[Reader-list] Edward Glaeser on Bombay/Mumbai (no) high-rises (The Atlantic)

[Patrice Riemens]

NB: This is probably more something specifically for Bombayites/Mumbaikars
among you...


from:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/

How Skyscrapers Can Save the City
by Edward Glaeser
The Atlantic Monthly, Feb 20, 2011


Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting,
tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and
creativity. Yet some urban planners and preservationists seem to have a
misplaced fear of heights that yields damaging restrictions on how tall a
building can be. From New York to Paris to Mumbai, there’s a powerful case
for building up, not out.

The Bombay/Mumbai part:

(...) Nowhere have limits on development done more harm than in the Indian
mega-city of Mumbai.

It’s a pity that so few ordinary people can afford to live in central
Paris or Manhattan, but France and the U.S. will survive. The problems
caused by arbitrarily restricting height in the developing world are far
more serious, because they handicap the metropolises that help turn
desperately poor nations into middle-income countries. The rules that keep
India’s cities too short and too expensive mean that too few Indians can
connect, with each other and with the outside world, in the urban places
that are making that poor country richer. Since poverty often means death
in the developing world, and since restricting city growth ensures more
poverty, it is not hyperbole to say that land-use planning in India can be
a matter of life and death.

Mumbai is a city of astonishing human energy and entrepreneurship, from
the high reaches of finance and film to the jam-packed spaces of the
Dharavi slum. All of this private talent deserves a public sector that
performs the core tasks of city government—like providing sewers and safe
water—without overreaching and overregulating. One curse of the developing
world is that governments take on too much and fail at their main
responsibilities. A country that cannot provide clean water for its
citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.

The public failures in Mumbai are as obvious as the private successes.
Western tourists can avoid the open-air defecation in Mumbai’s slums, but
they can’t avoid the city’s failed transportation network. Driving the 15
miles from the airport to the city’s old downtown, with its landmark
Gateway of India arch, can easily take 90 minutes. There is a train that
could speed your trip, but few Westerners have the courage to brave its
crowds during rush hour. In 2008, more than three people each working day
were pushed out of that train to their death. Average commute times in
Mumbai are roughly 50 minutes each way, which is about double the average
American commute.

The most cost-effective means of opening up overcrowded city streets would
be to follow Singapore and charge more for their use. If you give
something away free, people will use too much of it. Mumbai’s roads are
just too valuable to be clogged up by ox carts at rush hour, and the
easiest way to get flexible drivers off the road is to charge them for
their use of public space. Congestion charges aren’t just for rich cities;
they are appropriate anywhere traffic comes to a standstill. After all,
Singapore was not wealthy in 1975, when it started charging drivers for
using downtown streets. Like Singapore, Mumbai could just require people
to buy paper day licenses to drive downtown, and require them to show
those licenses in their windows. Politics, however, and not technology,
would make this strategy difficult.

Mumbai’s traffic problems reflect not just poor transportation policy, but
a deeper and more fundamental failure of urban planning. In 1991, Mumbai
fixed a maximum floor-to-area ratio of 1.33 in most of the city, meaning
that it restricted the height of the average building to 1.33 stories: if
you have an acre of land, you can construct a two-story building on
two-thirds of an acre, or a three-story building on four-ninths of an
acre, provided you leave the rest of the property empty. In those years,
India still had a lingering enthusiasm for regulation, and limiting
building heights seemed to offer a way to limit urban growth.

But Mumbai’s height restrictions meant that, in one of the most densely
populated places on Earth, buildings could have an average height of only
one and a third stories. People still came; Mumbai’s economic energy drew
them in, even when living conditions were awful. Limiting heights didn’t
stop urban growth, it just ensured that more and more migrants would
squeeze into squalid, illegal slums rather than occupying legal apartment
buildings.

Singapore doesn’t prevent the construction of tall buildings, and its
downtown functions well because it’s tall and connected. Businesspeople
work close to one another and can easily trot to a meeting. Hong Kong is
even more vertical and even friendlier to pedestrians, who can walk in
air-conditioned skywalks from skyscraper to skyscraper. It takes only a
few minutes to get around Wall Street or Midtown Manhattan. Even vast
Tokyo can be traversed largely on foot. These great cities function
because their height enables a huge number of people to work, and
sometimes live, on a tiny sliver of land. But Mumbai is short, so everyone
sits in traffic and pays dearly for space.

A city of 20 million people occupying a tiny landmass could be housed in
corridors of skyscrapers. An abundance of close and connected vertical
real estate would decrease the pressure on roads, ease the connections
that are the lifeblood of a 21st-century city, and reduce Mumbai’s
extraordinarily high cost of space. Yet instead of encouraging compact
development, Mumbai is pushing people out. Only six buildings in Mumbai
rise above 490 feet, and three of them were built last year, with more on
the way as some of the height restrictions have been slightly eased,
especially outside the traditional downtown. But the continuing power of
these requirements explains why many of the new skyscrapers are surrounded
by substantial green space. This traps tall buildings in splendid
isolation, so that cars, rather than feet, are still needed to get around.
If Mumbai wants to promote affordability and ease congestion, it should
make developers use their land area to the fullest, requiring any new
downtown building to have at least 40 stories. By requiring developers to
create more, not less, floor space, the government would encourage more
housing, less sprawl, and lower prices.

Historically, Mumbai’s residents couldn’t afford such height, but many can
today, and they would live in taller buildings if those buildings were
abundant and affordable. Concrete canyons, such as those along New York’s
Fifth Avenue, aren’t an urban problem—they are a perfectly reasonable way
to fit a large number of people and businesses on a small amount of land.
Only bad policy prevents a long row of 50-story buildings from lining
Mumbai’s seafront, much as high-rises adorn Chicago’s lakefront.

The magic of cities comes from their people, but those people must be well
served by the bricks and mortar that surround them. Cities need roads and
buildings that enable people to live well and to connect easily with one
another. Tall towers, like Henry Ford II’s Renaissance Center in Detroit,
make little sense in places with abundant space and slack demand. But in
the most desirable cities, whether they’re on the Hudson River or the
Arabian Sea, height is the best way to keep prices affordable and living
standards high.

(...)