What systemic deficiencies do our cities face globally?
They are of two types: visible and invisible.
“The crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it.” — Tom McDonough
Cities across the globe are under stress. Not just under the physical stress of swelling and sprawling but also on a systemic level. With the rising population and increasing complexity of urban environments, the political and regulatory systems are under strain. The institutional scars of these systems have reached the surface. They have been exposed by crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and the reverse migration.
Systemic deficiencies can be defined as the irregularities and consequences of the defects in the overall operation of a system.
Drawing from the cases of the pandemic and informal settlement, this article tries to identify systemic deficiencies in the governance systems of our cities. It also seeks to understand systems’ positionality in the cities of the global south.
Broadly, the systemic deficiencies can be categorised into two, visible and invisible. The urban services we get, the socio-political structures that govern them, and the conditions of urban living they produce are some of the visible deficiencies that occur in our cities. Whereas identity and knowledge production are the invisible deficiencies.
The systems of governance, regulations, and policies were developed around the concept of the urban condition. Systemic abstractions were developed to help us interpret, analyse, govern and ultimately resolve our issues of urban living. However, over time these abstract forms evolved into orthodox cultures. They have become distant, inaccessible, and invisible. Therefore, we must engage with urban systems and configure them to address our urban challenges.
Governance structures and Urban Inequities
COVID-19 pandemic exposed two particular aspects that deal with the working of Indian cities. The first one is the poor service delivery or provision of infrastructure. And the second is the prevalence of lack of agency in the informal sector.
Whether it is the mechanism of ration supplies or the social protection policy for informal workers, the systemic infrastructure is flawed at numerous levels. One direct problem with the apparatus of social protection is the non-recognition of domestic workers as a part of the Informal Economy. This non-recognition within the system created an identification problem. This led to uneven distributions of the government’s monetary and food provisions.
Another problem was with the entitlements. More than half of the construction workers did not have proper registrations. This meant that only those who had registered received the promised cash transfers. At the same time, others were left struggling with no income. The lack of registration is not a simple ‘implementation gap.’ But rather a result of procedural mechanisms of registration not designed to trust workers or fit into their lives. (Gautam Bhan, 2020). This case highlights the necessity of a data-informed policy for social protection.
The pandemic revealed the dependence of Indian cities on the informal economy. In the absence of labourers and workers, construction and domestic sectors took a major hit. Restaurant staff, peons in office buildings, vegetable sellers, food delivery guys formed a bulk of essential workers. Cities thrive in the presence of an informal economy due to their involvement in servicing the urban sector. While they served vital functions during the pandemic, schemes designed for them never reached them. They were solely from an elite perspective (weforum). As a result, the issues faced by marginalised sections continue to exist.
The lack of agency or powerlessness is further linked to urban poverty. For the most part, poverty is not because the urban poor are distanced from infrastructure but it is because they are excluded. They are excluded from attributes that remain a monopoly of a privileged minority. Take the case of housing. Housing policies incorporate the attributes of adequacy and affordability. But, rarely is viability taken into account. The consideration of ‘viability attribute’ enables a practitioner to think from the position of urban poor and their hyperlocal needs. Yet, it is left out.
The subject of housing goes beyond the provision of a permanent house. Informal settlements, the form of house and the locality chosen by urban poor is majorly determined by their work profile. It is a home-grown indigenous habitat. In most cases, their housing needs are different from those provided by housing schemes. At times, a part of this population works in cities to repay the debts of their houses in their native village. So, the government schemes do not approach the problem with the transient needs of the urban poor in mind; instead, it seeks to dominate them. Moreover, with prohibitions in the provisioning of services as free-market mechanisms and restrictions on individuals or groups to act on them, the urban poor are denied political autonomy. In the lack of agency, the population cannot participate in the market. As a consequence, services cannot be co-produced and remain inadequately provisioned.
Perhaps, this is why Patrick Schumacher made a bold statement for getting rid of regulations and reinforcing the idea of market-driven approaches. He says, “We do not have a real market in the real-estate provision, that’s why we have a housing crisis. Housing for [All] can only be provided by the freely self-regulating and self-motivating market processes.”
The market conditions of housing and provisioning are tailored to cause urban poverty. It is a created and maintained phenomenon. The artificial dominance over land properties and the intentional lowering of wages is a diabolical measure. It ensures that workers never receive enough money to buy property. So, eventually, only people who own assets are capable of trade. And hence, they continue to dominate and colonise the market of housing, land and provisioning services.
