Satellite imagery is a beautiful thing in civilian hands. Never before has it been possible to get a birds eye view of ones country and zoom in on blotches of green and brown that gives us some sense of the rampant urbanisation being experienced. While few can disagree over this crisis, even fewer are intervening to resolve it.
Lets face it, decision-making in Pakistan is no easy task, made more arduous still by our governments ensnarement in the administrative trap. This is usually explained as a state of affairs where government structures are organised vertically into units of sectoral, or functional, ministries and departments. This works reasonably well until the system encounters a problem like urbanisation which is of a very broad and highly integrated nature. Then the system tackles the symptoms that are identifiable to each unit or sub-unit as a problem in, and of, itself. This would make it seem that incoherent policies and poor coordination are the root cause of the urban problem, but that would be half the story.
The fact is that the continuing drive to enhance the productivity of the city-sphere is changing the macro-economic context in which the development of urban areas is taking place. This is reflected in the entire South Asian region where globalisation and decentralisation are re-engineering the political economy of cities as never before.
These forces have introduced a new and powerful dynamic to the conditions of unprecedented urbanisation already being experienced and it seems that the role of cities as engines of the economy and spaces for capital flows between domestic and global markets is increasingly being accepted by decision makers. As the city economy depends largely on the availability (or the foreseeability) of capital, urban development in turn becomes an exercise in ensuring the efficient and undisrupted flow of capital.
However, experience suggests that decision-makers often agree to take a particular course of action only to find that they have embarked on a trajectory which leaves them in a state of development lock-in. This logjam of being locked into specific-path development trajectories has been witnessed in the policies of the government over the years.
Furthermore, new urban developments may seem innocent and the benefits apparent. However, as our technical abilities to assess risks sharpen, surprises may eventually be faced that are often unpleasant. This allows us to appreciate the need for informed planning for both the critical present and the sustainable future even though it may become disadvantageous to wait before responding to our urban crisis.
Indeed, problems can become more and more complex and require additional resources to overcome with the passage of time. As in the case of Pakistani cities, there is not only less breathing room for stakeholders to change direction once a specific pathway is taken but also greater complexity of conditions to address. This translates into a greater potential threat for locking into development pathways that may not respond quickly to changes in governmental regulation later.
One has to respect the Chinese for using the same word for crisis and opportunity, and if the powers that be are not completely impervious to organisational and social change in times of crisis, they would do well to take a leaf out of a Chinamans book. As humans seem predisposed to intervene in this tangled mess of urban spaghetti, the solution to our problems needs to be far-reaching.
The need of the hour is a means-ends adjustment which places urban development as a means to ends of economic development, social equity and environmental justice as opposed to being an end-in-itself.
Along the path to a sustainable future, decision-makers need to launch an integrated assault on the ravages of urbanisation and actively seek the public interest by taking a communicative turn to register preferences and provide choices. This stems from the recognition that human beings are diverse people interacting in complex systems of economic and social relations, within which they develop potentially very varied ways of perceiving the world, of identifying their preferences and values, of reasoning about them, and of conducting relations with others.
Issues need to be discussed in the public realm and normative principles developed with which we might assess our discussions and build interrelations across our differences. In the wake of disasters of a human or natural origin, we are also forced to move towards more communicative and reactive cities. These scenarios question not the effectiveness of our technological or socio-economic constructs for combating urbanisation, for there would be no end to them given the wanton abandon with which advice and guidance is meted out; but our preparedness to address these issues holistically. In this time of crisis and opportunity, preparedness can come only with integrated and informed planning, and if Einstein is right, chance should favour us.
The writer is a consultant on public policy.
