CONFERENCE TRACKS

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were to be achieved from 2000 to 2015 have been replaced with 17 Sustainable Development Goals approved by the United Nations, and are to be achieved from 2016 to 2030. Goal -11 specifically deals with the urban:" Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable", and has been further elaborated in the form of 10 Urban Goals.

Goal -16 similarly focuses on sustainability and inclusiveness. Equality, justice, equity and poverty reduction are integral to Sustainable Development Goals. Goal -8 is also relevant to urban development as it focuses on 'inclusive and sustainable economic growth'. Ten Urban Goals focus on sustainable development of housing and services, and upgradation of slums, mobility, inclusive governance, protection of heritage, disaster reduction, access to the commons, prepare integrated policies and plans, integration of cities, peripheries and rural areas, and improving air quality. Sustainable Development Goals make important changes to the earlier held views on sustainable development. First, SDGs broaden the definition of sustainability by including justice and fairness apart from inclusivity in it. Second, new dimensions of `resilience' and 'gender equality' are added to sustainability. Water and sanitation, energy, climate change, and inequality are also being regarded as new additions by its proponents.

The organizers intend to initiate a dialogue in this session for mainstreaming the sustainable development goals with a specific focus on Goal – 11. Sustainability, equity, and inclusiveness could be used as the signposts for writing in this session.

Risk basically implies the possibility of loss or injury. We can think of external risks and manufactured risks. External risks are the result of some natural processes, and manufactured risks are the result of excessive human activity. Needless to underscore that city civilization has to mitigate risks in order to survive. A resilient city is able to survive traumatic blows to its physical infrastructure, its economy, or its social fabric. The resilient city bends but does not break. It absorbs impacts without shattering. Resilience is the tendency of a city to resist against disasters and risks. Achieving resiliency in a disaster context means the ability to survive future natural disasters with minimum loss of life and property.

This Session on climate change, risk and resilient cities would debate the inter-connections between climate change, risk and resilience. We believe that planning professionals, educationists, and researchers should be able to identify risks posed by climate changes, and address the issue of mitigating such risks for making cities resilient. Of course the scope and content of a resilient city in the context of developing countries needs to be further explored. So papers on the resilient city in a developing country would also form part of this Session.

Planning has been facing major challenges due to uncertainties caused by political regime changes, economic upheavals and social transformations. Confronted with huge political, economic and social problems, several governments in the developing countries have yet to frame national policies for city and rural planning. Those states that adopted land use driven master plans in the 1950s and 1960s have been fast adopting project driven public private partnership models premised on the utilitarian calculus. International funding agencies and think tanks have majorly motivated developing countries to move between well-structured and legal master plans, and project oriented city plans, which leads to development of isolated pockets in the mist of unplanned, unintended developments like slums and blights. The issue of contestation between master plans and project plans is not yet fully settled, although pressure is building upto review the planning process totally.

New ways of developing the city has thrown open the issue of striking a balance between planning for economic buoyancy, and social inclusion. It is a fact that a large number of people have been pulled out of poverty in developing countries after economic reforms. It is also a fact that economies of the developing countries are growing at faster growth rates in Asia, Africa, and South America. But at the same time, it appears that a majority of people in the cities in developing countries are feeling excluded from the benefits of economic growth. These inequalities are also visible spatially in the form of slums, and also large sections of workers finding work only in the informal sector alongside rising number of unemployed youth. Formal sector has become the sole preserve of highly skilled blue and white collar workers.

Private sector led housing for the rich and middle classes, construction of metro rails, malls and multiplexes, elite entertainment arenas, rising car ownership, new land policies, smart cities, and transit oriented development have become possible with growing economies, liberal rules and regulations, and consequently rising individual incomes. At the same time rising inequalities have posed major challenges for the lower income populations living in cities. Movements like 'the right to the city' are the result of increasing spatial inequalities, where survival has become a challenge for large sections of the populations in cities. Papers in this session are expected to address the issues pertaining to striking a balance between spatial inclusions alongside economic growth.

