Dear readers,

The less told story of India’s urbanisation, or city-making, is its underlying paradox. Cities and towns hold the promise of liberation from poverty and oppression for many aspirational migrants but they are also exclusionary and segregated. If cities and towns have to come good on their promise, there has to be a deliberate effort to plan, design and build them to be inclusive in every way, from spatial use to services and access to the best they can offer. Do urban plans recognise informal livelihoods and housing? How did people’s informal housing become the basis to exclude them from the on-going Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls? Why is the present-day riverfront development not inclusive? Why does Gurugram make no space for its working class? These and similar questions have been explored in this edition of Question of Cities, eighth in our series on the Built Environment.

Mathew Idiculla, noted legal consultant, and Shoubhik Chatterjee, a student of Master’s in Public Policy, analyse the Delhi Master Plan 2047 and write that although it recognises informality of livelihoods and housing, its regularisation provisions prioritise unauthorised colonies, largely inhabited by the lower-middle-class, while slum and Jhuggi-Jhopri cluster residents, the poorest, are offered only in-situ rehabilitation. The Plan, thus, establishes a hierarchy of ‘deservingness’ in informal housing. It must go beyond mere recognition of informality – the rehabilitation eligibility should be widened, land pooling and regularisation should apply across all informal housing, clear targets must be included, and it should define the share of land for Economically Weaker Section housing. Read it here.

From June to December last year, the 1.2-kilometre stretch of the Brahmaputra in Guwahati was turned into a beautified public space, with landscaped gardens, walkways, decorative lighting, and a monumental entrance gate. Purba Barua, a PhD scholar who witnessed this, observes that since the BJP government came to power in 2016, the language of development and political visibility have decided such projects over less visible but basic infrastructure of water and waste management. Beyond politics, questions remain such as whose riverfront is it, who can access it comfortably, who gets to use it, and importantly, whose relationship with the Brahmaputra does it acknowledge and who is left out of this spectacle? Read it here.

Multimedia journalist Ankita Dhar Karmakar spends time on the ground in bastis and Jhuggi-Jhopri clusters of Delhi tracking the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls and tells the story of how residents in some of these have borne the brunt of deletion of their names. Bela Estate, where 728 of 729 voters were deleted from the electoral rolls, is a microcosm of voter deletions in informal settlements of Delhi. There are several other areas. While people’s right to vote has been snatched, not having a voter card impacts their access to “ration and pension” and several government schemes, including, ironically, rehabilitation of housing that depends on their voter cards and history in a location. Read it here.

The manner in which Gurugram has been designed or, more accurately, for whom it has been designed is the story of who has been excluded, writes sociologist Ankush Pal. Gurugram was not a bold experiment in city-making but seen as a magnet for concentration of capital and its consumption which structured its spatial grammar, he adds. In a city formed of private housing complexes connected by roads, the working class that keeps the city running must seek permission to use public spaces that exist or risk being shooed away and put up with unwelcome stares in others. Gurugram’s Development Plan 2031 could have re-imagined the city where everyone has a right and claim. Read it here.

Team QoC puts together a curation of academic studies and reports on various aspects of exclusion in cities and how urban spaces can be – should be – made more inclusive for women, children, transgender persons and others. This set of five reports from frontline organisations and institutions probe into the exclusion-inclusion aspects of urbanisation from various lenses such as women platform workers in rising heat, children’s play as an ecosystem shaped by access and broader institutional structures, people’s behaviour and self-reported vulnerability to extreme weather events, the diverse models to include informal waste pickers in waste management, and housing for transgender persons. Read it here.

In our regular section, News Digest, read about Mumbai’s deteriorating air quality; UN urges India to exercise ‘utmost restraint’ while dealing with protesters; How climate uncertainty affects mental health of children; El Nino may push annual global average temperature to new records; France marches for climate after the summer’s heatwave; A new study finds that climate disasters increase cases of gender-based violence in girls.

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Thank you,
Smruti
October 16, 2026