| the selection of images, 'India' versus 'china'
| is telling, but the question is pertinent, given
| the shrill rhetoric in the NGO and sustainability
| architect circles ("less democracy, more sustainability")
| around here.
Seeing the Forest for the Tree-huggers: The Challenge of Democratic
Green Development
Exit the well-tended grounds and imposing gates of DS Kulkarni’s massive
Vishwa development, and the noisy, chaotic spectacle of urban India
unfolds. It’s also, not coincidently, where the Pune City limits end.
Most of the large private developments springing up around Pune are
being built on former agricultural land in the unincorporated villages
beyond the reach of municipal regulation. Over the last few years, civic
and environmental activists in Pune have united behind a campaign to
“Save hills, Save Pune,” which resulted last year in the passage of a
visionary “Green Development Plan” to limit construction and promote
bio-diversity parks on the environmentally sensitive hills surrounding
the city. Meanwhile, just over the crest of the protected hills, the
relentless demand for cheap land is pushing development farther away
from the city and straining an already overstretched urban infrastructure.
India’s largest metropolis, Mumbai (formally Bombay), has recently
proposed a set of green building guidelines for all new residential
construction based on Pune’s Eco-housing initiative. If adopted, it will
be the first mandatory certification program in India. Ever since the
devastating floods in Mumbai in July 2005, citizen groups have demanded
swift action from municipal authorities to upgrade the city’s choked
water and sewer systems and channel development away from sensitive
flood zones. The new Eco-housing guidelines were in part a response to
the environmental vulnerability of the Mumbai’s eight million poor, many
of whom are crowded into flotsam shantytowns lining the rivers and
drainage canals.
A 2003 McKinsey report on the future of Mumbai, commissioned by
prominent business leaders, was typically exultant about the role of the
private sector in remaking India’s aging financial capital into a world
class city. The report generated a raft of criticism from urban planners
and environmentalists responding to the assessment of Mumbai’s potential
as the “next Shanghai.” The critics say that Shanghai, with its ardent
embrace of capitalism, has become an urban dystopia of vertical concrete
slums and endless tangles of asphalt.
But China’s spectacular economic growth over the last 10 years has only
been possible with the strong, guiding hand (and sometimes the fist) of
the communist state. From 1990 to 2000, the Chinese government invested
an estimated $100 billion in the infrastructure of its cities.
Progressives in India, on the other hand, will argue endlessly on moral
high ground of the state’s responsibility to ensure economic and
environmental justice while ceding the real ground to feckless private
developers.
In a democracy, people can shape the development process and whom it
serves. Any definition of “green” development must take into
consideration not just outcomes in terms of water conserved and
kilowatts saved, but also in terms of how much democratic participation
is involved. Can we truly call “green” in any meaningful political sense
China’s plan to forcibly move a third of its population from farms to
flats in a single generation, no matter how healthy and efficient their
new homes? Such a frighteningly bold leap into modernity would simply be
unthinkable in democratic India where people have a voice and a vote.
But the challenge for India, and many countries committed to truly a
green building movement, is can they take an equally bold intellectual
leap toward a democratic development that’s good for the planet and the
people that live on it.
cont'd....
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3503