On Urban Housing, Roads, Dreams And Theories

The announcement of a nano-housing project 100 km from Mumbai allows us to focus more clearly on the issue of roads. As a reader’s comment on the news report laments, it will take 6 hours every day for the poor soul who owns that nano house to commute to and from Mumbai. So even if the Tata’s gift a Nano car with each nano flat, there may be few takers.

Now, if there were excellent highways all around, the picture would be very different. More and more city folk would live further and further away from the city, and commute. Mega shopping malls would erupt in the vacant surrounds. The unreal estate of rural India would become real estate. And, for the city dweller, the ability to buy residential property would no longer be an impossible dream, for the roads would add to the supply of usable urban land, lowering land prices overall. Of course, we need not depend only on government roads. I am a loud advocate of private tramcars. But even if private developers and private road companies do build private roads to service their own properties, I don’t think it is entirely possible to wish away the role of The State in providing a basic network of functional toll-free roads around cities, between cities and towns, around towns, right up to every village, and even up to every homesteader’s property.

Now, this needs to be contrasted with APJ Abdul Kalam’s PURA scheme. My earlier post on this has elicited a few comments. In particular, Salil recommended the PURA journal website. I checked it out and found an article there titled “The President’s Dream”, which begins thus:

“It is President Kalam's dream to make India a developed country rapidly. PURA is one of the tools he has advocated to achieve that goal. PURA is a high-quality Rurban habitat on either side of a ring road linking a loop of villages. With that design, all infrastructure lengths are halved. Workplace and residences can be co-located, minimising thereby daily commuting to work, the costliest part of urban life. Located as it is in rural areas, real estate prices will be a fraction of that in cities; water and waste management become simple. Thus, PURA cuts down both capital costs and running costs of urban services, minimises rural urban migration, and will even curb the mindless growth of cities. It can thus promote both urban and rural development simultaneously and raise the quality of life in both areas.”

With a circular ring road around every 5 village cluster, villages will not connect to cities and towns; villagers will connect only with each other, in an endless circle.

I also find the assertion that “PURA minimises rural urban migration, and will even curb the mindless growth of cities” to be a product of that faulty “Indian Economics” that does not understand cities and urbanization, and pursues “rural development.” Note that the word “curb” implies the use for force on a natural process.

Yet, theory indicates that it is only the spread of urbanization that will “develop” rural India. This includes real estate development, as roads raise the value of their endless fields of mustard. For this, which is also a solution to the urban housing problem, we need a roads vision.

But the roads vision must be based on patterns predicted apodictically by sound praxeological theory. Urbanization is one such pattern, a qualitative prediction. Hubs-and-spokes is another. These pattern predictions are not based on “dreams”: they are all derived from deep thinking based on sound theory. Similarly, the pattern prediction of mushrooming coastal cities and towns in a free trade scenario is not a dream. It too is based on the praxeologically derived linkages between trade, transportation and urbanization. The sea remains the most efficient mode of bulk transportation.

Of course, we must dream. So I dream of “truckways”: roads only meant for trucks. And “busways” dedicated to buses. And “freeways” – toll-free roads for tourists and holidaymakers. I dream of coastal expressways. Highways into Afghanistan and central Asia. Highways into Tibet, into Myanmar, into Bangladesh. Trade and tourism. Peace. A better life for all. We must dream. Dreams matter.

But theories matter more.