The Valley’s relentless growth

Photo Courtesy: Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya
Rana-era photographs show space that has been urbanised in the last three decades

Asked what they envision when prompted with the idea of 'Kathmandu', the Valley's leading urban planners and scholars respond in a variety of ways. Despite the differences in their conceptions of the Kathmandu Valley and the five municipalities that comprise it, none refer to a great deal of open or public space. And yet, it is just such spaces that help describe Kathmandu's past, while providing insight into its present and indicating future trends.

Three of the Valley's most famous open urban spaces surround the respective palaces of the Malla dynasty, which ruled between the 12th and 18th centuries: the Durbar Squares of the Valley's three main municipalities – Kathmandu (Yen) proper, Lalitpur (Yala, Patan) and Bhaktapur (Khwopa, Bhatgaon). Each of these squares is a cluster of temples, a palace, courtyards and raised dabali platforms. At dusk, one is free to climb the stairs on one of the temples in Patan Durbar Square, to sit and look out at the full performance of life below. Young children run about, while their older counterparts play slightly more structured games of catch, tag and hide-and-seek. Around the square, sales of cloth, vegetables, paper, spices and medicine take place; we could well be in Malla times, or the Licchavi period prior to that, or the Shah/Rana period following. If one concentrates, perhaps the children playing below are those of the palace attendants; the woman calling out to another is a member of the royal family, beckoning a member of her entourage. Behind a latticework window high up on the Taleju temple, you can observe a light and some movement. The king is doing puja to his protector deity.

And then the spell breaks. The door to the durbar opens, the word museum on a bronze plaque flashes by, and suddenly one notices the smell of exhaust. The sound of motorcycles and cars interrupts the brief voyage into the Valley's urban past. Indeed, the vehicles serve as a stark reminder of Kathmandu's evolution. According to the "Kathmandu Valley Plan for 2020", created by the Kathmandu Valley Development Committee, the number of registered motorcycles alone increased from some 24,200 in 1989 to more than 64,100 in 1995. By 2001, the Kathmandu Valley had 183,400 registered vehicles, at a growth of 21 percent per year. Growth of motorcycles continues at a rate of about 25 percent per year, while the numbers of buses and private cars plying the roads of the Valley had risen from 7069 buses and 18,000 cars in 1989 to 7557 buses and more than 28,900 cars in 1995. This data itself ends a dozen years ago, while in the intervening period the number of vehicles is said to have increased to well over 250,000.

The dramatic increase in the number of privately owned vehicles is a particular source of worry, both in light of the weakness of the Valley's road networks and the inevitable level of pollution. Kathmandu's bowl-shaped topography, coupled with its low winter wind speeds, makes the capital city acutely vulnerable to high rates of air pollution through the phenomenon known as 'temperature inversion'. Levels of so-called PM10 particles in Kathmandu's air – those that are able to lodge deep within the lungs, and are among the most harmful of air pollutants – are particularly high. According to studies done by the organisation Clean Energy Nepal, between 1993 and 1999 PM10 levels nearly doubled, to 225 micrograms per cubic metre, among the very highest in the world. And that rate does not look set to decrease anytime soon. According to 2002 estimates, PM10 concentrations in the Kathmandu Valley are to increase by some 82 percent between 1996 and 2011, with more than a third of this due to vehicle emissions. Meanwhile, the number of hospital patients with acute respiratory infections increases by around 23 percent every year. During the winter months, this illness is now the leading cause of death in the Valley.

The inexorable monthly rise in the number of private vehicles in the Valley reflects rising wages, the recent introduction of purchase financing as well as government neglect in establishing a system of public transport. The total length of roads in the Kathmandu Valley is currently over 1339 km, 275 km of which is tarred. And the increase in the total length illustrates the growing problem of urban sprawl, and a lack of attention to the civic needs of its inhabitants. Perhaps most indicative of this is the simple fact that, all the while, priority given to footpaths has fallen by the wayside. As Bharat Sharma, professor and former deputy director-general of the Department of Urban Planning and Building Construction, says, "The technocrats need to speak to the people! Planning is not an elitist exercise." But the reality is that, despite the nearly one dozen urban master plans that have been drafted over the past four decades, there is no planning. Kathmandu's urban growth is guided by brick-kiln contractors who push tracks through the fields, which then become a catalyst for a colony that follows.

