What happens when a city is managed almost completely by private corporations? Visit Gurgaon, India, a boomtown of millions without a citywide system for water, electricity or even public sewers.
https://archive.is/papmm
>An unplanned city can grow at astonishing speeds. In 1991, India’s legislature passed a raft of economic reforms that opened sectors of the economy to foreign companies. At the time, Gurgaon was an unexceptional town of 121,000 people surrounded by vast tracts of fallow land. By a regulatory quirk, the land around Gurgaon was managed by a single agency, the chief minister’s office in the state of Haryana, versus India’s usual thicket of competing government agencies. It meant that developers’ plans in Gurgaon could be approved in a matter of days, not years. The result? Fast-track approvals for office parks, luxury condominiums, five-star hotels and golf courses. Half of the Fortune 500 companies launched satellite offices in the city’s gleaming high-rises, and it’s home to one of the largest shopping malls in the world. “There are parts of it that look like Singapore or Hong Kong or any world-class city,” says Rajagopalan. But rushing into a bureaucratic void posed a challenge for developers: Who, if not the state, would provide basic public services? “If you ask a regular person, ‘Would you want to live in a city that doesn’t have a functioning sewage system or garbage disposal or a good network of roads,’ they’d probably say no,” says Rajagopalan. So the developers had to convince potential renters to say yes — by filing in the gaps in the city’s sparse public services themselves.
>A dystopian world between privatized compounds. Gurgaon does have some public services; “old Gurgaon,” about 35 sq km in size, is technically a town with a municipal body to manage it. But there are intolerable gaps in the city’s infrastructure. Private security guards may secure the grounds of an apartment or an office complex, but that leaves massive security gaps in the rest of the city. “Between one industrial park and another industrial park are empty areas that are not safe areas at all,” Rajagopalan says. Sewage trucks will frequently bypass treatment plants and dump their contents on public land, and while it poses a health hazard to nearby slums, public officials don’t have the resources to counter such infractions. In short, Gurgaon’s success story is confined to an archipelago of private compounds populated by those who can afford to live there. Look beyond those select properties — and into the city’s slums — and Gurgaon presents an object lesson in the limits of privatization. There, the residents suffer from power and electricity shortages, and the same unsafe and unsanitary conditions that shape daily life for so much of India’s urban poor. The pressing question for them is how a rapidly urbanizing nation will absorb another 404 million residents into its cities by 2050, according to one United Nations estimate, and not suffer a complete breakdown of public services.
>One paradoxical solution to Gurgaon’s heedless growth — sell off still more of the city. Rajagopalan offers an unlikely solution to India’s growing pains. Yes, developers show a dismaying lack of civic responsibility beyond property lines. But a funny thing happens as they snatch up larger and larger tracts of land. They develop an incentive to build — and finance — the missing pieces of public infrastructure. “Right now DLF doesn’t find it in its interest to run its own huge sewage system, because it has only four or five small developments,” she says. “It’s not profitable to run to a main sewage line and then treat the waste. But if it had a large enough property, then it would absolutely do it — otherwise no one would live there.”
>The private city has a precedent: Walt Disney World. In the 1960s Walt Disney bought up a 25,000-acre wilderness known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Florida. Today, you probably know it as Walt Disney World, and Rajagopalan holds it up as an example of what private developers might need to do once they own massive parcels of land.
tl;dr- The private parts of the city work great, and the solution to the problems with the city are actually privatizing more of it.