Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, eds., Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity (New Texts Out Now)

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Aug 29, 2019 Syria
Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, eds., Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity (New Texts Out Now)

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, eds., Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity (New Texts Out Now)

By : Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour (eds.), Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya: What made you edit this book? 

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour (KK & MG): We wanted to write a book that would contribute to the critical studies of modernity and global culture by making visible the actually existing, diverse, but previously neglected practices of social housing in the broader Middle East. We believed that the absence of a scholarly book that particularly addressed the topic was evident. Comparative studies existed, but either their geographical diversity was limited, or they included housing as part of larger debates in architecture, urban design, and city planning. So, we considered Social Housing in the Middle East as an opportunity to address this gap in scholarship. Following our co-chaired panel at the 69th annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2016, we came up with a book project that would bring together works on lesser known examples of social housing projects in the region by adopting cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives.
...lower-class families have extended the borders of the modernist paradigm...

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

KK & MG: The book underlines the interconnectedness of social housing experiences in the Middle East to various other sites, economies, and urban regimes around the world by gathering the stories behind projects that have until now remained virtually unexplored. In addition to further drawing attention to the agency of local builders and homeowners in refashioning interior and exterior spaces, it intervenes in the field by extending the notion of modernity beyond canonical buildings and by moving out of isolationist frameworks for the region. The book includes both practitioners and consumers within projects that have typically been addressed solely in terms of formal analysis. In addressing these interlinked agendas, accounts gathered in this volume seek to contribute to recent, more inclusive architectural history writing practices. In this respect, Social Housing in the Middle East is situated within the broad spectrum of critical postcolonial studies of architecture and urbanism.

The modernization of the Middle East and North Africa has been considered primarily as the story of elite groups. In the case of cities, the narrative usually consists of "important" works of architecture, either directly built by foreign (star) architects commissioned by "western oriented" governments or "western-educated" local actors. In response, chapters in this book tell diverse histories of alternative modes of dwelling cultures where lower-class families have extended the borders of the modernist paradigm by adopting, localizing, and reshaping given models. In doing so, the book turns its attention to marginalized subjectivities, competing identity claims, and class aspirations that have played a role in the development and transformation of lower-income housing settlements in the region.

Furthermore, housing is closely linked to topics that are both contemporary and whose scope reaches beyond mainstream architectural history writing—social movements, for instance. In response, our introduction chapter calls for the extension of social housing literature to include humanitarian endeavors such as building refugee camps and designing emergency dwellings (not typically included within the breadth of social and public housing), as well as activism organized around the “right to housing” in the MENA region.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

KK: My previous work focused on the transformation of the residential culture and the lower-income households in early twentieth-century Turkey. I also wrote on issues of urban culture and identity in contemporary Turkish cities. My collaboration with Mohammad began when he invited me to join the editorial team of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture in late 2011. Seeing that we worked together quite well and learned a lot from each other, we began to collaborate on research as well. 

MG: My previous research initially focused on Persian architecture and garden history, but I have published books on a wide range of topics, including bazaars in Islamic cities, synagogues in the Islamic world, and calligraphy in Islamic architecture. Although we had developed varied scholarly interests, both Kıvanç and I have backgrounds in architecture and architectural history, and have been interested in the contemporary urban developments in the Middle East, from large-scale landscape projects to temporary settlements, which brought us together in this project.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

KK & MG: We imagined Social Housing in the Middle East to be a work of reference for an international community of scholars and graduate students who are interested in exploring the role of locality in the production, transformation, and appropriation of global architectural typologies. The book includes both historical studies and contemporary debates on social housing in the region. For that reason, we hope that practitioners and policymakers, as well as housing activists, will also be interested in reading it. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

KK & MG: In addition to our individual research projects, we recently co-chaired a panel on “Housing Refugees in Urban Centers” at the 14th congress of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2019). We are also working on a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA), together with the guest editor Bülent Batuman, that will discuss the notion of displacement and its impact on architecture and the cities in the Islamic world.

J: Do you think your book covered all major social housing projects in the region?