Kathmandu slum
Any discussion of urbanisation requires a definition of the term. But until very recently, such a working definition did not even exist within the Kathmandu government. Now, the Department of Urban Planning defines a 'city' as a place with at least 5000 people, and with a density of at least 10 people per hectare. At least half of all economic activities must be non-agricultural in this area, and – importantly – a stipulated minimum level of services and infrastructure must be in place. Recent efforts to increase the number of areas labelled nagarpalikas, or urban municipalities, have drawn the scorn of town planners, who insist that a change in label alone will do nothing for a rural location.

In comparison to other Southasian cities, rates of urban poverty are relatively low in Nepal. Until the past decade, discussions of the urban poor barely figured into the national government's development scheme. In some ways, it is unfair to dismiss this as merely another example of government neglect. While rates of poverty in Kathmandu stood at 19 percent in 1995, for example, the poverty rate for the country as a whole was 40 percent. Attention to rural development was and remains a pressing need. At the same time, however, it is estimated that half of Nepal's population will live in an urban environment by 2035.

That could mean a lot of people squeezed into areas that are already unable to keep up with demand. Asked what he thinks of his city, Kathmandu taxi driver Rabindra Sitaula, originally from Chitwan to the southwest, responds simply: "It stinks. In the morning you get the smell of garbage; at night, the air is filled with the stench of sewage and the Bagmati River." In fact, these latter two points are one in the same: the smell of the Bagmati, Kathmandu's largest water flow, is exactly that of the raw, untreated sewage that is dumped into it. At one time, residents of Kathmandu used septic tanks and other means of treating their waste. Increasingly, however, homes are connecting to municipal sewage lines and storm drains, which lead directly into the river. In the non-monsoon months, the Bagmati's flow can be said to be strictly made up of urban sewage and a little bit of industrial effluent.

Of course there is no planning; but even progressive, alert urban planners would have had a difficulty in recent years coping with the influx of people into Kathmandu, largely driven by the decade-long conflict and the lingering, crushing levels of poverty in the rural areas. In addition the fact is that Kathmandu is the one metropolis with any level of urban services. "Everyone comes into the capital, because it is the city, and they have no other choice," says another driver, Bishnu Khadka, from Parbat District to the west. He suggests that this itself is a problem. "The international airport should be located outside Kathmandu. Other things – factories, schools, ministries – need to be moved too. What is progress if construction only occurs in the capital?"

Former Kathmandu municipality Mayor Keshab Sthapit, who made some waves with his flamboyant and activist streak a decade back until a series of poor political alignments sidelined him, is frustrated with the ennui of the population. "This is a city without demands," he says in frustration. And without demands, he continues, there can be no vision. Without a vision, there will be no progress. If the standard citizen of Kathmandu is unable to define what he or she finds lacking, and then find a means by which he or she can address that lack, how can the government be held accountable for its lack of action? "Kathmandu has yet to peak in terms of total population," warns Sthapit. "But unless we start changing the way we think about and act towards the city, the problems of today will pale before those of tomorrow."

If the government hopes for Kathmandu to grow in a healthy and sustainable manner, and not to become a hotbed of frustration and dashed dreams, it must commit itself to urban development outside of the Valley. In light of this fact, it will be interesting to see what the coming years and the new push for federalism will do for the face of urban Nepal – and the effect that this will have on the Kathmandu Valley.

At the same time, the burgeoning population of urban poor cannot, and must not, go unnoticed. And the shanties along the rapids of the Bagmati, Manohara and other rivers have made it difficult for the middle- and upper-classes now to ignore the poor. A number of pervasive myths in Kathmandu have made it difficult for groups to work across communities. Commonly held beliefs are as follows, with the most common first: The settlers are not sukumbasi, or landless people, but are simply seeking to latch onto Kathmandu's resources and steal the commons from the government; areas in which the squatters live become infested with crime; the settlers not only are not landless or displaced – and thus not deserving of government assistance – but a good number are lazy and unwilling to work at all. It is easy to forget that the urban poor in Kathmandu, as is the case in urban areas around the world, are the people who perform the tasks that allow the capital city to run – cleaning, carrying, giving their sweat as payment for the right to live in the city.