Planning practice as well as planning theory has been concerned with public participation in the plan making process after the Second World War. City planners have generally believed that being present in a meeting or discussion implies that the relevant concerns of citizens will get addressed. However, inclusion can mutate and act as exclusion and that applies for exclusion as well. Merely being involved in a certain aspect of planning process cannot be understood as inclusion. Inclusion refers to the degree of freedom from constraints on the movement of people to do and be what they like in the context of city planning and built environment. If collective agency of the disempowered is not developed through involvement in any planning exercise, such involvement should be conceived as exclusion even if citizens are present in these decision making processes and arenas.

Difference on the basis of gender, caste, religion, region, ethnicity, race, etc.; has provided reasons for discrimination and exclusion of the dominated groups by the dominating collectives. While city planning agencies in the western countries have begun recognizing these differences, and have been making attempts to address the issues of exclusion based on social constructs, planners in India have so far avoided these differences in spite of the fact that spatial conflicts in cities have manifested themselves on a regular basis. In developing countries emphasis on largely physical aspects of planning has led to the exclusion of discrimination and social conflicts from the planning discourse. Difference and discrimination have spatial manifestations, and therefore, become part of the scope of work of a planner.

Papers on the nature of these differences, spatial manifestations of these differences, consequences of discrimination based on these differences, and probable planning strategies to mitigate discrimination are invited in this session. Focus must be maintained on the aspects which city planners could use to reduce and eliminate these differences. Authors writing for this session should focus on complexities of exclusions and inclusions along with their nature, spatial signs, and circumstances when inclusion is presented as exclusion. Authors could also write on empowerment and inclusion to make planning practices and planning theories better.

Mobility has been intrinsic to human existence. Since antiquity people and their creations have been moved about for human survival. In modern times mobility remains at the root of human endeavors. Mobility is the core concern of urban and regional planning profession and education. Planners seek to make movement of people and goods within and beyond cities as affordable and efficient as possible by use of highly advanced technologies. Innovations like underground metro systems in cities, and air travel, regional and globally, in the backdrop of developments and intensive use of IT and ICT continue to hasten mobility. Mobility becomes crucial for human development as it enables to transcend the distances between places globally, and within the city. In today's era, movement of people, goods, services, and the capital is critical for widening and deepening social relations of capitalism. While mobility presents greater opportunities for economic growth and human wellbeing, it equally presents challenges of congestion and more importantly environmental pollutions, etc. From a planning point of view, access to opportunities enabling mobility is unevenly distributed; some people and groups are more mobile than others. Economic opportunities globally are directly connected with mobility.

Relationships between mobility, accessibility, people, goods, services and the capital are multiple and complex. In this session, we would like the paper presenters to explore these multiple relations and also unearth complexities of such relationships. Radical and critical proposals to improve mobility and accessibility in the interests of sustainable human existence that does not threaten the existence of this planet are most welcome including existing success stories.

Normal discourse lends support to the often made argument that physical and social infrastructure is the driving force behind economic growth and well-ordered city development. However, what is not fully articulated in policy arenas is the fact that planners need to create physical and social infrastructure, which could be accessed by all citizens. Affordability of the urban poor remains largely unaddressed issue in city planning for the provision and maintenance of infrastructure. Public private partnerships based business models have been responsible for providing modern infrastructure to those who earn enough and could afford access to infrastructure through market oriented mechanisms. Mobility on toll roads, private schools and hospitals, privatized power and water, access to metro rails, malls and multiplexes, access to commercial entertainment avenues, etc.; are all largely service the rich and the middle income groups. Another 50 percent population of income poor urban residents also needs to be serviced with physical and social infrastructure, lack of which would produce generations of underprivileged city dwellers.

Sufficient planning and technical knowledge exists to encourage universal access to modern social and physical infrastructure. In this session, we expect that paper writers should critically examine and address as to how every citizen could have access to physical and social infrastructure. Simultaneously we need to know gaps in infrastructure provision, construction of relevant standards for provision and maintenance, the issue of core and periphery infrastructure, and whether public agency or private agency or a partnership arrangement would provide infrastructure in order to achieve the goals of equity and efficiency.

