This article was originally published in Domus India 11 / October 2012

"We don't have so much time for the past like you in India. We have a long way ahead to go. How many hours in my day can I think about what happened a long time ago? I do not have enough hours in the day to plan my future and you want to go through these fields to see this old ruin which is not even listed by our antiquities."

I confessed that India was an ancient and wrinkled civilisation that had not experienced violent and destructive revolutions. I was in China, as part of a small team preparing the Tourism Master Plan for the province of Hainan and my Chinese counterpart and I were standing in front of a brick tower — the first genuine ancient structure that I had seen in the last month. Everything else had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt. Its remote location had saved it.

But I found Han's comments about the past very attractive. The past is imagined by us on the basis of some myths and random remains. Some people invent a long story about it, call it "past history", and then make it come to life as a monkey and carry it on their shoulders. Our madaris (magicians/entertainers) in power use their monkey very effectively. They make it dance for people to ridicule any new ideas these people may get while the madaris pocket the takings. If there is a divide that separates China from India, it is that we , in India, carry monkeys on our shoulders while the Chinese have got rid of them.

So thinking, writing, and talking about the future in India is difficult. Building for it is more difficult. Convincing people that one can invent it is even harder. There is no audience. The group that should be the most interested in it , the madaris in power, have the least interest. Why else would all our new government buildings be biriyanis with flavours from the past? Has anybody seen the one opposite the National Museum in Delhi occupied by the Ministry of External Affairs? These are the dancing monkeys of officialdom's patronage of modern architecture.

However, instead of going into an uncontrollable rage or depression about these ghosts from the past who keep coming to starve me of work, I have chosen to celebrate instead, by cultivating an unstoppable appetite for inventing futures and then devising ways to satisfy it. To feed this appetite, which is not small or temporary, I am cooking for a lavish banquet. The feast is a proposal for the realisation of a new generation of future urban settlements that can live in harmony with nature called Natural Cities, a term applicable both to new greenfield settlements that will absorb the growing migration in the Asian world as well as to existing cities, particularly megacities, which need to deconstruct and regenerate themselves as Natural Cities.

The Natural Cities proposal has high ambitions about an alternate future for urban Asia. It promises to regenerate cities in the wake of climatic, societal and economical change simply by restoring a natural relationship that has always existed between human beings, the built environment, its hinterland and the entire natural world that surrounds us all — 2% of whose area we happen to occupy on a landmass that covers one third of the planet.

I realise now that Han had a point. There is nothing written in the stars. Either we write our own future or somebody else is going to write it for us.

This banquet, for which I am cooking, will identify some key physical characteristics of a city that would definitely exclude it from being categorised as a Natural City. Such exclusion would kick in if the city had:
1. A population exceeding 1 million.
2. No intention to use 100% renewable energy and continues to use power generated by diesel, coal, nuclear and any form of fossil fuel.
3. No intentions of recycling 100% of its waste.
4. An inability to obtain most of its daily food needs from its own hinterland and is dependent on its food being transported from distant regions that are the hinterlands of other settlements.
5. No intention to be self-sufficient in its water supply but to rely on a parasitic arrangement where water is taken away from another community and transported across many regions (for example, most of Delhi's water is brought from the Himalayas).
6. Governance that is not transparent and does not support 100% renewability or have intention to become Natural City.

When we began cooking, this sounded like some pie in the sky. I was working with the nuclear/environmental scientist Dr. Vikram Soni. But as we developed the idea, we realised that most Asian cities , particularly the megacities were in such a disreputable condition that they just could not be fixed by preaching and fixing water and sewage. These cities were not only remnants of 19th century colonial trading hubs, but enormous parasitic habitations, both environmentally and socially. Using the simple six criteria listed above, we categorized most of our existing cities as well as all our megacities as completely unnatural and unsustainable for long-term survival.

We realised that all cities in the past had been founded, then thrived and eventually declined. Some had even disappeared as will the megacities of today. We needed to look to the future. The urgency of the need to invent our own urban future was stirred by the McKinsey Global Institute report on "India's urban awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth", which came out in April 2010. It has data that is very impressive and gives us a blow-by-blow account of measured disasters that are awaiting future Indian cities. Its recommendations however, in my view, spell the end of any hope of sustainability and the beginning of a new era of corporate subordination that will congregate more and more people into the existing megacities and satellite towns. Such reports are the dancing monkeys of our power-driven madaris for India's future.

The proposal for Natural Cities no longer seemed a pie in the sky. It had become a way to preserve the sanity of our communities in the future. An alternative to the corporate world's monkey that wants to dance for us. What alarmed me was the alacrity with which this doubtful document had assumed a level of gospel truth, without any public discussion, amongst our government and Planning Commission both of whom should have known better. A budget of $90 billion has been put up by the Industry Ministry to the Cabinet for approving the Industrial Corridor from Delhi to Mumbai preempting the first of 19 such corridors recommended in the McKinsey report. The Project's Final Plan Report, written by Scott Wilson, in October 2009, recommends housing one-third of the entire population of India in the project area by 2039. Unfortunately for the promoters (who happen to be the Japanese, the Government of India and selected private corporations) much of the project area has long been labelled as the "severest water shortage region in India". Maybe they forgot that unlike power, water is a finite resource. Who will get the scarce water? The farmers, industry or the 518 million people who will be living in the cities that are to be located on this corridor in 2039?

It seems to me that somebody has arrived here to write our urban future for us.

Romi Khosla primarily practices as an architect when he has a visionary client. Otherwise he has used his training as an economist to do urban revitalisation work for the UNDP in Europe and China. He has spent considerable time in the Balkans, Palestine, Israel, Tibet, Central Asia and China as a Principal International Consultant to the UNDP, UNESCO and UNOPS