Mumbai and Pune are overseeing the birth of two new cities growing in between their long, expressway-connected urban sprawl. These are Amby Valley and Lavasa. Both these urban dreams have been conceived in the mode of planned cities even though they have very different starting points. One is an out and out imitation of American suburbia while the other uses very sophisticated rhetoric about new urbanism. The interesting thing is that they began with the idea of containing their membership, of controlling the process through which they would get users to come to the city, but may well land up eventually opening their doors. After all, no city in the world can afford to have gateways, no matter how exclusive the original intention. The problem with cities that like to think of themselves in utopian terms ultimately find their unrealistic vision coming undone for one basic reason – money, investment and sustainability.

You have to understand the workings of urban economies very carefully to appreciate that. A city is not just about beautiful buildings, clean streets and idyllic landscapes. They need to be economic generators primarily. If you isolate these features and make them the focus, people will get bored. At best you will produce a suburban landscape, at worst a bedroom city. Mumbaikars – who one presumes are a big market for these two projects – maybe fed up with traffic jams, garbage and badly managed civic services for sure. But just take them away from their city for a long period and they start missing it terribly. They are certainly not missing the jams and garbage but definitely primarily its energy that comes from the special way in which people, lives, work, fun, entertainment and commerce enmesh into each other. They like the easy access that the city’s layered economy allows them to cheap basic services – no matter how rich or moneyed they are. Everyone wants things delivered to their door steps, safety in numbers and car shopping even if they do complain against hawkers too. Giving them clean utopias will work up to a point. The unbearable pain of dealing with the city’s basic pressures may make them fantasize about the promised new urban land – but eventually when they are confronted with the reality of a cardboard cut, picture perfect city, they will back off.

What may eventually happen is that both Lavasa and Amby valley may loosen up a bit and allow the spirit of Mumbai – dirt and all – to flow through their haloed gateways and share that magic. New Mumbai too tried hard to preserve a sense of planned idealism but what remains of that today is a grid over which the standard layer of Indian working class – service oriented urban economy has settled down nicely and thickly. Informal settlements have become firmly entrenched in the landscape.

Such experiments convince us that you cannot really plan or manufacture a city. You have to be sensitive to the way in which markets, bazaars, jobs and needs organize themselves and facilitate the process through which these translate into decent settlements. The expressway connecting Mumbai and Pune could itself have been a stimulus with the potential of being harnessed effectively to create many organic urban spaces. Instead – what we have is one unholy sprawl which multiples the civic, environmental and problems of both Mumbai and Pune.

To create two islands of urban idealism inside this is a hopeless effort when the proper way to go about would have been to pay greater attention to the possibilities of the entire stretch and create ideal living conditions for everybody – not just the moneyed classes. But one presumes that everybody in the business of making these two cities knew that. No wonder they thought of having helipads and airports first thing…