City profile: Guwahati

Despite several top-down planned efforts physical, social and environmental vulnerability of Guwahati is unprecedented.It is too simplistic to assume that a smart, sustainable Guwahati can be entirely planned through top-down controlled paradigms.Convergence between two processes, bottom-up emergence and top-down planning, seen as a renaissance of urban-planning.Smart Guwahati of the future to be rooted in its distinctive culture, antiquity, topography and location.

Guwahati, which enjoyed a strategic position throughout history due to its geographical location along the mighty Brahmaputra River and its defensive topography, has an ancient tradition of urbanisation. The city saw its periods of growth and decline from being an important cultural, religious, economic and political centre to mere a war site. It was rebuilt during the colonial period and within a century, grew from a swampy settlement of 12,000 people (1911) into a vast urban agglomeration of nearly 1.26 million population (2011). Today, while this ancient “City of Eastern Light” has regained its importance as an urban centre, intense growth has led to physical, social and environmental vulnerabilities regardless of numerous planned efforts engaged in city building including adoption of city Master Plans since 1960s. Despite this, Guwahati has been the focus of little research in terms of its morphology depicting both, historic planning paradigms and modern urban visioning to reflect the city's ongoing story. Based on secondary data, this city profile, narrates the growth and morphological evolution of Guwahati from mythology to modern period. It then critically examines the city in its present form and concludes that a convergence between emergence and planning may be a necessary renaissance for Guwahati as it seeks to transform itself into one of the most admired, smart and sustainable cities in India. The theoretical narration is supported with strong visual atlas which provides an empirical strength to this profile.