The situation of the 'homeless' in Kathmandu is complicated. Lajana Manandhar, the director of Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, a housing-rights organisation that has worked primarily in Kathmandu since 1992, explains that many of the residents of the shanties are not 'landless' in the strict definition of the term. Most, however, have sold much of their land in the villages, and have come to Kathmandu in search of work. Others may still retain property, but the political situation and the near-total absence of economic opportunities in rural areas have pulled them to Kathmandu.

"They may look like they are living in slums, but they have motorcycles, TVs and sofas," mutters one middle-class resident. "Why should we or the government help them?" While it is true that some squatter areas seem to have more financially secure residents, most do not. While the only official national housing survey was carried out in 1992, subsequent studies have continued to show the acute lack of housing in Kathmandu. Recent solutions have included the establishment of Nepal's first housing project, in Kirtipur in the southwest of the Valley. The project was created specifically for those living in unregistered homes by the Samkhosi River. In fact, the move to Kirtipur has precedent. In the days of the Malla kings, in the midst of growing congestion in Patan, the local government moved one family from each tole, or neighbourhood, to Kirtipur. In doing so, they transferred traditional place names, but also allowed more urban breathing space.

As recently as 1999, some described Nepal as urbanising rapidly – without a parallel increase in industrialisation, admittedly, but still without the slums and urban agglomerations that characterise other Southasian cities such as New Delhi and Dhaka. Just over the past year, however, Kathmandu has seen sudden growth of squatter settlements. Lumanti Support for Shelter has done a great deal of community organising in the Kirtipur, Kathmandu and Patan municipal areas with squatter communities. "In the past," says director Manandhar, "growth in these areas would occur gradually. Five or six homes would appear, and a few new families would arrive every five to six weeks. What we are seeing today is completely unprecedented."

Instead of slow, steady expansion, the area under the Bagmati bridge in Thapathali, a major thoroughfare connecting Kathmandu and Patan, has recently seen over a hundred homes appear over a period of weeks, along the fetid banks of the Bagmati River. Talk of a land mafia runs strong, and the inhabitants of the settlement are highly reluctant to talk to outsiders about themselves, let alone about the mafia. The existence of this land mafia is one that is even acknowledged by Surya Bhakta Sangachhe, the current director-general of the Department of Urban Planning. Asked about this mafia's connections with the national political parties – and, hence, the impunity with which it has worked – he affirms the suspicion that this group operates in conjunction with political parties at times when they are actively seeking public support.

Water, water everywhere
Kathmandu – both the municipality and the Valley's other cities – is innately habitable. "It's a museum in itself," says Sthapit, the former mayor, who comes from a long line of what most call Kathmandu's original inhabitants, the ethnic Newar community. "There is no city as vibrant as this one. There are people from all over the world here – people come and stay." The Valley's rich cultural history is warranted: the fertile fields and physical terrain, ideal for agriculture and habitation, attracted creative, hardworking people from throughout the country and region. The climate of Kathmandu, with four distinct seasons and without the extremes of Himalayan cold or plains heat, also makes this valley, at an average height of 4300 feet above sea level, an ideal urban location – some say in all of Southasia. "If only we could make plans, implement the plans, and mind the environment," says architect Sharma.

Given that Nepal is often touted as being the second most water-rich country in the world, and that the Kathmandu Valley floor is an ancient lake that has been known for eons for its fertility, the lack of water in modern Kathmandu is indeed a surprise to most. For today's residents, the lack of water for drinking and household use is a major source of frustration. Not only is the volume of water woefully inadequate, but its quality is suspect. A recent survey found that up to 44 percent of the municipal water in the urban area was unsuitable for drinking, with dangerously high levels of E coli bacteria, yeasts and moulds.

Within the Valley, access for those considered living in 'rural' versus 'urban' areas varies drastically, a disparity current officials and plans say will be addressed. Per-capita water use in the former is 27 litres per day, compared to urban households of about 39 litres per day. Neither of these figures approaches demand, however, which stands at 49 and 32 litres per day, respectively. But increasing supply by drilling the deep aquifer for water in Kathmandu has serious consequences, because of the presence of nitrates and heavy metals. As Bhushan Tuladhar, of the Environment and Public Health Organisation, says, "Nobody in Nepal is dying of thirst or lack of water. The problem is access to safe water." In addition, some environmentalists estimate that the water table is dropping nearly two metres every year due to rampant, and free of charge, extraction by the municipalities, factories, hotels and other institutions.

