Urbanisation is the movement of population from rural to urban areas and the resulting increasing proportion of a population that resides in urban rather than rural places. It is derived from the Latin word ‘Urbs’, a term used by the Romans for a city. Thompson Warren defined urbanisation thus: “It is the movement of people from communities concerned chiefly or solely with agriculture to other communities generally larger whose activities are primarily centered in government, trade, manufacture or allied interests.” This is very true of Tamil Nadu.

Urbanisation is a two-way process because it involves not only movement from village to cities and change from agricultural occupation to business, trade, service and profession, but also involves change in the migrants’ attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviour patterns. Facilities like education, healthcare system, employment avenues, civic facilities and social welfare are reasons attracting people to urban areas.

Since urbanisation concerns people, their lives and livelihood, it should have a distinct character, culture and ethos. This is called ‘Urbanism’ which author Jeb Brugmann defines as “a way that builders, users and residents co-design, co-build, co-govern and combine their activities to support ways of production and living that develop their shared advantage.”

‘Urban advantages’ are the four basic elements that make cities ‘magnets of productivity and prosperity’ – economies of density, scale, association and extension. Density is the concentration of people and their activities and this is the most basic of advantage of cities over any other kind of settlement. Density increases the sheer efficiency by which an economic activity could be pursued.

Next is the ‘scale of cities’. It increases the sheer volume of any particular opportunity, producing what we call ‘economies of scale’ that makes activities attractive or services profitable in a big way.

The scale and density of interactions among people with different interests, expertise and objectives then combine to create the third basic element – economy of association that exponentially increases the variety of ways and efficiency with which people can organise, work together, invent solutions and launch joint strategies for urban advantage.

These three economies of density, scale and association create the economies of extension, which is the ability to link the unique economic advantages of one city with those of other cities to create whole new strategies for advantage in the country and the world.

Urbanisation in India does not get the leverage of these urban advantages to the full because it does not practice urbanism of inclusive and shared development. When communities self-organise ways of designing buildings, organising space, arranging urban functions, and governing development in wards and zones to make specific kinds of production very efficient, and specific kinds of living very affordable and productive, this is called “community-based urbanism”. Such forms of urbanism have created centuries-old models of resilient city building.

In urbanism, the focus shifts from opportunistic development of individual plots, buildings and gated-settlements to community-disciplined development of wards and zones with specialised strategies to secure social and economic advantage in the city. Examples of community-based urbanism include the traditions of the bazaar, the mohalla, the madrassa as well as the ‘cosmopolitan slum’, as in the prominent contemporary case of Dharavi in Mumbai.

The advantage of this approach is that its production of many micro and small-scale units and the mixing of units of different sizes to co-locate residential, commercial, and small manufacturing functions makes it accessible to low-income populations, and creates efficient, productive, and governable units of the growing city. The disadvantage is that the approach tends to be based on incremental, cash-flow based building, and is therefore investment-poor. Building standards, public health, and urban services problems are endemic. But these are not irresolvable.

As cities grow, inclusive urbanism gets abandoned giving place to commercial commodification – producing, selling and purchasing generic built-units (square-foot) adopting industrial batch production approach. This is the hallmark of today’s globalisation-driven urbanisation, which is both exclusive and expansionist, keeping majority of citizens away from the ‘development stream’ and allocating scarce economic and environmental resources to the select few. This has become a common phenomenon in urban India and Chennai is no exception.

Urbanisation sans urbanism will make Chennai a ‘brick and mortar real estate’ entity rather than a vibrant human settlement. Such a monstrosity is dreamt of as ‘Global-City’. Chennai is pursuing such a dream of mutating itself into a distant autocratically governed city like Shangai. The question is whether such dreams are affordable, feasible or sustainable in ‘democratic’ Chennai?

(The author is a former IAS officer)