa by 8%, Americas by 3%, Europe by 3% and double-digit growth in some countries, and a negative increase in Middle eastern region by (−4)%. These statistics demonstrate broader patterns of uneven tourism arrivals across international destinations. Yet another concern less discussed is the environmentally unsustainable nature of tourism. While most economic sectors are reducing its ecological footprint and developing strategies of plummeting greenhouse gas emissions, the tourism sector has not attended this global concern. Peters and Landre (2012) have called for a ‘new tourism geography’ to better understand this phenomenon and develop mitigation policies. The global economy is witnessing an era of ‘mass tourism’, and thus, with economic prosperity, it generates tourist attraction and the enhanced scale of this activity promotes regional development. This, in turn, makes tourism a key factor in developing effective regional policy (Giaoutzi and Nijkamp 2006). Pearce (1979) examined the range and scope of tourist geography and opined the centrality of spatial interaction in the geographies of tourism. The geography of tourism examines a variety of areas like ‘the effects of scale’, ‘spatial distribution of

tourist phenomenon’, ‘tourism impacts’, ‘planning for tourism’, and ‘spatial modeling for tourist development’ (Williams 1998). The first theme scale is important since the interaction of human beings with tourist destinations is not consistent through time and space at different geographical scales. The cause and effect relationship vary across geographical scales. Thus, scale will be an important consideration since, human interactions, choice of destinations and tourism flows will be influenced with geographical aggregation of tourism flows. The second theme is of central concern to geographer’s namely spatial distribution of tourist phenomenon. This includes sub-themes such as spatial pattern of supply and demand, geography of resorts, determinants of inbound and outbound tourists, regional patterns of tourist destinations, patterns of movement and flows of tourists and tourism-led regional development among others. The third theme tourism impact is another area of interest since these can originate as economic, social, political, cultural and anthropological impacts, which vary across space and time. The fourth them tourism planning involves regional development of a tourist location. Once a tourist place is identified, it requires diverse types of infrastructure such as hotels, amenities, public infrastructure, and workforce. Finally, geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial

Fig. 27.1 Global trends in international tourists arrivals (Millions): 1990–2016 depicts the international tourism 1400 arrivals reached a mark of 1,235 million globally 1200 (UNWTO 2017). Source 1000 UNWTO tourism highlights, 800 2017 Edition

2016

600 400 200 0

2005 1990

1990

1995

200

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Studies in Tourism Geography of India …

statistics modeling can provide insights to the analytical interpretation of the evolution and change patterns of tourism through time and scale, spatial diffusion of tourism within and between countries, development of hierarchies of resorts and tourist places and effects of distance on patterns of tourist movements. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2016) reports that tourism will continue to grow in most Western developed economies. It has contributed to overall economic growth and accounts for 4.1% of GDP, 5.9% of employment, and 21.3% of service exports in the OECD region during 2015. In comparison, the impact of tourism and travel sectors on the Indian economy was 3.3% of GDP, 5.8% of total employment, 5.4% of total exports and 5.7% of total investment during 2016 (Turner 2017). In addition, a cyclic behavior of the destruction of the demand for old tourist place (X) with the substitution of new tourist place (Y). Initially, the tourists are in a phase of ‘exploration’, and a ‘destination’ is identified (X), and this destination is exploited until there is ‘maturity’, generating ‘exponential growth’ of visitors to the location. Ultimately, the old site is saturated with visitors and a new site (Y) replaces the old leading to a slowdown of trips to the old site with an eventual collapse in demand. The cycle of demand saturation of old site with demand for new site continues as the old over-exploited destination loses its attraction in relation to the new destination (UNEP 2000; Haggett 2001). Recently, Indian geographers have been interested in the spatial dimension of tourism in India (Mir 2016; Babu 2008). Mir (2016) opines tourist geography research in India is lopsided and model-building research is less popular. Further, Babu (2008) observed foreign tourist travelers data show an increased variability annually, and the domestic tourist travelers have been increasing exponentially. He also, observes a seasonal pattern of peak, trough and plateau among both foreign and domestic travelers. In addition, tourist accommodation and arrival statistics demonstrate higher concentration in selected states in India. The key domestic tourist

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generating states are West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. There is an uneven distribution of tourism sites, amenities and natural resources across Indian states. A sub-national study reported (Government of India 2015) the encouragement of ‘decentralization of power to local government’, ‘allocation of financial resources’, and ‘development of a well-articulated plan for tourism development’ across major states in India. Significant inter-state variations exist with respect to tourism characteristics such as purpose of trip, intensity of trip by state of origin, rural and urban variations. The largest tourist visitors during 2008–09 were in Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh and least in Northeastern states, and Goa. Given this overview, the objective of this chapter is to address two broad questions (1) What are the geographic perspectives on tourism? (2) What insights do Indian studies provide on tourism geography of India? The remainder of the chapter are organized into the following four sections: the second section defines tourism and reviews geographic studies, third section review tourism geography studies in India, and fourth section concludes.

27.2

Tourism: Concept and Definition

When people travel for less than a year for leisure, business, shopping, religious, medical or family reasons away from their residence, than it is considered as an act of tourism (UN World Tourist Organization 1994). They may be visiting a destination for sightseeing, meeting friends or relatives, or simply taking a vacation. Tourists may further spend their leisure time at a destination playing sports, enjoying exotic cuisine, reading on a beach or simply enjoying the environment or wilderness. Similar activities can be performed without travelling to a distant location, and within shorter duration of time, but that will not be classified as tourism rather it will be classified as recreation activities. Travel and

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tourism have an intertwining relationship since tourism involves travel from home to short or distant locations within the nation or international locations. However, travel may involve non-tourist destinations such as work related, visiting a relative or making a trip for shopping experience. A second distinction is that tourism-led travel takes place infrequently while non-tourism travel occurs more frequently. Duration and distance generally separate a general travel relative to tourism-related travel. Analogously, travel for pleasure without spending a longer duration can be defined as leisure, and organized activities for pleasure at home can be called recreation. Thus, recreation can be defined as the sum of all activities, experiences and processes involved in the use of leisure time. However, more recreation and tourism can be differentiated in degree rather than in kind since both types of activities are pursued for pleasure. In addition, both sets of activities imply a multi-stage process of a recreation experience namely: planning, travel to the experience, participation in the activity itself, travel back home and recall of the experience (Clawson and Knetsch 1966). Recreation tends to happen locally after work or school, during the week and weekends and often in relatively shorter distance from home. However, tourists make trips relatively less frequently usually during holidays, summer vacation periods and involve travel to more often a distant location for a relatively longer duration. Thus, comprehensively speaking tourism can be understood as a holistic process comprising several components whose interaction generates the totality of tourist experience. These components are ‘processes’, ‘activities’ and ‘outcomes’, that arise from the relationships and the interaction among four actors namely ‘tourists’, ‘tourism suppliers’, ‘host governments’ and the ‘local environment’ that acts as agents in attracting tourists to a destination. The tourist generally seeks psychic and physical experiences from a tourist destination, which affects the choice of selecting the destination. The businesses in the tourist destination see tourism as an opportunity to enhance their profit by supplying goods and

R. Kalra

services that the tourist market demands. The local government sees tourism as an opportunity to earn foreign exchange wealth, seek higher employment from services that tourists demand, and taxes collected from tourist expenditure either directly or indirectly. Therefore, tourism is an amalgamation of activities, services and industries that delivers a travel experience. This entails such services like transportation, hotel, dining, shopping, entertainment and other hospitality services available to tourist visitors. In the subsequent section, tourism is discussed from a geographic perspective.

27.2.1 Tourism Geography and Planning Studies Tourism geography grew as a sub-field within geography during the Great Depression period. The classic publication of an article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers by McCurry titled The Use of Land for Recreation (1930) led the take-off of this nascent area. Recreation geography has been defined as the study of all activities and phenomena that relates to the experiences and processes involved in the use of leisure time. Tourism is associated with the use of leisure time at a distant location for a considerable duration of time. It is inherently a geographic phenomenon since it allows people from distinct parts of the world to experience unseen places. Tourist places are spatially distributed geographically with varying degrees of accessibility. Tourism occurs at different geographical scales and can be local or global. The tourism industry is complex comprising of hotel chains and airline industry and tour operators that are spread across international boundaries through a network of multinational corporations. There is much debate on the effects of globalization on tourism. Several argue that globalization has made places look very similar since the multinational corporations and media have diffused popular culture, food and clothing products through alternate information outlets. Yet others argue that it is even more important to keep places distinct and allow them to maintain their

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Studies in Tourism Geography of India …

identity at the local and regional scales. Further, tourism trends can be deciphered for planning purposes at the regional scale. Tourists generating regions are source areas from where the tourists are coming, and tourist-receiving regions are destinations where the tourists are visiting. Using such information, one can identify the characteristics of tourist’s spots that contribute to the supply of tourist places. In addition, the tourist places need to be accessible, attractive, relatively well located and should have sound transport infrastructure. Tourist geographers have addressed seven themes in the past few decades like: ‘Tourism-led-development’, ‘Tourism resorts and their development’, ‘Tourism travel’, ‘Tourists impacts’, ‘Recreation and tourism planning’ and ‘Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application in tourism’. The sub-disciple has grown sufficiently to compile a journal of scholarly publications since 1999, titled Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism, Space, Place and Environment published by Routledge and Anatolia by Taylor and Francis. The first theme addressed is tourism-led regional development. It can be hypothesized that tourism leads to regional development since it generates employment, businesses prosperity, and higher tax revenue collection for the local economy. In the wake of these arguments, tourism can be said to promote regional development or vice-versa. The national and local governments have examined tourism as a tool for planning, economic diversity and improvement and then to analyze the success and failure of these efforts, but unfortunately the benefits of tourism development have been less rewarding than anticipated by government agencies. It is observed that lack of tourism has been a limiting factor in the development of Tamil Nadu (India) despite an abundance of natural and cultural resources. Study of tourism as a means of improving regional economies is in great demand, and case studies demonstrating the rationalization of growth, scale of development, social and political effects would add to the existing analysis. The second theme addresses tourist resorts and their development. A collective model has

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been proposed by Butler (1980), Smith (1991) and Dietworth and Ashworth (1995). A fundamental contribution of their analysis is the notion of a stage process of growth and change from some initial to a culminating stage of development or deterioration. Christaller (1963) initially described the set up such a model within the context of a peripheral theory of tourism location. The idea of a location theory of tourism attractions did not develop but it led to the development of resort-based development. The development is centered on a key resource such that development takes place with a focus on that resource. Resorts can be found in many places such as seaside (Britain), mountain regions (La Grande Plagne, France) and in the deserts (Palm Springs, California, Las Vegas, Nevada). The resort-based development model has been divided into six stages: ‘exploration’, ‘involvement’, ‘development’, ‘consolidation’, ‘stagnation and decline’. The model has been tested for discovering whether an ideal strategy exists for avoiding a center-periphery conflict. In addition, beyond the process of resort-based development process, there have been studies investigating resorts as morphological or tourist phenomena. The notion of a ‘resort business district’ has been proposed which suggests the idea of a specialized district characterized by a linear land use pattern and specific spatial relationships among and between retail centers. This type of development process has been implemented in places that have sea resources as in Britain, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia to develop seaside resort development. The development of Cancun as a resort in Mexico has been analyzed in terms of site and situation strategies. The analysis of the physical and cultural character of potential destinations in Mexico in relation with the cost and convenience of transportation to competing destinations led to the decision to position the resort in Cancun. This area of research is fertile and wide open as more studies are needed to validate the resort-based development model in conjunction with geographical and location attributes of potential resort locations. The third theme addressed by geographers is tourism travel, which is the single most

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researched topic by tourism geographers. Tourism involves travel between places of origins (residence) and the destination (tourist places). Williams and Zelinsky (1970) first inquired the question of international tourist flows. They examined international tourist flows among 14 top destinations using graphic flow assignment models that revealed eight sets of explanations. A study of international tourism in Canada addressed the relationship between factors attributed to tourism that affected Canada’s foreign trade deficit. A similar study of tourism in Europe concluded that distance plays a significantly lesser role relative to day-to-day travel behavior. The study utilized Chritaller’s core-periphery model and the notion of attraction. The center is defined as the origin (home country or region) and periphery (destination country or region). The analysis suggested the larger the country’s (destination) attraction the further was its relative location from the center (origin). A further implication of the analysis was that attractiveness is relative to the spatial choices of tourist between competing choices among destinations. Several studies have investigated domestic tourism at micro and macro scales in Victoria, British Columbia. The studies concluded that tourism travel is a search process with a directional bias. Tourists discovered that the outcomes of the search patterns were dependent on the mental images of the destination and personal motivations. Tourists travel within their home country between states as well. A few studies investigated gross tourist travel patterns among states and noted high degree of variations between state-to-state vacations travel besides most patterns conformed to the distance decay principle. A few important variables stood out to be significant shifters of the demand curves such as the number of state parks, auto ownership and a willingness to travel long distance. It was also opined that the southern and mountain states were tourist recipient’s states and the Great Lakes and eastern states were the tourist generating states. Further, it was noticed that travel to visit family and friends was the most dominant reason and a significant association existed among leisure travel and trip purpose.

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International tourism is an area that demands greater attention for research and investigation especially the determinants of tourism in the wake of globalization. The fourth theme addressed by tourist geographers is tourism impacts. The most important work in this area has been the book written by Mathieson and Wall titled Tourism economic, Physical and Social Impacts (1982). Tourism impacts vary in response from negative to positive to balanced, but the negative responses dominated. Amongst the responses, the book noted economic influences tend to be positive, and physical and social influences tended to be generally negative. The negative environmental impacts of large-scale recreation subdivision can be addressed by regional planning of water, soil, drainage and scenic erosion in relation with the needs of the region in conjunction to the environmental constraints of an area. The fifth theme addressed by tourism geographers is recreation and tourism planning. Two kinds of research have been undertaken in this direction and these are critiquing of existing plans and engaging actively in the planning process. Geographers working in federal agencies have utilized the concept of carrying capacity in river and recreation studies. This notion has been utilized to develop Wilderness Permit system, visitor information services, and establishing criteria for campsites. Another neglected aspect of tourism planning is the area of strategic planning. Strategic planning has been a valuable tool of addressing planning problems, but the field remains fragmented with topical interests that are at the most fragmented and scattered. Strategic planning remains a key area for tourism planning since as tourism development needs infrastructure, with a high capital cost structure, long time periods of construction and many interdependencies, this technique helps in mediating with different stakeholders to address this long-term objective. This task will require the formulation of a strategy to shape opportunities for competitive advantage and provide a plan for stakeholders to follow. Important decisions will have to be made involving stakeholders with multiple objectives.

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Studies in Tourism Geography of India …

The final theme addressed is the application of GIS to tourism problem-solving. GIS is the most widely utilized technology to harness, explore, query and model geographical database. It is the combination of hardware, software and practices used to run spatial analysis and mapping programme. It is a collection of practices, software and hardware, with the ability to collect, store, manipulate, analyze, prepare maps digitally, automate map with additional information, print and share output. It is important to know that GIS requires data structures in formats by computer software to reconstruct the spatial data model in digital form. Data models can be constructed utilizing raster and vector data. The raster data models are a system of tessellating rectangular cells in which individual cells are used as building blocks to create images of point, line, area, networks, and surface entities. Similarly, vector data models are spatial data models using two-dimensional Cartesian (x, y) coordinates to store the shape of spatial entities. GIS can be used in tourism planning such as tourism site selection, tourism retail trading decisions, attraction allocation, and visitor demographic data. First, for the advanced users, GIS has the capability to conduct scenario and forecasting analysis of demand and supply analysis. This technology at a very basic level can be used to identify specific development sites based on a set of criteria using economic, social, environmental and business development related data. Further, GIS can be utilized for tourism modeling for a prospective tourism region involving a complicated set of criteria. It has been used very successfully for planning, execution and engagement in strategic management of the enterprise. Second, tourism development is a geographic phenomenon and GIS can identify principal tourist activity spaces within a destination and flow among destinations. Businesses and local government can implement strategic plans for building superior infrastructure such as public transportation system linking various tourist activity spaces. Third, GIS can be used in relation to providing environmental justice with the implication that tourism perhaps cannot benefit all sections of society equally such as

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groups whose home are lost due to site selection. The technology also aids in preparing an inventory of resources to identify land use conflicts and complementarities and activities, available infrastructure and natural resources. Fourth, GIS can be utilized to study and analyze tourism impacts on various industrial sectors using time series or cross-section spatial data sets. The What if? (Klosterman 1996) tool can be used for scenario generation with the assumption what will happen if a critical variable in the model changes and how will it affect the destination? For the advanced user GIS can run spatial regression, location allocation and spatial optimization models to query geographic data for revealing the best tourist location and sites for future development. It can be an aid in supporting important business decision-making solutions.

27.3

Tourism Geography: Indian Studies

Tourism is conceptualized as ‘the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their realm for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes’ (World Tourism Organization 1994). The Government of India’s (2014) defines tourism as ‘a movement of one or more household members traveling to a place outside their usual environment for purposes other than those of migration, or getting employed, or setting up of residence, in that place and which is outside their regular routine of life for not more than six months’. In addition, ‘sustainable tourism is defined as tourism that takes into full account of its current and future, economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of the visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities’ (UNEP and WTO 2005). Geography of tourism can contribute to four areas of knowledge and understanding: ‘role of geographical scale’, ‘demand and supply sides of tourism’, ‘spatial components of tourism system’ and ‘spatial interaction between the various components of tourist system’ (Nelson 2017). The causation relationship among variables explaining tourism

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development may not be consistent across different scales and times. Thus, uncovering spatial relationships across geographical scales are important. Second, the identification of demand and supply factors is equally important for the understanding, estimation and decision-making. Third, spatial components of tourist system refer to the tourism generating areas, tourism receiving areas, and the intervening opportunities of connectivity between the supplying and receiving areas. Fourth, spatial interaction refers to the interaction, measurement, estimation and prediction between regions in terms of tourist flows. Further, Hannam and Diekmann (2015) opine that with rapid national growth in India likely will be a large source of and destination of tourist flows. They utilize a critical theory approach to analyze several themes like: ‘tourism governance’, ‘cultural tourism’, ‘heritage tourism’, ‘nature-based tourism’ from the supply-side, and the ‘international tourism’, ‘domestic tourism’, ‘outbound’ and ‘Indian diaspora’ from the demand-side. Given this brief overview the following six themes are reviewed in the Indian context in the following sections: ‘globalization and tourist development, ‘regional tourism and development’, ‘economic geography and tourism’, ‘eco-tourism and sustainability’, ‘tourism and environment impact’ and ‘infrastructure development and tourism’.

27.3.1 Globalization and Tourism Development Globalization and tourism are interdependent as the process of globalization affects the local; and vice-versa local affects the globalization. Thus, there is a reciprocal relationship between tourism and development. For example, beaches in Goa and the Taj Mahal in Agra attract not only domestic visitors but also international tourists. At the same time, liberalization of the Indian economy has encouraged international visitors. Nowak et al. (2010) opined the increasing international fragmentation of tourism production through such processes as ‘outsourcing’, ‘vertical specialization’ and ‘delocalization’.

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Outsourcing involves services in tourism sector that are information-sector based, technologically enabled business process outsourcing services. These may include such services as call center support, and other services including data entry handling and coding, medical and legal transcriptions and testing. For example, the package tour is an aggregate product that contains various segments of production. These production processes in turn require different technologies, alternate factor proportions, skill sets, marketing inputs and geographic locations, provided in different combinations to tourist consumers with various pricing schemes. Further, the Government of India (2017a, b) reports that the share of India as a proportion of international tourist arrivals almost doubled from 683.3 million during 2000 to 1235 million during 2016 and in terms of percentage increased from 0.39 to 1.18%. Figure 27.2 shows the larger percent of international visitors to India are primarily from the core developed countries i.e. Western Europe and North America as well as South Asia and Southeast Asia. In addition, globalization has positive and negative impacts on the local and global economy. Several positive impacts such as easy availability of credit due to international banking, alternatives modal choices, competitive and luxurious hotel accommodation, and international cuisine. On the negative side, there can be tsunami, terrorist attacks, disease breakthrough that may deter tourists from traveling to tourist destinations. In sum, globalization has a positive impact on tourism since the positive outweighs the negative impacts.

27.3.2 Regional Tourism and Development Tourism geography is a rapidly growing field in India without adequate attention being paid by Indian geographers. Babu et al. (2008) in their book Tourism Development Revisited provides a critical overview that deals with the details of the conceptual and paradigmatic evolution of tourism as a socio-economic phenomenon. Tourism

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Fig. 27.2 Foreign tourist arrivals in India from global regions (in percent): 2001 and 2016. Source Government of India, Ministry of Tourism (2014 and 2017a, b)

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40 30 20 10 0

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plays a significant role in economic, political, and social development processes. This sector is dynamic and thus, demonstrates changing patterns of space-time development across countries. Babu’s (2008) study identified several characteristics of Indian tourism: first, foreign tourists have been increasing over the years with high annual volatility, as well as domestic tourism volume has been extremely high; second, both foreign and domestic tourism display seasonality, i.e. peak, trough and shoulder; and tourist arrivals have been concentrated in certain destination and states. Further, the National Council of Applied Economic Research (GOI 2015) noted several spatial characteristics of domestic tourism such as: (1) 4.4 trips were made by an Indian household in rural areas, (2) 12 of 35 states and Union Territories showed a higher incidence of domestic tourism relative to the nation, (3) the highest incidence of trips were observed in Jammu and Kashmir with 904 trips per 100 households followed by Himachal Pradesh with 791 trips during 2008–09, (4) the states and Union Territories with the least intensity of domestic tourism were observed in Northeastern states and Goa, (5) the average number of trips made by urban households in an year is less than rural households and the states/UTs are Tripura, Assam, Jharkhand, Goa, Kerala and Chandigarh, Delhi, Daman Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Lakshadweep (6) the intensity of tourism is least in Assam, (7) the importance of factors that lead to trips are social, religious, medical, business and leisure, and (8) Delhi is the only state where

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the leisure trips are the highest (Government of India 2014). Further, a recent study on domestic tourism in India (Government of India 2017a, b) observed the following three trends with respect to household profile, characteristics of trip and expenditure on trip: (1) nearly 36.6 and 35.7% of rural and urban households reported overnight trips with central purposes of holidaying, leisure and recreation, health, medical and shopping during past 365 days of survey period (July 2014–June 2015); (2) Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh were the largest destination of visitors for all reasons; and (3) the costliest trip was for medical category followed by shopping and last holidaying, leisure and recreation. Shukla (2014) analyzed the geographical dimension of tourism in Gujarat using primary and secondary data analysis. He opined the motivational factors attracting tourists are post-monsoon season, which is cool winter weather; fairs and festivals, site seeing, as well as religious sites attract visitors; other factors motivating tourists are cheap and easy transport supply and historical monuments in the region. The Northeastern region in India has immense tourism potential and yet the number of visitors dwindle. The region is endowed with hills, plateaus, and plains along with river systems that contribute to scenic tourism. It has rich stock of both scenic and cultural resources, as it is located at the confluence of diverse ethnic stock of population. The region has tremendous potential for tourism-led regional development strategy (Bhattacharya 2008). In addition, Nagaland has a

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rich potential of rural tourism since it is known to be a world biodiversity hotspot (Ezung 2011). Goa is the recipient of a large locale volume of tourists and yet there are ill effects of tourism in Goa. The local people’s organizations are making a strenuous effort to prevent further degradation of Goa’s natural resources. However, on the other side the tourism industry with local muscle power and a nexus with politicians are trying to attract high-end tourist relative to cheap charter tourists. The real estate and luxurious hotels do not attract tourists since they travel for the scenic beauty and not the concrete jungle (Noronha 1997). India has followed the demand-centered strategy of developing Goa as a premier beach town and resort-styled development. The economic rationale of this strategy has been to maximize foreign exchange, employment and percolation of economic benefits to lagging areas. Such a development policy might not be the most efficient for three reasons: first, local population are harmed since they lose control of their land resources for the benefit of tourist consumption; second, they do not get a share of the profit; and third, tourism often escalates crime, prostitution and drugs at the expanse of the loss of local culture (Routledge 2000). Scale refers to the level at which a geographical phenomenon is represented. The level could be a Census block, township, city, district, metropolitan area, state, nation or the global region. If a certain trend is observed in the real world, and when data is aggregated over spatial scale for the same observation, the trends could be revered. In statistics, this could be referred to as Simpson Paradox. In geographical inquiry, one often notices this phenomenon and is called the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). Tourism geographic studies have been conducted at smaller spatial scales and more studies need to be conducted to unravel the impact of scale on tourist geographic phenomenon. Sahani (2017) conducted a survey to analyze tourist expectation and satisfaction using primary survey for Santiniketan of different tourist spots (West Bengal). Santiniketan is a cultural heritage and educational center in West Bengal visited by domestic and foreign visitors. A statistical inference

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analysis revealed no significant variation in tourist spots in relation to tourist expectation and satisfaction. Yet, he opines lack of management, marketing, and infrastructural facilities for tourist spots needs further attention. A qualitative survey determined that although tourism generates local development, it has led to the control of the business interests of the local area in Araku Valley Township by interests outside the local economy. The benefits to the local economy in terms of employment and income generation should outweigh the costs in terms of protecting the resource base and carrying capacity of the environment (Gangopadhyay and Chattopadhyay 2012). Mandal and Chakrabarty (2013) study a small place Gopiballavpur (settlement in Midnapore West district, West Bengal) whose economic strength is agriculture. The place is a leading hub for Vaishnavism and thus rural tourism, or sustainable tourism can bring more prosperity to the area (Mandal and Chakrabarty 2013). Such studies suggest the importance of micro-level studies, which can lead to macro-level generalization and produce more insights to the relationship between tourism and regional development. Thus, micro-level studies reveal aspects of tourism analysis not informed by studies at different scales.

27.3.3 Economic Geography and Tourism Tourism is an important sector of the Indian economy since; it contributes to employment, local development, foreign exchange, and generates wealth. The number of international tourist’s arrival during 2003 was 2.7 million, which increased to 8.8 million during 2016, which is a three-fold increase (GOI 2003 and 2017a, b). Majority of the foreign tourist visitors were from the top five sources Bangladesh, United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Malaysia (GOI 2017a, b). The number of domestic inbound tourists in India was 1614 million and their top five destinations were Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka during 2015–16 (GOI 2017a, b).

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Given these trends, this section examines the following sub-themes: ‘domestic tourism’, ‘international tourism flows’, and ‘tourism and national economic development’ in India at a sub-national level. Domestic tourism in India has been thriving and increasing during the period 2004–2016. Domestic tourism is also characterized by uneven distribution of tourist visitors across states. There has been a continuous growth in domestic tourism during 1991–2016 to all states and Union Territories at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.03% (GOI 2017a, b). In the wake of globalization, the flows of not only foreign travel arrivals but also domestic visitors have increased manifold. Figures 27.3 and 27.4 depicts a spatial pattern of tourist visitors in India: first, a high percent of domestic tourist visitors visited three states namely Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu during 2001 which expanded to include other states like Karnataka, Maharashtra and Rajasthan by 2016; second, the next category of visitors labelled medium travelled to states such as Karnataka during 2001 and included states such as Karnataka, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar; in the third, low category states visitors did not choose the Northern states, Central and Western states and parts of Northeastern states, which declined in the basket of states representing the region, yet the North, Northeast and East states did not attract so many visitors; and fourth category represents the very least(very low) states such as Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Northeastern region during 2001 which continued to include Northeastern states during 2016. Figures 27.5 and 27.6 displays the international tourist flows in India during 2001 and 2016. Four patterns can be observed: first, high group includes states such as Maharashtra, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and Goa during 2001 and 2016; second group medium consists of Kerala, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar; and third, the low group includes Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Gujarat during 2001 and 2016 and the very low group of states include Northeastern states, Puducherry, Gujarat, Odisha, J&K,

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Chandigarh and Punjab among many other states during both 2001 and 2016. Bergman (1996) asserts that the tourist potential of any region depends upon three A’s: first, the regions accessibility to the core countries; second, regions’ quality and number of accommodations; and third, the regions cultural and physical attractions. Several local governments have tried to promote regional tourism because of the potential economic gains it manifests. Singapore has attempted to capture inbound tourists from India in Southeast Asia through its efforts of exploiting India’s ‘Look East Policy’. This Indian policy is an effort of strengthening its economic ties with members of Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The economic liberalization policy has also surged Indian business travelers exploring investment opportunities in the region. Further, Singapore has expanded efforts to invest in Indian projects to solicit more Indian travelers (Yahya 2003). Similarly, Gopalan (2013) mapped the cross-border flows of tourists between India and European Union. He examined the determinants and barriers to selected countries and noted three factors of interest: ‘visa regulations’, ‘Bollywood tourism’ and ‘resident permits’ for employment and education purposes. Further, Dhariwal (2005) has estimated the determinants of international tourism in India during 1966– 2000. She observed that socio-political factors such as ‘communalism’, ‘Indo-Pak tensions’ and ‘terrorism’ have threatened the potential gains from what could have been a vibrant sector generating perennial income. The tourism sector is a vital component of the national economic development through its employment, income and development impacts. It contributes and interacts with many other economic sectors of the system and thus, creates economic interdependence among vital sectors. The Government of India commissioned a study (GOI 2014) to develop tourism satellite accounts for 2009–10 to measure the importance of tourism in national development. They estimated tourism direct share in India’s gross domestic product of about 3.7% and in employment 4.4%. In addition, if the indirect effects are aggregated these shares increase to 6.8 and 10.2%. Further,

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Fig. 27.3 Domestic tourism in India: 2001. Source Government of India, Ministry of Tourism (2017a, b, 2003)

Bhatt and Munjal (2013) quantified the economic impact of tourism through the computation of backward and forward linkages. The linkage analysis reveals that the expansion of hotel, air transport, surface transport, restaurant industry benefits the tourist sector immensely. Further, Munjal (2013) argues the case for inclusion of tourism in the input-output framework for analyzing the inter-linkage and multiplier effects of tourism on other economic sectors. Thus, policymakers need to take cognizance of these relationships while developing economic policies to foster tourism development. Hence, economic geographers can contribute in many significant ways to shed light, to the relationship between tourism and local and regional development processes in India.

27.3.4 Ecotourism and Sustainability Ecotourism is a form of tourism where travelers visit natural areas to enjoy and appreciate nature, promote conservation and involve local people for beneficial social and economic development. De-differentiation characterizes ecotourismbased travel activities. In such a pursuit of tourism, tourists often engage in activities such as ‘birdwatching’, ‘backpacking’, ‘surfing’, and or ‘bungee jumping’ (Shaw and Williams 2004). The age cohort of tourists are often within 35–54 in such tourism pursuits. Travelers from this age group are often motivated by two key factors: first, to enjoy scenery and nature and second, to access unfamiliar places and landscapes. Most eco-tourists are well educated and are from the

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Fig. 27.4 Domestic tourism in India: 2016. Source Government of India, Ministry of Tourism (2017a, b, 2003)

above-average income group. They are the ‘new middle class’ who are quite environmentally aware. Ecotourism has many characteristics such as ‘minimal impact visitor behavior’, ‘sensitivity and appreciation towards local people and biodiversity’, ‘support for local conservation endeavor’, ‘local participation in decision-making’ and ‘educating both travelers and local communities’. Bjork (2000) opined eco-tourism’s resurgence has been due to the ‘greening of markets’, ‘increasing awareness of the environment’, ‘better informed managers’, and the importance of the interdependent relationship among good ecology and well-performing economy. In addition, for ecotourism to be sustainable four groups of actors

need to participate, and they are: local people, the authorities, tourists and tourism-related business and organizations. Another related and yet overlapping concept is sustainable tourism. The practice of economic tourism within the ecological carrying capacity of land is termed sustainable tourism. Butler (1999) articulated sustainable tourism as a practice that is conducted in a manner, at such a scale, that it remains viable for an indefinite period. In addition, such a tourism practice should not alter the landscape to a degree that it prohibits the development of other activities. Tourism, like any other industry has positive and negative benefits. It has economic benefits of generating income and employment. However, the negative benefits of rising environment cost, increase in

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Fig. 27.5 Foreign Tourist Arrivals in India: 2001. Source Government of India, Ministry of Tourism (2017a, b, 2003)

the greenhouse gas emissions, and physical degradation of the natural and historical sites has led to the physical closures of tourist places to visitors. In addition, increasing tourism flows has led to an increase in rental prices, congestion and declining air quality of the tourist places (The Economist 2017). The Economist developed a ‘Sustainable Development Index (STI) to evaluate nations on their resolve to develop and promote sustainable practices in tourism. France and Germany lead the index overall, and across most domains of evaluation. Of the ten countries in the sample, these two nations have exemplified a sustained action at the national level, set targets and follow up

monitoring the outcome of government intervention (The Economist 2017). A 100-point score sets the maximum for computing the Sustainable Development Index (SDI). India scored 36.9 relative to France (73.9), Germany (71.7), Japan (46.0), Brazil (34.9), China (30.8) and Indonesia (27.1). It scored the highest amongst the developing nations and has sustainable development policies that sets out some milestones and contains metrics for selected groups of stakeholders. India scored 29.0 points in the ‘policy and regulatory environment’ realm relative to France (96.0), Germany (77.5), Japan (35.0) and China (17.5). Although, India has developed sustainable development policies, there are limited incentives

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Fig. 27.6 Foreign Tourist Arrivals in India: 2016. Source Government of India, Ministry of Tourism (2017a, b, 2003)

to enforce them at the lower tiers of tour operators (The Economist 2017). Thus, ecotourism is a concept that has gained popularity in India in the last several decades. Mir (2016) identifies several types of popular ecotourism practices in India. These are ‘mountain tourism’, ‘adventure tourism’, ‘wildlife tourism’ and ‘agritourism’. Ecotourism implies management of tourism and conservation of nature in ways to meet the need of tourism business, and at the same time satisfy the demand of local population for employment, food, fodder, timber, shelter and status of women. The Kerala economy is an exemplar of sustainable-based tourism development. Utilizing the three pillars of sustainable development

(economic growth, sustainability and community participation), it can be argued that the state might not measure up at the aggregate scale, although a few success stories prevail sporadically (Thimm 2017). Sreekumar and Parayil (2002) argue Kerala stands out as a model of tourist-based development. Although, it is observed that tourism earnings have been falsely recorded in official publications. This incorrect statistic is later utilized by the tourism industry for justifying subsidies, tax cuts, and concessions. While there is miniscule contribution of tourism to local development, the perceived benefits are notionally utilized for advancing projects that have degradation effects on environment.

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India is a rich location for wildlife, bird and tiger reserves. There are several attractions such as the Jim Corbett National Park (Himalayan foothills), Ranthambore National Park, Sariska and Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuaries (Rajasthan), Kanha National Park (Madhya Pradesh), and Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary (Rajasthan) amongst many other destinations. These places can be successfully utilized for wildlife tourism if their carrying capacity is kept intact. The carrying capacity will depend on several factors such as attitudes of local people, tourist satisfaction, cost and benefit analysis of tourism impact, and conservation management. Clearly, there are problems with wildlife serves and sanctuaries in India. Das (2011) echoed concerns regarding the basis of ecotourism guidelines for preserving tiger reserves and laments at the fragmented nature of policies and the resultant trade-offs. She suggests for a revision of the guidelines with a critical analysis of the underlying conceptual basis of eco-tourism. Banerjee (2010) opines there has been a sizeable loss of tiger population due to lack of funding, mismanagement, population and development pressure in the light of the ecotourism debate. Also, the current policies have not benefitted conservation efforts and the local communities. A suggested middle path is the integration of ecotourism with sustainable livelihoods that will be supported by local communities. Karanth and Karanth (2012) echoed a middle ground approach as well where a shared profit motive between the private landowners and tourism entrepreneurs would pave the way for the tourism industry to grow in a sustained manner instead of government intervention. An ‘adaptive management approach’ has been advocated for sanctuaries and reserve management in India (Holling 1978; Robbins and Chhangani 2015). This approach assumes that the system under consideration is poorly understood and uncertain which is true of Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan. This approach entails provoking experimental conditions such that a variety of policies are implemented to evaluate the outcomes. At the end, the objective is to understand and manage a complex system. Thus, such an approach will manifest:

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first, ‘the freedom to adapt and invest in new conservation rules’; second, ‘the opportunity to directly intervene in environmental systems’; third, ‘the necessity of democratic and scientific monitoring’; and fourth, the ‘opportunity to change rules to invoke new outcomes’ (Robbins and Chhangani 2015). The Indian government enunciated the first tourism policy (Government of India 2002). The basic tenets of the policy were to develop tourism sector as an engine of growth. The policy addressed additional goals of harnessing the direct, indirect, and induced effects of tourism for employment generation, position India as a global brand with its untapped tourism potential, utilize the role of private sector in cooperation with public sector, create a tourist circuit based on regional cooperation with states and other nodal agencies, and ensure that the tourists rejuvenates and energizes after a tourism experience in a way that they feel India from within.

