It's time to plan & build future cities

I went to Japan recently to attend a conference on future cities. Since the future growth is going to be more in the cities, a lot of countries have started taking a futuristic perspective and aggressively planning for the future. 

The scary future scenario about the urban sector is that as more and more people get packed into lesser area, they will generate wealth as well as waste, consume a lot of power and cause unsustainable pollution.

Since, people are now living longer and the percentage of geriatric people are on the rise, is the city friendly towards them? The super aging population will have special needs like community transportation, personal shopping services and other such targeted services, and a future city strategy has to take care of these concerns.

The cities in Japan are focusing on building a smart hybrid network of various decentralised and self-sufficient energy supplies. In view of the disastrous experience of the nuclear power plant following the Tsunami, the cities are planning to shift to renewable energy through an optimised combination of photovoltaic/solar thermal, biomass, geothermal etc and create a smart grid that are reliable in case of natural  disasters.

The cities will have to focus on sustainable waste management and aggressively promote the three Rs — Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. By adopting smart and efficient technologies, the society is trying to reduce wastage and generate less waste. The recycling rules are so comprehensive and so widely accepted that the recycling industry now generates more wealth and finds newer markets.

The cities in Japan are now planning on how to improve walkability by developing comfortable walkable space. By encouraging people to walk more, they calculate that it will make people healthier and reduce medical costs.

One calculation shows that if 20,000 residents in a city walk 2000 additional steps every day, it would result in saving 800,000,000 Yen! Increasing walkability will also lead to less motorised transport and less carbon emission. This strategy is to redevelop public transit to move away from car dependency. It is also seen that increasing walkability would lead to more buying activity and increase sales in shopping district.

Walking also leads to more social interaction as people bond better socially and it enhances the quality of community life. Achieving better walkability would require better social infrastructure and comprehensive urban planning with an efficient land use policy.

What Japanese cities are doing now to prepare for the future cities, we need to do that in India as well. More than 35 per cent Indians are now residing in the cities and in the decades to come, the urban population is going to increase at a galloping rate.

As it is, our current urban infrastructure is highly inadequate to ensure a decent quality of life.

Though our investment in creating urban infrastructure has gone up significantly in the last few years, we still have a long way to go in ensuring the basic urban necessities like treated and safe water supply, treated sewerage and waste management. While planning investments in the cities, we need to develop a ‘future city’ perspective in order to ensure that our cities become more liveable for all sections of the society as we move on to the emerging decades.

The author is municipal commissioner of Ahmedabad