Quantification of Residential Land Use Characteristics from an Impact Generation Potential Perspective

United Nation’s World urbanization prospects Report 2001, projected that the proportion of urban population in the world will touch 70% by 2050. In 2012, according to the World Bank data catalogue, 53% of the world population can be categorized as urban population, people living in urban areas as defined by respective national statistical offices. Increasing trend of this urbanization has made the residential land use a major shareholder in urban land uses. Residential land use predominantly consist of buildings used or constructed or adopted to be used wholly for human habitation and also include garages, and other out-houses necessary for the normal use of the building as a residence. There are systems/methods like Environmental Impact Assessment in place to check on the impacts of individual buildings/projects on environment. However a method/system to check the environmental implications of specific/critical land uses from a holistic viewpoint is totally missing. To conduct such a check it is mandatory to know basic traits of the land use under consideration. This paper fundamentally discusses on how to capture the innate characteristics of residential land use in an area and thereby its impact generation capacity and to express it as a site specific index. For this an expert survey was performed to integrate the various characteristics of residential land use in an urban area of a large city. The study was conducted in an Indian Urban context where there is multiplicity in scale of residential development and socioeconomic back ground of people. The expert group’s organized inputs are gathered, compared and composed in this regard and the results are presented and communicated.