"Emergence of Channapatna Local Planning Area – An Alternative to Decongest Bengaluru, Karnataka, India "

Abstract

There has been quite a debate to understand the scope and opportunities related to the fringe areas of urban cores and their associated areas. Indeed, planners envision fringe areas as ‘great alternatives’ to ease out housing pressure in cities. As many of the fast growing Asian cities, Bengaluru shows quite a rapid and haphazard development in terms of urban processes. The city has expanded rather comfortably since 1990s in a concentric pattern, but presently it is facing immense challenges in terms of land availability. City planners have struggled to find solutions, while taking measures for the decentralization of city functions in the case of fringe areas. This research highlights the physical set up and the existing land use components to understand the extension and development possibilities of the fringe region of Channapatna lying adjacent to the Bengaluru city. The study area is Channapatna, which is famous for its handmade wooden toy and doll making industries. The region is a fringe area that promises to be a great setting for residential and industrial activities. Nonetheless, the paper focuses on the current villages in the region, which are generally agriculture-oriented and thus the preservation of the land use and related conservation measures are needed in a single planning platform. The study describes the demographic parameters and discusses the current land use and future planning measures. Therefore, the focus is not on Bengaluru as the Indian software capital, but on Channapatna in Bengaluru fringe area, which has tremendously benefited from the city development efforts. As such, this development includes economic growth and sustainable planning measures that would promote the co-existence of the rural and urban land uses, safeguarding the interests of the local artisans and farmers while paving the way for urbanization. This paper highlights the demographic aspects of the villages considered for a comprehensive and cluster level planning of Channapatna with changing land uses showing its prospects in toy making industries and its nearness to the main city as a promising future of sustainable urban planning and development.