Politics of Urban Planning: Power, Social Engineering, and Place-Making in Cities

Walk through any Indian city and you’ll notice two versions of it layered on top of each other. There’s the city on the master plan: neat zones, wide roads, marked footpaths, designated green belts. And there’s the city people actually live in: footpaths turned into vegetable markets, “residential” plots that quietly became workshops, parks that double as cricket grounds and sleeping spaces. Urban anthropologists are less interested in the blueprint than in this gap. They ask a simple but pointed question: who gets to decide what a city should look like, and whose interests does that vision serve?

Planning as a tool of rule 🔗

Long before “urban planning” became a technical discipline with zoning codes and traffic models, it was already a political instrument. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow’s landmark study of French colonial urbanism showed that planning in colonial territories was never just about efficient infrastructure. It was also about classifying populations, drawing boundaries between “modern” and “traditional” quarters, and using the built environment to signal who was in charge. His research on French planning in Morocco and other colonial contexts demonstrated how city design became a way of testing and applying ideas about health, order, and social control on subject populations.

This wasn’t unique to French colonialism. Scholars studying British, Belgian, and other colonial administrations have documented how urban planning across colonised territories served the twin goals of political domination and control, whether through segregated neighbourhoods, restricted movement, or racially coded zoning. Wide boulevards weren’t just about traffic; they made it easier to move troops and harder to stage an uprising. Separate “native” and “European” quarters weren’t just about lifestyle preference; they encoded a racial hierarchy into the map itself.

The colonial hangover in contemporary cities 🔗

This history matters because it didn’t disappear with independence. Many Indian cities inherited planning logics, cantonment layouts, and zoning hierarchies first designed to serve colonial administration. Today’s arguments over which neighbourhoods get flyovers, metro stations, or heritage protection, and which get demolition notices, often follow the same underlying question colonial planners asked: whose comfort and mobility does the city prioritise?

The gap between utopia and everyday life 🔗

Every master plan is, in some sense, a utopia. It imagines a city that runs smoothly: pedestrians on footpaths, vehicles on roads, vendors in designated markets, residents in their assigned zones. Anthropologists who study cities are drawn precisely to the space between this vision and what actually happens once people move in.

Take footpaths. They’re designed for pedestrian movement, full stop. In practice, across Indian cities, they become sites of small businesses, temporary shelter, and social life. Public authorities have historically viewed street vendors as encroachers of pavements rather than as people meeting a real demand for affordable, convenient goods. Yet India’s Supreme Court itself has acknowledged that regulated street trade can add real value to urban life, offering everyday items at lower prices to people who don’t have time to visit a formal market. The footpath, in other words, gets re-authored by the people who use it every day, regardless of what the drawing said it was for.

Encroachment or adaptation? 🔗

The word “encroachment” itself carries a judgment. It assumes the plan is correct and any deviation from it is a violation. Anthropologists tend to flip this framing. They treat these deviations as evidence that plans are incomplete without the people who inhabit them. A road isn’t just an engineering object; it’s a space that gets negotiated daily between vendors, commuters, hawkers, police, and residents, each with different claims on how it should be used.

Whose vision of the “good city”? 🔗

Master plans don’t emerge from nowhere. They reflect assumptions about what a “good,” “modern,” or “world-class” city should look like, and those assumptions are never neutral. They determine where a city places its museums, government buildings, and manicured parks, and where it locates its waste processing plants, informal settlements, and industrial zones.

Research on Delhi’s redevelopment shows how the aspiration to become a globally competitive, “world-class city” has repeatedly clashed with the presence of slums in valuable, centrally located land. When land in the city centre becomes attractive for commercial or real-estate development, informal settlements sitting on that land are recast as eyesores or obstacles rather than as neighbourhoods where people have lived and worked for decades. The “good city” imagined by planners and investors, in this reading, is one with fewer visible signs of poverty, even if that means displacing the very workers whose informal labour makes the formal city function.

Social engineering through planning 🔗

Planning doesn’t just describe a city; it tries to reshape people’s behaviour and social relationships. This is social engineering in the literal sense, and it happens through decisions that look purely technical on paper.

Segregation by design 🔗

Zoning rules, land pricing, and the location of amenities can quietly sort populations by class, caste, or religion, producing distinct enclaves without ever stating segregation as a policy goal. Once these enclaves form, they tend to be self-reinforcing: ethnic and religious enclaves shape residents’ opportunities, identities, and social networks, sometimes in ways that open doors within the community while limiting connections to the wider city. Planners rarely draw a map that says “this area is for one community only,” but housing markets, informal steering by landlords, and public infrastructure choices often produce that outcome anyway.

Slum clearance and the pull of profit 🔗

Nowhere is the political character of planning clearer than in how cities treat informal settlements. Housing rights researchers have documented that Indian authorities demolished tens of thousands of homes and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in a single recent year, often without adequate rehabilitation or resettlement support. These actions rarely happen in isolation. They tend to accelerate when land becomes commercially desirable, when a city is preparing for an international event, or when a “beautification” or infrastructure project needs the space. Agencies that favour private investment and market-led development frequently frame slum clearance as necessary for progress, even though the same informal workers, street vendors, domestic help, and construction labourers, keep the formal city running.

What anthropologists notice that planners miss 🔗

Anthropological fieldwork adds something that planning documents rarely capture: the perspective of the people who actually live with a plan’s consequences. Instead of asking whether a scheme meets its stated engineering or aesthetic targets, anthropologists ask how residents interpret, use, resist, or quietly ignore the intervention.

This means paying attention to details planners might dismiss as noise: how a family repurposes a government-built one-room tenement into a home and workshop combined, how a community organises informal patrols after municipal services stop reaching their neighbourhood, or how vendor associations negotiate directly with local police to protect their pitch even without formal legal recognition. These aren’t failures of planning; they’re evidence of the political and economic interests that different groups bring to the same physical space.

Place-making: how residents rewrite the plan 🔗

The concept anthropologists use for this everyday transformation of designed space is place-making. A plan produces a location; people, through daily use, memory, and struggle, turn that location into a place with meaning. This process is rarely passive. It involves negotiation between residents and authorities, sometimes cooperative, sometimes confrontational.

Street vendor organising in India is a good illustration. Advocacy by vendor unions eventually shaped national policy, moving official language away from treating vendors purely as encroachers toward recognising them as a legitimate part of the urban economy. The resulting National Policy on Urban Street Vendors now asks cities to designate vending zones within their spatial plans rather than treating vending as inherently illegitimate. This shift didn’t come from planners rethinking their assumptions in isolation. It came from years of vendors organising, protesting evictions, and asserting their claim to public space, forcing policy to catch up with how the street was already being used.

This is the central insight urban anthropology offers students of the city: plans are proposals, not outcomes. The finished city is always a negotiated settlement between what authorities intended and what residents, workers, and communities actually do with the space they’re given. Reading a city well means learning to see both layers at once, the drawn plan and the lived one, and understanding that the gap between them is where much of urban politics actually happens.

What do you think? Think about a public space in your own city, a footpath, a park, a market. How different is its everyday use from what its original design seems to have intended, and who do you think benefits from that difference?

References

1. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3615890.html
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02665430902933960
3. https://dcmsme.gov.in/Street%20Vendors%20policy.pdf
4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19463138.2019.1666850
5. https://pdx.pressbooks.pub/urbandevelopment/chapter/culture/
6. https://m.thewire.in/article/urban/in-era-of-bulldozer-raj-and-forced-evictions-reality-of-urban-slums-paints-a-bleak-picture
7. https://www.wiego.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Sinha_WIEGO_PB2.pdf