- Linking Urban Form and Quality of Life in Kolkata, India    1489 kb by    Bardhan, Ronita & Kurisu-Hasegawa, Kiyo & Hanaki, Keisuke | ronita@env.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp    Short Outline With Polycentric-Compact city approach, emerging as a tool for sustainability, the spatial pattern & QoL becomes more important. It grows imperative to see how these components react & interact in already compact high-density developing countries. Abstract With the populous developing nations set towards a momentum of outward urbanized expansion, future urbanisation will largely be a developing world phenomenon. Yet it is in these nations the issues of urban sustainability are most pressing. This rapid urban outgrowth has created a colossal infrastructure gap with severe consequences in social equity and quality of life. Many scholars argue that sustainable urban form is a key towards achieving a sustainable development and that quality of life is a vital component of it. This is so because efforts to promote sustainability are unlikely to be fruitful if they impinge too severely on perceptions of human well-being. While polycentric-high density urban form or the “compact city approach” is argued to be the most sustainable one but its relevancy in already high-dense mono-centric developing nations is yet unknown. Moreover, as cities promote the goal of a ‘livable city ‘through compact-polycentric approaches, potential importance of spatial factors in determining wellbeing grows more important. Yet there exists very little empirical research to establish the claims. This paper explores these ubiquitous links between spatial urban forms to QoL in the high-density rapidly urbanizing economy of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA), India. Self reported satisfaction in the Citizen Satisfaction survey and Primary Census Abstract is used as a proxy for QoL and urban form variables. Structured multivariate statistical procedures, trend surface analysis and GIS are used to study the spatial variation of QoL to urban forms corresponding to the polycentric urban development policy of KMA. Investigation reveals that while objectively both urban form and QoL, although inversely related, exhibit a general concentric pattern with few high kinks (new population centers) towards periphery, a mono-centric distribution in contrary to the polycentric policy, subjectively QoL significantly becomes a function of the urban spatial pattern. Keywords Quality of Life, Spatial pattern, Polycentric-compact city, Urban Sustainability Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2011: LIVEABLE CITIES: URBANISING WORLD, Meeting the Challenge   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper