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B
oarding a local train in
Mumbai, India, requires skill,
agility and precision. Many call
it an art, but it is a reality for
about 7.5 million commuters
who use rail services every
day and maneuver their way
through swarming crowds and crumbling
infrastructure. Pedestrians navigate traffic-
congested roads that are swallowed by
thousands of buses, taxis, three-wheeler
vehicles, motorists and over 700,000 cars.
The air and water quality is getting poorer
and natural resources are dwindling. Yet,
this “city of dreams,” or megacity of 21
million, continues to grow at the rate of over
40 people an hour, attracting people from
every nook and corner of the country. Other
megacities in the global south are recording
similar growth rates and are looking to
positively leverage the flow of human capital
and steer the process of urbanization toward
sustainability.
”We cannot talk about sustainable
urbanization if we don’t look at resource flows
and understand what resources cities are
using, where these resources come from and
how much is being used,” says
Fiona Woo
,
Policy Officer – Climate & Energy, World
Future Council. That means studying and
analyzing urban metabolism. ”We need to
make a system that has a circular metabolism
instead of a linear one,” she says, which will
stem from the city’s understanding of its own
capacity to regenerate.
The good news is it is possible to do so,
as cities are using several data points to
gain insights. ”You can increasingly use
technology to track the flow of every bit of
material and energy, build better models and
theory to understand the flows better and
find points where they can be made more
efficient,” says
Luis Bettencourt
, a Professor
of Complex Systems at Santa Fe Institute. It is
going to prove crucial in time, as megacities
(and large and medium-sized cities) in Asia,
Africa and Latin America get denser and
project high rates of urbanization – between
one and six percent a year. The United
Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects (2014)
report notes that by mid-century, the overall
urban population of Africa is likely to triple
feature
In a rapidly urbanizing world, there is a pressing need
to build sustainable cities that connect systems, natural
resources, infrastructure, utilities, economies and
human societies efficiently.
But is it as simple as it sounds?
Sustainable
urbanization
– myth or
reality?
TEXT
ASHA GOPALKRISHNAN
PHOTO
iSTOCK
São Paulo city,
Brazil.
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