Wendell Cox, in his ongoing crusade to prove that everyone hates cities, writes about the suburbanization of Mumbai at New Geography. After reviewing all the statistics, he concludes:
Mumbai: Penultimate Density, Yet Representative: The core urban area (area of continuous urban development) of Mumbai represents approximately 80 percent of the larger metropolitan area population. Mumbai is the third most dense major urban area in the world at nearly 65,000 residents per square mile (25,000 per square kilometer), trailing Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Hong Kong. Yet even at this near penultimate density, Mumbai exhibits the general trends of dispersion and declining density that are occurring in urban areas around the world, from the most affluent to the least. In the two Mumbai city districts, as in other megacities, housing has become so expensive that population growth is being severely limited. Overall, the Mumbai larger metropolitan area may also be experiencing slower growth as smaller metropolitan areas outperform larger ones, a trend identified in a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute. Finally, the over-crowded, slum conditions that prevail for more than one-half of the city’s residents could be instrumental in driving growth to more the distant suburbs of Thane and Raigarh.
He never comes out and says it explicitly, but the implication is clear: Market forces are driving people out of Mumbai.
But with all this talk about overcrowded slums and high housing prices, Wendell Cox is missing the elephant in the room: land use regulation. Given rent control laws that would make Sheldon Silver blush and a fixed floor-area ratio of 1.33 for even the dense historical island core, how the hell does Wendell Cox expect Mumbai’s core to grow? India’s stifling regulations are legendary, but Cox seems to be floating on a cloud of car exhaust fumes, blissfully unaware of any facts that might get in the way of his people-love-suburbs narrative.
Two thoughts: First, wouldn’t Mumbai’s extreme density make it NOT a representative city? Wouldn’t the fact that only two other cities are more dense suggest that Mumbai might have reached a maximum possible density, either because of regulation or because of physical constraints to the way we build?
Second, Cox continues to mix up th various meanings of “suburbs” to make his point. The suburbs of Mumbai he refers to are extremely dense and walkable. They are, to be certain, cities. So he should not conflate their growth with any preference for low-density, automobile oriented living. For example, see this typical street scene from Thane.
Now, to be fair, in this article Cox doesn’t imply that the condition he’s describing indicates the failure of cities. But he and Kotkin frequently do make this mistake.
I’m tired of these guys. To misquote Jane Jacobs, nonsense in such undiluted doses is hard to swallow.
I think he does imply it. When he cites high housing costs and bad living conditions as a reason people are leaving, the implication is that these are inevitable. If he thought these costs and conditions were driven by regulation, he wouldn’t hesitate to point them out, as he often does when he discusses housing prices in California and Portland. But by leaving out any cause, he’s implying that these are the natural result of dense cities.
The distance from central Mumbai to Thane is 25 km, about the same as the distance from Midtown Manhattan to the North Bronx.
Re: extreme density, if you want to find a theoretical upper bound to non-slum density, there are some neighborhoods in Hong Kong that achieve it, and to a lesser extent in New York and Paris. It’s about 50,000/km^2 or a bit higher, and just can’t be done with an FAR of 1.33. The Upper East Side averages 42,000, with an FAR ranging from 6 to 10.
I don’t see how he could use this article to imply that cities are failing. Both Mumbai and Thane are cities – that one of the two is newer and slightly less dense doesn’t support his argument against American urbanists. That would be like saying cities are failing because Manhattan is losing population to Brooklyn. The city of Thane had a population density of 8500 per km2 in 2001, which is slightly less than New York City (10600 / km2) and slightly more than San Francisco (6600 / km2 ), the next densest major city in the US.
So, if he wants to use Mumbai as an example of people preferring low-density, auto-oriented living, he’s going to need to do some more work.
This proves Cox hasn’t read Glaeser’s book. Glaeser makesa case study of Mumbai, explaining how its ridiculously low FARs create overcrowding, high prices and sprawl.