Political Power in City Planning

Political Power in City Planning

Introduction

The idea of controlling cities and nations through planning has existed since the time immemorial. This planning involves all things that affect the city for the common good of all citizens. In most parts of the world that urban city planning is dependent on various groups such as planners, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, political leaders and the general public. It is however evident that urban city planning s much dependent on the political power and the decision of the leaders who are in power. This means that a certain regime has its own architectural designs and once the regime is over, the new one tends to bring new changes in the outlook of cities by coming up with some other designs which suit their power. The purpose of this essay is to describe how political power shapes city planning, talking example of Delhi city in India.

Political power plays a role in determining the size of land that should be set aside for city construction purposes (Horowitz,12). It is evident that many leaders exercise massive control over urban land ownership and through this, they play a very key role in planning for the construction of the city and other architectural designs. For example in Delhi, India, Edwin Lutyens was the architect who designed the city under the influence of President Jawaharlal Nehru (Luque-Ayala, 54).  Edwin Lutyens claimed that he was asked by the leader in power to make Delhi better than Washington and Paris. This made him come up with cityscapes which brought a lot of pressure for accommodation in the cities (Heller, 310).

In the city and urban planning, political powers are the ones which determine the nature of demographics before setting up any construction. It has been discovered that in the construction of major cities, there have been cases of displacement of people to create room for construction (Horowitz,15). It is through this task where the leaders in power determine how many people to displace and the new areas where they should occupy. Since most of the urban land belongs to the sitting government, private individuals cannot make decisions about construction (Luque-Ayala, 56). In Delhi, the capital city of India under the regime of Motilal Nehru, more than 2 million people were displaced to create room for city construction. This is also explained by Heller (312).

The planning of Delhi city in India led to social class difference, with the politicians gaining an advantage over the other ordinary citizens. According to Datta (8), political leaders in regime especially in India tend to favor those in power but leave the ordinary citizens suffering in the streets. It is the sitting political regime that determines the number of houses which government officials should own as well as where the ordinary citizens should dwell (Luque-Ayala, 58). For example, the white bungalows constructed in Delhi between 1912 and 1913 were mostly owned by the government as they housed senior government officials. To many, this was a York of imperialism in India as well as an anti-egalitarian embarrassment as it widened the gap between the rich and the poor (Datta, 17).

In conclusion, there are various reasons as to why cities where being constructed, especially New Delhi. Most of them where designed and constructed to promote commercial trading activities because after the agrarian revolution, people had adopted new methods of cultivation hence obtaining surplus from their activities. Urban planning was based on the principle established by the state institutions which were based on specific directions stipulated by the political regime in power.

Works Cited

Horowitz, Irving. City politics and planning. Routledge, 2017.

Luque-Ayala, Andrés, and Jonathan Silver, eds. Energy, power and protest on the urban grid:      geographies of the electric city. Routledge, 2016.

Heller, Patrick. “Development in the city: growth and inclusion in India, Brazil and South             Africa.” States in the Developing World (2017): 309-38.

Datta, Ayona. “New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’in Dholera smart city, Gujarat.” Dialogues in Human Geography 5.1 (2015): 3-22.