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Rethinking Regional Planning
As India urbanises, every city and town should brace itself for growth. Each such city or town will look for precedents in the country and planning models to emulate. One such will inevitably be Mumbai. So we need to assess Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority’s Draft Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Plan 2016–36, and see it not just in relation to its area of concern, but also in the context of wider application as an aspirational model.
Mumbai is often taken as the model to follow in India when it comes to urban development and planning. Before other states adopt this in regard to regional planning around their own metropolitan regions, it may be useful to critically review the Draft Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Plan 2016–36 (MMRDA 2016a), and its Development Control Regulations (DCRs) (MMRDA 2016b). As it happens, the plan is an excellent document, well-organised and well-produced, with very good maps (although it could have done with a run under a meticulous editorial eye, to avoid irritants like the use of billions sometimes, and crores, INR and Rs at other times, all in the same paragraph). Currently, the public hearing of suggestions and objections to the plan is ongoing, after which it will be modified as needed, and adopted. The corrections will have to be trivial, since at this stage, after so many years of efforts by a sizeable team of planners and such a voluminous publication, it is hardly possible to recast the plan with major changes or extensions. The purpose of this review is to suggest what these major improvements might be, so that future plans for other regions could consider incorporating these before reaching the point of definitive presentation.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is 4,312 sqkm in area. It contains eight municipal corporations, nine municipal councils, 35 census towns, and 994 villages, with a population of just over 21.3 million in 2011. The largest is theMunicipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), administering about 467 sqkm, with a population of about 12.4 million in 2011.
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