BY PRATHAMA MANOHAR,
CHAIR, URBANISM THINK- Do- TANK
THE URBAN VISION & COFOUNDER OF GoodPass
NEW DELHI | 30 JULY 2026
Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently made an unusual appeal to Indians: use less fuel. Avoid unnecessary travel, he said. Use public transport. Work from home where possible. Conserve energy.
The statement arrived amid rising war crisis in West Asia and renewed fears of oil volatility. But it revealed something larger than temporary caution. Beneath the language of conservation was a recognition that many governments are only beginning to confront: geopolitics is no longer merely influencing energy markets. It is beginning to reshape the physical design of modern civilization itself.
For most of the twentieth century, cities were built upon a remarkably fragile assumption that energy would remain endlessly cheap, abundant and politically uncomplicated.
Entire landscapes emerged from this belief. Endless highways around Los Angeles. Suburban office parks outside Gurgaon. Gated communities stretching across the edges of Bengaluru and Chennai. Vast parking lots glowing brighter than public squares. Human life separated into compartments: housing here, offices there, shopping somewhere else entirely and all connected through perpetual movement in a car powered by fossil fuel.
Now wars are dismantling that assumption. The green transition was once framed largely as a moral response to climate change. Increasingly, however, it is being driven by something colder and more immediate: strategic vulnerability.
Earlier this decade the Russia-Ukraine war transformed Europe’s relationship with energy almost overnight. Pipelines became geopolitical weapons. Fuel prices altered elections. Families in Berlin reconsidered long commutes. Transport protests spread across Europe as governments scrambled to rethink energy security.
Wars have a way of exposing the hidden architecture of ordinary life.
And one of the systems they are exposing most brutally is the modern city itself.
We tend to think of energy dependence in national terms i.e. oil imports, reserves, trade routes and diplomatic alliances. But the deepest layer of dependence is urban. It exists in whether children can walk to school. Whether groceries require a 20-minute drive. Whether daily existence can function without constant combustion.
A sprawling city is not simply an urban form. It is an energy system.
Globally, transportation accounts for nearly 30 percent of total final energy consumption and, in many advanced economies, close to 50 percent of oil demand. In highly automobile-dependent societies, mobility itself becomes one of the largest components of the national energy footprint. The shape of cities therefore directly influences the energy security of nations.
And the difference between urban models is staggering.
A sprawling city is not simply an urban form. It is an energy system. And the difference between urban models is staggering.
Studies by urban planning scholars Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy comparing cities such as Atlanta and Barcelona found that residents of automobile-dependent cities like Atlanta consume dramatically more transportation energy per capita than those living in dense, transit-oriented walkable ones like Barcelona. In some cases, the gap approaches tenfold. Atlanta, built around highways and suburban dispersion, requires immense quantities of fuel simply to sustain everyday movement. Barcelona, organized around walkability, proximity, mixed-use neighborhoods and transit, operates at an entirely different energy scale.
Your ecological footprint changes depending on the shape of your city.
The average resident of a car-centric metropolitan region can consume 10X times more transportation energy than someone living in a compact walkable city : not necessarily because of individual choices, but because the geometry of daily life itself is different. In essence, your energy footprint is based on the shape of your city.
When housing, transit, workplaces and leisure exist within proximity, movement changes character. Walking becomes practical. Public transport becomes viable. Streets evolve from traffic corridors into social infrastructure. Energy demand falls not because citizens are sacrificing comfort, but because the city itself requires less car based movement to sustain ordinary life.
This is the uncomfortable truth many climate debates still avoid: urbanism matters.
For years, governments promoted a vision of sustainability centered almost entirely around technological substitution. Electric cars would replace petrol cars. Renewable energy would replace fossil fuels. But the underlying urban model would remain untouched.
An electric SUV trapped in traffic still consumes space. A sprawling suburb powered by battery operated cars still requires highways, parking lots, flyovers and enormous quantities of infrastructure. Electrification changes the fuel source. It does not fundamentally alter the energy logic of sprawl.
The deeper transition is not from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. It is from distance-intensive cities to proximity-based ones.
And nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in India.
Historically Indian cities remain surprisingly energy-efficient by global standards. Mumbai’s suburban rail network carries more than seven million passengers a day with efficiencies many wealthy nations struggle to replicate. Mixed-use neighborhoods, buses, walking streets and dense clusters continue to sustain life across much of Mumbai at relatively low energy intensity.
But another India is emerging at the edges.
Drive through the outer corridors of Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Gurugram and a different landscape appears: gated communities isolated from workplaces, office parks disconnected from transit and highways extending endlessly outward. Commutes lengthen. Car ownership rises.
The city reorganizes itself around compulsory movement rather than human proximity. This transformation often arrives disguised as aspiration like the detached villa, the six-lane expressway, and the fantasy of private mobility. But beneath that aspiration lies something more enduring: an urban model that locks nations into higher energy dependence for generations.
And wars are making that dependence strategically dangerous.
India imports nearly 90 percent of its crude oil requirements. Nearly a fifth of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most geopolitically fragile chokepoints. Every kilometer added to urban commuting patterns becomes, in some sense, a future geopolitical liability.
Which is why the future of the green economy may depend less on technological breakthroughs than on something older and more fundamental: how societies arrange human life in space.
A metro line is no longer merely transport infrastructure. It is geopolitical insulation.
A walkable neighborhood is not simply an aesthetic preference. It is energy resilience.
High-speed rail is not only about mobility. It is about reorganizing entire national economies away from oil-intensive patterns of movement.
Wars rarely produce elegant outcomes. But they accelerate historical shifts already underway. And one of the shifts quietly gathering force is the realization that the most sustainable city is not necessarily the one powered by the cleanest fuel.
It is the one designed to need the least fuel at all.
(Prathima Manohar is Chair of Urbanism Think-Do-Tank “The Urban Vision” and Co-Founder of GoodPass, an AI-enabled platform for local experiences. Her work focuses on placemaking, regenerative tourism, and building made-in-local economies and resilient infrastructure)
Advertisement:
Add Comment