Land-Use Change And The Challenge Of Urban Planning In India

Suhasini Ayer

The review of master plans is never simply a technical exercise. It involves balancing strategies for transportation networks, housing, infrastructure, social amenities, open spaces, urban design, environmental management, and phased implementation. Yet in India, this process is complicated by the fact that planners have limited influence over the most decisive factor of all: land use.

Urban and peri-urban land in India is shaped less by deliberate planning and more by the interplay of administrative convenience, speculative markets, and political economy. Changes in land use are often driven by the need to levy taxes or collect planning dues, rather than by considerations of topography, resource management, or mobility capacity. As a result, the vital link between spatial planning and ecological resilience remains weak. Without strengthening this connection, cities will struggle to achieve sustainable growth and climate adaptation.

The Peri-Urban Dilemma

As urban boundaries expand, planners inherit peri-urban landscapes that have developed in regulatory vacuums—neither fully rural nor urban. These areas are shaped by speculative pressures on land values, often beyond the control of formal planning systems. The outcome is urban spillover into rural areas in ways that clash with long-term objectives.

Since the 1990s, Indian cities have witnessed a quiet transformation as rising land values steadily repurpose neighbourhoods. Once spacious residential areas are morphing into semi-commercial zones. Supermarkets, boutiques, and offices move in, first as tenants, then as owners. What appears as economic growth often comes at the expense of liveability.

The Costs of Transition

These shifts carry heavy costs. Energy and water consumption rise, while sewage, waste, and traffic intensify. Public spaces shrink—footpaths become parking lots and delivery bays, while neighbourhood parks once meant for children and the elderly turn into crowded vendor hubs.

The ripple effects run deeper: traditional markets, once the backbone of local economies, decline under the pressure of rising land values, displacing countless small enterprises and livelihoods.

Meanwhile, the relentless demand for affordable housing drives migrant workers to informal settlements. Drawn into cities by the construction and manufacturing industries, they often cluster in unauthorized areas where earlier migrants from their regions provide social anchoring.

These communities evolve as networks of familiarity and solidarity, vital in navigating the alienation of city life.

Yet, they often occupy precarious land: low-lying tracts, river setbacks, railway margins, bypass roads, and even landfills. Over time, such spaces become ghettoized, leaving inhabitants vulnerable to physical, social, and economic exploitation. Patriarchal norms resurface, compounding risks for women, children, and the elderly. Thus, inequities in land use are not only economic but also deeply cultural and political.

Strip Development and Industrial Expansion

Infrastructure development adds another layer of complexity. The construction of bypass roads around towns and cities, initially intended to ease highway traffic, quickly triggers strip development. Trucking depots, warehouses, hotels, and commercial services sprout along these corridors. Before long, agricultural land gives way to residential plotting, catering to urban aspirations of land ownership.

Similarly, the national drive to expand manufacturing has led to the pooling of agricultural and forest lands into Special Economic Zones and industrial estates. For small farmers with marginal, non-irrigated plots, land pooling often appears as a windfall, especially in an era of climate uncertainty. Yet, the resulting industrialization sparks creeping, unplanned land-use changes, further weakening ecological resilience.

Beyond the Planner’s Control

What ties these phenomena together is that most of them lie outside the control of planners and local administrations. Instead, they are driven by broader market and political forces: speculative land markets, national GDP targets, and private aspirations of ownership. Urban planning remains reactive, often catching up after transformations are already underway.

The consequences, however, are tangible. Heat stress, air pollution, and rising land surface temperatures disproportionately affect economically weaker groups who cannot escape these environments. These very communities, however, are indispensable—they sustain construction, manufacturing, and domestic services in cities. Ignoring them is neither socially just nor economically viable.

Toward a New Planning Paradigm

If land-use change continues to be shaped only by economic opportunism and administrative convenience, Indian cities risk locking themselves into unsustainable futures. What is needed is a new spatial planning paradigm—one that integrates ecological appropriateness with existing land-use realities. This means planning not just for housing and infrastructure, but also for reducing vulnerabilities to urban flooding, heat stress, and the irreversible loss of ecological assets such as clean air, potable water, and access to healthy food.

Climate change makes this imperative urgent. Adaptation is no longer optional—it is the only way forward. Urban planning must evolve into a tool that bridges environmental and social priorities with the political and economic forces driving urbanization. These forces may lie beyond the immediate reach of planners and citizens, but acknowledging and working with them is essential to shaping resilient, equitable cities.