“Public spaces must first be recognised simultaneously as climate infrastructure, social infrastructure, livelihood infrastructure and even as democratic infrastructure” —Aravind Unni

It is peak summer in India, and many of our cities rank among the hottest in the world.¹ Top 95 out of 100 are in our country. In such a context, one would assume that parks, gardens, or public open spaces would remain accessible to all as sites of respite from extreme heat. Yet paradoxically, many parks remain closed during the hottest parts of the day or restrict entry to “outsiders,” such as workers, often in the name of management and maintenance.

The case of Pourakarmikas (sanitation workers) in Bengaluru is the best example – imagine the workers most exposed to the sun being denied shade in a “public” park during peak heat. This is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger crisis around public space in Indian cities.²

A signboard outside a park with timings, Bengaluru. Source – Pragathi Ravi via Mongabay³

This raises a fundamental question: what truly makes a space public? 

Publicness, I argue, is not determined merely by ownership or physical openness. As not all ‘open’ spaces are genuinely ‘public’, just as not all publicly owned spaces are equally accessible. Publicness is shaped through three interconnected questions:  1. Access – who can enter and occupy space across social divides 2. Use – whether people can sit, sell, rest, gather, or play 3. Policy – who governs space, through what institutions and regulations, and whose presence is legitimised or excluded.

Historical Roots of Exclusion

The history of public space in India reveals that publicness has never been equal. Village squares, temple precincts, medieval bazaars, and streets historically functioned as spaces of gathering and exchange, but access to them was deeply shaped by caste, gender, religion, and social hierarchy. Colonial urbanism introduced maidans, promenades, boulevards, and functions such as ports and railway precincts, enabling new forms of urban interaction while simultaneously embedding segregation, surveillance, and elite control into modern urban planning.

After independence, many of these spaces became more democratised through everyday use rather than deliberate policy, evolving into sites of leisure, informal livelihoods, assembly, and collective life. Spaces such as Marine Drive and Kartavya (Raj) Path are among the best examples of this transformation.

Since the 2000s, however, liberalisation and widening inequality have accelerated the production of “world-class” urbanism through gated communities, corporate enclaves, shopping malls, waterfront redevelopment, and privately managed plazas. These spaces simulate publicness—they appear open and accessible—but remain tightly governed through surveillance, private management, and behavioural regulation.

The Public Space and Realm in Contemporary Indian Cities

A major part of this crisis lies in the limitations of contemporary urban planning frameworks themselves. Indian planning norms rarely define or conceptualise the “public realm” in substantive terms. Planning standards⁴ provide detailed norms for parks, playgrounds, transport infrastructure, and public amenities, but these are largely approached through land-use reservations and infrastructure provision. The absence of a substantive definition of the public realm in Indian planning practice has allowed publicness to be increasingly shaped by policing, market forces, and privatised governance.

Urban planning in practice and policy often privileges real estate value, visual order, and automobility over inclusive public use. Planning frameworks continue to privilege single-use zoning, plot-based regulation, and ownership-based land classification, leaving little room to recognise the layered, use-value and overlapping uses that characterise Indian cities in practice. Streets, pavements, transit edges, vending zones, neighbourhood gathering spaces, and multifunctional urban commons, all of which are in the public realm, remain weakly articulated within formal planning systems.

Another major gap is that streets, even now, are treated primarily as corridors reserved for vehicular movement rather than as public spaces in their own right. Large sections of public land and neighbourhood space are consumed by parking infrastructure, roads, flyovers, and automobile-oriented planning, often at the expense of pedestrians, children, elderly people, street vendors, and everyday city users. Planning frameworks also remain tied to regressive standards such as ECS (Equivalent Car Space)⁵, which prioritise automobile accommodation over inclusive and people-centred urban design.

