Assessment of Urban Resilience as an Approach towards Urban Sustainability: A Case of Gurugram India.

Abstract

Abstract: Indian cities are complex and interdependent system, extremely vulnerable to threats from both natural risks and manmade disasters caused by the growing urban population, migration, depleting resources and terrorism. There are abundant evidences on resource consumption and emissions, biodiversity and land use change to show that Indian cities are responsible for a large part of unsustainable trends which push the planet beyond its ecological boundaries. With expedited urbanization, it becomes imperative to prioritise vulnerability assessment in order to increase resilience and thus attain sustainability. Recent studies indicate that the resilience framework is not consistent; they have either been applied in a natural resource context or focused on a single factor such as socio- economic vulnerability or structural weakness of physical components. Secondly, there is lack of resilience framework for developing nations or local contexts as the applicability of results from developed countries are problematic to instrument technically or theoretically at native scale. Given the diversity of interpretations and application of the resilience assessment in complex urban systems, this paper looks at factors and parameters that influence the Indian cities with major focus on Gurugram.(the third wealthiest city in India, by per-capital income with a massive population but such phenomena growth has overwhelmed city planning even with the availability of funds).The paper further explores the resilience assessment framework based on the five defined and measurable domains including social (education equity, transportation access, health coverage, communication capacity), economic (employment, income, housing capital), institution (migration plan, flood coverage, political fragmentation by Indian institutions such as National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), physical (e.g. water, sanitation, housing and land use), spatial (elevation, spatial and temporal indicators), human (e.g. literacy rate, health insurance) and Environment (e.g. ecosystem services, environmental policies).Various case examples are used to suggest that urban resilience can be conceived as a multidisciplinary framework to analyse the reactive, adaptive and transformative capacities of (and within) the complex urban system of Indian cities.