Equity, Access & Resilience-Integrating Nature-based Solutions in Reclaimed Public Spaces in Dense Housing Environments

While cities are touted as the growth engines of the economy, urbanization often leads to compromising our open green spaces, the lungs of the city, providing the much required mental and physical relief. The city of Gurugram, the IT hub of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), is witnessing a rapid decline of its precious natural ecosystem. As a response to this decline, the Badshahpur Forest Corridor, once an abandoned, polluted urban wasteland has been reclaimed through a series of universal design and nature-based strategies (NbS) enabling much needed access and succor its residential communities. Between two arterial roads, daily commuters walk and cycle through from the old city to and from, industries, schools, colleges, condominiums, low-income housing and four urban villages. The corridor also serves as an ecological pearl, responding to urban challenges of waste through reuse, flooding and water security through restored natural water systems and loss of biodiversity through extensive native plantation, thereby bringing nature back into the built environment. Multiple benefits of equitable access to urban commons - urban spaces access to communities thereby ensures equity. Declining air-quality in the NCR necessitates the replication of these efforts throughout the city-region working as a strategic insert towards a larger 'Low Emission National Capital Region'. A receipient of the WUF-UIA 2030: Second Cycle Award for Adaptation to Climate Change and Resilience to Disasters, it enabled other city projects, including Sanath Road, redevelopment in a dense urban village, to increasingly adopt a similar approach. This has set in motion, wider adoption, in principle, to 100km of roads, greenbelts and open corridors by the state. Designated as a model for air pollution mitigation and dust reduction using NbS for city action plans by the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), India, Sanath Road is also a regional finalist for the WUF-UIA 2030: Third Cycle for Category 5: Access to green and public space. The session brings together stakeholders, designers, accelerators, grassroots organizations and global agencies working across South Asia and East Africa in a creative format to share and showcase how these and other such models can accelerate and institutionalize an integrated NbS approach.