There is a great concern that India is urbanizing too rapidly for its own good, that this change in demographics is driven by deprivation in the countryside. India will soon have too many big cities to manage sustainably unless it changes its urban governance paradigm drastically, and soon. Sure, the rate of population growth has increased, and India has added more people to cities than villages in the latest census. But mega-cities are an enormous opportunity for the country’s population. Their combined economic output exceeds the gross domestic product of many countries, even in the developed world.

Urbanization is irreversible. It is partly the result of media-created aspirations. Television, mobiles and the internet has shown rural youth, often educated but with little opportunity at home, what city life is. Generation Y moves to cities for work, to aspire ‘to an American way’ of life, says Jamshed Irani, Former Director of Tata Sons Limited. He is star-gazing, at a session on Imagining India’s Cities 2030, as part of the Future Dialogue on Sustainable Cities in New Delhi, 24 September, 2011.

To keep cities livable for the foreseeable future will need investments equivalent to India’s GDP. This will help provide adequate transport and habitation for the millions who are expected to move to cities in the next 20 years. “Governance exists, planning exists but what is missing is citizens’ awakening, political transformation and engagement,” says Shirish Sankhe, Director, McKinsey and Company.

The citizens are the major stakeholders in the growth of their urban centres. However, they are relegated to third or fourth place when it comes to planning. Powerful interests take precedence over their needs, such as politicians who have massive interests in real estate and predicate urban plans to serve their interests, rather than service the needs of citizens. Mr Irani feels the only way to sustainable development and environmentally-sound citizens is to fight these interests.

Echoing this, S Y Kulkarni, Professor, Department of Architecture and Planning, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, says while cities are hubs of facilities, they do not serve the needs of common people. For example, there are hospitals that provide world-class healthcare, but are too expensive for most to afford. The size of cities is another barrier between people and facilities. One solution is “have compact cities that have comparable facilities, that common people can use. Mixed development is the way to go, where residences and workplaces are close together.”

In the hubbub of planning, technology and politics, women’s issues have fallen by the wayside. Cities are increasingly developing large informal frameworks for people to work, in addition to the formal frameworks. This is an opportunity and a challenge, feels Sheela Patel, Founder of the non-profit Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres. In Mumbai, 65 per cent of the population lives in slums, that cover just 6 per cent of the city. “It is possible to plan if you can count, but most cities do not count their poor,” she says, of the typical planning process.

Addressing the politics of urban development means changing the politics of patronage to one of representation. As more people migrate to cities, politicians cash in and settle them in slums to bolster their careers. Those in slums also bear the brunt of climate change, since slums come up in ecologically-fragile areas – near the coast in Mumbai or in low lying areas in other cities. When it rains, they are the first to be flooded out of their homes. The large percentage of people in the informal sector exist ‘below the radar’, their needs for basic facilities ignored by city planners.

Security of tenure, especially for these large informal networks, makes a big difference to their quality of life. It makes them amenable to accepting and paying for basic services. They invest in their dwellings upgrading them from tin sheets to bricks and cement. Urban authorities are obliged to provide health, education and transportation.

Here again, the underlying theme of cooperation between politicians, scientists and business comes to the fore, but with a big if. If politicians provide the security of tenure, scientists can develop building technology that is affordable and accessible by the poor and businesses can help develop affordable housing. Cities are made of people and planning has to take the human aspect into account especially when developing affordable housing.