27.3.5 Tourism and Environment Impacts Tourism is a double-edged sword that generates benefits for socio-economic development in the local area, but at the same time leads to environmental degradation as well. It is the ecological, flora and fauna resources that attracts tourists, yet the very activities of tourism lead to an increased pressure on land and decline in its carrying capacity and thereby, environmental damage. The stress imposed by the increasing tourism has led to devastating impact upon the fragile natural ecosystem (water, land, forest and soil), declining land-man ratio, soil erosion, increased pollution, natural habitat loss, increased pressure for endangered species loss, enhanced pressure for forest fire, and disposal of waste in the nearby river and oceans leading to a harmful effect on the natural ecosystem and its depletion. Late Karan (1989) opined Sikkim opened for tourism for trekking. The tourism industry has increased pollution and destroyed the alpine vegetation. A development plan should include

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the absorptive capacity to maintain the fragile ecological balance of the high mountain area. For instance, Kullu district in Himachal Pradesh is a tourist destination because of its mountain scenery and cultural heritage. It has attracted tourist visitors for centuries and especially during the early parts of 1990s since the upgrading of National Highway 21, improvement in communication, effective marketing and growth of the Indian economy (Gardner et al. 2002). Cole and Sinclair (2002) applied an ecological footprint (EF) analysis to estimate the area of productive land and water ecosystems required to produce resources for consumption. The method absorbs the wastes the production economy generates. This technique was utilized to quantify the sustainability of Manali, a tourist center in the wake of an exponential increase in tourist visitors. Analysis revealed EF increased from 2012 hectares to 9665 hectares (450%) which tantamount to an EF twenty-five times larger than the size of Manali town. This outcome leads to several concerns for local government since almost 80% of the EF is attributed to tourist visitors. First, increased tourist visitors have implications for waste generation and its management. The increased waste (plastics, food, garbage, camping equipment, etc.) ends up in the Beas river which has implications for the long-term sustainability of river ecosystem. Second, increased tourism has led to the loss of valuable forest land, productive soil and natural vegetation for construction of hotels and homes. Third, there is increasing shortage of drinking water especially during peak tourist seasons. And fourth, there is an increased level of atmospheric and noise pollution due to the regional dependence on outside sources of fossil fuel to operate motor vehicles (Kuniyal et al. 2003). Thus, is it necessary to convert arable and pasture land for growing more food, increase dependence on fossil fuel, convert land for housing for the sustenance of tourists. In sum, local government needs to weigh the cost-benefit of the environmental loss for earning higher tourist income. Dey et al. (2018) conducted a geospatial analysis of the impact of tourism industry in Dehradun city (Uttarakhand

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state). They used satellite images for 1972, 2000 and 2016 for understanding the land use and land cover dynamics. It was observed that construction is being extended to steep and very steep-sloped areas making it vulnerable to landslides and other natural disasters. A similar fate for Mussoorie town in Garhwal Himalaya was observed where since 1989 tourist visitors have increased leading to haphazard development of tourist facilities (Madan and Rawat 2000).

27.3.6 Infrastructure and Tourism Development There is a strong interrelationship between tourism and infrastructure, since the supply of a well-developed road, rail, air transport network along with the provision of hotel and tourism hospitality services leads to a healthy growth of the tourist industry in the region. Hyma and Wall (1979) opined Tamil Nadu is rich in natural and cultural resources but lacks infrastructure and a well-articulated development strategy. They argued for a resource and urban-based development strategy that would have advantages for tourism development in a developing area. Such a provision of a well-articulated infrastructure supply implies that tourist visitors will not have problems in reaching their destinations, staying there and appreciating the attractions. Typically, the public sector and private sector cooperate in the supply of social infrastructure and the provision of accommodation. Infrastructure is the backbone of tourism development in India. The benefits or losses that a region makes is dependent on the travel account which is defined as the net difference between the income receipt from and expenditure on tourism when its people travel abroad. Thus, a provision of balanced supply of infrastructure will enhance the travel account. An associated concept is the notion of income multipliers and spatial linkages between infrastructure, tourism expansion and travel account. A popular tourist destination will receive more visitors as compared to a peripheral and a less popular destination. Every Rupee that a visitor spends at a destination will lead to three kinds of

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effects: direct, indirect and induced effects. The direct impact entails the initial introduction of currency into the local economy by the tourist visitors on hotel accommodation, food, travel and shopping. The indirect effect implies the next round of spending because of tourist spending. This in effect will lead the local businesses to spend on expenses, employee salaries, taxes and business expansion such as machinery, purchase of land, new hiring to better serve the tourist industry. Subsequently, an induced effect leads to yet another round of spending by the tourism business such as paying for licenses, fee, additional machinery and labor. Thus, this process of spending and re-spending is referred to ‘rounds of spending’ and is called the multiplier effect with each round of tourism spending generating an additional round of spending by business. Lastly, the development of tourism industry can lead to tourism-led-local development through the further development, expansion and diversification of tourism industry. The tourist industry can take advantage of the existing tourism business or purport the development of new businesses to facilitate the provision of tourism services. Such an articulated network infrastructure supply, tourism businesses leads to a spatial linkage effect and overall expansion of tourism development (Jackson 1993; Nelson 2017). Although the arrival of international tourists has increased from 5.08 million to 8.80 million during the decade 2006–2016 (India Tourism Statistics 2007 and 2017b) a recent report (Pacific Area Travel Association (PATA) posits that infrastructure was hampered by a lack of inadequate road, airport infrastructure and constrained with inadequate hotel rooms. Tourism arrivals have increased due to the ‘Incredible India’ marketing effort making her a sought-after tourist destination with respect to domestic, inbound, and outbound tourist travelers. The report purported four salient features of the strong consumption-driven economy that heralded the era of growth in tourism. These are: (1) increased government focus on tourism promotion, (2) a powerful branding campaign, (3) rapidly growing and increasingly wealthy middle class and (4) liberalization of the airline

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industry have contributed to the emergence of tourism in India in the international and domestic spotlight (Livemint 2007). Several Indian states have endeavored towards improving tourism infrastructure. For instance, Rajasthan a popular tourist destination has strived towards introducing a new train called the ‘Royal Rajasthan’ on the lines of palace on wheels. In addition, 16 air strips are to be improved/started and commercial airlines are to be invited to start operations. Another project to be imitated is the development of a ‘Mega Desert Tourist Circuit’ comprising Bikaner, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Pali, Mount Abu, through heritage conservation, landscaping and other initiatives (FICCI 2015–16).

27.4

Conclusion

The World Tourism Organization (WTO 1994) defines tourism as ‘the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes’. The tourism industry is the third largest after the oil and automobile industries. The tourism industry is very important for regional development since it generates wealth and employment, attracts foreign exchange, promotes travel and hospitability industry, advances cross-cultural communication and understanding, builds infrastructure, and leads to local as well as global development. Tourism geography has been a systematic branch of geography since the post-WW II period. Tourist geographers have addressed six themes in the past decades such as: ‘Tourism-leddevelopment’, ‘Tourism resorts and their development’, ‘Tourism travel’, ‘Tourists impacts’, ‘Recreation and tourism planning’ and ‘Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application in tourism’. Indian tourism statistics reveals an overall increase in domestic and international visitors to tourist sites. Tourism geography in India is a nascent area of research and this chapter surveys six areas of geographic research: ‘globalization and tourist development, ‘regional tourism and development’, ‘economic geography and

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tourism’, ‘eco-tourism and sustainability’, ‘tourism and environment impact’, and infrastructure development and tourism’. First, it is expected that with increased globalization the number of domestic and international tourist visitors would increase manifold, and this implies an increase in tourism planning for site selection, tourism development and local government investment. Second, regional tourism analysis suggests the proclivity of micro-level studies, which can lead to macro-level generalization and produce more insights to the relationship between tourism and regional development. Thus, micro-level studies reveal aspects of tourism analysis not informed by studies at alternate scales. Third, economic geography analysis reveals during latter part of post-liberalization period (2001–16) domestic tourist visitors have flocked to selected states in India such as: Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Likewise, foreign tourists have increased exponentially to Maharashtra, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and Goa during the same period. Fourth, the notion of ‘sustainable tourism’, which is defined as the practice of tourism within the ecological and environmental carrying capacity bounds of the land has become very important. The Economist (2017) reports India has implemented sustainable tourism practices, but there are limited incentives for implementing at the lower tiers of tourist operators. Fifth, the tourism industry attracts visitors due to environmental diversity, flora and fauna and yet, it is the tourist industry which is responsible for the increased ecological and carbon footprint in such areas like: Kullu-Manali, Sikkim state, Dehradun city and Garhwal Himalayan region. A cost-benefit analysis would suggest ‘preservation’ instead of ‘tourism development’. Lastly, there is a symbiotic relationship between infrastructure provision and tourism development. An increased supply of infrastructure will lead to higher spatial linkages and more tourist-led regional development.

449 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of Geography, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand for awarding me with the Ron Lister Visiting Fellowship during the summer of 2018. The fellowship facilitated the research and writing of this chapter. I also want to thank Professors Across Borders Grant from California State University, San Bernardino.

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450 Dietvorst AGJ, Ashworth GG (1995) Tourist and spatial transformations: implications for policy and planning. CABI, Wallingford Economist The (2017) The sustainable tourism index: enhancing the global travel environment. London, UK, The Economist intelligence Unit Limited Ezung TZ (2011) Rural tourism in Nagaland (India): exploring the potential. Int J Rural Manag 7 (1&2):133–147 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) (2015–16) Tourism Infrastructure: the role states play. Tansen Marg, New Delhi Gangopadhyay N, Chattopadhyay GP (2012) Tourism and its impact: an analysis of people’s perception study in Araku Valley Township, Andhra Pradesh. Indian J Reg Sci 1:88–94 Gardner J, Sinclair J, Berkes F, Singh RB (2002) Accelerated tourism development and its impacts in Kullu-Manali (HP) India. Tourism Recreation Research 27(3):9–20 Giaoutzi M, Nijkamp PJ (2006) Tourism and regional development: new pathways. Routledge, London Gibson C (2008) Locating geographies of tourism. Prog Hum Geogr 32(3):407–422 Gopalan S (2013) Mapping India-EU tourism flows. CARIM-India research report RR2013/15. European University Institute, pp 1–16 Government of India (2002) National tourism policy. Department of tourism, Ministry of Tourism and Culture New Delhi Government of India (2003) India tourism statistics. Market research division. Ministry of Tourism, New Delhi Government of India (2007) India tourism statistics. Market research division. Ministry of Tourism, New Delhi Government of India (2014) Regional tourism satellite account Puducherry, 2009–10. National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi Government of India (2015) State-wise comparison of characteristics of domestic trips in India—a study based on domestic tourism survey, 2008–09. National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi Government of India (2017a) Domestic tourism in India, NSS 72nd round, National Sample Survey Office. Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation New Delhi Government of India (2017b) India tourism statistics. Market research division. Ministry of Tourism, New Delhi Haggett P (2001) Geography: a global synthesis. Prentice Hall, New York Hannam K, Diekmann A (2015) Tourism and India: a critical introduction: contemporary geographies of leisure. Routledge, Tourism and Mobility Holling CS (1978) Adaptive environmental assessment and management. John Wiley, Chic Chester Hyma B, Wall G (1979) Tourism in a developing area: the case of Tamil Nadu, India. Ann Tour Res 6(3):338– 350

R. Kalra Jackson RW (1993) Input-output analysis: assessing regional economic impacts. Unpublished Discussion Paper, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Karan PP (1989) Environment and development in Sikkim Himalaya: a review. Hum Ecol 17(2):257–271 Karanth KU, Karanth KK (2012) A tiger in the drawing room: can Luxury tourism benefit wildlife? Econ Polit Wkly 47(38):38–43 Klosterman R (1996) What if?. http://www.whatifinc.biz/ about.php. Accessed 25th Mar 2018 Kuniyal JC, Joshi AP, Shannigrahi AS (2003) Environmental impacts of tourism in Kullu-Manali complex in northwestern Himalaya, India Part 1: the adverse impacts. Int J Fieldwork Stud 1(1):1–125 Livemint (2007) Poor infrastructure cramps India’s tourist inflows: a report. First Published March 12, 2007. Accessed 25th Jan 2018) Madan S, Rawat L (2000) The impact of tourism on the impact of Mussorrie, Garhwal Himalaya, India. Environmentalist 20(3):249–255 Mandal PK, Chakrabarty P (2013) An assessment on tourism aspects of Gopiballavpur: a religious hub of Vaishnavism. Indian J Reg Sci 1:109–115 Mathieson A, Wall G (1982) Tourism: economic, physical and social impacts. Longman Group Limited, Essex UK McCurry KC (1930) The use of land for recreation. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 20(1):7–20 Mir SM (2016) Geography of tourism in India. In: Bhat LS, Ramachandran H, Vyas RN (eds) Economic geography: ICSSR research and explorations, vol 2. Oxford University Press, Delhi Munjal P (2013) Measuring the economic impact of the tourism industry in India using the tourism satellite account and input-output analysis. Tour Econ 19 (6):1345–1359 Nelson V (2017) An introduction to the geography of tourism, 2nd edn. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD Noronha F (1997) Goa: fighting the ban of tourism. Econ Polit Wkly 32(51):3253–3256 Nowak JJ, Petit S, Sahli M (2010) Tourism and globalization: the international division of tourism production. J Travel Res 49(2):228–248 OECD (2016) OECD tourism trends and policies 2016. OECD, Paris Pearce DG (1979) Towards a geography of tourism. Anna Tour Res 6(3):245–272 Peters P, Landre M (2012) The emerging global tourism geography—an environmental sustainability perspective. Sustainability 4:42–71 Robbins P, Chhangani AK (2015) Adaptive management of India’s Wildlife statuaries. In: Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur SK, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development: regional resources, vol 1. Dordrecht, Netherlands, Springer, pp 235–251 Routledge P (2000) Consuming Goa: tourist site as dispensable space. Econ Polit Wkly 35(30):2647– 2656

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Sahanai N (2017) Tourist expectation and satisfaction: a case study of Santineketan, Birbhum District West Bengal. Indian J Reg Sci 1:124–133 Shaw G, Williams AM (2004) Tourism and tourism spaces. Sage, London Shukla PK (2014) A Study of tourism in Gujarat: a geographical perspective. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, M.S. University of Baroda Vadodra, Gujarat Smith RA (1991) Beach resorts: a model of development evolution. Landsc Urban Plan 21:189–201 Sreekumar TT, Parayil G (2002) Contentions and contradictions of tourism as development option: the case of Kerala, India. Third World Q 23(3):529–548 Taffe EJ (1974) The spatial view in context. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 64(1):1–16 Thimm T (2017) The kerala tourism model-an indian state on the road to sustainable development. Sustain Dev 25:77–91

451 Turner R (2017) Travel and tourism economic impact 2017 India. World Travel and Tourism Council, pp 1–18 UNEP GEO (2000) UNEP’s millennium report on the environment. Oxford, Earthscan UNEP & WTO (2005) Making tourism more sustainable: a guide for policy makers. UNEP and WTO, Paris UNWTO (1994) UNWTO tourism highlights. Madrid, Spain UNWTO (2017) UNWTO tourism highlights. Madrid, Spain Williams S (1998) Tourism geography. Routledge Contemporary Human Geography, New York Williams AV, Zelinsky W (1970) On some patterns in international tourist flows. Econ Geogr 46(4):549–567 World Tourism Organization (1994) Recommendations on tourism statistics. World Tourism Organization, New York, United Nations Yahya F (2003) Tourism flows between India and Singapore. Int J Tour Res 5:347–367

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Leveraging Brewing History: The Case of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood Neil Reid, Jay D. Gatrell and Matthew Lehnert

Abstract

The United States is experiencing a craft beer revolution. There are over 7,000 craft breweries in the United States; in 1980 there were only eight. The rise of craft breweries is a response to consumer dissatisfaction with the beer offered by mega-breweries such as Anheuser-Busch. Craft breweries offer consumers a higher quality product and a wide variety of different beer styles. The growing popularity of craft beer has also resulted in a renewed interest in the history of beer and brewing. The focus of this paper is Cincinnati, Ohio. During the nineteenth-century Cincinnati was the destination of tens of thousands of immigrants from Germany. Most of these immigrants settled in what would become known as the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. By the 1870s Over-the-Rhine was one of the most densely populated German-speaking neighborhoods in the western hemisphere— German-speaking churches, German-language schools and newspapers filled the neighborhood. Over-the-Rhine was also home to 13 breweries, which provided the local popula-

tion with German-style lager beer. During the twentieth century, the number of breweries in the United States declined as a result of a decades-long period of consolidation in the American brewing industry. In Cincinnati, as in other American cities, breweries closed one-by-one as national breweries, like Anheuser-Busch and Pabst, came to dominate the brewing landscape. Old brewery buildings either sat empty of were adaptively re-used for other purposes. Recognizing the historical value of these old brewery buildings, in 2005 residents established the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (BDCURC), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. The mission of the BDCURC is to “make the Brewery District a healthy, balanced and supportive neighborhood economy by preserving, restoring and redeveloping our unique brewing history and historic urban fabric.” The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Cincinnati’s brewing history is being leveraged as a part of the city’s broader neighborhood redevelopment efforts. Keywords

N. Reid (&)
M. Lehnert Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Brewery district community urban redevelopment corporation Cincinnati Craft beer Local economic development Over-the-Rhine













J. D. Gatrell Office of Vice President for Academic Affairs, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_28

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The Brewery District’s history is Cincinnati’s history. It tells a story about who we are. We can let it rot, or we can capitalize on it.1

28.1

History, Place, and People

Historical geographies shape regions and localities. And, we believe that craft beer is unique in that brand authenticity and the grounded meaning of everyday life define not only markets and industries (Gatrell et al. 2017; Reid and Gatrell 2017)—but also places (Gregson et al. 1999; Rose 1990). Indeed, shared histories serve to differentiate regions, regional economies, and specific industries (Boschma et al. 2017). In this chapter, we examine the historical development of the brewing industry in Cincinnati to understand how individuals, culture groups, specific firms, and socio-economic cycles transformed the industry over time and in place. In doing so, we demonstrate that the unique combination of immigration, industrialization, and localization has shaped and reshaped the industry, the city, and been codified in the form of the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Urban Redevelopment Corporation (OTR-BDURC). To understand why place matters, geographers have argued that localities (or regions) result from reaction to economic processes, and serve as a platform for social interaction, and become the focus of identification for residents and, we believe, also industries (Gilbert 1988). Yet, places and localities—such as the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, evolve over time and are the result of historically contingent processes that shape and are derived from individual decisions, behaviors, and the concretization of geographical imaginaries (Pred 1984; Peet 1996; Rose 1990; Boschma et al. 2017). These imaginaries in turn shape and re-shape communities and give rise to the creation of local structures— 1

Quote from the The Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation’s Brewery District Master Plan (OTR-BDCURC 2013, 32).

such as the OTR-BDURC—to encourage economic development that reinforce and extend from historical and authentic places (Molotch et al. 2000), which as Rose (1990) notes requires shared systems of identification, familiar economic structures, and a common platform for social interaction. And, as we will demonstrate, local structures like the OTR-BDURC enhance the overall competitiveness of localities and enhance capital investment as they serve as a vehicle for local growth in a hyper global economy (Cox and Mair 1988, 1991). Indeed, contemporary economic development, which are often described within the context of neo-liberalism, mandates communities exercise creative forms of local agency that permit, or more accurately empower, communities—vis-àvis structures (i.e., local organizations) such as OTR-BDURC, shaped by new urban policy to go “more global” (Cox 1998; Addie 2008).2 Beyond the issue of local growth though, communities are also embedded in a cultural politics of economic development that reflects the residents and their economic histories—and in some respects these cultural politics and narratives serve to shape and limit the scale and scope of economic change (Gatrell and Reid 2005, 2002). Moreover, this case will demonstrate how beer (as an industry), as an engine of neighborhood change, evolved over time in response to changing demographics, economics, and market trends. Moreover, the evolutionary economic geography of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood transformed the materiality of everyday life, social relations, and local institutions (Boschma and Frenken 2009, 2011). And, as we have argued elsewhere (Gatrell et al. 2

The literature on place competition asserts that local actors and organizations can strategically exercise agency in a global economy to enhance capital investment. As places and communities, “go more global” the literature also suggests that capitalist structures (such as firms and markets) can also go “more local” (see Cox 1998). One example of going “more local” is the trend towards neo-localism—particularly in the craft beer industry (see Reid and Gatrell 2017). Indeed, the efforts of “big beer” to acquire local breweries reinforces the importance of understanding and strategically deploying local agency in a global economy.

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2017), the overall competitiveness of individual craft breweries—and by extension neighborhoods too, is closely connected to the perceived authenticity of a place and its spatial brand. In addition to the concept of “place”, history and heritage are also powerful and intentional economic development narratives (see Addie 2008). Indeed, history and the cultural heritage of places have served to lend authenticity to market-based economic development strategies in the form of redevelopment and gentrification. In the case of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, this chapter charts the historical development of the community and brewing industry over time. As the case study demonstrates, the development of the industry and the neighborhood is closely linked to historical settlement patterns of immigrants, the cultural influences of immigrant groups on the industry, classic location theory (beer is a weight gaining product), public policy (e.g., Prohibition), technological change, the emergence of monolithic “big beer”, and the spatial fragmentation of an industry that results from the emergence of the contemporary craft beer movement. Finally, the case study is uniquely punctuated by social change and new social movements that have shaped and reshaped urban America and the specific geography of Cincinnati.

28.2

The Germans Are Here

The Germans, more than any other immigrant group, have had a lasting impact upon the American brewing industry—not only in Cincinnati; but also across the nation as they settled in large and small towns. Between 1830 and 1899, 4.9 million Germans immigrated to the United States. This represented 32.9% of all immigrants who arrived in the country during that period (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2009). The Germans settled primarily in northeastern and Midwestern states such as New York, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Cincinnati, Ohio was a major destination and, along with St. Louis, Missouri, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin formed what became known

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as the “German Triangle” (Benbow 2017). And it is this “regional geography” that has shaped the trajectory—and style—of American beer.

28.2.1 Building a Community Cincinnati’s German roots were firmly established well before the Civil War. While the city directory included only 64 residents who were born in Germany in 1825, the total number of German-born residents had swelled to close to 50,000, which represented 27% of the city’s population, by 1850 (Wittke 1962). By the 1890s, German-Americans accounted for 57.4% of Cincinnati’s population (Dobbert 1964). As the German population of Cincinnati increased, they started to settle in one small section of the city. This soon became known as the “Over-the-Rhine” neighborhood (Fig. 28.1).3 According to one commentator “by the 1870s [Over-the-Rhine] was one of the densest neighborhoods in the Western Hemisphere, with German-speaking churches, German-language schools and newspapers, and a network of breweries built atop enormous beer cellars” (Woodard 2016). In 1889, Cincinnati was home to 23 breweries, 13 of which were located in the Over-the-Rhine (OTR) neighborhood (Fig. 28.2). The breweries supported a number of ancillary businesses within the city, including 4 hops dealers, 9 malt houses, and 52 coopers or barrel-makers (Morgan 2010). Given the number of breweries and ancillary firms, beer was an important part of the everyday life of Cincinnati’s German population. However, it was not simply economics. It was also cultural. As a staple in OTR homes, beer was closely linked to the American experience of German immigrants and would eventually define the heritage landscape and development of contemporary OTR. For example, data from 1893 shows that while Americans consumed and 3

The name derived from the fact that the canal that ran just to the south of the German neighborhood earned the nickname the “Rhine” and so crossing the canal to enter the neighborhood necessitated going “Over-the-Rhine” (Scheer and Ferdelman 2001; Morgan 2010).

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Fig. 28.1 Map of Over-the-Rhine in 1914. Source Flikr user Michael G. Smith

Fig. 28.2 Cincinnati Breweries, 1889. Source Map created based on data from Morgan (2010) (To see the location of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood within the city of Cincinnati see Fig. 28.4)

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average of 16 gallons of beer per capita, the average Cincinnatian consumed an astounding 40 gallons per capita (Woodard 2016). This number reflects the seemingly unquenchable thirst that Cincinnati’s German population had for beer. In 1889, the city was home to over 1,800 saloons4; approximately 300 of which were OTR (Noble and May 2013; Morgan 2010). As Heuck (1958, 121) observed, there were “beer halls to the right of you, beer halls to the left of you” Saloons, beer halls, and beer gardens played an important part in the daily life of OTR residents. Saloons functioned as a “communal living room” where men socialized and conducted business, while beer gardens provided a space where families could gather (Morgan 2010). The importance of the German population as a driver of brewery success should not be underestimated. In an analysis of the nineteenth-century brewing industry, Manuszak (2002, 690) concluded that “the demographic composition of a market had a definite impact on entry as brewing was more profitable in markets which were more heavily German and male.” In short, German immigrants were central to the production and consumption of beer—and the driving force behind the industry’s success in the marketplace. Most of the beer that Cincinnatians consumed during the second half of the nineteenth century was brewed locally. Indeed, until the 1930s beer was a local industry as each community’s taverns tended to be dominated by local producers. During the 1860s, the local population consumed 90% of the beer brewed in Cincinnati. By the 1890s that figure had dropped to 60% (Morgan 2010). Local production and consumption was necessitated by the fact that beer was a perishable product that did not travel well over long distances (Shears 2014). The decrease in locally produced/locally consumed beer that occurred in Cincinnati as the second half of the nineteenth century progressed reflects some important changes that were affecting the American 4

This meant that there was one saloon for every 164 residents of the city; one for every 41 adult males (Morgan 2010).

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brewing industry. Four were particularly significant—the expansion of the railroads, the introduction of the refrigerated railcar, the advent of mechanized bottling, and the discovery of pasteurization (Stack 2000). These technological and scientific breakthroughs allowed some breweries to reach regional and eventually national markets. Yet, the industry remained highly localized and regional through the 1930s. In the OTR neighborhood, one brewery in particular was on a growth trajectory—the Christian Moerlein Brewing Company. Moerlein, a German immigrant, established his brewery in 1853. All of the 60,000 barrels5 of beer that it produced in 1870 were consumed locally. Moerlein had ambitions for his brewery and in 1876, he showcased his beer at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. As a result, demand increased (Downard 1969). In 1878 he installed the brewery’s first ice machine and by 1880 was producing 98,000 barrels of beer. By 1890, Moerlein brewed 225,000 barrels, was the largest brewery in Ohio, the 14th largest in the nation (Ross 1989; Appel 1986), and was employing approximately 500 people (Downard 1969). Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the brewing industry was an increasingly important contributor to the Cincinnati economy; by 1900, it was the city’s fourth largest industrial employer (Scranton 2005).

28.2.2 Prohibition: Social Changes OTR With the passage of the 18th Amendment to the United States’ Constitution, the country went dry on October 17, 1920. The period, known colloquially as Prohibition, prohibited the production, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages. It lasted over 13 years, before its repeal went into effect on December 5, 1933. And this experience would be one of the first major social events to shape and redefine the nature of the OTR community and its economic base. According to Morgan (2010, 133), “it is difficult to imagine a 5

A barrel of beer is 31 U.S. gallons.

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neighborhood more impacted by Prohibition than Over-the-Rhine.” While it is impossible to calculate an exact financial impact of Prohibition on the economy of Over-the-Rhine, it was clearly devastating. The breweries fell. Those that limped by did so as former shells of themselves. Saloons closed. In addition to the direct loss in saloons, restaurants, theatres, bowling alleys and other places of amusement; the indirect loss of jobs in grain and hop storage, cooperage and related industries; as well as the loss of significant tax revenue, the impact on land values must have also been dramatic (Morgan 2010, 160).

Only four Cincinnati breweries survived Prohibition—the Hudepohl Brewing Company, the Bruckmann Brewing Company, Foss Schneider Brewing Company, and Schaller Brothers. Notably absent from this list is Christian Moerlein—once the largest producer in the city. Two of the four that survived (Hudepohl and Schaller) were located OTR. Within a few years, after the end of Prohibition, half a dozen others joined these four breweries, although some had short-lived existences. By 1957, the only brewery operating in the OTR neighborhood was Hudepohl. In 1997, the brewery (now the Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewery) was sold to the Boston Beer Company (Jones 1997), which used the brewery to produce its line of Samuel Adams beers.6 At its peak, the OTR neighborhood had approximately 45,000 residents (Over-the-Rhine Chamber 2017). Starting in the 1870s though, the character of the neighborhood—like those in many industrial cities began to change. Indeed, the post-Civil War era marked a boom period for northern cities, which coincided with new technologies, enhanced wealth, and increasing economic opportunity. In the case of OTR, social change began and out-migration was facilitated by new infrastructures such as the construction of numerous incline rail lines. With access to new 6

After its acquisition by Boston Beer Company, Hudepohl-Schoenling brands continued to be produced at the brewery until 2001 (Boyer 2001). The purchase of Hudepohl-Schoenling by Boston Beer signposted the emergence of the American craft beer industry—and the eventual revitalization of OTR.

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transportation assets, neighborhood residents with the financial wherewithal were able to purchase homes in less-crowded and more desirable hilltop neighborhoods such as Clifton Heights, Mount Adams, and Fairview (Morgan 2010). Migration of residents to other parts of the city became a common theme for OTR and other Cincinnati neighborhoods. Anti-German sentiment during World War II contributed to this out-migration as many OTR residents felt that it would be easier to blend in by changing their name and moving to a more ethnically-diverse neighborhood (Woodard 2016). By 1960, OTR’s population had fallen to 30,000. Population decline has occurred in every decade since; in 2000 OTR’s population stood at 7,638 (Addie 2008). As the Germans moved out they were replaced by immigrants of Scots-Irish descent who had lost jobs as a result of mechanization in the coal mines in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia (Woodard 2016; Hyland and Peet 1973; Obermiller and Wagner 1997). By 1980, OTR was primarily African-American. This was the consequence of two forces. First, between 1960 and 1980, out-migration associated with suburbanization and so-called “white flight” saw OTR lose a significant segment of its Caucasian population. While Whites were moving out, AfricanAmericans were moving in. Displaced to make way for a new Interstate highway, many African-Americans in the adjacent West End neighborhood decided to make Over-the-Rhine their home and the share of OTR’s population who were African-American increased from 41,4% in 1970 to 77.2% in 2000 (Maloney and Aufrey 2004). As the second half of the twentieth century progressed, OTR faced a number of significant social and economic challenges. Across a number of different indicators, out of thirty-five Cincinnati neighborhoods, OTR consistently ranked in the lower five or six (Table 28.1). The challenges facing OTR resulted in a number of initiatives, on the part of the City, to revitalize and improve the neighborhood. These efforts were seen by many OTR residents as attempts by outsiders to impose their vision upon

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Table 28.1 Socio-economic status of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood (The socio-economic status rank is an index that is calculated using income (median family income), education (present of adults with less than a high school education), overcrowding (number of housing units with more than 3.01 persons per room), family structure (percent of children under 18 in two-parent households), and occupation (percent of blue-collar and service workers.) Indicator

Score (%)

Ranking

School drop-out rate

31.4

30

Less than high school diploma

47.5

29

Functional illiteracy

9

26

Unemployment rate

24

32

Socio-economic status

15.6

32

Source Compiled from data in Maloney and Aufrey 2004

the neighborhood: a vision that did not square with the one held by those who lived there. A vibrant and effective activist movement emerged to represent and protect neighborhood values and desires. These activists, of which there were roughly ten distinct groups, rallied and coalesced under the umbrella off what became known as Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement (OTRPM) (Dutton 1999).7 In many respects, tensions between residents of OTR and the City came to a head in 2001 when Timothy Thomas, an unarmed nineteen-year-old AfricanAmerican was killed by a Cincinnati police officer; three nights of rioting and looting followed (Horn 2001; Woodard 2016). The riots proved to be a watershed moment for the OTR neighborhood. Cincinnati Mayor, Charles Luken, took decisive action and enlisted the help of New York real estate consultant John Alschuler. The result was the Over-the-Rhine Comprehensive Plan (City of Cincinnati 2002). According to the plan, the primary challenges facing the neighborhood were disinvestment, the loss of population and economic activity, crime and the perception and reality of an unsafe and unhealthy environment, concentrations of poverty, and lack of mutual respect and community cohesion in a racially end economically diverse neighborhood. 7

The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a critique of relative positions of the “outsiders” who wanted to change fundamentally the neighborhood and the OTRPM. The conflict been these two entities has been critiqued elsewhere—see for example Miller and Tucker (1998), Addie (2008) and Woodard (2016).

The plan aimed to overhaul and reinvent OTR. It envisaged six types of land-use in the neighborhood—residential and mixed-use, medium-density residential, loft district, social/educational/cultural, retail mixed-use, and open spaces. Responsibility for implementation of the plan was not given to a local government department, however, but to a newly established corporate-funded, non-government entity—the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (known as 3CDC). Established in July 2003 as 501(c) 3, 3CDC’s s mission was to “strengthen the core assets of downtown by revitalizing and connecting the Fountain Square District, the Central Business District and Over-the-Rhine” (3CDC 2017). Funding for the 3CDC came from a combination of corporate contributions, management fees, and below-market developer fees. In November 2004, 3CDC took over management of Cincinnati New Markets Fund (CNMF) and the Cincinnati Equity Fund (CEF); two private loan funds targeted for downtown and urban redevelopment (3CDC 2017). In addition, the City created tax increment financing districts that used property tax dollars from downtown to invest in development efforts in OTR (Greenblatt 2014). The new entity had its work cut out. The website neighborhoodScout.com, which provides crime data to insurance companies, identified OTR as the most dangerous neighborhood in the United States (WKRC-TV 2009). In 2006, the neighborhood made the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of one of the eleven most endangered historic places in the United States

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(Over-the-Rhine Foundation 2017). It appeared on this list because of its historic significance and the perceived risk of imminent destruction. The 360-acre neighborhood has one of the best collections of nineteenth-century Italianate architecture in the United States. From the perspective of the nation’s brewing history, OTR was important because it is home to the largest concentration of nineteenth-century brewery buildings in the United States Between the end of Prohibition and 2010 more than half of the historically significant buildings in OTR were destroyed. During just the five years before its historic designation in 2006, 52 historic building were demolished; these included a number of breweries (Morgan 2010). 3CDC invested over $800 million in OTR and adjacent downtown Cincinnati. As a result of this investment 3CDC acquired over 1000 parcels of land, restored 144 buildings, constructed 50 new buildings, added over 1100 housing units, provided 320 shelter beds, added over 150 hotel rooms, and created 845,000 square feet of new commercial space. (Urban Land Institute 2017). The neighborhood has changed beyond recognition: There are two-hour lines for lunch outside organic fried chicken and gourmet hot dog restaurants and condominiums going for $500,000. Office rents rival those in the high-rises of the Central Business District, which abuts Over-the-Rhine to the south. Two blocks to the west, people flock to Washington Park and its $47 million in new amenities, including water jets, performance stage and dog park. To the north, craft breweries have reopened in long abandoned brewing complexes (Woodard 2016).

