Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic …
This handbook is a resource for enhancing disaster resilience in urban areas. It summarizes the guiding principles, tools and practice in key economic sectors that can facilitate the implementation of resilience concepts into decisions over infrastructure investments and general urban management as integral elements of reducing disaster and climate risks. …
Even as just six per cent of the city’s area is reserved for open spaces as per the development plan, a recent study shows that over 60 per cent of these spaces are in reality not open and accessible to the common man. As per a study funded by the …
The bazaar or intermediate classes have remained outside the predominant research imagination on urban change. Delhi's wholesale and retail traders, the primary subjects of this paper, are a subset of this bazaar world. This paper uses a case study of the Supreme court ordered sealing drives of 2006-07 to investigate …
This new regional study of 900 cities published by the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities and the Cities Development Initiative for Asia gives an insight into climate change priorities in urban policies, plans and investments of Asian cities. Only 3 percent of Asian cities have a plan to tackle …
These rules may be called the Rajasthan Urban Areas (Permission for use of Agricultural Land for Non-agricultural Purposes and Allotment) Rules, 2012. They shall extent to the urban areas situated in the State of Rajasthan.
This paper analyzes the dynamics of population growth and urban expansion in the city of Xalapa, Mexico. It focuses on the establishment of informal settlements, which are one of the many threats to forest and farmland conservation (although these settlements are not the only source of the problem). Spatial analysis …
The fragmentation of urban landscapes – or the inter-penetration of the built-up areas of cities and the open spaces in and around them – is a key attribute of their spatial structure. Analyzing satellite images for 1990 and 2000 for a global sample of 120 cities, we find that cities …
For long we have been fed lies. Mumbai has no scarcity of houses and the key to the truth lies in using digital technology to unlock the city's housing potential.
The politics of inclusion in the Sabarmati Riverfront Development project, an urban mega-project in Ahmedabad, has been predicated on a “flexible governing” of the residents of the riverfront informal settlements. Such flexible governing has allowed state authorities to negotiate grass-roots opposition and mobilisation, modify the project to gentrify the riverfront …
The change in the land use pattern due to rapid urbanization adversely affects the hydrological processes in a catchment, leading to a deteriorating water environment. The increase in impervious areas disrupts the natural water balance. Reduced infiltration increases runoff and leads to higher flood peaks and volumes even for short …
Understanding the growth dynamics of urban agglomerations is essential for ecologically feasible developmental planning. The inefficient and consumptive use of land and its associated resources is termed sprawl. By monitoring changes in the urban sprawl over a period of time, the impact of changing land use on land, ecology and …
The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for estimating flood risk, considering Noida as a case study. This paper examines the impact of different methods for estimating impervious surface cover on the prediction of peak discharges as determined by a fully distributed rainfall-runoff model (WetSpa). The study …
This article traces the shifting visibility of the river Yamuna in the social and ecological imagination of Delhi. It delineates how the riverbed has changed from being a neglected “non-place” to prized real estate for private and public corporations. It argues that the transformation of an urban commons into a …
The right to the city, an idea mooted by French radical philosophers in 1968, has become a popular slogan among right to housing activists and inclusive growth policymakers. In Indian cities unprecedented and unregulated growth, incremental land use change, privatisation and chaotic civic infrastructure provisioning are fracturing resources created over …
The traditional practice of utilizing wastewater into fish pond is a unique example of sustainable socio-economic development pertaining to resource recovery in the Eastern Kolkata wetlands, a Ramsar site in India. This paper revealed the stress of urban pollution and poor land use planning on the world’s largest natural wetland. …
Urbanisation in India is occurring at a rate that is faster compared to many other parts of the developing world. The Planning Commission of the Government of India estimates that about 40 per cent of the country’s population will be residing in urban areas by 2030. However, as conurbations and …
While Indian cities have grown manifold in the past several decades, and there is expectation that the pace of urbanization would accelerate in the future, problems of water supply, sewage disposal, municipal wastes, power supply, open landscaped spaces, air pollution, and public transport, have assumed stark proportions in many urban …
In Kathmandu you can smell the Bagmati before you see it; in Sundarijal you can hear this river as it cascades down from its headwaters to nourish the paddy fields in the plains below the Shivapuri hills before it finds its way into the city, much abused and yet revered. …
The Bagmati loses its way in Kathmandu amid political vacuum and urban chaos. The chaos and urban sprawl of today’s Kathmandu have taken a serious toll on the stretch of the Bagmati and its tributaries that meet in the city. In the absence of clear guidelines regulating river water use …
