Shared Cities – Redefining the Built Spaces in India

Authors:

Anil Kashyap, School of Energy Construction and Environment, Coventry University, Coventry,
England CV1 5FB

Aparna Soni, RICS School of Built Environment, Amity University, NOIDA, India

Abstract

The concepts of sharing economy and smart cities have gained popularity and are defining the 21 st
century urbanism due to connectivity and enabling technologies. The Global sharing economy is
forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 139.4% to reach US$115 billion by 2016 from US$3.5 billion in 2012.
The deep penetration of internet of things (IoT), in fact ‘everything’ into the urban lifestyle has
resulted in e-commerce and mobile- commerce led consumerism. The holiday industry has been
revolutionized by the influx of home-stays and platforms like ‘Airbnb’ that enable this behaviour by
renting out of unused private homes. Hospitality platforms (Stayzilla, Stayology and OYO Rooms),
transportation platform (Zoomcar, Ola and Uber) and commodity secondary markets (OLX) have
strong presence and gained acceptability with the Indian consumers. Unleashing the spare capacity,
these innovations cleverly make use of existing yet underutilized resources. India is an imminent
market with urban population expected to rise up to 36% by 2026 from 28% in 2001 requiring
associated social and communities infrastructure along with commercial and residential space for
nearly 100 million ‘Urban middle class’ households over next two decades.

Building on these, the opportunities to expand the principle of sharing to the provision of physical,
social and recreational infrastructure is yet to be explored for sustainable communities and smart
city context. This paper considers how to expand the built environment infrastructure assets under
the ambit of ‘shareable goods’. How smartly we use the spare capacity of uses and thus reducing
need for building more, when intelligent resource utilization and environmental benefits of sharing
economy have no second thoughts. Clustering and co-locating land uses have always made possible
the public-private sharing of space. Furthermore, this paper explores the credence in sharing
economies becoming the backbone of Smart economy, in the Indian markets using a case study
approach and embedding paradigmatic shift in ‘zoning’ landuse planning approaches.

Key words: Community compact, Sharing economy, Smart cities, Land use planning.