While 3CDC has focused on the broad revitalization of OTR and adjacent neighborhoods another non-profit group, the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (OTR-BDCURC), established in 2005, has focused its efforts on leveraging OTR’s brewing history. Its mission is to help make “the Brewery District a healthy, balanced and supportive neighborhood economy by preserving, restoring and redeveloping our unique brewing history and historic urban fabric”

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(OTR-BDCURC 2017).8 In 2006, the OTR-BDCURC developed a formal plan, which stated “the Brewery District will celebrate its heritage as a proud brewing manufacturing neighborhood” (OTR-BDCURC 2006). In 2013 the plan was updated (OTR-BDCURC 2013). The plans recognized the potential value of the neighborhood’s brewing history, while admitting that these had been poorly leveraged in the past: For an American city, Cincinnati is very old and has a very rich history. We have, however, done a very poor job of leveraging that history. Brewing is a big part of the city’s history and it is a fun aspect of history to which people are drawn. This history – more than, but including brewing and an amazingly unappreciated collection of historic brewery buildings – is an under-utilized asset of the City of Cincinnati and of the Brewery District in particular (OTR-BDCURC 2013, 30).

These assets not only include old breweries but also icehouses, bottling plants, administrative offices and homes of the nineteenth-century brewery owners (OTR-BDCURC 2013). Because of both plans, the OTR-BDCURC developed a series of programs and events that leverage its current assets in order to celebrate the neighborhood’s brewing history—and, more importantly, reconstruct the space as a heritage landscape. These include the annual Bockfestbeer festival that has been held every March since 1993. It is the oldest and largest Bockfest in the United States, attracting over thirty thousand people (Steigerwald 2017). Bockfest begins at Arnold’s Bar & Grill (Cincinnati’s oldest saloon) with a parade lead by the reigning Sausage Queen and a goat pulling a keg of Bock beer. The parade ends at Bockfest Hall where the keg is blessed and the festival begins. In 2006, a Brewing Heritage Trail (BHT) was established (Brewing Heritage Trail 2017). As part of the Trail residents and visitors can choose from one of six guided walking tours—Guilded Brew, Industrious Revival, Glasses and Growlers, Hard 8

The OTR-BDCURC defined the brewery district as comprising approximately the northern half of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, with Liberty Street serving as the boundary (OTR-BDCURC 2013).

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Brewing & Easy Drinking, Brothels, Bootleggers & Booze, and Over-the-Rhine.9 All the tours last ninety minutes and cover a different aspect of the city’s brewing history. The tours also start from a beer-related venue such as the Arnold’s Bar & Grill Washington Platform (an 1871 beer hall and saloon), and Rhinegeist (a modern-day craft brewery) (Fig. 28.3). Some have told the story of our brewing heritage well in books, articles and speeches, but we haven’t yet told our story with places. Yet, it is the places that bring our history forward to today, that let us experience the past in as “real” a way as possible (OTR-BDCURC 2013, 32).

Other initiatives that celebrate Cincinnati’s brewing history include the establishment of a beer garden (The OTR Biergarten) at Findlay Market.10 In 2009 a historic marker, recognizing the Brewery District’s heritage, was erected. The activities of OTR-BDCURC are bolstered by the re-emergence of brewing in OTR. The United States is in the middle of a craft beer revolution. There are now over 7,000 craft breweries in the United States (there were only 37 in 1985); 1 in 8 of the beers that Americans consume is made by a small-scale, independent, craft producer (Brewers Association 2017). Cincinnati is home to 14 craft breweries, three of which, Taft’s Ale House, Christian Moerlein, and Rhinegeist, are located Over-the-Rhine (Fig. 28.4). All three breweries are located in buildings that were formerly used for another purpose—a practice known as adaptive reuse. Taft’s Alehouse, which opened in 2015, is housed in the nineteenth-century St. Paul’s German Evangelical Protestant Church. Adaptive reuse, which is a common practice in the craft brewing industry, is important because it helps to preserve historically significant buildings (Reid et al. 2017). When Kevin Moreland (one of Taft’s three owners) first entered the old church, it was in a considerable state of disrepair. Indeed, the building, abandoned for 50 years, was being

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considered for demolition. Moreland and his two business partners reached out to 3CDC and with their support and assistance restored the old church. In doing so they were able to emphasize its historical appeal and architecture (Watkins 2015). According to Keith Maloy, General Manager at Taft’s Ale House: Part of what’s going on in OTR is saving something that used to be there. It would have been easier for us to start from scratch and build a new place. It would have been easier to construct and less expensive, but we would have lost a lot of the charm that’s in this building (quoted in Watkins 2015).

A number of the beers brewed at Taft’s Ale House incorporate locally sourced ingredients. For example, the brewery’s Maverick Chocolate Porter includes cacao nibs and roasted cacao husks from Maverick Chocolate, who are also located OTR. As noted above, the original Christian Moerlein brewery did not survive Prohibition. In 2004, however, Greg Hardman purchased the rights to the Moerelein beer brands. Having no brewing capacity in Cincinnati, Hardman had these beers produced under contract by breweries located outside Cincinnati. All that changed when Hardman purchased the old Husman potato chip factory, which was located OTR, and retrofitted it as a brewery; the new Christian Moerlein brewery opened in December 2010. Hardman had worked as a beer distributor in Ohio during the 1980s and had witnessed the demise of the Hudepohl Brewing Company (Armon 2011). Hardman’s decision to build his brewery in Over-the-Rhine, as opposed to elsewhere in the city, reflects his desire to “be part of the neighborhood’s future. … to authentically restore Over-the-Rhine’s brewing heritage” (Morgan 2010). The third brewery operating OTR is Rhinegeist (Fig. 28.5). Opened in 2013, Rhinegeist is located in the 1895 Christian Moerlein bottling plant. The brewery’s name pays homage to the history of the neighborhood:

9

There is also a 4-hour combined walking/bus tour called Heritage and Hops. 10 Established in 1952, Findlay Market is Ohio’s continuously operating public market.

Our name, Rhinegeist, translates to “Ghost of the Rhine” and refers to our place in the historic Over-the-Rhine Brewery District in Cincinnati.

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Fig. 28.3 The old Jackson Brewery (1829–1942) view from outside (top) and inside the lagering tunnels (bottom) that are under the brewery. Photo Credit Neil Reid

Built within the skeleton of the old Moerlein bottling plant (1895), we brew batches of beer that sing with flavor (Rhinegeist 2017).

The three breweries located OTR are a key piece of the revitalization that is occurring in the OTR neighborhood. While it is unlikely that the neighborhood will see a return to its late nineteenth-century peak of 13 breweries, there is potential for more breweries to open up. At the time of writing, there are plans to open up

another brewery literally just around the corner from Rhinegeist. The proposed brewery will be located in the old Christian Moerlein icehouse (Mains 2017). In addition, there are three breweries outside, but immediately adjacent to, OTR —Samuel Adams Brewery, Rock Bottom Brewery, and Wooden Cask Brewing Company (Fig. 28.2). The emergence of a critical mass of breweries within OTR creates the opportunity to market the neighborhood not just as a historic

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Leveraging Brewing History: The Case of Cincinnati’s …

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Fig. 28.4 Cincinnati Breweries, 2016. Source Brewers Association and various brewery websites

Fig. 28.5 The modern day Rhinegeist Brewery. Photo Credit Neil Reid

brewing neighborhood, but also as a modern-day brewery district (Nilsson et al. 2017). A number of cities across the United States are leveraging these contemporary brewing districts to attract visitors who are part of the emerging and growing phenomenon of beer tourism (Alonso 2011; Kraftchick et al. 2014). Cincinnati gets over 8 million visitors per year. The OTR Brewery District Urban Redevelopment Corporation hope to attract 10% of those visitors (Karol 2013).

28.3

Discussion

Since the early 2000s, the emergence and revitalization of the OTRBD has benefited from the confluence of history, social change, and targeted public policy initiatives that have transformed the materiality of the landscape, demography, and the local economy. Functionally, the creation of the 3CDC and the more recent the designation of

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the OTR-BDURC served as neo-liberal policy responses to the tension of the late 1990s and early 2000s that sought to capitalize on the politics of uneven development. As Mitchell and Venderwerf (2010) note, as well as Merrifield (1993) before them, planner, policymakers, and public-private partnerships intentionally leverage local heritage and the creative destruction of real estate markets to create new investment opportunities. And, the current revitalization—in contrast to the period between the 1960s and early 2000s, is unique in that the local economy has intentionally returned to its roots in the brewing industry—and its historical geography. While OTR’s current heritage boom leverages history and formal policy regimes, it has also coincided with the emergence of a specialized industry—craft beer. Consequently, the growth and expansion of craft beer across the nation and Cincinnati is unique—and Cincinnati’s role in the craft beer movement is special given the investment of the Boston Beer Company (BBC) in the late 1990s. Unlike the macro-breweries producing beers such as Bud Light and Miller Genuine Draft, BBC’s Boston Lager whet American appetites, created a demand for more diverse styles, and set the stage for more local branding. By the early 2000s, the craft beer segment had emerged as a major force across the industry by producing niche product lines that intentionally sought to extend from and serve local markets. Indeed, some have argued that the success of craft beer is partly a reflection of a growing neo-localism, whereby consumers are demanding products that are locally produced (Flack 1997; Schnell and Reese 2003). For that reason, brand authenticity—or the capacity of firms like Rheingeist, to leverage “spatial branding” is essential. While the growth and expansion of the industry and revitalization of the neighborhood is no doubt a benefit to the city and region, the case of OTR and its history are not unproblematic. Indeed, gentrification, shifting real estate markets, and new demographics pose new—but familiar challenges for the city’s leadership. While the net benefits from an economic development perspective are positive, the impact

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on the everyday lives of residents is more complex, as Addie (2008) notes. And as many other researchers have noted, the local politics of economic growth, gentrification, and the ravages of uneven development does create “winners” and “losers”—and the impacts can be negative for displaced residents insofar as the new economic opportunities serve to stratify socioeconomic inequalities.

28.4

Conclusion

This case study demonstrated how history, social change, and policy can redefine the space economy of local neighborhoods. While OTR’s recent growth echoes the experiences of other communities and neighborhoods that have created new post-industrial urban landscapes, the revitalization’s primary focus on the craft beer industry is unique. And, as we have argued, craft beer explicitly leverages history, authenticity, and industrial heritage to create competitive spatial brands. Finally, it is important to also recognize that neighborhood revitalization through the strategic rebranding of spaces and policy initiatives can be applied to a wide variety of economic landscapes—not just craft beer; but also the broader tourism, hospitality, and entertainment sectors that have driven new urbanism.

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N. Reid et al. Reid N, Gripshover M, Bell T (2017) Craft breweries and adaptive reuse—The use and reuse of space and language. In: Brunn S (ed) The changing world language map. Springer, Dordrecht Rhinegeist (2017) Our story. In: Rhinegeist. http://www. rhinegeist.com/our-story. Accessed 31 Jul 2017 Rose G (1990) Imagining poplar in the 1920s: contested concepts of community. J Hist Geogr 16:425–437. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-7488(90)90144-z Ross DR (1989) Beer and synergism: a tale of two cities. Queen City Herit 47:2–16 Scheer B, Ferdelman D (2001) Inner-city destruction and survival: the case of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. Urban Morphol 5:15–27 Schnell SM, Reese JF (2003) Microbreweries as tools of local identity. J Cult Geogr 21:45–69. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/08873630309478266 Scranton P (2005) Diversified industrialization and economic success: understanding cincinnati’s manufacturing development. Ohio Val Hist 5:5–22 Shears A (2014) Local to national and back again: beer, wisconsin & scale. In: Patterson M, Hoalst-Pullen N (eds) The geography of beer. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 45– 56 Stack M (2000) Local and regional breweries in Americas brewing industry, 1865–1920. Bus Hist Rev 74:435– 463. https://doi.org/10.2307/3116434 Steigerwald S (2017) A look back through the 25 years of bockfest. In: Cincinnati enquirer. http://www. cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/2017/02/28/25years-bockfest-goat-goes/97961546/. Accessed 31 Jul 2017 Office of Immigration Statistics, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2009) Yearbook of immigration statistics: 2008 Urban Land Institute (2017) Over-the-Rhine neighborhood: Cincinnati, Ohio. In: Urban Land Institute. https://casestudies.uli.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/ 98/2016/06/OverTheRhinePDF.pdf. Accessed 31 Jul 2017 Watkins DL (2015) Taft’s Ale house opens today. In: CityBeat. http://www.citybeat.com/home/blog/13029 254/tafts-ale-house-opens-today. Accessed 31 Jul 2017 Wittke C (1962) The Germans of Cincinnati. Bull Hist Philos Soc Ohio Cincinnati 20:3–14 WKRC-TV (2009) Over-the-Rhine most dangerous neighborhood in U.S. In: American renaissance. https://www.amren.com/news/2009/06/over-the-rhine/. Accessed 31 Jul 2017 Woodard C (2016) How Cincinnati salvaged the nation’s most dangerous neighborhood. In: Politico magazine. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/ what-works-cincinnati-ohio-over-the-rhine-crimeneighborhood-turnaround-city-urban-revitalization213969. Accessed 31 Jul 2017

Returning Migrants as a Force to Urban Transformation—A Case Study from Poznan, Poland

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Weronika A. Kusek

Abstract

Keywords

Literature has documented how urban landscapes around the world have been altered by immigrant groups but not much has been written on how returning migrants influence urban spaces in their home countries. This chapter focuses on the changes in Poznan, Poland precipitated by the return of Polish migrants from extended labor migration in the UK and other countries. Returning migrants diversify the city by introducing or creating a market for new businesses formerly unknown to the population of Poznan. The return of migrants inspires the introduction of ethnic (but not Polish) cultures and cuisines. These businesses were started and are operated by former emigrants or by travelers who had gained cultural knowledge by living, working, and interacting with different cultures during their stay away from Poland. Returning migrants also become the customer base for new businesses and help to shape and energize new consumer trends. This chapter will describe the origins, process, and outcomes of changes in the urban landscape caused by return migration.

Polish migrants Poznan Returning migrants Urban transformation

W. A. Kusek (&) Earth, Environmental, and Geographical Sciences Department, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

29.1










Introduction

Urban transformation, ethnic economy, immigrant communities, and multiethnic enclaves have been at the center of focus for many ethnic scholars over the last couple of decades (Harvey 2000; Kaplan and Recoquillon 2016; Wise and Clark 2017a, b). American cities, as well as many western European cities, have been studied to explore and understand a wide variety of changes that affected neighborhoods when immigrants settled in. Globalization, colonization, and the emergence of the European Union have been often used as a framework to studying immigrant communities and the ethnic economy. What has been missing from the discussion on the ethnic economy and place is (1) how Eastern European cities have been changing after many political changes that happened in the region: for example: after the fall of the Berlin Wall and later the acceptance to the European Union, and (2) how returning migrants are influencing their hometowns by “importing” new ethnic experiences or seeking out ethnic experiences acquired while

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_29

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living in a foreign country for an extended period of time. In this chapter, I will use the example of Poznan, Poland to demonstrate how the general mobility of humans, further fueled by the expansion of the European Union and the advancement in technology encourages migrants to move to a different country, gain cultural exposure, and in an increasing number of cases return home to establish or seek out ethnic businesses that had been previously unknown in their home communities. Via this process returning migrants often unintentionally or at least without an overarching coordination or awareness of potential impact initiate broader urban change. Before the concept of urban change via returning migrants is explored further, it must be clarified that in this scenario, and in this example of Poznan, Poland, the concept of an “ethnic business” must be defined more broadly. Traditionally, ethnic businesses are often enterprises owned and operated by an immigrant and often intended to serve immigrants from the same ethnic group. In the case of ethnic businesses explored in this chapter, an “ethnic business” must be understood as a business enterprise that intentionally offers and promotes specific ethnic experiences to the residents of the host city, regardless of the ethnic background of the owner or the target customers. It is a business owned and operated either by returning migrants who had gained cultural knowledge about a particular ethnicity by living, working, and interacting with different cultures during their migratory stay abroad or by travelers and entrepreneurs who take advantage of new ideas and lifestyles popularized in the home country by migrants. Due to these migrants’ exposure to various ethnicities, returning migrants are often not only entrepreneurs who introduce various elements of diverse ethnic cultures to their home communities, but are often also initial customers of other newly formed ethnic businesses. This is because they can immediately appreciate the diversity of food and music, and are used to spending their incomes at ethnic enterprises.

W. A. Kusek

The setting for this case study is Poznan, Poland—a major Polish city but also a more regional center that is less connected internationally than other Polish cities like Warsaw— the capital, or Krakow—an international tourist destination. Poznan has relatively been historically ethnically homogenous and inhabited almost exclusively by Polish citizens with a few exceptions of larger waves of mostly German immigrants arriving to the city in the seventeenth century and later a rather insignificant influx of western Europeans during the 1990s. As such, the city’s exposure to ethnic and cultural diversity, here understood as the cuisine, art, and culture of other ethnicities had been rather limited. With this historical context in mind, I will focus on the cultural and urban changes that Poznan had recently experienced due to the return of Polish migrants from labor migration in more diverse locations in Europe. I would like to focus on the impact that returning migrants have had on the city that can be loosely described as “ethnicization” of the city by introducing or creating a need for many new ethnic businesses formerly unknown to endemic citizens of Poznan.

29.2

Urban Transformation in Academic Studies

Urban transformation is a topic of interest of many academics around the world. Wise and Clark’s (2017a, b) latest publication critically assesses the theory and practice of urban transformation in different geographic and socio-political contexts. They advocate that academics have the responsibility to tell the story of how urban transformations impact people’s lives and everyday interactions. Following their recommendation, I attempt to tell the story of Polish returning migrants and the urban transformation they initiated in Poznan. Harvey (2000) stated that it is local governments, private investors and reformers who are responsible for implementing change in cities,

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Returning Migrants as a Force to Urban Transformation …

but many others (Lai 2012; Leary-Owhin 2016; MacLaran and Kelly 2014) agree that broader economic trends, political shifts, and cultural influences are another significant factor impacting the structure and composition of urban areas. In the case of Poznan, Poland the urban transformation at the center of my interest would not be possible without the broader impact that the European Union has had on shaping migratory stories of Poles in the last 13 years. It is the mobility enhanced by EU policies that enabled Poles to experience, visit, and live in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, or Germany, and to learn about ethnic diversity, ethnic businesses, and the idea of culturally and ethnically rooted entrepreneurships that were foreign to the majority of Poznanians prior to joining the European Union. In Wise and Clark’s book (2017a, b) we find multiple examples of urban transformations that enhanced changes for local communities around the globe. These examples range from public housing projects in Teheran, Iran, through ethnic retailing in Toronto, Canada, to downtown transformations in a small town of Kent, OH, USA. Nevertheless, not much has been written about independent, individual and organic efforts to change the city, precipitated by the return of emigrants from abroad. Thus, it is my intention to bring an understanding of the specifics of Poznan as a community, space and place, and broader processes that shape how urban and cultural transformation is happening there.

29.3

Methods

This chapter is based on two qualitative research methods: narrative approaches (oral stories of residents of Poznan) and participant observation by the author. Additionally, the author used commonly accessible online sources to identify ethnic businesses currently in existence in Poznan, as well as online sources to identify and gather data on ethnic businesses that started in Poznan in 1990s as not much has been written about them in academic literature. What is very

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important to state is that ethnically inspired businesses in Poznan have not been recorded, classified, or described by researchers thus no official records exist. One can rely on business registration records but these are often not reliable or do not provide sufficient detail about the nature of the business to deduce its contribution to ethnic diversity of urban landscapes. Thus, the author turned to oral stories told by the residents of Poznan. A group of 7 women between the age of 49 and 84 shared their memories of ethnically inspired businesses the 1990s and compared that to the present. The author also visited many of the ethnic restaurants between the summer of 2016 and winter of 2017 to personally evaluate the nature of their operation and impact on surrounding community.

29.4

Poland

Poland is located in central Europe and has a population of approximately 38 million people. Poland has experienced centuries of tumultuous history characterized first expansion and increasing prosperity followed by various invasions, political instabilities, the horror of World War II, and the resulting communist dictatorship. Although throughout centuries Poland was a relatively tolerant country and had allowed various ethnic groups to settle in Poland, it’s most recent history is one characterized by relative ethnic homogeneity? Understanding the limitations of any generalization, it can be stated with a relatively high level of accuracy that the majority of Poles are White, Slavic, identify as Catholic, and are mostly protective of their own culture, history, and heritage. In recent history, the most transformative change occurred in 1989 when Poland transformed from a centrally planned, Soviet-led state into an independent, capitalist, and democratic society. With the onset of capitalism, many political, economic, and social changes had occurred, dramatically changing the lives of Poles (Kusek 2015a). Poland’s turn to capitalism led to some diversification of the culture, however mainly defined by Western ideas

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and standards brought into Poland by a relatively small group of Westerners who settled into take advantage of a rapidly growing market in the early 1990s. More recently, Poland’s membership in the European Union has fueled additional migratory flow, especially in near-border regions. Furthermore, Poland is currently witnessing more and more cases of Polish migrants who had immigrated to countries such as the UK and who are now returning to Poland with their spouses and partners whom they met abroad and who represent various ethnicities (Kusek 2015b). This is the first time in Polish history when ethnically and racially mixed marriages become commonly noticeable even in small towns and rural areas. This change is often led by young Polish females who had migrated to Western European countries and now are returning with Pakistani or Sri Lankan husbands to visit their parents or to be closer to family in the long term (Kusek 2010). These new ethnically mixed relationships have not been extensively recorded by researchers but one can follow hundreds of online discussions on Polish women in the UK and their stories related to mixed relationships (see: policy.co.uk, polskieforummigracyjne.org). These superficial but also real and increasing in number stories of ethnic diversification of the Polish society are creating new consumer and cultural trends that find their manifestation in a variety of business enterprises that cater to these returning migrants, and to the Poles’ increasing interest in exploring various cultures. It is also important to note that even migrants who are not returning to Poland inspire new market trends. Research has demonstrated (Burrell 2009) that the nature of the current migration of Poles abroad is characterized by an unprecedented level of connectivity. Migrants leverage technology and cheap travel to stay connected to their homelands. In this sense, even if only some members of an extended family migrate, entire families participate in the exchange of ideas, experiences, and trends popular in more diverse consumer markets like those of London, Paris, or Oslo.

W. A. Kusek

29.5

Poland in the EU and Outmigration of a Million Poles

With its long and tumultuous history, there are several significant historic events that affected and influenced Poland as well as its status in the domain of cultural and economic diversity. This chapter will almost exclusively focus on changes precipitated by Poland joining the European Union in 2004. It has been estimated that about two million Poles emigrated from Poland when Poland gained access to EU’s labor markets. The majority of migrants moved to the United Kingdom. The British Census estimates that about 579,000 Poles are living in the UK—a tenfold increase from 2001 (Office of National Statistics 2012). Popular British media estimates the numbers of Polish immigrants to be closer to 1 million. The typical profile of a Pole living in the UK presents a hard-working laborer who takes up employment in the UK which, often due to language or formal requirements, does not correspond to the migrant’s educational attainment. Some studies also present the contrasting profile of a Polish professional in the UK; young, educated, well-acculturated, affluent who immigrated to the UK out of curiosity or seeking professional growth (Kusek 2015b). Both groups of migrants are described as active participants in the British society, contributing to the British economy not only by paying taxes and serving as a hard-working group of relatively inexpensive laborers but also by participating in the socio-economic life of the UK by attending cultural events, owning small businesses, shopping, etc. When described in generalizations, Poles are often perceived as curious, open to other cultures, and comfortable with spending their incomes in the UK and in ways which expose them to new experiences (Kusek 2010, 2015b). Therefore, it is not surprising to learn that many migrants are curious to explore different neighborhoods of London learning about different cultures, and using what

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Returning Migrants as a Force to Urban Transformation …

the city has to offer: from cultural events to dining at ethnic restaurants (Kusek 2015b). More and more recent studies indicate that the permanency of Poles’ migration to the UK is questionable, and the more and more emigrants plan to return to Poland to open businesses and apply what they learned in the UK in the Polish economy (Kusek 2010, 2015b). Many of the business ideas represented by these migrants are hoping to leverage the advantage of introducing something new, foreign, trendy. At the same time, the same group of migrants becomes themselves a new type of customer: one that is familiar with ethnic food, music, and affluent enough to use new services and offerings such as Indian, Lebanese, or Moroccan restaurants, visiting Brazilian coffee shops, or attending music events that promote ethnic cultures. Furthermore, as mentioned previously, the experiences and habits of these migrants are often projected onto their broader families and networks through direct interactions but also through the more technologically connected nature of modern migration. Migrants (returning or not) help to fuel new consumer behaviors, and help to generate market demands for new and diverse experiences.

29.6

Poznan, Poland

Poznan is one of the major cities in Poland with a population of about 550,000 and the Larger Poznan Metropolitan Area is populated by 1.3– 1.4 million residents. It extends to several satellite towns making it the fourth largest metropolitan area in Poland. Poznan is today one of the largest Polish centers of education, trade, tourism and culture hosting thousands of small, medium, and large businesses. The city serves as one of the most important academic centers in Poland with about 130,000 students shared by various institutions of higher education. Poznan is also among the oldest cities in Poland and was one of the most important centers in the early Polish state in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It also served as the capital for a short time in the thirteenth century. Poznan (Posen) became part

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of the German Empire in late 1800s—an event that resulted in cultural westernization and Germanization of the city and its surroundings, today mainly traceable in regional food traditions and architecture. Similarly to the rest of the country, Poznan has stayed rather ethnically homogeneous. The largest group of immigrants that settled in Poznan were the Bambrzy who moved from the area of Bamberg (Upper Franconia, Germany) to villages surrounding the city (see: Towarzystwo Bambrow Poznanskich). Other discussions related to immigration to Poznan are related to either displaced populations that settled in the are aduring WW II or perhaps references to relatively negligible groups of foreigners who moved to Poznan in the early 1990s after Poland’s economic transformation. The majority of migratory discussions related to Poznan take place in the context of emigration of often young and educated Poznanians to western countries (Kusek 2010, 2015b). The discussion gained a lot of academic attention after Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and many young Poles left for England, Ireland, and other EU countries. What can be observed today is a new phenomenon: after 13 years in the EU many Poles, including native residents of Poznan, are returning home. As they return, they are bringing with them and popularizing new business ideas but also ethnic experiences and customer needs that they acquired during their migratory journey. They are returning to Poznan but are not willing to abandon the experiences associated with ethnic diversity that they had become adjusted to during their stay in the UK or other more diverse Western European countries.

29.6.1 Ethnically Inspired Businesses in Poznan in 1990s Today, ethnically inspired businesses in Poznan range from clothing retailers, home goods stores, unique goods shops, to restaurants and ethnically themed clubs. Despite this proliferation of ethnic businesses, not much has been written about their

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onset, development, and future. Oral stories told by long-time residents of Poznanare the most easily accessible and most robust resource for learning about the development of ethnic businesses in Poznan next to online research focused on the websites ran by the businesses themselves. By using a combination of accounts taken from oral stories and personal research online, the author was able to confirm that, surprisingly, ethnic diversity in Poznan’s economy was somewhat available already in the 1990s. Clothes and home goods from Asia had been available in the 1990s and maintained their market presence since then. As the oral stories collected by the author indicate, these businesses were not received with much enthusiasm by the general public, but they were rather treated as a cheaper and creative option for some interesting and unique gifts. Many small oriental-inspired shops were opened in various parts of Poznan and offered candles, lamps, china, scarves, and other small goods from India and China. These wares were a good alternative to traditional small gifts that were often used by Poles when visiting with friends such as fresh flower bouquets, a bottle of alcohol, or cosmetics. Some entrepreneurs used the opportunities of a liberated market economy to fill certain market niches (Fig. 29.1). In the 1990s ethnically diverse food was entering the market at a much slower pace. A few specialized tea shops were some of the first

W. A. Kusek

ethnically inspired businesses that appeared in 1990s. Poland has traditionally adhered to Polish and Eastern European food traditions with some parts of the country (Poznan included) incorporating cuisine influenced by German food traditions. In Poznan, up until 1990s it was difficult to find restaurants serving international food. In the 1990s a new era emerged on the Polish restaurant market that was now characterized by more cultural diversity. The culinary diversity could be traced to three main trends: American fast food, relatively Westernized Turkish, middle-eastern, and far Asian fast food, and Italian fine dining. In the 1990s American fast-food chains such as McDonald’s or Pizza Hut opened their first restaurants in Poland, including the city of Poznan. McDonald’s became a destination for school day-trips, and a symbol of Poles participating in the modern economy (Fig. 29.2). The second foreign, ethnically inspired culinary experience that became available to Poznaniansafter the political transformation of later 1980s and early 1990s was related to Poland’s strong ties with Germany. Poles traveling to Germany became familiar with ethnically inspired fast-food restaurants offering Turkish kebobs. As a result, Westernized or even “Polonized” versions of Turkish street food became popular in Poznan and many other Polish cities (Fig. 29.3).

Fig. 29.1 Stores offering Asian clothes in Poznan (http://szlakteatralny.blox.pl/resource/P3164617.JPG) and Lokaah— Oriental Store in Poznan (https://www.locallist.eu/Sklep-Orientalny-Lokaah-J728G)

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Fig. 29.2 First McDonald in Poznan in 1994 (http://www. gloswielkopolski.pl/historia/g/tak-wygladal-pierwszymcdonalds-w-poznaniu-zdjecia,11560826,21865310/) and below first Pizza Hut in Poznan (http://poznan.

naszemiasto.pl/artykul/zdjecia/kultowe-restauracje-wpoznaniu-pamietacie-je-zdjecia,1831476,artgal,5152898, t,id,tm,zid.html)

Ethnically inspired fast food extended beyond Turkish or middle-eastern kebabs, and also included Chinese-inspired restaurants that became popular among the citizens of Poznan. The culinary diversification of Poznan’s economy was not only focused on fast food and distant culinary traditions. In the 1990s Poles also opened their pallets to Italian food. While Italian restaurants that opened in Poznan also included fast food options, the 1990s transformation introduced finer, more upscale options with

seafood dishes and gourmet pizzas (http:// milano.poznan.pl/) (Fig. 29.4). Although the 1990s introduced a transformative diversification of food options in Poznan and exposed Poznanians to a variety of new culinary traditions and flavors, admittedly the authenticity of the food offered by these restaurants could be questioned. In fact, many of those businesses served food that was rather far from authentic flavors. Dishes were aimed at satisfying the Polish customer who was unfamiliar with many

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W. A. Kusek

Fig. 29.3 Turkish-inspired Kebab restaurant “Ali Baba” opened in Poznan in 1990 (http://www.pkfi.pl/firma/ fuz39xph/ali-baba-kebab-bistro-pozna%C5%84/)

Fig. 29.4 Left: upscale Italian Restaurant Milano opened in 1999 (http://directmap.pl/no/pozna%C5%84/6678); right: fast food Italian Restaurant Avanti (http://poznan.

eska.pl/poznaj-miasto/gdzie-tanio-zjesc-w-poznaniugaleria-zdjec-propozycje-dla-studentow-i-nie-tylko/335/3)

of the flavors, and who was generally not tolerant of high levels of spice. In that sense ethnic businesses of the 1990s, especially in the culinary sector, while diversifying the economy,

were either representative of broader global consumer trends (American fast food), compromised authenticity to attract consumers (Westernized Asian food, or “Polonized” kebabs), or

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Returning Migrants as a Force to Urban Transformation …

filled small market niches (Indian or Chinese scarves, oriental scents).

29.6.2 Poles in the EU—Exposure to Diversity, Ethnic Businesses and Appreciation for New Cultures It was not until the mid-2000s when Poles began build more permanent and active cultural connections to western European countries such as the UK, France, or Spain. Many Poles took advantage of the EU expansion and the opportunity to, visit, travel, live, or work abroad. When emigrating more permanently, Polish migrants often settled in immigrant communities (Kusek 2010, 2015b) where they were exposed to other immigrant groups, their ways of life, ethnic businesses, new flavors, etc. They socialized with other immigrants either when they interacted with their neighbors or when they shopped at neighborhood convenience stores operated by other immigrants. Some Poles worked among other immigrants and were learning about their coworkers’ lifestyles. Others created personal relationships and married people who came from different parts of the world (Kusek 2010, 2015b). Finally, many migrants lived in cities and neighborhoods that have become popular due to their celebration of ethnic diversity. Cities like London or Paris do not only represent significant populations from around the world, but have in a way commercialized diversity, especially in the culinary sense, making Indian, Thai, or Ethiopian restaurants part of the culinary routine of all city residents. This commercialization of ethnic diversity influenced both migrants and even casual travelers who identified opportunities for similar market forces in Poland. The exposure to diversity granted Poles the opportunity to learn new flavors, new cooking techniques, and new ways of spending time and money that Polish migrants appreciated and began to introduce to their daily routines (Kusek 2010). They also

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started to share their new cultural experiences with families who remained in Poland. They did this by either sending goods to family members or by inviting their family members to experience some of the new foods and flavors when they were visiting the migrants in their new host countries.

29.6.3 Change in Cultural and Urban Landscape Due to Returning Migrants Some academic sources demonstrate that the era of Polish outmigration has ended. While significant numbers of Poles remain abroad and may are still emigrating or contemplating the idea of migration, an unprecedented number of Poles have started to return home from Western countries after a few years of living and working abroad (Burrell 2010). The reasons for the return migration are very complex, diverse, and warrant a separate investigation. Nevertheless one of the driving forces for the return of some of the migrants is what could be referred to as the “entrepreneurial gap”—migrants identified a market opportunity in Poland that they deceived to fill with newly acquired experiences, skills, and ideas. These ideas are often centered on opening businesses or ventures that introduce ethnic elements that were previously unknown in Poznan. Due to shifting market trends and consumer demands pursuing authentic and diverse experiences, the new ethnic businesses are not constrained in the same sense that their counterparts from the 1990s were. This time the ethnic businesses (usually culinary enterprises) aim for authenticity in ingredients, recipes, and experiences. Polish citizens of all major urban areas including Poznan can now enjoy culinary and other cultural experiences which were unavailable even in the most near past. Among a dynamically growing list of options, among others, in 2017 Poznan offers residents and visitors 8 Indian restaurants, 2 Lebanese restaurants, 2 Moroccan restaurants, dozens of

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restaurants and food trucks offering Middle Eastern/Turkish dishes, 3 Greek restaurants, 3 Mexican restaurants, several Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, a Brazilian café, dozens of Sushi places, dozens of restaurants serving Italian flavors, as well as a restaurant representing cuisine from Madagascar. Furthermore, there are many shops, markets, and distributors of exotic goods, spices, fabrics, and fashion accessories. Some of the restaurants offer additional services and events such as music shows and artist performances specific to the culture they represent (Fig. 29.5).