KK & MG: From the beginning, the edited collection did not intend to bring together all aspects of social housing production in the Middle East or all known examples in its near history, covering every single country. Our selection of each contribution is closely related to the structure of the book: the chapters are strong representatives of relevant themes surrounding the issue of social housing and spatial agency in the region. And although we initially planned to have a more even coverage, this has proven very difficult to accomplish, like in most edited volumes. Unfortunately, we did not receive any submissions from scholars working on sites that are usually excluded from mainstream sources, such as Palestine, Yemen, and Afghanistan. 


Excerpt from the book

Resurgent Typologies: The Apartment Block and Informal Housing

As in many other places in the world, in Middle Eastern cities mass housing has been but one of the formulas drawn in response to the quest for finding the right form of “inhabiting on a large scale.” While “large scale” has not always been the most popular solution, it has often been deemed the most economically sound answer to the housing problem. In Turkey, for instance, Siedlung-inspired detached and semi-detached types dominated the urban scene until the end of the 1950s. In the first half of the twentieth century, the so-called “rental barracks” were likened to contemporary prisons, which were thought to have symbolized a transient and nomadic life. Yet, beginning in the 1960s, these were gradually replaced by midrise and high-rise housing units, the most repeated form of social housing in the region today. The ambiguous reception of the big concrete blocks in Turkey is by no means unique. Across the world, multistory-type social housing models mostly emerged because of financial constraints or the lack of available land. For instance, in Iraq, multistory “public housing estates” that were built by various government agencies were mostly popular in the 1960s and 1970s. These models differed from the “low-rise high-density urban blocks” that characterized the larger modernization and reconstruction programs laid out by the state in the 1950s and were seldom repeated. In post-revolutionary Cairo, midrise modernist blocks were the widely adopted type in the 1950s and 1960s. This trend continued in the 1970s but gradually ceased in the 1980s, when regulation and planning gave way to the growth of informal settlements. Vast satellite cities built outside Cairo, once seen as a viable solution to stop mass migration to the capital city, ended up uninhabited or partially inhabited voids. In many other countries in the region, “the tendency for most affordable housing projects to be located in peripheral and relatively remote locations . . . has resulted in problems of higher social and infra- structure costs.”

Nevertheless, in stark contrast to Egypt and Turkey, the history of rapid urbanization linked to oil economies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain meant that welfare housing translated into the single-family detached home, and the consideration of alternative types has been rare. Similarly, in Iran, post-Revolutionary measures for centralization, such as the transition of ownership of urban wastelands to the government and regulation of the market, encouraged horizontal urban growth rather than high-rise developments. The second development plan of  the Islamic Republic continued this policy by focusing on producing social housing under the campaign of “building small.” Contemporary developments, such as the ambitious but poorly received Mehr Project (2007), however, consisted predominantly of midrise apartment blocks. In places where comprehensive government policies in social housing are yet to exist, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), private entrepreneurs who build affordable houses tend to reproduce existing high-rise models of luxury housing on a smaller scale and farther away from the city centers. 

While most countries chose to directly produce housing units, few ofthese attempts proved sufficient to meet rising needs. With increased migration to urban centers for prospects of better lives and jobs, as well as unending wars and conflict in the region, oceans of shantytowns began to emerge at the periphery of cities and towns. The unanticipated scale of informal housing in Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, and Yemen forced governments to look for more site-specific solutions, such as the sites-and-services approach, in which prospective users would be given cheap land and subsidies to build their own housing with affordable payment options, much below the market value. Another strategy was applying aided self-help housing methods, especially when government (central and local administrations) means were limited. When such attempts too fell short of providing sufficient housing supplies, primarily two things transpired: first, self-built vernacular housing typologies, including informal settlements in countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey, became customary urban forms in expanding cities. Second, small-scale contractors emerged as significant actors regulating the market in urban centers in competition with registered architects. In the second half of the twentieth century, cities in and around the Middle East were increasingly marked by “housing infill and densification” and self-help urban “apartment building extensions.”