Governments in the global south are steadfast in providing decent housing to all the citizens. This steadfastness is clearly demonstrated through continuous policy interventions and innovations based on different approaches. Different housing and land policies have been tried in the last century. Governments have tried to provide housing to the urban poor through government schemes. Governments have initiated housing policies where the private sector and the third sector play pivotal roles while governments act as enablers. Governments have also made policy provisions for self-help whereby citizens are asked to provide housing for themselves with the help and under the superintendence of governments. In the recent times, governments in developing countries are looking at housing for 'non-provided' through the private sector. Here governments encourage the private sector through financial and spatial incentives. But in spite of all these diverse attempts, a large number of people in the cities of developing countries continue to live in slums and squatters, in habitats unfit for human living. On the other hand recent studies in some of the developing countries have shown that there are large numbers of houses in cities that are lying vacant even after completion. Questions of scarcity of developed land and finances have always remained at the centre of housing debates. But processes leading to homelessness are now being more fully explored by scholars. Most significantly, separation of debates about processes causing lack of housing for the urban poor (evictions, displacements, dispossessions, resettlement and rehabilitation), and the dominant discourse of lack of adequate land and finances for such housing more often appear to remain divorced in scholarly writings in developing countries. More recent trend of the 'housing rights talk' has not been very helpful either. The important question then is: will citizens in developing countries be ever able to get access to decent housing? In this session our aim is to explore possibilities of how it could be made possible to provide housing to all citizens in the cities of developing countries within the given social, political and economic environment dominated?>

Smart cities have made global impact and developing countries do not want to be left behind. Accordingly, governments have also been initiating new policies to create smart cities with a singular focus on efficiency and competitiveness by embedding smart technologies in the built environment. However, city has been the primary arena for production and use of new technologies as elucidated by stalwarts like Lewis Mumford. But smart technologies are too different from historically developed technologies used in the last two centuries for providing various services in the city. Present technologies would no doubt make cities competitive but at the same time gaze into all aspects of our lives. New technologies have successfully transformed cities. Whether more can be done with advanced computing technologies to benefit populations and the natural environment. Whether modern technologies can meet the day to day challenges faced by a vast majority of people living in cities of developing countries. These are the core issues that need to be addressed in this session. Major national highway corridors linking mega metropolitan cities are being developed in India, and other developing countries throughout the globe. These developments are presented as a strategy to handle challenges of increasing level of urbanization and economic growth. Among other things, this approach takes advantage of the existing accessibility to develop cities as economic magnets. Accessibility within such urban agglomerations developed alongside major national highways is also needed to be looked at from the point of view of how such developments could be leveraged to enhance access to housing and infrastructure to all citizens. We also view accessibility broadly by including IT, ICT, GIS, GPS, and the idea of communication in planning developed both from theoretical and practical standpoints. Developments promoting mobility and corridor development without access to all citizens is viewed exclusionary in nature.

Technology has played a vital role in modern city development. Inventions of automobile and elevator are two examples, which have crucially shaped the form and function of the cities. Vertical and horizontal physical development of cities is critically linked with modern technologies. Like suburbanization was impossible without the mass introduction of automobile as a mode of personal mobility, and truly high rise tower construction for commercial, residential and other purposes could not be realized without the help of modern elevators.

Role of technologies, particularly those based on IT, ICT, GIS and GPS have revolutionized the city and its governance by completely transforming the ways in which citizens interact. One area where a major impact of technology could be seen is city governance. A large number of computer applications are developed by the same companies, which once ran computer businesses, for example, the IBM. These companies are now helping city governments govern the cities. Role of IBM in Rio is visibly important in making its governing systems transparent. Developing world is also experiencing interlacing of smart phones and city taxies for hiring purposes; use of GIS is becoming common for mapping and analyses; and GPS is interfacing between city governments and the citizens. Now it is possible that planners can encourage participation by voting, through predesigned and purpose built web platforms and internet platforms facilitating touch points for multiple interactions with city governments.

In this fast changing world of technology, the crucial questions to be addressed in this session are: where will be governance of cities positioned in the future, what kind of technologies will drive governance of our cities, and what kind of conflicts will emerge from such city governance processes? What form citizens and governing processes will take through application of advanced information and computing technologies? These are some of the issues that the conference would be interested in debating in this session.