Dear readers,

How does privatisation unfold in our cities? How does it impact people’s lives? What happens when basic services – even rights – such as housing, healthcare and transport are handed over to private entities or some degree of Public Private Partnership is introduced in their functioning and delivery? And what is the nature of the city built primarily by the private sector? In the next of our series on land use in cities, Question of Cities examines these and related questions with a combination of think pieces and reported essays focusing on various aspects to see how the phenomenon of privatisation is working – or not.

Prem Chandavarkar, a well-known architect, academic, and writer, opens the edition with his essay detailing that how we choose to imagine the city fundamentally affects whether democratic urban governance serves public interest or gets compromised by increasing privatisation. We tend to imagine it as a conceptual model translatable into technical frameworks such as a master plan. But we can also imagine it as a living system in which people shape its dynamism and diversity through how they occupy it. A purely technical conceptualisation forces simplicity on a complex entity. Conceptualising the city as a living system demands we recognise and inclusively account for all life within it, social and ecological, and a radical decentralisation of governance and planning down to the neighbourhood. Read it here.

QoC’s multimedia journalist Ankita Dhar Karmakar explores the Gurgaon (or Gurugram) model. Promoted as a haven of urbanisation and India’s showcase of private entities building a city, Gurgaon has turned out to be a case study of the limitations and shortcomings of this model. Barely two-three decades later, the cracks are showing. Perennial flooding and heat stress, water and sanitation crises, solid waste management, gridlocked traffic, and ecological strain have become legendary. The faltering private city-making model points to an inescapable certainty: There is no alternative to the government’s role or responsibility in building sustainable and inclusive cities. Read it here.

Multimedia journalist Jashvitha Dhagey and QoC’s illustrator-writer Nikeita Saraf  stake out hospitals across Mumbai to show the importance of the public healthcare system. With the city’s tertiary and secondary hospitals hardly functioning, the pressure falls on the large public hospitals, most of which are located in south and central Mumbai. These also see a large influx of patients from outside Mumbai. As the Public Private Partnership in healthcare rises, its accessibility for the masses remains in question. Studies point to one in three Mumbaikars having low access to healthcare. Though hobbled by resource crunch and staff shortages, there’s no alternative to robust public healthcare infrastructure if health is to be a right, not a commodity. Read it here.

Drawing on his extensive study and research, Rocco Friebel, PhD, Associate Professor of Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he also serves as Deputy Director of LSE Health, reflects on the privatisation of healthcare in low- and middle-income cities from Delhi and Mumbai to Nairobi and Lagos. Shiny private clinics rising alongside crumbling public hospitals create a geography of care that mirrors and reinforces urban inequality while regulatory responses reveal the political economy sustaining this arrangement, he writes. While private providers increasingly dominate urban healthcare, the regulatory infrastructure remains emergent, fragmented, and systematically undermined, and profit maximisation systematically overrides public health objectives. Read it here.

As India’s urban governance changed from mixed-use neighbourhoods to gated colonies, cities transformed reshaping land into a tradable asset disconnected from its social utility, writes Dr Tathagata Chatterji, Professor at XIM University, Bhubaneswar. Land is reserved for commercial use and high-income housing while informal neighbourhoods are missing from plans. Public spaces are handed over to private players. Without affordable housing, informal populations are pushed to the periphery, far from jobs and public transport. The future of Indian cities depends not merely on infrastructure, but on land politics: Who it belongs to, how decisions are made, and who benefits. Read it here.

In our regular section, News Digest, read about heavy rains, flash floods in north India; earthquake in Afghanistan; why public transit is safer than auto travel, and Trump Energy Dept’s ‘biased’ climate report.

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Thank you,
Smruti
September 05, 2025