In 2015, the year that the Indian government launched its 100 Smart Cities Mission, the United Nations published its 17 Sustainable Development Goals including the goal of “Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. Sustainable development goals can be seen as predominately relevant to the global South, which the UN projects suggests will be home to over 80% of the world’s megacities by 2030. The problems faced by these cities will be enormous: the housing of rural migrants; balancing formal planning with incremental and informal design; dealing with environmentally vulnerability; addressing public health and social equity. They are all, already, issues subject to extensive debate. Ananya Roy sees informality as a product of economic regulation, whether in Mexico, Egypt, India or Indonesia. Arjun Appadurai argues that grass roots social networks will be central to the new formal protocols of architectural regulation and urban planning. Aromar Revi critiques the integration of the rural and the urban through the lens of sustainability and the notion of the rurban. In bringing sustainability into the debate about equitable, humane and healthy urban development Revi opens a view onto questions of colonialism. Sustainability has a conflicted history in the global south where the march of economic development and agendas of environmental protection often clash. Indeed, they have led to exclusionary spatial practices with gentrification and ‘public safety’ zoning forcing the poor to the urban periphery flood plain zones at risk of flooding.

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Amps Proceedings Series (ISSN 2398-9467) | Book by Cambridge Scholars Publishing