Alex Tabarrok of MR has a nice post:
Earlier this year I posted about India’s private city, Gurgaon. Gurgaon has grown from nothing to a city of 1.5 million people in just 30 years and it has done so based almost entirely on the private provision of public goods, including transportation, utilities, and security. Gurgaon is a desirable place to live in India but it has grown haphazardly as a city of private oases, rather than as an integrated city. As a result, Gurgaon has not enjoyed all the benefits of economies of scale in infrastructure provision or the benefits that come from internalizing externalities–the types of benefits that are possible with a single owner or integrated political system. As Matt Yglesias explained at the time:
Imagine if someone owned all of San Francisco and leased the land and structures out. Well obviously he’d want to have some kind of fire department and building standards to protect his investment. And he’d want to have a security force, since crime would reduce the value of the rent. And he’d want there to be some parks, because people like parks and their presence will increase the rent he can charge. (Indeed, my building includes a small private park). And obviously he’d need schools and really all the rest. …But in order to internalize the benefits of privately provided infrastructure, parks, public safety, etc. the scale of the enterprise would have to be really big. Like the size of a whole city.
Gurgaon, however, is not unique. Private cities are growing throughout the developing world and some of them are quite large.
Points to some examples from Russia and then says we need to build private cities like hotels on a large scale:
Private cities are happening now for a reason. Africa, India, and China are urbanizing more rapidly than has ever occurred in human history. In Africa, the number of urban dwellers is projected to increase by nearly 400 million, in India at least 250 million will move to cities and in China more than 400 million will move to cities in just the next 20 years. Not all of these people will move to older cities, which are not always in the right places and which rarely possess anything like the right material let alone the right political infrastructure. The rising middle-class want to live in first-world cities and in many of these countries only the private sector can deliver those cities.
The rapid urbanization of the developing world is an opportunity to remake cities anew. Private cities as hotels on a grand scale.
Not sure whether Gurgaon is the right example. Infact it is a perfect example of how to ruin a great potential city. It is too unplanned and haphazardly done. It was fine till population was low but now a nightmare. India surely needs many new cities but we need to mix private sector with really good urban planning. With its huge monstrous population, without planning cities would just turn into an urban disaster like its old counterparts.
September 13, 2011 at 10:06 pm |
the planning stopped when the brits left to be honest.the disasters called gandhinagar and chandigarh and bhubhaneshwar all planned by nehru’s favorites planners are centres of bureaucracy lacking any vitality or dynamism. gurgaon gives us an example how even with massive neglect spontaneous cities can be more vital to the economy. the sarkar wanted faridabad to be promoted.but the entrepreneurs preferred rural gurgaon