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When Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks of starting centres of excellence, it sounds hollow, only because the real value of culture and its institutions is not in newness but in continuity. When business leaders like Narayan Murthy suggest world-class facilities, they miss the essential ingredient needed to make facilities world-class: interest, time and history. The particular lesson from English institutional history is the value it places on ensuring the growth of intellectual collections and giving them public support. Many resources remain happily obscure, in small villages and towns, truly a part of people’s heritage. While visiting friends in Dorset, we stopped for a cup of coffee at a small bakery, walked through a collection of 19th century maps in an old Armoury building, picked up a pair of socks nearby, and checked out a museum of telescopes, all in an afternoon.

Compare this to routines in an Indian town. City life is firstly an outcome of physical distress: the painful stratification of residents, the disparity between slum and Baroque mansion, overrun streets, broken roads, encroached sidewalks, the open defecation and absence of utilities. Certainly, all these contribute to the Indian city’s unmade and incomplete character. But these are the mere fallout of civic inadequacies. The real stench of despair is in the stifling lack of civic activity — bereft of participatory life. All primary civic sensation is formed from acquisition of land and home; all civic activity contained within the superfluous borders of shopping and eating.

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It is hard to believe, but there exist astounding similarities between the Indian city and 19th century New York. Pitted against the reality of poor migrants, many of New York’s earlier citizens gained vast wealth through business and industrial enterprise. Some among them stretched their largesse, contributing to the city’s social, cultural, and physical health. Private philanthropy rose. Andrew Carnegie’s millions were used to construct public libraries; the Rockefellers propelled their dollars into the performing arts. In its own way, private capitalism delivered; it recognised the shared importance of the city. And the investment in the construction of cultural institutions was as much a belief in a collective future as a hope in the greatness of the city itself. In the spread of its colleges, art collections, rare manuscript libraries, galleries, theatres, gardens and universities, the profit-makers showed their more generous side. In so doing, they lifted the city from the level of a temporary encampment to a place of global significance.

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Today, the civic wilderness of the Indian city promotes only extreme conditions. At one end, water, electricity and roads; at the other, hollow talk of centres of excellence. How then do you begin to ever transform places from a makeshift trading post to a settled town? How can city residents ever feel a sense of ownership with their cities? New airports, industrial townships, highways, hospitals — all suggest cities being made afresh. Certainly, Navodaya Vidyalayas, entrepreneurship training centres, urban clusters, affordable housing, give hope to a rootless people looking for a basic civic existence. But more than that, the crass emptiness of Indian towns needs the seed of a future public culture. Unless the smart city idea incorporates the values of long-term institutions and amenities that grow and age with the residents, the shells of new housing and infrastructure projects will get occupied by people with a grim and hollow core. Cities without a past tend to become cities without a future.