So what accounts for the shortfall of water for the Valley? To being with, it is the lack of water at source. For a country so full of mighty, perennial rivers originating in the melting snows, the Bagmati is spring-fed, with sources barely two km from downtown Kathmandu. All of its tributaries, including the Bishnumati, Hanumati, Nakhu, Manohara and Balkhu, are similarly spring-fed – they are gorged during the monsoon, and reduce to a trickle the rest of the year.

The figures with regard to municipal water are staggering: 40 percent of the water that should be reaching homes in Kathmandu goes unaccounted for; only 200 million litres out of the 300 million litres per day of demand even comes into the city, having been diverted earlier. As Bharat Sharma explains, the water-distribution system needs almost a complete overhaul, a project that is indeed underway and is to be finished in about four years. This notwithstanding, nearly all concerns related to the availability of water in the Valley, and the reforms necessary to ensure this, are regularly met with a single word: Melamchi, the controversial, USD 317 million project requiring a 26-km tunnel from the Melamchi Valley of the Helambu region, just north of Kathmandu, to bring water down into the Valley.

The Melamchi project, however, has been stuck in a quagmire for years, as obstacle after obstacle has arisen both within the continuously unstable Kathmandu government and within the various donor agencies that are bankrolling the project. While the Melamchi scheme is now tenuously moving ahead yet again, the frustrating stop-and-go nature of this massive undertaking has highlighted the difficulty in relying on foreign monies for something of such basic importance as drinking water for the capital city. The problems of adequate resources versus adequate supply infrastructure, however, go well beyond drinking water alone in Nepal. Similar issues could be pointed to with regards to electricity in this potentially hydropower-rich country, as well as waste management and, well, space and fresh air in general.

Bihar boxes
While the 1960s are commonly thought of as the start of urbanisation in Nepal, following the country's 'opening up' to the world following the fall of the Rana regime, it was the decade of the 1980s that actually saw any level of urban growth. But the chaos and urban sprawl for which Kathmandu is known today is a function of the 1990s leading into the 2000s. The rice paddies were swallowed up – initially by suburban compounds and bungalows, then by the congestion of unplanned modern shelters and, finally, in the last few years, by the establishment of gated housing colonies and apartment blocks. And if you care to look down from the bridge, or higher, the squatter settlements have also had a significant impact.

While high population density in the historic city core of Dharara, Asan and Thamel remains a problem today, in other places – such as Baneshwor – the sprawl, congestion and low population density (seemingly incompatible aspects) pose a more serious threat to the city's inhabitants, ecology and resources. "Future planning must focus on agriculture and riverbeds," says Sudarshan Raj Tiwari, former dean of the Institute of Engineering at Tribhuvan University. "Nature preservation, agricultural-land preservation, and the preservation of the river networks is a must if we hope for Kathmandu to be inhabitable." Particularly interesting about the ideas being put forth by many planners is the idea of a modern Kathmandu with both urbanised areas and agriculturally active locations. This would be an emphasis on returning to what Kathmandu did best: growing crops, but commercial crops.

Just 25 years ago, Baneshwor was known for its fields and tree-filled spaces. "People would say that you could hear the wolves howl at night," says Rohit Ranjitkar, president of the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust and a former Baneshwor resident. Today, urban planners and architects speak scornfully of 'Baneshwor-isation', with administrators despairing of it as an example of the failure of government to intervene and implement building regulations. Residents describe narrow, unlit roads that barely fit a car, paralysing congestion and uncollected garbage. The reality of Baneshwor is in stark contrast to previous planning: "In the past, planning didn't cater only for physical ambience, but for the social ambience," says Sharma. "They allowed in light and facilitated air circulation."