So, as we transition to a post-pandemic city, it is critical that we re-structure to solve these problems. We need to make our city more inclusive by thinking from the positions of the vulnerable and dispossessed.
The issue of identity
The informal settlement of Agargaon, in Bangladesh, grew on government land. 20 years later, the government planned to construct new institutions on that land. This meant the immediate eviction of thousands of residents. The slum dwellers were considered ‘illegal’ and had no official address. They were denied basic services and entitlements like water, sanitation, and healthcare services. Usually, this lack of governance and accountability in slum settlements resulted in residents paying heavily to access basic services. Local influential leaders, known as mastaans, took charge of the situation. They informally provided services with the help of local government authorities of the city. Then they extracted money from the residents for the provisioning of those services. On the ground level, these residents did not have any other option. They had to depend on those with a recognised identity and network connections.
This is why a few NGOs came forward and started implementing projects of water and sanitation programmes. But, when the evictions took place, these NGOs lost a lot of their capital investments thus, disincentivising them from implementing service delivery.
So, the identity aspects related to residency classifies the urban poor under the ambit of ‘illegality.’ It excludes them from the larger social, economic, and cultural processes of the city. Like that of a mastaan, a person’s identity becomes the deciding factor in terms of procurement and distribution of services. It normalises the situation as one caused by the own wrong-doings of dwellers and not as a result of unfair market mechanisms. Therefore, it aggravates their vulnerability to socio-economic and legal abuse.
Deprivation in Urban Living and urban health
The deficiencies in provisioning services exploit the urban poor. They spend a large portion of their income fetching basic services such as food, water, sanitation, etc. But these deficiencies and their systems are not confined to poor settlements. How? The provisioning services deficiencies force the higher-income dwellers to find better housing opportunities. These services then become the victims of quality due to the lack of legitimisation or lack of market, thus, providing inadequate quality at higher prices.
Therefore, the major contributor to the deprivation in urban living is the access to provisioning services. With systemic restrictions and difficulties in access, the overall health of the settlement degrades.
Knowledge production
In the context of cities, knowledge production and consumption is an invisible phenomenon. This is why it is mostly overlooked as a solution to urban challenges. It serves as an intangible infrastructure to the urban discourse.
Whether we think of revelations of the pandemic or listen to the stories narrated by informal settlements, knowledge production emerges as a tool to enrich public thinking in matters of crisis. With a recent experience of the pandemic, we all can relate to the concepts of lockdowns and social distancing. But the younger generations and the ones after them, may or may not even associate with these concepts. So, time becomes an important factor in why knowledge production is an essential dynamic.
With each city facing the effects of a crisis, like climate change, differently, knowledge and its dissemination are what can build momentum to address issues. It bears the value of storing and representing the order of any given time. Thus, as a precursor to co-production practices, the city-systems will have to proactively engage with data — its production, visualisation, and delivery.
Knowledge systems, whether traditional or ones in development, characteristically describe their own social and political orders. However, in the face of disruptive events, this knowledge and order may gradually fade to history. Therefore, the act of knowledge production, consumption, and dissemination about urban order, is an essential dynamic to preserve rationality.
In conclusion, we have observed systemic deficiencies of urban systems in the contexts of pandemic and informal settlements. However, a similar study can be drawn with different frames and contexts. On the path of seeking solutions to urban challenges on a systemic level, the notion of systemic deficiencies becomes an important milestone. In the upcoming article, we will explore a few ways to tackle systemic deficiencies.
About the Writer
Ajinkya Jamadar is an architect with an inclination towards Sustainable Development and Urban Ecologies. He has previously worked at Bangalore based architecture firm Biome Environmental Solutions. He is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Bhopal.
About the Editor
Srishti Mehta is the author of “From the Land of Mist and Snow: Haikus from Antarctica”. She is a creative writer, editor and publisher. She is the Editor-in-Chief at Zeyka. She is a graduate of the St. Xavier College, Ahmedabad, and the H.R. College of Commerce and Economics, University of Mumbai (MU). She has been the India Ambassador of the International Antarctica Expedition (2018) with 2041 Foundation. She has diverse volunteer experience in natural field studies, explorations, and journalism with numerous organisations including the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), Mumbai.
About the Illustrator
Ayadi Mishra is an undergraduate architecture student at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Bhopal. She is a writer, illustrator and graphic designer. She has experience working with An Architect, Ethos India, WPF Creatives, Nivedha Foundation, SkyManga. She has attended summer school at the Hunnarshala Foundation for Building Technology & Innovations, Bhuj, and has been a finalist in Solar Decathlon India.
