While much media focus is on the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, less attention is being paid to the current unprecedented urban growth in India. The rapid demographic growth in and around India's urban areas is changing the physical dimensions of cities such as size, shape, density, land use, layout and building types. Planned and unplanned housing development is putting intense pressure on existing urban infrastructure to support the quality of life of increasing numbers of residents. There is therefore an urgent need to examine the sustainability of India's diverse urban forms, with specific focus on planning, poverty, infrastructure and governance. An emerging international research network, CityForm-India, aims to address some of these issues. The network brings together academic and non-academic experts from the UK, India and Europe to share knowledge and explore how urban sustainability might best be achieved in India's urban areas.
1. COMPLEX URBAN GROWTH IN INDIA
Demographic change has been identified as one of the key drivers of urban growth in Indian cities.1 Urban areas are currently home to approximately 286 million residents, almost 28% of India's 1·03 billion people.2 Of this urban population, 14%—over 40 million people—live in densely populated ‘informal’ unplanned settlements or slums.1 Dharavi, in central Mumbai, is described as the largest slum in Asia and is home to more than a million people living in densities of 600–1000 dwellings per hectare3. The poor living conditions in slums are well reported: generally speaking, slum dwellers have poor access to physical infrastructure such as clean water and sanitation4 and social infrastructure including schools and medical and community facilities.
However, features such as open sewers and poor roads are not only found in unplanned settlements. ‘Millennium city’ Gurgaon is one of Delhi's middle-class satellite cities; it is linked to Delhi by an eight-lane motorway but Gurgaon's own inter and intra-city public transport is almost non-existent.5 Everyday, 375 t of solid waste are generated by Gurgaon's residents and there is currently nowhere for this waste to be treated; some expensive condominiums are surrounded by open sewers. Such inadequate primary infrastructure is due to a lack of comprehensive planning and irrelevant land-use controls that, together with demographic changes, have led to expanding urban sprawl. This, in turn, increases the already intense pressure on infrastructure that is, at worst, non-existent or simply not maintained.6
Examples of sprawl can be seen in both unplanned (Figure 1) and planned settlements (Figure 2). Very large gated communities or ‘townships’ such as Gurgaon are springing up all over India; they are exclusive enclaves only affordable for the higher echelons of Indian society.7 Such disparate examples of urban development illustrate the diversity to be found in India's urban areas and the critical need to provide adequate infrastructure and services to support residents' quality of life and achieve long-term goals of urban sustainability.
2. THE CURRENT URBAN POLICY CONTEXT
The Indian government has responded to the unsustainable state of cities by recently adopting its eleventh five-year plan (2007–2012), which aims to provide basic services to the urban poor and emphasises urban development as the ‘locus and engine of economic growth over the next two decades'.8 To meet the challenges of rapid urbanisation, the government launched the Jawaharlal Nehru national urban renewal mission (JNNURM) in 2005.9 By 2012, 1000 billion rupees (just under £12 billion) will be invested in urban infrastructure improvements such as mass rapid transit systems (MRTSs) and basic service provision for the poor including water supply projects, desalination and drainage systems.10 That sum is approximately £2 billion more than the estimated cost of preparations for the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games.11 To what extent the JNNURM programme is successful is as yet unclear. Some criticism is levelled at the programme for not sufficiently tackling urban poverty alleviation within a wider policy and urban context.12 Pollution, flooding, drought, poverty, infrastructure and quality of life are all aspects of everyday life in India that cannot be solved in isolation. Moreover, it is clear that some of the problems are associated with the physical characteristics of a city. There is therefore an unambiguous need to understand the influences on, and of, physical form in India's urban settlements.
3. THE CITYFORM-INDIA RESEARCH NETWORK
For the development of knowledge-based government strategies and urban development policies, there is an urgent need for empirical evidence examining the link between urban form and sustainability in India. A fundamental question needs to be asked: to what extent and in what ways does urban form contribute to sustainability in rapidly growing Indian cities? The recently completed UK-based project CityForm forms the basis of this integrated approach to examining sustainable urban form.
CityForm UK found that elements of urban form did not affect social, economic and environmental sustainability in a clear and consistent manner.13 For example, high-density urban development was positively associated with the economic viability of a place but less so with residents' feelings of safety or attachment to where they live.14 To understand fully the influence that urban form has on the sustainability of a city, it is clear that a wide range of aspects needs to be examined.
As a first step to tackle this, a timely new research network, CityForm-India, brings together academics, practitioners, built environment experts and policymakers from Europe and India to build an international research exchange on sustainability and urban form. To date, empirical research in India has not taken features of urban form into account in examinations of sustainability, and this has led to significant gaps in knowledge: there is no existing evidence in India that can explain how urban poverty may be affected by, for example, residential density and layout.3 Empirical data examining the link between urban form and sustainability could make a significant contribution to addressing India's economic, social and environmental problems including poverty, social inequality and increasing pressure on natural resources.
A successful inaugural conference, held in New Delhi in 2008,15,16 was attended by a wide range of academic and non-academic stakeholders, including the secretary and joint secretary of state from the Ministry of Urban Development, in India. Academic institutions involved in CityForm-India include the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi and the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad. The network (jointly led by the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD: Cities) and the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), Delhi) aims to facilitate the sharing of experience, expertise and knowledge to identify arising research challenges and opportunities and ultimately carry out empirical research within the context of India's rapidly growing cities.
More information on the CityForm project may be obtained from Dr Shibu Raman, OISD: Cities, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK (skraman@brookes.ac.uk) and the CityForm website.17