Today, however, homes are no longer limited to four, or even five stories in height, but neither is air flow what it used to be. Municipal regulations mandate building heights of under 35 feet on the Ring Road and in the core area, and under 45 feet in the rest of the city. But this no longer seems to hold, with housing permits being granted for buildings up to 130 feet high. This has inevitably altered the shape of Kathmandu's skyline. Prior to 1970, the skyline was formed by three- to four-storey buildings with tiled sloping roofs, and punctuated by temple roofs. During King Birendra's early reign, in the late 1970s, it was mandated that there be open brickwork facades, but this trend has been abandoned. Says Tiwari, "The character of the old buildings was expressed by exposed brickwork and tiled roofs, which gave a particular texture to the town. Now, you see many of the shapes that you would see in any Western city. Whether this is good or bad, we can't say."

While Tiwari may be reluctant to pass judgement on the aesthetic quality of current architectural trends, he is more frank about his view of buildings such as that of Singha Durbar, the Parliament house, which emulates the post-Victorian neo-classical design seen during Queen Victoria's rule in England. "This happened because of the Ranas sending us to the British for employment," he says. "It's a reflection of our values. What is this sophistication about, this love of British style? We've colonised ourselves mentally." On the other hand, even the faux Victorian architecture has its defendants among those who decry the lack of everything that has been built in the post-Rana era. "It is true that there was a brief flowering of art deco in the 1960s, as evident in the Ashok Cinema Hall or the many middle-class mansions of that era," says an architect who would rather go unnamed. "But then we were invaded by concrete pillars and brick-and-cement mortar, and artisans came up from Bihar to build for us. We had few architects in the 1970s, and so we got nothing but 'Bihar boxes' for a full two decades, if not more."

Meanwhile, even as the Valley's planners are increasingly able to look to the future, some are casting even longer glances backwards. Anil Chitrakar is a well-known expert on heritage preservation, and he is one of a handful of people who puts strong emphasis on ensuring that Kathmandu's heritage – neo-classical post-Victorianism and all – is well integrated with its urban future. His work focuses on creating hospitable, inhabitable spaces where the city can be known for its living heritage, not as an archaeological site. His ideas are echoed by Bharat Sharma: "What makes a thing living, and what makes it dead? What really infuses life into a space is culture. And culture is carried by people, not buildings alone."

Once an urban area becomes what Chitrakar is calling an archaeological site, its value as a 'living' city disappears. The dynamism, competition and creativity that have earned a city its name are suddenly relegated to museum shelves, in the form of inanimate objects. While this process is arguably inevitable in many places, there are a few notable holdouts in the Kathmandu Valley. Patan Durbar Square, for instance, remains very much alive. Ongoing preservation work in Patan encourages residents to look to their pasts for recommendations on how to manage modern urban problems such as water shortages (by using, and regularly aerating, the wells already present outside of many old houses) and the land crunch. But all the while, Chitrakar emphasises, "the focus must be on people."

This lack of people-focused planning does have direct implications. For many, caught up in the whirl of their work and family obligations, Kathmandu's odd absence of community activities and community engagement is something that they have come to reluctantly take for granted. While there are stories of neighbourhoods coming together to build a park or a recreation centre, such accounts are few and far between. But as long as settlements are built in a low-density, high-rise fashion, as per current trends, utility services will continue to be under stress. As long as homes are built in uninviting and severe compounds, without regard for parking, roads or neighbours, and as long as competition for services continues to distract from community involvement and worker productivity, the sense of community necessary for the dynamism that characterises healthy urban life will remain absent from Kathmandu.

It might be contradictory to claim that Kathmandu's urban centres, with their legacy of history, lack a modern urban culture, but that seems to be true. The ancient cultural institutions are owned by individual communities, and are zealously guarded. But the new demography of Kathmandu includes mountains, plains and hill castes, a wider variety of ethnicities and communities, all of whom are new arrivals. In their rush to strike roots, there is little thought for community action, which will evidently have to wait for another generation.

Haphazard attitudes
Kathmandu's divergence from other cities of Southasia includes elements such as an absence of flyovers and modest but definitive successes in heritage preservation. But it also sets itself apart with a lack of such basics as footpaths and streetlights, public toilets and public transport. Perhaps the greatest irony regarding Kathmandu's problems today is the city's rich history of urban planning. The best plans, in the post Malla-era, started to be created in the 1950s. The first four national five-year plans, from 1956 to 1975, stressed infrastructure development, with access to roads and electricity a key priority. The urban sphere, however, was not thought to be a problem till the third five-year-plan.