… 

Architecture in the Age of Turmoil: Extended Scope of Social Housing

Beyond (post)colonial legacies, which still inform the present in countless ways, two recent global and regional developments continue to shape contemporary social housing policies in the region: one is the larger neoliberal economic trends that hurl the Middle East into becoming a construction zone, with a reduced role for central authorities in housing production. Growing inequality and privatization of services foster the expansion of self-help settlements around the region at the same time as the emergence of a transnational capitalist class as investors reconfigure the scene. New cities are now being built from scratch in compressed timeframes with little or no concern for decent working conditions, such as Lusail City  in Qatar, the host of the 2022 World Cup In Dubai’s infamous labor camps, thousands of workers who are reported to be working long hours on giant construction sites are denied access not only to adequate housing, but also to freedom of movement, basic health care, and social security. In Beirut, where mapping affordable housing, or any form of housing for that matter, has long been equated with “mapping security,” the city’s old neighborhoods are in continual transformation with the fast pace of high-rise and gated residential development. In the meantime, neoliberal economic policies in the region have not remained unchallenged. For instance, unequal urban development threatening to eat up the remaining bits of green spaces in Istanbul, coupled with rising cultural and religious conservatism, led to mass protests and unrest in 2013 with the Gezi movement in Turkey.

The second major development affecting social housing debates is the political conflicts and violence, tension, and wars in the region, which caused millions of people to take refuge in countries neighboring Syria and Iraq, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Some of the early camps, built for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced from their villages and towns in the occupied territories as Israel tactically used (and continues to use) housing needs as a tool for colonial expansion, eventually became permanent residential areas. While Palestinians have long been denied the right to return their homes and lands, in the words of a humanitarian aid expert, these camp cities may well be the “cities of tomorrow.” One such example is the camp established by the International Committee of the Red Cross near Zarqa for Palestinian refugees after the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. According to the United Nations Work and Relief Agency (UNRWA) website, the agency “replaced the original tents with concrete shelters and over the years the refugees have made improvements and added more rooms. The camp now resembles other urban quarters in Zarqa.” Social geographer Myriam Ababsa writes that the unprecedented scale of such developments, in addition to financial difficulties, made Jordan steer away from its more comprehensive social housing and slum-upgrading programs in the 1990s and focus instead on providing basic services and infrastructure. The Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon has a similar story. In its old and newly built parts, one could see various permanent types of housing inhabited by diverse income groups. Almost completely destroyed during an armed conflict in 2007, the camp was rebuilt in 2011 by the UNRWA with the aim of reconstructing it “in a manner that preserves the social fabric through maintaining the camp’s pre-destruction neighborhood layout.” 

Beyond city centers, newly built refugee camps in the Middle East accommodate millions of people cramped in tiny shelters in a vast sea   of desert-barren land blemished by scarce water and thus unsuited for agriculture. Such crises drew the attention of not only humanitarian agencies, but also big manufacturers such as IKEA, to developing mic-dwellings, which go beyond either the container type or tent as a housing solution. An exhibition at MoMA in October 2016, Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, displayed “a range of objects, including the jointly-designed IKEA Foundation-UNHCR-Better Shelter modular emergency structure, along with works by Estudio Teddy Cruz, Henk Wildschut, and Tiffany Chung, among others.” Undoubtedly, the larger implications are becoming more devastating as homelessness and displacement in the region define a human tragedy of global dimensions. In the last six years, stories of these tragedies have been circulating in the news virtually every day: images of Syrian refugees sent back from European cities and borders to refugee camps, or the loss of life caused by desperate measures that families adopt to travel via land or sea to escape crises at home, to name a few. With these images and conditions in mind, is the time not ripe to rethink social housing as a category to include provincial refugee camps, as well as emergency dwellings, which, in practice, perform as permanent shelters?
Aug 8, 2019 Lebanon
James K. Boyce By :
James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce, Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (New Texts Out Now)

James K. Boyce, Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (London: Anthem Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

James K. Boyce (JKB): I believe that improving human wellbeing and protecting our planet’s environment can and must go hand-in-hand.

