India's Sustainable City Project Tests Low-Carbon Urban Development at Scale

An ambitious urban development project in India is attempting to design and build what its proponents describe as the country's most liveable city — integrating principles of compact design, green space, public transit, and climate-resilient infrastructure from the ground up. The project confronts one of the most consequential development challenges of the coming decades: India is expected to add 400 million urban residents by 2050, a number roughly equal to the current population of the United States, most of whom will live in cities that are yet to be built or expanded.

The central difficulty is that 'sustainable' urban design is expensive upfront in ways that systematically disadvantage developing-country cities competing for investment. Car-free zones, green corridors, and district-level water recycling require front-loaded capital that conventional real-estate markets do not reward unless regulation mandates it. Meanwhile, informal settlements — which house a third of India's current urban population — grow faster than planned development and operate entirely outside the sustainability frameworks planners impose on formal construction.

The key question is whether this project's model — if it succeeds — can be replicated across the Indian urban system or whether it will remain a showcase development serving middle-class residents, while the majority of India's new urban population arrives in cities with unplanned sprawl, heat exposure, and inadequate water infrastructure.