The American way of city planning is dead, Amitabh Kant, the CEO and Managing Director of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation told a crowded room, at this pivotal session.
"The American model is dead and the sooner we wipe it out the better, simply because you do not have the natural resources to make sprawling cities," Kant said. "There's so much pressure on land, on gas, on water. If you follow the American model you'll need four planet earths and you just have one."
Kant, who heads what is perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project India has seen to date, was speaking on a panel which brought architects and urban planners together to discuss issues around urbanization in the developing world and the construction of new cities.
An outspoken proponent of the public-private partnership model and the man behind the Incredible India campaign, Kant is perhaps the most powerful planner India has known.
Over the course of the hour-long discussion, Kant, who is charged with building twenty-four new cities and a 1483 kilometer long railway line, shed light on the future of what urban India may look like.
"You can't have the Gurgaon model being repeated again and again where you don't have public transportation. You need water, you need electricity, you need solid waste, and you need good technology through that utility corridor," he emphasized.
In Kant's view, a good mass transit system and affordable housing is key to any new development project. "Affordable housing must be the first plank of your development. If you don't do this large numbers will come in and create slums," he said.
The panel included two architects from the firm Serie, which has offices in London, Mumbai, Beijing and Chengdu, and an American architect-turned-activist whose non-profit group uses art to stimulate community cohesion, dialogue and social justice.
On the panel a macro level view of the future of city planning was presented alongside a micro level view of an urban renewal project in Mumbai's Dharavi slum. Alex White-Mazzarella, the head of the New York based non-profit Artefacting, gave a presentation on the changes he saw in Dharavi during his three months working on a public mural project there. Two architects from Serie presented projects they worked on in India and China. Kapil Gupta, a principal at the firm, talked about the differences between working in India versus China.
"It's about speed. In China most of our projects have been government projects and they are very aggressive," Gupta said. "In India on the other hand we have taken upwards of five years even for small projects."

"In the next four decades we will see great urbanization happening in India," added Christopher Lee, a co-founder of Serie and the design critic in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The challenge for architects in Lee's view will be constructing urban spaces that are civic minded.

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