Neighbourhood density and social sustainability in cities of developing countries

Within the concept of sustainable development, there is very little known about social impacts and levels of acceptability of compact urban form in the context of cities of developing countries. Social sustainability of these cities in developing countries might have a huge impact on the overall global sustainability, considering their large population size and high economic growth. This paper provides new empirical evidence from 11 case study neighbourhoods of different densities and built forms within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region to evaluate the relationship between social sustainability and urban densities. In doing so, impacts of both physical and perceived density on selected aspects of social sustainability in the context of Mumbai were examined. The findings suggest that, on social aspects of sustainability, higher household density and population density have no negative impacts. However, importantly, most of the negative associations of density were related to the perceptions of density, and therefore the built form, layout, design and amount of mix of uses as well as socio-demographic variables such as family income and location were found to have an important role in achieving social sustainability. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.