Major Components of Green Urbanization and Their Relative Importance

Abstract

Aspirations for being urban in character are considered as a significant phenomenon of socio-economic development in developing countries. Urbanization, in economic sense only, means intensive economic activities by a large number of people in a relatively small plot of land, where secondary and tertiary sectors play a dominant role and where certain amenities are bound to be available for general citizens, though it doesn't seem complete without addressing the issue of nature. Though urbanization of an area is tried to be measured by some academicians through applying the method of indexing with available indicators and their data-driven weights, environmental issues are not incorporated there for any kind of factor analysis to identify their individual relative importance. This chapter intervenes at this juncture and focuses on construction of an urbanization index for some selected “town area units” belonging to some selected districts of West Bengal and run a factor analysis of it on some identified environmental factors. It observes negative relationship between QVSE and IGU, positive association between IGU and PR, and positive relation between IWDS and IGU.