W. A. Kusek

The dramatically increased diversity of culinary and cultural offerings in Poznan is definitely an outcome of various cultural and market transformations that are not unique to Poland. The Polish society in general is interested in diverse experiences, and seeks new sounds, flavors, and cultures. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight some specific examples. First, based on online research, the author was able to confirm that the vast majority of ethnically inspired restaurants that have opened in Poznan in the past several years are owned and operated by Polish citizens, or mixed couples where one of

Fig. 29.5 Pictures taken by the author: Lebanese Restaurant and below Indian Restaurant, and a picture of a menu in a Mexican Restaurant

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Fig. 29.6 Shivaz Club & Restaurant—Indian restaurant in Poznan-located within a walking distance to the Old Market—(http://zjescpoznan.blogspot.com/2011/04/shivaz-club-restaurant-ocena-369.html) and Reeta’s Haveli

Restaurant near the Old Town (recently closed)—(http:// zjescpoznan.blogspot.com/2009/10/reetas-haveli-ocena-3. html)

the partners represents the ethnicity that inspired the restaurant. In that sense, ethnic experiences in Poznan are, with some exceptions, created by Poles for other Poles to introduce them and allow them to enjoy cultures that were not well known in Poland in the past. Many of these owners and operators learned about these cultures during their migratory experience, through extensive travel, or by somehow being associated with migrants. For example, Maciej Blatkiewicz, a restaurant critic from Poznan (http://maciej.je/omnie) mentioned in his review of one of Poznan’s Lebanese restaurants that his first introduction to Lebanese food happened in Paris and was facilitated by his brother whom he was visiting and who was a student there. Regardless of how specifically Polish owners and operators of ethnically inspired restaurants got inspired to introduce a particular type of cuisine to Poznan (whether through migration, extensive travel, or association with a migrant), these businesses have significantly changed the urban landscape of Poznan. While walking through the city center of Poznan there are many signs, displays, and advertisements that point to culinary and ethnic experiences often foreign to the city’s less modern or more senior citizens: quesadillas, sushi, hummus, masala, tandoori, pho. One important characteristic to note is that many of the ethnic businesses are operated in parts of Poznan that have been traditionally

known as older, dilapidating. A great example is the district of Śródka. The districts of Poznan that are gaining ethnic businesses are places where rent is still relatively inexpensive, parts of the city located closer to academic centers, and locations that many Poznanians from the suburbs do not visit on regular basis (for example: close to the Old Market, parts of Wilda district or parts of Jezyce district). The businesses often locate in older buildings changing the landscape of those places by both simply renovating the building facades and interiors, but also by introducing new colors, fonts, and decorations that in aggregate help to change the feel and nature of a district (Fig. 29.6).

29.7

Conclusion

The process of the cultural and culinary diversification of the economy in Poznan is currently ongoing and is characterized by a high level of dynamism. The origin of this process may not have been started by returning migrants, and as mentioned previously has various factors and components that shape its development. Nevertheless, returning migrants and travelers who take advantage of EUs open borders, and migrants who with the aid of communication technology influence their families who remained in Poland are fueling the process of redevelopment and

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diversification of cities like Poznan. In a way, this process is also demonstrative of how Poles are keeping up with the pace of globalization. In a rather ethnically and culturally homogenous country Poles are becoming not only open to new ideas and culturally diverse experiences but via personal entrepreneurship recreate these ethnic experiences themselves. The “ethnic entrepreneurs” settle in Poland from places such as the UK, Italy, or Spain. They open businesses that attract other returning migrants but also a younger generation of Poles that may have never emigrated from Poland but has extensively travelled across Europe and other continents, and that is familiar with and appreciative of what different cultures have to offer. It is difficult to predict the future of this process, nevertheless with much certainty it can be stated that ethnic diversification of the Polish urban landscape in cities like Poznan will only increase over time. The number of ethnically inspired businesses that open in Poznan each year is growing, and consumers have been including these establishments in their daily routines.

References Burrell K (ed) (2009) Polish migration to the UK in the ‘New’ European Union: after 2004. Ashgate, Farnham Burrell K (2010) Staying, Returning, working, and living: key themes in current academic research undertaken in the UK on migration movements from eastern Europe Culinary blog by Maciej Blatkiewicz. http://maciej.je/omnie. Accessed 19 Aug 2017) First McDonald in Poznan (1994). http://www. gloswielkopolski.pl/historia/g/tak-wygladal-pierwszymcdonalds-w-poznaniu-zdjecia,11560826,21865310/ First Pizza Hut in Poznan. http://poznan.naszemiasto.pl/ artykul/zdjecia/kultowe-restauracje-w-poznaniupamietacie-je-zdjecia,1831476,artgal,5152898,t,id,tm, zid.html Harvey D (2000) Megacities lecture 4: possible urban worlds. Twynstra Gudde Management Consultants, Amersfoort, The Netherlands Italian Restaurant Avanti. http://poznan.eska.pl/poznajmiasto/gdzie-tanio-zjesc-w-poznaniu-galeria-zdjecpropozycje-dla-studentow-i-nie-tylko/335/3

W. A. Kusek Italian Restaurant Milano opened in 1999. http:// directmap.pl/no/pozna%C5%84/6678 Kaplan D, Recoquillon C (2016) Multiethnic economic activity along three immigrant corridors in paris. Prof. Geogr 68(1):82–91 Kusek W (2010) The construction and development of diasporic networks by recent polish migrants to London, UK. Doctoral Dissertation. Kent State University Kusek W (2015a) Shifting the spotlight: suggesting a pragmatic approach to studying the polish LGBT community. J Urban: Int Res Placemaking Urban Sustain 8(1):82–96 Kusek W (2015b) Transnational identities and immigrant spaces of polish ‘Eurostars’ in London, UK. J Cult Geogr 32(1):102–114 Lai C (2012) The racial triangulation of space: the case of urban renewal in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 102:151–170 Leary-Owhin ME (2016) Exploring the production of urban space: differential space in three post-industrial cities. Policy Press, Bristol MacLaran A, Kelly S (2014) Neoliberal urban policy and the transformation of the city: reshaping Dublin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Lokaah—Oriental Store in Poznan. https://www.locallist.eu/Sklep-OrientalnyLokaah-J728G Office of National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/people populationandcommunity/populationandmigration/ internationalmigration/articles/internationalmigrantsin englandandwales/2012-12-11. Accessed 15 Aug 2017 Online Forum Polacy w UK.co. http://polacy.co.uk/ forum/dyskusje/zwiazek-z-pakistanczykiem-czy-toma-szanse-pomocy/103624. Accessed 27 July 2017) Online Forum: PFM: Polskie Forum Migracyjne. http:// www.forummigracyjne.org/pl/faq_nielegalni.php. Accessed 27 July 2017 Pekin Chinese restaurant in Poznan that opened in 1991. http://pekin.pl/ Social Identities, vol 16(3), pp 297–308 Towarzystwo Bambrow Poznanskich. http://www. bambrzy.poznan.pl/node/2. Accessed 27 July 2017 Turkish Kebab Ali Baba opened in 1990. http://www.pkfi. pl/firma/fuz39xph/ali-baba-kebab- bistro-pozna%C5% 84/ Wise N, Clark J (eds) (2017a) Urban transformations: geographies of renewal and creative change. Routledge, London Wise N, Clark J (2017b) Geographies of renewal and creative change: assessing urban transformation. In: Wise N, Clark J (eds) Urban transformations: geographies of renewal and creative change. Routledge, London, pp 1–10

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Intermediary Cities of Refuge: From Istanbul to Kolkata Ranu Basu and Pelin Asci

Abstract

The spaces of refuge are an intricate tapestry woven across the globe. As of 2016, there are 65.3 million people displaced worldwide which include 21.3 million refugees and further 10 million stateless people (UNHCR 2016). The question of transnational borders, justice and human rights are increasingly contested terrains that States must contend with in increasingly complex ways. What then constitutes spaces of refuge in the twenty-first century? What is its institutional basis and socio-political form? Camps, as a space of temporary to long term refuge, hosts many refugees such as Dadaab in Kenya, Zataari camp in Jordan or Mae La in Thailand. In this chapter, however we examine the urban as an intermediary space of refuge. The urban is often a place of convergence for displaced migrants due to the opportunity structures it provides. From Istanbul to Accra, Kolkata to Jordan, 60% of refugees are noted to reside in cities, the Global South often hosting the largest number of refugees. In this chapter, we conceptually and empirically explore two

contrasting cities—Istanbul and Kolkata. In 2016, Turkey was noted as the largest host country of refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in the world. Turkey hosted 2.5 million Syrian refugees and over 250,000 refugees of other nationalities mostly living in cities. Similarly, India has historically hosted the largest number of refugees after partition. More recently as of June 2014, India was home to 198,665 refugees. The urban provides a habitat conducive for displaced populations: the infrastructure necessary for shelter and day to day living; informal economy allowing varying livelihoods; the anonymity of living in largely populated cities provides a safeguard against deportation; and the freedom to live outside a camp environment affords a certain kind of flexibility. Yet the challenges in a complex world of poverty, violence and insecurity make the struggle of survival a complicated process of daily negotiations. Using the examples of Istanbul and Kolkata we argue that such contradictions necessitate that we rethink cities of the twenty-first century through the lens of transnational justice and refuge. Keywords










Intermediary cities Istanbul Kolkata Refugees Transnational justice UNHCR







R. Basu (&)
P. Asci Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_30

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30.1

R. Basu and P. Asci

Introduction

The spaces of refuge are an intricate tapestry woven across the globe. As of 2016, there were 65.6 million people displaced worldwide (compared to 33.9 million in 1997) which included 22.5 million refugees and further 10 million stateless people (UNHCR 2016). Of these, 40.3 million were internally displaced people (IDPs); while 2.8 million were asylum seekers. The unprecedented scale of such massive displacement due to global war, conflict and human rights violation, according to UNHCR estimates, amounts to 20 new displacements per minute. Half of these are children. The dim possibilities and political will in halting continual imperial geopolitical wars, suggests that forced migration has become a rationalized norm. The continual threats of military intervention are standardized discourse alongside the unfettered regularity of displacement and violence. U.S. President Donald Trump recently publicly declared through international media that their ubiquitous military presence around the world implied that they were well equipped to unleash war on nations that were not in compliance with their hegemonic interests (i.e. North Korea and Venezuela).1 Such geo-economic-political tensions are central factors in how these debates play out on the ground as has been evident worldwide in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Burundi, South Sudan, Congo and Colombia among others. The geography of asylum is uneven with more than 84% of refugees under UNHCR mandate hosted in developing regions—quite often in countries of close proximity. The 2016 UNHCR Global Trends Report identifies the top three source countries of asylum seekers as the Syrian Arab Republic (5.5 million) Afghanistan (2.5 million) and South Sudan (1.4 million). The top 1

After the 2017 elections in Venezuela was concluded— an exercise of Bolivarian sovereignty but ideologically opposed to U.S. capitalist interests, Trump retaliated: “We have troops all over the world, and places that are very, very far away…Venezuela is not very far away…. We have many options for Venezuela, including a military option if necessary”... (TeleSUR, August 11, 2017).

host countries, bordering these places include: Turkey 2.9 million, Pakistan 1.4 million, Lebanon 1.0 million, Islamic Republic of Iran 979,400, Uganda 940,800 and Ethiopia 791,600.2 Aside from the refugee receiving countries named above, there are 43 other countries who are members of the United Nations but who are not signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol. Some of these non-parties, such as India, host significant refugee populations.3 The rationales for this are many depending on the historical and geo-political contexts. The question of transnational borders, justice and human rights are increasingly contested terrains that States must contend with in complex ways. We will return to this conundrum later on in the chapter. What then constitutes spaces of refuge in the twenty-first century? What is its institutional basis and socio-political form? Both the site of enclosed camps and the urban, feature in discussions of asylum and settlement. Camps, as a space of temporary to long term refuge, hosts a large number of refugees such as Dadaab in Kenya, Zataari camp in Jordan or Mae La in Thailand. In fact the scale and size of camp environments has resulted in these spaces considered as ‘quasi-urban’ (Sanyal 2012). In this chapter we examine the urban as an intermediary space of refuge—with a particular focus of its spaces of refuge as fluid and in constant flux. From Istanbul to Accra, Kolkata to Jordan, 60% of refugees are noted to reside in cities—the Global South, as mentioned earlier, often hosting the largest number of refugees. The urban is often a place of convergence for displaced migrants due to the opportunity structures it provides. The urban provides a habitat conducive for displaced populations: the infrastructure necessary for shelter and day to day living and informal economy allowing for varying livelihoods. The anonymity of living in largely populated cities provides a safeguard against 2

http://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2016/ (dowloaded August 14th, 2017). 3 http://www.fmreview.org/non-signatories.html (downloaded October 1st, 2017).

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deportation and the freedom to live outside a camp environment affords a certain kind of flexibility. Yet the challenges in a complex world of poverty, violence and insecurity make the struggle of survival a complicated process of daily negotiations. We review these intricate intersections of refuge and urban in the section below. In this chapter we conceptually and empirically explore two contrasting cities of refuge— Istanbul and Kolkata. In 2016, Turkey was noted as the largest host country of refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in the world. Turkey hosted 2.5 million Syrian refugees and over 250,000 refugees of other nationalities mostly living in cities. Similarly, India has historically hosted the largest number of refugees after partition yet is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol. More recently as of June 2014, India was home to 198,665 refugees. Both Turkey and India have experienced unprecedented scale of asylum seekers at distinct historical junctures of time, unlike other places in the world, primarily congregated within the realm of the urban. What lessons can be learned from these very similar yet disparate contexts? Using the examples of Istanbul and Kolkata we argue that such contradictions necessitate that we rethink cities of the twenty-first century through the lens of transnational justice and refuge.

30.2

Cities of Intermediary Refuge

In 2016, according to a UN Report, an estimated 54.5 per cent of the world’s population lived in urban settlements.4 The increased rate and pace of urbanization across the globe to over half of the world’s population is associated with qualitative differences, central of which is migration. The UN Report emphasizes the importance of understanding key trends in the process of urbanization in order to set a broader agenda for sustainable development. Within this context the 4

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/ publications/pdf/urbanization/the_worlds_cities_in_ 2016_data_booklet.pdf.

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urban dimension of refugee settlement, we argue, needs serious consideration if any discussion of sustainability is to be theorized within a social justice framework of urban citizenship. The simultaneity of rapid urbanization and increased forced migration into cities, particularly in nation states bordering conflict riddled zones, necessitates new theoretical insights. Exploring the relationship between forced migration and the city, Darling (2017) reviews dominant discussions within the field. He classifies them into four accounts: displacement and the camp-city, dispersal and refugee resettlement, the‘re-scaling’ of borders, and the city as a sanctuary. The first body of literature relates to urban refugees in the Global South and the predominant ‘shadow’ of the camp. Darling argues that the urban dimension has been neglected in these discussions, and has only come to the forefront in recent years. Urban Refugee policy from UNHCR, until very recently (1995, 1997) he notes, viewed flows into cities as ‘undesirable’ with a focus on redirecting them to enclosed camps which receive funding. Camps were considered the ‘proper’ space for settling refugee populations. The policy directives of containment within camps, as a mode of regulation and technology of control, has historically allowed different governing agencies and states to closely monitor the movement of forced migrants and funding. Darling notes two dire consequences that result from such directives: first, the rights of refugees in urban environments are questioned; while second, where humanitarian aid is focused solely within camps. Urban refugees were considered outside the norm of these structures and ‘problematic’ (Hyndman and Giles 2011). Darling notes that it was not until 2009 that the reality of the situation of increased protracted refugees in the city was acknowledged. Forced migrants who travel to cities along often meld in with other migrants who seek options for economic opportunities and safety. Yet, despite the opportunities available in cities especially through the informal economy, the risk of exploitation, harassment and sexual abuse on women and children as a result of their unique vulnerabilities is well documented. The threat of

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deportation is also a constant risk, yet the urban remains a site of refuge. Within the context of the Global North, Darling (2017) argues that the literature in this field has focused on the practices of containment of asylum seekers within cities. This practice of ‘dispersal and managed marginality’, Darling argues, ‘needs to be viewed as part of a larger governmental formation that produces the marginality of asylum seekers through interconnected mechanisms of dispersal, detention and deportation’ (pg. 182). He notes using the example of many European cities that often these dispersals are in remote sites, institutional facilities like military compounds or in marginal environments devoid of services where the stigma attached to the place is further accentuated. Most recently (August 2017) in Montreal, Canada, the large number of Haitian migrants seeking asylum across the US border, (in the wake of President Trump’s policies on deportation for certain groups), have been temporarily accommodated in an Athletic Stadium of the city. In Scarborough, a post-war suburb of Toronto, local motels on a freeway are used as temporary shelters (Basu and Fiedler 2017; Basu et al. 2013). Finally Darling notes that the city is an arena for surveillance which he articulates as the ‘border within’ but also serves as a site for sanctuary movements to build progressive relations. Despite settling in parts of the city where resources are minimum and accessibility by transit more difficult, many displaced migrants have formed long term cultural and social networks to support each other. In previous work, Basu (2015) have explored how Scarborough has evolved from a post-war suburb of Toronto towards a city of ‘integrative multiplicity’ for subaltern cosmopolitan migrants. The study reveals how public spaces such as schools, libraries, parks and community centers form community hubs for regular engagement that are complemented by everyday civic spaces such as grocery stores, flea markets and religious centers (churches, mosques and temples). These ‘community’ spaces provide the nexus for social, cultural and political alliances based on their common struggles of hardship, alienation, racism

R. Basu and P. Asci

and exclusion. How do these associational linkages then relate to questions of citizenship and the lived experiences in cities such as Istanbul and Kolkata?

30.2.1 Cities of Intermediary Refuge —Case of Istanbul Within the last fifteen years, Istanbul has become the centre for Turkish government’s ambitious redevelopment policies that seek to promote the city into ‘world-class’ status. Urban development projects such as renewal of historical inner districts are being used by authorities and developers as tools to displace the urban poor and gentrify valuable urban lands. While Istanbul is in a process of being purged of its traditional working-class population through such renewal projects, it has also increasingly become a home for Syrian refugees who ‘prefer the independence and the opportunities offered’ in urban contexts ‘over the confinement and dependency of the camps’ (Fawaz 2016: 100). This case study brings these two contemporary dynamics together and explores how they interfere and intermingle with each other. Where is the place for urban refugees in a city that even local people cannot catch with the pace of its transformation? What are some of the challenges urban refugees as newcomers face? How does the growing real estate market and continuous neoliberalization of the city influence them? How do refugees transform the housing landscape in Istanbul? By focusing on the case of Fatih district in Istanbul, an area that attracts both a significant number of Syrian refugees and various developmental projects, this section will try to provide brief answers to these questions.

30.2.1.1 Syrian Refugee Crisis and Turkey: Urbanization of Refugee Camps The Syrian refugee crisis is one of the most important migration crises currently facing the world. Since the outbreak of the civil war in March 2011, more than half of Syria’s 22 million

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people have fled their homes, with more than 5.5 million leaving their country for political and humanitarian reasons.5 Turkey, Syria’s northern neighbour, hosts the world’s largest number of asylum-seekers. As of July 2017, 3,106,932 Syrians were registered in Turkey,6 which does not include many unregistered refugees. The Turkish government has an ‘open door policy’ towards Syrians under the Temporary Protection Regime which promises no forcible returns, registration with the Turkish authorities and support inside the borders of the camps (Ozden 2013). While the Temporary Protection Regime has provided Syrians with access to basic rights and services within camps, the system does not recognize Syrians as refugees but as ‘guests’ and the camps where Syrians are kept are not refugee camps but ‘guest camps’ (ibid.).7 Despite the great number of Syrian migrants it has accepted, the Turkish government’s official policy of not granting refugee status is an important factor that increases the vulnerability of Syrians in Turkey. In order to host the great influx of refugees, The Turkish government has established 26 refugee camps along the Turkey-Syria border where around 270 thousand Syrians reside. However, due to not having enough space in the camps and because of the opportunities urban centers present, most of the refugees have started to move from camp areas to big cities in Turkey. Over 90% of Syrians in Turkey live in cities which come with its unique challenges (Erdogan 2017). Poverty remains prevalent among the Syrian population due to the lack of access to a regular income, and the high cost of living in urban settings. Due to their precarious situation, many of the families have resorted to ‘negative coping strategies’ ‘such 5

http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=224. 6 http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=224. 7 “Upon entering Turkey, Syrians are registered by the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management (AFAD) officials. Displaced Syrians then are taken to one of the refugee camps where they are given ID cards. The camps, which are run by the Turkish government in collaboration with AFAD and the Turkish Red Crescent, provide Syrians with access to services that cover the basic survival needs. Syrians staying in the camps receive free food and health care.” (Ozden 2013: 6). http://www. migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/MPC-RR-2013-05.pdf.

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as child marriage, polygamy, child labor, reduced quality/quantity of food consumption, substandard housing, and street begging’ (United Nations 2017a: 6; United Nations 2017b). Syrians have moved to dozens of cities across all 81 provinces of Turkey. This makes outreach, gathering data and identifying vulnerable families a major challenge for all actors (ibid.). Istanbul, as the biggest city in the country hosts more than half a million Syrian refugees and is the most attractive area for the newcomers. It is important to keep in mind that this number is probably higher, considering the presence of many unregistered refugees. Recent research from Support to Life Association reports more than half of the refugees choose Istanbul because of its job opportunities followed by already existing networks among prior refugee families (Support to Life 2016: 19). However, despite the pull factors of Istanbul as a megacity that were described above, the everyday life of Syrians in the city reveals that Istanbul has little more to offer than others. Even though there are exceptions to the rule, many refugees who come to Istanbul choose relatively conservative/religious neighbourhoods where poverty is prevalent and everyday needs are relatively cheaper, such as Sultanbeyli, Sultangazi, Bağcılar and Fatih (Erdogan 2017). Among these working-class neighbourhoods, Fatih is an especially significant home for refugees.8 As a traditional working-class and conservative district Fatih, whose population is around 428.857 hosts 23,800 registered Syrian refugees by the date of July 2015 which is approximately 6.1% of its total population (Support to Life 2016: 8).

30.2.1.2 Refugees and Everyday Life in Fatih In a city like Istanbul where there is rampant neoliberalization and displacement of the urban poor, would be the place urban refugees? While walking along the recently gentrified streets of Fener and Balat neighbourhoods along the city walls in Fatih, one can first think that everyday 8

http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/suriyelilerin-tercihi-fatih40109027.

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life is not much touched by new coming refugees. However, walking away from the shore and inwards one meets with a totally different picture. Among the old and rundown buildings, of which many date to the pre-1930s era, one can witness the ongoing everyday life of the locals and increasingly more of Syrian refugees. As Arabic speaking Syrian women sit in front of their apartment doors and chat with one another, Syrian children play on the streets beneath the hanging clothes. As some parts of Fatih are becoming gentrified and marketed for upper classes, the remaining parts of the district are becoming home to many Syrians. Without the government support that is provided in the camp areas, many of the refugees are forced to survive within their own means, usually in unhealthy and even dangerous housing conditions (Ozden 2013). Those who can find work and afford renting their own place usually prefer basement units where rent is relatively cheaper. However, since many Syrian families are large families—usually 7 people or more, people are forced to live in crowded housing conditions. Those who cannot afford to rent their own places, on the other hand, have to live in even worse conditions, such as occupying empty buildings evacuated for upcoming urban projects. Thus in areas such as Fatih, it is very common to see refugees to occupy evacuated or incomplete buildings that are under construction. As such walking in the area of Fener- Balat reveals the existence of two different cities together: one street with newly opened gourmet cafes, organic product shops and co-working spaces for upper-class white-collar workers and another street for refugees to renting basement rooms with their large families. However, no refugee group is a homogenous entity and not all refugees experience the same conditions in their host cities. Refugee experience is mediated through people’s class positions in the country of their origin. As Ozden (2015) argues usually the wealthy classes are the first ones to leave their country and bring some of their capital to their host country. As such the wealthy Syrians were able to leave Syria during the first stages of the conflict and in many cases,

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could afford better living conditions. The so-called ‘white Syrians’ who reside in the old Roma neighbourhood of Sulukule is an excellent example for differential experience of Syrian refugees in Fatih. The Sulukule neighbourhood whose original Roma population was displaced due to the recent renewal project as described above (Uysal 2012), has currently become home to relatively upper-class Syrians who can afford higher rents.9 The incoming Syrians are mostly welcomed by the owners of the new villas, since Syrians’ demand for housing fills an important gap in the housing market. One of the old residents of Sulukule who himself cannot reside in the new building due to his debts, explains that ‘To pay off our debt, we have to rent our houses. Since the neighborhood is empty and still under construction, only refugee families are willing to pay the rent we ask for’.10 The boosting effect of Syrians for real estate economy is visible through much of the Fatih district. Heading to the inlands of the area, towards the neighbourhood of Aksaray one can see a real estate business in each corner of the street. The real estate advertisements are usually for short term fully furnished apartments and without exception all of them are also advertised in Arabic which indicates they are marketed for mostly newcomer Syrians. Aksaray is a vivid example of the fact that Syrians are changing the urban fabric of the city, despite their ‘temporary’ status. The neighbourhood, which has been also recently called ‘Little Syria’, has more many Syrian run shops and restaurants. Arabic is the mostly spoken language. The children’s park ground is full of Syrian children running around while their mothers socialize with each other. Here in the square of Aksaray, it is possible to simultaneously see both upper-class Syrian women drinking their lattes and shopping for latest fashion as well as the working-class youth who are serving in the cafes to save money for 9

By 2015, 200 out 250 villa style housing units were occupied by Syrians. Source http://t24.com.tr/haber/ romanlarin-kentsel-donusumle-gonderildigi-sulukuleninyeni-sakinleri-beyaz-suriyeliler,284158. 10 Source http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/sulukule-kucuksuriye-oldu-1153130/.

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their planned migration to Europe. The openness and accessibility of Aksaray Square as public space help refugees become visible, socialize and manage their day to day activities in a relatively more comforting and familiar space where the city otherwise can be foreign to them. The square seems to allow refugees to be the locals of the area and lose themselves in the routine of everyday of the city albeit temporarily. Aksaray, as its seemingly no difference than any other main urban centers in Istanbul is the living proof that the incoming Syrian refugees are not a homogenous body as it is often portrayed in media and mainstream channels. Indeed, the experience of the square and variety of the refugees’ experience indicate that a refugee’s experience in the host country is very much mediated by their class position and interferes directly on how one can become or not a part of city. While the majority of refugees are forced to live in dire conditions as a result of the lack of sufficient social and economic state policies for their welfare, a smaller portion of the incomers can have access to relatively better living conditions due to their already existing social and economic capital. Istanbul is one of the important cities in the world that strives to be a global city. It is the center of Turkish government’s ambitious developmental projects that are expected to contribute making Turkey a great economic and political power in the world politics. Urban renewal projects for historical inner-city neighbourhoods whose traditional residents are working-class people are among the crucial targets of this current developmental mania. In the meantime, Istanbul also faces a dramatic influx of Syrian refugees who choose to come to Istanbul for seeking shelter, employment, and livelihoods. By focusing on the district of Fatih, this section of the article looked at how these seemingly two different dynamics: a wholesale neoliberal transformation of the urban fabric and increasing flows Syrian refugees intersect and interfere with each other. Followingly it argued that contrary to the dominant media portrayal of refugees as a homogenous body, the refugee experience is strongly mediated by their class

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position in the society. The differences in refugees’ social, economic and cultural capital lead to crucial differences on how they become integrated into urban fabric to the housing market. The lack of a comprehensive settlement policies and welfare measures compel most of the newcomer Syrians to be exploited in the labor market and occupy the lowest positions in the housing market. On the other hand, relatively better off refugees who can secure higher stakes in Istanbul’s labor and housing market become integrated into the system as residents of gentrified neighbourhoods, replacing prior occupants.

30.2.2 Cities of Intermediary Refuge —Case of Kolkata In August of 1947, when after nearly three centuries of colonial rule the British Raj departed, the Indian Sub-continent was partitioned into two nation states based on religion: India and Pakistan (including East Pakistan, later becoming Bangladesh). The mass exodus between these states was one of the largest in the history of migration accompanied by violence, massacres and forced evictions. At this time around 78 million Hindus and Sikhs arrived from West Pakistan to India (primarily in Punjab); and around 8 million displaced migrants, between the longer drawn period of 1947–1971, sought asylum from East Pakistan (primarily in West Bengal). The second mass movement occurred in 1971 when the unprecedented flow of 10 million refugees fled from East Pakistan to India during the Bangladesh Liberation War primarily settling in West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. These two distinct periods of forced migration though similar in many respects, were differentiated by the different kind of migrants who sought asylum; and the corresponding hospitality they received. This section recognizes the difficulty of defining refugees given the differences of their situations, histories of coloniality, and geographies of settlement. Samaddar (2003) traces the different definitions that evolved over time originating from the colonial administrative and legal machinery that controlled the entry and exit of

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foreigners within particular jurisdictions (pg. 10). In this section thus the term refugees, migrants, displaced people, forced migrants are used interchangeably. Dasgupta (2016) notes that the history of partition in itself is important to understand questions of displacement and contested notions of citizenship; given that state formation and cross-border migration occurred simultaneously during this period of time. He notes that over the last six decades such cross-border displacement has included a large number of different ethnic and religious groups including Assamese Muslims, Sindhis, Tibetians, Burmese, Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghans, Nepalis and Kashmiris (pg. 7); most of them settling in the urban regions such as in Karachi, Delhi and Kolkata. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, another important point to keep in mind is that India is not signatory to the major international agreements on displaced people that includes the 1951 UN Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. In this respect, India has retained a certain degree of autonomy in dealing with the historical challenges of migration. Dasgupta (2016) highlights three aspects of this autonomy including autonomy from hegemonic states; autonomy from the protocol of international organizations and autonomy from the internal pressures of civil society and NGOs. Thus refugees were dealt with an uneven treatment on a case-by-case basis, over different periods of time, for different groups of people and treatment of support varied accordingly. Because of this ambiguity in status, refugees in India are treated like foreigners under the Foreigners Act of 1946. The ‘receiving’ state in turn manages relief, rehabilitation and repatriation (pg. 12) The urban dimension as mentioned earlier was reflected in the city of Kolkata since 1947. Those who sought asylum in 1947 were considered Partition Refugees. Rather than label themselves as refugees, they defined themselves as bastuhara (someone who has lost a home) as they considered themselves the victims of the postcolonial state. They considered it the duty of the new state to take care of their well-being. They arrived by foot, train, or by boat travelling from

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disparate places. The point of arrival is significant to note in terms of how and where the city of Kolkata evolved as spaces of resettlement. For example, railway stations like Sealdah Station or Coopers Camp became settlement hubs. The squatters and make-shift camps that sprung up around railway stations were hostile and difficult to survive in. Yet communities were fostered within these places that over time became politically organized and were able to mobilize the support of different political parties for funding and rehabilitation. Dasgupta notes four groups of displaced Bengalis who arrived after Partition: Bengali Bhadroloks who were middle and upper middle class who had been able to sell their land and reinvest their capital in West Bengal. The second group was an educated middle class who were able to gain employment opportunities with the government fairly easily. The third group consisted of lower middle class Bengalis, who found shelter in new colonies of the city, suburbs and resettlement colonies managing with no assistance from the state. Finally, the most vulnerable consisted of displaced peasants and agricultural workers, considered lower Hindu castes and the most marginalized of all the migrants. Most of them were moved to enclosed camps and rehabilitation centers, or were asked to leave West Bengal. The urban landscape changed accordingly to the unprecedented movement of people looking for refuge and to establish their homes. Camps were established alongside the border of West Bengal with Bangladesh. Dasgupta notes the large number of satellite towns that were established by migrants in the outskirts of Calcutta. He notes both colonies sponsored by the state and squatter colonies offered shelter to the newcomers such as Barrackpore, Khurday, Dum Dum and Panihati which soon became recognized as municipalities. Within the city, interspersed spaces were occupied as squatters. A distinct urban morphology evolved through the process of migration to Calcutta, further accentuated through religious divides. As most migrants from Bangladesh were Muslim, a distinct spatial organization of the city based on these religious

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factors affected this group. It is interesting to note how these periphery cities evolved with public spaces and institutions supporting their welfare such as schools, hospitals and community centers. Through these collective initiatives, they were able to become more politically involved and even unionized. These initiatives led to the steady rise of the left communist regimes that were to come to power a few years later and govern the State of West Bengal for over three decades. A few years later, after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, the sheer magnitude of the influx of migrants from Bangladesh was declared a humanitarian crisis. As the Indian state opened up its borders it sought the assistance of NGOs for relief programs. Dispersal initiatives that governments undertook to deal with the population crisis in the city of Calcutta were faced with immense resistance. Those who left the confines of these camps were not provided with government support and sought employment in the informal sector. Such work continues to provide the surplus labor for the city. Kunal Basu’s novel Kalkatta, poignantly traces the hardships of such displaced communities delving in multiple sectors, dangerous and precarious jobs to maintain their livelihoods. Yet even within the refugee communities, there were divides of class, caste and education. In sum, the City of Calcutta after both partition in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and to the present has experienced an unprecedented flow of migrants to the city. The border remains porous and fluid to this date. The urban morphology has changed over the years reflecting these flows in the form of satellite colonies and squatter settlements as land rights. Citizenship rights are claimed by migrants based on the ambiguity of their positionalities within the context of post-colonialism and nation building. Isin (2012) raises the complicated question of conceptualizing what he defines as ‘citizens without nations’. His discussion on the muddling of citizenship and nationhood proves useful in understanding these ambiguities and the corresponding concept of intermediary cities of refuge.

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30.3

Conclusion

This chapter emphasized the importance of understanding the urban as an intermediary space of refuge. Rapid urbanization and increasing flux of refugees into cities require us to rethink and conceptualize the relationship between the urban and forced migration. Faced with escalating rate of political conflicts around the world and growing number of refugees, it is evident that refuge settlements in urban areas have become the norm rather than the exception. This pushes us for new theoretical insights to understand both the urban and refugee lives both within and outside the contained territories or camps. Based on the cases of Istanbul and Kolkata, we argued that cities as spaces of refuge provide unique opportunities and challenges for incoming refugees. Istanbul and Kolkata are unique in their geographical and historical positions of hosting the largest number of refugees and displaced populations in history. The enormity of the scale of migrants has inevitably shaped the landscape and political economy of the city life and its forms. Due to their ‘temporary’ and precarious status refugees are usually compelled to be integrated into the host country’s economy through informal arrangements. Such informality renders them even more vulnerable to exploitation, insecurity and violence which make the struggle of survival a complicated process of daily negotiations. It is also important to note that the contemporary rise in right-wing populism and nationalism around the globe add to their vulnerability due to racism, discrimination and alienation in host nations. However, ‘cities as spaces of refuge’ also provide opportunities for establishing communities and places that become the nexus for social, cultural and political alliances based on refugees’ common struggles of hardship, alienation, racism and exclusion. As the cases of Istanbul and Kolkata reveal it is within and through the city that migrants can transform formerly foreign urban fabrics into familiar territories where they can speak, shop and even study in their own languages. They can adapt to and transform the host city and its economy in line with their

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everyday needs as in Istanbul and/or even shape it longer term by becoming politically involved and unionized as in Kolkata. Cities as spaces of refuge are simultaneously familiar and nonfamiliar places that both transform and become transformed through flows of migrants. However, it is important not to overestimate or romanticize the capacity of refuges to transform and become familiarized in their host cities. As is explored both in the cases of Kolkata and Istanbul, refugee groups are not homogenous entities and are often divided along class, education, religion, gender and in case of Kolkata caste lines. Thus refugee experience is much mediated through these varying positions and determines the process of integration itself. While some are able to change and familiarize their environment to a certain extent, others may not have access to reach the cities in the first place. The unevenness of refugee experience in cities as spaces of refuge brings out the questions of urban citizenship and the right to the city. The precariousness, the imposed and perceived temporality on refugee status, and their perceived ‘problematic’ existence in cities, in other words their out of time and placelessness, make it difficult for migrants to demand and pursue citizenship. Such rapid changing dynamics of refugee settlements and the opportunities and challenges from thinking of the urban as an intermediary space of refuge calls for further research to explore these links.

