Structural Limits to Equitable Urbanization

Abstract

The contemporary world is marked by deep inequities in living conditions on the one hand and by serious threats to the prospects of good life in future on the other. These two central problems are often put succinctly as intergenerational and intragenerational injustice. Yet, the typical development planner sees the city as a location where investment, production, consumption and innovation take place. The dominant approach in policy circles is one of competition—the city is supposed to be in endless competition with other cities for markets and for new industries. In this paper, an attempt has been made to understand the tension among the three goals of urbanization—economic growth, sustainability and distributive justice. International development agencies, while articulating a normative standpoint, often combine the three goals in such a way as to create the impression that they form a seamless whole, which could be attained without problems only if the international community had been sensitized about the importance of setting such goals. On the contrary, we unfold the tensions and conflicts, drawing on the Indian urbanization experience and the policy dilemmas to argue that although the imperatives of economic growth in the modern globalized world have an apparent ring of inevitability around them, an articulated view on social justice and appropriate conceptualization of equity through community engagement can help us understand the alternative possibilities with their associated trade-offs, which in turn would help us tread the contested terrain.