Introduction

The current rate of urban growth witnessed in India, approximately an 18% increase between 2001 and 2011, suggests that expansion will continue year on year (Ministry of Home Affairs 2011). As a result, each of the major urban centers of India (including the “big four” of Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai) have seen a dramatic increase in their urban composition (McKinsey Global Institute 2010). The outcome of which has been an increasing reliance on changing land use, i.e., from agricultural or open space to housing, which has, in many cases, seen the conversion of environmental resources into built infrastructure to meet transportation, commercial, and industrial land use needs.

One consequence of this process has been the downplaying of concepts such as landscape ecology, and includes a lack of reflection on the capacity of environmental resources to mitigate the fluctuating functionality of the landscape (Williams 2010). Closely tied to this process is a partial acknowledgment of how redevelopment of ecological resources into urban/ built infrastructure places additional stresses on the remaining land which may limit its ability to cope with growth (Williams 2010; Middleton and O’Keefe 2001). The efficiency of urban environments is therefore being compromised as ecological networks continue to be converted to other uses.

To address the potential impacts of a continual “graying” of the environment, Green Infrastructure (GI) planning has been proposed as offering a range of adaptive investment solutions to establish more resilient cities (Hellmund and Smith 2006).