(Closing Part 3) Batman's Gotham City – Learning for India’s Urban Governance

“Municipalities are more than just providers of services. They are democratic mechanisms through which territorially based communities of people govern themselves at a local level.” - Elinor Ostrom, at a Global Climate Change conference

In part 1 and 2, we covered the landscape of cities and the poverty of our urban slums, along with the larger issues of crime and corruption. In this closing part of this series, we cover the need for devolution of power in urban planning and the balancing of this bureaucratic governance interventions with innovation & economic opportunities.

Urban Planning and Devolution of powers

The most acute challenges arise from the fact that there are multiple government line departments who execute projects in the same city confines where the municipality is also doing part of its work. Unlike the American cities, where a central Mayor runs the aggregated show and accountability, Indian cities suffer due to either the lack of a larger master-plan or the co-ordination issues that stem from the lack of unified accountability, which can evaluate and implement the inter-linkages between housing, electricity, water, roads and transportation; while deciding on its larger policies.

The base inspiration for Gotham city for its multi-media creators across the past few decades has kept shifting from New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit in USA to now the UK cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow for the escapades of Robert Pattinson’s Batman (Hewitt, 2023), but, the issues plaguing the city has remained the same in the form of poverty, corruption and the access to public utilities and city infrastructure in general for the wider populace.

Artha Global (erstwhile IDFC Institute) has been at the forefront of researching the increasing urbanisation of India, a theme that Devashish Dhar (Dhar, 2023) vociferously calls out in his book India’s Blind Spot ). Artha Global in its reports has talked about the most effective example of urban planning paving the way for growth – that of New York, which was a small town in 1811, and then with a Commissioner’s Plan laid out a notional grid to be followed for its expansion. That is what ensured its systematic growth for almost a century, before planners lost track and let the fringes be developed in a very haphazard manner (similar to Delhi’s planning downturn). The consequence of this New York suffers to date, and hence interestingly ended up being the inspiration for Gotham city itself – a city of former glory, now degrading and imploding upon itself!

Hence, with this hindsight, a mega planning rehaul for urban cities needs to be the central focus of policy-makers. They will have to compensate for land and use re-allocation, just like the authorities in New York did back in the early 19th century. Most importantly, they will have to give teeth to the ULB’s (Urban Local Bodies) like the municipalities to have devolved power, accountability, budget, resources to make this happen - and not multiple other line departments, national bodies and parastatal bodies causing the current jumbling up of responsibilities and resources. More importantly our urban expanses need their own elected Mayors. This gaping hole is even more evident, when we realise that the practice of having Mayors exists only in the few states of Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The work done by Praja in its Urban Governance Index is a vital reference point to understand such gaps (Praja, 2020).

For our cities and urban agglomerations, this malaise of parastatal-parasites must be gotten rid of, once and for all.

?

David Harvey (Harvey, 2012) in his book Rebel Cities : From the Right to City to the Urban Revolution has covered the need for local bodies in extensive details in his book on the historical growth of cities. As David himself cites, Elinor Ostrom , famous for her own book on collective ingenuity, Governing the Commons , once ended one of her papers prepared for a Global Climate Change conference with a need for organising and enforcing urban solutions at the lowest common denominator of jurisdiction of public bodies. The stand-out line from the speech being what we referred to at the starting of this part, “Municipalities are more than just providers of services. They are democratic mechanisms through which territorially based communities of people govern themselves at a local level.” (Harvey, 2012)

The balance of governance with economic opportunities

Gotham’s economic landscape was almost an oligopoly, with most industries and sectors being controlled either by Wayne Enterprises or Lex Corp, with S.T.A.R. Labs being a third player in this mix (Anon., 2023). Gotham as a city continued to be heavily manufacturing-driven, which is what also explained a lot of its income disparities, ghettoization and social upheavals. India, has had an upper hand on that front. In India, our cities have greatly benefited by the onset of the services sector, more specifically the IT and ITES industry, and upon a further deep-dive the start-up eco system in general. Satellite towns like Noida and Gurgaon around Delhi, or Navi Mumbai and Thane around Mumbai, or stand-alone cities like Pune and Hyderabad, and with the new wave of Venture Capital investments even smaller urban towns like Jaipur and Indore are taking a share of the pie. Bangalore and Delhi are already starting to feature in the top 10 cities for VC investments. But, a vital point to note here, that this is still limited to certain geographies in the country, and is not a development model that has been successfully adopted and implemented by all (or even most) states.

