The Sclerotic City

In December 2005, in Meerut town, young couples in a park were severelyroughed up, slapped around and dragged by the hair, all the result of abrilliant public exercise by the police - ‘operation majnu’ - whichaimed at restoring ‘public decency and morals’

In September 2005, intimate pictures of a couple caught in a lip-lock whiledancing at a luxury hotel in Chennai led to the suspension of the hotel’slicense, though this was later renewed with ‘very strict’ conditions.

The Vice Chancellor of Anna University, Chennai, D. Viswanathan, has issued aban on the use of cell phones and prescribed a dress code for students in 227engineering colleges which bans ‘tight fitting outfits, skirts or sleevelessclothes and jeans’. His reasoning? "These clothes distract students fromacademic pursuits".

The thriving night clubs of Bangalore have been told not to play music that‘provokes dancing’. "Nightclubs have been told to play classical music",rues Amardipta Biswas, the Secretary of the Bangalore Resto-Lounge Bar andDiscotheque Owners Association. As couples sway to the throbbing music they aretold that they can be arrested - and nightclubs can only remain open till 11.30pm.

In June 2005, the vice-principal of Kirori Mal College at Delhi also saw fitto introduce a dress code. His advice was that the students from the Northeast,in particular, should wear Salwar Kameez ‘to prevent sexual harassment’.

And in a much publicized campaign, the city of Mumbai launched a driveagainst ‘dance bars’ - throwing thousands of girls out of work, and many ofthem into certain prostitution.

With the exception of Meerut, all the other cities in these random exampleswould be listed among India’s foremost cities, long known for theircosmopolitanism and liberalism, which in turn fostered and engendered the wealthof these cities. So what is going on here? Suddenly these bastions of thriving,vibrant energy are being swept by waves of ‘moral policing’. Is it a merecoincidence, or can the rapid decline of these cities be linked to these trendstowards obscurantism, illiberality and intolerance?

Today, Banglore is a pitiful city and bears noresemblance to the vaunted Indian 'Silicon Valley', which saw the eruption of anew and youthful culture, as thousands of talented young professionals poured inand grasped the many opportunities the city had to offer. For decades beforethat, Mumbai was the place to go for creative young professionals, with a milieuthat was comparable to the cosmopolitanism of New York or London. Yet it wasBombay that became one of the first among major Indian cities to buckle underthe forces of narrow communal fanaticism dictated to by the collapse of reasonand driven by the sheer cunning of stupidity.

Under the BJP-Shiv Sena combine, Mumbai progressively clamped down on everyform of free expression and entertainment, banning rock shows, burning filmposters, instituting legal proceedings against ‘nude’ and ‘obscene’models, and following up with oppressive levels of moral policing that had neverbefore been witnessed in India’s commercial and glamour capital. But thesuccessor Congress government has been no better, with its infamous crackdown on‘bar girls’, continuous and arbitrary police action against couples onpromenades under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with ‘indecentexposure and obscenity’.

All this is happening at a time when the country is witnessing urbanizationat a scale never seen before, with millions pouring into cities and urbancentres, which swell from mofussil towns into megaoplisis. This newurbanism - in which cities are unnoticeably competing - is producing a boomingeconomy and creating enormous wealth.

As the new trend of ‘moral policing’ takes city after city in its grip,it is crucial that we realize that an inward looking city, governed by bigots,is not one that can generate a positive atmosphere for growth, attracting allthe elements that make a city viable and prosperous. Experts today argue thatthe new centres of prosperity will be ‘the creative city’. Indeed, decadesago, Jane Jacobs noted that the ability of cities to attract creative people wasthe greatest spur to economic growth. And in his book, The Rise of theCreative Class, Richard Florida examines the phenomena of ‘cities withoutgays and rock bands’ losing out on the race for economic development.

Florida notes that, "Members of the creative class do a wide variety ofwork in a wide variety of industries - from technology to entertainment,journalism to finance, high end manufacturing to the arts. They do notconsciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos thatvalues creativity, individuality, difference and merit. More and more businessesunderstand that ethos, and are making the adaptations necessary to attract andretain creative class employees - everything from relaxed dress codes, flexibleschedules and new work rules in the office to hiring recruiters who throwFrisbees. Most civic leaders, however, have failed to understand that what istrue for corporations is also true for cities and regions: Places that succeedin attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t."

This is certainly one principle that most of our politicians and plannersshow little evidence of having grasped. In the wake of the many ambitiousschemes and plans for the ‘revitalization’ and ‘renewal’ of our cities,there is not a single message to suggest that encouraging creativity and theculture of liberalism would be part of the new vision, and not a single messagehas gone out to suggest that there would be zero tolerance for the risingculture of moral policing. The connections and consequences of this blind spot,and its role in destroying a city are still to hit home.

The late economist, Mancur Olson, had once noted that the decline of nationsand regions is a product of an organizational and cultural hardening of thearteries - he called it "institutional sclerosis". Places that grow up andprosper in one era, Olson argued, find it difficult and often impossible toadopt new organisational and cultural patterns, regardless of how beneficialthey might be, and in this lie the seeds of their decay.

Across India’s cities, we are seeing the regression of organizational formsand cultural patterns, as rabid, narrow minded groups attempt to force andimpose their warped codes on an intelligent and hardworking people who are justgoing about their businesses and trying to enjoy what they can of their lives.Some of these cities are now already seeing an exodus of the talented and thecreative, as they flee from repressive atmospheres into more open minded cities.

We are yet to realize the full import and dimensions of a ‘creative city’.As Florida has also pointed out, these go well beyond the traditional physicalattractions that most city administrations focus on - shopping malls, freeways,stadia, the sprucing up of tourist attractions and the creation of entertainmentdistricts that increasingly resemble theme parks. Such physical infrastructureis becoming increasingly irrelevant, as it fail to attract or inspire thecreative classes, and to create the cultural vitality that lies at the heart ofthe productive city. The creative city thrives because creative people wantto live there - when that desire begins to diminish, the death of the city isforetold.

The writer is Convener, Urban Futures Initiative