If West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wants Kolkata to take after London, perhaps the first thing she should do is think bridges. Yes, bridges, London’s bridges, because that’s where lies the secret of the beauty and dynamism of the city she so wishes to copy.
Up and down from Westminster, there are 24 crossings across the Thames. Most of them were built in the 19th century, as the city was growing on both sides of the river, reflecting an early dawn of wisdom on the part of the authorities that its future depended on the integrity of its two sections. Five bridges were added in the last century and two more have been built so far in the 21st to cope with new urban pressures.
The bridges have opened up London, bringing order to its landscape and mobility to its traffic, and perhaps saved the Thames from degenerating into a forgettable urban gully. It’s not that there are no traffic gridlocks in London. In fact, because of gridlocks, the city government enforces a congestion charge on motorists. But imagine what would have happened if Greater London’s 7.8 million people and 3 million cars had no easy access across the river. There would have been two Londons doubling up on themselves, huddled in their own separate coops with little social, cultural, or business interaction between them.
If Greater London, with a 1,572- square kilometre (sq km) area, can have 24 crossings to bridge its divide, why should Metropolitan Kolkata, with 15 million people (heading towards 21 million by 2025), 1.5 million vehicles (to reach 3 million over the next decade), and an area of 1,854 sq km, be content with only four across the Hooghly? How can we inject into this important urban basin a greater degree of cohesion and mobility if the river serves only to keep the region’s three municipal corporations, 38 municipalities, 72 cities, and 527 towns and villages apart?
Kolkata and Howrah could have been a liberating influence on each other had they really been regarded as twins for all planning purposes. But sadly, in all our urban calculations, they’ve remained mutually exclusive. This explains why, after the first two Hooghly bridges were built in 1932 (Bally Bridge) and 1943 (Howrah Bridge), nobody bothered to build another one until 1992, when Vidyasagar Setu came into being. The fourth one, Nivedita Setu, which is more like replacement bridge for Bally than a truly new one, had to wait another 15 years. Yet, the hard fact is that, without linking up the two and letting one flow into the other, it’s impossible to open up the clogged arteries of both and make their hearts beat freely again.
At least half a dozen more bridges are needed between the two cities, not only to extend their major east-west roads across to the other side but also to link them up with existing or future inter-state highways. Connections and ease of access make a city livable, and London is not the only example on earth to prove the point. There are others in Asia itself.
There are no fewer than 27 bridges across the Han River in the Seoul National Capital Area, which have helped integrate South Korea’s most important economic hinterland that also includes Incheon and Gyeonggi and has a population of 24.5 million. Seoul itself, having a population of over 10 million, is today a much better place to live in, cleaner, greener, healthier. With the bridges opening up newer urban areas, businesses no longer need to crowd in on the city centre and people have newer choices for housing.
Shanghai’s Pudong area across the Huangpu River owes its phenomenal growth, in a short period of time, largely to its bridge and tunnel links with the city’s western sections. Four major bridges and five subway tunnels (with two more under construction) have transformed the once fallow farmland, two-thirds the size of Greater London, into a thriving business and financial district of over 5 million people, where Shanghai’s new international airport is located and China’s tallest building (and the world’s second tallest), the 128-storey Shanghai Tower, is fast rearing its head.
Even Bangkok, once notorious for its traffic logjams, is a different metropolis today than 20 years ago. Its arterial roads and no fewer than 11 bridges across the Chao Phraya represent a valiant effort to cope with a population of some 10 million people and almost 25 million registered vehicles. And, in a massive effort to rid the inner city of population and infrastructural overloads, Ho Chi Minh City has planned to build 10 large bridges across the Saigon River. The authorities believe they’ll need at least 50 more in the next five years to meet the needs of a rapidly growing mega city of more than 10 million people.
