Column: Best Cities for Business by R. Sukumar

BEST CITIES FOR BUSINESS
In Search Of Rainbow City

What makes one city buzz with life while another falls into decay? That each of our cities seems to have a mind of its own may well have something to do with it.

By R. Sukumar

MUMBAI: the city of a thousand dreams

Cities, like organisations, live. They are born, they grow, they fall ill, and if left untreated, they die. Each boasts a portfolio of smells, tastes, and sights all its own. Delhi has its ruins, the pungent whiff of diesel mixed with a thousand other emanations, and roads so imposing you'll see none like them anywhere else in India. Chennai has the longest beach in the country, the smell of kippers (called karuvadu in the local lingo) and the two polluted waterways that run through it, the Cooum River (ha!) and the Buckingham Canal, and the closest India can get to New York's El, India's own elevated Mass Rapid Transit System. And Bangalore has its rain trees, a hundred darshinis that open their days at seven every morning and serve the best steamed dumplings (idlis, they're called) money can buy, and arguably, more laptops per square feet than any other Indian city.

Each city also has a character, a buzz, a thing-in-the-air that isn't just visible to those given to imbibing vegetable alkaloids, or are simply born extra-prescient. A colleague speaks of how years in Mumbai have endowed him with the ability to walk past the stock exchange building and tell, from that thingamajig in the air, whether the market is up or down. That may take some doing (and lots of years of living in the city), but try a simpler ritual. Pick a clear day in Mumbai, factor out the hustle and bustle of warm bodies going someplace else, and listen. The sound you hear is that of money. In Delhi, it is power; in Bangalore, enterprise; and in Chennai, industry of an extremely self-effacing strain.

Not all cities are born with a character. Most acquire them over time from their residents. And, in return, they lavish it on those to come. Bangalore wasn't always a hot-bed of entrepreneurial activity: it was a sleepy town, with a smattering of industries, great weather, no pubs, and an indigenous population that was predominantly Kannadiga or Tamil. Then, sometime in the 1980s the city discovered infotech, and everything-the large number of engineering colleges, the research-oriented public sector units, the great weather-fell into place.

It is this aspect of cities-the fact that they are alive-that thwarts the designs of city planners. Brasilia was designed by the followers of Le Corbusier in his image of La Ville Radiuese (The Radiant City), and instead of growing into a planned wonder with spacious sidewalks, huge buildings, and well-defined residential and business zones, the city degenerated into a place in the middle of nowhere where no one wanted to live. Soon, it was surrounded by sprawling squatter towns, and the city of the future, as it was publicly proclaimed while it was being built between 1957 and 1960, became no different from other urban infestations. Today, Brasilia is probably the world's largest urban slum.

The interaction between a city and its residents, with each taking on the characteristics of the other, introduces an element of variability into the best laid city-plans. And cities grow around their planned designs, like Brasilia did, or simply break out of them, as Chandigarh, a city designed by Corbusier himself, is now doing. In the true democratic tradition of humanity, cities have minds of their own.

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