How should we distribute land areas between amenities— schools, hospitals, parks—and private plots for homes and jobs? What is the ideal proportion for each? We need to do this for two different situations, greenfield sites and brownfield sites. In greenfield sites, where we start with vacant land, we have considerable freedom to choose our proportions, and the ideal we have selected will be a very useful guide for new area planning. Even for brownfield sites, a notion of what would be ideal proportions for land distribution between amenities and buildable plots would be a useful guide. The article attempts to extract guiding principles and concludes with a detailed study of the redevelopment of BDD Chawls at Worli, Mumbai.
