Intelligent Urbanism promotes a balance between performance and consumption. Intelligent Urbanism promotes efficiency in carrying out functions in a cost effective manner. It assesses the performance of various systems required by the public and the consumption of energy, funds, administrative time and the maintenance efforts required to perform these functions.

A major concern of Intelligent Urbanism, and in a low density town like Gelephu, is transport. While recognizing the convenience of personal vehicles, they attempt to place the costs (energy consumption, large paved areas, parking, accidents, negative balance of trade, and pollution) on the users of private vehicles. Presently the private automobile is subsidized by the Royal Government, even to the extent of lower interest rates for car purchases, than for home purchases!

Road taxes cover a fraction of the costs of roads! The costs of respiratory diseases, cancer, and heart ailments generated by the automobile’s pollution are borne by passive travelers, pedestrians, and the public health care system. This is particularly true in a town like Gelephu where “strip development” of shops are along the major arterial roadways.

Intelligent Urbanism promotes alternative choices to dependence on personal vehicles. It promotes affordable public transport. It promotes medium to high density residential development along with complimentary social amenities, convenience shopping, recreation and public services in compact, mixed-use settlements. These compact communities have shorter pipe lengths, wire lengths, cable lengths and road lengths per capita. More people share gardens, shops, street lights, storm drains, solid waste collection routes and transit stops. This pattern is more cost effective, cheaper and the cost recovery for infrastructure is easier.

In Gelephu, inexpensive land over the past several decades has made far flung, low density houses affordable. This has caused scattered development to the west of the city and to the north of the market area. These scattered, low density areas cannot be serviced efficiently, as the number of users per acre is too low in many cases to justify the extension of utility systems. It is imperative that high density urban village cores are identified at rational intervals across the urban space.

These compact urban nodes should be spaced along town and regional urban corridors that integrate urban nodes, through public transport, into a rational system of growth. Intelligent Urbanism promotes clean, comfortable, safe and speedy, public transport, which operates at dependable intervals along major origin and destination paths. Such a system is cheaper, safer, less polluting and consumes less energy. It is more efficient!

A corridor from Gelephu’s town market to Sarpang is emerging, as is a north-south corridor coming down from central Bhutan to the border market area of Gelephu. These are not planned, but circumstantial corridors. They are built on, modified or restructured in Gelephu. A major “structuring device” in the Gelephu plan is the road network and its hierarchy.

The same principle applies to public infrastructure, social facilities and services. Compact, high-density communities result in more efficient systems. There is an appropriate balance to be found somewhere on the line between wasteful low-density individual systems and over-capitalized mega systems. For example, individual septic tanks, soak pits and water bores servicing individual households in low-density fragmented layouts, cause simultaneous pollution and depletion of subterranean aquifer systems. The bores dramatically lower the ground water levels.

Alternatively, large-scale, citywide sewerage systems and regional water supply systems are capital intensive and prone to management and maintenance dysfunction. Operating costs, user fees and cost recovery expenses are high. There is a balance wherein medium-scale systems, covering compact communities, utilize modern technology, without the pitfalls of large-scale infrastructure systems. Intelligent Urbanism promotes the middle path with regard to public infrastructure, facilities, services and amenities. In the Concept Plan herein presented, a rational location of such nodes is indicated. This aspect of the Gelephu Structure Plan is integrated into the DANIDA programme of public health infrastructure which will start immediately upon the clearance of the Structure Plan. This will focus on sewerage management, potable water supply and solid waste disposal.

When these appropriate systems overlap communities with elected representatives the “imagery” between user performance through payments, systems dependability through management, and official response through effective representation, all become transparent.

Intelligent Urbanism promotes compact settlements along urban corridors, and within networks, such that densities enable effective and efficient infrastructure systems. Intelligent Urbanism promotes medium-scale infrastructure systems whose catchment areas overlap political constituencies and administrative jurisdictions. The Gelephu Structure Plan is moulded on this type of system.