| Abstract | The present approach towards urban planning in the developing countries, India bein g in the forefront, is largely based on West. In their pursuit to adopt the western norms and standards, t h ey overlook their own indigenou s society. The "west ern" concept of "master plan" based development, followed till today in most Indian cities, has failed to b r ing about the desired results. Not only it generates c haracterless urba n exp a n ses, in compar ison to the existing historic urban development, but it a lso results in wastage of precious non-renewable resources, which are spent after them. This study is an a ttempt to identify the positive lessons which our historic cities teach, in order to develop a u rban planning and designing system, rich in c haracter and economical in resource u se. Not muc h research has been done in this direction, posing the difficulty in terms of availing related literature and developing a methodology. The methodology followed as part of this research is an independent one, which is probed through a case study, in this case the city of Surat in the western region of India. The main obj ectives of the research are to develop a resource conserving future urban development for Surat, which is physically aesthetic, socially harmonious and environmentally condu cive in nature . For this purpose, three k ey aspects r e late d to urba n development are examined, namely r esource con s umption in terms of la nd and infrastructure , the prevalent c haract er of the built fabric and the socio-environment a l quality of the urban area. These aspects are compared be tween the existing "historic" and "modern" urban development in the city, with the aim of identifying lessons which could be learnt from both these areas. For this p urpose, one area each from the inner and outer core of the historic city were selected a nd compared with two areas outside the walled city under modern development. The a na lysis reflects the existence of a definite resource economy under the historic development, while the new areas were found to be environmentally better. The approac h u sed for this a na lysis was multi-fold, using mathematical corr elation technique for the resource analysis, while relying largely on t he qualitative a na lysis for the p h ysical and socia l characteristics. The results of the a na lysis s hows existence of a distinct relationship between urban density and resource utilization, which were u sed to develop a set of policies, guide lines and development control regulations for the future development of Surat's u r ban areas. Based on the methodology followed for the purpose of analysis, the policies made, address themselves to the macro and micro level of the city, some of whic h s u ggest redefining urban densities, reformulating development control r egulation, along with generation of a physically aesth etic future urban development. The recommendation ma de are addressed to the a uthor ities a nd the individual residents of the city, a like. |