Notes

The productivity advantage of existing cities

India's major cities like Bangalore and Mumbai have developed natural advantages that make them economically productive. These advantages didn't emerge by accident—they resulted from market forces, historical factors, and the concentration of activities over time. People moved to these cities seeking opportunities and in the process created even more opportunities for others.

Bangalore exemplifies this phenomenon with its concentration of IT, IT-enabled services, biotech, and emerging new sectors. This kind of economic agglomeration represents something valuable that has been built up organically. Rather than trying to artificially recreate such clusters elsewhere, it makes more sense to build on what already exists and works.

Suyash explains why these established centers matter:

"We already have fairly productive agglomerations in place, especially in places like Bangalore and Mumbai and other such places, where markets, history, various factors have led to certain concentration of productive activities. And people have also moved to these places in search for opportunities and created more opportunities by doing so."

However, the success of these cities has created new problems that now threaten their continued productivity and livability.

The affordability and mobility crisis

Despite their economic advantages, India's major cities have developed serious problems that affect both quality of life and economic productivity. The most pressing issues are affordability and mobility constraints that limit how these cities function.

Affordability has become a major barrier even for well-to-do residents. In cities like Bangalore and Mumbai, reasonably prosperous people can only afford small apartments. Businesses face similar constraints, with most firms having to manage with very little floor space per employee. This cramped working environment affects workplace quality and productivity.

Mobility problems are equally severe, particularly in Mumbai. The city doesn't function as a unified urban area because of congestion and poor connectivity. A commute of 45 minutes to an hour—which should connect you to much of a well-functioning city—only reaches a small portion of Mumbai.

Suyash describes this fragmentation:

"If you look at Mumbai, it doesn't feel like it's one city. It feels like there are many different cities. And if you take a one-hour commute or a forty-five minute commute, you cannot cover the large part of the city in that. So you have to basically if you take the city as where you can get into in forty-five minutes or one hour, you can only get to a part of the city."

This limited accessibility means that for practical purposes—work, services, social connections—people can only access a fraction of what should be available in their city. The economic benefits of urban agglomeration are severely diminished when people and businesses can't easily connect with each other.

Why the current planning approach creates inefficiency

Research conducted by the CEPT Urban Planning and Design Foundation reveals a fundamental imbalance in how Indian cities allocate land between public and private uses. This imbalance explains much of the affordability and mobility crisis.

The public realm in Indian cities is severely constrained. Streets typically occupy only about 15% of urban land, compared to 25% in well-functioning cities like London and even more in places like New York. Parks and other public spaces account for barely 3% of land, compared to about 5% in successful international cities.

This shortage of public space creates the mobility and congestion problems that plague Indian cities. There simply isn't enough street space to handle traffic efficiently, and there are too few public spaces for recreation and community life.

Meanwhile, an enormous amount of land sits inefficiently used within private plots. The research shows that about 42% of land in studied urban areas exists as private open space—land left empty around buildings due to setback requirements, margins, and other regulations.

Suyash emphasizes how unusual this pattern is:

"If you have go to say New York or London or Hong Kong or Tokyo, you don't see so much land in private open spaces inside private plots. In India, so far our analysis shows that about forty-two percent of the land in the areas that we've studied, and these are mostly areas in the city, not on the periphery, not in the suburbs. But they the use of land inside private plots is almost suburban."

This suburban-style land use in dense urban areas represents a massive inefficiency. Cities end up with the worst of both worlds: the congestion and expense of density without the efficient land use that should make density worthwhile.

A planning solution that expands both public and private space

The research findings point toward a planning solution that could address both affordability and mobility problems simultaneously. The key insight is that the current inefficient use of private land creates an opportunity to expand the public realm while actually increasing the amount of useful floor space.

The solution would work through carefully planned interventions during natural redevelopment cycles. As private properties undergo renovation or rebuilding over time, planning policies could require that some portion of each plot be contributed to public use—primarily for street widening. This would gradually expand the public realm and improve mobility.

Critically, this wouldn't reduce the total floor space available for private use. By reforming development regulations to allow more efficient building on the remaining private land, developers could achieve the same or greater floor space than before, even after contributing land for public use.

This approach requires fundamental reform of development regulations, which currently mandate excessive setbacks and margins that waste urban land. If these regulations were made more targeted and efficient, much more floor space could be built on smaller plots.

Suyash outlines the mechanics of this rebalancing:

"You can think now in terms of a planning intervention that plays out over decades where as and when the private plots go into redevelopment, as more new buildings come up. At that point of time, planning interventions which are done in advance, can create a situation in which part of the plot goes into the public realm, so use for street widening specially. And the remaining plot you can cover more."

The process would need to be implemented fairly and carefully, following due process and rule of law. No individual property owner should be victimized or unfairly burdened. But if done well, this approach could create a win-win situation where both public and private interests are better served.

Learning from successful urban transformation elsewhere

The idea that existing cities can be dramatically improved isn't just theoretical—it has historical precedent. Many cities worldwide have successfully addressed similar problems of rapid urbanization, affordability, congestion, and informal settlements.

Nineteenth-century European cities faced many of the same challenges that Indian cities face today during their periods of rapid industrialization and urban growth. They developed solutions through planning interventions, infrastructure investment, and regulatory reform. Similarly, East Asian cities after World War II dealt with comparable problems and managed to transform themselves into highly functional urban areas.

These transformations often involved exactly the kind of improvements that Indian cities need: expanding public realm, improving mobility infrastructure, formalizing informal settlements, and creating better urban design that makes public spaces comfortable and safe.

Suyash draws inspiration from these examples:

"Many cities in the world have gone through these kind of problems when they were organizing rapidly, and they solved them. So if you look at nineteenth century Europe, they had a similar kind of an experience. Post-war, uh, East Asian cities had similar kind of problems, and then they solved them."

The transformations weren't immediate—they played out over decades through sustained planning efforts and policy reform. But they demonstrate that cities can evolve from congested, unaffordable, and poorly functioning places into productive and livable urban environments.

Rather than accepting current problems as permanent features of Indian cities, the historical record suggests that systematic planning interventions can create dramatic improvements. The key is approaching urban improvement with the right knowledge, improved planning practices, and sustained commitment to better urban design and policy.

Supplementary Resources

• Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud (Book)
• Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser (Book)
• State Capability in India by T. V. Somanathan and Gulzar Natarajan (Book)
• The Urban Density Debate: India's Story by Ramanath Jha (Paper, ORF)
• Relaxing Floor Area Ratio: Housing Supply & Affordability in India by Geetika Nagpal and Sahil Gandhi (Working Paper, World Bank)
• Reforms in Urban Planning Capacity in India by NITI Aayog (Government Report)
• The Pathway to Affordable Housing in Urban India: A Case Study of Mumbai by Abhay Pethe, Rashmi Sharma, and Dhaval Desai (Paper, ORF)
• Urbanomics by Gulzar Natarajan (Blog)
• The Policy Edge (Blog)

The complete transcript file is available to download below.