Split City - have our urban missions caused multiple personality disorder in our cities ?

I had written in an earlier blog how the urban development process in India has overcome the "plan-was-good-but-implementation-was-poor" impasse by abandoning planning itself. And by planning I am referring not to the oft encountered terms such as "governance", "resilience", "sustainability" etc. etc. which end up meaning pretty much everything (and therefore - nothing), but the art and science of making sense of the future in order to better prepare for it. 

As Brian G. Field and Bryan D. MacGregor wrote:

"Planning is a process of analysis and action which is necessarily about the future. It involves intervention to manipulate procedures or activities in order to achieve goals. Forecasting is crucial to such a process." 

- 'Forecasting Techniques for Urban and Regional Planning'

Our political leaders and government officials love to mention in public speeches how the length of roads and pipes built in the country could well nigh be measuring tapes for the solar system and the number of dwelling units built under our housing programs could house the population of certain developed countries six times over (that is, provided they agree to stay in homes of the size of 25 to 30 square meters. I have been involved in building scores of these...I have some idea).

But the mere reaching of astronomical numbers and sizes is not a measure of the functionality of the amenities created.

I wrote in the blog how new affordable housing units ended up getting constructed under an earlier central government scheme right next to a slum which was being upgraded under a current state government scheme.

Presumably, the affordable housing scheme (intended to house the residents of the slum), and the slum upgrading scheme (intended to keep the slum residents in their existing settlement) were not exactly on talking terms. The result was a creation of new housing units for households that didn't need them anymore.

The phenomenon is commonly described by concerned folk as the challenge of "working in silos". The solution prescribed is often a healthy dose of the magic medicine called "convergence".

But the problem is a bit more complex than remaining and operating in silos. It seems to be one of full blown Dissociative Identity Disorder (or split personality disorder).

Split City Syndrome

Working in silos would suggest that a particular unit dealing with a project or its part is not communicating adequately with other units dealing with related projects or other parts of the same project.

However, a multiple personality syndrome would be when the same unit acts like totally different entities when dealing with separate parts of the same project or with different but inter-related projects. For example, when working with Swachh Bharat Mission the same planning office may be oblivious of the fact that Pradhaan PMAY houses contain toilets and then while working with PMAY, it may forget that toilets for the targeted households may already have been constructed under SBM. This transition may happen seamlessly over the hours of the same working day.

This is not mere speculation. This is exactly what's going on in the field, in the cities and towns of India (comfortably far away from the large halls of Vigyan Bhawan where the National Urban Planning Conclave was recently held).

While attempting to saturate each and every slum settlement of a state with individual household level toilets, the alarm suddenly rings that the households that have applied for PMAY funding for benficiary led house construction (BLC) should be factored in. 

That is certainly a wise thing to do, except that "factoring it in" effectively translates into counting the houses that have applied for PMAY BLC funding as "toilets that have already been constructed."

When thinking about toilets, the SBM personality dominates. Like a hammer seeing everything as a nail, that personality trait sees everything as a toilet. It eliminates all other rooms in a BLC house and sees only the toilet. It cares not if the house has been built or not. Then when the time comes to look at what is going on with the PMAY BLC house construction, all hell breaks loose, because it is realised that the construction has not even started as funds from the centre have not yet been released. When the PMAY personality trait dominates, then the SBM trait dissolves -- only the ghosts of toilets in yet-to-be-built houses populate the spreadsheets of SBM. 

Convergence is desirable...but not at the top 

The attempt to use the concept of "convergence" to link and coordinate the various mission verticals is a good idea. Overcoming the analysis-paralysis of long drawn planning exercises was necessary. If planning lags behind reality by an ever increasing margin then such planning is useless. As Otto Koenisberger had remarked already in the 1960s, after his experience with plan making in Karachi, that by the time the plan was prepared it was already out of date.

However, an implementation frenzy of the kind we are seeing in our cities, where the various mission verticals try to maximise their own outputs without paying any heed to how other missions are intertwined with it, is not desirable either. 

Advances in technology and computing make it possible to have dynamic, real-time systems that can coordinate the functioning of inter-connected mission verticals. The so called "convergence" of these missions is not supposed to happen at a higher level of decision-making - for example, an over-arching department of planning and convergence or in the office of a senior IAS officer who is in-charge of multiple mission streams.

It is supposed to happen throughout the network of the mission streams and through the rank-and-file of the organisational system that is in-charge of the implementation. 

More on that in forthcoming blogs...