Infrastructure, Ecology and Urban planning

I had been to attend a research pre submission talk at SMS, CUSAT on 29th July, 2009. There were two. The first was on the problems of the textile mills in Salem. The other one was on the urban planning at GCDA. The second one was worth the time though none in the audience appreciated it.

Essentially it used the ratio HDI/Ecological footprint.

The HDI combines normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of measuring human development—a concept that, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc. The basic use of HDI is to measure a country's development.

At the urban development level therefore the HDI can be summarised as infrastructure support for a physical and possibly other well being.

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It compares human demand with planet Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste. Using this assessment, it is possible to estimate how much of the Earth (or how many planet Earths) it would take to support humanity if everybody lived a given lifestyle.

At the urban development level this would mean how well to utilise our resources especuially land to the benefit of all.


Urban sprawl

In India except for Chandigarh none of the cities are planned resulting in what urban planners call urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is the low-density expansion of an urban population away from a city center through unplanned, incremental development.

The phenomenon typically results from increased wealth and social desires to "escape the city" and lead a "suburban lifestyle," with more open space and isolation. Urban sprawl is often associated with cities of the western United States, but occurs in cities throughout the world.

In the case of Kochi the urban sprawl is a result of not people escaping the urban areas but people due to changed socio - economic considerations would rather come closer to the city form their traditional villages. The Malayali's individualistic strain viewed the apartments with suspicion and added to the unplanned growth. Kochi has the added feature of the backwaters too leaving it a very sensitive ecosystem.

The answer to the question of urban planning is counter to the way it is going now. Like most cities in India, the development is characterised by a phenomena called urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is a feature where the dwelling places are built with large areas of vacant land often in agricultural land, ecosystems or wasteland.

The trick in planning is to grade the land in sectors into agricultural, ecological and suitable for habitation and then restrict the habitation to the habitable third.

This leaves the agricultural land intact adding to economies of scale, the ecology in tact and more importantly brings human population and sypport infrastructure together. In this way the land which is otherwise left sub optimally utilised can effectively be used to include say a park, football and other grounds, shopping complexes and human habitation together so that even the commute time can be optimised thus adding to huge savings.

My own feeling is that we are past the tipping point in population to have any effective such planning though scientifically it makes sense. That adds all the more expediency to save the remaining before it becomes too late.