Cover Story | Sustainable Urban Development
Varying ideas, facades of cities Only 32 per cent people in India live in cities today. India’s urban population will cross the halfway mark by 2045, in the next 25 years. If the cities of the future need to become sustainable and inclusive, the preparation has to start now
Abhishek Pandey Editor
U
rban trends and data tell interesting stories. Sometimes, these stories are different from what we observe and experience. If you move out in cities in India and many other cities in less urbanized nations, we find cities to be very dense. As soon
26 March 2020 | www.urbanupdate.in
as they become prosperous, they prefer to go vertical. Vertical cities appeared to be accommodating more people in less space. And, this is not a very old phenomenon. It has picked up pace in the last twenty years. A news report suggests, “all of the world’s 73 residential towers over 250 metres high were built after the year 2000. Another 64 are under construction.” Many public and private redevelopment projects, including that of projects being implemented in New Delhi by the government where low-rise residential quarters of government employees are being razed to build multi-storied apartments, have been designed with this idea in mind that going vertical will ensure optimal utilisation of resources. This is still to be concluded whether going
vertical is the solution because many modern cities, including New York, have a mass of wealthy citizens who have moved out of their cramped city residences to sparsely populated suburban areas. According to a research done by Professor Shlomo Angel of New York University on urban expansion, high-rise cities like Seoul and Tokyo are less densely populated than Dhaka of Bangladesh, where most people live in low-rise residential buildings or slums. He also underlined that cities can become dense in multiple ways. He adds that Hong Kong is pictured in our mind as a city where the cost of living is very high. The city is known for stacking people on top of each other. All of us must have seen the pictures of 5-10 people living in a 10x10 feet studio apartment. Angel’s research on urban
