Whenever commentators, academics and policy-makers call for ‘Smart Cities’ , I end up scratching my head, asking myself the question- do these people think that our cities are dumb ? Let's get this adequately clear- Cities are smart. Have been and always will be. The reason our cities are in a mess when compared to Chinese, Japanese or Western cities is that our administrators and governments are dumber than theirs. Way dumber !
Why do I call our governments dumb?- They refuse to recognise that cities are evolving systems which work better when guided by the invisible hand of the market. Our governments still think that they can do a better job of guiding the functioning and evolution of cities than markets. They think of themselves as gladiators fighting for the interests of the urban poor when they do little more than collect hafta from developers and keep us all in a collective state of misery.
For that reason, I’ve come to see that calls for smart regulation are dangerous no matter how well intentioned they are. Governments take this as endorsements to their assumed role of guiding (read- wrecking) the growth of cities. They will continue to make master plans to keep us urbanites less productive than our peers in other countries.
Recently, Ashwin Mahesh- a noted commentator on Urban affairs wrote an article supporting the resuscitation of the BMLTA (Bangalore Metropolitan Land Transport Authority) in Bangalore so as to bring about more synergies in the two modes of transport in the city - Bus i.e BMTC and Metro. Smart Regulation eh ?. The reason he gave was that there are coordination problems in the market at present and hence the efficiency of the public transport system in Bangalore was sub-par. What he forgot to mention was the reason there are coordination problems in the system- It's run by the government ! A legal monopoly courtesy Sec 99 of the Indian Motor Vehicles Act,1988. ! . A better option exists- removal of the monopoly and privatization of BMTC. ‘Prices’ work as better coordinating mechanism than governments. All other mechanisms are poor cousins of the Market based Price System. I fail to understand this aversion to entrepreneurial solutions to the problem of Urban mobility.
R Jagannathan a wrote a while back - ‘ Smart Cities need a transparent land-use and building permits policy. ………………Smart land use policies actually create more land and more public and road spaces.’. It is these two lines which prompted me to write this lengthy response. Here too, the emphasis is on ‘Smart Policy’ and ‘Smart Regulation’. It ignores the fact that only the most minimally interventionist Land Use and Building Permits Policy can be transparent. Anything else is already corrupt or will soon be. Smart Land Use Policies create no land for anything. Any ‘Land Use Policy’ has only one impact- reduce availability of land for more productive uses. What is needed is a Land Use Policy which is minimally interventionist. Anything else is usually dumb and keeps any city from reaching it’s full potential !.
Commentators who make well intentioned calls for ‘Smart Regulation’ of cities need to emphasise that they are asking for minimal regulation. If not, our ‘all-knowing’ policymakers will take it as an endorsement for central planning of our cities !
