City issues have been capturing the attention of town planners more than that of policy makers and/or public administrationists. Cities cannot develop in isolation of the rest of the country.
If the peasants are getting converted to landless workers and then jobless vagrants, they will tend to migrate to the cities even if the formal sector there is not generating enough jobs to absorb all of the urban labour force growth.
Such migrants generate more incomes living informally on the fringes of urban societies than they can in their home villages. A parallel informal economy comes up in the city which creates pressures on civic amenities that the city can possibly provide.
While the upshot is called "urbanization" definitionally as the percentage of urban population grows, in reality the cities become "ruralized" if rural setting means backwardness with inability to provide the basic services that all population nodes must cater to the people living there.
Can this process of "ruralization" of urban centres be addressed by merely improving town planning and/or public administration and/or policy formulation or all of them together?
If the issue is stemming primarily from uncontrollable rural-urban influx, then clearly an integrated approach to rural-urban development is required that would enable the population to realize its potential in its areas of origin.
By implication, this would mean agricultural development of the kind that would engage the rural population and not displace them as happens routinely due to labour-displacing technologies and inequitable distribution of land.
When the ignored and the marginalized of the rural areas migrate to cities swelling up the size beyond cities' capacity, problems of the kind we call problems of urbanization are created.
While the core cause of urbanization problems can be addressed through the equitous development of rural-agricultural sector following which the role of town planners may gain salience, the city problems can certainly not be ignored or expected to wait until the rural-urban influx triggered by deprivation is contained through transformational government policies.
An effective response, however, requires not much planning in the strictest sense as paper plans become ineffective due to external factors that cannot be anticipated fully. The best laid town plans that do not account for unexpected environmental developments are derailed.
Effective response capability can, however, come from strategic public administration that is equipped to deal with both the internal and external factors as and when they show up.
Many developed societies have qualified public administrators with Masters in Public Administration (MPAs) running the affairs of their cities. There is an elected city mayor and an elected city council which appoint an MPA as a city manager. City management is then organized around functional lines with each functional area again staffed by qualified public administrators.
The functional areas include water, sanitation & sewerage, roads, health, education, other utilities, waste disposal, law & order, etc. Weekly council meetings open to the citizens keep all those in public administration accountable who also keep giving an account of the utilization of the financial resources they mobilize from citizens.
A bigger city could be divided into districts with each district organized as above. People are not expected to build their own roads and lay their own gutter pipelines if the government is not being able to do so.
Rather, the government is expected to and made to fulfil its responsibilities if it occupies the position that it does. Also, there are no separate rules--one for the affluent and another set for the poor with the government machinery mobilized in elite areas and the poor expected to help themselves.
Public goods are provided equally to all irrespective of their financial status and power. The city government and administration remain responsive and accountable to all.
If the people are dissatisfied, they will vote the city government out of the office in the next elections. With them will go the city manager and administrators they had appointed.
Survival in the office depends on a successful discharge of public obligations of which people are the judge. People also evaluate execution of city development projects which they propose and finance themselves either directly through bond flotations or indirectly through taxes. People scrutinize how their tax money is utilized by city management which maintains and gives account of the same routinely.
While district governments and union councils came up in Pakistan, professional public administration remains conspicuous by its absence. The upshot is little or no different or even worse in some cases as compared to what it was like when agencies, boards, and public organizations were trying to manage city affairs.
A system of accountability also remains absent as elections to the councils are driven more by political considerations than by performance in the realm of public administration.
Much of the city population remains indifferent to the electoral process driven more by political parties for gaining political strength than by the aspirations of the people directly connected with city affairs.
The outcome is poor sanitation, dilapidated roads, poor supply of utilities, waste disposal and environmental issues, poor quality health and education facilities, and grave law and order situation.
A strong city management infrastructure could have translated the intent of President Musharraf's famous anti-terror speech of January 12, 2002 into action thus alleviating the problem considerably.
The domestic sources of terror that thrive due to an apathetic over-stretched higher-level government could have been brought under the watchful eyes of smaller-scale city or district government thus ameliorating the lot in this realm to a large extent.
In the face of all of the above, a dejected public raises the slogan of self-help. While the "self-help" concept inadvertently absolves the government of whatever little responsibility it feels and owes to the public, it cannot solve the grave problems the cities have now come to be plagued with --law and order being now on top of them all.
While neighbourhood committees can provide limited security to a certain extent, people will still not be safe on the roads, shopping centres, offices, and worship places they visit routinely outside their own neighbourhood.
Also, how many sewer pipelines and roads can be laid especially by those ill-equipped for the purpose physically with time and space constraints? Population nodes require coordinated provision of infrastructure and facilities which cannot be a randomly undertaken exercise.
Under an overall broad framework, this activity can, however, be devolved to be undertaken with the participation of people who are expected to provide both the ideas as well as the financial resources for the provision of civic amenities.
The actual provision and delivery of basic services would, however, require professional departments dedicated for the purpose at the union, district, and the city levels.
Economies of scale associated with the provision of these services necessitate professional organization in the interest of low cost and timely delivery of quality service that the novices would always remain ill-equipped to provide.
The people are to, however, monitor such activities through their representation on union and city councils which should exist for promoting public interest in the realm of city management and not merely for promoting political interest at the national political level.
It is through the above kind of public-private partnership that the city's issues can possibly be addressed. Public-private partnership certainly does not mean that an already burdened and over-stretched public also takes up the unfinished tasks of the government for which it is neither trained nor has the time and space to pay adequate attention to.
Just because a few such projects could be executed with success does not imply replication throughout the length and breadth of cities that have sprawled beyond the imagination of the country's best town planners.
Only a localized government focusing on a manageable area can come up with innovative responses to changing needs through the involvement of people whose confidence it must enjoy.
Confidence of the people is a test that not many of our governments are able to pass. The reason is that, inter alia, the political will to discharge their responsibilities also remains low no matter how many tiers of government are created.
So, creation of additional tiers of government is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for improving city administration. While professional public administration is imperative to discharge the city functions, this would also require an effort of the will for quality, timely, and low-cost delivery of public service.
Effort of the will is, in turn, driven by a value system which has yet to be viewed as invaluable by our society. Unless girded by a can-do mind-set; faith in honest hard work; aversion to duplicity, hypocrisy, and greed; desire to change the status quo for the better; self-interest rather than selfish interest; the "will" will remain underpinned by a disvalue system that will keep widening the speech-action gaps.
The best ideas in organization, management, and planning will, therefore, be thwarted. It is this disvalue system against which the civil society ought to rise with a view to reversing it.
Otherwise, in the future some of us will not only be envisaging providing our own infrastructure but also making some of our own basic goods currently available off the shelf.