DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR HILL AREAS

Abstract

Over the last few decades, basic concepts, dimensions and issues of sustainability have been reasonably researched and understood. However, due to the greater adverse impact of unsustainable development of larger cities, the focus of research in the domain has been on those which are located in plain areas, and neither in smaller cities nor in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the Himalayan hill region, which has been recognized as one of the most important eco-sensitive zones with fragile ecology, lower carrying capacities and threshold limits (Nilsson and Grelsson, 1995), and one which has been facing several threats and challenges due to natural and anthropogenic activities. Further, “the fragility of mountain ecosystems makes the impacts of unsustainable development more severe and more difficult to correct than in other areas of the world” (Nilsson and Grelsson, 1995), considering its uniqueness, the research and development efforts in this mountain system require special attention in terms of site planning, design and development to ensure long term sustainability of the region. Understanding issues of sustainability in Himalayan hills, particularly urban areas, that are specific to the context and different from those in larger cities in the plains, is crucial for ensuring their sustainable development. Despite all contributions that urban sustainability assessment can make to the achievement of sustainable urban development, until now, only few academicians, researchers, and institutions have focused on the sustainability in the environmentally sensitive hill areas by identifying the peculiar aspects of sustainability in environmentally sensitive hill areas and of site-specific and spatial natural environmental aspects (Pushplata 2000). Though many academicians, and researchers, have highlighted the need for the sustainability in the environmentally sensitive hill areas. Further, in order to assess the impact of (urban) development, several tools, techniques and frameworks for urban sustainability assessment have been developed and applied, but these have not been applied in context of environmentally sensitive hill areas and nor their appropriateness checked. Some work on the selection, planning, and development of hill areas has been done but these are mainly at building level and neighbourhood level. Also, it is observed that holistic framework considering all aspects of sustainability of urban development in hill areas is still lacking that influence the urban sustainable development. Hence, there is need to develop a comprehensive list of indicators and range of weightages varying according to contexts, that can lead to development of a context-specific sustainability assessment tool and methods to monitor the development in environmentally sensitive areas and enable planners, designers and developers to consider all the aspects of urban sustainability in a holistic manner. Therefore, the aim of this research is to develop a new urban sustainability assessment tool for assessing the hill areas based on recognized and agreed context specific aspects of sustainability in hill area, which could be considered in urban sustainability assessment tool. The research methodology used includes four main steps. The first step is concerned with the theoretical aspects of the subject. The last three are focused on the empirical aspects of urban sustainability assessment. In the first step, a brief review of the literature has been done on the concept of sustainable development, existing theories, practices and approaches of urban sustainability in general and in context of environmentally sensitive hill areas in particular. This step also presents and discusses the main issues of sustainability in hill context and the implications for research. In the second step, six tools such as Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) Communities, United Kingdom; Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficiency for Urban Development (CASBEE-UD), Japan; Green Building Index (GBI) Township, Malaysia; Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighbourhood Development (LEED-ND), United States; Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) Green Townships and GRIHA for Large Development, India; are selected through screening analysis and reviewed in depth to identify the gaps in existing tools, and to find out whether they are capable/suitable of adequately addressing the sustainability issues in Indian hill regions. Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) is employed to investigate the issues of sustainability coverage, local adaptability, scoring and weighting, and its applicability. Results of this analysis indicate that most of the tools do not mention the crucial aspects for sustainability in environmentally sensitive hill areas. Further to provide an insight into the empirical aspects of urban sustainability assessment, the comparative case study analysis is done to highlight the peculiarity of each selected urban sustainability assessment tool (USAT) and examine the viability of developing a new tool for the urban sustainability assessment of hill areas. New Tehri Township, located on the southern slopes of outer Himalayas of Tehri Garhwal, Uttarakhand has been selected as a case area for the evaluation of town with the selected USAT’s and further to validate the proposed sustainability assessment tool. The township is the only planned hill town of Uttarakhand and has also been awarded Prime Minister's National Award for Excellence in planning and design in hills in 2000. The findings of the case study analyses highlighted that there is no single, best method for assessing the sustainability of environmentally sensitive hill areas. Not all the criteria and indicators included in a given USAT’s are relevant in a different context due to different environmental, social, and economic conditions. The study emphasized on the creation of a database of all context specific criteria and indicators and suggested to consult relevant stakeholders in the selection of criteria to be used for context specific assessments. In the third step, after finding important context specific indicators, relative weights by using Analytical Network Process (ANP) tool have been assigned and the framework for measuring indicators developed. Thereafter, evaluation of the proposed tool has been done and the final score of the selected case for the assessment of urban sustainability in the context of environmentally sensitive hill areas has been calculated in order to validate the tool/framework. The final outcome of the research is in the form of a development of urban sustainability assessment tool for hill areas and presents the method to demonstrates how the tool can be deployed in the selected case study. It is found that the integration of spatial dimension in the tool can help in collecting data and measuring spatially-related indicators of hill areas and providing better visualization of urban sustainability status using GIS based analytical tool. Further, the developed tool can also assist planners, designers and decision makers to design strategies for improving the overall urban sustainability of hill areas using GIS-based assessment model.