Are You Living In The Wrong City? Best City To Live In

11,137 views Wait, is this logic right? • Oct 11, 2024

Slog Reference: Are You Living in the Wrong City?

Description

Which is the best city to live in India, or in the world, in fact? The popular opinion is that slums are a sign of a city regressing. Contrary to this belief, we discuss how factors such as increased traffic, slums & overcrowding indicate the growth of a city. While city planning is important, what are the long-term consequences of a planned city when compared to a non-planned city? What are some factors to look out for when choosing a city to settle in? In this episode, we discuss & elaborate on all these points & more. Watch until the end to reflect on whether you’re living in the right city or not.

Book mentioned in this episode:
Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott: https://tapthe.link/JPj_5m6Sz

More episodes you might enjoy:
Why Is India The Most Populous Country: https://youtu.be/Sjur6Bu30YM
Opportunity Cost Explained: https://youtu.be/fgtiC6RkRwg
The Income Distribution of India: https://youtu.be/z4Qf44Ti338 Pollution Is Making You Dumb: https://youtu.be/ANvfe_pPg-Q

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Overcrowding is Good
01:15 You Will Always Be In Commute
03:42 Slums Are Good For The City?
05:46 Is Village Better Than City?
07:44 Planned Cities Are Bad?
10:31 Should We Just Give Up?
12:10 So Which City Should You Choose?

Sources Cited:
Marchetti's Constant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant
MIT Study on Commuting Times: https://news.mit.edu/2014/study-commuting-times-stay-constant-even-distances-change
The Wrong Kind of City: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/the-wrong-kind-of-city
Agglomeration Effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
The Challenge of Slums (UN Habitat Report): https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/download-manager-files/The%20Challenge%20of%20Slums%20-%20Global%20Report%20on%20Human%20Settlements%202003.pdf

#futureiq #bestcity #slums #traffic #cityplanning

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Are You Living in the Wrong City?

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Transcript

- if your city has too much traffic yes slums yes overcrowding yes unplanned growth yes then congratulations you are living in a good City what because if it does not have these things you are in trouble uh what how is too much traffic good too much traffic is definitely not good for one thing my blood pressure stop getting worked up about traffic okay first of all remember you are the traffic okay he's right there is a funny joke which says that oh nobody goes to that restaurant anymore it is too crowded do you see the joke there yeah right if nobody goes to the restaurant then now is it crowded and if it is crowded then everybody goes to the

0m 41s restaurant to put it differently and bring it back to point yeah if you don't want traffic go live in my Village there is no traffic there okay I can guarantee you that your commute will be very less right why is nobody moving there because it's a village and I don't think the places I want to work for necessarily have offices in those locations yes that is the point the reason your city has traffic is because it has all the good stuff and all the people in that City want to go to all those good places right I don't like it when you make sense in these things let me tell you about a fascinating thing called Martis

1m 21s constant okay okay Martis constant says that no matter what you do the average commute in your city will be be 1 hour 30 minutes each way wait what okay yes no matter how much you improve the roads and the methods of transportation and whatever MH the average commute will be 30 plus 30 minutes this is true of Boston this is true of RI this is true of Lisbon London it is true 100 years ago it is true today and it is claimed that it was through 10,000 years ago the Stone Age okay that might have been an exagger a but then again the way they figured this was they looked at the settlements of those periods and the

2m 08s distances to nearest water nearest place for hunting nearest place for fruits and nuts and they figured that these people are in like within a few kilometers of each other and roughly they are spending an hour walking to get these things okay 30 minutes maret is constant I tell you why this is true okay the logic because if you fix traffic you magically make all the roads wider and all of that you know it's not that your commute will go down to 10 minutes it is just that either you will travel longer find an even more interesting job which is 30 minutes away yeah or more people will move into this city until the traffic increases right yeah and uh I

2m 58s just realized that over a period of of time Mar's constant has remained true for me because I used to travel 30 minutes to go to university and I still traveled 30 minutes when I joined my job and even when I moved houses I moved in such a way that the commute was 30 minutes yeah and before you people object in the comments let me clarify this is an average there will always be some people who are willing to commute One Hour 1 and a half hours and there will always be some people who are like 10 minutes away from work yeah but if you take an average across the city it remains constant right even though

3m 36s things change even though traffic changes pattern changes what work people are doing changes this remains constant okay so Mar's constant explains the traffic situations but you also mentioned slums and them being good for a city no no no I said slums will always be there okay if a city doesn't have slums you are in trouble because it means the city is dead there is no future and all the people who would normally be living in a slum there have moved to a different city okay and in slums in that different city okay here is a thought experiment right what would happen if I magically provide decent housing to all slum dwellers in a city will the city and those people live

4m 18s happily ever after they should right no more new people will move in and create new slums okay okay the only solution huh is to prohibit slums sounds uh this is a terrible idea because it is reducing the growth of a city or slowing it down right because whenever there is a city which has lots of opportunity there will always be poor people wanting to move in okay and no city has enough infrastructure that it can provide rapid quick cheap housing to all the poor people that are coming in right either you have to wait because because well you know there has to be a water connection and house and this and that electricity gas all of those or you

5m 06s let them come in a slum where all of these things happen informally and in jard and then slowly these people get better and they move into housing right right so there is a un habitat report which points out that slums are the first stop for most poor migrants and the services and Commercial activities that informally spring up in a slum are the ones that the formal sector is either not able to provide at all or cannot provide at a cost that can be affordable to these people right cities can't really survive without them fair I get what you're trying to say but the thing that most people don't like about slums is that they make the cities look

