Shanghai and Mumbai: sustainability of development in a globalizing world

The concept of 'sustainable development', according to the Brundtland Commission Report (1987), is that "there is no difference between the goals of development policy and appropriate environmental protection".
Dr. Tapati Mukhopadhyay has made an attempt to test this concept in a case study on the growth and development of urban and peri-urban areas of the two great coastal Asian cities, Shanghai and Mumbai.

The focus of the study is on the city of Shanghai along with the Pudong New Area on the one hand and Mumbai (Bombay) and Navi Mumbai (New Bombay) on the other.
The study is based on comparable, and fast changing, land-use patterns of these two cities, which are growing at a very rapid rate. It has brought out the salient features of the respective development processes of Shanghai and Mumbai, which will indeed be useful for fine-tuning of the land-use planning and surface resource management elsewhere in the future. The study, unique as it is, is based on both the secondary as well as primary data, along with a number of maps prepared using the GIS package so as to understand the temporal changes of the existing urban, peri-urban and rural areas of Shanghai and Mumbai.