While concepts such as complete streets and Multi-Utility Zones (MUZs)⁶ are gradually emerging, they largely remain fragmented pilot interventions rather than a structural shift in planning practice. Indian cities continue to allocate enormous amounts of valuable public space to free parking while lacking comprehensive parking policies and effective taxation mechanisms for private vehicles. The normalisation of private vehicle storage on public land reflects a deeper imbalance in urban priorities: the right to free car parking is often treated as legitimate, while livelihoods, vending, resting, or gathering are treated as encroachments.

At the same time, contemporary urban policy has increasingly criminalised informality, livelihoods and everyday survival in public space. Street vendors continue to face evictions, and anti-hawker drives despite protections under the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014. Informal workers, migrants, homeless persons, and low-income groups are frequently rendered invisible within formal planning frameworks, even though they are central to how cities function.

Our cities do not accept that pavement may function as a vending space in the morning, a resting place for workers in the afternoon, a play space in the evening, and a site for gathering or protest later at night. Recognising that overlapping uses are not signs of disorder, but expressions of vibrant urban life.

Public spaces are also becoming increasingly securitised. Parks are tightly regulated, access timings curtailed, and streets and open spaces that historically enabled gathering and collective expression are increasingly governed through surveillance, private management, barricading, and policing. Public spaces in Indian cities are also governed through fragmented institutions – municipal corporations, development authorities, police, traffic departments, RWAs, parastatal agencies, and private bodies – often with little democratic accountability. Decisions are frequently taken through centralised and technocratic processes with limited public engagement. The erosion of public space is therefore not merely spatial; it reflects a deeper transformation in how we have turned inwards as a society.

Reimagining the Public Spaces for Future Cities

The challenge for Indian cities is therefore not only to create more public spaces – though their scarcity remains severe, unequal in distribution – but to govern them in ways that ensure inclusion, coexistence, and the right to the city.

Public spaces must first be recognised simultaneously as climate infrastructure, social infrastructure, livelihood infrastructure and even as democratic infrastructure. In an era of intensifying climate risks and deepening inequality, streets, pavements, shaded sidewalks, parks, and open grounds are not merely recreational amenities; they are spaces of survival, mobility, work, rest, care, assembly, and social interaction. Public investment in inclusive public environments is therefore central to equitable urban development and climate adaptation. Urban planning and policy must urgently course-correct to establish new norms and standards for the public realm and to promote its incremental increase in Indian cities.

Planning frameworks should support mixed-use streets, universal accessibility, shaded pedestrian infrastructure, drinking water, toilets, seating, and shaded resting spaces for workers, women, children, elderly persons, and persons with disabilities. More equitable cities would reduce excessive car-centric planning and prioritise people over vehicles, so outdated norms of car provision should be done away with, redundant parking appropriated, and a radical imagination of open spaces that will help exchange amongst our society, thereby building better cities and societies. 

In the end, no policy and plan can manufacture a public. Policy may create possibilities, but it is people who make spaces public through everyday use and collective presence. A democratic city is not one that merely builds public spaces, but one that enables even the most marginalised to inhabit them with dignity, without fear, exclusion, or criminalisation.

1. https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/india-turns-into-a-hotbox-95-out-of-100-worlds-hottest-cities-today-are-in-india-2901125-2026-04-24  ↩︎
2. https://india.mongabay.com/2024/05/closing-bengaluru-parks-in-the-afternoons-deprives-outdoor-workers-of-refuge-from-heat/ ↩︎
3. https://india.mongabay.com/2024/05/closing-bengaluru-parks-in-the-afternoons-deprives-outdoor-workers-of-refuge-from-heat/
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4.  For instance, the Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation Guidelines (URDFPI) guidelines continue to form the basis of urban planning frameworks in India. ↩︎
5.  Equivalent Car Space (ECS) is the standard area allocated for parking one car—about 15 sq. m. (roughly 3 × 5 m), including circulation space—used in Indian development regulations and parking norms ↩︎
6. Multi-Utility Zones (MUZs) are designated public spaces planned for multiple uses such as vending, parking, pedestrian movement, social interaction, and community activities within urban areas. ↩︎