The way we will live

Will today's village be tomorrow's urban hangout?

For a long time, R Rajagopalan lived and worked in Mumbai. As usual, he complained about the city's traffic snarls. Then he moved to Hyderabad. For a long time now, he has been reminiscing wistfully about the ease of commuting in Mumbai.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of many who moved to what were, a decade or so ago, the cities of the future. The conditions in cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore, and suburbs like Gurgaon, make the migrants ache for the horrors they left behind in Mumbai or Delhi.

But the good news is that if one looks really far into the future, it is difficult to see things like commuting being a concern. As the Internet grows in popularity as a way to shop and carry on business, this could have dramatic results. The new technologies have already made it easier for some businesses to relocate outside cities "" drawing many workers with them.

As shopping and working online become mainstream, people may feel less inclined to travel to crowded business districts. We are already seeing some routine workers, especially part-time workers, working entirely from home.

Some even conduct business, including recruitment interviews, in neighbourhood coffee shops. All this may lead to a universal scattering of millions of villages, giving individuals locally the comforts of village-scale life and electronically the cultural richness of great cities.

Thus, the future of cities may well be one in which cities don't exist, blown apart by the rapid advancement already taking place in technology. Some may argue that cities are about people, not merely houses and office buildings. True, but how many of the voluble middle and upper class are today living where their first moorings lie?

However, there is a new dimension that cannot be ignored. The special economic zones, backed by Big Business and offering the walk-to-work option, may rival today's mega cities as hotspots of life and work.

Some four decades ago, the Maharashtra government, in collusion with builders, thwarted the development of New Bombay to keep property prices high in the city. If the Mahamumbai SEZ of Reliance Industries does entice people away from Nariman Point, the future of cities will see the wheel turn a full circle.