As researchers Pravakar Pradhan and Ranjit Perera outlined in a 2005 study of the impact of urban growth on the Valley's livelihoods, the third plan included resettlement programmes for those from the southern Tarai plains, environment policies and heritage-protection plans. According to experts, these studies were extensively researched: the geography, the river systems, the cultural systems. None of the plans that have come since, nor their implementation, has made a dent on the laissez-faire nature of the expansion of Kathmandu Valley's urban space.

In fact, it has been administrative, not even political, failures that have been the main cause of urban disorganisation. To begin with, the urban sprawl has now enveloped many of the towns of the Valley into one metropolitan unit, and the system cries out for an administrative departure. And yet Kathmandu maintains its distinction as a 'metropolitan' city, while Patan, which by now is a continuation of the urban space, is a separate 'sub-metropolitan city.' And, the central government's ministries continue to control the water, sewage, roads, infrastructure and even cultural heritage, which robs the citizens in the wards of initiative. Even so, there has not been an election to local government for nearly a decade amidst Nepal's political flux, so Patan, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur do not even have mayors. All the work is done instead by bureaucrats bending to various political winds.

Director-General Sangachhe and Professor Tiwari all agree that the biggest problem at present is haphazard development. "The current rate of urban growth stands at about 4.5 percent, national growth is at 2.5 percent. This will not decrease. We must urbanise rural areas, and this cannot happen without industrial growth." Future expectations, he warns, should account for urban poverty as a consequence of imbalanced urban growth. With pro-poor governance, and a reversal of the policies and procedures currently in place, such inequities can be addressed and resolved. There are those who hope that the Maoist-led government, which has now presented its first 'pro-poor' budget, will have the strength to grapple with the issues.

Photo: Min Ratna Bajracharya

Ultimately, the biggest problems facing Kathmandu today are not related to sky-high land prices or even the miserable state of the Bagmati River. Rather, they are attitudinal. Attitudinal change means encouraging municipal governments to take charge of their own space. Perhaps most significantly, Nepal's government needs to reacquaint itself with the environment, and regularly remind itself of the ecological fragility of the Valley. Plans for successful urban development have existed for decades. As increasing numbers of well-trained graduates in urban studies and city planning emerge from engineering schools in the capital, the government must put their knowledge and creativity to work. Students from areas outside of Kathmandu must also be encouraged to join, with incentives and support for the implementation of development plans in other semi-urban areas. Make no mistake: Kathmandu's limits to growth are rarely physical. While the distribution of electricity may serve as one current limit, Kathmandu has – or should have – adequate water and land supplies for a larger population. What is needed is the courage to demand accountability, to have elected municipal representation, and to loosen the central government's control on local municipal affairs, added to the ability to collect tax and spend it.

There are few who believe that Kathmandu Valley's sprawl can be controlled. The spaces to the northwest, northeast and the larger plateau to the south (in Lalitpur/Patan) are bound to fill up. Even if the recently announced 'fast-track' six-lane highway brings the Tarai plains to within an hour-and-a-half drive, experts do not believe that Kathmandu Valley will stop growing. The only thing to do, therefore – at least in terms of physical infrastructure – is to allow growth, and to ward against sprawl by planning for water, roads, footpaths, streetlamps, sewers, sewage treatment, public transport, mass transit and public toilets.

In Southasia today, cities are the stuff of reverie and nightmare alike – the 'central' point in a country. A city is a marker of success, a place of great hardship and great potential. But this understanding of a Southasian city, while true for almost any, paints the space in broad, vague brushstrokes. In reality, each city retains a distinct character. Kathmandu seems to have always attracted travellers and merchants. It will continue to grow, and it has both the space and the resources to do so. What is needed is a shift in the attitude of those in the middle levels of government, administrative and political, and a commitment to change. "The know-how is there," says Sthapit. "We must look at challenges as opportunities, and not as insurmountable problems." The 2006-07 National City Rules and Regulations is a good start, providing an analytical perspective on the most pressing concerns of urban governance. In addition, with the new Maoist-led government in place, perhaps some of those plans from the 1970s and 1980s will finally be dusted off, reassessed and put into practice.

~ Kabita Parajuli is a student of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York.

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