References Basu R, Fiedler RS (2017) Integrative multiplicity through suburban realities: exploring diversity through public spaces in Scarborough. Urban Geogr 38(1):25– 46 Basu R, O’Connor K, Fiedler R, Ko C, Prier N (2013) Integrative multiplicity through suburban realities: exploring diversity through public spaces in scarborough. Report to CERIS—Ontario Metropolis, http:// www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM30 74692&R=3074692 Basu K (2015) Kalkatta. Pan Macmillan, India

R. Basu and P. Asci Darling J (2017) Forced migration and the city: irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence. Prog Hum Geogr 41(2):178–198 Dasgupta A (2016) Displacement and exile the state-refugee relations in India. Oxford University Press Erdogan MM (2017) From disengagement to adaptation urban refugees: syrian refugees and municipalities: the case of Istanbul. (“Kopus”yan “Uyum”a Kent Multecileri: Suriyeli Multeciler ve Belediyelerin Surec Yoneyimi: Istanbul Ornegi) http://marmara.gov.tr/ UserFiles/Attachments/2017/05/09/2a50f712-6413489f-9deb-56dc52de7264.pdf Fawaz M (2016) Planning and the refugee crisis: informality as a framework of analysis and reflection. Plan Theory 1–17 Hyndman J, Giles W (2011) Waiting for what?. The feminization of asylum in protracted situations. Gender, Place and Culture, pp 361–379 Isin E (2012) Citizens without nations. Environ Plan (D) 30(3):450–467 Ozden S (2013) Syrian refugees in Turkey, MPC research reports 2013/05, robert schuman centre for advanced studies, San Domenico di Fiesole (FI): European University Institute, http://www.migrationpolicy centre.eu/docs/MPC-RR-2013-05.pdf Ozden S (2015) Being able to maintain a dignified life: about syrian refugees in Turkey (Onurlu bir yasam surebilmek: Turkiye’deki Suriye’li Gocmenler Uzere), http://www.bantmag.com/magazine/issue/post/32/345 Samaddar R (2003) Refugees and the state practices of asylum and care in India, 1947–2000. Sage Publications Pvt, Ltd Sanyal R (2012) Refugees and the city: an urban discussion. Geogr Compass 6:633–644. https://doi. org/10.1111/gec3.12010 Support to Life (2016) Vulnurability evaluation report for syrian refugees in Istanbul. (Istanbul’daki Suriyeli Multecilere Iliskin Zarar Gorulebilirlik Degerlendirme Raporu), http://hayatadestek.org/yayinlarimiz/2016_ istanbul_rapor.pdf United Nations (2017a) 3RP-Regional refugee & resilience plan 2017–2018. In: Response to the Syria Crisis: Turkey, http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/ download.php?id=12787 United Nations (2017b) 3RP- Regional Strategic Overview 2017–2018: In Response to the Syria Crisis, http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/download.php? id=12854 Uysal ÜE (2012) An urban social movement challenging urban regeneration: the case of Sulukule. Istanbul Cities 29(1):12–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities. 2011.06.004 UNHCR (2016) Global trends report http://www.unhcr. org/5943e8a34.pdf (downloaded 1 Nov 2017)

Part VII Future: Sustainable Development

Sustainable Cities in the Global South: Lessons from the African Continent

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Christopher Cusack and Julie Elwell

Abstract

Keywords

A watershed moment occurred in 2008 when, for the first time in human history, most of the global population could be categorized as residing in urban areas. Contributing to this remarkable transition has been the rapid population growth in cities of Africa. Natural increase and rural to urban migration patterns throughout Africa have resulted in striking rates of urbanization across the continent. Such rapid growth in urban population has fostered awareness for the need to address such development in a sustainable fashion. A regional approach to understanding the needs and addressing the issues of sustainable urban development provides opportunity to examine best practices of generating sustainability through twenty-first century efforts of planning and governance. Examination of cities as case studies affords meaningful cross-cultural context and better opportunity to identify transformational practices in policy and planning. Cities selected for examination in this research are noted for their pioneering and dynamic approaches to planning. Linking economic expansion with social equity and environmental protection, such cities may well serve as global vanguards in a new urban era.

Africa Global south Sustainable cities Sustainable urban development

C. Cusack (&)
J. Elwell Keene State College, Keene, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected]




31.1







Introduction

By now, the statistic is widely known; it has been a decade since the world became a majority urban society. However, simply stating that a preponderance of the global population, for the first time in human history, now resides in urban areas belies the magnitude of this remarkable transition. Identifying where rates of urbanization are increasing most significantly, and why this process is occurring, helps to give insight into the global problems and prospects of a rapidly urbanizing world. Rates of urban growth are by no means geographically uniform, as the lesser-developed regions of Asia and Africa currently evince the most striking urban growth. Concomitant to this growth, however, has been an increase in awareness of the need for sustainable urban development. Though many cities in the developing world face daunting challenges engendered by rapid expansion, there is also an understanding, if not optimism, that this growth may provide economic prosperity and even challenge the conventional inputs and outcomes of urbanization. This chapter therefore provides a case study of East Africa; a region of the world

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that paradoxically demonstrates the very highest rates of urban growth while remaining one of the least developed. East Africa stands as the poster child of the evolving global urban dynamic and provides a viable and valuable template for analysis. Natural increase and rural to urban migration patterns throughout Africa have resulted in striking rates of urbanization across the continent. In fact, according to UN-Habitat, twenty-four of the thirty cities with the highest growth rates in the world will be in Africa. Overall, Africa’s rate of urbanization has increased from 15% in 1960 to 40% in 2010 and projects to reach 64% by 2050 (UNDESA 2014). The world urban population, which stood at 3 billion in 2000, is expected to reach 6.4 billion in 2050 with fully 90% of this growth occurring in Africa and Asia (Angel et al. 2011). Akin to global urban growth rates, urbanization trends within Africa are similarly disparate as Northern and Southern Africa are already relatively urbanized while West and East Africa remain on the other end of the development continuum. As noted, this is significant because the regions of rapid urbanization are those that are the poorest in terms of GDP/capita (UN-Habitat 2015a, b, 16). Expected to average an annual urban growth rate of 5.35% over the 2010–20 decade, Eastern Africa is perennially highlighted as both the world’s least urbanized and most rapidly urbanizing sub-region (UN-Habitat 2014). Goodfellow (2013) likewise highlights the urban growth in East Africa as being amongst the highest in the world and relates that managing such growth is particularly urgent due to extreme levels of urban primacy and immense pressure on urban land. Additional challenges facing cities in East Africa include overcrowding, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, poor housing conditions, as well as increasing concerns over social, economic and public health challenges (WHO 2016, 18). That a significant share of the urban population in East Africa is already unemployed or living in slum conditions or both, heightens concerns over the rapidity of the urbanization (UN-Habitat 2014). Because of its unique position of demonstrating the most rapid rates of

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urbanization in the world, East Africa provides exceptional opportunity for analysis of urban development. East Africa also works as a case study region given its common roots in Swahili culture and shared experiences in British Colonialism and the East African Community (Frigerio 2016). However, definitions of the geographic extent of the region vary. The United Nations geoscheme for Africa identifies East Africa as being comprised of 20 countries and territories, while the African Development Bank Group identifies the region as being comprised of 13 countries. On a smaller scale, Mutahaba and Pastory (2015) identify East Africa as being comprised of only Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. For this chapter, East Africa is defined as those countries constituting the East African Community (EAC), Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, along with Rwanda and Burundi. Limiting analysis to urbanization in these countries is also supported by the region’s geography. The countries of the East African Horn are largely separated from the rest of the region by the swamps of South Sudan and the aridity of northern Kenya. Meanwhile, the islands of the Indian Ocean are in many ways more oriented to trade and cultural influences from points east across the ocean (UN-Habitat 2014, 152). Thus, the core of East Africa is undeniably those countries comprising the East African Community.

31.2

Cities and Challenges

Countries of East Africa have historical commonalities in terms culture and the colonial era and now exhibit shared experiences in terms of addressing rapid urban growth. While all countries of the region face urban challenges, in recent decades they have exhibited variation in terms of government response. Policies and approaches to urban development link closely to the overarching political structure of each country. While Uganda has exhibited frequent policy changes depending on the political powers of the day, Kenya has remained largely capitalist and Tanzania has opted for ujamaa (socialist)

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Sustainable Cities in the Global South …

policies (Mutahaba and Pastory 2015, 268). Yet despite its commitment to ujamaa, the Swahili coast has remained connected to transnational trade and the global economy (Heathcott 2013, 225). These variations have resulted in different responses to the rapid rates of urbanization that the countries of East Africa are experiencing and contribute to a comparative analysis. Yet it is more than just the rapidity of urban growth in East Africa that necessitates response, as climate change is also of paramount concern. ‘Prone to natural disasters such as floods, droughts and cyclones, the sub-region is considered to fall in a “global hotspot”. Climate change poses a range of potential threats to Eastern Africa and its cities’ (UN-Habitat 2014, 158). Climate change is likely to pose extraordinary biophysical risks to urban development even though the entirety of the African continent accounts for less than 2% of current greenhouse gas emissions (Baumert et al. 2005). Trends demonstrate that much of Africa is warming at a rate faster than the global average with effects of climate change disproportionately onerous to the poor and vulnerable in urban areas. Flood risks in cities of Sub-Saharan Africa are most acute in poor settlements and bring with them waterborne disease, including malaria which has even spread to the highland city of Kigali in Rwanda. Paradoxically, rapid population growth coupled with climate change has also resulted in severe water shortages in many cities throughout East Africa (Myers et al. 2016, 327). The correlation between poverty and exposure to environmental risk is clear, and those most at risk from the effects of climate change are the urban poor—especially women and children. Yet while at greatest risk, the urban poor also remain generally disenfranchised from political decision-making (UN-Habitat 2014, 33). This coupling of rapid urbanization with environmental risk necessitates examination of the conditions of cities in East Africa to identify existing conditions and optimal response. Indeed, the need for a realistic, yet meaningful, approach to urban planning is acute. However, tremendous obstacles must be overcome before successful urban design and development becomes the norm in cities of East Africa.

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Addressing demographic pressures and providing basic life-sustaining necessities alone necessitates critical evaluation of existing norms in terms of governance of these rapidly expanding cities. With population growth greatest disproportionately occurring in the region’s largest cities, these cities not surprisingly receive most of the attention. Even with research demonstrating that poverty and inequality in smaller towns in the Lake Victoria region are comparable to those of capital cities in Eastern Africa, the sheer population sizes and growth of the larger cities necessitates that they receive the preponderance of political and scholarly attention. Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Nairobi in Kenya and Kampala in Uganda, all serve as primate cities and all contain a disproportionate share of their country’s urban population (UN-Habitat 2014). The relative size of cities in the region are evident in Fig. 31.1, and concomitant with such rapid population growth rates are issues that include acute housing shortages, traffic congestion, environmental pollution and uncontrolled peri-urban sprawl. In terms of population, Dar es Salaam is more than five times larger than the next largest city in Tanzania. In Kenya, Nairobi is nearly four times as large as Mombasa and in Uganda and Rwanda the disparity is ever starker, as the populations of the capital cities of Kampala and Kigali, respectively, are more than ten times larger than the second largest cities in their countries. The effects of such rapid and relatively poorly managed growth are dire, as most of the urban growth ends up taking place in slums where quality of life is poor and adequate resources are lacking. Not surprisingly, such rapid population growth has resulted in extensive slum settlements, with Kampala in Uganda reaching a sensational 85% of its population living in slums. Many slum dwellers have trouble maintaining steady supplies of food, and all-over East Africa most urban slum areas lack adequate services in electricity, sewage and piped water. Efforts to address these needs have been inadequate and face substantive impediments. With so many urban dwellers lacking basic services in terms of sewer and water, infrastructure planning needs remain critical.

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KAMPALA

BUJUMBURA

Burundi 751,000

Uganda 1,936,000

KIGALI

Rwanda 1,257,000

NAIROBI

Kenya 3,915,000 MOMBASA

Kenya 1,104,000 DAR ES SALAAM

Tanzania 5,116,000 ZANZIBAR

Kenya 1,000,000

Fig. 31.1 Principal cities of East Africa

Obstacles to provision of such services include inadequate resources, concerns regarding governance and associated levels of corruption, the rapid pace of urbanization and decentralization as a strategy by federal governments to place infrastructure demands at the feet of local governments (Kihato and Karuri-Sebina 2012). With such significant portions of urban populations without adequate sanitation, those who lack this service are given to contamination of their water, ground and surface, with waste and other organic and inorganic pollutants. One consequence is apparent in the informal settlements of Nairobi, where the rate of diarrhea among children under three years is more than two times the rate of the city (African Population and Health Research Center 2012). The inadequacies of infrastructure planning cities of East Africa have not always been this penurious as water and sewer proved adequate during the colonial era when Europeans controlled the size of urban populations. Rapid urban population growth post-independence, coupled with an inability to expand water, sewer and transport, has brought the cities to inadequate

levels of infrastructure delivery (Biao et al. 2013, 473). At the same time, engineering norms pertaining to sectoral infrastructure planning date back to the colonial era (UN-Habitat 2015a, b). Presently, cities of East Africa are struggling in all facets of urban planning and service delivery. At the most basic level, urban planning remains either outdated or lacking in context in terms of cultural sensitivity, or both. Planning writ large remains oriented to and fashioned after urban planning in the Global North. Three principal elements that underpin planning in East Africa demonstrate this mirroring of approaches: a spatial development framework elucidated via a master plan; planning and building standards and regulations; and, a system to control development. While the approaches to urban planning are similar, the contexts could not be more disparate (UN-Habitat 2014, 163–164). Nowhere is this dualistic nature of urban development more evident than in Nairobi. Nairobi has been the site of glaring contradiction for more than a century. On one hand, city leaders seek to make Nairobi fulfill a modernist vision of

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Sustainable Cities in the Global South … world importance. Nairobi’s planners and elites have long seen the city as a model—for a European-settler colonial city, for a garden city, for a green city in the sun, for a city of multiracial harmony, and, lately, for a “world-class city-region” in the age of economic globalization. On the other hand, Nairobi all along has looked very differently to its majority of citizens. The inequalities and injustices of Nairobi are as dramatic as its spectacular skyline or its leaders’ grand ambitions, and many of its settlement areas and lower-class estates simmer with small-scale violence and sociopolitical unease, occasionally erupting to gain the world’s attention (Myers 2015, 329).

The result is that, in their present form and through their present approaches to planning and service delivery, cities of East Africa no longer reflect past ideals of colonial powers nor provide appropriate developmental approaches to their citizenry (Biao et al. 2013, 474).

31.3

Public and Private Responses to Urbanization

Except for Uganda, most national government structures in the region have undergone reform intended to decentralize control and afford more power to local governments (Mutahaba and Pastory 2015, 268). Under these varying structures, highly ambitious and well-publicized master plans for the region’s major cities have been promoted, although the context in which they have created their intended targets and the success of their implementation has varied dramatically. The most successful master plan has been that which received the greatest use and highest level of commitment, that of the Kigali Master Plan of 2007. Touted internationally as a success, the Kigali Master Plan serves as an exemplar to the rest of the cities in East Africa (Goodfellow 2013). Shortly after the Kigali master plan, the Nairobi Metro 2030 master plan was published. Paying homage to ‘green’ urban development, the terms sustainability, inclusion and public transit receive more than 25 mentions in the plan. While aspirations, or at least lip service, of a future green metropolis is evident, the immediate concerns of violence, inequality,

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unemployment, or youth, receive only passing mention in the document (Myers 2015, 339). While Kigali can highlight many successes in urban planning and Nairobi can at least point to a master plan, the city of Kampala has become renowned for haphazard development, crumbling infrastructure and collapsing buildings while enduring years of neglect and antagonism from the national government. Recent administrative reform of Kampala has meant a national takeover of the city via creation of a new national authority, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), which supersedes decisions of the popularly elected mayor and council (Gore and Muwanga 2014, 2202). On the other end of the continuum, Dar es Salaam has a city administration that is fragmented into three municipal administrations functioning independently in terms of political decision-making. Despite disparate governmental forms, incredible planning and development efforts are taking the form of new satellite cities. Located outside the largest city in each East African country, these ‘neo-cities’ are being developed with the intention of providing more balanced population distributions. Attainment of this goal is to be accomplished through new commercial and industrial developments that are to serve as centers of technological innovation, education and entertainment. Boasting all the functions of a metropolis, the sheer scale and ambition behind these satellite cities is breathtaking. As the continent’s most active region in planning satellite cities, the scale of current urban development projects and proposals in East Africa has not been experienced since the planning and construction of colonial cities more than a century ago (Grant 2015). Exemplars of such cities include: Konza Techno City and Tatu City, both located near Nairobi; Kigamboni City in Dar es Salaam; and, Kakungulu City not far from Kampala (Table 31.1). Marketed as Africa’s ‘Silicon Savanna’, the first phase alone of Konza City is expected to cost at least $3 billion US dollars and will include a 5,000-acre technology park (Watson 2013, 218). The overall development process projects to take twenty years and ultimately will result in a technopolishosting

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Table 31.1 Characteristics of satellite cities in East Africa Satellite City

Country

Location

Size

Significance

Konza Techno City

Kenya

60 km southeast of Nairobi

30,000 residents; 2,000 ha

To enhance Kenya’s global competitiveness in technology and innovation

Tatu City

Kenya

Along northern radial road; 25 km northeast of Nairobi

150,000 residents; 2,400 ha

World-class, mixed-use, mixed-income new city

Kakungulu City

Uganda

Along the Kampala-Entebbe corridor; 18 km from Kampala

144,000 residents

Largest gated community in Uganda

The New Kigamboni City

Tanzania

Within Dar es Salaam, south of the CBD

500,000 residents; 6,494 ha

Future industrial and Indian Ocean maritime port area

business process outsourcing (BPO) ventures, a science park, a financial district, residential properties, recreation properties and commercial ventures that include hotels and shopping malls. On the other side of Nairobi, Tatu City is a ten-year project advertised as a ‘world-class, mixed-use, mixed-income’ new city and a ‘prototype for the twenty-first-century African city’ (Kihato and Karuri-Sebina 2012, 34). In Uganda, a similar type of satellite city taking shape outside Kampala in the form of Kakungulu is fashioned as Africa’s response to Bengaluru, the principal IT hub of India. In addition to a vast IT park, Kakungulu is designed to hold all the accoutrements of a dynamic twenty-first-century city as a major sports stadium, hospital, luxury hotel and signature golf course highlight the designs. Ultimately, the goal is to employ a large and talented pool of university graduates in Western-style call centers (Murray 2017, 46–47). A slightly different variation is taking place in Tanzania, where Kigamboni is more connected, indeed almost a part of, the primate city of Dar es Salaam. Envisaged to include commercial, trade and industrial, educational, recreational and residential facilities, Kigamboni could ultimately reach 500,000 inhabitants. Yet criticisms of these designs that they advantage people with higher incomes eclipse the contention that establishment of such satellite cities will take pressure off the larger cities in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Concerns of increasing urban sprawl and dependence on the

automobile have dual detrimental effects on the environment and the urban poor. Accommodations for low-income housing are largely excluded, which sets up for additional slum development elsewhere where the quality of life is very low, and populations cannot make significant economic contributions. Walls, private security forces and rapidly increasing housing costs is further segregating the population in the contemporary equivalent of the colonial era during which cities were largely segregated by race (Grant 2015, 303). The ability to bypass all the problems of existing East African cities affords these greenfield developments opportunity to ignore reality and create fanciful new visions. In the futuristic fantasy projection of city builders, these master-planned, holistically designed urban enclaves are ‘city doubles’, faux doppelgängers that are the mirror (and yet polar) opposites of existing urban landscapes in Africa. By doing away with overcrowding, chaos, and congestion, these ‘parallel cities’ represent everything existing metropolises in urban Africa are not (Murray 2017, 31).

In addition to their apparent emulation of cities such as Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore, the physical vision for each of these satellite cities are couched in terms of green living and sustainability, and none involved any kind of public participation or democratic debate (Watson 2013). Lack of public involvement has heightened the very legitimate concerns of a dualistic society

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Sustainable Cities in the Global South …

in which the disparity in everything from living conditions to economic opportunity to life-sustaining essentials becomes starker. With most urban growth in the region taking place in slums and informal settlements these new planned satellite cities, no matter whether they be considered visionary or fanciful, do nothing to alleviate the appalling conditions that predominate such major cities of Kampala, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Claims that the satellite cities will alleviate congestion and are to be sustainably designed may be considered rather specious and have already been aspersed as little more than ‘green-washing’ (UN-Habitat 2014; Watson 2014). Purported benefits of these satellite cities are certainly not likely to make any difference in the lives of the urban poor in cities such as Nairobi, where over 60% of the population lives in slums. Yet even in the face of these proposed satellite cities, efforts to improve life for the poor and vulnerable are ongoing and already showing success. Marked infrastructure improvements in the slums of Nairobi, have resulted in a six-fold increase in the proportion of slum households using flush toilets (WHO 2016, 137). Such success stories demonstrate that coordinated solutions and targeted investment can have a dramatic and truly life-changing impact. However, those lacking political power remain subject to the frequently adverse decisions made by governing bodies. Like many cities in the region, Nairobi is being infused with foreign direct investments, principally from China. While sorely needed, these investments often prove disadvantageous to the urban poor, as evidenced by the Chinese-build Southern Bypass Highway that slices through a portion of the slum of Kibera (Myers 2013, 113). Foreign investors are attracted to the region’s youthful population and the emerging urban ‘consuming class’ which is making demands for housing, retail, and leisure development. Hence, the construction of the satellite cities that ignore the realities of existing urban conditions (Watson 2014, 116). With foreign investment concentrating on new and largely exclusive satellite cities, it is incumbent that local and national governments work collaboratively with nongovernmental organizations

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(NGOs) and other entities to provide for the needs of their existing cities. While the satellite cities will include mixed-use development, future urban growth in the region will remain unsustainable if the human potential remains untapped or underinvested. Undoubtedly, education and health are critical determinants of success, and while the youthful population of the region could translate into a sizable workforce for foreign investors, such a workforce requires appropriate skills and knowledge base (UN-Habitat 2015a, b, 32). This requires not only government commitment, but also openness and resource sharing as well—two things for which governments in this region are unfortunately not well known. Despite improved service provision in Kibera, one of the largest slum settlements in the world, residents of the slums of Nairobi generally perceive the state as repressive and as the main perpetrator of evictions and demolitions (Rigon 2014, 279). Lack of transparency is a hallmark of government as a well-informed populace, empowered through open access to data and information, will be able to hold elected officials more accountable. This lack of transparency and unwillingness to share information has contributed to the rise of NGOs that are serving to empowering citizens with information. For example, Twaweza, an NGO distributed throughout Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, is working to improve learning and educational opportunities for children, to provide citizens with tools to assert their rights and to encourage governments to be more open and responsive (WHO 2016, 208). Empowering the underprivileged requires combining community knowledge and government resources with advanced technologies that have the capacity to generate and share city-level data. Such technologies include smartphones and other locational technology such as public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS). While the benefits of PPGIS are well documented (see, for example, Chingombe et al. 2015; Cusack and Bills 2016), GIS data access remains limited by typically authoritarian East African governments that perceive freely available spatial data as a threat to their power

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(Williams et al. 2014). Despite this, demands for more participatory governance and local self-determination by the people of East Africa are pulling their governments, however reluctantly, towards a more open society (UN-Habitat 2014, 27). Shared data, discourse and decision-making is not only important for good governance, but is also necessary if cities are to take adaptation to climate change seriously. To adequately address issues associated with climate change, such as flooding or the urban heat island effect, ‘a fundamental rethink of urban planning as a tool to support adaptation and promote sustainable development is required’ (Bulkeley and Tuts 2013, 655).

31.4

Cities and Sustainable Development

Admirably, several cities in East Africa are participating in UN-Habitat’s Cities and Climate Change Initiative (CCCI), including Kampala as one of four pilot cities. The cities undertake assessments of their vulnerabilities and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and receive assistance in developing innovative policies and strategies. The CCCI has achieved successes that

include the strengthening of urban youth groups in Kampala, Mombasa and Kigali through a ‘green team’ approach to climate change adaptation (Bulkeley and Tuts 2013, 656). Importantly, the CCCI takes a pro-poor approach to its climate change strategies. This critical element of sustainable development is one that has been rather lacking in discourses of what makes a city ‘sustainable’, as Williams (2010) properly notes that the definition of what makes a city truly ‘sustainable’ remains somewhat contested. However, a commonly accepted characterization is derived from the 1987 UN publication Our Common Future that declares sustainability to be ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The goal of sustainable development has long been oriented around the ‘three E’s’ of environmental protection, economic growth and social equity. These goals have oft proved contradictory and may not fully encapsulate the facets needed for true sustainable development. The UN-DESA (2013) offered a fourth vital component—that of effective urban governance (Fig. 31.2). While retaining the original goals and highlighting the important facets of each, the UN-DESA recognized that none of 3 E’s of sustainable

Sustainable Cities Social development • Education and health • Food and nutrition • Green housing and • • • •

buildings Water and sanitation Green public transportation Green energy access Recreation areas and community support

Environmental protection

Economic development

Effective urban governance

• Forest and soil

• Green productive

• Decentralization and

• • • • •

management Waste and recycling management Energy efficiency Water management (including freshwater) Air quality conservation Adaptation to and mitigation of climate change

growth • Creation of decent employment • Production and distribution of renewable energy • Technology and innovation (R&D)

Fig. 31.2 An integrated strategy for sustainable cities (Source UN-DESA 2013)

planning • Reduction of

inequities • Strengthening civil

and political rights

• Support of local,

national, regional and global links

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Sustainable Cities in the Global South …

development are likely to be accomplished without the presence of effective government structures. Accentuating the need for decentralization and planning, reduction of inequities, strengthening civil rights and support of linkages at all scales are elements of effective urban governance. Without question, the cities of East Africa all could benefit by working towards this fourth component of sustainable development. Effective urban governance would be most beneficial in the city of Kampala. With heavy-handed centralized governmental control, the city is rife with inequity, corruption and failure of regulatory enforcement on all land. This severely and adversely affects opportunity for advancing the sustainable development principles of social or economic development or for environmental protection. For example, regulatory failure proved harmful to the city’s few open green spaces and resulted in the transformation of Centenary Park into a complex of restaurants and bars that cater to the elite. Rather than simply beautifying the park, as was the original intent,

Fig. 31.3 August 7 Memorial Park in Nairobi

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the metamorphosis of Centenary Park into something foreign was due in large part to political pressure from above (Goodfellow 2013). Other East African cities are not immune to politicking or to conflict between the disparate elements of sustainable development. In Nairobi, for example, open and recreational space may be pitted against housing provision. While the city has admirably retained its green space, it does not always necessarily avail itself to the urban poor as, for example, the August 7th Memorial Park does incur a fee for entry (see Fig. 31.3). Perhaps a greater source of potential conflict between equity and the environment is that the amount of open and recreational space is so substantial that it occupies more total land than do Nairobi’s slums (Bradlow 2012, 7). With East African urban population growth rates at the global apex, slum settlements in Nairobi and elsewhere will only continue to increase in population density as well as urban land cover. Such growth is a clarion call for sustainable urban development, as urban land cover projects to

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expand dramatically in sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and 2050. If densities decline only 2% annually, urban land cover will expand more than 12-fold by mid-century (Angel et al. 2011, 58). This growth also poses a threat to the amount of available green space in cities, as the natural environment typically gives way to the built environment. Cities are where sustainability is most challenging but also most indispensable (Asprone and Manfredi 2014). This requires a change of ethos in East Africa, and indeed much of sub-Saharan Africa, where urban greenery is generally limited to tree planting (Cobbinah and Darkwah 2016). With little recognition or concern for other forms of greenery, the amount of lawns, parks and playgrounds is declining in most cities throughout East Africa. With rapid urban growth as the reality, any urban containment strategies are likely to affect land markets and further constrain the ability of the poor to secure safe, affordable housing. The conflict between open space, population growth, consumption of urban land cover, need for housing and more, will only exacerbate in the coming decades. The demographics of East Africa, highlighted by the increase in youth population, must be viewed as an opportunity as opposed to a challenge. Harnessing this demographic dividend can be facilitated through sustainable urbanization that affords economic agglomeration, technological innovation and increased public participation (UN-Habitat 2015a, b, 2). Investments and partnerships with non-governmental organizations coupled with governmental support can result in small-scale but meaningful achievements. Already in East African cities, entrepreneurs are creating green jobs, carrying out urban farming and adopting organic waste management techniques (Acey and Culhane 2013, 1046). Neighborhoods in Kampala, for example, are entering into partnerships to recycle waste into animal feed, compost and alternative fuel (UN-Habitat 2014, 50). However, barriers to even these small-scale efforts remain. In Nairobi, efforts to initiate several biogas projects are being thwarted, in part, by local gangs who run the dumpsite and are threatening violence should food waste be diverted elsewhere

C. Cusack and J. Elwell

(Rosner 2011). The question, then, that remains to be to whether these countries can generate urban growth in a sustainable fashion. Despite such concerns, the urban advantages of concentrated living, innovative economic opportunity and political reform, may indeed prove that these East African cities offer the most sustainable forms of living.

31.5

Conclusion

Cities around the world are proffered as vanguards of sustainability. Cities demonstrate compact design with higher population and housing densities, as well as opportunities for public or alternative transportation and other sustainable features. Consequently, they are receiving increasing emphasis as affording the greatest potential for meeting the needs of the present without necessarily sacrificing the needs of the future. The relative successes of urban efforts to house, feed, employ, transport and generally provide for their citizenry warrants cross-cultural and cross-national examination. As noted by McHale et al. (2013), comparative analyses of urban development, deemed as requisite for the planning and development of sustainable communities, must continue to receive attention. As such, and with the highest urban population growth rates in the world, oft-dire living conditions, newly planned satellite cities and tremendous demographic dividend, the cities of East Africa are apposite for analysis. The immediate future will provide further evidence of what does and does not work—as between 2012 and 2014, Nairobi, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Zanzibar and Kigali each announced the drafting of new master plans. Though the plans uphold western-style development, there are corresponding efforts to blend these principally top-down tactics with bottom-up approaches that continue support for economic efforts to make service provisions sustainable (Frigerio 2016). Regarding climate vulnerability, adaptation and sustainability, Bulkeley and Tuts (2013, 647) have posed queries regarding urban challenges

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Sustainable Cities in the Global South …

faced, roles of different actors, and, ultimately, winners and losers. It may be that the cities of East Africa provide the answers to these critical questions of global import. While many cities noted for sustainability are those in the West— think London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Vancouver, San Francisco and others—increasingly, cities from around the global South, from Curitiba in Brazil to Bangalore, India, to Tianjin, China, are receiving attention for their efforts of sustainable urban development. However, with rates of urban growth amongst the very highest in the world, cities in East Africa are now receiving requisite recognition for both the need and delivery of sustainable urban development efforts. The need is real, and with climate change disproportionately affecting the urban poor, so too are efforts at development that are both sustainable and equitable. Likewise, as the continent’s most active region in the planning of satellite cities, concerns over acceleration of a dualistic society between haves and have nots are prevalent. Considering these concerns, efforts are being made to engender sustainable urban development. With master plans being fashioned, with some decentralization of power, and with an understanding of the need for sustainability, the cities of East Africa have tremendous opportunity to generate not just meaningful results, but a legacy of truly sustainable development.

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501 climate policy. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC Biao I, Esaete J, Oonyu J (2013) The role of learning cities in the rejuvenation of Africa. Int Rev Educ 59 (4):469–488 Bradlow B (2012) Inclusion: a sustainability agenda for African city growth. Perspectives 3(12):6–10 Bulkeley H, Tuts R (2013) Understanding urban vulnerability, adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change. Local Environ 18(6):646–662 Chingombe W, Pedzisai E, Manatsa D, Mukwada G, Taru P (2015) A participatory approach in GIS data collection for flood risk management, Muzarabani District Zimbabwe. Arab J Geosci 8(2):1029–1040 Cobbinah PB, Darkwah RM (2016) African urbanism: the geography of urban greenery. Urban Forum 27:149– 165 Cusack C, Bills KJ (2016) Glocalizing’ urban sustainability: the case of Nairobi. In: Dutt AK, Noble AG, Costa FJ, Thakur SK, Thakur RR, Sharma HS (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and urban development. Springer, Netherlands, pp 99–115 Frigerio A (2016) Facing rapid urbanization: a century of East African urbanism. In: Hein C (ed) International planning history society. Proceedings 17th IPHS Conference, History-Urbanism-Resilience, TU Delft Goodfellow T (2013) Planning and development regulation amid rapid urban growth: explaining divergent trajectories in Africa. Geoforum 48:83–93 Gore CD, Muwanga NK (2014) Decentralization is dead, long live decentralization! Capital city reform and political rights in Kampala, Uganda. Int J Urban Reg Res 38(6):2201–2216 Grant R (2015) Sustainable African urban futures: stocktaking and critical reflection on proposed urban projects. Am Behav Sci 59(3):294–310 Heathcott J (2013) Heritage in the dynamic city: the politics and practice of urban conservation on the swahili coast. Int J Urban Reg Res 37(1):215–237 Kihato M, Karuri-Sebina G (2012) Urban socio-spatial change and sustainable development: the neo-city phenomenon. Perspectives 3(12):34–40 McHale MR, Bunn DN, Pickett STA, Twine W (2013) Urban ecology in a developing world: why advanced sociological theory needs Africa. Front Ecol Environ 11(10):556–564 Murray MJ (2017) Frictionless utopias for the contemporary urban age: large-scale, master-planned redevelopment projects in urbanizing Africa. In: Datta A, Shaban A (eds) Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state. Routledge, London, pp 31–53 Mutahaba G, Pastory P (2015) Local government capacities in East Africa. Public Policy Admin 14(3):268– 280 Myers G (2013) From expected to unexpected comparisons: changing the flows of ideas about cities in a postcolonial urban world. Singap J Trop Geogr 35:104–118

502 Myers G, Owusu F, Subulwa AG (2016) Cities of sub-saharan Africa. In: Brunn SD, Hays-Mitchell M, Zeigler DJ, Graybill JK (eds) Cities of the world: REGIONAL patterns and urban environments. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, pp 323–366 Myers G (2015) A world-class city-region? Envisioning the Nairobi of 2030. Am Behav Sci 59(3):328–346 Rigon A (2014) Building local governance: participation and elite capture in slum-upgrading in Kenya. Dev Change 45(2):257–283 Rosner H (2011) Biogas—the low hanging fruit. Popular Sci 279(1):66–76 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2013) An integrated strategy for sustainable cities (policy brief no. 40).https://www.un.org/ development/desa/dpad/publication/undesa-policybrief-no-40. Accessed 29 June 2017 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2014) World urbanization prospects, 2014 Revision. United Nations, New York United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) (2014) The state of African cities: re-imagining sustainable urban transitions. https:// unhabitat.org/books/state-of-african-cities-2014-reimagining-sustainable-urban-transitions. Accessed 29 June 2017

C. Cusack and J. Elwell United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) (2015a) Towards an Africa Urban Agenda. https://unhabitat.org/books/towards-anafrica-urban-agenda. Accessed 29 June 2017 United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) (2015b) Sustainable Urban Development in Africa. https://unhabitat.org/sustainableurban-development-in-africa. Accessed 29 June 2017 Watson V (2013) African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares? Environ Urbanization 26(1):215–231 Watson V (2014) Will the profession speak out? Winners and losers in the future African city. Plann Theory Pract 15(1):115–118 Williams K (2010) Sustainable cities: research and practice challenges. Int J Urban Sustain Dev 1 (1):128–133 Williams S, Marcello E, Klopp JM (2014) Toward open source Kenya: creating and sharing a GIS database of Nairobi. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 104(1):114–130 World Health Organization (2016) Global Report on urban health: equitable, healthier cities for sustainable development. http://www.who.int/kobe_centre/ publications/urban-global-report/en. Accessed 29 June 2017

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Growing Sustainable Transportation in an Autocentric Community: Current Trends and Applications David H. Kaplan

Abstract

Transportation is among the highlights of human achievement, but it comes at a major cost in exhausting nonrenewable resources and increasing environmental pollution. In particular, the expansion of automobiles throughout the world has led to higher levels of air pollution, greater degree of congestion, and the promotion of urban sprawl. This chapter examines how initiatives in sustainable transportation can counter some of the environmental distress caused by our current transportation system. It first looks at the meaning of sustainable transportation by looking at what makes our transportation system unsustainable, including resource depletion, air pollution, congestion, and inequities in access. It then examines several means by which to shift transportation modes to more walking and bicycling by altering the community infrastructure, encouraging denser housing, functional integration, and traffic calming. It then discusses how to enhance the efficiency of personal vehicles through improvements in gas mileage, introduction of electric and hybrid vehicles, and strategies to make traffic run more smoothly. Finally, the chapter shows how accessibility can be

D. H. Kaplan (&) Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

improved for those who have been left behind through greater investments in transit and in making automobiles available for short term use. Taken together, many of these initiatives can lead to a more sustainable transportation future. Keywords







Automobile efficiency Bicycling Congestion Modal choice Transportation access Urban sustainability Walking




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Introduction

Transportation is among the highlights of human achievement. In a couple of hours, people can traverse the distance that used to take weeks, altering our opportunities and our worldview. The development of personal transportation— enabling everybody the freedom to travel whenever and wherever they choose—has further reshaped our experience. But transportation advances have unfortunately also led to environmental distress. Most new technologies have required fossil fuels—coal, diesel oil, propane, and petroleum—to feed the engines which whisk us away. The advent of improved transportation, from railroads to automobiles to airplanes, has also transformed the built environment that must now account for these conveyances and the infrastructure to enable them.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_32

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The autocentric community appeared first in the United States, where most middle households had access to cars by 1930. It later diffused to other parts of the world, heralding prosperity and autonomy. The rate of growth in automobile ownership is now highest in countries like China and India as more people enjoy the advantages that enhanced mobility can bring. The environmental consequences are obvious however. With increased automobile ownership come higher rates of air pollution, and major cities now record pollution 5–10 times the maximum safe levels. In countries, long accustomed to automobiles— such as the US, Canada, Australia—exhaust emissions are by far the biggest contributors to air pollution but the consequences show up in a kind of endless sprawl, as open spaces reappear as vast subdivisions and shopping centers. In all countries that have embraced the automobile, the increasing congestion on the roads and highways has taken back some mobility gains as people spend much of their daily commute stuck in traffic. To counter this greater dependence on automobiles, we have begun to reconsider our transportation choices. The term “sustainable transportation” covers many different things but still encompasses the general notion that we should encourage transportation that is less polluting, contributes less to sprawl, and make our communities safer and more pleasant to live in. What I would like to do in this chapter is to discuss (1) what we mean by sustainable transportation, (2) some of the applications of sustainable transportation, and (3) the trends in sustainable transportation.

32.2

The Meaning of Sustainable Transportation

The concept of sustainability has grown in popularity and usage as a way to offset resource depletion and the overall degradation of the natural environment (Gibson 2006). The idea was that a sustainable society would provide the necessary goods for the present without sacrificing future generations’ ability to meet their

own needs (Brundtland Report 1987). Thus, any sustainable endeavor centers on its ability to conserve resources and to limit pollution. As the concept of sustainability has taken off, other facets, including greater harmony between people and the natural world or the ideas of social justice, have been added (Gibbs et al. 1998). One way to think about this is that sustainability involves ensuring that resources and the environment are maintained for future generations but also that existing resources are distributed equitably right now (Vojnovic 2013). Many people aspire to the ideal of sustainability, but there is a great deal of flexibility in this ideal. For the purists, one might consider a “hard” form of sustainability that brooks little compromise. In this instance, sustainability means reducing consumption of resources drastically, allowing for virtually no pollutants into the water, air or land, and abjuring many modern comforts to reduce the human imprint on the land. The Limits to Growth, while not advocating a return to past poverty, affirmed that economic growth would have to be curtailed in order to save our planet (Meadows et al. 1972). This would require a reduction in conventionally measured standards of living. For these reasons, hard sustainability will always have trouble gaining acceptance among people because it involves too much sacrifice. A more practical approach considers some form of “soft” sustainability. These are ways to attain certain sustainability goals through replacements and technology. A few tweaks to the system, some technological advances, and alterations in production and supply chains allows for development to proceed apace, but in a sustainable way. In fact, politicians may brag about how this approach to sustainability leads to more “green” jobs. Even though some academics argue that economic development is at its root an unsustainable enterprise (Redclift 2005), this is by far the most common idea of sustainability in practice. As a means of staying relevant, scholars who work in sustainability fields look to solutions rooted in possible tweaks and fixes (Miller et al. 2014). Sustainability is very much related to transportation because transportation has long been a

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remarkably unsustainable enterprise (Black 2010). Before steam power, sailing ships were the main form of long-distance transport. Yet these vessels required tall trunks of sufficient height and thickness. The proliferation of ships and their greater size could not be sustained as they were simply not enough trees. Before the electric streetcar and the automobile, most urban transport relied on horsepower. The impacts of this—from horse droppings, to stables, to dead horses along the side of the road—caused a crisis that showed no signs of abating. Gasoline-powered transportation emerged as a panacea but then realized problems of its own. Today, unsustainability in the transport sector comes about in four ways. 1. The first is the fact that most current transport requires fossil fuels and fossil fuels are finite. The energy crisis of the 1970s portended a future where petroleum would need to be carefully rationed out. This did not come to pass as new reserves were discovered and greater fuel efficiency allowed vehicles to do more with less. However, there is still a cap in how much energy is left in the ground (Richie 2017). 2. The second level of unsustainability derives from transportation as the biggest contributor to air pollution, through the combustion of fuel, and is also the largest source of excess carbon dioxide, tied to human-induced climate change. Much of the world is still unmotorized (Poushter 2015) but less developed countries have the highest increases in auto ownership. Because they start from a very low base, this means that with economic development, they will emit more and more pollutants (Dargay et al. 2007; FIA Foundation 2009). In fact today, cities in China and India far exceed the World Health Organization maximums (WHO 2014). 3. The third issue has to do with overall congestion. As the demand for transportation infrastructure outstrips its supply, it becomes more difficult to accommodate existing traffic (see Downs 2004; Dunphy et al. 1997). In the United States, there were 60% more vehicles

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using each lane mile in 2015 than there were in 1985, and people ended up spending three times the hours stuck in traffic (U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics 2017) Congestion also occurs in the airline sector as many larger airports are at full capacity (FAA 2015). 4. The fourth issue relates to continued inequities in access to transportation. Globally, one billion people lack access to good roads and the most basic forms of motorized transportation, forced to take long journeys to acquire the most basic necessities (World Bank 2017). Even within a wealthy country like the US, while most households have cars, many do not. In many cases, public transit systems are weak to nonexistent, leaving people stranded far from job opportunities (White 2015). A sustainable transport sector requires reductions in the consumption and emission of fossil fuels, and an efficient and equitable distribution of transportation access. This can be accomplished through several strategies that will be examined in more detail below.

32.3

Minimizing Resource Consumption and Environmental Pollution

One key means of reducing motorized transportation is through the greater use of non-motorized options. This does not mean going back to the horse and buggy but it does involve a shift in transportation mode. This can be a challenge worldwide, but is particularly acute in the United States, which overwhelmingly relies on single-occupancy vehicles for commuting and other everyday travel. The result of these myriad choices is that more people rely on cars, and more communities are built such that automobile travel is the only safe and reasonable way to get around. This creates what might be described as an ‘autocentric’ city, where the built environment serves to accommodate vehicular travel to the exclusion of all other modes.

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The ills of the autocentric city have been well documented in both the popular and academic literature. These range from the problems of mobility (Kay 1997) to the marginalization of pedestrians and bicycles (Dannenberg et al. 2011; Speck 2013), to the sheer ugliness of the landscape (Kunstler 1994), to the loss of community (Talen 1999), to health considerations (McCann and Ewing 2003), to the amount of space taken up with parking (Shoup 2005). A sustainable transportation policy attempts to increase the numbers of people who walk and bicycle (assisted by transit), while decreasing the number of trips undertaken by automobiles. Shifting transportation modes is difficult but not impossible. The demand for walking and biking must be boosted while creating a hospitable environment (see Frumkin et al. 2011). Decades of decentralization have vastly increased the distances between places while

Fig. 32.1 Snow covered sidewalk

D. H. Kaplan

roadways have largely neglected sidewalks and bike paths. One vexing problem for walkers in many communities is how little attention is given to sidewalk snow removal (Fig. 32.1). Countering this have been several attempts to create communities where houses, shopping, and workplaces are placed closer together. This follows from the observation that compactness and an orientation to bicycling, walking, and transit will encourage non-motorized travel. In his book, Cervero (1998) provides several examples of what he calls “transit metropolises”. These are existing cities which consciously restrain automobiles, promote compactness, push through more transit options, and provide the infrastructure for nonmotorized transportation. Many of this was put into place early on, before being overwhelmed by sprawl. Copenhagen, Denmark is a great example as development has proceeded outward along linear corridors, called the “finger

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plan”, served by rail. But within the core of the city and each of the fingers there are ample facilities and infrastructure for bicycles and pedestrians. Nice wide sidewalks, bicycle lanes, buses that accommodate strollers, and the overall taming of the automobile make Copenhagen quite amenable to sustainability, and far more people get around without automobiles. For cities which have all but given themselves up to the automobile, smart growth has been touted as a way to develop businesses and residences while reducing the overall environmental footprint and promoting strong and healthy neighborhoods (Duany et al. 2000). New urbanist communities, developed from whole cloth by architectural firms and developers eager to promote this vision, always include great infrastructure for sustainable transportation and take pains to lessen the impact of automobiles. The Charter of New Urbanism states that “communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car”and this has been a clear strategy in the design of communities (Congress of New Urbanism 2000). Where it is not possible to recreate a completely new community, the goal is for more incremental change. Increasingly, cities have looked at developing sustainable comprehensive plans to protect the environment, foster healthy communities, and promote a better transportation balance. In light of transportation, one goal may be to increase pedestrian access on every roadway. Existing sidewalks can be widened and maintained, winter and summer, to allow for a more comfortable walk (Speck 2013; Shoup 2010). In some communities, ordinances might be passed the mandate sidewalks for all new developments (Warner and Morken 2013). An additional measure can be the development of safer and more frequent crossings on the roadway. In less pedestrian-friendly communities, crossings are spread far apart and vehicles do not stop for people trying to cross the street. Attention to more frequent crosswalks, enforcement of existing laws fining drivers, building traffic islands or raising the walks themselves, can make

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a huge difference (see AMATS Regional Pedestrian Plan 2012). Bicycling enables people to travel much further than walking and can function as a useful transportation mode for trips of up to 5 miles. Several obstacles, from a lack of bike lanes to no bike racks, make bicycle travel more difficult than it has to be. In the United States, there is also something of a mindset that bicycling is more of a recreational than a practical activity (Dill 2009). We know that several European cities have developed excellent bicycling accommodations, and these provide some lessons for the United States. Bicycling infrastructure includes building bike lanes and paths, fostering higher levels of safety through traffic calming, providing more storage facilities for bikes, as well as other items proven to increase the modal share of bicycling in a number of cities (Pucher et al. 2010). Also, new bicycles can be costly and can be easily stolen without proper locks. This creates a higher start-up expense for prospective cyclists. The final infrastructural improvement involves calming the speed of vehicular traffic and reducing the footprint of parking areas and highways. Much of the unpleasantness and peril of walking and bicycling results from cars speeding down widened highways, while barely acknowledging the presence of other modes of transport. Under these conditions, only those people too poor to afford vehicles will choose to walk or bike. However, there is a whole kit of traffic calming tools that have proven effective in slowing down cars and increasing both pedestrian and bicycle usage (Ewing 2008). There is also the strategy of “road diets” which reduce the number of lanes (perhaps replacing with bicycle lanes or wider sidewalks) (Noland et al. 2015). Finally, efforts might be made to reduce the size and prominence of parking lots (Mukhija and Shoup 2006). Will these changes to the built environment alter modal choice? We know that cities with great bicycling infrastructure tend to have much more bike traffic, but this could be because the

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community demands it. In regard to how the built environment affects bicycling and walking, Ewing and Cervero (2010) conducted a meta-analysis of more than 50 studies. The conclusion is that walking is associated with population density, the number of intersections (indicative of short blocks), a jobs-housing balance and the number of stores nearby. A study by Winters et al. (2010) showed that bicycling was linked to higher intersection density, traffic calming measures, bicycle signage, more functional integration and higher densities overall. Kaplan’s (2015) study of transportation choices on a university campus affirmed the significance of many of these environmental features for both biking and walking. There are some things that are not possible to control, like the weather or the hilliness of a community, but there are many items that can be manipulated if there is the will to do this.

32.4

Enhancing Efficiency

A second set of sustainability goals comes through efforts to enhance the efficiency of vehicular transportation. This mostly takes the form of developing more efficient vehicles or improving the transportation arteries in order to reduce congestion and to keep traffic flowing. Decreasing the average distances between places can reduce the amount of fuel used of course, so these other efforts would add to that. The drive for greater fuel efficiency has come in fits and bursts. Countries in the developed world experienced their first oil and petroleum price shocks in the early 1970s, when an embargo from several oil-producing Arab countries cause shortages and led to price spikes. This led to a more general consciousness that the supply of fossil fuels was finite and that it was incumbent on us to introduce greater efficiency. Transportation, especially automobile transportation, was a great place to start. For the first time, automobile buyers became aware of how efficient car engines were, as measured by miles per gallon (Greenlees 1980). Smaller, more efficient cars commanded a premium and

automobiles produced in Japan especially, already smaller to account for higher gas prices and narrower streets, began to take market share from the bigger cars produced in Detroit (Train and Winston 2007, Rubenstein 1986). Changing costs of fuel were not enough, however, as demand for larger cars, light trucks, and sport utility vehicles shot up when gas prices fell (Train and Winston 2007). Two strategies have been used to encourage fuel efficiency beyond the price of gas. One strategy is to impose a minimum efficiency standard for vehicles, or for a fleet of automobiles. In the United States, the federal government in 1975 imposed Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that were scheduled to increase on a regular basis. While this policy has been somewhat effective (see National Academy of Sciences 2002), it has also been weakened by some reluctance to increase CAFE standards, especially when automakers felt that most consumers preferred bigger cars. It has also been undercut since separate lower standards were imposed for so-called “light trucks”. When the law was first enacted, most American drove automobiles, but since then a higher proportion has moved to minivans, pickup trucks, and sports utility vehicles—all considered light trucks under CAFE standards. The popularity of highly fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles, which combine an internal combustion with an electric engine, has increased fuel economies considerably (O’Dell 2013). A second strategy was through the increase in the gasoline tax. In the US, the gas tax was introduced in the 1920s to help pay for road construction and maintenance (Gutfreund 2004). Before this time, there was no consistent funding, and the lack of decent roads became something of a national disgrace. The tax enabled the building of a paved road network. But a gasoline tax can also encourage greater fuel efficiency as it raises the price of gasoline. This is a mechanism used without too much controversy in most countries where the tax on gas can be more than twice the original cost of petroleum (OECD 2014). However, it has become a very difficult tool to use in the United States. There is a federal

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tax and normally a state tax. Most economists agree that an increased gas tax would yield many benefits including promoting efficiency. But raising the tax, especially the federal tax, has been among the most difficult things to do politically and was last done in 1993. Other proposals to raise a gas tax, or levy a general carbon tax, have been met with virulent opposition. Within the last few years, electric vehicles, once a novelty, have advanced to a point that they are accessible to a wider cross-section of the population (Ogden and Sperling 2016). The battery life has been extended and the price has come down to rival that of a higher end automobile. The literature on electric vehicles is vast, but we can make a few points in respect to their impact on sustainability. The foremost point is that such vehicles produce no emissions. Cars powered by electricity operate cleanly and quietly. At the same time, the electricity has to be generated from somewhere and in many parts of the country, that very likely to be coal. So there is a tradeoff between fuel emissions versus the pollution caused by coal extraction and power generation. In regions where most electricity is produced from hydroelectric, solar, or wind power, then the electric car is clearly more sustainable. In California, for instance, an electric car would produce about half the greenhouse emissions of a fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle. But in Minnesota, heavily dependent on coal-generated electricity, the electric vehicle produces 50% more emissions than the hybrid (Biello 2016). In general though, electric cars are far cleaner than gasoline-powered or even hybrid cars, decreasing global warming emissions by half or more (Nealer and Anair 2015). Other efficiencies can be wrung from making traffic patterns run more smoothly. One key area of improvement comes from the alleviation of congestion. The term “congestion” refers to a situation where the demand for space on a roadway meets and exceeds the capacity. As vehicular traffic rises, bottlenecks can occur in a number of places: at intersections where traffic is turning left and right, on streets with traffic

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entering and exiting frequently, in segments where some form of merging occurs, or if there is an accident, construction or other blockage (Dunphy et al. 1997). Congestion leads to a gridlock of vehicles being backed up, stop-and-go traffic, or a full-scale traffic jam. Congestion is temporally and spatially uneven. It occurs at particular times of the day, when traffic demand is at its peak. It tends to also be focused in particular places (Downs 2004). Congestion is annoying to people stuck in traffic, but it is also unsustainable. Cars idling in traffic use more gas and emit more pollution while people spend a great deal of time just waiting for traffic to get moving again. There is generally a high monetary cost to all of this (Texas Transportation Institute 2015). This is particularly true in cities in the developing world, where congestion hampers economic productivity and makes it even more difficult for poorer people to get around (Faiz 2011). Strategies have been devised to ameliorate congestion. The most obvious is to build more capacity, a popular option still. The problem is this can be quite expensive especially since many congestion hotspots are in areas where there is a lot of density and so there is the cost of buying up building and land. In addition, the evidence shows that increasing capacity often induces more demand (Duranton and Turner 2011). Plus, the expansion of roads and highways runs counter to many other tenets of sustainability. It encourages more vehicular traffic, is generally hostile to pedestrians and bicyclists, and consumes more land. Regulating demand can be effective in discouraging traffic during high congestion periods and in high congestion districts. Bans can be effected for vehicles, with cars permitted into districts in alternate days, depending on the license. This helps to regulate congestion and should stave off dangerous levels of air pollution, though evidence is mixed. Several cities around the world such as London, Milan, and Stockholm have introduced congestion pricing (Black 2010). This is a way to levy a surcharge on vehicles traveling within a certain zone at a specific time

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tools used to enable emergency vehicles to get through traffic more rapidly with fewer impediments. Moving far up in cost is the development of smart highways such as the San Diego automated highway which guides vehicles through magnets on the road (see Black 2010). Navigational systems and new smartphone apps such as WAIS belong in this category too as they facilitate precise travel and help people circumvent too much traffic congestion. Future innovations with self-driving cars could have the potential to reduce congestion by dramatically increasing the allowable density of traffic. Human-driven cars and trucks must maintain large buffer zones to be able to stop in time to avert accidents. Self-driving vehicles would be able to work with much smaller buffers and so could allow many more cars on a given stretch of road.

32.5

Fig. 32.2 Congestion zone in London

of day. This might be assessed by street segment or via a cordoned area (Fig. 32.2). The value of this scheme is that, like a gas tax, it adds revenue while it curtails automobile use. In this case, the value is in keeping down the levels of traffic. One of the less expensive means of increasing efficiency comes through intelligent transportation systems. This comprises several techniques that help keep traffic moving. One option is through dynamic signaling, where the length of stop and go lights varies depending on the volume and direction of traffic. There may also be

Addressing Inequities

The issue of transportation access relates to transportation sustainability in less the purely environmental sense of the term, but in the more social dimension. A sustainable system of any sort is one where all people are able to fulfill their potential and have access to the resources necessary to live. A society where all of the resources go to just a few people, even if sustainable in a narrow ecological sense, is not sustainable socially. Inequities clearly exist in transportation access. A tiny slice of humanity can instantly summon private jets and helicopters; a much larger minority can travel when and where they want with few impediments. But still, the vast majority do not have the means to easily travel to where they need to go. Even in US society, where most people can access a reliable vehicle, there are still a significant numbers of people, particularly the poor, elderly, and disabled, who must instead rely on other choices for getting around (Federal Highway Administration 2009). Even where there is some level of access, the poor pay much more proportionally for transportation while reaping fewer of the benefits (Blumenberg 2017).

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Transit is a catch-all term for transportation modes that move people around but are not personal. This can include streetcars, light or heavy rail, subways, buses, demand response systems or more unusual modes such as ferries, aerial tramways and funiculars. This does not generally include long-distance transportation such as airplanes, passenger trains, and ships. In many countries, transit is publicly owned, though this is not always the case either now or historically. Generally, this category would not include taxi services of any sort. Transit comprises a fairly low percentage of American commuting— about 5%—though this varies widely by geography. Rural areas and outer suburbs have little to no transit; inner sing suburbs and central cities enjoy the bulk of transit. Transit is also much less common even in many large metropolitan areas, particularly in the south and mountain west, but far more vital to the Pacific states, many Midwestern cities, and throughout the northeast. New York City in the US is the only city where the plurality of people commute via transit but other metropolitan areas rely on transit as well (McKenzie and Rapino 2011). In other countries, transit is a much larger part of the transportation system. European cities generally offer more robust transit networks and a high ridership (Cervero 1998). Transit is more heavily subsidized and private vehicles are discouraged. Low-income cities have an even greater reliance on transit since so few people can afford the costs of car ownership. In these instances, private jitney type services may flourish to meet demand, but public transit is often a better and safer alternative (Klein et al. 1996; Vuchic 2010). An accessible, subsidized transit system is an important element of transportation sustainability. From an environmental aspect, the use of transit can be less polluting contingent on good occupancy levels. Transit also is more efficient as one bus or train displaces dozens if not hundreds of private automobiles. Finally, transit provides a means for people without a driver’s license or automobile access to get to work, to go shopping, to obtain services, and to visit friends. Without transit, many of these people could be quite isolated and suffer from many fewer

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opportunities. Transit can be a great option for people who can otherwise afford and drive cars; it is a necessity for people without automobile access. This constitutes some 9% of American households but is a much higher proportion within the inner city, reaching close to 30% (Federal Highway Administration 2009). Communities that do not invest in solid, connected transit incur massive penalties on their most vulnerable populations. In the United States, most transit is routed through regional transit associations which are county or metropolitan based. This may be supplemented with city or even university transit systems. However the funding streams for transit agencies can be tenuous, and several are not able to provide the routes and the timing to service the entire population. This can be even more severe in a decentralized city. Not only does transit’s appeal increase with density, but it also become more cost-effective. But people in less dense cities need transit just as much if not more. In these places, long inconvenient trips are the norm if a trip is offered in the first place. Add to this the fact that many transit districts do not coordinate paths and schedules and this makes it even more difficult to travel between counties (Rivasplata et al. 2012). Other efforts to improve accessibility include providing demand-response transportation, short term options, or subsidizing riding services. Demand response involves sending out a van or other vehicle in response to a request from a client. The vehicle then makes several trips to pick people up and to drop them off. Pick up times must be established in advance. This can be a good solution in some cases, particularly low-density areas, but it costs a lot per trip. It can also take a long time to get service and travel needs to be planned well ahead of schedule. Short term options that provide transportation to those who require the use of a vehicle but either do not want or cannot afford one include car-sharing services. Individuals sign up for the service and then pay by the hour. The best-known player in the US is Zipcar. Car sharing has become popular in European cities, where Autolib in Paris provides a fleet of electric

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vehicles. Some car shares allow individuals to rent out their cars on a short term basis. In addition to car shares, ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft contract with individuals to use their own vehicles and provide their own labor. These systems have the advantage of flexibility, and they are sustainable and normally much more affordable than car ownership. They are also much more environmentally friendly in that they replace many cars on the road. In each of these cases, a true revolution may come when automobiles drive autonomously. In this case, the cost of rideshares will diminish with no labor costs and the automobiles that are on the road will be utilized much more efficiently. There will be little need to garage these autonomous vehicles as they can prowl the city streets responding to ride requests.

32.6

Doing Sustainability—In Lieu of Conclusion

The above strategies combine to provide a more sustainable transportation system. But we cannot lose sight that these involve action at different scales and much of that requires making difficult choices. In many ways, a focus on sustainable transportation demands a change in mindset. The traditional notion of transportation advance was that faster was better, and that we should strive for greater mobility in transportation infrastructure (Litman and Burwell 2006). It was also an approach that would call for singular solutions to singular challenges. If there are too many cars on a road, say, then we should widen that road. A sustainable transportation strategy is more amenable to an integrated approach which needs to examine environmental, social, and economic issues together. This entails an approach that moves away from simpler language that prioritizes automobile travel towards one that looks to improve accessibility for everybody, reduce reliance on automobiles, and promotes overall community livability, equity, and reduced pollution. Sustainable transportation also demands a

more integrated approach (Litman and Burwell 2006). In many administrations, “transportation” is consigned to a particular agency, often a civil engineering department, with no coordination with other agencies—such as community planning and zoning—which highly influence transportation demand. This causes a host of unintended consequences (Kennedy et al. 2005). The trick to effective transportation is through a more coordinated public administration that considers land use, transportation infrastructure, demand control, and pollution amelioration. Ideally, this also goes hand in hand with neighborhood design that encourages sustainable transportation and, most importantly, is tied into a broader region that allows sustainable mobility. There is no silver bullet to creating a more sustainable transportation system. The solutions involve more efficient vehicles, greater access to convenient mass transit, encouragement of pedestrian and bike travel, better urban design and planning, and more coordination across the board. This requires a major rethinking of how transportation has been measured, funded, and administered. But a movement to sustainable transportation does not ask people to compromise the quality of their lives. In fact, just the opposite. A workable sustainable transportation system will transform not only how people get around but create the types of happier, healthier communities that most people prefer.

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D. H. Kaplan data/national-transportation-statistics/217651/ntsentire 2017q4.pdf Vojnovic I (2013) Advancing towards urban sustainability: the pursuit of equity. In: Vojnovic I (ed) Urban sustainability: a global perspective. Michigan State Press, East Lansing, MI Vuchic V (2010) Transportation for livable cities: problems, obstacles, and successful solutions. In: World cities: achieving livability and vibrancy, pp 105–130. Jan 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/9789814280730_0006 Warner M, Morken L (2013) Building child- and age-friendly communities in tight fiscal times. In: The municipal year book. International City County Management Association, Washington, DC White G (2015) Stranded: how America’s failing public transportation increases inequality. Atl Mon. May 16 Winters M, Brauer M, Setton EM, Teschke K (2010) Built environment influences on healthy transportation choices: bicycling versus driving. J Urban Health: Bull New York Acad Med 87(6):969–993 World Bank (2017) Transport overview. http://www. worldbank.org/en/topic/transport/overview#1 World Health Organization (2014) Ambient air pollution database. WHO, May 2014

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Holy-Heritage City Development and Planning in India: A Study of Ayodhya Rana P. B. Singh and Sarvesh Kumar

Abstract

Religious heritage as religious properties and sacred places can be an integral part of larger ensembles, such as historic cities, cultural landscapes and natural sites. Religion had played a role for controlling power in Indian monarchy in the ancient past, and in contemporary India too it played a role in the formation of religious nationalism and corporate identity of religious heritage, through commonly using processions, pilgrimage, religious assemblies, religious fairs (melā), and visit to sacred places. Situated on the right bank of Ghaghara River (Sarayu), Ayodhya is primarily an ancient tirtha (riverfront sacredscapes) and salvific city that has settlement continuity since at least ca 800BCE. Ayodhya is the sacred place not only for Hindus, but also for other religions of India, like Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhs and Islam (Muslims). In

Hindu mythologies, it is described as the birthplace of Lord Rama, a major deity of Vaishnavite group. Ayodhya records many rituals, festivities, pilgrimages journeys and important ancient temples, river ghats (stairways and bathing places), holy tanks, holy wells and holy ponds and their aesthetic qualities and heritage values; those are the representative grandeur of art and tangible and intangible heritage values of the city. Presently around 1.9 million pilgrims pay visit to Ayodhya every year on various religious occasions. Now, most of the religious heritage sites and monuments are dilapidating and are in abandoning condition in lack of rational and viable conservation and preservation strategy, good administration management and lack of people awareness and their involvement. The present paper deals with the historical and cultural development of the heritage-sacred city of Ayodhya and examines the strategies in process for the future development, taking into consideration the National programmes of HRIDAY and PRASAD, and development of pilgrimage sites. Keywords

R. P. B. Singh (&) Department of Geography, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India e-mail: [email protected]







Cultural landscapes Pilgrimage Religious heritage Riverfront sacredscape




S. Kumar Department of Geography, D.D.U. Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_33

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Introduction: Visioning Sacred-Heritage City

The basic idea of India’s heritage, which has endured since remote antiquity despite subsequent acculturation, is the maintenance of a unified sensibility in the search for wholeness and interrelationships among matter, life and mind; these altogether converge into ‘holiness’. In this regard, a theory of archetypal transformation of the celestial realm (macrocosm), on the earth as the visual and experienced reflection (mesocosm), and down to the individual temple or body symbolism (microcosm), has been developed by Indian seers. In a harmonic balance between nature and humanity a close interconnection between all three realms is maintained. Such thought processes provide the essence of the ethics behind the development and maintenance of India’s heritage, denominated with the Indian Sanskrit/Hindi term dharohara, which is derived from ‘the mother earth’ (dhara), and ‘endeavour of identity through time’ (ihara), that is how dharohara means the object identity perceived in time on the earth as symbol of culture. Dharohara (heritage) is explained in terms of roots, and ‘our’ ‘deep’ glories of the past, a concept of heritage which is a way of viewing the past and its association with places (Ashworth 1996, p. 1). Thus, ancient sites, monuments and antiquities are, symbolically, the places of learning, and ‘repositories of knowledge about former understanding of our planet and our relationship with it’ (Devereux 1990, p. 54). In a broad sense, such heritage refers to the places where the spirit of nature and culture meet, and are additionally symbolized and maintained by people’s attachment to rituals performed there. In this way territory is conceived as a temple and the whole landscape converges into the sacred landscape, a process which may also be explained through landscape geometry. In the past, these places attracted people aiming to share and experience the power possessed therein, resulting in the growth of settlement and the development of cities whose economic and administrative functions encompassed the promotion of heritage and its

maintenance, articulated through the rite of pilgrimage with a view to experiencing the spirit of place possessed therein. The landscape-territory is conceived as temple and the whole landscape into the sacredscape (see, Singh and Singh 1997, p. 290). ICOMOS defined ‘Heritage’ as abroad concept that includes tangible assets such natural and cultural environment, encompassing landscape, historic places and build environment as well as intangible assets such as collection, past and continuing cultural practices, knowledge and living experiences. The concept of heritage appeared with respect to sacred heritage city, all kinds of things which give knowledge about the past of the city, they are under the heritage. It is always shown and maintains the relationship between the memories of our past for better consequences of present and future. A heritage city is ‘an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, planning, land-use which is representative of a culture, or human interaction with the environment and is directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance and values’ (UNESCO 2002, p. 2). The following six value elements constitute of the sacred heritage city. The four basic issues for expressing representations and discursive construction of sacred heritage include: (i) understanding cultural significance, (ii) information on the value of heritage, (iii) conservation in response to religiosity-spirituality and (iv) cultural responsibility (Waterton et al. 2006, p. 350). The sacred place can be constituted through reiterate cultural practices and performances, including the practice of daily visitation and invisible communication with inherent spirit and human quest. Such performances constantly make sacredscapes alive, maintaining friendship with human being (Singh 2011a, p. 6). The resolution of ICOMOS 2005 General Assembly calls for the ‘establishment of an International Thematic Programme for Religious Heritage’. The report mentions that ‘There exist a great variety of religious and sacred sites that are representative of the different

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cultures and traditions of the world. Approximately 20% of the properties inscribed on the World Heritage List have some sort of religious or spiritual connection’. Further, the resolution of ICOMOS 2011 General Assembly emphasized the protection and enhancement of sacred heritage sites, buildings and landscapes to keep and sustain the outstanding universal value (OUV). Religious landscapes and heritage as a religious properties and sacred places can be an integral part of larger ensembles, such as historic cities, cultural landscapes and natural sites. The sacred heritage cities are important sacred spaces in all important religions of India. They not only connect the local people to divine and sublime but also help to promote social values, cultural identities and power relationship. Since 2005, intensive discussions grappling, under the purview of UNESCO, with the meaning, character and values residing in the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) have resulted in the Vienna Memorandum and in resolutions from international meetings. For planning strategy and conceptual framing, the historic urban landscape and the urban cultural landscape (UCL) are interchangeable terms. Most of the ancient cultures, especially the South Asians in the ancient past ordered the natural world on cosmological principles and shaped harmonious relation with nature, which ultimately resulted in formation of urban cultural landscapes. The HUL is an urban area understood as the result of a historic layering of cultural and natural values and attributes, extending beyond the notion of ‘historic centre’ or ‘ensemble’ to include the broader urban context and its geographical setting: sites’ topography, geomorphology, hydrology and natural features, built environment, both historic and contemporary, infrastructures above and below ground, open spaces and gardens, land use patterns and spatial organization, perceptions and visual relationships, other urban structure elements. It also includes social and cultural practices and values, economic processes and the intangible dimensions of heritage as related to diversity and identity. UNO Habitat III (17–20 October 2016, Quito, Ecuador) has provoked that framing structure

and understanding of urban cultural landscape (UCL) should be projected in the purview of culture-based regeneration, urban heritage conservation, urban landscape, cultural and creative industries, cultural values, cultural diversity, creative economy, inclusive development, social cohesion, right to cultural heritage, density, mixed-use, strategic territorial governance and associated issues. In Indian context, the sacred-heritage city is a repository of sacredscapes. Sacredscape is a double directed vision— special character of spatiality back to the wisdom of the past, and deeper sense of meaning and attachment forward to posterity. Cultural and historical processes intertwined with human psyche strongly reflect the background to sacredscape. Unfortunately, at present the growing ‘materialistic cultural running after economics and loss of human sensitivity, man-nature harmonic relationship is badly threatened by, resulting in loss of value-system and life-force. Many things are not seen in their full reality until they are seen and experience, not necessarily as sacredscape, but as existing within the context of sacrality’. This is a way of double-vision of spiritual and physical worlds integrated by the human faith and belief system—what theosophically called as ‘Clairvoyance’, i.e. Clear Seeing. The place becomes sacred by the manifestive power of sacrosanct process and it possesses ‘power’. Power is a spiritual energy of life-force that enables an individual or a place to interact with the forces of the natural and supernatural world (cf. Radimilahy 1994, p. 91). Sacredscapes are the powerful places where power is needed for transcendental energy or for protection of spiritual danger. Mythological description of these sacredscapes helps to develop variety of images and imaginations too. Sacredscape is more than an imagery product of mind, it is also the landscape of faith, belief system and a state of transcendental consciousness—always becoming new and transformed by the ‘process of sacralisation and ritualisation. The sacredscape as pilgrimage centre is a ceremonial centre too’ (cf. Silverman 1994, p. 2). The pilgrimage centre distinctly draws ‘a transient mass of worshippers from across a social, political

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economic, cultural and spatial spectrum and, in so doing, to synthesize critical social and cultural elements from wider patterns of belief and practice in a region or regions’ (Silverman 1994, p. 3). Our soul is an abode. And by experiencing ‘sacrality’ and ‘sacredscape’ we learn to ‘abide’ within divine interconnectedness. If the process of sacralization, ritualization and deeper interconnectedness together make the place as distinct ‘sacred place’, better call it sacredscape— integrative entity of eternal bond between human psyche and the nature-spirit. Ayodhya is a sacred-heritage city that possesses several of these characteristics.

