SUSTAINABLE URBAN CANVAS- EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH

Abstract

The phenomenon of urbanisation, especially suburbanisation, is observed monolithically worldwide, but in a rippling wave like vogue. It trickles down vertically and diffuses out horizontally from the developed to the developing areasand from central to the peripheral regions, respectively. No economically progressing country has ever been able to avert its occurrence, which is inevitable and challenging. The daunting task of intelligently designing and confirming sanity and sustainability for an urban canvas is a multidimensional and multi / cross disciplinary endeavour. This demands retrospective understanding of the place and its people; anticipatory sense to forecast and strategize; and awareness about the practices worldwide and indigenous. Civilizations have always been civilized because of their informed and active citizens, who have come forth to the rescue of theirlands of origin and fellow natives. Representation of this kind can be cited in the Garden City and City Beautiful movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, followed by many similar smaller and bigger experiments to the formal school of thought of urbanism, called “New Urbanism”.Many experiments happened under the wide umbrella of New Urbanism and garden city movement across the globe. From Great Britain, to the USA, Abu Dhabi and India, all have witnessed and / or are undergoing the sweeping dynamism in thought and action, for the pursuit of urban revamp and sustainability. This piece of research is an attempt towards compiling and evaluating such utopian models, taking cases from different countries, from different time periods, that have aimed at urban amelioration. The paper considers four cases of Masdar City (Abu Dhabi), Letchworth City (U.K), Disney Celebration Community (U.S.A.) and Magarpatta City (India) to showcase people’s experiments with truth for urban sustainability.