Why city planning and Enterprise Architecture analogy fails in Indian Metropolis

By Mohan Krishnamoorthy

Enterprise Architects like me frequently use the City Planning analogy to explain to corporate stakeholders what we do, and why it matters. The city planning is a rather elegant and intuitive one as most of us who live in urban cities can relate to the services we expect from statutory bodies that manage our cities.

City Planners a.k.a Urban planners develop land use plans and programs that help create communities, accommodate population growth, and revitalize physical facilities in towns, cities, counties, and metropolitan areas. One can argue that most of us living in urban areas are armchair city-planners and can relate to the need to have a long-term vision and to plan a city 10-20 years out. We are quick to opine on issues facing our cities and how things can be better. Not surprisingly, Enterprise Architects have taken on this analogy to highlight how they are expected to be custodians of the enterprise’s ‘City Plan.’

City Planners spend most of their time designing for functioning, livable cities that also comes down to effective engagement with stakeholders including elected leaders, officials from other government departments and citizen. For EA ‘city-planners,’ stakeholder engagement includes effective coordination with functional users, operational staff, senior executives, and managers across business units. Planners also work to ensure a seamless network of infrastructure, roads, sewage, water, electric supply and other services – this is analogous to integration strategy to ensure interplay of large platforms in a corporate landscape.

A well-functioning governance is required to ensure a city plan on paper gets actioned in the real world. Residents of a city expect their elected leaders to hold city planners accountable for this strategy realization.

While living in western cities, I would find the analogy between City Planning and Enterprise Architecture extremely relatable but would muse about the failure of this analogy in urban India. An often-quoted refrain among the Indian digerati and intelligentsia goes “If only we had effective city planners, we won’t be in such a mess.”

In India and parts of developing nations, it isn’t the lack of city planners, but rather a dearth of planners who are honest, and can withstand diverging demands from stakeholders and property owners out to cut corners. Case in point is the recent arrest of a team of city planners in Bengaluru.
Arrest of a corrupt City planner in Bengaluru

A week ago, the media were all over the news of a raid by the Anti-corruption board in the offices of Town Planning in Bengaluru. A few key members of the city planning and zoning team were raided and arrested recently. The people raided include Gangadharaiah K.L., Assistant Director, Town Planning of Bengaluru’s city council (BBMP).

The anti-corruption task force (Lokayukta police) recovered a large cache of bullion, gold jewelry, silver and currency (including ₹14,716,000, USD 10,298, Dubai Dirham 1180) from the official’s residence. The police also found that he owned 14 apartments in and around Yelahanka along with some other prime property around the metropolis.

Another town planning officer, T. Hanumantharaya, an Assistant Executive Engineer, Storm Water Drains division was also raided. The police said that a huge cache of incriminating documents relating to the assets of these individual officers has been recovered during the raids, apart from cash, gold jewellery and silver articles.

The arrest of a senior Town Planning official of the BBMP highlights how the malaise goes much deeper – corrupt, incompetent officials out to cut corners to line their pockets; long term plans of the metropolis be damned.

Inept governance and collective accountability
Like many residents of Bengaluru – the Silicon Valley of the East – I am chagrined by the unplanned urban sprawl. The utter lack of zoning enforcement manifests its ugly head all the challenges facing the metropolis – ranging from flooding during monsoons to the traffic gridlock which we see on most roads every day.

While residents point to inept administration and politicians, few are willing to acknowledge that the residents themselves are responsible for the mess. Take for instance, our neighborhood where my dad built our house over three decades ago. Over the years, many neighbors decided to cut corners and bribed local town planning officials to have their properties rezoned to commercial and re-developed them into multi-story shops, offices, Paying Guest and other ventures.

The then quaint neighborhood has now succumbed to unplanned sprawl. The subdivision that accommodated a few hundred families now hosts over a hundred thousand people, and the impact is for all to see – sewage lines designed for the earlier loads are regularly clogged. Roads and lanes designed for residential traffic are gridlocked with commercial vehicles making regular deliveries. There is hardly any parking spot available, forcing residents to park on narrow roads, further exacerbating traffic jams. Thanks to the encroachment of stormwater drains, many low lying areas get flooded after brief showers.

Failure of collective governance
When the stakeholders – citizen and business users – coerce city planners to approve projects by cutting corners, haphazard, unplanned sprawl begins hitting the ecosystem and life all around.
When the system breaks down, as it often does, residents take to social media to complain, quietly ignoring the fact they and their neighbors with the connivence of corrupt city planning officials are to blame. I see the same story play out in almost all the subdivisions around the sprawling metropolis, and almost all other cities across India

Bottomline: Failure of governance when it comes to City Planning hits urban residents for generations. In the same way, the failure to govern a corporate City Plan hits the business operations, and eventually the revenue stream and profitability.

– Mohan Krishnamoorthy is an Indian American technology executive with a multinational company. The opinions in this article are his own and not that of his organization. To those wondering about his CTC, he was honored with a Silver certificate by the Income Tax Department for his tax contributions to the Indian economy. He can be reached at [email protected] or https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohanbabuk/