Date: 26/09/2022

Relevance: GS-1: Developmental issues, urbanization, their problems and their remedies.

Key Phrases: Urban spaces, Migration, Climate change, Urban planning, Science and Environment’s Ease of Living Index, Garden City movement, 15-minute city, Metropolitan green belt, Master Plan, Urban land Utilisation, Climate resilience perspective, Sense of cityhood, Town planning education.

Why in News?

• Indian urban centres need to plan for migration, climate change. Healthcare, affordable housing, sustainability and inclusion hold the key to reimagining them.

Context:

• It took just one day of heavy rainfall in Delhi-NCR to bring back the familiar sights of water-logged streets, crawling traffic, broken-down vehicles and citizens wading in knee-deep water with their two-wheelers in tow.
• Power outages, crumbling walls and deaths due to electrocution compound citizens’ woes.
• A fortnight ago, 126 of Bengaluru’s lakes had overflown, with water logging reported in many parts of the city.
• Over 2,000 houses were flooded and 10,000 homes isolated from the rest of the city — in many places, including posh localities, there were instances of lack of drinking water and electricity.
• It is a recurring phenomenon each year, across all major Indian cities. This raises the issues of urban planning in India.

Why Urban spaces need to be reimagined?

• The current harrowing situation is an indication of the lack of urban planning.
• Urban areas with economic vitality have sprung up with limited civic infrastructure.
• Our cities routinely neglect key elements of urban planning — storm water drains are ignored and lakes and rivers are neglected while concretising urban spaces.
  • For ex. case of Mumbai, where almost 1/4th of the land is open public space — while over half of it is the underutilised space around buildings, which is enclosed by walls and hived off from public access. Such open spaces, if available, would help cities like Mumbai achieve similar ratios as globally benchmarked cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona) in public land availability (typically above 40 per cent).
• Indian cities, by and large, are very poor in executing urban projects.
  • Bengaluru scored 55.67 out of 100 in the Quality-of-Life metric in the Centre for Science and Environment’s Ease of Living Index 2020.
• Master plans, where they have been developed, are detailed documents, with limited urban planning flexibility.
• Little thought is given to how market forces and migration will impact the plans.

Urban Development Missions in India:

• Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT)
  • It was launched in June 2015.
  • AMRUT focuses on development of infrastructure in the sectors of water supply, sewerage management, storm water drainage, non-motorized urban transport, and green spaces and parks.
• Smart City Mission (SCM)
  • It was launched on 25 June, 2015.
  • The main objective of the Mission is to promote cities that provide core infrastructure, clean and sustainable environment and give a decent quality of life to their citizens through the application of ‘smart solutions’.
  • The focus is on sustainable and inclusive development by creation of replicable models which act as lighthouses to other aspiring cities.
  • 100 cities have been selected to be developed as Smart Cities through a two-stage competition.
• Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework 2.0
  • Launched in September, 2020 with an aim to provide an overarching roadmap to formulate, implement and monitor urban climate actions in India.
  • The top 9 performing cities which have been awarded 4-star rating are Surat, Indore, Ahmedabad, Pune, Vijayawada, Rajkot, Visakhapatnam, Pimpri-Chinchwad and Vadodara.

Step needed to tackle urban problem:

• Master Plan
  • Every Indian city should ideally have a Master Plan, a strategic urban planning document which would be updated every decade or two.
  • The document would entail how a city is supposed to grow, vertically and horizontally, across zones, while offering a high quality of life in a sustainable manner.
  • Such plans would also consider poverty mitigation, affordable housing and livability for urban migrants
• Urban land Utilisation
  • Urban land use needs to be better.
  • Land use and land management practices have a major impact on natural resources including water, soil, nutrients, plants and animals.
  • Land use information can be used to develop solutions for natural resource management issues such as salinity and water quality.
• Climate resilience perspective
  • All ongoing and upcoming urban infrastructure projects must be reconsidered from a future climate resilience perspective.
• Sense of cityhood
  • Establishing a sense of cityhood by making a push for a city as a co-created space will also require building up institutional capacity.
  • India would ideally require 3,00,000 town and country planners by 2031 (there are just 5,000 town planners currently).
• Town planning education
  • Much of urban planning problem is fundamentally due to a lack of town planning education in the country — there are just 26 institutes that provide this course, producing 700 town planners each year.
  • We already have a shortage of 1.1 million planners. More schools are needed, with a push for local IITs and NITs to have a standalone planning department.

Way Forward:

• Our policymakers also need to be cognisant of the historical context of our urban development — a push for glass buildings or utilising granite may not always be suitable for our cities.
• Renewing our cities will require us to rethink various urban topics, including urban design, urban healthcare, affordable housing, sustainability and inclusion among others. Our urban future depends on getting this right.

Source: Indian Express

Mains Question:

Q. Why urban space faces the problems of water-logged streets, flooding and congestion? Suggest measures to tackle these problems. (250  words).