5m 55s shabby that's a rich people problem okay fair again but you can't say that people living in the slums are happy living in those slums okay let me ask this question okay have you seen the cops at the bus stations and the train stations preventing people from going from slums to Villages no no no no what no what that means people are in the slums by choice right yeah but is it a choice they free to make though they are free to make the reason they are in the slums is because the alter Al native being in the village is even worse okay I agree this is a problem that we should be trying to fix this is a problem of the

6m 38s country not having enough resources for everybody and in fact the whole world but this is different from what we are talking about in this episode in this episode we are pointing out that given the current situation being in the slum with all those problems is still better than being in the village is it is it really better though because what is it about a village that you don't have that you have in a slum my friend works with villages he points out that in villages people die because there is no or little medical care of things that would not be a problem at all in a city okay there isn't much to do other than Agriculture

7m 23s and even that is like a pretty tough and not very rewarding work right the boys in villages can't get married because the girls don't want to stay there and there is nothing much to do other than to watch SAS Bahu serials right the Village People also typically racist sexist bigot there just okay so cities are better but can't they be planned better please like why do why does every Big City devolve into chaos yeah so I get this point and Indian cities are especially badly planned one especially important point I want to make is that even the best cities are unplanned okay fully planned cities are a very bad idea okay there is a book

8m 14s called seeing like a state you should read that or at least read a summary okay where James Scott points out that fully planned cities like Brazilia or chandigar suffer from a serious problem which is that that the planners don't really know how the future is going to unfold what people want uh right so dhavi the slum it has thousands of small Enterprises from leather to recycling and this could never have been planned because there are all kinds of informal networks of suppliers and services and you know yeah there is forget planning it there is nobody who even understands that system right now but it works very well there have been multiple attempts at cleaning up the whole thing and

9m 04s replacing it with a planned thing and they failed because nobody understands that whole complex Beast right and this is true at a city scale right things have to evolve from the bottom up that is the only way that you can truly understand what people want and how strengths of this city are evolving compared to other cities and so on right chandigar Brazilia these were planned they ran into issues like the rigid zoning they said oh this will be residential and this will be commcial and what not Financial right that just results in everybody having to commute too much and then the traffic not being able to handle it especially when you plan it thinking of two wheelers and

9m 46s suddenly everybody has cars and so on right there is imposed uniformity that oh all the buildings will be similar to each other and people hate that people want their thing to be their thing right somebody wants a big house somebody wants a small house right there is a cultural disconnect because you know communal spaces like jaur Varanasi with winding streets and public squares those are much more vibrant than a thing with wide Avenues and treelined streets and nobody walking on those streets right yeah I mean you want a mix of both in the same location that's what has happened with s chandigar right it started off as being planned at some point they gave up and now the plant

10m 29s stuff is taking over and that's good are you saying we just resign ourselves to living in a large city no matter how bad it is there must be some good city in the world right yeah so there are some things you can look out for okay so for example pollution okay to some extent if a city is vibrant and if it is growing and all that there is going to be pollution any good city will have more pollution than a village but Indian cities have way too much pollution and other cities in the world have shown that it is possible to be a big thriving City but still have reasonably low levels of pollution right so we do need

11m 09s to keep pushing our officials to find ways to reduce pollution and we do need to not stay in Delhi okay yeah and if you want a scientific reason for that we have an episode titled pollution makes you dump yes it actually affects your IQ another important thing to look for in a good is good public transport right yes the more public transport there is the more people are able to travel with fewer Vehicles aha less cars less traffic not true marchet is constant is still true but what it means is for the same streets same infrastructure more people can travel you can get more Commerce done right so that City will have a better productivity for a given

12m 00s infrastructure right that's true that is very true you are not doing that to reduce traffic you are doing it to increase the efficiency of your city right yeah a third thing to look at is a concept of producer City versus consumer City okay there is a lot of research on this I'm not going to get into that but basic idea is that there are two kinds of big rich cities okay a producer City is growing and Big and Rich because it is producing something valuable right it is manufacturing something or it is creating software so Bangalore Mumbai Pune amaba are examples of producer cities okay a city is a consumer City if it is Rich because either it has some

12m 52s raw material or some resource like oil that it is just selling to somebody else or it is Rich and important because it has managed to capture political power it is like the administrative capital Washington DC Delhi and Geneva and well no Delhi is both yeah Delhi is actually both say chandigar is primarily government jaur is primarily tourism right so those are more consumer cities so okay go for producer cities go for produc why go for producer cities and why not go for Consumer cities well the research says that producer cities are more vibrant will continue to grow they have good future prospects whereas consumer cities can survive for a while but their long-term prospects are

13m 41s dwindling H basically real estate tip for you invest in Pune real estate but what he says does make sense uh and we are seeing consumer cities like the oil states that he mentioned turn into kind of producer cities where they are inviting uh where they're creating tourism as sort of a uh production material of sorts but yeah that's another topic for another day interesting so large cities are not necessarily as bad as we think they are and the fact that they are large uh might cause problems for people living in it but with those problems or within those problems are also hidden very important um opportunities within every problem is an opportunity there we go Shri Kant naen

14m 36s an opportunity for you to learn via future IQ and if you like this episode check out our episode on opportunity costs