Exploring the role of Urban Green Spaces in 'smartening' cities in India

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the conceptualization of Urban Green Space (UGS) within India’s urban planning process. In doing so, the context of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM), which is a flagship programme for urban transformation in the country, is chosen. We identified four key elements of UGS planning in the literature – quantity, accessibility, multifunctionality, and connectivity. Using this as a framework for analysis, we reviewed the national SCM guidelines and plans of four cities – Gwalior, Bhagalpur, Chandigarh, and Udaipur – in depth. We find that multifunctionality does not feature in the planning of UGS, and the notable absence of a connected, strategic vision suggests the need for strategic-level planning and assessment that goes beyond the project level in India.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban Green Spaces
• open spaces
• India
• Smart Cities Mission
• multifunctionality
• green infrastructure

Notes

1. The urban planning literature uses a variety of terms such as ‘urban open space,’ ‘urban green space,’ and ‘public open space’ to refer to green areas (Ignatieva et al. 2011). Benton-Short et al. (2017) contend that standardization of terminology is challenging and may not even be desirable. Because of this, in this paper, we use open spaces and green spaces interchangeably, recognizing that sometimes green spaces may also refer to only a subset of open spaces (Taylor and Hochuli 2017).

2. There is some variation in terminology used in the literature for these three functions but they broadly refer to ecological, economic, and social functions. For example, Lovell & Taylor (2013) use ecological, production, and cultural functions while Ahern (2007) uses biotic, abiotic, and cultural functions.

3. Lennon and Scott (2014) identifies three kinds of connectivity relevant within GI: spatial, scalar, and institutional. In our case, we use connectivity in the spatial sense, which refers to ‘a physically connected system across the landscape’ (Lennon and Scott 2014, p: 572).

4. This is somewhat surprising because Urban greening guidelines (2014) of Indian government, which came prior to SCM, specifically mention: ‘Protecting green spaces in isolation will often fail to sustain the capacity of urban ecosystems to generate value and they have to be integrated in overall city landscape’ (Government of India 2014, p.3).

5. Mell (2018) is an exception in which the author analyses the development plan of India’s western city of Ahmedabad and finds that the city’s plans, in spite of differences among various stakeholders, appear to be consistent with a GI approach.