@svembu This is fundamentally flawed line of thinking. Tokyo is not a large city because of high rents, it has high rents and demands more infrastructure because it is a large city. We need to ask why is it still growing in a country with rapidly shrinking population? 1/n
@svembu The reason why large cities exist is that they generate very returns to scale. These seem to not have reached limits even at Tokyo's 36 mn population. This is not to argue that all activities should be done in mega cities or that smaller cities are not needed..... 2/n
@svembu ...but just to point out that the problems of large cities are the result of their success (which attracts inflows of people), not their failure. We need to invest in smaller cities - decentralization & urban diversity are important in their own way, but big cities are needed 3/n
@svembu India needs a handful of mega-cities as part of its urban mix. The urban buzz of Mumbai or the start-up ecosystem of Blr are important for the economic & socio-cultural mix. Their clustering effects cannot be recreated by work-from-home 4/n
@svembu Gandhi's statement "India lives in its villages" is not a viable economic model. It is not even historically true as all periods of prosperity in Indian history were driven by mega cities - Mohenjodaro, Pataliputra, Vijayanagar etc. 5/n
@svembu Cities are "complex adaptive systems" and it is fundamentally wrong to use an engineering framework to thinking of them. That will fail for exactly the same reason that socialist-era five year plans failed with the economy 6/n
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