33.2

Ayodhya as Sacred-Heritage City: Historical Outline

Ayodhya counted among one of the seven most scared and salvation-endowing cities of the India (i.e. Ayodhya, Mathura, Maya-Haridvar, Kashi, Kanchi, Avantika-Ujjain, Puri, Dvarka), is situated on the right bank of the holy river Sarayu (Ghaghara, a tributary of the Ganga) at 7 km east from Faizabad city (Fig. 33.1) (Singh and Rana 2006, pp. 277–285). According to Hindu mythology, Ayodhya was settled by King Manu (Hindu progenitor of mankind), and narrated as the birthplace of Lord Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu. Ayodhya was one of the famous cities and the first capital of the powerful Koshala Kingdom among the sixteen Mahajanapadas of ancient India (Law 1944, p. 424; Chakrabarti 2000, p. 378 and p. 387). Ayodhya for a period of over two thousand years has borne witnessed to the presence of Jainism, Buddhism, Shaivism, Vaishnavism and Islam too, therefore Ayodhya consists of the sacred and religious places for Hindus together with Muslims, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs too (Shaw 2000, p. 698). By the turn of the second century CE, the city of Ayodhya was well established and known as a pilgrimage centre, and by the turn of Gupta period (fourth-sixth centuries) many temples and ghats along the Sarayu River were made. With its general decline, all over India from the sixth

century onwards, Buddhism lost its position in Ayodhya too, and appears to be virtually extinct thereafter CE 1000. It is evident through literary and archaeological evidence that in the twelfth century there were five important Vishnu temples located one each at Guptār Ghat, Chakratirtha Ghat and Janmabhumi, and the western and eastern sides of Svargadvāra Ghat. There were four important Shiva temples located and present now one at Nageshvarnath in northern side, Kshireshvarnath in southern side, Koteshvarnath or Durgeshvarnath in western side and Bhadreshvarnath in eastern side (Singh and Rana 2006, pp. 300–301). Historians have identified this place to be Saketa, a key Buddhist centre during the fifth century BCE (it is a widely held belief that Buddha visited Ayodhya on several occasions) which it remained till the fifth century CE. Visited in same period, Faxian, the Chinese monk, kept record of several Buddhist monasteries that he saw here. The outline of the chronological history is presented in Table 33.1. Ayodhya is sacred and religious place even for Jains. Jain texts also stand testimony to the visit of Mahavira, Jainism’s founder to this city. There are five Jain temples located near birth place of the five Jain Tirthankaras (angels), viz. Adinatha or Rishabhadev temple in Muraitola Swargadvara, Ajeetnatha temple near Saptsagar, Abhinandananatha temple near to Saraya, Sumanthnatha temple near to the Ramkot and last one Anantnatha temple near to Golaghat. Ayodhya also records more than hundred mosques, mazars (tombs), idgahs (prayer ground), Karbala (burial place), etc., related to Muslim sacred/ritual landscapes, that is how in folk way metaphysically known as a ‘Chhoti Mecca’ (Little Mecca). Muslim people are performing a variety of rituals on related sacred places. Ayodhya is famous for two important graves of Muslim saint and those are playing important role in the existence of Muslim ritual landscape. The Grave of Hazrat Shish was the son of Hazrat Adam (the first man to be sent on earth) and according to myths he was the first child to be born on earth and lived for about 1,000 years. Another popular grave is of Nughazi (‘9-yards in

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Fig. 33.1 © The authors

length’) Mazar or Hazrat Noah; here newly-weds, especially Hindus and Muslims both come to seek his blessings for a happy

married life. Both communities perform fatiah (prayer) rituals on every Thursday at these sites (Kumar and Singh 2016a, b).

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Table 33.1 Ayodhya: chronological history (Source Shaw 2000, p. 695; and authors’ addition) Time period

Archaeological and historical events

Seventh–sixth centuries BCE/BC

Northern Black Polished Ware levels Nalatila and Janmabhurni in ‘Ramkot’ area. References in Buddhist texts such as Digha Nikāya

Fifth century BCE

Annexed into kingdom of Magadha

Third century BCE

Part of Maurya Empire; Massive burnt brick wall on west side of ‘Ramkot’; Coins of local rulers found in early historic levels at Hanumangarhi

Second century BCE

‘Sunga’ inscription found in early historic levels at Hanumangarhi Coins of early dynastic kings (Vayudeva, Muladeva, Dhanadeva, Visakhadeva, Naradatta and Sivadatta)

CE/AD 78

Kushana invasion. Many Buddhist monuments destroyed

CE 150–300

Mitra dynasty

CE fourth–fifth century

Gupta empire; Jain community developed in Ayodhya and Mani Parvat as ruins of the Buddhist site seen by Faxian in ca. CE 400

CE 320

Chandragupta I

CE 455–67

Capital moved by Skandagupta/Vikramaditya from Pataliputra to Ayodhya in order to ‘restore’ Ayodhya’s glory and revivification of five important temples of Ayodhya, i.e. Ramajanmabhumi, Ratnasinhasanas temple, Kanakabhavan, Sheshavatara temple, Devkali temple and bathing ghats developed at the riverfront of Saryu

CE sixth century

Huna invasion, followed by political fragmentation

CE eleventh century

Gahadavalan kings period; fortification of Ramajanmabhumi, revivification of five Hari (Vishnu) temples—Chandrahari, Vishnuhari, Dharmahari, Chakrahari, Guptahari, and for three pilgrimage journeys, i.e. Panchakroshi, Chaudahkroshi and Chaurasikroshi well established.

CE 1192

Ban on Hindu temple construction under Muhammad Ghuri

CE 1226

Ayodhya becomes capital of Oudh Province under Delhi Sultanate, the debris of AdinathaJain temple converted and known as a Shah JuranTila.

CE 1527

Invasion by Babar; destruction of Ramajanmabhumi temple

CE 1658–1707

Aurangzeb’s rule, the Mughal King

CE late eighteenth century

Political centre moved from Ayodhya to Faizabad under Nawabs Ramaite appropriation of Hanumangarhi temple and revivification of Nageshvarnatha temple

CE 1855

Communal violence breaks out at Hanumangarhi and spills over to Ramajanmabhumi

CE 1949

Beginning of police protection order at Ramajanmabhumi

CE 1992, 6th December

Destruction of dilapidated Babri Masjid (mosque) by the supporters of VHP

33.3

Ayodhya on the Criteria of UNESCO-WHC

In 1997 a Korean delegation paid visit to Ayodhya in search of the historical connection of Queen Huh (original Suriratna, from Ayodhya’s royal family), a progenitor of the Kaya dynasty; this resulted to develop a bilateral Indo-Korean heritage linkages by adopting Ayodhya as a sister city of Kimhae/Gimhae (Korea). This further

steamed up the proposal for getting inscribed city’s heritage landscapes in the UNESCO World Heritage List (2012; Gidwani 2012). However, no followed up procedures and dossier were prepared for submission and processing. Even in the ongoing process of the Master Plan there the issues are put at the margin, together with not paying attention to the UNESCO guidelines (UNESCO WHC.16/01, 26 October 2016). In a recent agreement between the state government of Uttar Pradesh and the central ministry of

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culture—Govt of India (24 March 2017), Ayodhya is taken for special development programme for religious heritage and pilgrimage-tourism with a view to serving as nexus for global harmony. On the line of the earlier proposal (that was not finalized), taking UNESCO Guidelines for inscription in the World Heritage List city of Ayodhya also to be assessed as it fulfils the eight criteria out of ten, as given below:

33.3.1 Representing a Masterpiece of Human Creative Genius There are several examples of architectural master pieces of attached with inherent meanings, archetypal representations (mythological and metaphysical) and continuity of performances and rituals. Among them temples of Kanak Bhavan, Hanuman Gadhi, Chandrahari, Nageshvaranath and monasteries of Badi Chhavani and Chhoti Chhavani are notable ones. The Valmiki Ramayana Bhavan is a microcosmic and archetypal inscription of 24,000 m of the story of the Ramayana as described by sage Valmiki, (considered the oldest such tale, dated ca 1000 BCE), depicted on the marble wall, considered to be the only one in India.

33.3.2 Exhibiting Interchange of Human Values in Architecture and Monuments In the city alone, there are around 2000 Hindu shrines and temples, about 100 Muslim shrines and mosques, 5 Jain temples (including that of the first one, Rishabhadeva), 5 Sikh temples (gurudvaras), a few Buddhist ancient sites and several other sacred sites and places, related to different castes (e.g. 62 castes-based temples). Here Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and even Islam have their distinct traditions, and on the other end they together conform the harmonious life and culture of mosaicness. This tradition developed before sixth century BCE and till date continued and maintained.

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33.3.3 Testimony to Cultural Tradition in History Through archaeological investigation, it has been proved that the city has been continuously settled since ca 800 BCE. Several of the traditions of performances testifying intangible heritage representing the various facets of Rama’s story, like Rama Katha (general story), Ramalila (theatre performance), Ramanami chanting (in temple continuously for some days) and Ramajanma Badhai (birthday celebration) continued and maintained since last thousands of years.

33.3.4 Outstanding Example of Architectural Ensemble and Landscape (Riverfrontscapes) The unique oblong-shaped arc of the Saryu (Ghaghara) river has attracted devout people from various parts of India to come, settled and make their own distinct ashramas (monasteries) in the city as clearly visualized in the grandeur of temple architectural and the cultural landscapes. The type of routescape within the agricultural land of Yamathara Manjha presents a boat-shaped or ship-shaped design, which is eulogized as symbolic representation of ship that was made by Manu (first human progenitor of mankind) for saving life at the time of mythic dissolution-flood on the earth surface. Since sunrise to sunset, the cultural landscape along the Sarya river is dominated by ritual scenes and religious activities, a supportive system for other profane functions that are dependent on this.

33.3.5 Example of a Traditional Habitat, Culture and Interaction There are tombs of Muslim Sufi saints which are regularly visited by Hindus and Muslim, who perform their own rituals side-by-side. Ayodhya is perhaps the only place in India to have the

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mazar (tomb) of Islamic paighambar (prophet) Hazrat Shish, dated ca fifteenth century, which makes the holy place for healing. He was the first child to be born on earth and lived for about 1,000 years. It is believed that his mazar has increased in length since the time it was made. Abul Fazl (1551–1602), a writer in Akbar’s times, has mentioned this mazar. It also finds a mention in ‘The Gazetteer of the province of Oudh’ (1877, by Benett). Another popular mazar of the Nughazi (‘12 foot’ in length) Mazar lies in Kotwali, and believed to be the mausoleum of Prophet Nun (story of Noah’s Ark), where Hindus and Muslims, both pay visit and perform religious activities. These mazars attract Muslim visitors even from South Africa, Indonesia, and Trinidad and Tobago (see Kumar and Singh 2016a, b).

33.3.6 Example of the Continuity of Living Traditions of Life (Intangible) Since ancient times the natural and cultural landscapes of the city, closely associated with the traditional way of life, have retained an active social role in contemporary society. The city is a place of pilgrimage and a holy site for sacred baths in the Saryu (Ghaghra) River, for religious purification and spiritual merit. Despite several downfalls and upheavals, traditions are fully alive even today. Predominance of monastic institutions of various sects (around 200), of course again in majority of Ramaiate is the unique characteristics. Recently some of the old festivals and pilgrimage routes have been revived in it original style, despite some modern touches.

33.3.7 Beauty of Natural Phenomena and Aesthetic Importance The city represents a unique natural shape along the Sarayu river which forms an oblong shape, flowing from west to east for about 10 km; the main city has grown on the right bank in

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semi-circular form around it. The area along the left side is a flood plain, preserving the natural ecosystem. Thus, together the two sides represent the cultural and natural beauty where meet the human construct of architectural grandeur in the form of series of traditional buildings and other side perennial flow of the Sarayu from west to east, which finally merge into the Ganga river. Once the Sarayu river was known for dolphins and turtles, but now they are extinct in this area.

33.3.8 Unique Traditional Performance: Example of Environmental Theatre Of course, originally proclaimed in 2005 by the government of India, UNESCO has incorporated the ‘Ramalila—traditional performance of the Ramayana’ in its representative list of 90 declared on 4 November 2008. This list also includes two more intangible heritages, i.e. ‘Kutiyattam, Sanskrit Theatre’ and the ‘Tradition of Vedic Chanting’. The Ramalila is a dramatization of the epic journey of Rama, the 7th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who was born in Ayodhya. The Ramalila, a theatrical form of story of the Ramacharitamanasa (old Ramayana), is performed in a series of scenes that include song, narration, recital and dialogue. It is performed across northern India during the festival of Dashahra, held each year according to the ritual calendar in autumn (September–October, Hindu month of Ashvina), and around the festival of Ramanaumi (birthday of Rama). Other representative places of Ramalilas are Ramnagar and Banaras, Vrindavan, Almora and Madhubani.

33.4

Ayodhya: Intangible Heritage on Unesco Scale

According to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)—or living heritage—is the mainspring of humanity’s cultural diversity and its maintenance a guarantee

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for continuing creativity. It is defined as ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills— as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. For the purposes of this Convention, consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with existing international human rights instruments, as well as with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development’. The UNESCO has broadly classified ICH into five categories: (1) Oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; (2) Performing arts; (3) Social practices, rituals and festive events; (4) Knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and (5) Traditional craftsmanship (Singh 2015, pp. 125–126). While giving due consideration to the UNESCO Scale of ICH, in the Indian perspective of the ICH, specially referring to holy-heritage cities like Ayodhya and Banaras, various attributes of the ICH can be classified into ten broad categories, viz. (1) Oral Traditions, (2) Performance Arts, (3) Ramalila and other Lilas (variety and distinctive; historical), (4) Parikrama/Yatras, Pilgrimages, (5) Rituals and Festivals (selective), (6) Traditional Art and Craftsmanship, (7) Scholastic Traditions, (8) Indigenous Knowledge and Healing Tradition, (9) Memorials, icons and Saints’ associated sites and performances and (10) Birthplaces and memorials of Freedom Fighters and Literates (see Table 33.2). Also, to be noted that in the context of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as discussed above, Ayodhya is fully suited to be designated as a site of intangible cultural heritages.

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33.5

Ayodhya: Heritage Zones

The idea of heritage zone is based on the importance of an area possessing representation of ancient and alive religious and sacred sites that maintained the continuity of age-old tradition, and considered to be basic resource for inclusive heritage development. Ayodhya is predominantly a sacred-heritage city that is how religious landscapes are the prevalent scene, and their concentration in specific area is taken to demarcate the specific zone. In the ongoing framing of the Master Plan, which first shaped for 1983– 2001 and now still in process for 2021, mentions scattered religious sites spotted in different parts, which can easily be bounded with four heritage zones (Fig. 33.2).

33.5.1 Ramkot Heritage Zone In this zone fifty-five properties are enumerated, including Hindu temples, ghats, kunds, Jain temples, Muslim shrines and tombs, and passing on pilgrimage route. The Ayodhya Act-1993 and Archaeological Survey of India’s rules related to acquisition of land (buildings, shops, residential houses) near to Ramkot (Ramajanmabhumi) by provenance and rule under the Central Government of India, prohibits any type of new constructions near Ramkot, to avoid interrupting security of the Ramajanmabhumi. However, there are incidences of illegal encroachments, taking benefit of religious sentiments. With the revival of traditional Hinduism during 1950s, pilgrimages became more popular. Of all domestic travel in India, over one-third is for performing pilgrimage. The growth and importance of pilgrimage-tourism in India may be related to an increased desire among Hindus to assert their identity against an ever more visible Muslim population. Such competition emerged more actively after the destruction of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya on the 6th December 1992 by conservative Hindu nationalist groups who wished to build a temple on this sacred site, which is believed to be the birthplace of Lord Rama. This act of aggression resulted in civil

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Table 33.2 Ayodhya: intangible cultural heritage attributes (Source Compiled by authors) Se

Intangible cultural heritage attributes

Occurrence in Ayodhya

1

Oral traditions

Rama Katha (religious story telling), Birha

2

Performance arts

Bhajan, Nautanki, Bharat Milap, Lok Nritya (folk dances), Ramajanma Badhai, Birha, Ramanami chanting, etc.

3

Ramalila and other Lilas (variety and distinctive; historical)

Ramalila of—Rajdvara, Bagvatacharya Smaraksadan, Bade Sthan, Gola ghat, Lakshmankila, Jankimahal trust, Sahabganj Ramajanki Mandir, Kothaparcha, Fatehganj, Vazeerganj Japti Ramalila, etc.

4

Parikrama/Yatras, pilgrimages

Chaurashikroshi Yatra, Chaudahkroshi Yatra, Panchakroshi Yatra, Ramkotki Parikrama, Antargriha Parikrama, Kalpavas

5

Rituals and festivals (selective)

Hindu festivals: Makara Samkranti, Vedavyasa Mela, Maha Shivaratri, Rangabhari Ekadashi, Holi, Matgajendramela, Chaitra Navaratri, Rama Navami, Buddha Purnima, Sarayu Mahotsav, Savan JhulaMela, Naga Panchami, Raksha Bandhana, Krishna Janmasthami, Durga Puja—Dashahara, Nakkataiya, Hanuman Jayanti, Dipavali/Divali, Annakuta, Yama Dvitiya, Prabodhini Ekadashi, Naga Nathaiya, Surya kunda Mela, Chhatha (Karttika Purnima), Parikrama Mela, Nanak Jayanti, Rama Vivah; Muslim festivals: Muharraum, Idul-fitr/Idel-Juha, Chehaluum, Sabbe-rat, etc.

6

Traditional art and craftsmanship

Murti casting (sculpturing), wooden work, Special sweets (e.g. Anarsa), special breakfasts—Kachuri and Imarte, Samosa

7

Scholastic traditions and schooling and discourses system

Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Avadh University, Narendra Dev University of Agriculture and Technology, Gurukul Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya, Kamta Prasad Sunder Lal Saket Mahavidylaya, Rama Naam International Bank

8

Indigenous knowledge and healing tradition

Sanskrit study, meditation, Ramakatha Vyas Peath (Rama Katha Vachak)

9

Memorials, icons and Saints’ associated sites and related performances

Shri Rama, Gautam Buddha, Five Jain Tirthankara; Rishabhadev, Ajeetnatha, Abhinandananatha, Sumanthnatha, Anantnatha, Nanak/other Sikh saints, Mazars—Hazrat Noah, SheshPaigambar, HazratSayad shah (Adgada Mazar), Tulasidas, Ram Kinkar Upadhyay

10

Birth places and memorials of freedom fighters and literates, and related celebrations

Acharya Narendra Deva, Mangal Pandey, Brij Narayan Chakbast and Mir Babar Ali Anis (Urdu Poet), Adya Prasad Chaturvedi—a famous Hindi writer and poet, UmraoJaan, Indu Jain (owner of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, Times of India Group, Forbes India’s top 20 richest persons), Francis Quinton—an English cricketer, Akhil Kumar (Indian Boxer, Olympian), Begum Akhtar (singer of Ghazal, Dadra, and Thumri genres of Hindustani classical music)

disturbances throughout the country. Since then large numbers of Hindus have become more conscious of their Hindu heritage, resulting in increased participation in traditional rituals, celebrations, the construction of temples and of course pilgrimages (cf. Singh 2013, p. 201).

33.5.2 Riverfront Heritage Zone: Ghats and Temples The bank of the Sarayu River at Ayodhya consists of twenty-five of bathing places (ghats), those are counted as sacred and ritualistic places

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Fig. 33.2 Ayodhya: heritage zone (© The authors)

for Hindu adherents. The riverfront buildings (monasteries and built heritage) are overlooked by lofty palatial buildings built mostly by kings and lords from different parts of India between eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This zone consists of two parts, viz. the eastern, and the western. Most of the riverfront sacred-heritage sites are in the eastern part. The notable ghats in this area are Svargadvara Ghat, Lakshman Ghat, Jhunki Ghat, Papamochan Ghat, Rinamochan Ghat, Raj Ghat, Brahmakunda Ghat, Kaushlya Ghat and Chakratitha Ghat. The important religious buildings include Kanchan Bhavan (starting point of the heritage walk) at Rinamochana ghat, Ramasiya Piya Kila at Jhunki ghat, Lakshman Kila at Lakshman Ghat, Divyakalkunj temple at Svaragadvara ghat and Nageshvarnath temple. Among these Svargadvara Ghat (‘door to the heaven’), spreads between the Sahastradhara and the temple of Treta Ke Thakur, is the most popularly visited ghat, where the pilgrims perform the sacred bathing and related rituals (Kumar and Singh 2015). Svargadvara Ghat in eulogized as the first tirtha established on the

bank of the Sarayu River. According to the ancient text this holy place was established by Vishnu before his seventh incarnation as Rama. The archaeologist Alexander Cunningham describes in his report Svargadvara as the place where body of Rama was cremated (last ritual) (Führer 1891, p. 297). Its sanctity and importance continued since eleventh century onwards. It is believed that people who die or would bury at this place were at once be relieved from the transmigration and their soul be settled in the heavens. Around the Svargadvara Ghat the notable temples are Chandrahari temple, Gangamahal temple, Sarayu temple, Nageshvaranath temple and Chaturbhuji temple. Guptar Ghat, the only site in the western part, together with some other sites like Raj Mandir and Company Garden, evolved as an isolate site.

33.5.3 Gulab Bari-Bahu Begum Makbara Zone This zone contains about seven properties related to Nawab period, i.e. Gulab Bari or tomb of

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Suja-ud-daula, Tomb of Bahu Begum (Makbara) and Tomb of Bane Khanam, and all are under the protection of Archaeological Survey of India. The other properties are Tri Gateway of Chawk, Fort of Nawab Shuja-ud-daula, Moti Mahal (living building of Bahu Begum) and Mosque of Nawab Hasan Raza Khan. Gulab Bari is one of the most accomplished monument of Avadh Nawabi architecture, built by the second Nawab of Avadh Nawab Safdar Jung, surrounding the garden of varieties of roses. Tomb of third Nawab of Avadh Nawab Shuja-ud-daula is situated in inner part of Gulab Bari. The construction of this tomb was themselves started by Shuja-ud-daula in his Nawabi period and after death in CE 1775 he was buried in this tomb (Führer 1891). The final construction of the tomb with dome and tower was accomplished by Bahu Begum, the wife of Nawab Suja-ud-daula in CE 1789. Tomb of Bahu Begum (died CE 1815) is the other important monument of Nawabi architecture. Tomb of Bane Khanam is a mausoleum, honouring the wife of Nawab Najam-ud-daula, to be dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In CE 1860, it was occupied by British government, and late on after independence declared as monument under the control of Archaeological Survey of India.

33.5.4 Mani Parvat Zone This zone contains more than twenty properties associated with Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus. Mani Parvat (Mound) is the oldest Buddhist ruined site dated ca. 400 CE that was seen by Faxian (Bakker 1986 II, p. 31), but presently it is known for Rama-Sita temple and the ceremonial place for Shravan Jhula festival. Now, this site is under the protection of Archaeological Survey of India. The Vidya Kunda lying 200 m east from the Mani Parvata and 1.75 km south-west from the Sita Kunda, is situated in the inner courtyard of the Mahavidya temple complex. A temple of Vidya Devi (goddess Sarasvati, goddess of knowledge) is situated on the south side of the Vidya Kund tank whereas the west side of the tank was said to contain a Vidyapitha (‘seat of

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leaning’), which might have been a religious institution of learning, which was said to be the place where Rama was taught by sage Vashishtha in the fourteen basic sciences (Bakker 1986 II, p. 206). Other famous places in this zone are Grave of Hazrat Shesh related to Muslim site and Sita Kund (‘water pool’), Khajuri Kund, Ganesh Kund, Ranopali Temple (Udasin Ashrama) and caste-based temple, etc., related to several Hindu sects.

33.6

Pilgrimage (Yatra) Routes

Pilgrimage and its associated sacred routes are the most common religious heritage in holy cities. Ayodhya has developed five pilgrimage routes in continuity of history, viz. Chaurasikroshi, Chaudahakroshi, Panchakroshi, Ramkot ki Parikrama and Antargrihi Parikrama; among these the two later are minor and relatively less popular (Fig. 33.3). Three major pilgrimage routes define the three territorial limits of Ayodhya, viz. Chaurasikroshi, Chaudahakroshi and Panchakroshi. Like most of the pan-Indian holy centres Ayodhya too displays a three-tier cosmology, respectively as macro (i.e. mandala, the Outer one), meso (i.e. Kshetra, the Middle one), and micro (i.e. Puri/city, inner sanctum) cosmos, all demarcated by routes and linked archetypally by temples/shrines and are described in the ancient mythologies, which are frequently cited in various rituals and group-chanting and sacred walks. Chaurasikroshi is the oldest pilgrimage route, and associated with 148 sacred places. Mythologically the route symbolises journey to 8.4 million (84 lakhs) of organic species where the soul must move, and is performed in a period of thirty days. The Chaudahakroshi Parikrama route links over thirty-six sacred places, related to life incidences of Lord Rama, from birthplace (Ramakot) to death-place (Guptar Ghat). The Panchakroshi refers to the core area and associated with thirty most sacred places; these are only related to the birthplace of Lord Rama, and completed within six hours. These all five pilgrimage routes converge into five circular loops from inner Antargrihi to outer

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Fig. 33.3 Ayodhya: pilgrimage routes (© The authors)

Chaurasikroshi pilgrimage routes. All pilgrimage journeys start clockwise with firstly taking sacred bathe in the Sarayu River and performing ritual of moral bondage (sankalpa) for performing pilgrimage journey and the journey ends with the process of getting release from this bondage (sankalpa chodana) (Singh 2003). In the planning of sacred heritage city tourism, ‘pilgrimage’ (‘tirtha-yatra’) and associated tourism are the most viable resources. This age-old tradition has changed into a way of alternative tourism in the frame of pilgrimage-tourism or spiritual tourism (Rana and Singh 2011). The sacrality and cultural continuity of Ayodhya has always been a distinct force of spiritual magnetism attracting people from all corners of India. Ayodhya records a very special image (like sacrality associated to the birthplace of Rama) in each of the visitor’s mind, irrespective of domestic or international tourists. Domestic tourists-pilgrims visiting Ayodhya mainly perform rituals like taking holy dip in the Sarayu River and worshipping in the Ramajanambhumi, Hanumangarhi and Kanaka Bhavan. According to personal experiences and

understanding it is estimated that presently around 1.9 million pilgrims (as in 2016) pay visit to Ayodhya every year. Of course, international tourists and devout Hindus also visit the city, but mostly stay for one, or two nights.

33.7

Contemporary Heritage Inclusive Development Projects

Two special heritage inclusive development projects are progressing in Ayodhya. One of them is to reinvent the ancient story of the Ramayana, and the other one to re-create the Indo-Korean historical-cultural links taking in view to develop Ayodhya as a model of cross-cultural understanding.

33.7.1 Ramayana Circuit The Central government has passed a resolution in June 2014 to encourage alternative tourism by identifying theme-based pilgrimage circuits

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along India’s age-old religious sites associated with Rama and Krishna, both incarnation of Vishnu and considered as the god. The Committee proposed 11 sites across six states for what is being called ‘the Ramayana circuit’: Ayodhya, Nandigram, Shringaverpur and Chitrakut in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh; Sitamarhi, Buxar and Darbhanga in Bihar; Jagdalpur in Chattisgarh; Bhadrachalam in Telangana; Hampi in Karnataka; and Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu. Under this programme with the support of the state government special sub-circuit at Ayodhya is proposed taking in view the pan-India sites like Ramananmabhumi (Ramkot) and Nandigram, and the spatially manifested and locally important 12 sites (Fig. 33.4). These sites include different regional and local traditions, mythologies and folklores related to the life of Rama, from birth to his passing to heavenly abode. In fact, these manifested ‘sacred landscapes sustain and authenticate myths and legends far beyond oral and textual traditions; [and] the pilgrim experiences the power of place and encounters the living

Fig. 33.4 Ayodhya: proposed Ramayana circuit (© The authors)

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presence of gods. His faith and belief in religious texts are strengthened through encountering the reality of landscape (sacred sites), temples, rituals and fellow pilgrims’ (Sinha 2006, p. 73). These manifestive places make a resonant, conversing into archetypal sacred geography; of course, in a way these are ‘imagined landscape’, nevertheless they are lived landscapes, ‘possessing the relational character, evolving emotions and attachment’, thus serving as soul healing places (Eck 2012, p. 11). In these landscapes, man’s consciousness meets the divine realm, and through visitation, performing rituals and other festivities their continuity is maintained. Additionally, the state government has already approved and sanctioned (in June 2016) a sum of Rs 200 million (US$ 3 mill.) for the development of the Ramayana Museum, highlighting the life story of Rama. It is also said that these programmes are more concerned to attract Hindu electorates for getting support for voting by the political parties; at Central level the BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party), and at State level SP (Samajwadi Party), both tried to impose their

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own interests through supporting Rama’s sacred landscape for their political interest. Noted Venugopal (2017), that ‘… in the game of one-upmanship for the Hindu votes, no one is leaving the chance to belittle the effort of the other. For now, the SP has accused the Centre of announcing the museum project without even procuring land for it’. Since 19 March 2017 the BJP sworn in the State of Uttar Pradesh with absolute majority, and already started to activate that plan at priority level with an aim to re-establish the Hindu heritage vision.

development of tourism and culture at international level, especially to promote Indo-Korean cultural exchange (see Kumar and Singh 2016a, b, 2017). A budget of Rs. 500 million (US$ 7.5 mill.) has already been planned, which as per requirement will further be enhanced. This project is operated under the departments of tourism and culture of the state government. This will cover a land area of one ha (7590 + 2430 m2 = 10,020 m2) that will be taken over from the sand-silt belt along the Sarayu river and the area of Handicraft Village Complex (Fig. 33.5). With the initiative of Culture and Tourism Department of the government of Uttar Pradesh, recently (November– December 2016) with the support of Gimhae City (Korea) Administration and Cenral Karak Clan Society together with Indo-Korean Cultural Association a detailed development plan has been prepared to develop Queen Huh Memorial Complex in Ayodhya (see Fig. 33.6). Both authors of this paper visited Gimhae City during 20–22 October 2016 and done survey and discourses with the institutions involved in formulating the plan, which later took the formal shape.

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33.7.2 Ayodhya–South Korea Project On behalf of ancient cultural relation, going back to CE 48 referring to the marriage of princess from Ayodhya to Korean king Kim Suro, Korean government has planned a massive memorial complex project in Ayodhya in the memory of Queen Heo Hwang-ok, or Huh (named Suriratna in Sanskrit). The project of Queen Huh Memorial Complex is conceived as a mega project for the

Fig. 33.5 Site plan of Queen Huh memorial complex, Ayodhya (© The authors)

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Fig. 33.6 Detailed plan of Queen Huh memorial complex, Ayodhya, as proposed by the Indo-Korean association (Source Unpublished report, personal collection)

33.8

Heritage and Pilgrimage Inclusive Development: Framing HRIDAY and PRASAD

Framing tourism and cultural development in holistic frame for national and international resource within the purview of the ancient roots of heritage properties and traditions of spirituality, sacrality and pilgrimages that have a long tradition and continuity in India, Ministry of Tourism and Culture and Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, have recently conceptualized two innovative and appropriate national programmes of interfacing and counter-depending missions of (i) Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY) and (ii) Pilgrimage Rejuvenation And Spiritual Augmentation Drive (PRASAD). In both programmes the ministries of Culture and Tourism and Urban Development will collaborate to strengthen and promote the heritage sites and centres of pilgrimage-tourism in making the environment green and sustainable while befitting into the roots of culture, traditions and

society and image of the site. The three major sites selected earlier at priority level, include Varanasi, Mathura and Ajmer. Under the banner of new government in Uttar Pradesh (19 March 2017) an agreement between GOI Ministry of Culture and Tourism and government of U.P. has been made on 24 March 2017 to develop and transform the five cities as special sites for heritage and religious tourism, viz. Varanasi, Ayodhya, Mathura, Gorakhpur and Agra. Special plans are in process preparing conservation and rejuvenation of heritage and religious sites in these cities to promote pilgrimage-tourism and spiritual message for global harmony.

33.8.1 National Mission of HRIDAY The National mission on the ‘Heritage city Development and Augmentation Yojana’ (HRIDAY), aims conserving and preserving the distinct and unique characters of the heritage cities, those maintained the continuity of their traditions of heritage (tangible, intangible and cultural landscapes, including written, oral and performed

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ones), and they would be used as a resource for sustainable development and ecological restoration. That is how, heritage development means not only the beautification of the city and conservation of the heritage site but also the preservation and sustainable development of the entire city with respect to its cleanliness, planning, livelihood of the local people and economy. In Indian tradition, heritage is called ‘dharohara’, which is a combination of two words, i.e. dharā—(‘the mother earth/Lord Vishnu who holds’), and ihara (‘endeavour of identity through time’). The word also carries the meaning of ‘bearing’ and ‘preserving’ the surface of the earth. That is how it should be explained in terms of the ‘root’ (‘shrota’) and ‘identity’ (‘asmitā’)—a framework of continuity of interconnectedness and a personality of culture, thus in terms of space it combines the microspace, site (sthān), the extended space, habitat (paryāvāsa) and the regional projection, territory (parikshetra), and ultimately linking to terrestrial, cosmos (brahmānda). Additionally, it also connotes the tangible, intangible and visual attributes. Altogether the Indian word ‘dharohara’ should be better translated as ‘heritagescapes’ and to be explained in the purview of ‘heritage ecology’ in corroboration with ‘deep geography’. It possesses the spirit of spirituality and interconnectedness that have roots in the past, existence in present and vision in future (‘sanātana’), and altogether this works in unified totality for psychological well-being or soul healing. Cultural heritage sites are the true representative of the divine order and human’s deep faith involvement, that is how it may be accepted as religious ‘resource’, but it has scientific, recreational, aesthetic, economic and sacramental values too. Thus, the metaphorical meaning of ‘HRIDAY’ (literally ‘heart’) is the core concern for the ‘inclusive-sustainable development of heritage-and-pilgrimage cities’ in India. This frame would be taken as core concern under the HRIDAY Programme. The protection, augmentation, management, authenticity and integrity of properties (both tangible and intangible) are also important

considerations, together with the above specific characteristics. In the above context three basic meanings, in historical context, to the understanding of heritage sites are:

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• a political meaning—to assure responsibility for the decisions; • a cultural meaning—to save culture rootedness and sense of continuity; and • a didactic meaning—to promote citizen’s participation. These meanings are associated with deconstructing the value of cultural heritage into its component parts identifying the following six value elements: • aesthetic value: the visual beauty of the building, site and so on; • spiritual value: the significance of the asset in providing understanding or enlightenment or in representing a religion or religious tradition; • social value: the role of the site in forming cultural identity or a sense of connection with others; • historical value: connections with the past; • symbolic value: objects or sites as repositories or conveyors of meaning and • authenticity value: the uniqueness of visiting ‘the real thing’.

33.8.2 National Mission of PRASAD With a view to beautify and improve the amenities and infrastructure at pilgrimage centres of all faiths, a National mission on ‘Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Augmentation Drive’ (PRASAD) has been announced in the Union Budget 2014–2015 and an amount of Rs. 1000 million (US$ 15 mill.) has been proposed for this initiative. Under PRASAD the old historical-cultural pilgrimage routes and associated sites would also be developed. These two schemes together planned to activate the following objectives:

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• Planning, development and implementation of heritage sensitive infrastructure. • Service delivery and infrastructure provisioning in historic city core areas. • Preserve and revitalize heritage wherein tourists can connect directly with city’s unique character. • Develop and document a heritage asset inventory of cities—natural, cultural, living and built heritage as a basis for urban planning, growth and service provision and delivery. • Implementation and enhancement of basic services delivery with focus on sanitation services like public conveniences, toilets, water taps, street lights with the use of latest technologies in improving tourist facilities/ amenities. • Local capacity enhancement for inclusive heritage-based industry. • Create effective linkages between tourism and cultural facilities and the conservation of natural and built heritage. • Urban heritage adaptive rehabilitation and maintenance, including appropriate technologies for historic buildings retrofitting (HRIDAY 2015). The interconnectivity and reciprocity between pilgrimage and tourism are an integral part of human travel. That is how ‘pilgrimage-tourism’ is conceived as an alternative for the solution; of course, this is more inclined to metaphysical issue and life philosophy: meeting sacred-andprofane. Pilgrimage-tourism is considered now as a strategy for heritage awakening, deeper experiences and transferring the religiosity into global humanism and spirituality (see Rana 2014). The sustainable frame of pilgrimagetourism and heritage should be promoted in three ways: philosophical, organizational and managerial. The eco-healing approach to pilgrimage-tourism is considered as a postmodernist way to consider pilgrimage as a bridge between recreation and spirituality; this way pilgrimage-tourism will provide a rational alternative for cultural consciousness and strategy for poverty alleviation.

