Indian Cities: Cities or just markets
Cities have always meant more than dense settlements or centres of trade. Historically, they represented the highest stage of human settlement: places of certainty, safety, and shared civic life. Living in a city meant being part of a predictable society, where people could walk, wait, meet, and exist without the constant struggle for survival. Urban life enabled individuals to interact with one another as citizens rather than being defined by kinship, caste, or occupation. It offered the possibility of belonging beyond blood ties and economic exchange.
In the Indian civilisational context, cities carried an even deeper significance. They were not merely administrative capitals or commercial hubs but also spiritual and intellectual spaces. Cities such as Varanasi, Ujjain, Madurai, Kanchipuram, and Nalanda were built around learning, pilgrimage, contemplation, and ethical life. Knowledge, faith, and everyday living coexisted in these spaces. Urban life implied refinement—reflection over impulse, restraint over excess, coexistence over isolation, and continuity over disruption. Commerce was present, but it did not define the city’s soul. Today, however, Indian cities appear to be drifting away from this civic idea. Increasingly, they resemble markets rather than cities. Urban life is organised less around shared existence and more around transactions. The logic guiding city planning and governance is no longer primarily civic but commercial. User-fee regimes, public-private redevelopment projects, and monetised public services increasingly tie access to urban life to one’s ability to pay. The city is no longer first a space to live; it is a space to consume.
At its core, a city offers certainty. One should know where to walk, where to wait, where to rest, and how to move without fear or improvisation. Certainty builds trust in public life. Yet uncertainty defines everyday urban experience in India. Walking is often unsafe or interrupted. Waiting is disorganised and exhausting. Movement through the city demands constant negotiation with traffic, vendors, broken footpaths, and invisible rules. Public spaces rarely invite people to linger or pause. One is either pushed into traffic or pulled into consumption-driven environments. Simply being in the city without a clear purpose or purchase has become difficult.
Markets, by nature, do not cultivate belonging. They thrive on speed, turnover, and exchange. Their logic is transactional rather than relational. When cities begin to function like markets, public life shrinks. Footpaths become vending spaces, open grounds turn into commercial parkings spaces, and neighbourhood streets become traffic corridors. Street corners, once social spaces, are reduced to channels for vehicle parking and advertisements. What was once a site of discourse becomes a site of negotiation between access and exclusion.
Urban aesthetics reflect this shift. Cities once expressed shared ideas of beauty through architecture, public spaces, and cultural life. Beauty belonged not only to private homes but also to streets, squares, and everyday surroundings. In Indian cities today, beauty is increasingly privatised. It exists behind gates in malls, offices, cafés, and controlled interiors. Outside these spaces, cities appear cluttered and fatigued. City skylines are increasingly dominated by billboards rather than civic buildings. Advertising, rather than a sense of belonging, shapes the visual priority and identity of the city.
The spiritual rhythm of Indian cities has also weakened. Historically, temples, ghats, and sacred spaces slowed urban life and encouraged reflection. They reminded citizens that the city was not only about speed or profit but also about meaning. Today, spirituality is often either commodified or marginalised. Sacred spaces struggle to survive amid noise, congestion, and commercial pressure. Instead of offering calm, cities intensify haste. The space to pause, breathe, and reflect has nearly vanished, taking with it the contemplative rhythm that once distinguished urban life.
The clearest sign of cities turning into markets lies in how access is mediated. In a city, public presence is a right. In a market, presence depends on purchasing power. Indian urban life increasingly follows the latter logic.Places for rest, gathering, or leisure now demand spending. Leisure itself has become an act of consumption. A cup of coffee in a café may cost as much as an informal worker earns in an hour. Such everyday contrasts reveal a deeper transformation: citizenship is quietly replaced by consumer identity.
This is not an argument against markets. Trade and economic activity have always sustained cities and brought diversity. Markets are necessary. The problem begins when the city becomes the market. When profit overrides civic logic, care recedes. Cities governed only by commercial priorities struggle to accommodate those who cannot consume. They fail not because they lack growth or ambition, but because they forget their primary purpose: to make life easier, calmer, and more predictable for all.
Indian cities do not suffer from a shortage of projects or capital. They suffer from a thinning of social imagination. Economic growth cannot substitute for shared space, dignity, and trust. If cities continue to be shaped primarily as markets, they may grow richer and faster, yet poorer as cities. To reclaim them, public life must be recentred not as an afterthought, but as the foundation of urban existence. Otherwise, we risk living in markets that we continue, out of habit, to call cities.
Author is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UILS, Chandigarh University, Punjab
