Abstract
The New Urban Agenda indicates that by 2050 the world urban population is expected to nearly double, making urbanization one of the twenty-first century’s most transformative trends. The COP23 and Sendai Framework have attempted to suggest solutions to environmental challenges and disaster risk reduction at a global level. As cities expand and new urban centres come into being, massive sustainability challenges are poised to surface in terms of housing, infrastructure, basic services, food security, health, education, decent jobs, safety and natural resources, among others. In addition, the persistence of multiple forms of poverty and deprivation, growing inequalities and environmental degradation, remain among the major challenges to sustainable development in the global south, with social and economic exclusion and spatial segregation often an irrefutable reality in cities. Cities of the global south are constantly under the threat of climate change, flooding and heat island formation. In light of the above, the current issue of the journal highlights few of these challenges existing in Asian cities through original research. The current issue has seven articles, four of which deal specifically with environmental concerns of carbon emission, climate change, flooding and urban heat islands. Two articles have looked at issues of water insecurity and housing, respectively, whereas the section on perspectives covers an article on role of NGOs in promoting affordable housing.
Kala Seetharam Sridhar has attempted to build an understanding of the determinants of carbon emissions, using internationally comparable data and cross-national regressions for India and China from an empirical perspective in her article titled ‘Urbanization and Carbon Emissions in India and China’. The article while exploring the relationship between urban land use regulations and carbon emissions concludes that urbanization has no impact on carbon emissions per capita, or per unit of geographical area. However, electricity consumption in China, and electricity produced from coal in India, have a positive effect on carbon emissions. GDP per capita has a positive effect in India only, but per capita GDP squared has a negative impact on emissions in both the countries.
In addition, a city’s urban form, to which policy contributes, is correlated with carbon emissions. More suburbanized cities, which sprawl more, also emit more carbon. The author opines that India’s land use regulations relating to building height restrictions are conservative, hence Indian cities sprawl, which leads to carbon emissions. Therefore, the focus of urban policy has to be on the development of compact cities. The article concludes with highlighting the caveats of data.
In their article titled ‘Urban Climate-Proof Finance for Disaster-Resilient Infrastructure: Issues on Competitiveness and Sustainability’, Salil K. Sen and Viput Ongsakul argue that issues on competitiveness and sustainability frame the configuration of urbanization in Asia Pacific where climate-change-triggered migration is rapidly growing. The authors opine that unpredictability and intermittency of extreme climate and weather events exacerbate economic, societal and environmental sustainability of urban habitats, which augured the need to review the climate-proof finance for disaster-resilient infrastructure. This article uses the complexity and sustainability viable systems model (VSM) to gauge the multiplicity of parameters on vulnerability of disaster-prone infrastructure. The assurance on sustainability while maintaining competitiveness is corroborated with the tenets of VSM utilizing top-down–bottom-up alignment of disaster-proof financing. The article articulates the need to establish equilibrium between competitiveness and sustainability, as economic considerations outweigh the need for disaster-proof financing of infrastructure.
Nguyen Van Long and Yuning Cheng in their article titled ‘Urban Landscape Design Adaption to Flood Risk: A Case Study in Can Tho City, Vietnam’ present the development history of the city and the correlation between its urbanization history and the existing characteristics of the urban landscape. The article analyses challenges in urban development, assessing existing water infrastructure and opportunities of current urban and rural landscapes. Urban landscape design strategies have been discussed at the end to suggest improved resilience of the city with flood management in the context of climate change.
In their article titled ‘Urban Informal Housing and Surface Urban Heat Island Intensity: Exploring Spatial Association in the City of Mumbai’, Surabhi Mehrotra et al. argue that urbanization leads to densification of built-up areas, and thereby increases surface heat island intensity (SUHI)−which is one of the growing concerns in rapidly urbanizing cities. Another notable aspect of cities like Mumbai is the uncontrolled growth of informal slum housing clusters, which has emerged as a significant urban built form in the landscape of cities. Taking Mumbai as a case study, the article aims to explore the linkages between slum housing−referred as ‘slum urban form’ (SUF)−and SUHI supported by spatial-statistical analysis. The magnitude of the impact of urban form on SUHI, measured by land surface temperature (LST), is examined using Cohen’s d index, which measures the effect size for two groups−SUF and ‘formal’ housing on LST. The results confirm a ‘large’ effect indicating a significant difference in mean LST between the two groups. The exploratory spatial analysis indicates that the contribution of SUF in elevating SUHI is more than the formal housing areas as well as has increased vulnerability to heat stress. The on-ground validation of the results using environmental sensors confirms the susceptibility of SUF to heat stress.
Diganta Das and Haslindah Safni in their article titled ‘Water Insecurity in Urban India: Looking through a Gendered Lens on Everyday Urban Living’ examine the everyday experiences of water insecurity among poor women in urban India. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Hyderabad and Bangalore on water insecurity, the paper opines that the impacts of water insecurity are highly gendered and contentious and adds that it is in the landscape of gender division of labour that women have to negotiate their everyday lives around water. Deploying photography as the primary method, this article demonstrates social dimension of water insecurity and impact on women’s lives that bear the majority of domestic water issues. The article concludes that lack of efforts by the state and its agencies to improve understanding of the lived experience of water insecurity would aggravate the water issues in urban India and leave the poor urban women to be highly water insecure.
Steve Kwok-Leung Chan in their article titled ‘Enclave Tenement Trap: A Case Study of Ethnic Minorities Residing in Private Rented Housing Sector in Hong Kong’ investigate the housing process of ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. The article attempts to explain how the minority ethnic groups are filtered and trapped in the private rented housing sector in inner city enclaves. Low-income Pakistani and Nepalese migrants in two districts in Hong Kong were studied through focus group discussions and interviews. The article argues that affordability, discrimination and location consideration draw the Pakistani and Nepalese families into the private rented sector in tenement slums. The article solicits for more social work intervention and change in the focus of housing policy.
Coincidentally, like the previous issue, the article titled ‘Assisted Community Housing Initiative in Dhaka: Rethinking Role of NGOs in Affordable Housing Development’ by Halima Begum et al. in the section ‘perspectives’ is also on Bangladesh. This article documents how the strength of a group of mobilized slum dwellers was harnessed to bring in change in their housing condition. The community, with active support from a non-government organization, was able to develop housing for themselves. The article demonstrates that assisted community housing as an approach is capable of offering sustainable housing development solution in a resource-constrained country like Bangladesh. Through elaborating on the community efforts, the article identifies the difficulties that were encountered by the NGO and the community making this a shared struggling experience. It identifies that with few policy-level interventions and changes in operational practices of different government agencies, a supportive environment can be created which will foster NGO’s stewardship to making this approach produce more equitable, efficient, affordable and sustainable housing development for the urban poor.
Inputs based on original research is a sine-qua-non to effective policy formulation to address global environmental challenges. The articles in the current issue underscore some of the challenges in this regard in select countries of Asia. We hope that the research and issues highlighted in this issue will draw the attention of policymakers and researchers at both global and local levels to address the environmental challenges in cities of Asia.