R. P. B. Singh and S. Kumar

The deeper sense of attachment is pre-requisite for awakening (or awareness). Once one can develop deep feeling (of love) to a place that would help caring for it—a path that helps one to have realization leading to revelation. As the ‘caring for the place (the Earth)’ is inherent in the pilgrimage-tourism, it provides an opportunity to intimately sense and deep feelings for the place and the people—their behaviour, their heritage and the present in which they live, act and keep the glorious tradition alive. The approach to study tourism so for has been the study of economic activity almost always. It limits the scope and answer to many questions posed as a consequence. On the line of ‘commodification approach’ proposed by Ashworth (1991, p. 111), the ‘eco-healing package’ (cf. Fig. 33.7) may be explained here which extends the horizon of potential resources in pilgrimage-tourism as an alternative tourism, expected that it will fulfil the objectives of PRASAD. The state government of Uttar Pradesh has recently (24 March 2017) made an agreement with the central government to promote pilgrimages centres of Varanasi, Mathura, Ayodhya and Gorakhpur. The purpose, of developing ‘eco-healing approach’ within the frame of PRASAD, evidently is to highlight the strong rationality of developing pilgrimage-tourism on the pathways of eco-friendly and eco-spiritual ways. The components of this package may be briefly explained as the following: (a) The Resource(s) This package identifies cultural and spiritual heritage as resources. In one hand, the goddess shrines and associated territories form the cultural heritage resources; and, the rituals, awe, deep feelings and faith, belief and the system of vratas and fasting, etc., together make the spiritual resources on the other hand. The live traditions of continuing maintenance of these resources reflect their inner strength. Their qualitative and quantitative richness may be taken as the indicator of their potentialities for serving as the basis of an alternative tourism. Additionally, the involvement of spiritual resources will effectively check the consumer

33

Holy-Heritage City Development and Planning …

533

Cultural Resources

Accumulation/ Selection Spiritual

Resources

Method Selection

Spirit of Place

Experiences

Supporting structural components

Real Exposition

Interpretation/ Experiencing

Organized pilgrimage

Fig. 33.7 Components of pilgrimage-tourism (Source Singh, Pratibha 2004, p. 213, used with permission)

(tourists) behaviour and thus ensure healing of the mother earth. (b) The Assemblage The process of assembly begins with selection of the way. Apart from it, this process, also involves interpretation. With reference to goddesses, the assemblage of archetypal symbolism represented by the goddess’s form and geographical setting, the spiritualscape and the cultural context makes the spirit of place meaningful and confirm its potentiality for pilgrimage based tourism. While interpreting, the importance of deep feelings and intimate sensing to be projected in clear and simple terms. Making simultaneous reference to enshrouding value system is also equally significant. (c) The Operational Aspect Experience(s) and the capacity to experience are two most vital issues at the interface between the product and consumer, i.e. spirit of place and (pilgrim) tourist. Here, the greater emphasis is on the (pilgrim) tourist who must undergo the process of experiencing, which depends upon certain pre-requisites, e.g. reverence and respect, belief and faith and more importantly deep

insight to understand the revelation and a developed sensitiveness to feel the spiritual bliss. For the successful operation of this kind of alternative tourism, it needs to be well organized. This stage involves many supporting agencies to provide infrastructural facilities. Ashworth (1991, pp. 118–119) talks of certain ‘necessary preconditions’, like organizational integration, motivational integration, financial integration, functional integration and spatial integration— for the efficient functioning of his model. These seem to be equally essential in the case of pilgrimage based alternative tourism that remains oriented more towards the health of heritage (and mother Earth) than commercial profits (for appraisal in India see, Neuß 2012).

33.9

Concluding Remarks

Heritage is the mirror of mankind’s growth, progress and prospects; it is very important that it should be preserved. One must remember that modern way of life and science, and ancient wisdom and its messages can work together to

534

help in searching a harmonious and peaceful path of mankind’s integration with nature. In order that this heritage becomes a resource for development, it needs to be first documented, then protected, maintained and finally utilized according to specific heritage guidelines and legislations. Only then, combined with an increased citizens’ awareness and participation, will policy efforts and interventions become sustainable—environmentally, socially and culturally (cf. Singh 2011b, p. 251). Still, predominantly following top-down approach in India the heritage conservation is guided by a manual written in 1923. Of course, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act (1958 and amended in 2010) is in operation, however it mostly cares for the material artefacts, fencing from their surroundings. The INTACH Charter for the Conservation of Unprotected Architectural Heritage and Sites in India (2004) defines the integrity of heritage not only in terms of the physical fabrics of buildings but also the collective knowledge systems and culturalheritage landscapes it represents (Sinha 2017, p. 6). It is felt that the existing legislative and administrative framework in India, so to say in South Asia, is grossly inadequate for conservation, preservation and maintenance of cultural-heritage landscapes, and there is lack of a system that maintains close ties with the stakeholders. In order that heritage becomes a sustainable resource for development, it is essential that: (i) Heritage be protected and maintained; (ii) Heritage protection be continuously monitored, assessed and strategies be changed fitting according to appropriateness, priority and in need of the time; (iii) Impact of heritage protection should be constantly evaluated and improved upon; (iv) Heritage protection activities should be supported by the residents and stakeholders; (v) City development plans follow specific heritage guidelines support system and the by-laws; (vi) Heritage to be promoted so as to bring sustainable economic benefits to the local population; and (vii) Information and cultural programmes on heritage issues to be disseminated for awareness building among citizens (Singh 2016, p. 444).

R. P. B. Singh and S. Kumar

Under recently initiated (24 March 2017) the state government’s strategy of ‘PilgrimageHeritage City Development Plan’, the pilgrimage-heritage cities will enhance the natural environment, preserve culture and history and embrace new urban technology, with the hope that these things will lead to the ‘restoration and sustenance of culture, holy sites and related heritage and spirituality with enhanced quality of life’. The supporting resources and monetary allocation will be sorted out by a publicprivate-partnership (PPP). While the heritage zones and related properties have been mentioned in different contexts throughout the DPR (‘Detailed Project Report’), only time will tell if the heritage properties will be given budgetary or viable development schemes, or it will again be placed at the developmental margin (see Singh and Rana 2017).

References Ashworth GJ (1991) Heritage planning: conservation as the management of urban change. GeoPers, Groningen NL Ashworth GJ (1996) Realisable potential but hidden problems: a heritage tale from Central European cities. Paper presented to the International Cultural Centre Conference, Krakow, p 14 Bakker HT (1986) Ayodhya: The history of Ayodhya from the 17th century BC to the middle of the 18th century. (3 vol. in one) Egbert Forsten, Groningen, The Netherlands Chakrabarti DK (2000) Mahajanapadas states on ancient India. In: Hansen Morgens Herman (ed) A comparative study of thirty city-state cultures. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Copenhagen, pp 375–391 Devereux P (1990) Places of power. Blandford, London Eck DL (2012) India: a sacred geography. Harmony Books (Random House, Inc.), New York Führer AA (1891) The monumental antiquities and inscription, in the North-Western provinces and Oudh. (Archaeological Survey of India) Government Press, Allahabad Gidwani D (2012) Ayodhya on its way to becoming global heritage zone. DNA (a daily from New Delhi, edition Lucknow), 30 July. http://www.dnaindia.com/ india/report-ayodhya-on-its-way-to-becoming-globalheritage-zone-1721508. Accessed 25 Mar 2017 HRIDAY (2015) Operational guideline for heritage city development and augmentation Yojana. Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, New Delhi

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Kumar S, Singh RPB (2015) Cultural-heritage tourism in Ayodhya-Faizabad: scenario and prospects. The Geographer (Geog. Society, Dept. of Geography, AMU Aligarh, ISSN: 0072-0909) 62(2):66–74 Kumar S, Singh RPB (2016) Ritual landscapes of Ayodhya (India) in the context of multicultural religious belongingness. In: Tajai S (ed) Proceedings, of the 5th ACLA International Symposium on ‘Sacred Sites, Cultural Landscapes, and Harmonizing the World of Asia’: 2–5 Dec 2016. Faculty of Humanities and Social Science; Lampang Rajabhat University, #119 Lampang-Maetha Road, Muang District, Lampang Province 52100, Thailand, pp. 174–183 Kumar S, Singh RPB (2016) Ayodhya the holy city of India: riverfront and a place of Indo-Korean interfacing symbolic landscapes. Sthapatyam, Indian J Arch Art 3(6):101–116. ISSN: 2349-2369 Law BC (1944) Ayodhya in ancient India. J Ganganatha Jha Res Inst (Allahabad) 1(4):423–444 Neuß J (2012) On the loss of cultural heritage in the Narmadā Valley. Berliner Indologische Studien 20:195–248 Radimilahy C (1994) Sacred sites in Madagascar. In: Carmichael DL, Hubert J, Reeves B, Schanche A (eds) Sacred sites, sacred places. Routledge, London, pp 82–88 Rana PS (2014) Pilgrimage tourism: a study of Varanasi. SRME Publishers, Sagar, MP Rana PS, Singh RPB (2011) Perceptions and images of tourists and pilgrims in Banaras. In: Singh, RPB (ed) Holy places and pilgrimages: essays on India. Planet Earth and Cultural Understanding Series, Pub. 8. Shubhi Publications, New Delhi, pp 165–206 Shaw J (2000) Ayodhya’s sacred landscape: ritual memory, politics and archaeological ‘fact’. Antiquity 74 (285):693–700 Silverman H (1994) The archaeological identification of an ancient peruvian pilgrimage center. World Archaeol 26(1):1–18 Singh RPB (2003) Towards the pilgrimage archetype. Panchakroshi Yatra of Banaras. Indica Book Agency, Varanasi Singh P (2004) Shiva-Kashi: puranic context and contemporary reference. Vishwavidyalaya Prakashan, Varanasi (in Hindi) Singh RPB (2011a) Sacredscapes and sense of geography: some reflections. In: Singh RPB (ed) Sacredscapes and pilgrimage landscapes. Planet Earth & Cultural Understanding Series, Pub. 7. Shubhi Publications, New Delhi, pp 5–46 Singh RPB (2011b) Varanasi, India’s cultural heritage city: contestation, conservation and planning.

In: Singh RPB (ed) Heritagescapes and cultural landscapes (Planet Earth & Cultural Understanding Series, Pub. 6). Shubhi Publications, New Delhi, pp 205–254 Singh RPB (2013) Hindu tradition of pilgrimage: sacred space and system. Dev Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi Singh RPB (2015) Banaras, the cultural capital of India: visioning cultural heritage and planning. J Interf Sci 1 (1):100–122 Singh RPB (2016) Urban heritage and planning in India: a study of Banaras. In: Dutt, Ashok K et al (eds) Spatial diversity and dynamics in resources and Urban development (vol II). Springer Science + Business Media, Dordrecht and New York, pp 423–449 Singh RPB, Rana PS (2006) Banaras region: a spiritual and cultural guide. Pilgrimage & Cosmology Series: 1. Indica Books, Varanasi Singh RPB, Rana PS (2017) Banaras, the cultural capital and heritage city of India: the purview of Urban heritage planning. In: Vinayak B, Sandmeier T (eds) Routledge companion of global heritage conservation. Routledge-Taylor & Francis, London/New York/New Delhi Singh RPB, Singh RS (1997) Urban heritage in India: towards orientation to planning. In: Singh AK, Rai VK, Mishra AP (eds) Strategies in development planning. Deep & Deep Publs, New Delhi, pp 289– 304 Sinha A (2006) Landscapes in India: forms and meaning. University Press of Colorado, Boulder Sinha A (2017) Introduction. In: Kapila S, Amita S (eds) Cultural landscapes of South Asia: studies in heritage conservation and management. Routledge, Abington Oxen U.K, pp 1–9 UNESCO (2002) The criteria for selection. http://whc. unesco.org/en/criteria/. Accessed 23 Dec 2016 UNESCO WHC (2016) Operational guidelines for the implementation of the world heritage convention. WHC.16/01. http://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/. 26 Oct 2016 Venugopal V (2017) Jai Shri Ram! Battlefield Ayodhya. The Economic Times (Delhi). http://epaperbeta. timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid= 31816&articlexml=Jai-Shri-Ram-BattlefieldAyodhya-09012017004078. Accessed 26 Jan 2017 Waterton E, Smith L, Campbell G (2006) The utility of discourse analysis to heritage studies: the Burra charter and social inclusion. Int J Heritage Stud 12 (4):339–355

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34

A Review of Preservation Practices and Attitudes in Historic District Act Municipalities of Pennsylvania Megan McNamee and George M. Pomeroy

Abstract

In a growing number of communities preservation planning has been recognized and pursued for its benefits such as making history, heritage and historic character strong building blocks for revitalization, growth, tourism and job creation. Conceptually, preservation planning in the United States dates back to the decades preceding the civil war when efforts to preserve resources associated with significant figures and events in American history. Subsequent to that time, federal, state, and local legislation, including the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, have contributed significantly to legitimizing historic preservation activities. In Pennsylvania state legislation such as the Historic District Act (HDA; Act 167 of 1961), the Municipalities Planning Code (MPC; Act 247 of 1968), and Home Rule Charters have all paved the way to provide legal authority for local communities to regulate for historic preservation. Given this legal context, this chapter presents a discussion of the significance and evolution of

historic preservation in the United States, the role of federal, state and local governments in historic preservation, outlines the historic preservation in Pennsylvania with a focus on the Historic District Act and finally presents findings of a survey of stakeholders conducted to understand what strategies, techniques and tools are being used under the auspices of the HDA, as well as an assessment of how effective these tools are. The survey reveals that while community attitudes are positive toward historic preservation activities, there is some unevenness in implementation. The public at large is broadly supportive of historic preservation activities, whether they be regulatory or non-regulatory approaches. The findings also suggest that, despite this overall level of public support and municipal satisfaction though, there seems to be a lack of capacity in addressing preservation. Keywords




Historic preservation National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966 Preservation planning The Historic District Act







M. McNamee Environmental Planning, Upper Allen Township, PA, USA G. M. Pomeroy (&) Department of Geography-Earth Sciences, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. R. Thakur et al. (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31776-8_34

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34.1

M. McNamee and G. M. Pomeroy

Introduction

The rationale for historic preservation efforts ranges widely and deeply, encompassing important cultural, historical, aesthetic, economic factors and even environmental factors. While there is a strong and broad consensus that historic preservation efforts are important, there is some debate on how effective historic preservation planning implementation has been at the local level. In particular, there is a struggle to understand which strategies and tools have been most widely used and, of these, which ones do local planning officials perceive as most effective. A survey of those historic preservation stakeholders across selected municipalities in Pennsylvania employing the Historic District Act (Act 167 of 1961) provides a sense of which historic preservation strategies and tools are being employed, which may be most effective, and if the programs are effective at large. The survey reveals that while community attitudes are positive toward historic preservation activities, there is some unevenness in implementation and a possible lack of capacity among many municipalities.

34.2

Significance and Evolution of Historic Preservation in the United States

Protection of historic architecture is a crucial step in preserving the time and place of past cultures. Architectural preservation is unique in that it allows citizens to appreciate how past generations lived by providing a visual and tangible demonstration of cultural identity. Not all historic architectural preservation is the same. Some buildings, with specific historic context, require precise attention to detail in order to accurately preserve their historic significance. Most buildings, however, require the capacity to be lived in and support public use. These buildings and districts need regular attention in order to meet the demands of a growing society while at the same time maintaining the building’s historic integrity. As a community, we have the

obligation to protect our historic resources and preserve them for future generations. In addition to reinforcing a community’s past, preservation can help strengthen a community’s future. Historic buildings help create vibrant, cultural downtowns that attract tourism, art, festivals, and other activities which inevitably draw investment, revenue, and economic development. Furthermore, historic preservation can be a tool to boost economy and quality of life. Local residents can also benefit through interpretive components such as learning and recreational activities that complement an historic site’s didactic offerings and illustrate a special meaning between its past, present, and future. The more the community is involved, the more successful effective an area will become for locals and visitors (Ryberg 2013). Historic Preservation has also been recognized as having very clear ecological benefits. For instance, instead of having to use large equipment to demolish a building, preservation allows that building to remain in use. This also saves on the environmental costs of having to produce new building materials for new construction (Pond and Pomeroy 2007). Historic Preservation in the United States dates to the early nineteenth century. Early efforts at preservation were characterized by two features. First, they centered on protecting individual structures that were deemed to have historical significance. Secondly, such efforts were usually undertaken by highly motivated “small heroic bands of amateurs” (Juergensmeyer and Roberts 1998). The effort to protect George Washington’s Mt. Vernon estate, perhaps the first major historic preservation success story, was illustrative of these early efforts. This effort was seen as providing the model for future preservation efforts, as many historic structures often were portrayed as “the next Mt. Vernon.” Sometimes these efforts were successful, as in the case of saving Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Other times these efforts failed, such as in the case of “Old Indian House” in Boston. Built 1704, it was the only surviving structure from early Boston. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in 1848 after

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A Review of Preservation Practices and Attitudes …

having been described as having “no intrinsic value.” Over time, historic preservation advocates became more organized, professionalized, and legally complex. A U.S. Supreme Court case, United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railway Co. (1896) legitimated condemnation for historic preservation as a valid public purpose. Some progress was made during the interwar period as local ordinances, most notably in Charleston, South Carolina and San Antonio, Texas. These and other communities possessed distinctive community architectural and historical character that even in the 1930s was seen as having both cultural and economic value, hence the efforts to maintain such character and identity (Duerksen and Goebel 1999). Perhaps the biggest legal step forward for historic preservation came in the 1978 Supreme Court Case of Penn Central Transportation v. New York. The Penn Central case legitimated the use of the police power to engage in local regulation of private property for the purpose of preserving structures and areas with historic, architectural and cultural significance. One of several related points the court made was that the regulatory takings was only partial, and that the owners could still recover a reasonable expected rate of return on their property investments, thus still respecting 5th Amendment rights (Duerksen and Goebel 1999). This decision opened the flood for local communities to regulate for historic preservation. Today, over 3,000 communities in the United States have local historic preservation programs of various. While there is a broad public consensus that historic preservation is an important and worthwhile task in the most general sense, some voice concerns about historic preservation regulation being burdensome, particularly with respect to minimum maintenance and anti-neglect provisions. Some property owners view maintenance of architectural standards as prohibitively expensive. In cases where building owners are not able to demolish their structures for what they consider a “highest and best” (most profitable) use, they see historic preservation regulations as taking, despite the precedents of case law.

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34.3

The Role of Federal, State, and Local Government in Historic Preservation

Federal, state, and local governments all play a role in historic preservation, but it is at that the local level of government that historic preservation regulations and other related activities are most consequential. In the United States, the U.S. Constitution charges the federal government with certain responsibilities, with remaining powers be reserved for the states. Therefore, with respect to historic preservation (and to land use planning in general), powers to regulate rested with states. States, in turn, have delegated these responsibilities to counties and local municipalities through state enabling legislation (Blaesser and Weinstein 1989). Despite the delegation of powers to the states, the federal government does still play an important role in the realm of historic preservation that is pertinent to local preservation, particularly through the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966. This legislation established the National Register of Historic Places, provided federal funding, created an advisory council, and developed a “Section 106” process (named for that section of the law) that established rules by which federal agencies must operate when potentially impacting properties on or eligible for the National Register and with respect to use of federal funds. The National Register lists districts, sites, buildings, and objects that are deemed significant on a national, state, or local level in American history, archeology, engineering, and culture. These properties and eligible properties (those meeting the criteria but not yet listed) are protected from federal action, among other considerations. Section 106 of the NHPA provides federal agencies a set of rules by which they must operate. A further significance of this locally is that many municipalities afford a higher level of protection for entities listed on the National Register. This is discussed further in the section on local efforts below. The National Historic Preservation Act also serves the legal basis for the federal-state-local preservation partnership. Qualified local

540

governments will be certified by their respective state offices (discussed with greater depth in subsequent paragraphs), to carry out functions in this partnership including the identification, evaluation, registration, and preservation of historic properties within their jurisdictions and promote the integration of local preservation interests and concerns into local planning and decision-making processes. Other federal programs’ actions have contributed to historic preservation, most notably the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), various transportation acts, and tax policies that provide tax incentives to preservation. Their roles, however, are tangential to the concerns of this chapter. State governments also impact historic preservation, with every state taking some degree of action. All states have some enabling legislation for historic preservation. Some states variously have agencies and programs dedicated to historic preservation, state registers, state-wide planning goals related to historic preservation, and state environmental policy acts that may require impact statements to including historic preservation considerations. Maryland, California, Missouri, and New York even have state constitutional provisions with respect to the topic. With particular significance for this chapter, states provide programmatic support and certification for the establishment and management of these historic preservation programs through State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPO). In Pennsylvania, the SHPO (“PASHPO”) is organizationally placed under the umbrella of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), a state agency. As alluded to earlier, respective state SHPO offices across the United States, including Pennsylvania, serve a liaison function with the National Park Service, surveying, evaluating and nominating significant historic buildings, sites, structures, districts and objects for their suitability on the National Register of Historic Places. As noted above, it is the efforts of local governments that are most consequential to historic preservation. States typically allow historic preservation planning to be undertaken through

M. McNamee and G. M. Pomeroy

state land use/community planning enabling legislation or through more narrowly focused historic preservation legislation, or both. Pennsylvania is one state that possesses both types of enabling legislation.

34.4

Historic Preservation in Pennsylvania with a Focus on the Historic District Act

In Pennsylvania, the odd artifacts of state legislation leave three pathways that could provide legal authority for local communities to regulate for historic preservation: The Historic District Act (HDA; Act 167 of 1961), the Municipalities Planning Code (MPC; Act 247 of 1968), and Home Rule Charters. The MPC, as it is popularly referred to, is the standard planning enabling legislation that allows communities the police power with respect to standard zoning, subdivision regulation, comprehensive plans, and other general planning tools. With specific regard to historic preservation, the MPC states “zoning ordinances shall provide for the protection of natural and historic features and resources.” (Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code 2015). Home rule charters in Pennsylvania as in other states, allow municipalities greater freedom and discretion in governing. Notably, both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s two largest cities, have Home Rule charters, as do 77 other of the state’s 2,560 municipalities. To add to the potential confusion, municipalities can fall within none, one, two, or all three of these categories. The HDA enables municipalities and counties to “create historic districts within their geographic boundaries.” (Lefevre 1997). These districts are determined through consideration of historical and architectural significance together with considerations of municipal comprehensive plans, special area plans, or redevelopment plans. Municipalities that do so must also appoint Boards of Historical Architectural Review (more commonly referred as “HARBs”) and to regulate for the “erection, reconstruction, restoration, demolition or razing of buildings within the historic districts.” HARBs must have at least five

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A Review of Preservation Practices and Attitudes …

members and some of these must have specific fields of expertise, such as a real estate professional, an architect, etc. Taken together, the provisions of the HDA provide a clear programmatic and legal path to establishing, regulating, and certifying designated historic districts. The certification of historic districts (a requirement) is accomplished through the mechanism of the SHPO (noted above in the discussion of the role of states in historic preservation), which also provides technical and programmatic expertise to local communities engaging in preservation activities. Programmatically, all of these elements speak closely to the federal-state-local partnership. At the time of this writing, pursuant to the HDA, there are 95 Pennsylvania municipalities that have to manage certified 157 historic districts (Van Sweden 2014). While the dictates of the law seem to leave matters programmatically clear, anecdotal conversations with local planning professionals, historic preservation advocates (Hammerstedt 2014), and state-level historic preservation officials (Van Sweden 2014) raise questions about which specific ground-level strategies and tactics are most effectively employed in historic preservation planning. There is a sense that, despite the program regularities, that on the ground implementation of historic preservation programming is inconsistent and less effective in application.

34.5

What Are the Strategies, Techniques and Tools and How Well Do They Work?

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have begun to consider the question of what strategies, tools or techniques are local historic preservation planners are being employed and where. Extending this further, which seems most or least effective? These are complicated questions to address. That there are three distinctive routes to authorizing local action, 2,560 municipalities of various types (boroughs, townships, cities, and a town), and a wide range of socio-demographic contexts means that generalizing about the nature of historic preservation regulation and related activities is challenging, at best. This research then is confined that subset of 95 municipalities using employing the HDA to enact historic preservation regulation. Studying these communities has several advantages. First, a clear and manageable set of communities and their respective historic districts engaging in this planning path was already identified (whereas an unknown number of communities are planning for historic preservation using the MPC). Secondly, the legal and other program requirements related to the HDA are more clearly prescribed and consistent, so what likely varies greatest is the local implementation and effectiveness of such programming. In other words, these communities are drawn from the same experimental population, so to speak. Finally, in each of these communities, there is a clearly identified and demarcated concentration of historic structures (whereas in some municipalities historic structures may be sparsely distributed across a wider landscape).

34.6 Despite the provision of several legal pathways to enacting historic preservation regulations, there remains a general feeling that preservation efforts are less effective than intended, too often fall far short of accomplishing their objectives. Another anecdotal judgment across the range of perspectives is that the success of such efforts varies tremendously across the state. Practitioners, public officials, and other stakeholders have started to reassess what is being done and how at the most local level. Some of the stakeholders

A Survey of Historic District Act Communities

The survey itself considers regulatory and programmatic aspects of historic preservation that are commonly identified as in the literature, as well as issues of community awareness. Over thirty questions were drafted and subsequently reviewed by staff at Preservation Pennsylvania, a non-governmental organization dedicated to preservation, a regional PASHPO specialist, and the Shippensburg University institutional review

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M. McNamee and G. M. Pomeroy

board (which approved the survey). A refined subset of these questions was then formatted into Google Forms. Contact information for each of the designated local HDA liaison was provided by the PASHPO. The survey was administered in fall 2015 with an email that was sent to each of the 95 local contacts. The email provided an introduction and description of the survey and its purposes, a link to the online survey, and a letter of endorsement each from Preservation Pennsylvania and PASHPO. A six-week deadline was presented. Two follow up reminder emails were sent at two weeks and one week prior to the deadline. The questions broadly dealt with regulatory legal tools, financial tools, and other incentive programs. A selection of the specific questions is noted in the discussion of the findings and analysis below.

34.7

Findings

33 municipalities responded to the survey. Geographically, these municipalities were largely concentrated in three clusters. The largest cluster was in the ring of suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia in southeastern Pennsylvania, a second cluster was in south-central Pennsylvania, and the smallest cluster included Pittsburgh and nearby municipalities in Allegheny and surrounding counties. Socio-demographically, these communities varied substantially in population size though they entirely consisted of boroughs and cities (no townships). Anecdotally, those communities in the southeastern Pennsylvania have higher affluence, greater development pressures, and more sophisticated planning infrastructure. One issue related to the effectiveness of historic preservation program is resource commitment. Many municipalities are financially strapped and lack dedicated funding for historic preservation activities. Resources can include funding, expertise, and time. Oftentimes several personnel are stretched across various planning responsibilities, with historic preservation concerns often assigned a lower priority. In a

Table 34.1 Question: on average, how many hours per week are devoted to historic preservation related activities? 0 or less than 1

1–5

6–10

11–20

21 or more

6

12

6

3

3

question on person hours devoted to history preservation (Table 34.1), 60% of the municipalities allocated five hours or less per week. Only Pittsburgh, the largest of the cities represented in the survey, dedicated the equivalent of at least one full-time employee (70 h). Two other large cities, Bethlehem and Lancaster, were the only other cities to devote more than 20 h to historic preservation. Related questions revealed that most of the work falls to one individual within the municipality. Public enthusiasm and ongoing public outreach are viewed as critical in building public support and political willpower needed to sustain regulation and other programming. There is a tremendously wide variety of outreach activities undertaken by these communities (Table 34.2). Design guidelines, most widely employed, are primarily used to provide those planning alterations, modifications, or intending to build a sense of the architectural and style requirements. They do, though, serve as in-depth educational tools. Media tools (newsletters, booklets/ pamphlets) are also commonly employed. Some are perceived as more effective (Table 34.3), particularly staff assistance. Staff who may be primarily tasked to process and sometimes approve applications or permits for alterations, demolition, or construction, are well placed to provide informational and educational assistance to property owners and builders. Design guidelines, which can be inexpensively posted to municipal websites, are especially effective tools for outreach and education. Other programming is useful, depending on the preferences, capabilities, and idiosyncrasies of the individual municipalities themselves. Communities that are well informed and educated about historic preservation are generally more supportive of such activities and this,

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A Review of Preservation Practices and Attitudes …

543

Table 34.2 Public outreach methods employed Question: what types of public outreach does your municipality use to make residents more aware of their heritage?

No. of municipalities using these methods

Design guidelines

25

Newsletters/feature stories in local newspapers

19

Staff assistance to property owners

16

Booklets/pamphlets/brochures

15

Tours

13

Awards programs

4

School field trips

2

Other (web site, pattern book, conference, “nothing”, TV program, education presentations, distributed poster of landmarks)

11

Table 34.3 Public outreach methods perceived as most effective Question: of those public outreach methods used, check the three you consider most effective?

No. of municipalities

Staff assistance to property owners

17

Design guidelines

16

Newsletters/feature stories in local newspapers

12

Booklets/pamphlets/brochures

11

Awards programs

3

Tours

2

School field trips

2

Other (violation letters, website, historical society, pattern book, TV program)

5

in turn, provides the broad foundation for the political willpower needed for successful and complete implementation of plans and programs. Communities that are well informed, and thus supportive, are less susceptible to uneven implementation and enforcement. The communities surveyed at least had enough public support and historic preservation leadership at one time in order to establish their historic districts and preservation programs. Nonetheless, communities evolve and sometimes knowledge and education levels fade. Table 34.4 captures a perception about how well residents are informed and educated on historic preservation. It seems that in large part, most communities fall into the middle of the spectrum with other becoming (or remaining) better or less informed. Focusing on community support, broken down into stakeholder subcategories (Table 34.5), it seems that

most residents (whether residential property owners or the business community) seem supportive in nearly all cases. With the rental community, however, matters are more ambiguous. Due to the nature of the act, municipalities that have adopted the HDA are relatively uniform with respect to treatment of properties and regulatory activities. There are some complementary ordinances outside the confines of the HDA but within the respective municipal code that are especially useful in facilitating historic preservation planning (Table 34.6). Property maintenance ordinances, while useful in general, provide a useful bulwark to protecting historic properties. They are common and familiar features in many municipal codes and enforcement is much more consistent. Indeed, most municipalities already have such ordinance language in place to address maintenance issues more widely.

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M. McNamee and G. M. Pomeroy

Table 34.4 How well, do you feel, are residents informed/educated on historic preservation? More Informed

Unfamiliar

1

2

3

4

5

1

9

13

5

1

Table 34.5 Do you feel the ________ of your municipality support historic preservation? Strongly support

Support

Oppose

Strongly oppose

Unknown

Residents in general

2

26

1

0

Residential property owners

6

24

1

0

2

Rental community (renters)

0

9

2

0

19

Business/commercial property owners

2

21

4

0

4

3

Table 34.6 Other leading incentives and legal tools employed Incentive/legal tool

Number of municipalities

Property Maintenance Ordinance Demolition Ordinance Transfer of Development Rights Preservation/Conservation Easements, Covenants, and Reverter Clauses Façade Grants

19 13 3 3 2

Another complementary provision also found among the HDA communities was a general demolition ordinance, which again, is featured in many codes and enforcement is consistent. Other tools are noted but are not widely employed. These other tools, with greater outreach efforts from the PASHPO, are potentially useful and may become more widely adopted. One leading challenge in HDA municipalities is maintaining an inventory of historic resources. Personnel changes, the ebb and flow of community interest, and other factors taken together mean that inventories of historic resources sometimes become dated and are even lost. Re-inventorying historic resources is a

potentially large, expensive, and time-consuming task relative to the resources that are available. Even though an inventory is required prior to PASHPO approval of an HDA ordinance, many of these inventories have faded and disappeared. Of the 29 municipalities that responded to the question, over one third noted that they either aren’t aware of an inventory, do not know the date of the inventory, or simply could not respond to the question (Table 34.7). Despite the ebb and flow of interest in preservation among local municipal officials and residents in respective communities, most communities remain generally satisfied with their historic district programs (Table 34.8).

Table 34.7 Does your municipality have a historic resources inventory? If yes, when was your historic resources inventory last updated? No inventory, year of inventory unknown or not specified

Before 1980

1980 through 1999

2000 through 2009

2010 and later

10

1

5

8

5

34

A Review of Preservation Practices and Attitudes …

545

Table 34.8 How satisfied are you with your local historic preservation program? Very satisfied

Very dissatisfied

1

2

3

4

5

2

10

14

4

1

34.8

Conclusion

The public at large is broadly supportive of historic preservation activities, whether they be regulatory or non-regulatory approaches. Even among constituent groups, including property owners, the rental community, and residential property owners, the widely held perception is that these stakeholder groups are supportive. This is a positive sign for those communities wishing to start, extend, or deepen their historic preservation efforts. There is even a perception that residents are reasonably informed and educated on the topic. At the same time, the local contacts interviewed, who typically were planning professionals or well-informed municipal officials and staff, perceived their local historic preservation planning efforts as worthwhile and, on the whole, were satisfied with their programs. The survey findings substantiate these points. The findings also suggest that, despite this overall level of public support and municipal satisfaction though, there seems to be a lack of capacity in addressing preservation. Municipal inventories are frequently dated, human resource commitments in terms of person-hours are limited, and there is a sense that many of the strategies, tools and outreach methods are unevenly employed and perhaps only moderately effective. Given this mismatch between on one hand, the public and institutional support for such historic preservation activities, and on the other, the uneven character of such activities, policy leadership and programmatic action that build local capacity from both the state and even county planning offices is warranted. Greater state support would ideally come in the form of greater staffing and funding for educational, technical, and other outreach activities. In

particular, funding (perhaps through matching grants) for historic preservation resource inventories, the development of revolving fund programs that provide small grants to facilitate maintenance and repair for low-income homeowners, and greater guidance in the development of those tools that seem to work best, such as design guidelines. Given that the communities surveyed have enacted their program under the structured and well-prescribed elements of the Historic District Act (HDA), one speculates that other communities using the less prescriptive Municipalities Planning Code (MPC) to enable their historic preservation planning activities may have even greater challenges. The MPC based programs will likely wildly in both capacity and implementation. Subsequent research efforts could explore this more widely.

References Blaesser BW, Weinstein AC (1989) Land use and the constitution: principles for planning practice. American Planning Association, Chicago Duerksen CJ, Goebel RM (1999) Aesthetics, community character and the law. Planning advisory service report number 489/490. American Planning Association, Chicago Hammerstedt E (2014) Field representative. Preservation Pennsylvania Juergensmeyer JC, Roberts TE (1998) Land use planning and control law. West Group, St. Paul, Minnesota Lefevre MR (1997) Historic District Designation in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code (MPC), Act of 1968, P.L. 805, No. 247 as reenacted and amended. Retrieved from https://dced.pa.gov/download/ pennsylvania-municipalities-planning-code-act-247of-1968/ Pond L, Pomeroy G (2007) Building a better ordinance. In: Thakur B et al (eds) City, society, and planning: society vol 2, p 42

546 Ryberg SR (2013) Historic preservation’s urban renewal roots: preservation and planning in midcentury Philadelphia. J Urban Hist 39(2):193–213. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (Accessed 7 Sept 2014)

M. McNamee and G. M. Pomeroy Van Sweden B (2014) Community preservation coordinator, Susquehanna Region, State Historic Preservation Office, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Personal communication