Cities should be able to manage themselves and be self-sustaining, with a single energy input. This article presents the idea of natural cities.

In the developing world climate change has far more ramifications than can be addressed by controlling just carbon
emissions. The developed world has stable populations and landscapes, and is thus affected mainly by the air which
spreads democratically without boundaries. On the other hand, the developing world with increasing populations and
consumption is depleting its living natural resource base of water, forest, soils and agriculture, and is poised for a far

Coming out of a key recommendation of the McKinsey Global Institute report on India’s urbanisation in the coming decades, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project envisages the establishment of several new cities, industrial nodes, ports, airports and high-speed rail and road lines over six states. However, as is typical of such research and policy vision documents that have been farmed out to international corporate consultants, the project analysis relies on several arguable assumptions about resource availability, especially of water in a severely water-deficit region.

The top layer of accumulated sand washed down by floods over millions of years, makes river floodplains into giant aquifers. We propose a scheme for the natural storage of excess monsoon river-water discharge in the extensive and deep sand top layer of the floodplain of the river.

We present a local, self-sustaining, natural and economic

Wastelands occupy 20% or more of India. Since these wastelands are neither in agricultural or urban use, they would fall in the undeveloped category. In other