india: Look up, India needs to live there well

Gurugram is tweaking its urbanisation model to build taller buildings. This makes for efficiency from a town-planning perspective, reducing the cost of building cities and lowering the impact on the environment than that caused by sprawl. Given the pace of urbanisation in India, municipal bodies are challenged to keep housing costs low while providing facilities such as transport. The answer lies in the vertical growth of cities where people live and work in dense pockets served by mass transit. Land-starved Mumbai houses three in four of India‘s tall buildings. But other cities are beginning to look upwards as well to cope with migration. Construction technology and design are now at a point where tall buildings can give back more to the environment than they cost. This weighs the argument in favour of vertical cities.

Yet, the argument can be taken too far, as China has done, by allowing forests of high-rises to grow in provincial towns. Central planning has run amok there. Cities need to grow organically and generations of town planners will be drawing lessons from China’s ghost towns. Efficiency and cost have to be balanced against comfort and habitability. The spectre of cities gobbling up the countryside is no less dystopian than buildings rising to dizzying heights. Both forms of urban growth deliver in controlled doses, and governments have a tough job with titration.

India has a relatively slow pace of rural-urban migration. This pace will subside as fertility rates stabilise. Still, its cities will absorb the biggest chunk of the worldwide population currently moving out of villages. It needs to get urbanisation right to sustain its growth and benefit from the demographic dividend. The choice of upward or outward growth by its cities will ensure economic growth is sustainable, financially and ecologically. India’s younger cities at the frontline of job creation will have to take the lead.