Too often these are juxtaposed as if they are competing ends. Human wellbeing, some allege, can be improved only at the expense of the environment, and the environment can be safeguarded only at the expense of human wellbeing. I wrote this book to challenge that assumption and to stimulate thinking about practical ways to combine these two goals.

Ironically, the trade-off notion is propagated not only by mega-corporations opposed to environmental regulation, but also at times by environmentalists when they use the phrase “limits to growth” to describe nature’s limited capacity to provide raw materials and dispose of wastes. In the book’s opening chapter, “Limits to Growth – Of What?” I call for a new banner: Grow the good and shrink the bad.
...equity—that is, fairness—must be a central feature of climate policies for them to be effective....

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

JKB: The book is divided into three parts, with twenty-seven chapters in all. So, the chapters are short and to the point. Part one discusses economics and the environment. Here, among other things, I argue that the state-market dichotomy along which so much political debate has been waged in the past is less important today than the more fundamental dichotomy between democracy and oligarchy. In an oligarchic society, where wealth and power are concentrated in few hands, neither markets nor states can be counted upon to produce positive outcomes for the majority of people or the natural environment.

Part two is about environmental justice and environmental injustice. Here, I delve into the two-way relationship linking inequality to environmental degradation. Greater inequalities of wealth and power tend to result in more environmental degradation, and in turn, environmental degradation exacerbates inequalities across lines of race, ethnicity, and class.

Part three of the book turns to climate policy. The most pressing environmental challenge of our time—global climate destabilization—is driven above all else by profligate use of fossil fuels. I make the case that equity—that is, fairness—must be a central feature of climate policies for them to be effective. One way to address this is to curtail the supply of fossil fuels, thereby raising their price (a policy known as “carbon pricing”), and return most or all of the revenue to the people as equal per capita dividends. Carbon dividends help to ensure the political durability of what otherwise would be an unpopular policy, turning a regressive tax into a progressive net impact. At the same time, dividends give concrete expression to the ethical maxim that the gifts of nature belong to everyone in common measure. Another important way to build equity into climate policies is to maximize the air quality co-benefits of the transition to clean energy, improving public health and reducing environmental inequalities. Equity also comes to the fore when we consider how to allocate scarce resources for adaptation to climate change. I argue that we should prioritize protecting human life, not the real estate of the rich, contrary to the conventional logic of cost-benefit analysis.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

JKB: I have been working on these issues for a number of years. The essays in the book appeared originally in other outlets—newspapers, magazines, blogs, and so on. The book updates them and draws them together into an accessible whole. My last book, Economics, the Environment, and Our Common Wealth (2013), touched on similar themes in a somewhat more technical and academic treatment.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JKB: I would be delighted if the book attracts readers around the world who share a common interest in building new economies that work better for people and better for the planet. The book is also suitable for classroom use at the high school and university levels. In addition to the electronic version, the book’s publisher, Anthem Press, will issue a paperback edition in October 2019.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JKB: Much of my effort these days is devoted to climate policy. Another book of mine published this year, The Case for Carbon Dividends, delves more deeply into the idea of treating the limited carbon absorptive capacity of the atmosphere as a resource owned by all, charging for its use (instead of the now-usual practice of giving it away for free), and returning the money to the people.

I also continue to work in the field of development economics. At the moment, I am working with colleagues to better understand the phenomenon of capital flight from Africa—illicit financial flows by which money is siphoned from some of the poorest countries in the world.

J: Climate policy and capital flight seem like very different topics. How are they connected in your mind?

JKB: Both topics have a common root. They stem from the ability of those with wealth and power to advance their own narrow, short-run interests at the expense of the long-run wellbeing of the vast majority of people. Extreme inequality is the underlying disease, and it has many morbid symptoms.

 

Excerpt from the book 

From chapter thirteen: “Letter from Delhi”

Arriving in Delhi in January, at the height of the winter pollution season, you notice the air as soon as you step off the plane. A pungent smell with hints of burning rubber and diesel fumes assaults the nose and stings the eyes. On the highway into the city center, a digital screen shining through the smog displays the current level of suspended particulate matter. You don’t need to understand the numbers to know it’s bad.

