Urban Design as a Spatial Assessment Tool in Achieving SDG 11: Case of Bengaluru, India

Cities today organize and render themselves as complex adaptive systems with continuous cycles of emergence, self-organization, and reorganization of urban agents influenced by the external environment and feedback systems, giving rise to complex spatial patterns, dynamically interacting networks and hierarchies that transcend scale, system type, and disciplines. Global cities compete (for sustainable development and urban resilience) by dissecting the layers of such complex entities, flows, and interactions. Spatially speaking, until recently, the approach to understanding sustainable development or building resilience through transdisciplinary approaches has been restricted to provision and accessibility of technical infrastructure, i.e., urban mobility, energy management, disaster control, technology, etc., mostly at the metropolitan or regional scale. Attributes of urban design such as urban form and morphological structure of cities for problem-solving remain unexplored and thus indicate the need to design analytical and assessment tools that measure the complex spatial components and their relationships. As a country dedicated to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainability, India has robustly aligned its national development agenda with the SDG localization model to effectively realize the sustainability goals at a varied subnational level. The central body, National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog’s mapping of SDG 11, and Centrally Sponsored Schemes highlight India’s interconnected strategy to realize the 2030 Agenda. The Ease of Living Index (EOL) was launched in 2017 under the Smart City Mission as a competitive tool to rank Indian cities across three aspects: quality of life, economic ability, and sustainability. Interestingly, a dissection of the 14 categories and 50 indicators on which the assessment tool is based indicates the minimization of urban design as a recognized parameter of assessment. This chapter thus makes an inquiry on the parameters of urban design that shall enhance the spatial assessment criteria in tools assessing sustainability with specific focus on EOL and Bengaluru city.