CEPT University president says urban planning must be market-oriented, so that spatial growth is aligned with economic growth
“Since the late sixties, when Soviet-style central economic planning gripped the imagination of India’s policymakers, Indian urban planning has been all about replacing markets by planning. Urban planners have attempted to ‘design’ cities instead of enabling their growth. And in that style of planning, what is crucial is that planners try to figure out where we are going, which is a folly,” he emphasizes, going on to say that, according to this approach, urban planners make assumptions “about the size of population of a given town or city in the future, and specify the types of homes they should live in, the standards they should adopt as well as the type of industries that should come up. Planners believe they can accumulate all the information that is necessary to be able to project this future and then make a plan that everybody had to follow.”
Patel finds this approach deeply problematic, because “planners are no better at judging where we are going or where we ought to go than anybody else. Usually, we have to accept the limits to our capacity to anticipate the future. The simple test of it is, to think back 10 years, and think of what we knew about today’s society and today’s economy 10 years ago. We knew very little about where we are now. Therefore, to believe that now, 10 years from now, I will know what’s going to happen, where to take this city, is illiberal planning.
For Patel, Ahmedabad is a pioneer in transforming urban planning and liberalizing it to make it more effective. The process started in 1999 when the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) put together Ahmedabad’s 2002 urban development plan (DP).
The new DP pioneered many reforms. The policy of reserving individual plots in the DP was abandoned; land-use zoning was liberalized; building bye-laws were simplified; the scope of planned provision of goods and services was limited and floor-area ratios were liberalized.
...
“Our cities cannot be properly developed without planning. Urban planning has to be made to work in India; otherwise our cities are doomed. To make city-planning work, we have to abandon old ways of planning that have not worked for many decades. We have to embrace a new way of planning that works with the market rather than against it. There are cities in India where such a new way of planning has already been adopted and the results are clear to see. More and more cities must adopt this way.”