Recipe to build a Kolkata suburb

Ingredients:
1. A few acres of land
2. A few thousand families

Cooking time:
Sixty years

For each family:
1. Fence of your personal area with bamboo and twine, then string up a temporary shelter in the middle of it.
2. When you can afford to, replace the temporary shelter with a mud shack, keeping a small plot to grow your vegetables or tether your goat
3. When you can afford to, replace the mud shack with a fairly solid brick and plaster structure
4. As funds allow, gradually add floors to give yourself more living space
5. Tear the whole house down and build a block of flats on the same little plot, extending right to the roadside. Goodbye green space, hello modern suburb.