Urban development in India

Indian Urban Futures 4

AFFORDABLE AND SUSTAINABLE HOMES:
Where could India and England collaborate?

The fourth in the series of Indian Urban Futures events took place on October 12th 2021, the second day of the Bristol Housing Festival. The expert group of 14 panellists were based in Hong Kong and Mumbai, Tirunelveli and Chennai in Tamilnadu, Southern India, Bristol, London and Newcastle.

The nine presentations considered the issues of how to make housing both affordable and sustainable, where to build new housing to minimise environmental impacts, and what could be done to create effective partnerships with investors. Both Bristol and Tirunelveli are both expanding university towns with high levels of housing demand.

You can watch edited recordings of all nine Presentations in sequence here or access individual recordings and pdfs from the table below. This report outlines the presentations and discussions of the online event  and summarises the key findings. We want to express our thanks to the many who have helped us so far, especially Buro Happold. We welcome any comments on our evolving Smarter Urbanisation project.

Smarter Urbanisation

Indian Urban Futures: Working with the Urban Design Group, the trust has organised two symposia in London, and a third in Tamil Nadu. The trust’s main project is testing out the application of garden city or ‘eco neighbourhood’ principles to the growth of medium sized cities through locating new housing where it will have the least environmental impacts and the most social and economic benefits.

The SCAD Eco-House

Working in partnership with SCAD (Social Change and Development) and the Nirman Trust, Nicholas Falk has funded the design and construction of the first of a series of low energy houses. These are intended to be affordable to India’s fast growing middle class. The lessons for sustainability are being shared with a range of colleges, including a project with post graduate engineers at the Centre for Sustainable Development in Cambridge University.

Future Proofing India’s Medium-sized Cities

Findings from research in 2017 and visits to Southern india by the Urbanism Environment Design (URBED) Trust, suggest how medium-sized Indian cities-those with populations currently of around half a million people-might cope with the pressures of future growth. It proposes simple steps drawn from experience in promoting ‘new garden cities’ in the United Kingdom. It then describes how an experimental project to build some demonstration ‘eco-villages’ can offer solutions that could be scaled up, as decribed is more recent posts on this page.