Why designing with people in mind is now essential for India's urban future

As urban populations surge, the call is growing for cities built around people's lived realities, not outdated templates or top-down planning

Cities don’t emerge fully formed. Rather, they accumulate. They collect policies, decisions, improvisations, accidents, and repairs. They stretch when the economy expands, decay where governance thins, and pulse in accordance with how people use them rather than how they were originally planned. Indian cities are no exception to this rule and most of them have grown at the intersection of ambition and urgency, often faster than the systems that support them. By 2036, Indian cities are estimated to house 600 million and contribute almost 70 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Yet, it is evident that much of this growth has unfolded and continues to unfold without a coherent design or shared intent. That is why after decades of building, reacting, and adjusting, the question finally surfaces with clarity: The design conversation has never been more urgent.  

 

Design is often considered synonymous with beautification, facades, neat diagrams, and emblematic structures. In the context of cities, though, it is not merely cosmetic but also structural. It determines who feels welcome and who feels excluded, who is able to move and who remains stuck. It determines whether public life thrives openly or vanishes behind gated walls and private malls. Rick Griffith’s framing of design as a mechanism of control reveals how seemingly neutral planning decisions can shape power and access. For example, a widened road with no footpath privileges cars. A gated community designed without permeability fragments the neighbourhood ecology. A metro line without last-mile thought is biased against those who do not own vehicles. The built form, therefore, becomes an instruction.  

 

There is, however, another way to think about design which is not just grounded in form but in experience. Human-centred design offers a useful counterpoint: Instead of designing for assumptions, we design from lived reality. The example from El Paso city in Texas demonstrates this. When residents avoided Covid-testing sites, local government didn’t respond with blame or more signage. They observed, listened, and redesigned. A calmer entry sequence, clearer communication, reduced procedural intimidation, and these small interventions changed behaviour. The lesson is not about testing centres. It is about posture. It is about governance listening before deciding.  

In India, this shift is not just desirable but also essential. Our cities are growing into the future at a speed that demands intentionality. Between 2011 and 2036, India’s urban population is projected to increase by nearly three-quarters. Much of the infrastructure India will rely on in 2050 does not exist yet. This is a rare moment: Unlike older nations forced to retrofit, India is in the process of shaping first versions. However, if the country repeats its old paradigms such as car-centric mobility, top-down planning, and exclusive zoning then we lock in inequity for generations. Future-ready cities are not defined by technology alone. Smart poles and dashboards may help but design at its core is about alignment: Aligning policy with lived reality, aligning infrastructure with mobility patterns, and aligning climate risk with resilient systems. For instance, projections indicate that India may need more than $2.4 trillion in climate-resilient infrastructure by 2050 to manage extreme heat, flooding, and climate migration. That scale demands design thinking not as an aesthetic discipline but as an integrative one.  

Designing cities is also about asking the right questions. Instead of expanding roads, first ask why congestion exists. Instead of beautifying lakes, ask how they died. Instead of relocating street vendors, ask how informal economies sustain cities. The moment the city begins asking different questions, it begins designing differently. Listening becomes methodology and not a mere courtesy.  

Some Indian cities have started adopting such shifts. For instance, Pune’s pilots on cycling networks, Chennai’s street-redesign playbook, Ahmedabad’s BRT (bus rapid transit) system, and Surat’s resilience planning offer early signs of what intentional design can achieve. These initiatives didn’t emerge from architectural brilliance alone, but they emerged from rethinking systems, governance, and user experience. They reflect a turn from designing objects to designing relationships between citizen and state, footpath and road, housing and livelihood.  

Still, the challenge remains significant. India faces a capacity gap: Too few trained planners, fragmented jurisdictional authority, and planning institutions often operating with outdated frameworks. Design, therefore, cannot remain the domain of specialists. It must become a civic muscle present in municipal processes, policy drafting, budgeting, and everyday governance. When Roman Sanchez describes redesigning city budgeting in a manner so that residents can meaningfully engage with it, he is reminding us that design is not art direction but translation.  

If India embraces design as a way of thinking —iterative rather than rigid, empathetic rather than abstract, participatory rather than prescriptive — then our cities can evolve into ecosystems rather than machines — cities where walking is safe, public transport is dignified, public space is genuinely public, and services feel intuitive rather than bureaucratic; cities where design is not invisible because it is ignored but invisible because it works.  

India stands at a decisive point in its urban evolution. What we build now will outlive us. The opportunity before us is not simply to expand cities but to design them thoughtfully to shape environments that enable people not only to survive but to thrive. If we get the thinking right, the designing right, and the listening right, then perhaps the future Indian city will not be something endured but something proudly inhabited. 

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The author is chair, Institute for Competitiveness. 

X: @kautiliya. With inputs from Meenakshi Ajith