IPMX @ IIM Lucknow

More people today live in the cities than villages. Countries like USA and UK are more than 75% urbanised. Cities combined consume 75% of the world’s energy and produce 80% of its greenhouse gas emissions apart from being heavy users of water and producers of waste. However, the disadvantages that cities have created can be reversed by making them a key part of the solution. In fact cities are critical to addressing the issue of climate change and sustainable living because of their nature of having dense urban concentrations of people, shorter supply chains and shorter commuter travel. Research in sustainable development has explored this phenomenon and has proposed Ecocities as the answer to solving migration and urbanization problems.

Eco-cities are designed according to certain principles. Reducing the scale is an important principle. The so-called green codes focus on maximising the efficiency of individual buildings whereas the real gains come from the overall design of the city. Cities should be dense rather than sprawled, with more of apartment blocks and public transport. Similarly, public transport systems do not work efficiently when the city is spread out and commuters cannot easily walk to the bus/metro stop. We need to design our cities based on urban densities rather than size. But at whatever population, the scale of material consumption and waste should be much smaller than in today's cities and villages.

Access by Proximity is another important principle of ecological city building. If enough diversity is close enough, one doesn’t need to travel a lot for life's basics like residence, job and school. The idea is to design maximum access right into the city structure aided by mixed use zoning. Proximity access policies could also include local hiring practices, renting apartments to people who don't own cars and who work nearby, making bank loans available in the neighborhoods from which the savings come and permitting increased residential construction in activity centers and prohibiting it in farther-out areas.

Diversity is healthy. This is perhaps the largest, broadest principle of all. It is no longer meaningful to design for separate “zones” for commercial and residential activity (except for hazardous industries).Our cities today are home to the ultra rich on one hand and the slum dwellers on the other. We need to have more inclusive growth. For example, slum re-development projects help to rehabilitate the poor in EWS housing while freeing up the land for other development. Singapore has created a successful network of hawker-centres across the city.

In the past, a common obstacle for ecocity advocates was the conventional wisdom that anything less than direct automobile access would be bad for business. The mere suggestion of replacing a parking space with a sidewalk cafe would be enough to draw the ire of merchants and chambers of commerce. Over the last decade or so this perception has been changing drastically. With more and more cities embarking on pilot projects to close streets for traffic, businesses are seeing the benefits of car-free commerce. Thus Instead of viewing integrated ecological design at odds with economic development, city planners worldwide are increasingly promoting urban density with a focus on community and people’s connection with nature as an automatic boost to small business and local commerce. This new urbanism combines the strengths of the market with the strengths of good planning and basic ecological and social principles.