*Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Economics, University of Calcutta. E-mail: joykarmakar49@gmail.com
**Professor, Dept. of Geography, University of Calcutta (Retd.)
Online published on 9 October, 2018.
Policies on the contemporary development of cities favour the concept of compact city, an idea that has not yet clearly defned. Compactness of cities often refers to urban sustainability achieved by dense, mixed neighborhoods and high intensity (Jenks, Burton, Williams, 1996) which make cities livable. Land use of a city play signifcant role with respect to compactness, livability and broadly to sustainability. The paper explores whether the planned towns of West Bengal are compact in nature as they are being physically planned and these towns has passed more than three decades since inception. Importance of these planned towns is enormous because the towns are developed as an alternative form of urbanization (Planned Urbanization) and they would be the cities of tomorrow and will play signifcant role in the process of future urbanization of West Bengal. Selected unplanned towns have been taken into consideration to compare with the planned townships’ compactness. This Paper argues based on compactness index that almost all planned towns’ fail to reshape the alternative new form of urbanization. Towns (both Planned and unplanned) located close to Kolkata are more compact compared to other planned and unplanned towns. This precisely proves the dominant role of Kolkata. It also sheds light on the challenges of the towns with respect to their failure of compactness and as an alternative strategy of Urbanization. Planned Towns are in the study include Kalyani, Durgapur, Bidhannagar and Haldia.