Delhi has extensive parks, broad avenues, beautiful buildings and a vibrant culture. But casting a pall – quite literally – over it all is the worst air pollution of any major city in the world.

I lived in Delhi in spring 2015, accompanying my wife who had a research fellowship there. I brought along work to do on air pollution inequality in the United States. For the first week, we stayed in a guesthouse near the center of town. One night I was awakened around 2 a.m. by the acrid smell of pollution. To get back to sleep, I had to slip on an N95 pollution mask (at the suggestion of a doctor friend, I’d brought some with us).

In the morning it struck me that it would be absurd to devote all my time in Delhi to working on U.S. air pollution while ignoring the far higher levels around me. In an environmental twist on the spiritual maxim, ‘be here now’, I resolved to educate myself about Delhi’s air pollution and what can be done about it

One of the most dangerous air pollutants is particulate matter. In Delhi it comes from multiple sources, including diesel trucks that are allowed to pass through the city in the middle of the night, rapidly increasing numbers of passenger vehicles, coal-burning power plants and brick kilns that ring the city, construction debris and open burning of wastes. Particulates are measured by an Air Quality Index (AQI). An AQI below 50 is considered ‘good’. Anything above 300 is considered ‘hazardous’ and would trigger emergency health warnings in many countries.

An intrepid team of Beijing-based volunteers today assembles real-time data from air pollution monitors around the world and posts them on the website aqicn.org. In Delhi I soon fell into the habit of checking the data from our nearest location several times a day. This could be pretty alarming. When I checked on the morning of Valentine’s Day, the AQI for particulates was 399. Overnight it had hit at 668, off the standard AQI chart. Sometimes it soared even higher.

A month before I arrived in Delhi, the Centre for Science and Environment, India’s leading environmental advocacy organization, released the results of a study in which several residents were equipped with handheld devices to monitor air pollution levels over a typical day. Some of their readings topped 1,000.

A 2014 World Health Organization report identified Delhi as having the highest average level of particulate air pollution among 1,600 major cities worldwide. In the past two years, Beijing’s air had qualified as ‘healthy’ for just 58 out of 730 days. Delhi’s air qualified for only seven.

In the run-up to President Obama’s three-day visit to Delhi in January 2015, a satirical website reported that U.S. security agencies were flying in 20,000 gallons of clean air for him to breathe, the Secret Service having concluded that ‘more than any terrorist strike, the Delhi air poses a serious security threat to POTUS.’ Extrapolating a bit too literally from health risk statistics, Bloomberg.com reported that the visit took six hours off the president’s lifespan.

Air Pollution as Environmental Injustice

Everyone in Delhi, young and old, rich and poor alike, is exposed to air pollution. But not all are exposed equally. A study in the scientific journal Atmospheric Environment found that Delhi’s low-income households experienced significant adverse health effects from air pollution, whereas high-income households were not significantly affected. Part of the explanation may be that affluent households have access to air conditioning as well as better health and nutrition. The authors also found that low-income men in Delhi spend on average about seven hours a day outdoors, whereas at the top of the income scale the time spent outdoors is close to zero. A study by professor Amit Garg of the Indian Institute of Management examined the correlation between suspended particulates and socio-economic status, and concluded that exposure is generally higher in the city’s low-income neighborhoods.

Health risks for children are especially acute as their developing brains, lungs and immune systems are vulnerable to air pollution. A study for the Government of India’s Central Pollution Control Board that examined more than 11,000 Delhi school children in the early 2000s found that 43.5 per cent of them had reduced lung function, which was likely to be irreversible. The lower the family’s socio-economic status, the higher the percentage. The study made recommendations on everything from where new schools should be sited to when children should be allowed to play outside. But according to its principal researcher, ‘absolutely nothing was followed up on’. Since that time Delhi’s air pollution has deteriorated further.

Some of the most extreme exposures are experienced by those who earn their livings on Delhi’s arterial roads, including drivers of the three-wheeled auto-rickshaws that ply the streets. A study of in-rickshaw pollution concentrations found that levels of ultra-fine particles were eight times higher than the levels at rooftop monitors one kilometer away.

