It is convenient for us to insist on our unfettered right to development. But the blunt truth is that sustainability is an important issue. Rather than simply worry about the costs of dealing with sustainability issues, we can also look at the opportunities. India is at the threshold of rapid urbanisation. A little regulatory smartness up front on a range of things, like building codes, transport systems, assessments of the ecological footprint of cities, can entail huge savings down the line. Part of the reason we are intimidated by this issue is that much of the attention of the little urban discourse there is focuses on the cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, rather than on the real areas of growth and targets of opportunity: tier two towns and cities. As with growth and inclusion the question of sustainability cannot by pass the cities.

Cities historically are, for good or for ill, the sites of new forms of sociability and new kinds of politics. As so much research has shown, the patters of violence in a society are profoundly shaped by forms of urbanisation in so many different ways. Crime rates are a function of many things. But they are crucially influenced by the spatial architecture of the city. Cities that are conducive to more people being out on the streets, where populations are not starkly separated in spatial terms by class, where use of space mixes different kinds of activities like residential and commercial are, other things being equal likely to have less crime than cities segregated by gated communities and stark segregations of populations by class. Adam Smith had noticed a profound truth as early as the eighteenth century, when he was trying to explain the differences in crime rates between London and Paris: the poor do not commit crimes because they are poor. They are driven to commit crimes only if the city excludes them spatially and socially, if they find no space in the city. Kolkata was a striking example of a city with low crime and an astonishing degree of urbanity in the best sense of the term, despite its great poverty. Cities whose regulatory regimes spatially segregate the classes starkly are setting themselves up for trouble.

... contd.