Impact of building regulations on Indian hill towns

Abstract

Unique development pattern is evolved in response to various geo-environmental constraints which include difficult topography, complex geological structure, adverse climate and fragile ecology in Indian hill towns. These hill towns have been experiencing high pressure for development due to rapid growth, increased employment opportunities and increased tourist influx from last few decades; as a result, tremendous development has taken place in these environmentally fragile hill towns, which has drastically changed the overall environment in and around hill towns. Different building regulations are enforced to guide and regulate developmental activity in hill towns and minimise the impacts of development on fragile and attractive environment of hill towns. But, as evident from existing development these building regulations are ambiguities and fail to address challenges for development in peculiar hill context and consequently have enormous impacts on the urban environment of hill towns.This study attempts to highlight various issues of existing development pattern and existing building regulations of hill towns along with various factors responsible for building regulations. Various impacts of building regulations on urban environment of hill towns are also highlighted in this study. ª 2015 The Author. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Housing and Building National Research Center. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Barriers to infrastructure sustainability for mountainous townships in Chongqing

“…Without fully considering the special factors in mountainous environment when planning [1] 30 Public lack of sustainability awareness…”

“…Mountainous regions have the typical characteristics of weak ecological carrying capacity, extremely sensitive and unstable ecological environment [1,2]. So the natural ecosystem in these regions is easy to be damaged for any carelessness during the construction and economic activity.…”

“…According to the "21st century agenda" in 1992 [3], the importance and fragility of mountainous ecosystem has been addressed, highlighting that sustainable development of mountainous regions is the major challenge faced by human kind. In mountainous regions, due to the barriers by difficult terrains, steep gradients, complex geological structure, climatic conditions and rich flora, it is considered not suitable for large-scale urban construction [1,2]. As a result, townships play more significant role in mountainous regions [4].…”

“…Research works about mountainous regions and townships are across various dimensions. Kumar [1] pointed out that the construction regulations in mountainous regions should be made according to mountainous characteristics. The studies by other researchers investigate the effects of the geographic characteristics of mountainous regions on their economic development [2,7,10].…”

City profile: Shimla

“…This inappropriate development and building regulation has enormous impact on different aspects of urban built environment natural environment, development pattern, existing buildings, infrastructural facilities, transportation network and system, open spaces and social infrastructure and overall townscape (Kumar, 2015).…”