From Urban Economic Growth To Inclusive And Livable Cities
India stands at a defining urban crossroads. UN Habitat projects that more than half of India’s population will live in cities by 2030 — one of the largest urban transformations in human history. Cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune are celebrated as engines of growth and innovation, yet the same cities struggle with crumbling infrastructure, inadequate housing, toxic air, flooding, and the systematic exclusion of the urban poor.
The promise of inclusive and livable cities has been repeatedly articulated through the Smart Cities Mission, AMRUT, and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban). Yet the gap between promise and practice is wide. Nearly 65 million people reported living in slums in the last census, often without tenure, sanitation, or clean water. Indian cities are also increasingly on the front lines of extreme heat, erratic monsoons, and urban flooding. It is the poorest residents, those living in low-lying areas, working outdoors, or in homes without insulation or ventilation, who bear the heaviest burden of climate impacts. Governance, too, remains a structural challenge. Governance also remains a structural challenge: despite the 74th Constitutional Amendment, urban local bodies lack finances, technical capacity, and political authority to act decisively, and citizen participation remains more token than transformative.
Land Governance, Planning, and Their Limits
In Indian cities today, land markets and land governance touch the lives of virtually every urban resident. Central to this is the question of how cities know and record themselves. Initiatives like Naksha, which seeks to digitise property boundaries, ownership, and land use, represent an important step toward transparent governance. Yet digital record reform has repeatedly collided with fragmented data systems, disputed boundaries, legacy encroachments, and pervasive informality. For the urban middle class, opaque records and overlapping jurisdictions make property transactions legally fraught. For the urban poor, incomplete records are far more consequential — rendering their settlements invisible to the state, their claims to land illegible to planning institutions, and their neighbourhoods perpetually vulnerable to clearance.
Indian cities have increasingly embraced spatial planning instruments meant to guide growth more equitably. Transit-Oriented Development (ToD) concentrates density and affordable housing around transport nodes. Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) compensates landowners for public acquisition while enabling higher-density development in appropriate zones. Densification policies aim to make better use of existing urban land rather than perpetuating sprawl. Each carries real redistributive potential. Yet in practice the gap between design and outcome is stark. ToD corridors have been undermined by a build-first-integrate-later approach where policies on last mile connectivity, non-motorised transport, street vending, and parking remain unchanged while proximity to transit is sold at a premium, producing high-end housing. Similarly, while TDR is widely acknowledged as a sound mechanism to add density sustainably, its implementation in most Indian cities has been deeply flawed and opaque, primarily because TDR has traditionally been managed on paper, through manual processes, and without any central marketplace.
For small businesses, the inability to secure affordable commercial space reflects a planning system that privileges large formal development over the mixed-use, informal economy that sustains most Indian cities. Meanwhile, the value created by public infrastructure like roads, metro lines, airports is mostly captured by private landowners rather than recycled into the public resources the city needs.
Cutting across all of these groups is the challenge of the urban commons — parks, lakes, waterbodies — being lost to encroachment, privatisation, and development pressure. Their disappearance diminishes the quality of life for all urban residents and erodes the ecological systems on which city resilience depends.
The track invites sessions that cover:
How is India's current model of urban growth performing — where has it delivered, where has it fallen short, and what reforms in financing, governance, land, and data could strengthen its outcomes for all residents?
How is Naksha faring on the ground — what early successes can be built upon, and how might the programme be strengthened to meaningfully resolve legacy disputes and map the tenure of informal and low-income residents?
What has ToD, TDR, and densification policy achieved in Indian cities so far — where have they worked well, and how might they be redesigned to extend those benefits more equitably to low-income residents?
Where has land governance reform made real gains for ordinary citizens — and what further steps in transparency, participatory planning, and value capture would deepen that progress?
What is currently working in creating secure, affordable commercial space for small businesses, street vendors, and informal traders and what planning reforms could better recognise and protect the mixed-use, incremental economies that sustain urban life?
What does inclusive public space actually look like, and how do cities reclaim streets, parks, and waterbodies as genuinely shared assets?
How are Indian cities building climate resilience today — what approaches are showing results, and how can they be scaled to better protect low-income households exposed to heat, flooding, and air pollution?