Brownfield Development Endowing Urban Resilience: Fid-Bau Portal

Brownfield Development Endowing Urban Resilience

Mishra, Shreya / Kokhil, S.

The method of urbanization in cities may be a direct effect of business revolution (Meerow S et al. in Landscape Urban Plann 147:38–49, 2016). The stress on industrial production prompted demographic changes and the urban development of business areas in cities. As a result, the previously developed industrial land within the geographic area is left abandoned or underutilized for years, further termed as ‘brownfield.’ Urbanization acts as a strong tool for development. The rise of urban population in India has led to a steep rise within the demand of urban land. In attempting, densification of existing areas, and most importantly, outward expansion, often haphazard of cities into their rural hinterland (Dandekar in City, space + globalization: an international perspective, 1998). In the last decades in India, there has been a massive land uptake disproportionate to the demographic increase. Urban development was encouraged as a key factor for economic growth. According to an independent study conducted by Town and Country Planning Organization [T.C.P.O.], during 1961–81, an estimated 1.47 million ha of rural land was converted to intensive urban use, representing a loss of agricultural productivity at the national level which is not only substantial, but also perhaps not entirely necessary as there remain unutilized and underutilized lands within urban areas whose optimal development ought to have largely substituted haphazard urban sprawl. Another study carried out on surplus lands within urban areas in the beginning of the eight [T.C.P.P., 1983] covering 407 urban areas of diverse sizes was one of the earliest to reveal that in metropolitan cities, vacant land accounted for 25.4% of the total developed land (Ministry of Urban Development Government of India Smart Cities Mission Statement & Guidelines Government of India Ministry of Urban Development, 2015). This amounts to availability of 2.2 ha of vacant developable land per thousand population. This serves as an indicator of how serious the problem is while addressing the issue of unutilized or underutilized land in urban areas. On the issue of more intensive use of land, both the National Land Use and Wasteland Development Council and their operational bodies have taken a clear decision against the process of urban centers taking over land on the urban fringes. Emphasis is laid on the need for restructuring town-planning strategies in future toward better use of land within urban areas.