Urban Rural Nexus: A Case for Ruralisation

Naresh V Narasimhan, Principal Architect, Venkataramanan Associates

There’s a lot of talk about urbanization in India today. The debates on the need for smart cities, Greenfield developments and more have us floored by their ambitiousness and seeming urge for progressiveness. Semantics of smart city aside, the focus on cities and the related promises of the push to middle class have set me thinking – is the current optimism about urbanization truly justified? There is a lot of meaning and worth in the building of cities but must we always speak of urbanization of the rural as a panacea for all ills? What about ruralisation of the urban? Urbanisation is rarely discussed with a mention of the changes rural areas undergo in the process. The situation almost always suffers from a one-sided representation. Defining rural, especially in contemporary times has been particularly difficult. A large proportion of settlements classed as ‘rural’ in China and India would fall within the ‘urban’ category, if they used the criteria and population thresholds adopted by many other countries. So exactly what is rural? Ruralisation today can best be understood as counter-urbanisation.

With high congestion, pollution, rising crime rates and the absolute lack of affordable housing within the city, rural regions can be a great destination for better quality of life, more and more affordable housing and greater scope for expansion. But how is this different from the numerous gated communities springing up in the outskirts of the city? Newspapers are rife with plush green ads for townships and gated residences that promise the calm, peace and walkability of the countryside. But it is imperative that we recognize who such developments are really benefitting.

Ruralisation is NOT urban sprawl - Ruralisation is easily misunderstood for being urban sprawl - or the engulfing of villages and rural peoples by cities. But it is not just about relocation of city-dwellers to the countryside; it is as much about lifestyle and mindset as it is about geographic location.

Even with a growing number of self-styled ecologically sustainable folk (who are urbanites despite their best interests in ruralisation), urbanisation and not ruralisation has been the predominant growth dimension in our urban-rural nexus. For far too long, cities have taken precedence in the race for growth and development. The qualities characterizing the typical city have been taken as the norm for all other regions to naturally grow into. Migration and employment patterns are testimony to this process of cities burgeoning into nuclei of high densities and growth with little thought given to cultural assimilation, socio-economic balance, leaving migrants feeling lost and alienated and leading to high-crime rates and dull, dormant urbanscapes. The loss of lakes, the presence of large green tracts of land that are inaccessible for public use and declining mobility for sites of food production are some of the issues in Bangalore that point to a need to return to more ‘rural’ way of planning.

Ruralisation is really more about a way of planning that addresses the growing divide in the urban-rural nexus. The recent uprising of villagers in Mandur, Bangalore district against the dumping of wastes in their region should bring to our attention what architects, urbanists, the city’s decision-makers and enforcers have overlooked all these years – how do we tackle the landscape interface between the town and the country? If we are indeed to embrace the idea of new cities (smart or otherwise), what is the approach we will take to build them? Can the village be the new city? India is bound to witness an unprecedented rise in population and this is an interesting time for the Indian landscape; we must employ it to re-define and question our understanding of the city as a purely urban phenomenon.