The Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission is a well-meaning programme that has put in some deeply thought out incentives for hundreds of towns and cities in India, including Mumbai, ostensibly to improve their civic life.

Within Mumbai city its impact has not always been so visible – barring a few newly designed buses that were purchased under its name. The programme has however seen all kinds of mixed responses elsewhere, including in the wider Mumbai Metropolitan Region. In many cases it has encouraged a huge hunger for new urban land by taking over and converting the countryside into real-estate investment zones. Its justification? India is going to be even more urbanized in the coming decades and it is important to be prepared.

However, to understand the full impact of the urban renewal plan, we need to step back a bit and see it in context of other policies as well. For example, water management and irrigation projects that were once directed towards rural areas are slowly shifting gears and becoming supply points for new urban centers. Rural areas, not withstanding the massive political investments, are actually being drained of their vital life-force – water, in the name of getting ready for an avalanche of urbanization set to double the population of our cities. This is backed by a move to facilitate a huge corporate centered investment in the area of exploiting natural resources (iron, bauxite, gas) to speed up development by going into and beyond the countryside.

In the name of making up for a bias against the urban – these policies only justify a wholesale takeover of the countryside. What will this land up doing? It will encourage more migration of the poor to specific, job-yielding cities. At the same time a lot of rural land will be made available for setting up new cities not really meant for poor migrants.

End result? Many if not most cities will still be bursting at the seams and no amount of investment in infrastructure will be able to cope up.

The fact is that urbanization took different forms in different countries if you are willing to look closer. In Italy, hundreds of small towns, with well connected routes into the countryside distributed populations more evenly. America’s urbanization is complex, with the experience of ‘suburbia’ making people live in rural-urban limbo while being well connected to urban development. In Japan, many villages got integrated into urban systems through sheer population expansion and great transport networks.

In India too, it is vital for us not to create a sharp divide between rural, urban and tribal regions at a policy level. Instead of isolating a town within a rural district which will only gobble up funds endlessly, (as the JNURM tends to do), there is a serious case for looking at existing administrative districts as specific urban units in which villages, towns, forests, food-production and management of natural resources are managed and integrated more locally. This will allow for a more decentralized pattern of urbanization.

It’s definitely a time to re-think urban policy. JNURM has been a good start – but its nowhere there.

It seriously needs to ask the following questions:

1) Are there adequate safeguards to distinguish legitimate urban investment to aid civic improvement, from purely commercial infrastructural, especially land-hungry projects? There are enough indications revealing how real-estate companies have jumped onto the rhetoric of urban development to produce planned cities by driving out agriculture from existing land use practices. Often they do not respond to the economic needs from within the local context – but derive their economic clout from speculative flows a la Dubai. They get bailed out, but the people dependent on the land rarely do. They land up at the threshold of cities hunting for jobs.

2) When isolating a town or city within a district, are the existing channels of connections with the villages and towns being paid adequate attention to? Are the villages and towns that are part of the urbanscape of a district being adequately integrated into urban policy decisions or will the town’s need for more infrastructure translate into conflicts with the countryside around it? It is possible to effectively integrate villages into urban systems, and modernize them through communication and transport networks and not necessarily through encouraging density of habitation.

We need to seriously define urban spaces not in terms of population density or modes of occupation alone but in terms of economic exchanges of goods, services and people across rural and urban zones. In the case of cities in India and maybe even China, understanding the concept of Urban Systems may be more accurate in terms of evolving ways of looking at urban life. An urban system may be defined as a cluster of habitats and economic activities that are networked and work functionally on an everyday basis. An administrative district can possibly be seen as an urban system, especially if people commute from far of villages to the towns everyday or markets of food and other natural resources show co-dependency between designated towns and villages.

It is vital to question the argument that one close set city is environmentally more sound than clusters of villages and towns. What is more pertinent to ask is what’s happening to the ’spare’ land around a big mega-city. In many cases they are example of unsustainable water-management projects, sites of extraction of mineral resources and other environmentally un-sound practices.

Conversely, agricultural practices by themselves do not indicate a ‘rural’ eco-friendly economy. Most commercial agricultural practices are commercially linked to markets that are often part of ‘urbanized’ centers – and encourage de-population of rural areas so that the land can be more effectively exploited for commercial gains. Again – far from being environmentally sound. In fact many developed economies with a high level of urbanization have a massive case of environmentally unsound practices in their vast, empty but not – so – pristine agricultural lands.

For countries like India, and possibly China, the mega-city approach may not be the best foundation for developing a sound urban policy. Nor would it be enough to treat small towns as versions of mega-cities in terms of their infrastructural needs. It makes better sense to look at existing networks of economic exchanges in which towns, villages and cities are seen in a more localized and integrated way.

For this we also need to question existing patterns of urban development which are being more and more co-opted by real-estate and infrastructure companies and spend time understanding how construction activities need to respond to the intricacies of economic life and needs outside the spell of speculative seductions.

Conceptually we need to accept that mega-cities as self-sustaining universes are only one example of urbanization. Networks of cities, towns and villages can together also count as a form of urbanization. In these days of carbon – sensitivity, we definitely need a kind of urbanization that escapes both – the tyranny of rural ideals as well as the one-track road towards mega-citification that we see so prevalent today.