For better quality of life, city planners need to take into consideration the additional population that will flow in due to greater urbanisation while allocating public green spaces
One of the principal ways by which city planners attempt to ensure quality of life in cities is by the provision of public green spaces. Green spaces aid the city environment, and enhance the aesthetics, recreation, health, and overall city sustainability. These areas, unlike private green spaces, are accessible for enjoyment to all citizens. Its universal availability is enhanced if these spaces are spread out across the city and take various forms—walkways, play areas, children’s spaces, pet spaces, and such freely accessible areas that could serve different human recreational needs. They could also be of various sizes, following a hierarchy. Very large parks could be very few in number designed to serve a larger city area; regional public green spaces may have the objective of serving a specific region and neighbourhood spaces could be aimed at smaller neighbourhoods. Such differentiated planning unquestionably raises the utility and enjoyability of public green spaces through the concept of proximity and the targeting of diverse population groups.
Its universal availability is enhanced if these spaces are spread out across the city and take various forms—walkways, play areas, children’s spaces, pet spaces, and such freely accessible areas that could serve different human recreational needs.
However, a question that urban planners must answer is—what is the extent to which public green spaces should be provided in a city. City planners have broadly configured this in two ways—define spatial requirement by population or benchmark it by physical area. The latter method is easier to achieve and uphold. For instance, if a city has a geographical spread of 100 square kilometre and the standard adopted for public green spaces is 10 percent of the physical area, the city plan would provide a total of 10 square kilometre for public green spaces. This percentage does not get disturbed over time since it is linked to geography and does not get impacted by human densification, no matter how many more people come into the city. In case a city expands its physical area, more public green space can be earmarked in the newly acquired geography in the same benchmarked proportion. However, the weakness of this benchmarking method is that with larger populations, the enjoyment of public green spaces gets shared amongst a larger population. Each person, therefore, gets a smaller segment of the enjoyment.
If the population of the city with the same area were to rise to 2,000,000 persons, the availability of public green space would go down to 5 square metres per person.
The other method of defining public green spaces is by population. The United States, Canada, UK, Australia, and many others follow this method. India’s Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation (URDPFI) guidelines prescribe 10-12 square metres of public open space per person. This appears theoretically more sustainable and logical. It makes an estimate of how much public open space is needed by each individual and accordingly attempts to fulfil that yardstick. The problem that arises here is that to achieve the benchmark, there is a maximum population that automatically gets stipulated. Therefore, if the standard adopted is to provide 10 square metres per person in a city, and if the city is 100 square kilometres in area, then the adopted standard can be maintained if the city has a maximum population of 1,000,000 persons. As soon as the population goes beyond the cited figure, the standard adopted falters and gets reduced per person. Thus, if the population of the city with the same area were to rise to 2,000,000 persons, the availability of public green space would go down to 5 square metres per person. The shortfall could be compensated by earmarking additional space in the city as green spaces. However, the possibility of finding additional vacant area for reallocation to public green spaces is limited since land would already have been earmarked for other, equally vital civic purposes.
In the context of Indian metropolitan and mega cities, this is what has been happening over the last several decades. And as urbanisation marches on and cities continue to densify further, the adopted standard would get further and further distant from its benchmark. This phenomenon is undoubtedly compromising the quality of life parameters in cities. Unfortunately, at this juncture, urban planners do not seem to have applied themselves to seek an answer to this conundrum. The planning exercise that city planners undertake once every two decades follows the old method of estimating the additional population likely to come into the city in the next two decades and then to use planning standards to provide for the additional population. The provision of most other services can be managed in the city as one can build more and higher in the allocated spaces. Commercial establishments, offices, schools, and hospitals can provide more space and accommodate more people by building taller. However, public green spaces, by their very nature, are related to horizontal area and cannot, therefore go vertical. Some cities have attempted to add to green spaces through roof-top gardens or podium green spaces. These, however, are enjoyable by the community that lives in structures that have these facilities but such spaces cannot be termed truly as public green spaces.
The logical conclusion that follows is that if cities must maintain a stipulated standard with regard to public green spaces, they should either start with a higher percentage, say 15 square metre per person instead of 10 square metres and allow the standard to get depleted and over time adjusted close to the prescribed standard as populations rise. However, even this ploy may have its limitations if populations continue to rise beyond the numbers that have been taken into account.
The planning exercise that city planners undertake once every two decades follows the old method of estimating the additional population likely to come into the city in the next two decades and then to use planning standards to provide for the additional population.
What modern cities would also have to bear in mind is not merely the requirements of quality of life, but also the new factor of climate change that has begun to hit cities very hard. This can be witnessed in the form of excessive precipitation in a short time-frame leading to urban floods, rising cases of heat waves with abnormally high temperatures not witnessed in the past, and health emergencies such as pandemics, the latest being COVID-19 hitting cities in repeated waves. In each of these cases, the imperatives of climate change suggest that higher demographic and built densities would be detrimental to the sustainability of the city. Water egress needs larger permeability, and therefore, plentiful green spaces; mitigating heat wave requires lesser built density and a larger green cover that would allow heat to dissipate and pandemics demand thinner demography allowing safe distance to be maintained between two individuals so that people-to-people transmission could be largely prevented. Each of these climate change events get tougher to handle with high human and built density in cities.
It is, therefore, high time that while drawing up development plans of cities, the planning methodology of the upward revision of human population expected in a city every 20 years needs to be abandoned. Instead, ab initio planning in a city should start with an end population in mind. If the city seems to be reaching that population, then activities in the city that would add more people should be discouraged, and in extreme cases frozen as far as possible. This obviously does not mean stopping urbanisation. It means encouraging urbanisation in some other city through larger investments in the economy and physical and social infrastructure in that city. The dynamics of a city may not always allow the strategy to work and strategic adjustments may have to be made along the line. However, this is not an impossible task. Neither does a sustainable alternative appear in sight. An exercise of this kind has to be attempted given the demands of climate change and quality of life. Densification of cities ad infinitum does not seem to be an option any longer, if city resilience continues to be an objective.
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Dr. Ramanath Jha is Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai. He works on urbanisation — urban sustainability, urban governance and urban planning. Dr. Jha belongs ...
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