The Voluntary City: Markets, Communities and Urban Planning - Hardcover

"At the time of Independence, Gandhi said, "India lives in her villages". Close to 60 years on, this statement is no longer true. We are already close to 30 per cent urban, and within the next 20 years, there will be more Indians living in cities and towns than in our villages. Unfortunately, this growth has crept up on our policy-makers, who have historically been in denial of urbanisation. As a result, as India reaches the tipping point of urbanisation, we are suddenly waking up to its complex challenges, and finding our responses woefully inadequate on a number of fronts: adequate housing for the urban poor, provision of water and sanitation, public transport, environmental degradation, administrative training, and so on. The decibel levels are rising in urban India. And as more people start agitating either on the streets, or in their own minds about the state of urban affairs, there is hope that this energy can be harnessed for constructive change. One of the critical ingredients for such change is the infusion of fresh ideas on urban services. - Ramesh Ramanathan (of the Janaagraha fame) in his Overview to this volume As early as 1961, Jane Jacob lamented that planners were unable to tap local knowledge. In India, the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts of 1992 entailing the down-top planned development process gave us the opportunity to tap this resource. However, the top-down governmental machinery have ever since been overcautious in the inevitability of bringing Civil Society to the forefront of participatory urban growth. The Voluntary City shows us how communities can pointedly expand their collective actions in areas where governments cannot and should not get involved. This publication of handpicked articles is a must for the shelf of every scholar and decision maker in urban India striving to seek answers to the unprecedented growth all round them. - E F N Ribeiro, Director, Association of Urban Management and Development Authorities, New Delhi"

The Voluntary City assembles a rich history and analysis of large-scale, private and voluntary, community-based provision of social services, urban infrastructure, and community governance to restore the vitality of city life. Such systems provide education, transportation, housing, crime control, parks and recreation, health care, employment, and more, by being more effective, innovative, and responsive than those provided through special-interest politics-as-usual and bureaucracy. ""The Voluntary City"" reveals how the process of providing local public goods through the dynamism of freely competitive, market-based entrepreneurship is unmatched in renewing communities and strengthening the bonds of civil society.