Do Indian Cities Need To Be More Densely Populated?

Economic activity and population density are highly concentrated in Indian cities. About half the people in India's financial capital, Mumbai, live in slums; this is seen as a failure of the city's urban planning. Nearly 60 per cent of India's billionaires live in Mumbai and Delhi. This, too, is cited as an example of the country's poor urban planning, and many are led into believing that Indian cities should broaden to empty out dense city cores. If that happens, mass transit ridership may decline, as people will have clearer roads to drive on, and vehicle ownership will rise. This, in turn, will congest roads and pollute the atmosphere. This has already happened in many Indian cities like Delhi – another experiment seen as a failure.

As only an insignificant fraction of India's land is needed to build houses and office space for the whole of India's population, scarcity of land does not explain why Indian cities are dense. So, do all these examples prove India's urbanisation is skewed?

The advantage

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points out that cities attract poor people in large numbers for the same reason as they attract wealthy individuals. Amenities and businesses are concentrated in dense areas of cities and these properties attract people regardless of their income levels. High density is important for greater concentration of amenities, and interaction among firms providing complementary services. It is also important for like-minded people to find each other.

India's metropolises, in fact, are congested to the point that people are not able to fully reap the advantages of living there. The air quality is poor; diseases spread faster in these cities. The poor face bigger challenges when they stay in these cities; malnourishment is common in slums and illegal colonies. Tooth decay is so common that doctors call many children in Mumbai's slums dental cripples. There is no proper water supply or sanitation. However, all this does not stop them from moving from green villages to scanty urban spaces.

Decoding density

Whether a city is dense or spread out depends on many factors, and these are not within the control of municipal authorities or state governments or the central government. It is not intellectuals or urban planners who decide whether a country – or a city for that matter – has its population and economic activity concentrated in a few centres, or the population spreads out to other urban centres as well.

Culture, among other things, is a factor that decides how dense a city will be. Some cities and countries prefer greater concentration in a few centres. Asian cities, for example, are notoriously dense, while Latin American cities and European cities are not so much. By comparison, many American cities, Atlanta for example, are very sparsely populated.

Urbanisation in the US is more widely spread out, partly on account of cultural preference for space, and partly because of the long history of car ownership. (Car ownership, as such, does not lead to a city spreading out without a prominent urban centre. Many European cities with vehicle ownership levels comparable to American cities still have prominent central business districts, and wealthy individuals prefer to live there.) In the US, there is greater sub-urbanisation because Americans, unlike Europeans, have a strong preference for space.

In thick and thin

Though Delhi is a relatively dense city, there are only 40 people per hectare in some of the city's expensive parts like North Delhi Municipal Corporation. Such low density in central areas and near transit corridors will make it difficult for large cities to benefit adequately from urbanisation. This is true of Mumbai, too. Density in central areas of Mumbai is lower than in global cities that are far less dense. But areas of Mumbai that are not adequately served by infrastructure, such as Kamathipura and Dharavi, are incredibly dense. So, what really ails Indian cities is not density but the fact that density is not properly dealt with.