SHIVANI SINGH

As much as we love the spacious, affordable homes in gated communities on the city’s outskirts, suburban living comes at a cost. Suburbanisation is a strain on resources and, as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts it, an “inexorable product of carbased living”.

Most of the residents living here commute long distances for work and education. As its outer limits keep expanding, the sprawl demands heavy investments in flyovers and mass-transit. The absence of adequate public transportation leads to increased dependence of residents on their cars.

To counter this unsustainable model, many cities in the world have opted for densification of their core areas to house more people within the city limits. Delhi, on the other hand, has paid little attention to reviving its inner-city areas until it decided to rebuild eight South Delhi neighbourhoods to house more government officials.

Unfortunately, Delhi’ first attempt at re-densification has turned out to be a textbook case of bad urban planning. Instead of countering the challenges thrown up by urban sprawls, it ended up transporting those very problems to the city’s core.

The south Delhi redevelopment project aims to replicate the gated communities of the National Capital Region with huge underground parking slots, running edge-to-edge below the entire estate. No large tree can survive on such a hollow ground. Hence, the proposal to cut 14,000 of them. Not a raindrop will percolate through that sealed earth to Delhi’s fast-depleting aquifers.

The original residents of these neighbourhoods were all government employees. “Many of them used public transport to move around. But now, we are trying to replace this lot with people who have a large carbon footprint,” points out Moulshri Joshi, an architect associated with the citizens’ movement to save trees.