Independence Day 2023 | Vision@2047: How conscious cities of India will look like

Award-winning town planner and disaster management expert Anshu Sharma believes there will be a reversal to green cities in India by 2047.

Award-winning town planner, Anshu Sharma co-founded SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society) as a student at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi in the mid-1990s. A member of the three Indian disaster management experts picked by Government of India to assist Nepal's recovery from the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, Sharma has helped rebuild towns after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Orissa super cyclone, Ladakh and Barmer, Rajasthan floods. He has co-authored the World Disaster Report published by the International Federation of the Red Cross and participated in rehabilitation efforts following the Gujarat earthquake, Haiti earthquake and East Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster.

Anshu Sharma was in a lab at his alma mater, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi a few years ago, leading students on an elective on urban design called, City Futures. He provocatively asked the students to describe their vision as an urban planner for Indian cities in the year 2100. "India has set a 2070 target for being carbon neutral. Some cities like Delhi are saying we will become carbon neutral by 2050. If you talk about national or city master plans, they are only for 20 years. We can see projections like the rise in temperature by the year 2100, but there is no plan or vision for 2100. Our plan is shortsighted," he adds.

But one student surprised the highly experienced urban planner by making a simple drawing that visualised green cities in 2100 where elephants will be crossing the roads surrounded by water bodies. "That is where the cities should be and can be," says Sharma. "To get there by 2047 is a little earlier than the midpoint. The year 2047 will be the year we will be taking the U-turn, to go from a green, nature-based living to an industrialised polluted city and back to a green city," he adds.

How to get there

Incorporating local solutions, technology and participation; using Artificial Intelligence in monitoring heat wave, flood and fire; building open, shared neighbourhood spaces for families and children, drafting plans for fighting climate change; building carbon-free infrastructure; stressing on non-motorised (walking and cycling) first mile and last mile transport; creating free public spaces for art and culture.

Starting the reversal

In the 1920 when urban planning as a discipline was coming together, American urban planner Clarence Perry defined a neighbourhood as an area where a child can walk to her elementary school in fewer than ten minutes without crossing a major road. "Cities are meant to be designed around children," says Sharma, explaining Perry's plan of a city as clusters of several such neighbourhoods. "There is a saying, If a city works for children, then it works for everyone."

"Twenty years ago, we talked about global warming, but we couldn't measure it. Now we are measuring it. Twenty years ago, we spoke about sustainability, but we couldn't project the future. Today we can," says Sharma. The ability to anticipate, measure and manage will help the people, institutions and industry steer Indian cities towards Conscious Cities.

The ability comes from the participation of the local community, culture and technology. "We can now process a very large amount of data in a very short time. We can almost in real time see how much the city is growing, what risk it is going to face in the near future and how to manage it. We have been measuring temperatures in cities at neighbourhood level, but with satellite imagery and Artificial Intelligence we can now see data at the level of individual houses. We can make hyper-local assessments and warn those homes, alert local authorities and prepare health services," says Sharma.

AI-backed hyper-local ability to look at data around people, living conditions, natural built environment, assets and consumption will help manage cities. "We are able to target our resources precisely, so efficiency goes up. Also we don't miss anybody out. If we secure the environment and human capital, we get a just and fair economy," he adds. "The divide will never go away, but we will know that people will never fall through the safety net."

How conscious cities of 2047 will look like

• Social, fair, equitable and just
• Information everywhere from production to consumption
• Real-time response to everything that is not right like hazards, flood, fire
• Generating far lesser waste and able to recycle it well
• Optimised water consumption and recycling water
• Cities don't burn much energy, a lot of it renewables, because of efficient consumption
• Localised, individual-centric solutions to bring in efficiency
• Micro-level interventions like cooling and heating spaces around people instead of entire rooms
• People will travel much lesser due to technology-based interaction
• Mobility for cultural and social causes instead of work
• Exponential growth of fundamental knowledge
• Customised education for every child
• Entrepreneurial, decentralised and niche jobs
• High-tech production away from cities