Optimising Green Spaces for Sustainable Urban Planning: A Case of Jaipur, Rajasthan

Abstract

World urban population has crossed the mark of 50% in 2009 but in India the urban share of population is just 32% of the total population. In absolute figures, the urban population of Asia and particularly China and India is the highest among all countries. Indian cities are growing very fast and with that the demand of housing and other infrastructure is also increasing. The new built-up comes on either forested area or agriculture land, and in both the cases tree cover is reduced significantly. In India, the total forest cover is already low and such land-use land cover changes threaten the sustainability of environment. The increasing built-up area accentuates the heat island phenomenon making cities hotter and suffocating. The green spaces in urban built-up environment are important to maintain the environmental equilibrium. Having more green spaces in one part of the city is not the solution to the problems; the green spaces should be uniformly distributed. Therefore, the present study aims to identify sectorwise distribution of green spaces and built-up area in order to optimise the future distribution of green spaces for the sustainability of urban environments. The city chosen for the study is Jaipur, Rajasthan as the city has dense green cover in the northern part of the city but very sparse tree cover in the south. The study suggests three-tier solution to optimise the green spaces viz. (i) Conservation in the north part; (ii) Terrace gardens in the central and old part of the city and; (iii) Horizontal expansion of green spaces in the south of the city.