If you do not want your city to be a nightmare space, it is important to understand its essential nature and the separate yet interdependent worlds that coexist in it.
THE temptation to talk about the growth and nature of Bangalore or Delhi is irresistible. Bangalore is the happening city, the new metropolis awash with malls, shops, restaurants and gleaming new residential towers. Delhi's sprawl has overflowed to Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, as the new urban areas replete with malls, slick new office buildings, multiplexes, flyovers and towering complexes of luxurious apartments in Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad and other areas in what is called the National Capital Region will testify.
But what exactly is one talking of when one speaks of growth and nature? Are they not really the notions of cities that one has, seen from an individual point of view, which are unwittingly used to give the cities an identity, an identity we recognise or to which others can relate? Invariably, they become a kind of class statement and actually move away from the real identity of the city.
A city - any city - is multilayered in terms of the people inhabiting it. This is a truism but one that needs to be stated from time to time. And, to take that a little further: people create their own unique spaces, which all coexist in one city. Consequently, any identity that one ascribes to a city needs to take this factor into account, which may make a very neat definition difficult, but whatever does emerge will at least reflect the immense complexity of the city itself.
In one of his plays, Gurcharan Das talks of a city as being "cruel, even callous, but always tolerant of our fellow human beings". Tolerant at times, perhaps, and at other times not so. Cities can spawn groups and sub- groups that can be exclusive, even hostile, as nothing really binds them except the contexts that members of a group share. So it happens that on an occasion people will gather to assault a person who they think is a thief or who has done something which offends them. At other times, as was the case in Kolkata recently, when an attempt was made to snatch a young female model coming out of a house off the street and into a car, not a single person came to her aid. In fact, when her companion - also a model - tried to stop the two men trying to abduct her, he was thrashed by them. They then turned their attention back to the girl, but fortunately a police van came into view and the attackers fled.
Perhaps, this is a function of the multiplicity of social levels: had the community been small, such an act could not have taken place as the people involved would be generally known. Differences in social structures breed anonymity, which, as Das says, can create tolerance, in that a person can pretty much do what he wants to and no one would really be bothered, and at the same time it can breed hostility, which again elicits no response other than curiosity.
The ills of a city that need attention must, equally, be remedied in a manner that is not only conscious but has, as its centre, an awareness of the city's different worlds. The tailor who sets out every morning to his small shop, takes a few minutes off in the afternoon to eat a frugal meal and then goes back to work and finally finds his way on foot or by bus to the room that is his home inhabits one Delhi; the young television anchor who drives to work in his Ford Ikon, spends his day working on scripts, in the make-up room and in the studio and rounds his day off with a drive home and a tired night with a can of beer inhabits a totally different Delhi. The cities the two see are different; they might as well be in two totally different places.
This is precisely why solutions to a city's problems cannot be churned out in a facile manner by people in the municipal commissioner's office.
And in that city through a forked November Love, like a Catherine-wheel, de lighted me And when it sputtered out, hung charred and sombre, The city flavoured my delicious misery. And so I guess that any landscape's beauty Is fathered by associative joys Held in a shared, historic memory, For beauty is the shape of our desires.
(A City Remembered by Vernon Scannell)Rows upon rows of tenements never solve the housing problems that afflict our cities because the premise on which they are conceived, designed and built are only dimly understood. Certainly the multitudes of worlds that constitute the city do not weigh with the bureaucrats who are trying to provide for accommodation for slum-dwellers. Accommodation for slum-dwellers. This is where the problem lies, in the attitude. Slum-dwellers are people in the city. What needs to be done is to look at that first, at different ways of living, what Vernon Scannell calls "associative joys" in his poem, look at them the way Laurie Baker did, who then built homes that embodied that way of living for those people.
So too with transport, and roads - these too reflect and embody how a city lives its different lives in its different worlds. So why must the authorities persist with their squint-eyed approach to this, as to housing? An eloquent example of this kind of work is in the gallant attempt by the Delhi authorities to provide flyovers on the arterial ring road that runs almost completely round the city. They built them and proudly opened them to the public and must now be appalled at the horrific traffic jams at the foot of these flyovers. Clearly, not one of those who worked on the project had the faintest notion that it is on the roads that different worlds come together. These worlds collide and are hopelessly entangled as they try to retain their separate yet coexisting presences.
If one has to work for a city, one must try to understand it first: not just its different worlds but also how it is a snare in which one is caught and which one must untangle with understanding, even compassion. It is where we will spend our days and where we will end them, as the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy knew:
. . .the city will follow you, In the same streets you'll wander endlessly, The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age, In the same house go white at last- The city is a cage. No other places, always this Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists To take you from yourself. . .
(The City)Understanding a city is of prime importance: its essential nature and its separate yet interdependent worlds. Whatever we do for it must recognise that, and where this has been realised, cities have developed, even blossomed, for instance, when open spaces and parks have been provided. Other tasks may not be so easy, but they have to be addressed, not so much out of necessity as out of the love one must have for one's city. Poets have understood that love; so have some designers like Laurie Baker. Surely others can do the same, if our cities are not going to become nightmare spaces in which we are condemned to live.
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