Approaching Maximum

So a week from today we'll be arriving in Mumbai (or Bombay, more on that later). I've been reading Suketu Mehta's marvelous Maximum City, an in-depth look at the city's sprawling array of fascinations and crises - politics, gangs, social life, sex trade, and more, written by an expat Indian who has returned to the city after years living in Jackson Heights, Queens. It's equal parts thrilling and disturbing.

One point Mehta dwells on is just how many people are jammed together in Mumbai, on land reclaimed from the sea and filled in among a series of islands. With 14 million people, Mumbai is one of the most populous metro areas in the world. It's also the densest: Mehta reports that, in 1990, the city had a population density of 17,550 people per square mile. New York City, by comparison, has about 2,180 per square mile. The comparison seems less mind-boggling if you consider that Manhattan itself has a density of about 70,000 per square mile - but Mehta's number for Mumbai seems to be on the low end of the estimates I can find, and it's reported that, in some areas of the city - the slums - a single square mile can be home to as many as one million people.

For Mehta, these numbers are alarming - and more alarming still is the stream of new arrivals turning up in Mumbai every day. One of his points is that, for all the indifference Bombay's residents show toward the rest of India - a country to which, he says, they literally turn their backs, preferring to gaze west toward the Arabian Sea - their city cannot be saved unless other systemic problems in the country are first addressed:

What makes Bombay overpopulated is the impoverishment of the countryside, so that a young man with dreams in his head will take the first train to Bombay to live on the footpath [i.e., living on the streets or sidewalks without shelter]. If you fix the problems of the villages, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the cities.

I found this interesting after having read Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods - a highly-praised account of modern India and its challenges. Luce argues precisely the opposite: India, he says, isn't urbanizing enough. Sixty years of post-independence policy has prioritized preservation of village life and neglected the development of cities. To Luce, this is a major source of misery in both city and country: there are just too many people in the villages, he argues. Land holdings, divided among so many peasants, are simply too small to be profitable, even for bare subsistence, and are certainly too small for the kind of mechanization that could make India's agricultural sector productive enough to drive a sustained economic expansion.

The solution, Luce believes, is for many more people to leave the villages and move to the cities - to build a modern economy while those left behind in the countryside can consolidate land holdings enough to make them at least modestly profitable. Luce accuses India's federal government of ignoring the problems of the cities - allowing the ongoing existence of massive slums, which are indicators of an urbanization process the government obstinately refuses to acknowledge, much less encourage. India should be focusing on making its cities decent places to live - rationalizing land use, improving service delivery, and planning for a more urbanized future. In other words, pace Mehta, Luce says: if you fix the problems of the cities, you fix, as a happy side effect, the problems of the villages.

I have no idea who's right on this question, but I'm inclined to believe that Luce's argument makes more sense. I don't expect that a whirlwind trip through India will really shed much more light on the matter, but it's something I'll be thinking about as we arrive in Maximum City.