Just as not everyone is harmed equally by pollution, not everyone benefits equally from the activities that cause it. Delhi’s upper-income residents ‘consume more of energy intensive and emission-producing goods such as electricity and private transport’, Garg observes, ‘while the poor bear a disproportionately higher share of the resultant air pollution health burden’.

In other words, Delhi’s air pollution is a classic case of environmental injustice. The distribution of its costs and benefits mirrors the distribution of wealth and power.

What to Do?

Public awareness of air pollution in Delhi lags behind that in China, where face masks are a common sight and the remarkable film Under the Dome received 100 million views within 48 hours when it was posted in March 2015 (before being banned by Chinese authorities). But this may be starting to change. In spring 2015, the Indian Express, one of the country’s leading newspapers, ran a searching multi-part investigative series on Delhi’s air pollution called ‘Death by Breath.’ The Centre of Science and Environment, which successfully campaigned a decade ago for conversion of Delhi’s buses and autorickshaws to compressed natural gas, continues to raise public consciousness and advocates for policy remedies.

In the expatriate community, Delhi’s toxic air is viewed with rising alarm. The U.S. embassy has imported 1,800 top-of-the-line air purifiers for its personnel. ‘My business has just taken off,’ the director of a local firm selling air filtration units told the New York Times. ‘It started in the diplomatic community, but it’s spread to the high-level Indian community, too.’

But such individual solutions – for the few who can afford them – can only go so far. Returning to the United States after three years as the New York Times Delhi correspondent, Gardiner Harris wrote that the city’s air pollution is ‘so frightening that some feel it is unethical for those who have a choice to willingly raise children here’. His own eight-year-old son suffered asthma attacks requiring emergency hospitalization. So many expatriates are leaving Delhi, he reports, that the American Embassy School is ‘facing a steep drop in admissions next fall’.

Indian government officials aspire to make Delhi a ‘world-class city’. This goal is utterly incompatible with the city’s current air quality.

Because Delhi’s pollution has multiple causes, clearing the air will require multiple solutions. Important measures that could be undertaken immediately include expanded pollution monitoring with real-time reporting of the results; emergency health advisories and school closings when pollution exceeds dangerous thresholds; and the provision of particulate-grade masks to autorickshaw drivers, traffic policemen and others who earn their livings on the streets, not only to protect them but also to build public awareness of the issue.

In the longer term, key measures in the transportation sector include cleaner fuel standards and a phase-out of diesel vehicles; completion of bypass roads, so trucks no longer pass through the city; the expansion of public transport, including state-of-the-art bus rapid transit systems plus pedestrian walkways and bicycle lanes for ‘last-mile connectivity’ between stops and final destinations; and a cap on numbers of private automobiles.

Other necessary steps include strict (and strictly enforced) controls on emissions from coal-fired power plants and brick kilns (and enforcement of the ban on burning old tires in the latter); a rapid buildout of clean, renewable electricity generation; and a ban on open burning of wastes, including the burning of plant debris and crop residues which effectively turns beneficial fertilizer into hazardous pollution.

These same measures would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions, helping to mitigate global climate change – a linkage that may help to unlock international finance for green infrastructure investments. The potential air quality co-benefits from curbing use of fossil fuels are substantial even in high-income countries with relatively clean air. In India, the public health co-benefits of a clean energy transition would be enormous.

Another possible source of finance would be revenues from capping the supply of automobile license plates and auctioning them to the highest bidder. In Singapore, which has been doing this since 1990, the current price of a license plate valid for 10 years is US$60,000. The environmental writer Aseem Shrivastava and I have suggested a similar policy for Delhi with part of the auction revenue dedicated to green infrastructure and part returned to the residents of Delhi as equal dividend payments, based on the principle that the limited amount of public space that is available for private vehicles belongs in common measure to all the city’s residents.

Other major cities around the world have shown that clean air and economic development are not only compatible but can go together. These goals can be reconciled in Delhi, too, if and when its citizens demand it and its politicians respond.