Abstract
Green infrastructure planning in India has the potential to rationalise current development issues relating to economic growth and rapid urban expansion. Independence from the British facilitated progressive shift to an economically driven development based on modernisation and partial-deregulation of infrastructure provision. The impact of this process has been a decoupling of human-environmental approaches to urban planning and reliance on the utilisation of landscape resources beyond their capacity. Utilising a discussion of Nehruvian and Gandhian perspectives to urban development, this paper argues that whilst both approaches offer valuable mechanism for growth, an integrated analysis which links them provides a more responsive and effective structure for planning to deliver change. Green infrastructure approaches to urban investment are proposed in this paper to create equilibrium between the difficulties of balancing economic growth with sustainable urban development. Through an evaluation of state and alternative investment drivers this paper proposes that urban greening can form a mainstream framework to facilitate a sustainable approach to urban expansion. The paper concludes by stating that approaching investments in green infrastructure through an understanding of a state-interactions provides scope to plan economic development and ecological sustainably effectively.
Highlights
Rapid urban growth directly influences the outlook of the Indian nation as its cities continue to evolve
By evaluating the use of AIMS Environmental Science urban greening against the backdrop of expanding Indian cities the paper addresses whether it is possible to establish equilibrium between the role of green spaces and other forms of grey infrastructure. It questions whether the changing structures of planning including the liberalisation of development regulations post-1991 [17], the release of revised urban green space guidelines [18], or the rebranding of the Indian Planning Commission as the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog in early 2015 has impacted upon the political structures supporting investments in green infrastructure. To rationalise this debate the paper reflects on the interactivity of the policy, stakeholder investment and advocacy in New Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) to consider if green infrastructure can be identified as a strategic development process which can be mainstreamed into urban growth narratives
Current approaches to policy formation and delivery utilised by the Modi led government employ a combination of Nehruvian and Gandhian rhetoric to cope with the broad socio-environmental, economic and political factors which influence planning in India [4]
Summary
Received date 10 December 2014, Accepted date 1 March 2015, Published date 4 March 2015.
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