20, May 2024
The Future of Urban Living – The Sustainable Communities of Tomorrow
By – Akash Pharande, Managing Director – Pharande Spaces
I travel a lot to understand how different countries address their urban sprawl because we use such insights to design integrated townships here in India. In fact, one result of these travels was our partnering with a globally acclaimed architect who helped us recreate a global residential experience in India.
However, my main takeaway from this globetrotting has been far less positive – the alarming rate at which rampant urbanization is challenging even the most glamorous world cities.
As cities’ populations overflow, traditional urban infrastructure groans and often crumbles under the strain of housing demands. Did you think that overcrowding and declining living standards are the order of the day only in India? Far from it – it is a global phenomenon.
The Global Scenario
In the thronged streets of New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong – and even in Berlin, Hamburg, and Stockholm – urban sprawl running wild is in evidence everywhere. In India, we have accepted congestion, pollution, and stressed infrastructure, but be aware that very few countries are exempt from them anymore.
Across the world from Asia to Europe to North America, local governments and expert city planners are implementing the only viable solution. You guessed it – integrated townships.
In Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, self-sufficient, self-contained integrated projects have in fact been at the forefront of urban planning for many decades. Singapore, in particular, is famous for master-planned communities such as Punggol and Tampines, which integrate residential, commercial, and recreational facilities to create vibrant and self-sustaining neighborhoods.
In the UAE, integrated developments like Dubai Marina and Masdar City deliver comprehensive living and working environments for residents. In Europe, Sweden and the Netherlands have embraced the concept of integrated townships to promote sustainable urban development.
Stockholm and Amsterdam have pioneered eco-friendly neighbourhoods that prioritize walking, cycling, and public transportation while incorporating green spaces and mixed-use developments.
In North America, integrated townships have gained traction in response to urban sprawl and the growing trend for more walkable and inclusive communities. Vancouver in Canada and Portland in the United States have implemented policies to encourage mixed-use development and compact urban forms.
This approach has given rise to highly integrated neighborhoods that provide everything their residents will ever need – living spaces, offices to work in, as well as shopping malls and recreational amenities.
Integrated Living – No Alternatives
If this sounds like a marketing prospectus for a modern integrated township in India, it’s because while we certainly haven’t pioneered the concept, we have certainly caught on to it big time. And for good reasons.
A report by international property consultants JLL India entitled ‘Livability quotient – a paradigm shift in India’s emerging cities’ puts it very aptly – “A balanced lifestyle contributes highly to the livability quotient of a city or township,” it states. “Amenities for leisure and recreation such as sports facilities, gymnasiums, clubhouses, malls and shopping streets are considered lifestyle amenities and are much appreciated by users.”
“Townships managed by private developers have an advantage over cities managed by local governments. The high level of interaction that happens between a township developer and customers naturally enables a focused delivery of services.”
I guess there’s no better way of putting it. As our larger cities draw more and more inward migration because of their employment prospects, we certainly need better solutions to house everyone. India’s growing upper-level middle class expects to find housing that multi-tasks and delivers on their lifestyle preferences.
What better solution for this than integrated mixed-use developments where they can seamlessly transition between living, working, and leisure activities without enduring long commutes?
As the successful eco-cities of Scandinavia and the master-planned communities of Singapore and the UAE demonstrate, integrated townships are a concept whose time has come – and is, in fact, by now an imperative in India.
A Long Way to Go
As Anarock Property Consultants put it, the growing demand for integrated townships in India has risen even more in the wake of changing housing preferences post-pandemic. However, despite the increased interest, integrated townships still represent only a fraction of the total housing supply in India. Since 2010, only about 2% of all housing projects in the top seven cities fell in this category,
Clearly, we are missing something important here.
India is a nation at a crossroads in its urbanization journey. Rapid population growth, rural-urban migration, and fragmented urban planning have spawned a host of challenges, from sprawling urban sprawl to choked traffic arteries and polluted air. The need for holistic urban planning has never been more pressing.
Integrated townships offer hope amidst this urban chaos. With the government’s ambitious plans to create smart cities and revitalize urban infrastructure in a country where land scarcity, fragmented development, and outdated infrastructure are the norm, there is quite simply no other solution.
Without integrated townships, the status quo in India is frankly unsustainable. With every passing year, our trajectory of urbanization is spiraling further out of control – with far-reaching consequences on our society, our environment, and our economy.
Beyond just bricks and mortar, integrated townships also serve as catalysts for economic growth and building strong, wholesome and supportive communities. They provide local employment opportunities, reduce dependence on city centers, offer higher returns on investment, and provide a holistic solution to the many challenges we face in our cities.
About the Author:
Akash Pharande is Managing Director – Pharande Spaces, a leading real estate construction and development firm famous for its township projects in West Pune and beyond. Pharande Promoters & Builders, the flagship company of Pharande Spaces and an ISO 9001-2000 certified company, is a pioneer of townships in West Pune. With the recent integration of Puneville Commercial into one of its most iconic townships, Pharande Spaces taken a major step towards addressing Pune’s current and future requirements for fully integrated residential-commercial convenience.
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- By Rabindra
7, Feb 2024
Cisco’s Pioneering Identity Intelligence Defends Against Most Persistent Cyber Threat
CISCO LIVE EMEA, AMSTERDAM, Feb.7, 2024 — Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, today unveiled new innovations within the Cisco Security Cloud as part of its mission to simplify security. First-of-its kind Cisco Identity Intelligence and continued innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are the latest milestones towards its vision of a unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform.
Cisco is introducing an industry-first approach that brings together identity, networking and security to better protect organizations’ complex identity stack against increasingly sophisticated attacker techniques.
Today there is blind trust between authentication and access solutions, and threat actors have successfully compromised some of the largest organizations in the world in 2023 by targeting these weaknesses. In fact, more than 26% of all Cisco Talos Incident Response engagements in 2023 involved adversaries using compromised credentials on valid accounts.
A user is often mapped to many digital identities and accounts – drastically increasing entry points for attackers and the possibility of lateral movement “across” identities. Too often legacy permissions have not been removed, and security teams are missing crucial context about historical identity behavior, actions across systems and current risk levels that are needed to make trusted access decisions.
Cisco Identity Intelligence runs on top of customers’ existing identity stores and provides unified visibility, as well as AI-driven analytics. Customers can discover their whole identity population, clean up vulnerable accounts, eliminate unused and risky privileges, detect behavior anomalies and block high-risk access attempts – without ripping and replacing their current solutions.
While multifactor authentication (MFA) remains a critical first line of defense against identity-based attacks, malicious actors are using new and creative ways to steal credentials. According to the 2024 Duo Trusted Access Report, Cisco Duo processed 16 billion authentications in 2023, up 41% annually, and saw weaker forms of MFA like SMS and phone calls dip to an all-time low of 5%, yet the volume of identity attacks is higher than ever.
“Identity is the fabric that connects humans, devices and applications in the workplace, and has become an easy target for modern cybersecurity attacks. Organizations need to adopt an identity-first approach to security, which among other things allows them to evolve from just asking ‘can’ a user access a system to continuously assessing whether a user ‘should’ be able to do what they are doing once they are authenticated,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “By analyzing the entire attack surface of an organization’s users, machines, services, apps, data and their behaviors, Cisco Identity Intelligence bridges the chasm between authentication and access. We are the first vendor bringing together identity, networking and security into a complete solution to address the largest cyber challenge of modern times.”
Cisco Identity Intelligence is built on a powerful identity graph that pulls data from customers’ many existing third-party sources that manage identity and access. With AI-driven behavioral analytics and Cisco’s unmatched reach into the network, organizations can take a graduated response, such as quarantining an identity, killing active sessions or isolating the network leveraging Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). Cisco customers will gain visibility with these critical insights through their existing solutions, including:
- Smart Authentication with Cisco Duo: Detect unusual patterns based on behavior and third-party signals.
- Smart Access with Cisco Secure Access: Verify the authentication decision and block unusual or high-risk behaviors.
- Smart Threat Detection with Cisco XDR: Correlate identity signals to provide missing information that traditional endpoint and network security solutions miss.
Cisco Identity Intelligence will be available July 2024. With the addition of Identity Intelligence to the Cisco Security Cloud, customers will get even more value from their existing investments.
“Hybrid work and modern multi, hybrid cloud IT architectures have evolved the perimeter to be based on Identity. The reality is that this modern identity includes islands of embedded legacy identity and corresponding directories, creating a complex, forever-evolving problem. Thus, a zero-trust future does not exist without identity having a prominent seat at the cybersecurity table,” said Frank Dickson, Group Vice President, Security & Trust, IDC. “Cisco now bridges the two worlds of identity and security to offer actionable visibility.”
“Identity is the new perimeter to protect and it’s an ongoing challenge for enterprises as witnessed by recent security breaches. Identity threat detection and response (ITDR) aims to converge identity and security, strengthening controls tied to authenticated access leveraging multiple data sources and analytics,” said Will Townsend, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. “Cisco’s announcement is a step forward, combining identity intelligence and actionable insights with its existing network visibility, XDR orchestration, Secure Access and Duo access capabilities.”
Continued AI Momentum
Cisco continues to make AI pervasive across the Cisco Security Cloud to help to tip the scales in favor of defenders, including the recently unveiled Cisco AI Assistant for Security, which helps customers make informed decisions, augment their tool capabilities and automate complex tasks. On the heels of launching the AI Assistant for firewall, today, Cisco’s rapid pace of innovation is on display with additional groundbreaking AI capabilities:
AI Assistant in Secure Access: Leveraging the power of generative AI, customers can create security access policies using natural language prompts within Cisco’s Secure Services Edge (SSE) solution.
Securing AI: New capabilities in Secure Access will also automatically detect and protect intellectual property (IP) as it flows in and out of AI systems.
AI-based Email Threat Detection: Cisco Email Threat Defense now uses AI to simultaneously evaluate different portions of an incoming email for markers of malicious intent.
Secure Connectivity
Cisco is integrating its robust Networking capabilities with Cisco Secure Access. Experience Insights, powered by Cisco ThousandEyes improves productivity for hybrid workers by quickly revealing connectivity and application issues and fostering faster resolution. There is no additional cost for this feature, as it is included in all Secure Access licenses. Cisco Secure Access also now integrates Catalyst SD-WAN, for a complete Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering.
