India Shining was born in 1991, the year India liberalised its economy. It is an archipelago, a collection of islands where the middle class Indian dreams of leading a life at par with his cousins in America. And now they can, in Orange County, Beverly Park, Regent Park, Malibu Towne, thanks to the government finally realising the failure of state-controlled planning and allowing private players to step in.

Each island contains a range of housing options, glittering shopping complexes, glassy office towers, even schools, arranged neatly according to well-laid out internal master-plans. The range of architectural design on display in India Shining is truly unprecedented.
With the government allowing 100 per cent foreign direct investment in real estate from 2005, India Shining welcomed foreign professionals to design and execute buildings and complexes without much concern for their suitability in the Indian context as long as they looked impressively international. The islands are now ambitiously competing with each other to get globally-recognised star architects to create signature landmarks to soar high above the sea of suburban style residential development, office parks and SEZs. Not much thought is given to long-term sustainability, to the resources servicing these islands, such as water, public transport and public scape.
The islands of India Shining loosely float in a complex spatial sea where two different spaces intermingle. The first is the high-density historic and collapsing cities, large and small, where most of India’s wealth is generated. These spaces are more and more being referred to as India Crumbling. Post 1991, the economically-powerful middle class in these cities started demanding better infrastructure and planning in the mode of India Shining. So the government and the private sector are now investing heavily in the renewal and revitalisation of India Crumbling. Streets are being beautified, new flyovers rapidly constructed over any traffic intersection that quickly done studies reveal as problematic, river fronts spruced up to resemble the South Bank of the Thames, chosen monuments lit at night and more strictly cordoned off to prevent even the most adventurous child from playing nearby as children boisterously do in the most celebrated of historic cities, Venice. The flagship idea driving the renewal of India Crumbling is the public-private-partnership, or PPP, that seeks to operationally privatise as much of the government as possible. The success of these beautification and renewal efforts are highly debatable as in the case of the makeover of Delhi for the Commonwealth Games. There seems to be little long-term planning or vision driving these efforts other than a flirtatious engagement with the elusive dream of becoming a world-class city.
The second kind of complex spaces around India Shining are the environments that the majority of urban Indians find themselves in — unplanned, chaotic, grappling with urban poverty and surviving on informal economies. This is the world of India Surviving. Liberalised India and its liberal design and planning ideas by and large have not touched the lives of India Surviving, which works, as Jeb Brugman points out in his book, Urban Revolution, “free of imported ideas and plans, foreign capital, government regulation, and investment schemes”. This is the India that walks and cycles to work, and travels in over-crowded buses and trains. This is the India that claims spaces owned by others to live and work, converting flood-prone vacant low-lying areas into thriving settlements over time, and flimsy platforms projecting from public walls into bustling business centres. In the absence of the state providing services, particularly housing, the citizens of India Surviving not only rely on informal markets but also illegal ones, as was poignantly brought to light in the recent collapse of an illegal apartment building in east Delhi where more than 70 residents, all new migrants, died. Liberal ideas in design and planning continue to be about formal spaces. In defying all rules of the formal, India Surviving also defies the imagination of architects and planners who have no training of ad hoc city building or understanding of urbanism shaped mainly through the occupiers.
The three stereotypical urban realities that we just encountered are products of very different approaches to citymaking. The 20th century records three main approaches to planning. The first is centralised master planning that originally produced many of our crumbling cities as a reaction to post-Independence urbanisation and industrialisation to create modern cities. It demarcated mono-functional land uses and placed critical infrastructure for projected future populations. The second is social planning, which emerged in the western world as a reaction to the tendency of the master plan to solve social problems with technical means. This form of planning, focusing on local areas, communities, and social justice, never really took off in India other than in the advocacy works of NGOs and other civic society organisations. The third idea though, of market driven neo-liberal planning, really took off in India in the last two decades and produced India Shining. However, neither central master planning nor market-driven neo-liberal planning solved the inherent problems of Indian cities nor magically transformed them into modern global cities.
Our liberal ideas in design and planning first and foremost need to embrace India Surviving and understand the logic of city building that allows migrant populations to survive and thrive. Before undertaking any major project, liberal planning and design processes should engage not only economic and technical experts, but also cross-sections of citizens. Liberal ideas should unstereotype the urbanisms of the many Indias to create cities that are dynamic, green and equitable, where people of different backgrounds, age, gender and abilities can have their say and find ways to be happy.

Sudeshna Chatterjee is an
urban designer, writer and researcher based in Delhi