Is There A Need To Sacrifice Highrises For Open Spaces?

Environmentalists vigorously oppose the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) plan to reclaim coastal land in Mumbai based on the argument that people need more open spaces. The civic body plans to set aside 91 acres of the 161 acres of land that is reclaimed to create open spaces and is set to invite the opinions of Mumbaikars in designing these spaces.

Now, for a city that is among the most crowded cities in the world, with just 1.1 square metres of space per person, open spaces do matter. However, the assumption that there is an inevitable conflict between high-rise buildings and open spaces is ill founded to a great extent.

Sample this. If we will be able to house 400 people in four buildings which are 10-storey tall, it stands to reason that we will be able to house that many people in a 40-storey building. By building a 40-story building, we will be able to eliminate three such 10-storey buildings. This would certainly lead to more open spaces in Mumbai, a city which needs more open spaces?

There are, of course, many other problems with this argument. While it is true that open spaces matter, living spaces matter a lot, too. For most people, living spaces matter more than open spaces. If this is true, there is no good reason why we should sacrifice living spaces to have more open spaces. But, the fact is that there is no need to sacrifice anything to have more open spaces. All we need to do is to allow developers to build very tall buildings. We will have both living spaces and open spaces at the same time.

Mumbai is a city where land is a luxury because it was built on the narrow end of a peninsula. Even in the United States, the only cities where housing is expensive are in coastal areas. So, even if there is nothing unique about the geographical constraints Mumbai faces, such a city will have fairly expensive housing. But, building regulations make the problem much worse. Even though there are building regulations in place in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong and other similar cities, they are not anywhere as stringest as in Mumbai.

Usually, environmentalists assume that preserving open spaces, agricultural land and historical area are important. It is true that such goals may be valid in certain cases, this should not be goals that cities should be pursued regardless of the costs. Such aesthetic preferences of environmentalists are too costly for many low-income households that live in unhealthy environments where they are likely to die quite early in life. Life expenctancy in Mumbai is seven years lower than in rest of India. This was true of cities like New York over 100 years ago, but by creating better infrastructure and allowing greater real estate development, they have overcome this. Today, New Yorkers live longer than ordinary Americans.