DDA’s East Delhi Hub set to roll, what is ‘transit-oriented development’?

The concept

TOD is an urban development strategy that aims to create the maximum possible numbers of houses, shops, offices and recreational spaces near public transport facilities.

Unlike road-centric planning approaches and other planning paradigms which separate residential, commercial, and industrial zoning, a TOD approach puts public transportation at the centre of the urban development plan.

The objectives are to minimise use of personal vehicles, make commutes shorter, and reduce the cost of transport and exposure to pollutants.

To transportation agencies, TOD offers an additional source of non-ticket revenue.

For land-owning agencies and governments, TOD appears as a mode of value-capture financing, which allows them to fund public projects through potential increases in land values resulting from these projects. For instance, property prices go up when a metro station or an airport is proposed nearby.

TOD principles

TRANSIT HUB: Neighbourhoods built around a TOD strategy are built around at least one major transit node such as a metro station or other rail systems, preferably combined with other modes of public transport such as a bus station and/ or an airport.

According to the New York-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, high-capacity, reliable, frequent, and affordable transport connecting the neighbourhood to the rest of the city is critical to TOD.

Multi-modal integration is an important component: transfers between different modes of transport, such as switching from a metro to a city bus, should be a seamless process.

PEDESTRIAN-FRIENDLY: These localities must also be friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, since one of the major thrusts of this approach is to take vehicles off the road. Therefore, they should have a dense network of footpaths and bicycle lanes.

Planners advocate that TOD hubs should also have open public spaces such as transit plazas and parks to increase street activity and foster a sense of community.

DENSE MIXED-USE: TOD localities should be mixed-use, so that people can live, work, and relax within a small radius.

The neighbourhoods should be compact and dense; this is in contrast to the urban sprawl, which is a haphazard expansion of urbanisation that leads to increased reliance on cars. To facilitate this, governments generally allow more construction to take place in these areas compared to elsewhere in the city.

East Delhi Hub

Spread across 30 hectares, the East Delhi Hub is being developed by DDA as a “world-class mixed-use urban centre, integrating residential, commercial, and civic spaces within a vibrant, walkable city environment”.

Home Minister Amit Shah laid the foundation stone for the project in December 2019. It was proposed as a mixed-use scheme, with 70% land earmarked for residential purposes, 20% for commercial purposes, and 10% for public facilities. Thirty per cent of the total area was marked as green open public space.

According to DDA, the Towering Heights project will be 155 metres tall.

Registrations for 1,026 two-bedroom flats will open on October 31. Possession is expected to be offered by July 2026.

DDA plans to build public facilities like a Harit Bhawan, a cultural centre, a skywalk and basement parking facilities at the Hub.

Criticism, concerns

The project was supposed to be completed by 2023. A DDA spokesperson said the project suffered for several reasons, including delays in forest clearances and the provision of water and sewerage services by the then government of Delhi.

When completed, the project would have 4,526 units for the middle class and 288 for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), Shah had said in 2019. Since then however, the project has been downsized and the number of proposed flats reduced.

Experts have pointed to features of the project that are contrary to established TOD principles.

They have flagged a seeming mismatch between the target demography and the likelihood of residents using public transport. The base price of two-bedroom apartments range between Rs 1.78 crore and Rs 3.09 crore, and “the bulk of the housing is for people who might not be availing of facilities like public transport”, said Jagan Shah, CEO of the think tank The Infravision Foundation.

According to Shah, it would have been better to have provisions for studio apartments for young working professionals who can leverage quick access to public transport. DDA did not respond to questions about whether the next phases of the project will have studio apartments.

Additionally, TOD principles generally include a lot more publicly-accessible open spaces such as plazas, parks, and markets, where people can interact and communities are created. There are also supposed to be a lot more commercial spaces in which offices are set up. Public and commercial spaces are also supposed to be integrated with residential spaces and transit nodes. DDA did not provide information on when commercial and other public facilities will be completed or launched.