Should Chennai be a global-city?

Should Chennai be a global-city?

On August 22, 1639, Captain Francis Day of the British East India Company secured a piece of land at the fishing village of Madraspatnam through a firmaan (charter) granted by Damerla Venkatadri Nayak, in command at Chandragiri under the Vijayanagar kingdom.

This obscure fishing village today is Chennai Metropolis with an economy that has a broad industrial base in the automobile, technology, hardware manufacturing and healthcare industries. The city is India’s second largest exporter of software, information technology and information-technology-enabled services. While so, Chennai is the poorest among the four metropolises of India, with the share of employment in the informal economy sector continuously increasing and is now over 70 per cent.

Nevertheless, Chennai has dreams of becoming a world-class city catering to the needs of ‘globalisation’. Miles and miles of fancy flyovers and underpasses; high-speed, multi-storied and elevated corridors; Metro Rail; international airport; sprawling malls and Special Economic Zones; glass edifices as workplaces; skyscrapers and gated-communities for residences. Everything is ‘mega’, which is believed to be the hallmark of a ‘global-city’.

Thousands of crores of rupees of public funds are being poured in to transform Chennai sometimes into a Singapore and sometimes into a Dubai. This pursuit to un-become itself and mutate into a distant pretentious city seems to be the ceaseless manner of our times. All other visions are rubbished and deemed regressive. Becoming what it is not, is made to appear as the only vision for Chennai.

Despite the five-star nature of this process, its inner logic of destruction is all too visible. Increasing incidents of inhuman slum ‘rehabilitation’ is dislocating the poor and the downtrodden, throwing them to the wolves. Legalisation of slums has practically stopped but large tracts of land are being handed over to corporates for the asking. Tens of thousands of trees are being remorselessly cut down; alien-looking commercial complexes are replacing parks and open spaces, and water-bodies are quickly disappearing. This large-scale destruction of lives, livelihood, homes and trees for road widening, elevated corridors, metro, airport etc., makes most of the city look denuded.

For all the wealth it claims to generate, inequity and inequality in Chennai are among the worst in India. Amidst the pomp, essential services like water and sanitation, especially for the poor have deteriorated. While unscientific, inappropriate and expensive infrastructure projects get sanctioned in a jiffy without the consent or participation of local people, the poorest of the city are denied even basic shelter, transportation, healthcare and education for want of adequate resources. With skyrocketing prices, without sustained and skill-based employment, savings or social security, more and more people, including the middle class, are losing control over their own lives to the whims of someone else’s imagination.

The ‘global-cities’ of Dubai and Singapore no doubt represent ‘modernity’ – skyscrapers, flashy cars, trendy shopping malls and fancy hotels and restaurants. But for many, however, they are places with no history, no personality, and no sense of place. These are ‘soulless cities’ — embodiments of urbanisation sans urbanism!

What then is the driver of Chennai’s ‘global-city’ dream? Over the last few decades, the world has witnessed the emergence of multinational companies that are huge firms operating on a global scale. The world is their “production network” as they source finished goods and components from hundreds of locations all over the world. The world is also their market as they sell these products in almost all countries. The headquarters of most of these firms are located in a few “world cities”, the most important of them being New York, London, and Tokyo.

Managing these extensive production and marketing networks is an extremely difficult affair. These firms have to follow what’s going on in hundreds of places and make sure that nothing interrupts the operation of their networks. They also have to deal with different types of governments, cultures and political situations. This is not possible if these firms remain in their headquarters in few big cities. They have, in a sense, to follow their networks and establish points from where they can manage their extensive operation across the globe.

As a result of this need, “second-tier global cities” like Dubai and Singapore have emerged. These cities, called “control and coordination centres” perform the role of a regional headquarter for these MNCs, overseeing the operations in their respective regions.

As the next step, ‘third-tier sub-regional centres’ are being identified by MNCs and Chennai is one such city. The recent IT boom and unfettered flow of Foreign Direct Investment hastened the process. The Government of Tamil Nadu laid out the reddest of carpets. ‘Real-estate’ became the development mantra!

The question is whether the historic city of Chennai should become an MNC’s ‘sub-centre’ through the global-city dream or retain its character and develop into an inclusive metropolis?