Earlier this month I had a chance to visit Bengaluru – the new name for Bangalore; my third visit in the last three years.  To no one’s surprise, the Bengaluru boom continues, and has been only slightly slowed down by the global recession.  Among Americans who visit Bengaluru, I am in a minority because I never get out to visit the new high tech, internet based campuses of companies like Infosys and Wipro.  By all accounts they are amazing – perhaps setting the benchmark for “American-style” suburban campus development.  When I go to Bengaluru I stay in the central city.

For years, Bengaluru has had the reputation of being a poster child for gridlock.  East-west traffic was funneled onto Mahatma Gandhi Road (“MG Road” – one of the most common names for main street in Indian cities) – including traffic from the international airport, which was bursting at the seams.  With revenues from high-tech firms flowing through the economy, however, Bengaluru’s municipal government has been working for years to tackle the problem.  Two of its main initiatives are the construction of a metro rail system (elevated through the downtown) and relocation of the airport.  The metro is underway and the airport is complete.  Unfortunately, the airport was relocated not only off the crowded east-west corridors, but very far away to the northeast.  While the world media covers China’s rapid construction of airports and roads, India is doing the same on smaller scale.  Nevertheless, when I travelled through India in 2006 and 2007 almost every medium and large city I visited was in the process of dramatically enlarging or replacing its existing airport.  Bengaluru’s is the first one I saw completed, and both it and the freeways leading to it are impressive.  Although the traffic still has to get into the city, it now gets there along the slightly-less-crowded north-south axis.

So what lessons does Bengaluru hold for urban planning and development in the U.S?  The main one is that competition is coming.  Not just competition for jobs and world trade – that was obvious long ago.  I mean competition for the resources we count on to build and rebuild our cities and their infrastructure – steel, concrete, and petrochemical products.  The combined demand of India and China for these products is likely to continue to drive prices up, so U.S. cities will face pressures to use less of them and to use them more efficiently.  And that probably means fewer miles of roads, pipes, and wires per person housed and employed – i.e. more compact development patterns.  Because the U.S. already has such dispersed land use pattern (most traditional downtowns now compete with multiple secondary employment centers and major suburban job hubs) more compact growth will not necessary mean more centralized growth.  It probably means more job and employment density in and around existing urban and suburban development nodes – and particularly those along transit lines.  American cities should be pro-actively zoning land to accommodate “densification” of those nodes – and should be using the tools identified in A Better Way to Zone to make that happen more smoothly.  More specifically, reforming zoning ordinances to integrate guidance in the sections on “The Mixed Use Middle”, “Attainable Housing”, “Dynamic Development Standards”, and “De-Politicizing Final Approvals” will help American cities compete with the Bengaluru’s of tomorrow.