India’s Disappearing Public Spaces: Urban Planning, Privatisation, and the Right to the City

India’s rapidly growing cities have, over recent decades, experienced a consistent pattern across multiple metropolitan areas: a decline in genuinely accessible public space — parks, maidans, public squares, and informal community gathering areas — relative to population growth, as urban land of any value becomes increasingly subject to commercial and residential development pressure that municipal planning frameworks have often struggled to resist or adequately balance against public space preservation.

The Measurable Decline

Urban planning research across several major Indian cities has documented a consistent pattern of open public space per capita declining even as overall urban population and built-up area expand substantially, a trend at odds with international urban planning benchmarks that generally recommend a minimum threshold of public open space per resident for adequate quality of urban life, a threshold most major Indian cities fall well short of according to available comparative assessments.

The Privatisation of Leisure

As genuinely public, freely accessible space has come under sustained development pressure, a parallel trend has emerged: the growth of privately operated, fee-based leisure spaces — shopping malls functioning as de facto public gathering spaces, paid entry recreational clubs, and gated residential community amenities — that provide comparable leisure and social functions but only for those able to pay entry costs or afford residence within gated developments that include such amenities. This shift effectively privatises a social function that public parks and maidans historically provided to all residents regardless of income, with consequences for social mixing and community formation that are rarely incorporated into urban planning cost-benefit analysis.

The maidan tradition specifically — large, open public grounds historically used for informal sport, community gatherings, and political assembly in many Indian cities — has faced particularly acute development pressure, given the substantial commercial value such large parcels of urban land command when converted to commercial or high-density residential use, pressure that has resulted in numerous documented instances of maidan land area being reduced or partially redeveloped despite their established historical and community function.

A city where access to green and open space increasingly depends on the ability to pay an entry fee or afford a particular residential address has redefined a previously universal urban entitlement as a market good — a shift that occurs gradually enough, parcel by parcel, that its cumulative social cost rarely receives the policy attention a single dramatic redevelopment decision would attract on its own.

What Better Urban Governance Would Require

Addressing this trend would require municipal planning frameworks that treat public open space preservation as a binding requirement embedded into urban development approval processes, rather than a discretionary consideration that commercial development pressure can readily override on a case-by-case basis. It would also require explicit municipal budget allocation for the maintenance and accessibility of existing public spaces, since poorly maintained, unsafe, or inaccessible public spaces functionally exclude the population they are nominally meant to serve almost as effectively as outright redevelopment would. Several Indian cities have begun more deliberate public space revitalisation initiatives in recent years, a genuinely positive development, though the scale of these efforts generally remains modest relative to the decades of accumulated public space loss that preceded them.