Innovation, as the author Andrew Wear (2020) says in his book Solved (how other countries cracked the world’s biggest problems, and we can too) , “Innovation is not generated by market forces alone. The government’s role – as funder of research, financer of commercial risk early in a company’s journey, as customer and partner in city development – is critical. Well crafted regulations can give the market confidence, and creates the incentives that drive private sector innovation”. (Wear, 2020)

And all of these developments will come to nought, if public transportation is not improved on a war footing in our urban areas. Otherwise, the paradox of Bangalore’s Silicon Valley (visualised in the two images below), will end up becoming the new reality of every other urban locality – where historic water bodies are drying up, and traffic jams only getting worse by the day – primarily due to the un-planned, almost amoebic development of the urban area in all directions.

It is not for nothing that even after 15,000 years of urban life and death, governance of our burgeoning cities still remains a chronic problem. Economic development and targeted government policies to encourage the same, can help reduce a lot of socio-economic disparities that reflect in the slums and ‘bastees’ of our existing cities. This action will need to be complimented with a comprehensive plan for urban development that will have to be executed by a single accountable government body – this devolution of power to the Urban Local Bodies will need to be a mandate from central policy-makers, leaving aside their political differences.

In the Christopher Nolan trilogy for Batman, as we move from the movie Batman Begins to the Dark Knight trilogy, we realise that “corruption can never end in Gotham, so the criminals move away from the slums and into the skyscrapers, banks and police precincts.” (Motamayor, 2020). It is exactly why addressing just a single part of this development-governance network will never be enough.

So, lest we aim to let our cities turn into a 21st century Gotham City, the reformation of accountabilities and integration in our urban city planning has to cross the realm of imagined realities into an actionable necessity!

References (Part 3 only) ->

Anon., 2023. batman.fandom.com . [Online] Available at: https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Wayne_Enterprises [Accessed 27 September 2023].

AswathyHoneylal, K., 2015. Missing Lakes of Bangalore : Cause and Effect, s.l.: ISB Certificate of Business Analytics - Batch V.

Dhar, D., 2023. India's Blind Spot (Understanding and Managing Our Cities). s.l.:HarperCollins India.

GoogleMaps, n.d. Concrete Wasteland. [Art] (Google Maps).

Harvey, D., 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. s.l.:Verso Books.

Hewitt, Z., 2023. variety.com . [Online] Available at: https://variety.com/2023/artisans/spotlight/the-batman-british-cities-1235496898/ [Accessed 27 September 2023].

Masood, K., 2016. Why is Bangalore stuck in traffic jams?. [Art].

Motamayor, R., 2020. https://observer.com/ . [Online] Available at: https://observer.com/2020/08/gotham-city-christopher-nolan-dark-knight-films-batman-begins/ [Accessed 28 September 2023].

Praja, M. D. W., 2020. praja.org . [Online] Available at: https://www.praja.org/ugi#:~:text=Urban%20governance%20Index%20is%20a%20measure%20of%20the,democratic%20empowerment%20and%20accountability%20pertaining%20to%20urban%20governance . [Accessed 27 September 2023].

Prior&Dunning, 1817. Plan of the city of New-York. [Art] (The New York Public Library).

Wear, A., 2020. Solved - How Other Countries Cracked the World's Biggest Problems (and We Can Too). s.l.:Oneworld Publications.